“You mean, they don’t have any evidence it was arson,” she said.
He studied her carefully. “All right. I don’t believe it was an accident either. But why would a demon set fire to Fresh Start?”
Same question she was asking herself. She shook her head. The waitress returned to take their order and left again. Nest tried to think the matter through, to discover what it was she had missed, because her instincts told her she had missed something.
“You said on the phone you’d been thinking about what I told you,” she said finally. “You said that maybe you were wrong. What made you change your mind? It wasn’t just the fire, was it? It must have been something else.” She paused. “You said you came over because you thought maybe something had happened to me. Why did you think that?”
He looked decidedly uncomfortable, but there was a hard determination reflected in his eyes. “Do you remember the dream I told you about?”
“I remember you didn’t exactly tell me about it at all.”
He nodded. “I didn’t think it was necessary then. I do now.”
She studied him silently, considering what this meant. It couldn’t be good. All right.” she said. “Tell me.”
Her face was so bartered and scraped that it was all he could do to keep his voice steady. He could not help feeling responsible, as if by having had last night’s dream he had set in motion the events prophesied for today. He wanted to know what had happened to her, but he knew she would not tell him until she was satisfied he was reconsidering his position on the Lady’s warning. He felt a sense of desperation grip him as he began his narrative, a growing fear that he could not accomplish what he had come here to do.
“I’ve been having this dream far several months’ he began. “It’s always the same dream, and it’s the only dream I ever have. That’s never happened to me before. For a long time after I stopped being a Knight of the Word, there were no dreams – not of the sort I used to have, just snippets of the sort everyone has. So when I began having this dream, I wars surprised. It was the same dream, but it changed a little every time, showing me a little bit more of what was to happen.
“The dream goes like this. I’m standing on a hill south of Seattle watching the city burn. Like all the old dreams I had as a Knight of the Word, it takes place in the future. The Void has besieged the city and taken it. Them is a battle going on. I am not a Knight of the Word in this dream, and I am not involved in the fighting. But I am standing there with captives all around me, and in the dreams of late, I am their captor. I don’t understand why this is, but I am.
“Then an old man approaches, and he accuses me of killing someone long ago. He says he was there, that he saw me do it. He says I killed Simon Lawrence, the Wizard of Oz, in Seattle, on Halloween. He says I killed him at the art museum. He doesn’t say it exactly that way. He says it happened in the Emerald City, in the glass palace, in the shadow of the Tin Woodman. But I know what he means. The art museum is mostly glass and outside there is a piece of sculpture called Hammering Man, a metal giant pounding his hammer on a plate. There’s no mistaking what he means. Besides, in the dream I can remember it happening, too. I can’t remember the details-maybe because I don’t know them. But I know he is telling the truth.”
He stopped talking as the waitress arrived with their food. When she departed, he bent forward to continue.
“I didn’t learn this all at once. It was revealed in pieces. But I put the pieces together. I knew what the dream was telling me. But I didn’t believe it. There is no reason for me to kill Simon Lawrence. I respect and admire him. I want to work for him as long as he’ll let me. Why would I ever even consider killing him? When you asked me yesterday about the dream, I didn’t see any point in going into it. Whether or not I was a Knight of the Word, I wouldn’t let the events of the dream ever happen. To tell you the truth, I was afraid that the dream was a tactic by the Word to bring me back into line, to scare me into changing my mind about serving. I even considered the possibility that it was the work of the Void. It didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to allow it to affect me.”