Annie was already fixing me the drink. She passed it to me. Purple liquid fizzed and danced inside the glass. I looked at it nervously.
“Drink it,” she said. “You’ll be fine.”
Could I trust her? Could I? Then again, did I have any choice?
“Hurry,” she said.
I swallowed the drink in three big gulps. Almost immediately, the room grew fuzzy.
“Annie, what about you?” I said. “What are you going to do?”
“I’ll meet you there,” she replied, her voice coming from the other side of a wall springing up between us. “Just get to the shop, Philippa. We have to stop him.”
A moment later, the room had disappeared, and I was in my bed in the cottage.
I sat up, panting, my heart racing as though I’d been running for miles. Staring at the walls of my room, I tried to gather my thoughts. Bit by bit, they came to me. Daisy in trouble; trying to convince Robyn — had it worked? Then Robyn going, Daisy fading, the lions, Annie’s house.
Annie — what did she have to do with all this? What did she know? Remembering her words, I flung on some clothes. It didn’t matter if I didn’t have any answers yet. All that mattered was that I got to the shop in time to rescue Daisy.
As I crept past my parents’ bedroom, I had a pang of guilt. They’d be so disappointed if they knew I was sneaking out on my own in the middle of the night. Not angry. I wouldn’t get punished or anything. I never did. It would be one of those kitchen-table talks where we’d all discuss what I’d done and why I’d done it and see if we could brainstorm for some ideas about how I might have approached the situation more positively. And maybe a role-play where we’d act out a better way of behaving.
I knew I shouldn’t be sneaking around in a strange village in the middle of the night. But I also knew that my best friend’s life might depend on it — and that was a hundred times more important right now.
I tiptoed down the creaky stairs and opened the front door. Closing it softly behind me, I pulled my coat on, glanced around, and ran through the silent streets to the bookshop.
Now what? The front door was locked — not that I expected anything different. I scanned the windows. All locked. There was a small passageway beside the shop. I hurried to the back and tried the windows there. Locked, too.
Running back to the front of the shop, I banged on the door with my fists.
Nothing. The street stood just as silent as before. It was as though I were the only person awake in the whole world. Where was Annie? Was she coming? Had I really communicated with her, or had it just been a normal dream?
I banged on the door again. Then I bent down and opened the mail slot. “Robyn!” I yelled. My voice echoed into the dark shop. “Robyn!” I banged again, not caring who I woke up. I’d explain. I’d think of something. I’d have to. All I knew was that Daisy was in terrible danger, and I had to save her — if I wasn’t already too late.
I curled up my fists and was about to bash on the door again when I heard something. I lifted the mail slot and peeked inside. It was Robyn!
“Robyn!” I yelled through the slot.
She opened the door. “You’d better come in,” she said, letting me inside.
“What’s happened?” I asked, panicked. “Am I too late?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“What d’you mean?”
“He won’t let me in. He’s locked himself in the office.”
“Have you tried to talk to him?” I asked.
Robyn nodded. “He just keeps sending me away and saying it’s for my own good.” She glanced shyly at me. “I told him what you said to me. At least what I think you said.” She paused before adding nervously, “In the dream.”
“I did,” I replied. “I know it sounds crazy, but it was really me!”
Robyn pulled her hair behind her ears. Her face was pale, and her eyes were scrunched up and tired. “He just keeps saying it’s not how you said. I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t understand, and I don’t know who’s telling the truth.”
“And Daisy?” I held my breath, waiting for her reply. Please, please don’t say I’m too late.
“I don’t know,” she said. “He won’t tell me.”
I headed over to the door at the back of the shop. “Robyn, we have to make him understand what he’s doing.”
“I know, but —”
“But nothing. We have to stop him! She’s my best friend!” I threw the door open and ran up the stairs, three at a time, all the way to his office at the top of the house.
I tried the door. Locked.
“Go away, Robyn,” Mr. Fairweather said from the other side of the door. “I’ve told you.”
“It’s not Robyn,” I said, forcing my voice to sound braver than I felt. “It’s Philippa. And I’m not going anywhere till you tell me what you’ve done with Daisy.”
“Daisy?” he replied, his voice muffled and flat, as though he were beyond caring. Way beyond caring. “I don’t know anyone named Daisy.”
“The butterfly,” I said. Then I swallowed and summoned up all the nerve I could find. “She’s my friend. And you’re harming her. If you don’t stop, she’ll die.”
He didn’t reply.
Robyn came up to the door to stand beside me. Leaning against it, she spoke softly. “Dad, you’ve always said you wouldn’t hurt a fly,” she said. “But if Philippa’s telling the truth —”
“I am telling the truth!” I interrupted.
“If it’s true,” Robyn went on, “then you’re harming more then a fly. You’re harming a . . .” She looked at me.
“A fairy!” I said. If Robyn couldn’t speak the truth out loud, I certainly could.
“I don’t understand,” Robyn said, so quietly I wondered if he’d hear her at all. “Why would you do such a horrible thing? I would never have thought you could be so cruel.”
We stood by the door, waiting in the dark for a reply.
Somewhere downstairs, a clock ticked. There was no other sound.
And then, a shuffling noise on the other side of the door. A key turning. Mr. Fairweather opened the door.
He looked at Robyn with eyes so dark and heavy they seemed to weigh his whole face down. “Cruel?” he said. “You think I’m cruel?”
“What else am I supposed to think?” Robyn asked.
He shook his head. “I can’t have you think that. I can’t.” He walked away, leaving us in the doorway. “Cruel? My daughter says I’m cruel,” he muttered. “And there’s nothing I can do about it.” He had something in his hand: the photo of Robyn’s mom.
He slumped into the chair, leaning on the desk and resting his head in his hands. He looked like an old man.
I don’t know what I’d expected. Maybe that he’d be screaming and shouting — he’d have Daisy in his hand, squeezing the life out of her, a razor in his hand, ready to chop off her wings if I said a word. I don’t know. But certainly not this: a broken man, huddled over a picture of his dead wife in the dark.
“I can’t. I can’t have her think that,” he said. He was talking to the photo! “Forgive me, my darling, if this is wrong. I can’t live with the lie anymore.”
Then he turned to us. “All right — I’ll tell you why I did it,” he said. “I’ll tell you everything.”
I folded my arms and waited.
“It was for you,” he said, looking Robyn in the eyes. “All of it. I did it for you.”
“We agreed from the start that we wouldn’t tell you,” he said, still looking at the picture. Who was he talking to? What was he talking about? Before either of us could ask, he went on. “Your mom had always said it would be hard for any child we had. But we wanted you so much. And then you came along and answered our prayers.”
He turned to face us. His face was so long and drawn, it was as though the skin were falling off him. “We agreed we didn’t want you to have the burden that she had. It was a wonderful gift, of course — but a burden, neverthele
ss. We asked them if there was any way we could stop you from having to take over when the time came. They said that luckily you’d inherited more of my genes, and it wouldn’t pass to you anyway.”
“Dad, what are you talking about?” Robyn said, her voice pinched and tight. “Who did you ask? Who’s ‘they’?”
He drew a slow breath, then looked down into his lap and let it out. Raising his head again, he looked her in the eyes. “ATC,” he said.
“ATC? What’s that?” Robyn asked.
I gulped. “ATC? Above the Clouds?”
Robyn’s dad looked across at me, as if noticing me for the first time. “How do you know about ATC?” he asked.
“I — I just do,” I said, summoning all the bravery I could find. “I don’t have to explain to you. You’re the one who needs to explain!”
He lifted his shoulders in a heavy shrug. “Anyway, we agreed not to tell you. You didn’t need to know. No one’s supposed to know. We did everything we could to protect you from it and let you have a normal childhood.”
“Dad — protect me from what?” Robyn broke in. “What was the big secret that I didn’t know?”
“About your mother,” he said carefully.
Robyn stared blankly back at him. “What about her?” she asked.
He looked first at me, then at Robyn. In a low, calm voice, he said, “That she was the Dream Maker.”
Robyn sat down on a box. I stood next to her. Her face had gone almost white. Her hands were clenched tightly together in her lap. “I don’t understand,” she said. “What’s a dream maker? What are you talking about?”
“It’s a job,” Mr. Fairweather began. “A very important and special one. The Dream Maker creates the dreams that are delivered to everybody at nighttime.”
“What? You’re not making sense,” Robyn burst out. “How can a job like that exist?”
Mr. Fairweather took a breath. “There’s a different world out there, alongside ours,” he said. “It’s run from a place called ATC. Above the Clouds.” He glanced at me. I stared back. I wasn’t giving anything away — not till I had Daisy and I could set her free.
“It’s run by fairies,” he said. “Fairy godmothers, to be more precise. They have all sorts of different roles, and each of them is given assignments. Some are very short; some are much longer.”
“Dad, what are you saying?” Robyn asked, almost choking on her own words. “That Mom was a fairy?”
He took off his glasses, wiped his forehead, then replaced them. His voice hoarse and shaky, he went on. “They come from nature. They can be different things.”
“Like butterflies!” I interrupted before I could stop myself. We were running out of time, and I had to get her back! “Like my friend in the jar. Where is she? You have to give her back!”
He ignored me, and I knew he wouldn’t give Daisy up till he was ready. The best thing I could do for her was to keep quiet till he’d told his story. I wished he’d hurry up about it, though!
“She was a tree,” he said. “She was supposed to have a long, long life.”
Robyn jumped up. “A tree? Mom was a tree? Dad, that’s ridi —”
Then she stopped and clapped a hand over her mouth. She sat down again, almost falling back on to the box. “The oak tree,” she said hoarsely.
“How did you know?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I — of course. The oak tree,” she repeated as she stared into space. “It’s weird,” she went on, shaking her head. “Now that I’ve realized it, it’s as if I always knew. Always. I’m right, aren’t I?”
Her dad simply nodded.
“But it —” Robyn stopped. Staring blankly ahead of her, she said, “It died.” Her voice had taken on the same faraway tone as her dad’s. “It became ill, just when Mom did.”
“It died, and so did she,” he said huskily.
The pair of them got quiet, both lost in their thoughts and their memories. I was desperate to get Daisy back. Where was she? How much time did we have? My eyes scoured the room, searching for her as Mr. Fairweather went on.
“Many years ago, something happened,” he said. “One of the dream deliverers had an accident. It was your mother’s fault, really. She hadn’t been watching what she was doing. She was out in the yard, chopping some wood for kindling. One of the dream deliverers came into the yard, and your mother — well, it was the timing. She was swinging the ax and sliced one of its wings off.”
“One of its wings?” Robyn asked. “You mean there were fairies out in my own backyard, and I didn’t even know it?”
“They were butterflies,” I said. “That’s who delivers dreams.” I turned to Mr. Fairweather. “Isn’t it?”
He stared back for a moment or two before nodding. “Your mother was devastated. When a fairy loses its wings, that’s the end of everything. It has no place in the fairy godmother world — or in any other world. But your mother wouldn’t allow that to happen. She went straight to ATC and begged them to help.”
“And what did they say?” Robyn asked, her eyes wide and focused on her dad.
“They gave the butterfly a special role. Changed her life cycle so that even though she could no longer deliver dreams, she could still help. They made her your mother’s assistant,” he said. “She did her job well. Your mom couldn’t have managed without her, especially when she became ill. Around this time, ATC said she would take over the role of Dream Maker.”
“Who would?” I asked. “The assistant?”
He nodded. “But back on the day of the accident, I’d discovered something. Later in the day, I was out in the backyard when I spotted something on the ground. It was the wing that had been cut off. Lying on the grass. I picked it up, and I noticed it had little particles of something in it. Well, at first I assumed it was just dust. But when I looked closer, I noticed it glittered and shone. That was when I realized what it was.”
“Dream dust,” I said.
“It stuck to the wing. I showed your mom, and we were both entranced by the beauty of it: a dream caught and held tight by a butterfly wing. I completely forgot about it after a while, but then —”
“But then, years later, you thought you would use that knowledge for your own ends.” The voice came from behind me. I spun around.
“Annie!” Robyn cried. “What are you doing here? How did you get in?”
“You left the door open,” she said simply. She was looking at Mr. Fairweather. “I knew you’d done something,” she said. “All during this last year, I’ve wondered what it was. I knew Robyn hadn’t had the dreams. Now I understand how you did it.”
“Get out of my shop!” Mr. Fairweather growled, rising from his chair. “Get out of my house!”
“No, Martin,” she said firmly. “I will not do as you tell me any longer. It has to end.” Annie’s eyes bored into him until he eventually sat back down.
“You stole butterflies. You cut their wings off and used them to hold the dreams back, didn’t you?”
He didn’t reply.
“You made a dream catcher from the butterflies’ wings and used it to stop Robyn from having the dreams. Didn’t you?”
Again, he refused to reply or even acknowledge her presence.
“And you got the idea from the day that your wife saved a fairy’s life after it lost its wings.”
“Annie — how do you know all this? How do you know about the butterfly?” Robyn cried.
Annie knelt down in front of Robyn. Reaching into her lap, she picked up her hands and held them in her own. She smiled gently. Then she turned around, loosened her shawl, and let it slip from her shoulder. All the way down her right-hand side, her back was lined with a long red scar, as though a part of her body had been torn away.
She put her shawl back in place. “How do I know about the butterfly?” she said, turning back around and glaring at Mr. Fairweather before meeting Robyn’s eyes. “Because it was me.”
Robyn got up and paced the room. She stomped across to one
side and then back again, all the time shaking her head. “No, no, no,” she said. “You’re lying — all of you. It doesn’t make sense!”
“I know — it’s a terrible shock,” Annie said. “It’s going to take time to get used to it. But it’s true. Tell her, Martin.”
Mr. Fairweather looked at his daughter with such anguish it almost hurt to look at him. “That first night after your mother’s death,” he said, “you woke from a terrible nightmare, crying, howling. You sounded like an animal caught in a trap in the forest. Wailing, in such distress. Then the next night, it happened again. Worse, even. Of course, I knew you were grieving — but to go through such horrors at night as well as during the day — well, that just seemed cruel.” He shot an angry look at Annie. “Too cruel.”
“So what happened?” I asked.
“I went to Annie, begged her to let Robyn not have the dreams.”
“You knew Annie had been made the Dream Maker?” Robyn asked.
He nodded. “Your mother and I never hid anything from each other. We knew ATC had decided to pass the job on to her. She’d been your mother’s assistant for years. She was the obvious choice. I pleaded with Annie not to send you those terrible dreams, not to let them be delivered. Anything to spare you at least some of the pain you were in.”
“And you wouldn’t?” Robyn asked. “You made me have the dreams?”
“I sent them to you because they were the dreams you were meant to have at that time,” Annie said carefully. “Without them, you would never have the chance to grow beyond them, to heal.”
“And that’s when you made the dream catcher,” I said to Mr. Fairweather.
“It was a long shot. I had no idea whether it would work, but I remembered what had happened with the dream dust years earlier, and I gave it a go. I had nothing to lose,” he said. “I hung it outside Robyn’s window. Sealed the window frame up, just to be sure. And it worked! The dreams never came in. They were lodged forever in the dream catcher. I’d spared her at least that bit of sadness.”