I chuckled, but my attention was caught by movement in the Mason jar. The blackness had completely escaped its capsule and was darting back and forth like a tiny fish made of ink. “It shouldn’t be moving that fast.”
“Maybe your time pepper expired?”
I picked up the Mason jar and turned it sideways. The pocket of air at the top didn’t move. Neither did the ripples on the surface of the water. The slowsand was working as it should. “Maybe thisisits slowed-down state? No, that would mean this stuff normally moves so fast, it would shred and burn your insides between one breath and the next.”
“Sage took them without dying.”
“Which means it’s just ignoring the effects of the slowsand.” It shouldn’t have been able to do that. I was both intrigued and offended by its blatant disregard for the laws of magic. It was swimming in circles at the top now, extending threadlike tendrils to poke the lid. “Does this thing look alive to you?”
“Alive and purposeful. It’s trying to escape.”
I gave the jar a good shake. The water didn’t respond, but the blackness jerked back and forth. When I set down the jar, it resumed swimming and testing its confines. “I’m not sure what it is yet, but it’s safe to say those pills are not FDA-approved.”
• • •
For the most part, dreams were not a window into other universes. Nor were they the whispers of the gods or glimpses into future possibilities or a map of the unconscious mind showing the winding path of your psychosexual development from birth to death.
Most dreams were born of simple mental static, random voltage jolting the neural pathways to create a storm of sights and sounds.
Dreaming was when we spun order from that mental chaos and wove it into a story.
All of which was to say, my dream of working on Margaret’s van—sliding underneath the body and getting my hands up into her engine, checking her fluids, working on her exhaust—meant absolutely nothing.
The needles-to-the-eardrums sensation of my protective spells coming to life, on the other hand? That meant trouble.
I tried to wake up, but my body wouldn’t cooperate. So in my dream, I crawled free of the van and flew to the roof of my house. I perched like a starling on the peak, where I could survey the entire grounds to see where the danger was coming from.
Lucid dreaming was a useful skill if you planned to go into the magic business. It prepared you to fight off creatures that could attack you through dreams, and it let you work magic without having to go through all that nasty waking-up business.
I saw nothing outside that shouldn’t be there. Margaret was resting in the parking lot. A skunk waddled across the street. The roses out front needed water—I planted a thought in my mind for the morning so I’d remember to take care of them, then turned my attention to the inside of the house.
I sank through the roof into the second floor. I didn’t want to peek, but I could feel Ronnie sleeping in the guest room. Jenny was asleep as well. Annette was awake but resting.
I floated into my library. I found myself asleep in my La-Z-Boy. My book was still in my lap.
I hated seeing my body from the outside. My self-image was that of a younger man. Notyoung, but certainly not this frail, loose-skinned body sprawled in the recliner. My face looked especially alien without my dentures to fill out the mouth. My old brown newsboy cap with the spell that helped my cholesterol had slipped down over the left side of my face.
A shoggoth was sitting on my desk.
Its body covered the entire surface of the desk and spilled over the edges. Blotches of greenish light rippled through the thing’s flesh like bioluminescent jellyfish swimming in a giant slug with skin formed from an oil spill. Bright spots floated around the surface like bubbles: hundreds of eyeballs of different sizes. When it moved, it sounded like a toddler slurping runny Jell-O.
Many of the eyeballs were watching my sleeping body. Others swiveled toward my dream form.
“Hello,” I said cautiously. I wasn’t sure how one was supposed to address an otherworldly horror who predated the universe itself.
It didn’t answer. I felt relief, sensing instinctively that if we were to communicate, the connection would snap my mind like raw spaghetti. Even the mere sight of a creature so different, soother, stressed my grasp of reality to the breaking point.
The shoggoth sat exactly where I had left the Mason jar. If I shifted my senses, I could see the jar within its body. The glass and lid were intact. The physical goop I’d trapped inside remained trapped. This was a projection, an aura.
The good news was that I now had a very good idea what was in the pills Annette brought back from Sage Parker’s house.
The bad news was that Grandpa Finn’s canning spells were perhaps not quite as strong as I’d hoped, and the dream-shoggoth was now stretching tentacles of unworldly, evil phlegm toward my physical body.
This was the part where I went mad.
“You’ve lost your edge, Jenny. In the old days, you would have busted through my door by now with your sword and your quips. I’ve spent months preparing for you, and you never had a clue what was happening right under your nose.
“It’s too late now. R’gngyk’s power is growing. I’m becoming stronger than you ever were. Strong enough to do what you should—
