The Girl Who Could Not Dream by Sarah Beth Durst Page B

messy.
    â€œWhat’s going on—” Ethan began.
    â€œShh.” Sophie wanted to run through the house shouting for her parents. Instead, she waited at the top of the stairs.
Please be here!
she thought.
Please be okay!
Mom said she didn’t have to worry. Mom wouldn’t lie to her.
    But her parents would never, ever leave books just strewn like this. Pages were bent. Spines were cracked. Covers torn. All her life, Sophie had been taught that books are precious. Each one holds people and worlds. Each one is a piece of someone’s heart and mind that they chose to share. They were shared dreams.
    Monster clattered down the stairs, spilling more books in his rush. He ran across the top of the books to Sophie. “No one upstairs.” His voice was hushed.
    â€œDownstairs?”
    â€œI’ll check. You try to call them.” Silently, on the pads of his feet, Monster darted down the stairs. He knew how to unlock the basement door with his tentacles. He’d claimed he learned it from a book on lock picking.
    Passing Ethan, Sophie raced back down to the bookshop and ran for the phone by the cash register. She dialed her father’s number. It rang. And rang. Soon, it switched to voicemail. “Dad, it’s Sophie. Where are you? I’m at the shop. Please come home.”
Stay calm,
she told herself. They could have ducked out to run an errand. Quick trip to the supermarket or post office . . . Hanging up, she tried her mother’s number.
    A phone rang at her feet.
    She looked down—her mother’s purse was tucked into a shelf. The phone was inside it. Sophie hung up and tried even harder not to panic. Mom never went anywhere without her purse.
    Monster’s voice drifted up from the basement. “Sophie! Down here!”
    Sophie hurried across the bookshop. Her stomach was flip-flopping, and her heart was pattering extra fast. “Monster? Are you okay?” She ran down the stairs, taking two at a time. “Are Mom and Dad there?”
    â€œNo,” Monster said. “But you need to see this. Oh, this isn’t good.”
    Downstairs, the dusty yellow glow of the lights filled the room. Bottles glistened from the shelves. The somnium sat quietly under the stairs. But the distiller—all the glass tubes and levers that used to overflow a table . . . It was gone.
    Sophie gawked at the empty table. Dust outlined where the distiller used to sit. The wood was faded and stained in places that she’d never seen before. “I don’t . . . Where . . . How?” They’d never moved the distiller. There was no reason to move it.
    Monster hopped onto the distiller table and prowled over the empty surface, sniffing at the wood. Droplets of old spilled dreams shimmered in the cracks in the wood.
    First the books, now the distiller. And her parents weren’t here.
    Sophie felt sick. Her heart pounded, her ears roared, and her palms were slick with sweat. The walls seemed closer. The air felt hotter. In short, she felt, for the first time, like all those dreamers must have felt in the middle of a chased-by-something-horrible nightmare.
    Behind her, Ethan said, “Whoa, what is this place?”
    Oh no, she’d forgotten about him, and he’d followed her! “Go back up,” Sophie ordered. “Forget you saw any of this. Please!”
    â€œLet him stay,” Monster said. “He’s already involved, thanks to the gray giraffe. Besides, we have worse problems.” He paced back and forth on top of the distiller table. His tentacles waved at the shelves. “Look!”
    She looked at the shelves. Several were empty. There had to be two dozen, three dozen . . . maybe fifty missing bottles, all from the same set of shelves. “I don’t understand,” Sophie said. Or more accurately: she didn’t want to understand.
    Ethan raised his hand. “And I seriously don’t