Chapter Two hundred eight – Hare and Back Again

Time passed in a kind of haze. Thaniel took Pandy everywhere with him, and she recognized the Dunning estate, where Thaniel had grown up and lived until the night of the raid where he was meant to die.

It was filled with mostly-blurry figures who swept floors, hung laundry, and took care of the grounds. Those grounds were far better-tended than they had been in Pandy’s time, with flowers blooming, and a pretty path down to the stream that must have been overgrown when she saw it.

Marta was there, cooking up delicious treats, which she offered to Thaniel whenever she saw him, along with hugs that smelled of vanilla and cinnamon. Cassie, the maid who’d neglected Thaniel far more than she cared for him, was entirely absent, and George, later the sole remaining groundskeeper, might have been one of the foggy figures toiling among the flowers, and he might not.

Besides Marta, there were only three people whose faces had real definition. The clearest of these was Lian, but he was a Lian Pandy had never met. He, too, was visibly younger, and while he still had his nose in a book most of the time, sometimes he played with Thaniel and Pandy. When he did, he smiled easily, and participated in tickle-fights that ended with both boys breathless and laughing.

The Father was there, too, and for the first time, he became more than a distant, dour character escaped from a Gothic novel. His black hair was neatly styled, and when he spoke to his sons, the blue eyes they all shared were bright with interest and intelligence. He was handsome, with broad shoulders , well-defined face, and level brows. Moreover, he told jokes. Dad jokes, about silly snakes and chickens crossing the road. He, too, smiled often, but never more brightly than when The Mother entered.

Of the trio, The Mother was the one with the softest features – not soft like Lady Reedsley’s, but soft around the edges, as if Thaniel was beginning to forget exactly how her nose turned up at the end, and the arch of her brows. Those brows were the same golden color as her sons’, however, with the same kind of curls, only hers were caught up in a net-like device Pandy thought was called a snoop, or a snood, or something like that.

That hair and her solemn green eyes were the only things really sharp in her face. Now Pandy could see that Lian must have gotten his sober demeanor from her, while Thaniel was more like Lord Conroy. Pandy found this surprising, since she’d heard from several people that Lady Conroy was the one who liked to attend parties and have guests, while Bryan Conroy was the retiring sort, preferring to keep to himself. Going by Thaniel’s Dream versions of them, this was almost exactly the opposite of the truth, though Pandy was well aware that dreams and reality could be very different things.

Thaniel’s ‘days’ were filled with adventures – rolling down hills, investigating small caves and burrows, chasing after Lian, and stealing snacks from the kitchen while pretending to be Wayward Pirate Pete. Those days melted unpredictably into meals eaten with his family, or evenings spent being tucked into bed by his mother, with her singing the lullaby he’d taught Pandy over and over again. There were no classes, no tutors, and no long, boring periods spent waiting for someone to have time for him. Lord and Lady Conroy were always happy to see their sons, and Lian never went away to school, though Pandy knew he should have started by now. 

There was no way to know how much truth lay in those halcyon days. It was the very picture of the perfect family, complete unto itself, and without a speck of conflict. Thaniel’s parents held hands, smiled at each other, and certainly never once had an argument that might have led to Lady Conroy taking her sons and fleeing the house. The dark tower where The Father spent his final months seemed not to exist, but that was true of most of the house. Thaniel visited the kitchen, the dining room, his own bedroom and playroom, and what seemed like it must be the entirety of the outdoors portion of the estate.

Everywhere he went, Thaniel took Pandy, and no one questioned her presence, including Grace Conroy, who had never met her. In fact, Thaniel’s mother pressed kisses to the top of Pandy’s head as readily as she did Thaniel’s, and wished ‘Bunny’ good-night as easily as if it had actually been part of her daily routine.

At first, Thaniel kept Pandy close. He held her, but even when he did set her down, if she tried to hop away, she simply found herself with him again, his subconscious mind redirecting her paws. Pandy didn’t mind it, just glad to be with him again, though she kept her eyes out for any crack in the facade, any slip that might allow her to convince him to wake. The first time he went to sleep in his dream, she hoped he might wake in reality, but as soon as he closed his eyes, they were back outside in a field of yellow flowers, rolling around until they were covered in sweet orange pollen, and bees followed them home while Thaniel ran and laughed at the bumbling insects.

After a while, however, Thaniel seemed to forget she’d ever been missing, and Pandy found she could wander a little bit. This was disconcerting in many ways, because away from Thaniel the halls and rooms faded to pastel watercolor images of themselves, barely recognizable as places they’d been in together what seemed like moments before. The same thing happened to all of the people, with even Lian becoming a grayish humanoid blob sitting at a larger brown blob that should have been a desk. Out of sight, out of mind, indeed.

Still, once Pandy realized that attempting to wake Thaniel by stomping, pinching, jumping, or even biting wasn’t going to work, she knew she would have to take drastic measures. She and Thaniel were trapped inside a spell, and perhaps she could find the edges of that spell and apply her teeth to its metaphorical backside.

So she wandered halls made of pastel pudding and glow-sticks, entering every room, and investigating every bipedal blob. When Thaniel remembered her, she would suddenly find herself yanked to his side, which was both disconcerting and upsetting, especially once she’d explored the areas near where he usually spent his time, and had to travel longer in order to explore something new. She had nothing else to do, and no other ideas, however, so she persisted.

Sometimes the manor windows were open, and sometimes they were closed. Sometimes there was a ledge or a roof outside those windows, and sometimes the exterior was little more than a whitish expanse that spread horizontally from her point of view. Eventually, Pandy even made it up to the roof, and there she found the lost tower, just as it had been on the night Lord Captain Reedsley led the raid on the Dunning estate.

It was the only part of Thaniel’s idealized home that still had the dirty walls and overgrown vines of the house as Pandy had known it. Gargoyles glared down at her, even more grotesque than she remembered them, with bulging eyes, claws as long as Pandy, and broken, dripping teeth. What dark liquid dripped from their maws, she didn’t know, but it wasn’t chocolate syrup.

Without Hop, Pandy couldn’t make it to the top of the first gargoyle, much less up to the ledge and the window that had allowed her entry the first time. She couldn’t even tell if the window existed in this version of the edifice. It could easily have been just a solid, terrifying tower tucked away in the very back of Thaniel’s mind.

Once she found it, however, she began to notice other things. The Mother didn’t always look solemn, sometimes she just looked tired, and there were circles beneath her eyes. She was pale, and not in a way that said she just didn’t get out much. Was she sick? Had she spent so much of the last portion of her life ill that this was what her then not-quite-six-year-old son remembered of her?

If so, what could have convinced a seriously ailing woman to flee her home? Had she wanted to go to a doctor, but her husband wouldn’t allow it? That didn’t jibe with the way The Father seemed to break after her death, unless he’d dismissed her concerns, then blamed himself when she died trying to get help? But unless Thaniel was seriously misremembering their relationship, Pandy didn’t think Bryan Conroy would have risked Grace’s life like that. The Father and Mother in Thaniel’s dreams were still very much in love, often holding hands and smiling at each other for no apparent reason.

Once Pandy realized she wasn’t going to get into the tower – she couldn’t find an access point from inside or outside the house, and the tower was only visible from the roof anyway – she took to following the different characters around. And they were characters, or rather, NPCs. When Thaniel was around, they played their roles, but as soon as he left, they faded to repetition. Their mouths moved, but no words came out, servants swept the same patch of floor or polished the same section of banister for as long as Pandy managed to watch them before Thaniel remembered she was here and she reappeared at his side.

Not surprisingly, it was the three family members and Marta – the only ones with faces and figures that didn’t shift disconcertingly every time Pandy glanced away – who didn’t behave quite so predictably. Marta did leave the kitchen, and she spoke to some of the other servants, especially two smaller ones that were probably around twelve years old. Pandy couldn’t tell if they were the cook’s children, or if they just started work even earlier than the assistants at Falconet, but she did know Thaniel had paid more attention to them than most others, since they didn’t stretch and deform like rubber on a regular basis.

Pandy was following Marta one ‘day’ when she caught a glimpse of movement from the corner of her eye. It was dark, even shadowy, which was strange in this world of light and color. They were in the garden, where Marta and her two helpers were gathering herbs and vegetables for dinner. Strangely, the carrots here had a strong resemblance to orange cake, and tomatoes were definitely muffins, but this was Thaniel’s dream, so it wasn’t that surprising.

None of the three NPCs seemed to notice the figure that skulked among the bruise-like treeline on the far side of the stream. Pandy, however, found that she couldn’t look away, and began to hop in that direction. Thaniel didn’t go past the stream, probably because that had been the limit of where he was allowed to roam when his mother was alive. Pandy, of course, had already investigated the woods, finding that walking into them was an almost certain way to end up back with Thaniel. Still, she’d never seen any of the other characters in this world go over there, and she wanted to know who was casting that shadow.

She passed beyond the edge of the house, and, as happened sometimes, the distance between her and her goal suddenly snapped closed, and she found her paws landing in the edge of the stream. This occasionally happened in reverse, as well, with Pandy hopping down an endless hallway that didn’t end until Thaniel remembered her again.

This time, Pandy gave her best jump, almost managing to clear the running water. Her tail dipped into the rippling waves, and she jerked it upright, then shook it off, water droplets catching the sunlight as they flew. It was only then that she realized everything was oddly sharp, almost completely realistic, which simply didn’t happen when Thaniel wasn’t around.

She froze, staring into the woods, ears straight up, body tense. She’d fallen from the house a few times while trying to reach the roof, and she didn’t think she could die here, but there was something about this place that made her very uncomfortable. Frightened? Yes, maybe even frightened.

A deeper shadow within the deep green leaves and particularly barky-bark of the trees made her jerk and flatten herself against the ground. Leaves rustled, a branch snapped… and George, the Extremely Creepy groundskeeper, walked out of the woods. He didn’t seem to notice Pandy, though he glanced furtively back and forth. It was, frankly, very strange behavior for a man standing in broad daylight.

And then it wasn’t. Daylight, that was. The sun didn’t set, it was simply gone. The sky was a broad wash of violet, without moon or stars. Thaniel would be at dinner now, this ambient ‘darkness’ visible outside the windows of the dining room, or he might be in bed, listening to his mother sing his favorite lullaby while she kissed his forehead and tucked him in.

George’s arms had been empty, but now they weren’t. He carried something Pandy had only seen from a distance, and only twice, before she decided it was best that she stay in Thaniel’s room with him while night held the manor in thrall.

It wasn’t a body. It also wasn’t not a body. It looked like a tube of something. Like a giant manicotti, dripping what looked like it might be hair from one end, and might be feet from the other. It might also be a carpet, tasseled and fringed, and though Pandy didn’t know why he would be carrying something like that out of the deepest part of the forest, who was she to judge?

She followed along as he made his way toward the house, and now the tower was there, piercing the unfinished sky like a needle carrying stars on its thread. Another figure stood in the doorway, waiting. The Father.