Molly looked at my face, “You have another star. And just one more to go.” She looked towards the window. To me, it was just darkness—but just as Harry could see something on the TV that hadn’t been there for me, Molly seemed to have the unique ability to look out that window and see the moon.

  I moved to join her. I hated the darkness out there. It was too blank and too open and too much of nothing at all. It made my brain itch the same way that seeing Tabitha on the banister had made my brain itch. But where I had known what I wanted then—to push her and see what happened—I didn’t know what the window made me want to do.

  Crawl out of it and into the void, maybe. Find out if it was a divide the same way that hallway had been. Find out if I would float away like Dream May, or just show back up somewhere in this weird, creepy house.

  Molly didn’t say anything.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked her.

  “Tomorrow is the full moon,” said Molly carefully.

  Crap. “I have to get Trevor taken care of before then.”

  Molly didn’t turn toward me. “Is that the boy?”

  “You don’t know their names?”

  “They don’t speak to us. They just showed up here and they packed up the dolls and they made it their own.” Molly gave a heavy sigh. “I miss Delilah.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Another doll.”

  “I mean, I could have guessed that much,” I snapped, irritated. “I was asking who she was, like—you know what? Never mind. If tomorrow’s the full moon, then I don’t have time to stand around talking about that, anyway. Where’s the boy at?”

  Molly didn’t answer right away. Then she said, “I don’t know. The last time I saw him, he was the one putting all of the dolls into boxes, down in the basement. Harry might know.”

  “Where’s Harry?”

  A long pause. Molly was still staring out the window. She cocked her head to the side like she might have heard something. Her eyes slid to the left, but there was no one there. The little ballerina gave a slight nod—just a little tilt of her head, then said, “He’s this way,” and darted off. She didn’t run, though. Molly danced her way out of the kitchen and into the dining room adjacent. There was a long table there, just like in the real world, but this table was made of glass and not wood.

  Molly jumped up onto it gracefully, then turned and offered me her hand. I only hesitated for a moment, then took it and climbed onto the table, too. The glass lit up as we ran and danced across it. The table stretched out like a piece of candy, on and on it went, and the glass glowed, and Molly laughed like it was the most fun she’d ever had.

  And I laughed, too, even though I was thinking about sticking a knife through Trevor’s heart the same way that his real world counterpart had stuck one through mine.

  Molly let go of my hand quite suddenly and took a leap—landing neatly on the air. She started to jump and float. I followed her, taking a leap. Thump! I landed on nothing! The air was solid. Each step through the air lit up just like the table had, meaning I could just jump onto the glow that Molly left behind her.

  It was just further proof that Molly could see things the rest of us couldn’t. There was a hole in the ceiling. It was perfectly circular. Molly danced and jumped and leaped her way over to it, then hooked her hands around the edge of the hole and neatly pulled herself up and onto the next floor.

  I followed after her, but wasn’t quite quick enough. The final light vanished before I could get to it!

  I froze. “Molly?”

  There was no answer. The space was directly beneath the hole. It would be easy to land on… but my brain was thinking in rational ways, and not thinking about dream logic. It went there’s nothing there, don’t jump! And my body locked up and listened.

  “Molly, come back,” I called out, louder this time. My knees had locked up so tightly that I couldn’t seem to bend them. There was silence, but Molly didn’t come back.

  I wasn’t sure if I was angry or scared. The two emotions swam inside of me like a twisting, knotted-up haze. I curled my arms around myself. For the first time since I got here almost a solid month ago, I found that—

  Wait.

  Wait.

  How could a full month have passed by already?

  It felt like hardly any time had passed at all! I didn’t sleep, and that should have made it seem longer, not shorter, right? It felt like just a few hours ago, I had killed off Dream Hero! But according to Molly, whole days—weeks—had passed by.

  Maybe each hidden threshold in the house took way more time to pass than I thought? And that’s why it was always changing, and everything felt just slightly off?

  “Or maybe,” I told myself, nose wrinkling with irritation. “It’s a dream, and that’s why it doesn’t make sense. Come on, Quinn. You’re putting way too much thought into this.”

  I was putting way too much thought into the jump, too. I didn’t have to aim for the invisible step. I just had to aim for the hole! The step had been right below it.

  “Come on, you’ve done everything else so far, you can do this too!” I gave myself a quick little pep talk, forced myself to shake out the tension in my hands and arms, and then to kick the tension out of my feet and legs.

  Once my limbs weren’t quite as locked up, I took a deep breath.

  Then… I jumped!

  For a moment, I was soaring through the air. Without the lights or Molly’s laughter, it didn’t feel like a fun dance. It felt scary. The table seemed to be miles beneath me instead of just a few feet. The air was cold, empty.

  I reached toward the hole, but was just a little bit too short. The tips of my fingers curled against the edge of the wooden opening, but they slipped straight back down. I fell, but there wasn’t even enough time to scream before I thumped down onto the invisible step.

  It lit up underneath me.

  Molly stuck her head out through the hole, hanging upside down. “What’s taking you so long, Quinn?”

  “I was calling for you,” I accused her.

  “I didn’t hear you.”

  “There’s no way you didn’t hear me. Just—forget it. Whatever.” Whatever, forever. “Help me up.”

  Rising to my feet, I shoved a hand toward Molly and let her help me up through the hole. It healed up behind us, gone by the time both of my feet were on solid ground. There was no wooden floor. Instead, it was a white tile. The walls were blue tile. Even though I didn’t feel small, the bathroom seemed to be fit for a giant.

  The sink was so big, I couldn’t even see the basin in it. The doors to the cabinet were sitting open, and inside of them was a bedroom. Strings of colorful flags and bright fairy lights had been hung from the sink pipes. A race car bed was pressed to one of the cabinet walls. There were bean-bag chairs and splashes of paint on the floor, and there was a dart board, and a bunch of markers and crayons all over the floor.

  “I… I put him in here.” I stopped outside of it.

  “Don’t tell him that,” warned Molly. “It made him very sad when his room moved. The pipes leak.”

  “They leak?” I asked, aghast.

  Molly bobbed her head. “They leak! Constant dripping! And then his eyes started leaking, too.”

  “You mean, he was crying.”

  “No, his eyes leaked.”

  “They weren’t leaking when I saw him last.” That wasn’t quite true though, was it? He had stared at the TV, and silent tears had rolled down his cheeks, leaving streaks in his face paint.

  My mouth twisted into a frown and the knots in my belly twisted up all of their own accord. “Molly,” I blinked, “what’s happening to me?”

  It was like my emotions were going haywire. They spritzed and fitzed and shot out in all directions. I had nearly pushed Tabitha over the railing. I had yelled at Molly, even though it wasn’t her fault the light in the air had vanished.

  I was quick to jump, and fight, and bite, and kill—even though they were just dream people. That wasn’t like me.

  Dad used to say, You’re the sweetest girl I’ve ever met, Quinn, just like candy! Then he would pull a butterscotch bite out of his pocket and give it to me. I had a whole shoebox of the wrappers back before the house burned down. I kept it under my bed. It was my ‘Sweet As Candy’ box.

  Why did I keep them? I couldn’t remember. That bothered me, too. I was having a hard time remembering a lot of things. What did my dad sound like?

  Molly shook her head. “We need to find Harry.”

  “Please,” I pleaded. “Tell me what’s happening. I can’t take it anymore, Molly. I feel like there are bees in my brain.”

  They were buzzing around in there oh-so loudly; bzzt, bzzt, bzzzzzt. Each time they made that sound, it put me all out of whack. They were loudest when one of the members of the dream family were around, but it was starting to echo in the background of my brain even when there wasn’t someone that I was supposed to kill in the area.

  “Come on,” Molly beckoned, and then she turned her back to me. She climbed into the cabinet beneath the sink and after a long hesitation, I followed her.

  Clown's Circus

  The room under the sink wasn’t a room at all. It was a whole little house. Well, it wasn’t actually all that little. Everything was normal sized in comparison to myself and Molly. It was just that the pipes in the sink were massive. It was impossible to forget there was something weird about what was happening here.

  The bedroom was nice, with a race-car bed and bright rainbow-striped quilting, and then it had the dart board just across from the wall. The darts were all over the wall beside it though, not actually in the board.

  Molly giggled. “Harry doesn’t have very good aim.”

  “I can see that.” I snickered a little myself. There were different-colored area rugs on the floor, which mapped out the location of the different rooms. One rug must have been the kitchen. There was a fridge shaped like a rocket standing in the middle of the area rug. A cutting board sat on the floor with a whole fish on it.

  Empty pie tins littered the various rooms, and so did empty cans of seltzers. There were popped balloons all over the place. I bent down to pick up a bit of bright blue rubber, only to jump when the sound of another balloon popping filled the air.

  “He must be over this way.” Molly led us away from the bedroom and over to the other side of the sink cabinet. The rugs were all different colors and patterns, some of them striped and others displaying geometric features. There were some rugs with tassels and some that were made out of woven nets.

  One of the areas came better into view. There were balloons floating in the air there. The strings were tied to various pieces of furniture. Harry was grabbing the strings and pulling them down, then jamming a great big needle against them.

  The needle must have been blunt, or the balloon must have been strong, because it took a lot of pushing and grunting and struggling before the tip of it would pierce the rubber. Pop! It exploded! Bits of yellow went all over the place.

  Harry looked furious. He grabbed another string and started pulling it down.

  “Harry,” said Molly. “We need to find the boy.”

  Harry didn’t answer. He pulled the pink balloon closer, wrapped one arm around it so that it was nestled in the crook of his elbow, and then jammed the needle hard against it. The balloon bent the needle.

  “Why, you little—” Harry made a sound like a dolphin. The noise startled me so suddenly that it took a minute for me to realize what he was doing.

  That’s how people used to curse in old-timey cartoons! A stream of garbled dolphin sounds, bleeps, buzzers, and sirens came from his mouth.

  I froze. Molly’s jaw dropped.

  The needle wouldn’t go through. Harry flung the balloon with all of his might. It hit the end of the string, still tied to the back of the green bench, and then floated back up to join its brethren above.

  He finally seemed to notice that we were around. His cheeks colored with a blush, but instead of red they turned bright blue. The shade matched his curly blue hair. “What are you doing in here? Haven’t you people ever heard of knocking?”

  “We don’t have time to knock,” said Molly, with a shake of her head. She stepped over to Harry and curled one dainty hand around his wrist. With the other, she took the needle from him. It was a sewing needle, just…a massive one.

  She dropped the needle onto the floor. I reached out and picked up the needle. It had a lot of weight to it. The metal was as long as my hand from the wrist to the tip of my pointer finger, and the eye at the end of it was as thick around as my thumb.

  I tapped the tip of it to the meat of my palm. It was sharp enough to hurt.

  “What are those balloons made out of?” I asked.

  Molly said, “It doesn’t matter what they’re made out of. We’re not here about the balloons. Harry, we need to know where Trevor is at. The boy, the son, the one left. It’s the full moon soon. She has to finish this chapter of the story.”

  “Wait, what do you mean this chapter?” I blurted.

  Molly ignored me, telling Harry, “I know everything is topsy turvy and all wayside right now, but if you can help us get rid of these strangers, we might be able to get things back to normal. Wouldn’t that be nice, Harry? To have things back to normal?”

  Harry made a sniff and rubbed at his face. His makeup didn’t smear at all. Maybe it wasn’t makeup. Maybe that’s just what his skin looked like, since he used to be a doll and all of that. “Normal? Nothing’s ever going to be normal, Molly. Look what happened! Look at those monstrosities!”

  He jabbed a finger toward one of the balloons.

  Hesitantly, Molly asked, “What’s wrong with them, Harry?”

  “What do you mean what’s wrong with them? Don’t your eyes work, Molly?” He grabbed one of the strings for the balloons and pulled it down with a jerk, the bright yellow balloon bobbling about in the air. He flung his hand forward, so that the balloon was floating eye level with me and Molly.

  It just looked like a normal balloon to me, though the rubber might have been a little less see-through than normal.

  I glanced at Molly, brows raised. She could see things that weren’t actually there, after all. But Molly seemed just as befuddled at the balloon as I was.

  She reached past it and gave Harry a pat on the wrist. “That might go away when the people do.”

  Harry’s lower lip wobbled. “It’s all ruined, Molly.”

  “I can fix it.” The words were out before I even finished thinking them through.

  Fix it? Geez, I didn’t even see what was wrong with the balloon! It doesn’t matter. This is just a dream, anyway. I just have to get my hands on that stupid boy and make sure he pays for the way Trevor treated me.

  “How?” Harry’s lip was really wobbling now, almost comically.

  Molly seemed curious, too.

  “Welllll,” I said, drawing the word out. Right! I snapped my fingers. “I’ll draw it better!”

  Harry turned big eyes onto me. The makeup made them seem even bigger. “What?”

  “If I can find Trevor before the full moon, then I’ll get to go home. And then I’ll be able to draw you something—somewhere better. Molly said that this house is just here because it’s what I was drawing, right?” I offered.

  Molly stared at me, lips parted.

  I continued, “Harry, that means I could draw you the best==”

  “Circus!” blurted Harry.

  “What?”

  “I want to go back to the circus,” he repeated. “There used to be a circus, and it had all sorts of people just like me. There was a magician and a woman who could see in a crystal ball and a bearded lady and—and there were other clowns.”

  “I’ll draw you a circus then,” I promised him. “But I won’t be able to do that if I’m not able to find Trevor, and Molly says you’re the only person in this whole place who knows where he’s at.”

  “I…” Harry stared at the balloon, then let go of it. The string pulled it back toward the bench, and it floated up to mingle with the others. I still didn’t see where there was anything wrong with them.

  Molly reached out and took hold of Harry’s hand. “You don’t need to come with us, Harry. Just tell us how to get to him.”

  “Through the door under my bed,” Harry answered after a moment. “You’ll really draw me a circus? I can go there again?”

  I nodded seriously.

  “It’s been so long since I went to the circus. Last time—” His mouth snapped shut like a rubber band. He made a muffled sound, wide eyed, and reached for his lips. Fingers tugged at them, but he couldn’t make them open.

  “Harry?” I couldn’t keep the shock out of my voice.

  Molly chided, “You know we can’t talk about that.”

  Harry looked at her and then, at the reminder, seemed to relax. Once he stopped struggling, he was able to work a single finger in between his lips and start to pull them open. It looked a bit like watching someone trying to open a plastic bag where they stretched around his finger before snapping apart.

  Way more gross than anything else I had seen in this weird dream of mine, that was for sure.

  “Sorry,” said Harry. “I forgot.”

  I almost asked what that was about, but then decided that I didn’t want to risk that happening to my own mouth. Freaky and double-down gross!

  Molly chided, “Don’t forget again. That sort of thing could be dangerous. What if it didn’t open back up?”

  “There’s a door under the bed?” I blurted, not wanting to talk more about how his lips had just glued themselves together. There was something unsettling about it; about the way it had looked, about the fact that it had happened.

  And okay, fine. Fine! There was something background unsettling about all of this. It felt a little bit like, well, like I was on a carousel, and it kept going back and forth between spinning at a normal speed and going nauseatingly fast. I was fine when everything was ‘normal’ for this dream world. But then something like that happened and…

  It made me wonder.