Dreamside

ONE

“I dreamt it.”

“It doesn’t seem possible.”

“But there it is.”

Ella and Honora, heads together, huddle in secrecy in the panelled snug of Belfast’s Crown, sipping creamy black stout that left thin white moustaches of foam on their upper lips.

“But he was never in your bed, or close to it?”

“Ella, I was dreaming, but I wasn’t drunk. I wasn’t interested in him. Apart from that dreamthing Brad never got near enough, and neither did anyone else. If it had been Lee things could have been different.”

“I always knew that you had something for each other.”

“I could never have stolen him away from you Ella. He was starry-eyed.”

“But this thing with Brad; it was rape.”

“Yes. At least that’s what I thought then, and for a long time afterwards. But he said I could have stopped it if I’d wanted. It was a mind thing, and I let it happen. I’ve thought about it a lot since. I don’t know if he’s right.”

“But you were paralyzed; he was stronger and he took advantage. It’s no different from the real thing.”

“It might as well have been the real thing.”

“That’s the part that doesn’t seem possible.”

“You see! Even you doubt me! You’ve had experience of dreaming, you’ve been there. You know how it is—but you can’t bring yourself to believe that I got pregnant because of something that happened on dreamside. Maybe she was drunk, maybe she can’t remember, maybe she just doesn’t want to admit it, I’ve had plenty of time to try them all on. How could I expect anyone else to accept this, if you of all people can’t see it?”

“Honora, I do believe you; I have to believe you. Like you said, I’ve got some experience of this, but even for me it seems like a long time ago and sometimes I don’t even know how much of it was true.”

“It was all true, all right. The pregnancy was confirmed, absolutely. No question of error.”

“But you lost the baby? It miscarried? Was that before or after you took an overdose?”

“After. It was the pregnancy that made me do it. I was going mad. You don’t know what it was like. I thought I might have the baby; then I thought it might be born with two heads or not even human at all. And me a good Catholic girl. At least, I was then. Anyway, the suicide attempt induced the miscarriage. It was finished.”

Ella put a hand on Honora’s.

“You’d best be moving if you really want to catch that ferry. Will you let me know what Lee found out about you-know-who? Though I’ll tell you something Ella, I didn’t have a bad dream or a repeater while you were here. Maybe they’ve stopped again after all. God help us, I hope so.”

“I hope so too Honora. Now, no more grieving about lost babies, OK? Promise?”

“No more grieving. I mean, if she were out there now, she’d forgive me, wouldn’t she?”

“Just try not to think about it.”

“Right. No more grieving.”

“You’ll come over to England and see us?”

“I’ll try.”

“I don’t want try, I want promise.”

“Perhaps when I get a few days’ holiday… Easter.”

“Easter. That’s a promise and I’ll keep you to it.”

Outside the Crown they walked to the car park and kissed, something they would never have done in student days. Age softens as much as it hardens, thought Ella. She got into her Midget and raced back.

She arrived at Lee’s cottage before midnight. He had heard the car and was standing silhouetted in the doorway. The hall was spiced with the smell of the curry which simmered on the stove, a hint of whiskey on Lee as Ella squeezed his hand and went by him into the lounge.

He poured strong drinks and served up the curry. They caught up in shorthand, then finished the meal in silence. Ella took her glass and sat on the floor in front of the open fire while Lee massaged her aching shoulders. The fire sparked and flickered hypnotically.

“So it could be him?” Ella said lazily.

“It could be; he’s fallen into a well. I never got near enough to second-guess him. It wasn’t the fond reunion. He’s been that way so long his face has gone whiskey coloured.”

“But he’s had the dreams?”

“Oh, he’s had the dreams all right; there was a very scared Brad inside that alcohol. He made a little speech about unwanted visitors, but I didn’t know whether he was talking about me or the dreams.”

“But is he bringing them on? Has he been back there?”

“That’s the question. Whatever it is, he seems to think that they’ve started to get up and walk. He kept staring out of his window at the empty cottage next door. Looking for enemies.”

“What did your instincts say?”

“Too frightened. What about her?”

“She was definitely holding out on me. I’m sure it’s her. She gave me as much of the story as she thought would keep me satisfied. Rationed it out, right up until the end. But there’s more, I’m sure of it.”

“So it’s Honora.”

“I could be wrong.”

“It’s all we’ve got to go on. So how was the journey?”

“I had some bad feelings on the way over. Then when I got to Ireland it was OK. Honora was warm after she’d recovered from the shock of seeing me. It brought a lot of things back.”

“Me too. Seeing Brad, even in that state.”

“It brought back things about us, too.”

“All of it?”

“Everything.”

Lee kissed Ella’s neck. “I never really figured why or how it ended.”

“Well,” Ella smiled, “we never really forgave each other for being only human.”

“One day you were gone, then there were three postcards, and then thirteen years had passed.”

“The postcards! I remember trying to fill them with anything but what really mattered.”

They lapsed into silence. Ella felt Lee’s loneliness dangerously close to the surface.

“You were never out of my mind. All the years.”

“Stop talking about it. Come here. We can make the years fall away.” She smiled again, and put her hand inside his shirt. “Do you remember a certain game we used to play?”

“Of course I remember”.

Ella pulled him down on to the rug and they made love. It was clean, hungry sex. They pretended nothing had changed, that they were back in Ella’s scented cave and that the amber light from the fire was the dawn breaking through the heavy curtains of their old world. They could be childlike again. They could pretend to be victims of a fold in the ordinary sequence of time, with the intervening thirteen years as a long cold night. Pretending was good, and each could pretend as well as the other, and the game of pretending didn’t devour the way that dreaming devoured.

TWO

Honora Brennan, still recovering from Ella’s unexpected visit, is frightened. She wanders round the house drinking from a glass of stout and swallowing temazepam. In her back room she stands before the covered easel and removes the tablecloth.

Sitting back on a high stool, she contemplates her work, squinting at it through the soft-focus lens of alcohol and tranquilizers which gives the painting a fluid quality all of its own. The canvas shows a familiar scene: a sturdy, spreading oak leaning out across a lake that seems to have no farther shore. But the view is changed in some way, as if Honora has painted a different dreamside, one in the grip of a new authority, which leaves even her guessing.

Honora covers up the painting before the answer comes to her. She climbs the stairs to bed. The hinge on the gate outside whines and she glances down into the street. A child has climbed on to her gate and is swinging on it, gently back and forth: a girl, a little older than those she teaches at school, neglected, wearing a cut-down dress from a fashion at least a decade past, with lank hair framing sad eyes. The girl looks up at her. Honora draws the curtains.

Curled up in the dark, Honora wishes that Ella had stayed longer. Maybe she would go to England, and spend some time with Ella. Her visit has turned up buried secrets, memories that sit up and point at her like corpses out of coffins; but it has also brought the warm companionship they enjoyed in the early days on dreamside.

Honora spends half the night drifting between waking, sleeping and dreaming. She is shaken by the wind rattling the window. Ella, Lee, Brad, Professor Burns and countless other voices all take turns at owning the hand that rattles the window, until in exasperation she gets out of bed. Taking a school copy of the prayer book from her bookshelf she levers open the staples that bind it, carefully folding the leaves into paper wedges and forcing them between the gaps of the window frame. She climbs into bed and drifts back into sleep.

The familiar branches of the giant oak loom large, as if from out of a mist, swaying gently and beckoning her on; she’s carried in by the currents. She just goes with it, not part of it but with it, that’s all it ever took, all it ever wanted, without struggle or without any more need to help it along, until, breaking into substance like the gentle breaking of an insignificant wave upon a beach it is delivered to you or you to it.

But this is not the same dreamside. The oak is dead, the willow a cluster of bony twigs in ugly gestures; the trampled grass a crust of hard frost; and the lake itself a solid, frozen feet-thick sheet of ice.

This is the dreamside that Honora has been visiting these last twelve months, searching for something she doesn’t understand. She patrols the lakeside looking out across the frozen water for signs that never come. She walks clear out onto the frozen lake about twenty, thirty yards. Her boot scrapes the sprinkled layer of snow: the ice underneath is a grey paste with impenetrable darkness immediately beneath it.

Then, as before, she hears the dull thump of an explosion under the ice: dooomphh way out from the shore; a thud, maybe, of ice shifting and resettling. There it goes again, doooomphh, only nearer this time. Honora is spooked by the sound, even though she’s heard it before a thousand times.

For the first time (every time she comes it’s for the first time) Honora sees hairline cracks in the ice, though it’s feet thick with no sign of a thaw. She sees more shadowy movements beneath the ice, strange shapes forming and reforming, something live. DOOOOOMMPH! There goes that noise again, much closer this time, and she feels the ice shiver beneath her. What thing is under the ice, thrashing around, trying to get out?

Honora bends down to take a closer look then— DOOOOOMMPH!!—that thudding explosion happens right under her feet and this time she feels the ice shaking beneath her and is almost thrown off balance. She sees a large crack opening up and zigzagging towards her, passing between her legs, racing towards the shore. Now the crack is opening up wide and Honora begins to run, slipping as she goes, her legs becoming paralyzed as she tries to escape the opening ice behind her. Her running slows. Her muscles freeze. The ice is locking in to her. She is becoming ice herself. Only by a monumental effort of will is she able to throw herself on to the shore, and out of the dream.

She wakes up in a temazepam-and-stout-induced sweat, wishing for someone to hold, to speak to, the someone she denies herself by way of self-punishment. She even contemplates phoning Ella and making a clean breast of it. She picks up the clock. It’s 4:40 A.M. Maybe she will go over to England, to see if Ella and Lee can help her with this madness. She sinks back down on to the pillow, hoping for unviolated sleep, clean in the knowledge that the dream, like the little girl swinging on the gate, won’t call on her in the same night twice.

THREE

Nothing has been said exactly, but Ella stays at Lee’s. Both think leave it, wait and see, bad luck to use words on it. They sleep together, curled up like two question marks, one sleeping body cupping the other, resisting the dream.

Lee goes back to his office where he tries to work, struggling against exhaustion and fear. Ella waits at home, reading paperbacks and doing uncharacteristically wifely things: cleaning, shopping, cooking dinner and giving him a neck rub when he gets back from work. In return, Lee fixes the roof of the car.

Then, one night, their resistance collapses and they find each other on dreamside. The dream is lucid and with the same feverish excitement as at any time before, but they wrap their arms about each other’s waists as if the other might dissolve at any moment. They stare around in horror at their idyll: the charred branches, the barren soil, the icy lake…

There is nothing to say in the face of this sterility, and immediately the dream breaks.

“What happened?” they ask, waking. They have always regarded dreamside as a private island and a personal haven, despite the menace that shadowed their later dreaming. It has always been held to be a place beyond change. “But what happened?”

That morning, Ella got a call from Honora, She had decided to spend Easter with them. She had booked a flight from Belfast to Birmingham. Ella was to drive to the airport and collect her.

Honora was shy with Lee when they returned. “Twelve years? Can it really be twelve years?”

“Nearly thirteen. You look great,” said Lee. She didn’t. Honora looked pale and her blue veins stood out too prominently on her forehead and hands. Her eyes lacked sheen.

Of course it’s her, he thought, just look at her.

They talked the evening away, without mentioning the dreaming. The subject itched to be scratched, but Ella was patient. She knew that Honora had come to tell her something, and she waited for the moment to be right.

That moment came the next day. Ella had arranged to take Honora for a drive, anything to distract from the burden of anticipation. In the morning they drove to Warwick Castle, and crept giggling around the dungeons and waxworks. In the afternoon they visited Coventry cathedral, where the giant new building stands shoulder to shoulder with the war-blitzed shell of the medieval Gothic version. Inside the ruin, Honora turned to face the altar with its cross of charred beams.

“I had it,” she said. “You knew, didn’t you?”

“The baby miscarried. You lost the baby.”

Honora turned to face her. “I lost the baby. I also had the baby.”

“What are you talking about, Honora?”

“I had the baby and I didn’t have the baby. You still don’t understand? Do you need me to spell it out for you?”

“Maybe I do. Maybe I’m not as clever as you think.”

They stood facing each other, Ella searching Honora’s disappointed eyes until suddenly, she understood.

“On dreamside?”

Honora didn’t flicker.

“You had it on dreamside? It couldn’t be!” Ella suddenly felt out of her depth. She was first to look away.

“Are you sure it wasn’t…”

“Wasn’t what? A dream?”

Ella took the other woman’s arm. “Let’s go. I need to sit down somewhere and think about this.”

They walked across the hollowed-out shell of the old cathedral, down the steps and out across the face of the defiant new monument. They found a bench. Honora stared downwards.

Have it? How can you have it and not have it? But that’s how it was.

“It was November. Cold November. Ma and Da thought I was going mad. Maybe I was… I remember everything. Mostly I remember how cold it was. Bitter winds and mists rolling down from the loughs. Rain. All that.

“It was my barren year. My lost year. After I’d tried to kill myself at university, I was just idle. I felt… cauterized. All nerves gone. Spring and summer slipped into autumn and I didn’t even notice. Ma and Da fussing over me the whole time, I had to shut them out to stay sane. There was a weekly appointment with a psychologist. A nice man. I told him everything about myself. I opened up to him like a flower, told him all about my childhood, all that stuff. And in all the candour he didn’t see I’d kept this other thing quiet.”

“You didn’t tell him about dreamside?”

“Not a thing.”

“Didn’t he guess you were hiding something?”

“I don’t know. I kept him busy with masses and masses of information about other things. It just came pouring out. It seemed to keep him satisfied. But the more I talked, the more I kept it a secret, the more I could feel it swelling inside me. I knew I had an appointment on dreamside. It was inflating me, insisting, summoning me.

“I stopped fighting it, and then one night I was back there. You know, it’s funny: it was always night, and I couldn’t change it. And the moon was always full, and on dreamside I had this huge, soft, roundness growing inside me. It was all different. A cold place. Frost, and moon washed nights, and trees all silhouette. And the lake was calm, like oil.

“I was terrified, Ella. Every time I was drawn back there, I was bigger. I tried to hold it off. Have you ever tried to stay awake, days at a time? Try it. You start to break up. First there are little slips, with your words faltering and fusing together. Then there’s all the dithering, unable to perform simple tasks. And you lose concentration, you’re ‘away’ somewhere else; and then you start to laugh at yourself, but with hysterical laughter that cuts back at you. You forget why you’re trying to stay awake. So that’s what you do, fight it, fight it. In the end, of course, you give in.

“Then I arrived there with the awful realization, you know, this is the time, this is the moment. It was so cold there. And there was something else… a shadow… a bad echo. The trees were ugly charcoal silhouettes and the moon was like a gob of candle wax dribbled across the lake. I was thinking I would rather be anywhere but here when I felt the first contraction. It was like a shock wave. Instinct took over, and I looked for somewhere to crouch. I went over to the oak. I couldn’t get this idea out of my head that I was like an animal, looking at the moon; like a she-wolf about to whelp.

“I thought about my body, sleeping in my bedroom. But what was the point? I couldn’t stop it. Hours seemed to pass. There was no light, no dawn. Only pain. Loneliness and pain. Then the waters broke. I grabbed hold of my knees and held my breath. The contractions came every two minutes.

“I leaned back on my hands and I could feel the baby’s head, pushing, pushing. I was delirious, I thought the dream would have to break: no, it’s impossible, it won’t come, there’s really nothing to come, but then there it was. Red-hot iron searing at my insides. I was shivering with fear or pain or cold. I couldn’t stop shivering. Then when I pushed the baby’s head shot out. I was biting the air for breath.

“The rest of the baby came in a slippery, blubbery heap. I knew I was weeping and gulping and shivering, but I did everything on instinct. I cleared out its mouth with my finger and then it gulped at the air and began to cry. I was actually holding the baby in my hands. Then I laid the baby on the ground, bit the cord and knotted it as if I’d done it a hundred times. I took the baby and walked into the lake, up to my knees. It was very cold. I washed the baby clean, and then I washed myself.

“The baby was whole, pure, clean; and beautiful. So beautiful that I remember sobbing over her, from exhaustion and relief. Then the dream broke.”

Ella let out a deep breath. “You went through it alone. All alone.”

“There’s no midwifery there, Ella.”

“But we went back there. We could never find you. Or you never came.”

“I never came to you. But I couldn’t stop it. On dreamside I grew bigger, even though there was nothing physical showing here. I carried it. I carried it and I delivered it.”

“But you never told me anything. We could have helped. We could have done something.”

“But I didn’t want you, Ella. Not any of you, and least of all him. God, I can’t even speak his name. I delivered the child in that place, under that tree, and I did it with a scream and a curse that had the place shivering. God help me, when that child came out I named it a curse on him, a blasted curse in all the mess and pain and blood. I know it was a terrible thing to do, and I know that curses come back on you, but that’s what I felt. I cursed it in his name and I cursed him in its name.

“Remember that time on dreamside when you swore at Brad— and didn’t he deserve it!—but it came out like a real thing? Words like real things? Well, I did the same and I offered the tiny soul of that dreamside baby to the curse I put on Brad Cousins.”

“But in the end it’s only words, Honora. Words are not real things. They’re only words.”

“Not on dreamside they’re not. Words are things there. I cursed the baby and I washed it, and then I wished the baby away. Then the dream broke.”

“As they always did.”

“Yes.”

“And did you ever go back?”

“Never voluntarily. I was dragged back. I don’t know if something was pulling me or whether I was unconsciously driving myself back there to look for it. Anyway, it was never there.”

Ella gazed thoughtfully at the cathedral spire pricking at the blue sky. “Do you still go to mass?” she asked suddenly.

What? You’re joking. I haven’t been since.”

“Since it all happened?”

“Yes.”

“You used to be a strong Catholic; do you think this could be why you keep returning to dreamside?”

“I never said I did.”

“No, you never said you did. Honora, you should go to mass.”

Honora shook her head, puzzled.

“I see it. Tomorrow’s Good Friday. You must go to Catholic Mass.”

“Don’t you go making plans for me. I haven’t been near a church since my university days and I’ll not go to one tomorrow nor any other day.”

“It’s important. I know it!”

“Listen to you! An atheist, telling me to get to church!”

“I’m not claiming to be a believer; for you it’s different.”

“I lost my faith years ago, and I feel better off without it, thanks all the same.”

“I don’t believe it; you know what they say, ‘once a Catholic’…”

“What do you know about being a Catholic?”

“I know that you’ve had an experience that might be enough to derange someone else, and that you’re still carrying around terrible feelings about that baby you lost-”

“Aborted.”

“That’s your word, not mine. And it’s exactly the point: you can’t come to terms with that guilt, so back you go to dreamside, night after night, trying to deal with it, wanting to block it out so much you think or dream or know you’ve delivered on dreamside. I’m talking about guilt Honora, something your church knows all about, and it offers you a way out. I’m the first person you’ve told in thirteen years. You’ve got to find someone you can confess it to, someone who means more to you than me. You’ve got to go to confession!”

“That’s all very pat; but you’ve no understanding of the things you’re speaking about. For one, I’ve no faith and no belief, it doesn’t mean anything to me any more—”

“Maybe not consciously; but isn’t that the point?”

“And secondly, you’ve no conception of what it means to walk into confession and cheerfully announce, besides a few venial slips, an avalanche of mortal sin. Oh no Father I haven’t been to mass in thirteen years, no not even on Good Fridays, and then there’s this small matter of the abortion or induced miscarriage call it what you will, and besides that the wee question of attempted suicide. Everyone a roaster, guaranteed apoplexy for the priest. Forget it.”

“It’s your only way out.”

“Ella, I said forget it.”

They drove back to Lee’s house in gloomy silence. Lee was dumb enough to ask what was wrong.

“Talk to her,” Ella said as soon as Honora’s back was turned, “she’s more open to you.”

But Ella finally relayed the whole story, while Honora sulked in her room. Lee sat in silence and despaired. He was beginning to have serious doubts about everything. He understood that Honora was neurotic and began to have second thoughts about Ella’s state of mind. He was afraid of the drama these two mad women were creating, and wanted to stay well clear. Ella was still applying her usual methods to force him into carrying out her will. He was looking for a suitable opportunity to put his foot down, and thought that this was it.

“I’m not sure what you’re asking me to do,” he said, “but if she’s saying no to the idea, then it just won’t work.”

“It’s guilt; honest, natural, inevitable, abscess-forming guilt. It just needs draining. Lance it with confession, out comes the pus, stitch it up. That’s what the Catholic Church is for, and that’s what she’s missing. End of dreams. Talk to her; she’ll listen to you.”

“If she says she doesn’t believe any more, then you have to accept it. You can’t resurrect people’s faith for them. It’s not like renewing your membership down at the tennis club.”

“She’s a Catholic; she’s not Sunday School C of E like us. It’s scorched into them from an early age.”

“I won’t ask her to do it.”

“What’s the matter with you? It makes no difference if she feels she’s lost her faith. She’s Catholic through and through. She’s like a stick of seaside rock with the letters running through.”

“Or the wick running through the candle, is what the priests told us,” said Honora, appearing behind them. “I’ve thought some more. Maybe you’re right. At least I’ll try.”

Ella smiled, but only at Lee.

FOUR

It was Good Friday. Honora had protested seven changes of heart, but Ella had managed to deliver her that afternoon to a small modern Catholic church near by. Ella watched her go in with her head bowed, and sat waiting in the car with the radio turned up.

Inside, Honora sat through the service with a hardened resistance. She dutifully kissed the cross when called, and took the sacrament, though mechanically, feeling nothing. But in the confessional she asked for the young priest’s blessing and revealed the entire story in terms of a catalogue of sin until the priest, at last realizing the depth of her distress, asked her to stop.

She emerged from the church and got into Ella’s car.

“Well?”

“It’s a bit like going to the dentist after a long absence. I’ve got to go back tomorrow and have some more done.”

“Is that usual?”

“Only for us very bad mortal sinners,” she smiled. “Actually, it was me; I asked if he would talk to me tomorrow. There was a whole row of people ready with their fictitious confessions, and I was holding them up.”

“What’s he like?”

“Young. Quite nice.”

“Tasty?”

“Get on, Ella. He’s a priest!”

Ella was relieved that Honora could be light. They had a private joke about the priest, which they kept from Lee, who wanted to know what they were giggling about. That night Honora slept deep and free of the pull of dreamside. It was the first time since the dreaming had started up again.

In the morning, Ella drove to the church, watched Honora go in, and waited in the car again.

But Lee had not been free of dreams. Although spared the direct dreamside experience, he’d spent feverish nights in the grip of anxiety. Now there were two strange women in his house, conspiring to draw him into complex plans of action, all based around phantom events. Something was closing on him, something he’d held off for a long time. Ella and Honora, just by being there in his house, opened the crack between the worlds and made him believe in things he’d had to work hard to dismiss. They undermined his sealed, ordered world.

Still Lee maintained incredulity at Honora’s story of dreamside conception and delivery, but Ella had refused to let him challenge the idea.

“Get a grip on reality,” he had urged.

“You’ve forgotten everything you learned,” Ella hissed. “Try telling that to Honora. In reality, in the dream, in the mind,” prodding her own head for effect with an angry, stiff finger, “you’re sure you know the difference?”

“There’s a clear difference. A very clear difference.”

“Is there?”

Lee had remained awake for hours, staring into the gloomy shadows of the darkened bedroom, looking for very clear differences.

But it was only when he had the house to himself that he had the space to think things through. He wanted to chart his own course. After all, who was this Ella? Not the same person he knew thirteen years ago, in the days when the desire to believe anything (so long as it was bizarre enough) far outweighed any interest in seeing things clearly. Lee had heard precious little about what had happened in the intervening period, only that it was X-rated. What was he supposed to make of that? And what was he to think about being rewritten into the script? So much had happened to them; they couldn’t possibly be the people they once were.

But why had it taken only moments to put the clock back, make love on the rug and reopen this obsession with dreaming? The answer to that, he knew, was Ella: it was what Ella wanted. He only ever seemed to figure passively. She blew into his house like a high wind, undressed on his rug and stood over him: she slept in his bed and she made him dream again. Then after that she dragged poor ill Honora all the way over from Ireland to be mad in the house with them.

Lee began to suspect that it might be Ella, after all, who was in the business of dream resurrection. He strode out to the garden shed and emerged with a stepladder. He brought it indoors and set it up on the landing directly beneath the hatch to the attic. Then he went off in search of a torch.

Inside the church Father Boyle was watering a vase of irises. Otherwise the church was empty. On a blue wall, painted in golden lettering were the words HERE I AM LORD.

He was a couple of years younger than her, with a freckle face and close-cropped sandy hair. His piercing blue eyes were moist with enthusiasm. Honora had only ever experienced priestly powers vested in men much older. She had never been expected to respect the spiritual authority of someone younger than herself.

He looked up as he heard the door close. “Come in, Honora; see, I didn’t forget you. You know, a funny thing happened last night. I went to sleep and I had a dream, well it was all mixed up; but the thing is, I knew that I was dreaming.” He set down his watering can with a bump.

“At least, that was the only thing that was clear. What do you make of that? Isn’t that something like you were saying to me yesterday?”

“Something like that, Father.” It seemed slightly ridiculous to call this smiling boy “father.”

“Do you want to tell me again? Not as in the confession; I think we dealt with that—as far as I understood it to be a mountain of mortal sins.” He seemed to make light of it. “But I got a bit confused about whether or not these sins were actually committed or dreamed about.”

“You’re not going to be much clearer whichever way I tell it.” Try me.

She could see that he wanted to help. Not in the ritualized way of the priests she remembered, or at least not just in that manner, but through some more earthly, human contract. He looked even younger than she had at first thought as he leaned towards her solicitously. Suddenly he said, “Put aside what may be sin or sinning— you’re here and I’m here, let’s talk it through.”

“You’re kind, Father. Here goes.” Honora took the priest through the story, leaving out nothing. He listened attentively, nodding throughout and stroking his beardless chin. He interrupted her only twice; once to clarify what she had said about the discovery of blood, and then to ask her for some details concerning her attempted suicide.

“You probably think I need a psychiatrist, not a priest,” said Honora.

“Not at all.”

“Yes you do. You think I’m an hysteric.”

“No. I’ll admit I’m baffled, bewildered, confused by what you’ve told me. It goes beyond my… beyond the range of my confessional. But I have to believe in your unburdening.”

They were silent for a while. The priest coughed and started uncertainly, “A lot of people, when they want to… unburden, can’t face the realization of their own sin. They often tell me that they weren’t… in possession of themselves at the time. They were drunk, perhaps had taken drugs, or sometimes they tell me they were sleepwalking or in a trance, a daze, a fog; and occasionally they tell me…”

“They thought they were dreaming.” Honora looked away.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be so banal.”

“It’s not in my head, Father. There are other people who were involved who can tell you; I’ve already said that. One of them is sitting outside in a car waiting for me.”

“The other woman—is she a Catholic?”

“Ha!”

“But it was her idea for you to come? Interesting!”

“The point is that if it was just me, I might believe that I was off my head; but there were a number of others involved. We weren’t hallucinating, or drunk, or stoned, and in those days we were all reasonably sane God forgive us, we were just… dreaming, dreaming, I want to say dreaming but there should be another word for what was happening!”

“I was just trying to fit things into a way of understanding it.”

“Don’t try! I’ve been trying for thirteen years and all it gives you is the shakes before you go to bed at night.”

“Do you believe in the sins of omission as in those of commission?” said the priest.

“Of course,” said Honora, “that is I understand the difference. As for belief, well I don’t know where I am with that these days.”

“The sins of commission, the things we have done wrong, belong to the world as it is, as we have made it. The sins of omission, the things we have failed to do, belong to the world as it might have been. Isn’t it the same with your dreams? They belong not to this world as it is, but as it might have been.”

“But the miscarriage… and I tried to kill myself. That was all real.”

“Honora, perhaps everything is a dream,” he leaned his face closer to hers, still smiling, “but a dream in the mind of God.

“Consider,” he said. Heavy spots of rain began to fall, tapping loudly on the roof. Honora made an effort to concentrate. “Consider that the world, the universe, is a dream in the mind of God. When He awakes, it’s all over. But maybe it’s not a universe, but a multi-verse, what about that? You know, dreams within dreams within dreams, smaller and smaller or larger and larger whichever way you like. Meanwhile, us sinners go about our business in His dream, dreaming ourselves. Here’s where it gets complicated. If our dreams are out of our control, that’s one thing: and wasn’t it Saint Augustine who thanked God that he was not responsible for his own dreams! But if we start to be able to control our dreams, and therefore are able to choose between sinful and righteous acts at this other level, that’s another. Only in the multiverse, you would have to make a choice. Which level, I mean. And you would choose Him and His dream.”

“Are you telling me it doesn’t matter what happens in the dream world, even if you know what you are doing? That there’s no right or wrong in the kind of dream world that I’m telling you about?”

“I’m telling you that God has placed it beyond the range of our theology,” he said, still smiling.

“Father, has the Church changed at all in the last thirteen years?”

“Why do you ask that?”

“Because you don’t sound like the priests I used to know in Ireland. I mean, are you sure, about this dreaming thing, that there’s nothing… demonic?”

“Is that what they taught you in Ireland?”

“No. I didn’t mean that.”

“Then I wish you hadn’t said it.” His lovely boyish smile had faded. He went cold on her. “Look, I thought we could better exorcize… pardon me, chase away these dreams of yours by talking it through. If you prefer we could pray and I could give you a penance.”

The priest made this last remark as if he were a village GP offering to prescribe coloured water to another doctor. Honora felt as though she had let him down. “Whatever you think best, Father,” she said meekly.

“Let’s kneel together under the statue of Our Lady,” he said gently, evidently reconciled to the idea. They went and kneeled together in the shadows of an alcove, under a plastic statue of the Virgin Mary. It frightened Honora a little. It was too realistic, the blue-robed, white-cowled icon hovering over her, one hand raised in doubtful benediction. It seemed to glow slightly in the candlelight of the darkened alcove. She avoided its gaze.

“Close your eyes,” said the priest, “and I want you to think of these dreams. Then I want you to empty your mind of them, and fill it with thoughts of God.”

With Ella and Honora out of the house Lee found it easier to discount anything he had ever believed about dreams. When you added it up it didn’t amount to so much. These recent disclosures about a dreamside conception and a dreamside birthright… it was all so far back. At best he wouldn’t be prepared to swear that they didn’t invent most of it, or, to be more accurate, didn’t deceive themselves into believing things. The point was that they had all wanted to believe in it, badly wanted it. So when you came to check it out, what exactly happened?

There was the undeniable fact that some kind of out-of-body liaisons were taking place, and at some consciously agreed location which they had come to call dreamside; but the corroboration of this could only ever happen after the event. Maybe the agreements they all reached were not concerned with a secondary plane on which real experiences took place, but were no more than the result of a rough telepathy in the group. Certainly the results achieved in the days when the professor was around would square with this theory. It was only after the death of Professor Burns, when discipline was lost and things started to slip, that the whole experience went haywire.

As for the four of them, hell they were so wrapped up in their bloody experiments that they hardly spoke to another soul. They were always prepared to support—uncritically—the most outrageous claims about what could be accomplished. A classic case of isolation sustaining a group delusory system. Was there a real basis for thinking that anything had happened at all? Had they just fired themselves up into a frenzy of delusion?

He climbed the stepladder and pushed open the trap door to the attic. He switched on the torch and flashed the beam around the unplastered walls. There was something there he wanted, something he’d stored there years before, after dreaming had been forgotten—or had been pretended to be forgotten… Lee’s attic had not been disturbed for years. Opening the hatch was like breaking into someone’s sleep.

In the most recent episode of dreaming, when he and Ella had accidentally drifted back to dreamside, they had not found the place where all their previous rendezvous had occurred but somewhere different. This confirmed for him that dreamside was not a real place, but a projection. Sometimes our needs are so strong, he thought, they will stop the sky from falling.

And now Honora claimed to have left something behind on dreamside. Plainly she was ill.

Making love on dreamside: what was that all about? He and Ella had been so obsessed with the projection of their relationship on this other level that their real relationship, the one made of blood and tears, had been eclipsed. Perhaps it had all been a way of making themselves seem more important. Incense and candlelight can only ever transform the cave so far. Then you need help in the fantasy game, and they had gone out and called in the heavy artillery.

Lee crossed the attic floor carefully, stepping from one unboarded joist to another. At the far side was a tea chest draped by an old blanket. A small dust storm billowed up in the beam of the torch as he removed the cover.

Brad snorting, sweating, turned in a fever somewhere between sleep and stupor, swimming against a tide that pulls him back and back to that dreaded place. His sea of sleep is full of sharks these days and he gulps down mouthfuls of salt water as he swims frenziedly. He woke up shivering and felt a warm patch turning icy on his leg. He’d pissed himself again in his sleep.

Through the window all he could see was the mist rolling in from the moors. It was 11 a.m., Easter Saturday, and the mist had laid thick trails of moisture over the grass outside and had breathed vaporous patterns on the windows. He was cold. He looked for the tiny cone of blue flame in his single paraffin heater and saw that it had gone out. He buried his head in his hands and allowed himself the luxury of tears.

Then he remembered Lee Peterson. Or was that all another dream? Another bad dream? He had woken up on the sofa to find Lee standing over him like a boxer who’d just put him on the canvas. Thirteen years older and looking more, gone a bit porky, with hair thinning and face fattening, stiff with respectability, but more than that, looking like someone who had never been capable of dreaming in his life.

“Wherever you came from, fuck off back there.” He said it to the snakes and scorpions of his delusions and it always seemed to do the trick.

But Peterson had been there in the flesh: he’d left a business card on the mantelpiece. Brad read it and tossed it away in disgust. He couldn’t remember the details of their conversation, but he did know what it was about. No doubt Lee had some kind of an angle on the things that were stirring on dreamside; and that bitch Ella Innes was probably mixed up in it somewhere too. Brad leaned against the windowsill and blinked at the squat, derelict cottage across the yard.

It was shrouded in mist, but someone was looking back at him through one of the broken windows. He had to squint to make it out in the poor visibility, but it was a face he knew. He thought he might race across the yard and grab her by the hair; but he knew that by then she would be gone. She was always gone. The face at the window vanished.

“Why won’t you talk with me?”

The mist rolled over the yard, muffling all sound. Brad saw a tiny light flicker and then go out in the upper windows of the cottage.

“Dreamwalkers.”

Sometimes he saw blue and yellow sparks through the windows, and red glowing embers in midair. He’d had dreams about the cottage: elementals came up through the earth and into the house, crossing over the threshold of dreams and into the realm of waking life, childlike, malignant, massing for an attack, bursting and spilling across the world. Every time he allowed himself to sleep he feared he gave the dreamwalkers more power, more time to marshal their forces, a route across an unguarded bridge from one realm to another. He saw the light flicker again. He pushed his feet into some shoes, grabbed an almost empty bottle of whiskey and rushed out into the yard.

“Wherever you come from, fuck off back there!” he bellowed, draining his bottle and flinging it at the cottage. It smashed and the light went out. “I know your game. It was me that let you in; it’s me can send you back! Back!”

Lurching back inside, he grabbed the can of paraffin and marched across the yard to the cottage. Hanging from broken hinges, the door was wedged open. He squeezed inside. Bricks, rubble and fallen plaster obstructed his progress, and he stumbled and climbed over the debris in darkness, stirring the smell of decomposing plaster. There was a wild scuffling in the shadows.

“Rats, bats and dreamwalkers,” he muttered.

Groping his way, he found the staircase and set foot on the first step. The house reeked of dry rot. He was afraid his weight might send him crashing down to the cellar. At the top a door stood ajar. He pushed and saw broken rafters, and black puddles on the floorboards; gaping holes to the floor below. He turned to the other door.

In the second room, windows, ceiling and floorboards were all intact and unbroken. It was tidy, swept, and on its walls someone had hung a poster and a few bleached, twisted shapes of wood as ornament. Opposite the door, huddled in a single sleeping bag and clinging to each other in terror were two young people, boy and girl, sitting with their backs to the wall, their wide eyes like huge silver coins in the grey light.

“Human form,” said Brad from the doorway.

“We’re not hurting anything,” said the girl.

“Dreamwalkers! What’s your name? Quick now!”

“Victoria.”

“Victoria,” mimicking her squeaky voice. “No it’s not, it’s Honora Brennan. What’s your name lad?”

“Keith.”

“No it’s not, your name is Brad Cousins. Dreamwalkers!”

“He’s drunk,” said the girl.

“Issat your little girl? Eh? Eh? Is she yours?”

“What girl?”

“Don’t play with me, son. Is she yours? Dreamwalkers? Little girl eaters?”

He marched into the room, twisting the top off the paraffin can.

“Whoever you think we are, we’re not!” shouted the youth.

Brad stopped for a moment and looked at him. Then he shook his head. “I can’t take the risk.” He started flinging the paraffin around the room.

“Jesus, is that petrol? Vicky get up!” The two students grabbed their clothes and the sleeping bag and fled naked out of the room. Brad emptied the can before discarding it, struck a match and dropped it on the spilled paraffin. Then he followed them down the stairs and out into the yard, where they were struggling into their jeans. His breath reared in the mist.

“Stay and watch,” Brad invited generously. “Burn her up!”

But they declined, running down the road as they buttoned their clothes. Brad waved goodbye and turned, with enormous satisfaction, to watch the growing blaze.

While Honora was inside the church wrestling with the young priest’s theology, Ella yawned and stretched and fiddled with the car radio. Something crackled and stuttered through the wavebands, a child-woman’s voice, singing:

Ella tried to catch a better reception, but the signal drifted out again. She snapped off the radio and was startled to see someone looking at her through the passenger window. It was a girl, standing in the rain a few yards away from the car. Their eyes met. She was pale and thin, not quite into her teens and wearing what looked like left-overs from a church jumble sale. She had a bruised look, the eyes of a kid who has taken a beating for stealing sweets. Ella, soft on street waifs everywhere, instantly felt a surge of pity. Wanting to give the girl something, she reached for her purse and got out of the car.

But the girl had gone. Ella looked up and down the street: nothing. She looked at the closed doors of the church and shrugged before climbing back into her car, shielding herself from the increasingly heavy rain.

She settled back behind the steering wheel before realizing that something had been written in the condensation on the inside of the windscreen. Water droplets had collected and dripped from the crudely formed letters to the foot of the glass. The words said HELP ME.

Prompted by a movement, Ella glanced from the words to her rear-view mirror. Then she turned to look across her shoulder. Now the girl stood by the doors of the church. She opened the door and looked back at Ella, as if inviting her to follow. When she entered the church, Ella got out of the car and went in after her.

Lee, in the attic, lifted from the chest bundles of note books, ring-binders full of papers, photograph albums, a couple of half-completed diaries. Then the smaller stuff like posters and tickets for college dances, academic year photographs and other university flotsam, old poems that now made his skin crawl, theatre programs, a signed publicity shot of an unfamous female rock singer to Lee love from Carla Black, great fun XXX, letters from old friends. From the bottom of the tea chest he lifted a Perspex case.

He hardly dared open it. Could things be said to have happened only so long as they agreed they had happened? Perhaps all that had gone on between Ella and him was the grand performance—what had the professor called it? folic a deux—a teenage romance conducted against a blazing operatic backdrop erected just to give things stature. Maybe that was it: nothing more than an outlandish metaphor for adolescent love.

He balanced the torch on the corner of the chest and broke open the Perspex case. It contained a girls black beret; a half-empty packet of Rizla liquorice cigarette papers, a brass incense-trinket, half a dozen colour-faded photographs of Ella or of himself with Ella, and three postcards from the Greek Islands. It was his shrine to Ella. Over the years he had preserved it in secret. There was one other thing. It was an Indian carved wooden box, about two inches square, which Ella had given him after an important event had taken place. He opened it and inside, its tiny white rays and yellow disc dried and withered, but preserved and perfectly recognizable, was a daisy head. He took it out and held it in the palm of his hand. Somewhere, unless she had lost it, Ella had the other one. He would have to ask her.

Lee sat in the dark attic, with the weak light of the torch shining on the daisy head resting in the palm of his hand.

Honora knelt in the peace of the empty church, hearing only the sounds of the hail on the roof and the creaking of the hassock on which the priest kneeled. She allowed her mind to range unfettered over vivid images of her dreamside experiences.

The memories flooded her with a sweet intensity. She felt the anxiety and the sheer pleasure that came with the control of dream-side. She felt the body’s dreamside ache, a lust more physically acute than anything felt in the material, waking world. But she also remembered the fear, the brooding undertow beneath the earth and water and waxy sun of dreamside.

They were inseparable, this pleasure and this fear. Never before had she felt them so strongly. It was like a live thing inside her. She had called it from dreamside, the essence of dreamside, reforming, shape-shifting, soul-sucking, predatory, sloughing off one skin like a serpent, taking on new colours, all-devouring, breaking her down, covering her over with warm soil, reconstituting her, like a death without dying until buried over she became spice for the earth’s pleasure. This was the thing the priest would take from her. This was the sin she could surrender to him.

She wanted purification. The priest would take her confusion and sin and guilt and doubt, and dissolve it. She felt it slip from her to him, memories that melted as they transposed themselves, her mind drained of all thoughts of lucid dream incarnations.

She opened her eyes. The priest had stopped praying and was looking at her. He was shocked. She knew instinctively that he’d had a taste of it, had peered over the edge and drawn back. He was unable to take it from her. What should have been dissolved between them had been arrested. Now bitterness hung on the air. His hands were trembling.

“You felt it!” said Honora. The priest failed to answer.

In despair she looked up at the plaster statue of the Virgin. The figure hanging over her swelled as she looked at it, and pulsed. This pulsing was the beating of her own heart. She desperately wanted release. It was all wrong. The priest couldn’t help her. She looked at the figure of the plaster Virgin; at the flecks of skin-colour paint, faded with age to grey. Over how many failed confessions had this flaking plaster Virgin presided? How many prayers had dropped short?

Honora wanted to cry for her childhood. She wanted to cry for every Sunday School and for every mass she had attended, in their own way like lucid dreams—the invocation of hopes and the for-fending of horrors. Her eyes were wet. As she looked up the Virgin stirred. There was a rustle of her blue robe and Honora was sure she heard her sigh. A whiff of decay hung on the air.

She sobbed and closed her eyes. Her memory fanned out across her faith; it was like watching the fragments of a shattered mirror reassembling: light streaming through stained glass; pungent smells of incense; votive candles flickering out; Latin words; all competing for her attention. She opened her eyes again, and this time the Virgin moved. Her eyes flicked open, and she struggled to speak. She saw her shiver, saw that she was real flesh, that her tears were wet and flowed and were an agony to her.

But her sobs turned to gasps as the figure began to change. She was appalled as it transformed, slowly, painfully, to the figure of the little girl. The girl swinging on the gate at home, the girl who would never leave her alone. The incarnation of Honora’s sin. She felt dizzy, dislocated; a sick wave of fear rolled over her.

She felt something inside herself fall away. The girl fixed her with an unbroken gaze as she descended, glimmering faintly in the shadows of the church, moving slowly towards her, arms outstretched. The air turned cold: Honora could see her own breath icing over in front of her.

She was paralyzed. The girl was moving towards her, about to touch her. A blast of cold air passed from her. Her hands seemed cracked with the bitter cold and Honora shrank back from the diseased touch. The girl mouthed silent words. HERE I AM LORD; HERE I AM. As the girl drew close, Honora’s screams echoed around the vaults.

The figure had changed again, had transformed back into the image of the Virgin, but this time more terrible, its body twisted and distorted with agony, wounds blistering and cracking on the painted flesh, open sores glistening and bleeding, its face contorted in a silent scream. The statue swayed, and came toppling down on top of her, the plaster Virgin shattering into fragments as it struck the hard floor of the church.

Ella entered the church to find the priest trying to drag the sobbing Honora away from the debris.

FIVE

Ella closed the bedroom door quietly behind her. “She’s sleeping,” she whispered to Lee, and they went through to the lounge.

“The priest helped me to get her to the car. Not exactly good in a crisis, that one. In fact he was in a terrible state. He seemed more concerned about his statue.”

“Honora had actually pulled it down on top of her?”

“That’s what it looked like, though she denies it.”

“It’s crazy. What did she tell you?”

“Very little. But whatever it was, the priest saw it too. He was in a state of shock. He couldn’t—or wouldn’t—tell me anything about it. He just wanted us out of there. But it was obvious to me that he was just as shaken up as she was.” She sighed. “I don’t say that I go along with it… but Honora is convinced that it’s something from dreamside. A demon or a ghost or something…”

“Oh for Christ’s sake Ella…”

“Lee, Honora thinks that her… child… has found a way to come through from dreamside.”

“And you think it could be real.”

She didn’t have to answer. Lee looked very tired. He thought about the box in his attic.

A moan from Honora sent them scuttling along to the bedroom. She was sitting bolt upright. “Am I awake now?”

“Have you been dreaming the repeater?” asked Ella.

“Several times.”

“This is awake.”

“I wish I could believe you.”

“Lee; give her a book.”

Lee found a paperback. Honora turned the pages and read the opening lines:

It read the same second time around.

“Somehow I still don’t trust that,” said Honora.

“Why don’t you go back to sleep,” coaxed Ella. “You look like you need it.”

“I’m not going back to sleep!” Honora shouted.

“OK. Listen; I’ve got another idea.”

“Whatever it is,” Lee said to Honora, “you say no, and I’ll say no.”

“Agreed.”

Ella bristled. “Why the hell do you both think we’re here? Why am I here? Why are you here? Are we just renewing old friendships or what? Do I have to remind you that we’re in some kind of crisis? I don’t know about you two, but I don’t want to spend the rest of my fucking life frightened to go to sleep! I want to end it!” She walked out of the room, slamming the door behind her.

“She’s right isn’t she?” Honora muttered.

“She’s always right. One way or another.”

Lee found Ella outside in the garden. He had stocked it with tall flowering plants. In summer it would be a paint box of delphiniums, snapdragons, foxgloves and flags growing up beside the red-brick wall. Along the top of the wall ran an untidy row of blue coping stones which only habit kept in place. In one corner of the garden was a trellis overburdened by a rampant growth of honeysuckle. In another corner, staked against the wall, was an ornamental tree.

She stood with her back to him, fingering the tiny pink match-heads of budding flowers. Lee came up softly behind her.

“Cherry blossom,” she said. “I didn’t even know it was here. It’s getting ready to flare.”

“I planted it years ago. To remind me of someone. But now it’s pulling up the wall.” He pointed at the base of the wall where the bricks, buckled by the tree’s roots, pressed in towards the garden. “All it needs is a good push. Let’s hear the plan.”

“You won’t like it.”

“Can it be worse than the business in the church?”

“It concerns Brad Cousins.”

“It’s worse.”

“Hear me out.”

“I don’t like it already. Neither will Honora.”

“We’ve got to do something.”

Ella stepped onto a brick protruding from the broken wall. She hoisted herself up and hooked her elbows over the row of coping stones. Lee stood behind her. “You’ll have the wall down on us.”

Ella didn’t reply. She was looking at something on the other side. In the waste ground stood the girl she’d seen that morning, and had followed into the church.

She’s bringing this on us, she thought.

She looked up at Ella and mouthed painful, silent words. They were visible, as if painted on the air. The same words: help me help me help me.

“What is it?” said Lee, sensing something.

“Nothing. Lift me down.”

“Are you all right?” Lee lifted her down. He looked at her quizzically, before hoisting himself onto the wall, to see what had startled her.

“There’s nothing there!” he said.

“No. Let’s go indoors. I’m cold.”

“Lee,” she said when they were inside, “you’ve seen something of Honora’s condition. She’s not insane, though you may think you are before this thing is through. And she’s only the first, she’s not going to be the only one. We’re all in danger. Something has started.”

“What has started?”

“I just feel it. And it’s coming to us all. How is your dreaming lately?”

“Every night a fight.”

“To stay away from there?”

“To stay away. I’m afraid more than anything of going to sleep.”

“And the repeaters?”

“Worse than ever.”

“Then you do know of the danger. All of those dreamside dangers, they’re coming home to roost. Only here, while we’re awake. We can’t hold out for ever. It’s got to be resolved.”

“But how?”

“I don’t know. All I’ve got is ideas. But I’m not going to hide and pretend it’s not happening. And you’ve got to be strong.” She held on to his sleeves. “If you fall, we all will.”

“What?” said Lee. “Why me?”

“It’s true. You’re the solid one.”

But he knew she meant stolid. He also knew that it was she who was the strongest one. She was going to have to carry three others. She was just trying to give him some of her strength. He looked at her and knew that if she commanded, he would try to realign the planets.

“Let’s hear the plan.”

“It’s not going to be easy. We’ve got to take another walk on dreamside, but this time with Brad and Honora. Together we have to bury whatever it is that’s out there.”

“Or whatever it is that’s in there. I’d say you’ve got about a fifty percent resistance to that dreamside walk taking place.”

“So long as it’s no more than fifty per cent.”

“I said I’ll do it, and I meant it.”

“Firstly there’s Honora. You’ve got the influence. I know it. She’s always harboured a lot of feeling for you. You’ll have to persuade her. She’ll do it. She’s got a much more acute sense than you of the danger, and she’s running out of energy. She’s been fighting it for longer. Make it clear she either does this thing once and for all or she lives with it for ever. Tell her. Hold her hand. You might even have to sleep with her.”

“I hope you’re joking, Ella.”

“Push her hard. You can bring her to it, whereas I know I can’t. I know she’ll come. You’ll have room to manoeuvre. I’ll be away working on Brad.”

“Will you be sleeping with him?”

“Only with my space suit on, after what you told me. You worry about your own score. You can’t bring Brad along; Honora certainly wouldn’t want to try; that leaves me. I’m going to have to bring him, across my shoulder if necessary. I’m calculating on him being in the same condition as Honora. If he is, I’ll throw him a line and he’ll grab it. I’ll go tomorrow, early. I figure we don’t have a lot of time before something bad happens to one of us, and I want to be gone before Honora wakes up. I’ll have Brad with me in under forty-eight hours or not at all. I’ll phone to let you know. And you know where to meet us.”

“Yes. I know where to meet you.”

“I’ll also need to take some things of yours with me.”

“Take anything, Ella. You led me into this. You might as well lead me out.”

“I led you in?”

“I never told you. All those years ago. I only ever went to that first dream meeting because of you. I stood behind you in a shadowy corridor, feeling horny, and I overheard you say you were going to the meeting. So I went. I never expected the rest.”

“None of us expected the rest. Now let me tell you something about that first meeting. If you hadn’t stood next to me in that corridor, and I hadn’t spoken so loudly to make sure that you’d hear… That’s made you look serious! Now kiss me; because it helps.”

SIX

The next morning Ella was far away before Lee woke up for the third time, with a frightened start. Each false awakening was like breaking through a thin shell which would fragment and fall away only to reveal another one. This time it occurred to him to get out of bed and pick up a book. He let it fall open, read a paragraph twice and was relieved to find that it didn’t change.

Honora found him in the kitchen. He was muttering over broken eggs. “You’re awake,” he said. “Any repeaters?” By now it was almost like saying good morning. You heard the sentiment but not the words.

“Lots. Where’s Ella?” Honora looked better. She had colour in her cheeks and her hair tumbled free over her shoulders.

“Gone to collect something.” He would have to tell her later. Ella had told him to win her confidence, to get her to take that dreamside walk. How he was supposed to do that was anybody’s guess.

He was still thinking about the episode in the church, and of his Perspex shrine lying in a box in the attic. He could no longer pretend that Honora’s problems didn’t concern him, or that he was in any way outside of events. His rational objections had already dissolved, and he had been forced to recognize the seriousness of Ella’s mission.

“Where did you say Ella had gone?” Honora said over breakfast.

“She had to go out to get something.”

“What, exactly?”

This time he looked her deep in the eye before lying through his teeth. “She didn’t say.”

Being alone in the house with Honora made Lee feel on edge. He wasn’t entirely certain what was creating the tension, but she clouded the air. It disturbed him. He cleared the dishes and busied himself at the sink. Honora hovered uncomfortably behind him for a moment before going through to the lounge. Then some movement outside the kitchen window caught Lee’s eye.

“Wonder what she wants here?” he said aloud. He went outside, leaving the kitchen door open. Cold air fanned the house. Honora, who had also seen the girl, waited breathlessly in the lounge.

Lee wandered back. “Gone,” he said, shutting the door behind him. “A kid. Sad little mouse, blue with cold. She looked at me as though she wanted something.”

Honora said nothing.

Lee returned to the sink. Persuading Honora was not going to be easy. She would rather be lowered into a pit of snakes than meet up with Brad Cousins again, on dreamside or anywhere else. As for winning her confidence, Lee was out of practice at getting close to people. Nevertheless, at some point he would have to steer the discussion around to Brad.

Lee plunged his arm into the hot water and took a plate. He heard the ping! and felt it split as he lifted it out. The hot water had broken it.

A hairline crack appeared in the centre, spreading jaggedly both up towards the rim and down to his wrist. But then the crack extended itself at both ends simultaneously: at the top of the plate the crack skipped from the plate to rip at the plastic bowl, releasing a tide of foaming water. Then with a groan of tearing metal it wrenched apart the stainless steel sink itself, water gushing through the breach in the basin. At the other end of the plate the crack swept along the lifeline of the palm of Lee’s hand. Skin cells popped and unzipped bloodily, following the curve of a vein in his forearm, marking its progress with a gory, congealed butcher’s gash.

Lee was rooted. He let out a tiny gasp. Then he jumped backwards and dashed the plate to the floor where it shattered into minute fragments. The crack breaching the sink repaired itself and closed up instantly. The gash in his hand and arm healed.

Honora came in. Lee was staring at the palm of his hand. Honora took it as if she was looking for a burn, but she had already guessed part of the truth. The kitchen floor was awash with water.

“What happened?”

“I don’t know!” said Lee. He was still looking for the phantom gash. “What was it? Did that really happen to me? It was like a… like a memory flash from dreamside. An elemental. Oh God!”

“Come through to the other room,” said Honora.

“Are we awake? Or are we sleeping?”

Honora had already experienced these invasions into daytime. Lee hadn’t, and was shocked.

“We’re awake. This has happened before.”

“Often?”

“No, not often.”

“But the book… the acid test. I did it this morning.”

“You can’t trust it any more. The old rules are broken.”

“God, I’m still shaking. I was being torn apart!”

Honora was still holding his hand. She leaned forward and

kissed it lightly.

“What was that for?”

“That was for you.” Her eyes were the blue of a lake.

“Honora, did you never meet anyone, after you left the university I mean. Did you never want to?”

“My one experience of men was enough.”

“Are you going to blame everyone for that?”

“I don’t know. After it all happened I went into hiding, and that became a habit.”

“Did you never think that the reason for all of this might be that you were hiding, I mean repressing things.”

“You’ve all got your boxed theories, haven’t you? Ella’s theory was Religious Guilt. Yours is Sexual Frustration. At bottom, neither of you wants to admit that there’s the dream, the whole dream and nothing but the dream. So you try to put the problem on to me.”

“That’s not fair…”

“Come on. It’s going to take more than a bit of pop psychology to clear the rats out of this cellar.”

“Don’t misunderstand me, Honora. I wasn’t suggesting that we…”

“Well, I could do worse. Look at you, you’re easily shocked! And why not anyway? Things could easily have been different.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh… let it go.”

“You mean it could have been you and me instead of Ella and me.”

“Oh no, not really. Ella was always the bright sparkle on the water. She made me feel like I was standing in the shade. I always admired her and felt a little jealous at the same time.”

“I can’t imagine you as the jealous type. What was there to be jealous of anyway?”

“Well, she had you for one thing.”

“Oh come on Honora, be serious.”

“No, really, it’s true. I liked the way you could sit back from a situation, when others argued; you always seemed to have… reserves.”

“You’re mistaking the absence of ideas for reserves; I just didn’t have anything to contribute, I always thought: go which way the wind blows.”

“That’s not such a bad philosophy, is it?”

“You’re wrong about that. I’ve lived all my life in a draft!”

“Oh go on. Don’t put yourself down.”

Lee thought how easily indeed it might have been different. There was a moment back there, years ago, in the shadow of a doorway somewhere, between Honora and himself. But the moment had been distracted by a sparkle on the water, when Ella had dropped back and had steered him by the elbow down a different path.

Lee put his hand into the nest of brown curls tied back above Honora’s neck, and felt them slide over his fingers like cool, live things. But when he tried to draw her to him, she resisted.

“Too late for all that,” she said.

“Yes, but I’m going to kiss you anyway.”

This time she consented. She put her mouth on his, and her tongue flicked at his mouth. Through half-closed eyes, he saw her curls tumbling free and twisting towards him. He thought of Ella’s words before she left, about sleeping with Honora, and he knew that Ella had seen this, hadn’t been joking. Or maybe he credited Ella with too much vision, maybe she had just been afraid of this happening. But he closed his eyes and all thoughts of Ella were subsumed in the honeyed kiss. Honora’s lips were sweet and her inexperience excited him. She smelled of the freshly falling rain.

Then he opened his eyes and he saw not Honora’s face, but a child’s. A girl child’s, the colour and texture of white candle-wax; the sick, unhealthy face of the child who had eyed him that very morning from the bottom of his garden.

And now he saw not the waving curls of Honora’s hair, but a writhing, spitting nest of vipers. Her eyes had turned the dull yellow-gold of a venomous serpent. He tried to pull back, but his tongue petrified in her mouth and the saliva on their lips became a glue which bonded them. Tearing himself away was the agony of lips lacerating in strips of flesh. He gasped and flung himself backwards, crashing into the table and shattering the glass cabinet in the corner of the room.

“What is it? What happened?” cried Honora, getting up to help him.

“No! No! Don’t touch me!”

The vision had already disappeared. All he could see now was Honora’s helpless and horrified expression, her arms lifted towards him, a trace of blood on her mouth. But he couldn’t let her near him.

SEVEN

A peculiar instinct guided Ella, offering soundings of what was swimming in the depths around her, what to avoid, where to go next. She charted her course by this intuitive sensory apparatus, and she was rarely wrong.

Wrapped in her fleece-lined flying jacket she accelerated the Midget down the fast lane. The motorway was choked in its own stratosphere of exhaust fumes. Her split-leather holdall lay on the passenger seat, stuffed with Lee’s possessions. Though her foot was firmly pressed on the accelerator, she felt decidedly less than confident.

Her sonar instinct couldn’t be held responsible for the fact that Ella, knowing with uncanny prescience where trouble or difficulty lay, would often head straight for it. Nature always seemed to volunteer her to be the one to jump through hoops of fire; though to her credit she never asked anyone to take responsibility for it but herself. She was committed to her current course of action. There was no going back.

Driving south, she passed a car which had broken down on the hard shoulder. Shortly after, she was overtaken by a dirty white estate car piled high with luggage. A kid with a sickly, lop-sided grin made faces and waved at her through the rear window as it sped by. The kid made her think of Brad Cousins.

She had been right about Honora and the Church. What had happened between Honora and the priest had happened precisely because Ella was right, even if the event had failed to resolve things. Had she been wrong, Honora would have walked away with a rosary and a soothed conscience, but with their group problem unsolved. Now, she knew, she was right about having to bring them all together. It was unfortunate to be always right.

Before she did anything else, she and Brad had some business to sort out, something to get straight. Then Brad would come. She would make him come. From Lees description of Brad’s physical state she didn’t need to guess at his psychological condition. Of the four, only Lee seemed to be standing up to the increasing pressure, the cracks which had begun to appear in the fabric of reality itself, the invasions from dreamside. She hadn’t mentioned her own recent experiences— better to keep the lid screwed down tight. If he had so far managed to stay clear of the frightening distortions that had crept up on her over the last few days, then that could become a source of strength.

Ella herself had been suffering the horrors of these attacks for some time, without saying anything to Lee. She had survived them only with the intellectual effort of the reversal techniques they had all learned on dreamside, sometimes with effect, sometimes without. Lee had, had no idea of what she had seen over his garden wall the previous afternoon. She had said nothing because she wanted to shield him from what was bearing down on the rest of them. He was the one with the slightest sense of the real danger.

As for the others, Honora was in a wildly unstable condition. Her encounter with the priest showed that she was wired up to all kinds of energies. But Ella calculated that Brad was the weakest of them all. Brad had been the strongest, most powerful dreamer; consequently those energies he had spent so freely on dreamside would be making their claims on him, with interest. He would be the most susceptible to these attacks. Which is why he would now, in all probability, be lying drunk somewhere.

Ella sailed past a car which had broken down on the hard shoulder. Shortly after, the Midget was overtaken by a dirty white estate car packed full of luggage, a child with a lop-sided grin making faces at her and waving through the back window as it went by.

Didn’t that just happen, back there? The sense of deja vu was acute and powerful, but she credited the event to tiredness and dismissed it. She was more concerned about the impending encounter with Brad. If Lee’s accounts were not exaggerated, she might be lucky to find him conscious when she arrived. On the other hand, Lee had been certain that Brad wouldn’t be going anywhere. Ella would have a captive audience.

For the third time Ella passed a car which had broken down on the hard shoulder, but now she noticed the driver in the act of opening the door and climbing from his seat. She put her foot down hard, but sure enough, was overtaken by the grubby estate car complete with the manic child grinning back at her through the rear window. The landscape around the motorway went on unchanged for miles, a deep swath through the countryside, lacking any distinctive landmark. Ella had lost all sense of where she was. She kept her foot hard down.

For some days she had struggled against hallucinations and distortions. She knew how to suppress the initial rising panic, signalled by a familiar but unidentified metallic taste in the mouth. But this was different, as indeed they always were. She passed the stranded roadside car yet again, and, with a deep sickening recognition, watched the sequence regenerate itself as the estate car sped past her.

This time she recognised the face in the back of the car. She had seen it before, and more than once. She could identify every feature of that girl’s face; just as she knew exactly who the girl was. The air was seeded with something colourless, odourless, tasteless, but yet dense and oppressive. She knew it was in control of the loop in which she was trapped, controlling events. Even now it regulated the flow of traffic, closing it up to block her from moving into the inside lane. She was being obstructed from pulling over, prevented from moving out of the loop.

Ella drove on. In the distance she saw the stranded motor coming up on the left-hand side. She slowed and indicated to pull in, but the procession of traffic on the inside lane had squeezed together. No one would give way. She sailed past the car parked on the hard shoulder, helplessly watching the rest of the sequence play itself out.

Again she saw the stranded car on the left. Again she slowed and signalled to move in, and again no one would allow her the space. She gripped the wheel and turned recklessly into the car abreast of her. There was a blast of horns and a shrieking of tires as she squeezed the Midget into a silhouette’s space between two chrome fenders, a space so narrow it wouldn’t have admitted a playing card. Miraculously, she made it, skidding and braking on the hard shoulder, scraping the side of the Midget along the crash barriers, stopping bumper to bumper behind the car which had broken down.

The driver was already climbing out of his seat. He came, opened Ella’s passenger door, and said: “That was close.”

Ella, still trembling, lit a cigarette.

She was too shocked to respond, or to look up at the man standing over her. She got an impression of an elderly figure in a long beige raincoat and smartly polished brown shoes. She knew exactly who it was.

Ella heard his voice as if from a great distance. “I had faith that you would stop. Faith will move mountains, but it won’t drive the internal combustion engine.”

She pulled harder on her cigarette as she felt the man climbing into her passenger seat. She could only manage a whisper. “Oh God; am I dreaming?”

“Don’t be afraid. You needed me.” It was almost the same gentle, reassuring voice which Professor Burns had used to guide them through their early experiments with lucid dreaming. Burns put his hand on Ella’s arm. His grip was warm, but she shivered.

“Help us, Professor.”

“Drive a little, Ella.”

Rigid with fear, she started the motor and rolled the car back on to the motorway. It was easier than having to look Burns in the eye. She drove slowly, blindly, thinking: How do we wake up? How?

It was a long time before Burns spoke. “You are in danger, Ella. Serious danger. All four of you. You stayed too long on dreamside. You have left a terrible need there, and it calls you back. And it will have you back. Your minds are unravelling. Even now it’s winding you in.” Burns was agitated.

“But what can be done? What can we do?”

Burns paused. Ella couldn’t look at him. Her eyes settled instead upon his hands, which he was twisting together. “Undo what was done.”

“How? How can you undo what isn’t there?”

“How did it come to be? Dismiss it in the same way. This is the best help I can give you. But beware. This is the danger of dream-side: those who stay too long may never be allowed back. All four of you have stayed too long.”

The professor pressed his hands together, as if in prayer. Then he looked nervously over his shoulder at the road behind.

“Are you cold, Professor?”

“Oh yes, cold. Always cold. Stop the car. I will get out. Then you must think that this meeting never really happened.”

Ella coasted to a stop on the hard shoulder. Burns got out and closed the door. Nothing more was said. She steered back onto the motorway. Through the rear-view mirror she could see him staring after her. Then she blinked, and saw the girl gazing at her from the spot where he had stood. The figure of the girl diminished in the distance.

Ella was becoming unstuck. So many overwhelming things were happening she could only try to move with the flow. The old forms had to be abandoned. She had to learn new, simpler rules for existing: can I feel it /does it stop me? Who was that in the car with her a moment ago? The professor? The girl? Or neither, just phantoms gathering out of a zone of madness they had come to call the dreamside.

She had to keep herself together long enough to get Brad back to the others. That was the only important thing now. She continued her journey braced against further horrors. Three hours later she stopped the car outside an isolated cottage.

Lee had told her to look out for two cottages, but all she could see was this one and the charred and blackened shell of another burned-down building near by. The roof had gone and a side wall had fallen in. At the holes where window and door frames had all been burned out, the stone was charred with soot patches like great black rags hung upside-down. Ella could still detect the smell of charred wood in the air.

Fixed beside the door of the remaining cottage, however, was a split wooden plaque bearing the name Elderwine, just as Lee had described. Ella walked right in.

In the first room she entered, she saw Brad Cousins in yellowing underclothes, lounging on an old sofa. His feet were drawn up beneath him, and he was blowing smoke at the ceiling.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” he said.

“You’re the second person today,” said Ella.

EIGHT

“Is this the best you can do?” Ella, in her WWII flying jacket, stood framed in the shadowy doorway. She looked to Brad like a modern Valkyrie, or some other messenger of the gods, come to peck at his liver.

“You look great,” he said, “the crow’s feet under your eyes give you character, though your breasts have sagged. Also your jaw has slackened off, which has lifted the venom sacs from under your lip. Really, you look better. Where did you land the Spitfire?”

“I could have landed a small aircraft in your mouth. That hasn’t changed.”

“Give me one of those godawful poseur’s cigarettes you always smoke.”

Ella swept newspapers and empty brown ale bottles from a chair on to the floor. She inspected the seat closely before deciding to sit. Expertly hand-rolling one of her liquorice-paper cigarettes, she tossed it to Brad. “This place makes me want to puke.”

“Well, we didn’t know the princess was coming.”

“Thought you said you were expecting me?”

“The servants are away this week.”

“You’re almost coherent—I’m surprised. That must mean something’s wrong. I thought you’d be drunk.”

“Dear old Ella; she’s very clever. And she’d fuck anyone for fourpence.”

Ella only shrugged. “You can do better than that, a man of your bile.”

“Have you really come to peck at my liver?”

“Don’t be obscure.”

“Never mind. Never you mind, me old princess.” He hoisted himself up off the sofa, swaying slightly as he came forward and stood over her, uncomfortably close in his filthy T-shirt and yellow-stained underpants. Lee’s graphic descriptions hadn’t been exaggerated. His hair was matted and his stubbled chin was stained by something saffron colored he must have eaten recently. The smell of his unwashed body turned Ella’s stomach.

He had a bad look in his eye as he stood provocatively near, arms dangling at his side, puffing on his cigarette, waiting for some kind of reaction. She wanted to tell him that he smelled like the carcass of something washed up and rotting on a beach. She thought better of it, taking a pull on her own cigarette and meeting his eyes, but as if with infinite patience. It was always possible he might just smash her in the face.

He snapped his fingers loudly and turned away to find his bottle. “Do you want a drink me old princess me old duchess me old empress? Do you?”

“Oh it’s a cocktail bar! And I thought I was in a hovel! I’ll pass, but don’t let me stop you from getting any further out of focus.”

Brad slumped back on the couch with his whisky. “How’s your boyfriend? He paid me a courtesy call recently—we go back a long way you know—he wanted me to join his golf club. Had to disappoint him. Don’t even know why he came. And a couple of weeks later, here you are. Imagine.”

“Imagine. One more and we’d have the full set.”

Brad scowled. “But what could Ella want with me, eh? What could the old harpy want with Brad?”

“Still pretending, are we Brad?”

“Pretending? Pretending what?”

“Pretending we’re not pretending.”

“Gibberish. With a capital ish.”

“Why did you call us, Brad?”

He looked at Ella with contempt. “You what?”

“You called us.”

“Talk shit.”

“I always could out-guess you, Brad. You never liked that, did you? Now that I see you, I’m more certain than ever it was you.”

“You don’t come here to lecture me; I know what you are. You’re dirt. You’re diseased! Unhinged!”

Ella went over to Brad and kneeled down beside the sofa. She put her hand into his matted hair. “You’re still a boy, aren’t you Brad? A big boy, but still a boy.”

“Piss off! Get the fuck out of here!” But he made no attempt to pull back from her.

“You know, Brad, for a long time I thought it was Honora, going back there, shrouded in guilt. But it was you, wasn’t it? You started it again. We were all asleep, for years; then you went back there, and you needed us, so you woke us all up. Didn’t you, Brad? You called us.”

“Just go would you? Just go.” Something in Brad’s voice had fractured.

“Here I am, Brad.”

“No.”

“You have to tell me, Brad. You have to.”

“No!”

“It can’t go on. You know it. You have to tell me.”

Brad looked at her. She had never seen such desperation. “She’s out there, Ella.”

“Who?”

“She’s out there. She’s hungry.”

“Who’s out there? Honora?”

“No no no no no. Not her. She.”

“But who is she? You must tell me.”

“Out there. She’s hungry. She wants to eat me… the little girl.”

“How can a little girl hurt you, Brad?”

“She’s not a little girl. Just pretending. Disguised. She hates me. She wants to eat me. Stop looking at me like that.” Brad buried his head in the sofa. “Stop it!”

“Why can’t I look at you?”

“Because I’m disgusting. I’m a leper. Don’t look at me, Ella.”

Ella pulled Brad to her, and cradled his head in her lap, stroking his filthy, matted hair as he cried. It was an hour before his sobbing subsided.

They were standing in the kitchen. “When did you sleep last?”

Ella had salvaged and scoured four of Brad’s biggest saucepans. She had filled them with water and they were heating on the front and back plates of the filthy electric cooker. The water began to bubble.

“I haven’t slept for three days and nights. I’m too scared to sleep.”

“Like the rest of us then. Well? Are you going to bring it in?” Brad shuffled uncomfortably. “Come on, do it,” said Ella.

Brad went out of the back door and returned clumsily manoeuvring an old tin bath. “Where shall I put it?” he asked pathetically. Ella wiped the tin bath with a damp rag until she was satisfied that it was as clean as she was going to get it, then poured in the hot water. It amounted to about three inches in the bottom of the bath. This was topped up with cold water, and the four saucepans were immediately refilled and set to boil.

“What are you waiting for?” she said. “I’m certainly not going to undress you.”

Brad stared back at her, and eventually began fumbling with his underclothes. Undressed, he climbed into the bath and drew his knees up around him. “It’s not very warm,” he said sulkily.

Ella produced her leather holdall, from which she withdrew soap, sponge, scrubbing brush, towels, razors, shaving brush, shaving soap, scissors, combs, shampoo, deodorants and cologne. She lined them up on the kitchen table like a surgeon’s equipment. Then she set to work, vigorously scrubbing Brad’s neck and shoulders.

“Steady!” shouted Brad.

Ella didn’t ease up. “It’s disgusting.”

“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you!”

“It’s what I live for.”

She splashed soapy water over his head, and drew the line at washing him below the waist.

“You would have, once.”

“Never; and don’t forget it.” She tossed a jug of cold water over his head by way of emphasis.

The water turned black. She refilled the bath with more hot water from the stove, reheating pans all the time. After washing his hair, she proceeded to cut it none too carefully, telling him that it was fashionable to look like someone from a thirties soup kitchen. He said he doubted it.

“I met someone on the way down here,” said Ella as she snipped recklessly close to Brad’s ears. “I gave him a lift. He gave me some advice before he got out of the car. He said…”

“Watch my ear for chrissake!”

“Sorry… He said we should undo what was done.”

“Big help.”

“Do you know what he meant?”

“Christ! Watch my ears will you! That was deliberate!”

“Sorry. This man—at least at first I thought he was a man, then I thought he might be just a phantom, from dreamside—was helping me. He was a friend. At least he seemed to be.”

“Other things have happened.”

Ella was careful to release only part of the story. If she mentioned the girl at this point, it would all be over. “That’s the trouble. Not being able to tell the difference, I mean. That’s why it’s dangerous.”

Brad just stared into the murky water which was turning cold around his genitals. He was pink with scrubbing. His ears were sore from clippings gone wide of the mark, deliberate or otherwise. He was beginning to feel sober and he was beginning to feel ridiculous. Ella whisked up a lather of shaving soap, sculpted it around his jaw and set in with the razor.

“I’m relieved you’re doing this with us Brad. It’s the only way.”

“Did Honora agree to it?”

“She will.”

“I don’t see what good it can do.”

“Just don’t change your mind.”

“Did you ever tell Lee about us?” he said suddenly.

She didn’t stop shaving him. “There was nothing to tell.”

“I mean about that one time. Us. On dreamside.”

“It never happened, Brad. Not between you and me.”

“I know different. We discussed it years ago; you denied it then.”

“And I deny it now. Whatever dream you had that time, even if I was in it, I wasn’t there.”

“You can say that now.” He flicked water from his eye.

“You’re wrong.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Careful while I’m holding this razor. I’ll say it again: I wasn’t there.”

Brad went to contradict her; but he saw a cold gleam in her eyes like a reflection of the razor she was wielding. It made him stop. It was so long ago even he couldn’t pretend that the contours of truth hadn’t folded a little. Lucid or otherwise, it was all dreaming. “I’m getting cold,” he said.

Ella stood him up, poured another pan of cold water over his head and wrapped him in a towel. She gave him sweet-smelling lotions together with instructions for liberal use; and a complete set of clothes belonging to Lee. He disappeared from the kitchen to try them on.

When he returned, with his cropped hair combed back and wearing the oversized clothes, Ella started giggling. Brad retreated angrily, slamming the door, refusing to come out again and threatening not to make the return journey to rejoin the others. But finally she got him into the car. He climbed into the passenger seat and sat with arms crossed and with head bowed.

“I need to tell the others we’re on our way,” said Ella.

She stopped the car at a telephone kiosk to make a progress report to Lee. Stepping out of the car, she had a second thought, and reached for the keys.

“What’s that for?” Brad demanded. It was the first time he had spoken since leaving the cottage.

“Reflex.”

“What’s the matter with you? Do you think I’d drive off in the car or something?” He was angry.

“Relax. I’m just going to make one phone call.”

“You’re taking the keys anyway, I see!”

Inside the booth, and away from Brad for the first time in over six hours, she sighed, leaning her head against the dial. Brad’s behaviour was still unpredictable, and he was in a suggestible state. So far he had followed, but if he was to have a change of heart she would never be able to bring him back again. If she could keep her own head clear she might do it. She was terrified by the idea of what might happen if he or she experienced an attack en route.

She carefully phoned Lee’s number. When the answer came, it was Honora on the line, though her voice could hardly be made out. The line was full of interference, strange electronic chirpings, and innumerable unfathomable ghost conversations, as if a hundred other people were trying to claim the line. Ella put the receiver down and tried again, but got the same results.

“Phone’s out of order,” she told Brad, back in the car. “It’ll have to wait.”

Brad only stared sulkily ahead of him. “This car will never make it,” he said.

Ella could sense two forces working in Brad. One surrendered him completely to her judgment, and with blind faith asked her to take charge and deliver him from his nightmares. The other was a palpable terror, growing so fast she could smell it on his breath: a fear both of facing the source of his horrors, and of facing his fellow dreamers with whom he had brought the living nightmare into being. This terror, she knew, was already telling him that in coming with her he had made a mistake; and his apprehension of that mistake was increasing with each mile of their journey.

It was beginning to get dark. At a service station half-way up the motorway she stopped and tried to phone again. She got no better results—a line awash with interference, busy with sounds like whispered conversations which changed as soon as you tried to listen in on them. When she returned to the car park, Brad was gone.

She found him in the reception area of the service station, hanging over an electronic arcade machine. A space patrol game. His hand fumbled with the joystick as he peered darkly into the kaleidoscope of shifting pin-lights behind the black glass.

“Time to go,” said Ella.

“But I haven’t beaten the invaders. The earth’s in peril.”

“You have to put some money in to do that.”

“Oh… sure.” He released the stick and followed her back to the car.

Shortly after she had turned off the motorway, Brad suddenly seemed to emerge from a daze. “I need a drink,” he said.

“Brad; it would be a good idea if you stayed off the pop.”

He gripped her wrist hard enough to make her stop the car. “I need a drink.” His eyes were almost crazy with fear and lack of sleep.

“Maybe you do. I’ll find a pub.”

She had to drive for a while along a winding and deserted country road. Dusk was slipping away quickly into darkness. She found a place with a dimly lit sign saying The Corn Man. It had the expectant hush of a pub just opened and too early for most customers. Brad marched up to the bar and ordered himself two large brandies, both of which he drank, leaving Ella to order herself a tonic water. He repeated his order, and the barmaid eyed him quizzically as she nudged his glass under the optic measure.

“Ease up,” said Ella. “Lee will bring enough to keep you satisfied.”

“Lee Lee Lee. Lee schmee.”

Brad kept a hand on one of his brandy glasses, as if someone might want to take it away from him. Ella waited patiently, in silence. At length he got up. “Must take a leak,” he said.

Ella sat nursing her tonic water until she realized that he wasn’t coming back. She even stood outside the gents’ toilets, calling to him, but she knew he wasn’t in there. She returned to her car and sat behind the wheel, not knowing what to do. Half an hour had passed before he walked out of the shadow and climbed back in the passenger seat. She thought he had the smell of vomit on him.

“What are we waiting for?” he said.

NINE

“I’m sure it was Ella.” Honora didn’t sound at all sure.

“What did she say?”

“I didn’t hear anything. She sounded like she was phoning from another planet. I couldn’t make her out.”

Lee hadn’t quite recovered from his vision of Honora as a Gorgon, his second attack of elementals within the space of minutes. For the moment he was less concerned with Ella’s difficulties than with his own. He hadn’t drawn breath to consider what might have happened between Honora and himself if the hallucination hadn’t intervened. What’s more, he was no closer to having explained Ella’s absence.

“Where would she be phoning from?”

“She wouldn’t be too far away.”

“Why won’t you tell me where she’s gone? Why won’t you answer me?”

Lee was running short of escape lines and changes of subject. He actually contemplated faking another attack of writhing snakes in order to divert her questions. A deep intuition told him not to play games.

Fortunately Honora backed off. He tried to distract himself by shuffling playing cards on the coffee table, pretending to deal rounds of patience, but lacked concentration. Still shaken from that last attack, he felt sick to his stomach.

His anxiety was exacerbated by Honora, who gave him the jitters simply by sitting still with her hands gently clasped in an attitude of such perfect serenity that it could not fail to betray the deep agitation within. Worse, it had dawned on Lee that Honora had become aware, either by intuition or by the simple application of common sense, that Ella had gone to recruit Brad Cousins into her latest scheme. A disconcerting feeling came over him. He felt, irrationally, that he was unwittingly projecting mental pictures to Honora, or that she had found some ghoulish means of bleeding him of information.

It was difficult enough being subject to these random mental distortions without fearing that there was some kind of telepathy going on. It could be another overspill from dreamside, the residual thoughtspeak of dreamside. Anyway, it was happening. And when Lee admitted this, he felt a corresponding wave in Honora. They sat up and looked at each other, and there was a dovetailing of insight. He knew she knew, and she knew he knew she knew, and so it went, back into infinite space.

Lee continued to turn cards, gnawed at by visions of his earlier hallucination.

Honora stepped over to the window, peering out at the dusk. She snatched the curtains closed.

“Shall I tell your future?” she said suddenly. “From the cards. Shall I?”

“I don’t want to know it under the circumstances.”

“You don’t have to believe it!”

“That’s what I told myself the other night. I don’t have to believe in the power of dreaming. 1 told myself several times, but it didn’t help.”

“Nonsense. Give me the cards.” Honora knelt alongside the coffee table and gathered up the pack. Lee sat back, putting a respectful distance between himself and any possible repeat hallucination. Briefly shuffling the cards, Honora started placing them across each other on the table, intoning as she turned them up. “This crowns you, this crosses you, this circles you; this is beneath you and this is behind you; this speaks for you, this will deceive you, this will defend you, and this is all before you.”

Lee didn’t get to see his future because the phone rang. This time he answered.

“It’s Ella,” he said. “Ella, you’ll have to shout; I said you’ll have to shout; I said… Jesus this is hopeless… I said I still can’t hear you!”

Lee could just make out that it was Ella, but her message was lost in a flurry of static and signal interference. There was a wall of sound crackling from the earpiece. From the middle of it Ella’s voice piped through, but was distant and stripped of tone and amplitude. Her voice had been reduced to the narrowest frequency, a single oscillation playing along a fine wire that could have been stretching half the length of the galaxy. Ella was there and he could hear her, but he couldn’t identify a single word she was saying. The line seemed full of breathing and whisperings, and waves of static, all conspiring to crowd her out. Lee pressed his ear closer to the receiver.

“YOU’LL HAVE TO SHOUT, ELLA!” The electronic piping of her voice continued, sounding like the noise an electronic or mechanical bird might produce, against the unabated interference. “ELLA? WHAT IS IT YOU’RE SAYING?”

Lee felt his earlobe, pressed tight against the earpiece, start to get hot, then smart and sting. Then he felt a sharp sensation like a pin being inserted into the tender part of his ear. As he pulled the phone away from his head it jerked at him, as if his ear had become glued to the receiver. Pulling at it only produced a searing pain, like flesh tearing away in strips.

“Honora!” he shouted. This time he knew what was happening. Honora jumped to her feet.

But the stinging continued, until it felt like a razor cutting his ear, or something gripping him tightly like a pair of scissors. He tried to breathe deeply and control the hallucination, as he had done on dreamside many times, thinking in detail down the procession of events, smoothing back the sequence of the attack. Then he felt himself begin to panic as he felt out of control.

“There’s something inside the phone!” Honora shouted.

Lee felt it now; and as he inched the receiver away from his head he could almost see at the periphery of his vision the dull gleam of yellow blades snapping and twisting and bringing blood to his ear. A black feathered head squeezed out of the earpiece, shaking frantically, eyes bulbous with fear, and he realized that what was tearing at his ear was not a razor, not scissors, but the sharp pecking beak of a bird. Honora screamed and stood over him, not knowing what to do to help. Lee wrenched the phone away from his head. The bird, large, the size of a blackbird, squeezed out of the earpiece, its wings flapping wildly as they came free, first one then the other, still pecking and cutting at Lee’s bloodied ear in wild panic.

Dropping the phone and lashing out with his hand, Lee smashed it up and away over his head. The bird flew frantically around the room, disastrously, crashing into walls and thrashing against the window. Lee crumpled and retched and vomited. The bird swooped crazily, and flew into objects around the room. The black rag of its wings was magnified by the confinement of space, fanning them with ice-cold waves of air. Torn feathers came floating down around them, until at last Honora, screaming and crying, in utter desperation picked up the coffee table and hurled it through the central window. The glass shattered spectacularly, and the table fell back into the room. The bird flew out of the smashed window and away into the dusk outside.

Honora staggered over to where Lee lay on the floor. She hoisted him up by his waist. Breathing heavily she said, “Come on; you’ve got to get up; you’ve got to get up.”

“It was real,” he panted. “You saw it. It was real. It wasn’t a hallucination at all.” His ear was bloodied and torn.

“Of course I saw it. You must get up. It’s time for us to go isn’t it? Ella was trying to tell us it’s time. They’re both going to be there, aren’t they?”

Lee nodded. He was beginning to understand why Ella had been in so much of a hurry.

“Get some overnight things; get some blankets and covers. I’ll get the rest. Then get in the car.”

They loaded up the car in silence. Then they drove away, dusk slipping into darkness, leaving the gaping hole of the smashed window in the empty house behind them.

A foul wind came up, assaulting the room they had left, like a raid made a few moments too late. It flapped the heavy curtains beside the broken window and flipped Honora’s unread cards, dealing a new sequence, one darker and full of portents which only the wind could read.

TEN

Somewhere in the Brecon Beacons, guided in the moonless dark by an infrared confidence and a blueprint memory, Ella found her mark. It was the early hours of the morning. The Midget, engine knocking wildly, stalled outside the house on the exact spot where an old Morris Minor had stood one summer thirteen years ago. Ella had already jumped out, leaving Brad to stare moodily around him. The house stood empty.

“Thirteen years on,” she said to Brad, “and still a holiday home for some overpaid academic who’s probably been twice since we were here.”

Brad got out of the car. He didn’t begrudge anyone a single brick of the place. “How will we get in?” he said, in a voice that suggested. “Let’s turn back.”

Ella lifted the boot of her car. “You’ve got a narrow experience of life, Brad Cousins.” She lifted a slender chisel and a hammer from the boot, and marched around to the rear of the house. Brad followed at a distance of five paces. She slotted the chisel between the upper and lower frame of a sash window, swung the hammer once, hard, and the window catch flew open. The window required only a light push, sliding up as if by hydraulic gears.

“Where did you learn that?”

“From a cigarette card. Go and fetch those things from the car.”

Brad trotted off obediently as Ella climbed through the window. When he reappeared with Ella’s bag, she had the back door open.

“No, don’t switch on the lights. We don’t want to attract attention. Anyway, it’ll soon be light. Close the curtains and light some of these candles.”

“Romantic,” said Brad.

“You think so?”

“No.”

With the candle flames flickering and darting long shadows across the room, they could see that the house had recently been renovated. Floorboards had been sanded, old cupboards replaced by units, and the enamel sink supplanted by one of stainless steel. They made coffee and played a nervous round of That-Wasn’t-Here-Before.

“What time will the others come?”

“When they show up.”

“Give me one of those ridiculous liquorice cigarettes, will you?”

Some time after three o’clock in the morning, a car pulled up outside the house. Ella went to the window and drew back a curtain. Then she opened the door.

“We got well lost,” said Lee, “we’ve been driving in circles. Scary kind of circles.” He gave Ella a special look.

So now Lee was getting a taste, Ella thought. Now he understands what’s happening. “Don’t tell me about it. You’re here. Come inside, Honora,”

“Is he in there?”

Ella nodded, and they walked through. Brad sat stiffly in a corner of the room. Lee was only mildly surprised to see him shaved, shorn and kitted out in some of his old clothes. Honora simply erased his presence: he wasn’t there. Brad might have flickered a glance in her direction, or maybe it was only the play of candlelight across his eyes.

Lee rubbed his hands with simulated gusto, paced the floor and chattered about making coffee and getting comfortable: anything to overlay the smoky bitterness in the room. Ella was wiser than Lee. She knew the exact nature of the ingredients that had to be brought together to bubble in the cauldron. Let them feel it, she thought, let them feel it.

Lee discovered what hard work it is to keep up conversation when three other people don’t want to join in. He quickly ran out of counterfeit enthusiasm. The candles burned steadily, and the four sat silently, nursing empty coffee mugs, only their eyes reflecting the available light. Occasionally a flame would shiver in a draft, dispatching shadows across a wall and releasing a worm of black smoke.

“This is like a séance,” said Lee. “Let’s see if we can contact the living.”

No one bothered to laugh. Lee was reminded of the early lucid dreaming seminars, where they would sit for twenty minutes in uncomfortable silence waiting for the professor to speak. He was about to wonder aloud what Burns would have made of their situation, but opted against unwise comment. Honora gazed down at the rug beneath her as if she saw something significant in its pattern, and it seemed to Lee that her silence was the deepest. Brad continued to find the far corner of the ceiling an image of satisfaction. Ella looked far too comfortable, and the corners of her mouth were turned up fractionally in what he thought was an incipiently malevolent smile.

That Ella was in charge was unquestionable. The other three had by now surrendered themselves to her. They all knew why they were here, but they were waiting for Ella to summon them to order. She seemed to have the power to draw something out of them, to distil something from the brooding silence. When Ella did speak, the others were steeled to listen.

“No one’s in any mood for sleeping; and we all know why that is. In any event I’m wide awake, and the dawn will be up in an hour or two. Better save it for tomorrow night, when we will need to sleep. We have to take that walk together on dreamside.” Ella paused for effect, and released a deep sigh.

“Tomorrow,” she continued, “or rather when it gets light, we’ll go and take a look at the lake. We’ll just spend the day together, however much effort that takes. It’s what Burns showed us. It worked before and it will work for us again. Tomorrow night we sleep, and we do it. Agreed?” Ella looked from person to person but all eyes were averted. “There can’t be any stragglers.”

“Ella,” said Brad self-consciously, making a waving sign at his mouth.

“Sure,” said Ella. “Lee, I hope you didn’t forget Brad’s medicine?”

“What?”

“Did you bring anything for him?”

“Oh sure,” said Lee, glad to do something useful. He went out and returned with a half-empty bottle of whiskey. “Don’t scowl at it; there’s more in the car.”

“Don’t give him ideas,” said Ella, but not before Brad had hooked back a good belt of Scotch.

Before the candles had burned down, the first grey light of the day leaked into the room. The dawn chorus was in song before they realized it, followed by a brighter light. Honora went round snuffing out candles, slowly, like a church acolyte. Ella watched her and was afraid for her. She had spent most of the night in complete silence, haunting everyone else with her inward stare. Now she stood poised over the last candle, thumb and forefinger moistened to nip out the flickering light, but arrested in the motion. She gazed steadily into the flame without blinking. It was as if her soul was a fine thread being unwound from a thick spool and pulled in toward the heart of the flame.

“Look at her,” Ella whispered to Lee, “something is taking her, a little at a time.”

“What is it?”

Ella shook her head. “Stop her.”

Lee moved up behind Honora, gently reaching over her shoulder to nip out the candle flame. She seemed to wake up.

“Have I been sleeping?” she asked.

Lee looked over at Ella, but they said nothing. Then Ella pulled back the curtains, looked up at the sky and pronounced that it was going to be a fine day. Brad snorted.

“We’ll go for a walk,” said Ella. “Take a look at the lake.”

’I’ll stay here,” said Brad.

“No. We need your cheerful company.”

The sun came up fast, blood-red. Just as quickly it mellowed to a pallid disk. They were a strange troupe, filing down the hill of the country lane without speaking. Honora walked on a few yards in front. Brad straggled behind. Ella and Lee wanted to grip hands but were for some reason impelled against it. It was no short distance to the lake, and in the chill, damp air of the early morning they completed the hike in silence.

When they got there, the lake was dead.

Or if not completely dead, it was locked in a state of suspended, strangled ugliness. The breath of spring, which abounded in everything else, had passed it by. A yellow, oily foam like detergent had collected in raked scum patterns on the surface of the water. It clung to dead branches and Coke cans and other debris at the lake’s edge. The towering oak had failed to come into leaf and the rough bark was stripping itself on the side leaning over the water. The willow that had once dipped into the lake would never recover; it had withered into dry twigs and run the colour of rust. The colonies of birds and insects that should have regenerated had either died with the lake or had migrated, never to return.

“Where did all this pollution come from?” said Brad. He sounded as if he took it personally.

Ella found some kind of an answer pinned to a tree. It was a notice of a public meeting, placed there by a Conservationist group.

The notice was already out of date: the meeting had gone by two days earlier.

“Lytex?” said Lee, puzzling over the notice. “Sounds familiar.”

“Forget it,” said Brad.

Honora stood at the very edge of the lake. “It’s poisoned,” she said, gazing into its depths. Then her face set in that same expression Ella had identified earlier. She swayed slightly on the bank above the polluted water, as if played on some invisible cord, with some still, small part of herself unwinding into the lake. Ella saw it again. Honora looked pale, beautiful and unearthly, but anaemic, as if her life-blood was leaking away. This time it was Brad who made a move to save her, but Ella stopped him with a gesture. Then she stepped forward, put an arm around the other woman and turned her away from the water.

“I’m losing myself,” said Honora.

“It’s all right. I’ll watch over you.”

Lee fingered the diseased bark of the tall oak. Ella peered from the bank as the iridescent scales of a detergent slick writhed slowly on the water. Even amid the corruption and pollution she could see the shining scales of a dragon, or a winged serpent, or a beautiful, silver-armoured company with banners fluttering below the surface of the water. It was difficult to look away. “Let’s get out of here,” she said.

She led them from the lake over to the woods, where afternoons had been spent strolling in Burns’s company, when they were wide eyed and receptive to his sharp definitions of life and to his quiet revelations. Even in waking time on those afternoons, Burns had made the woods a place of jewelled cobwebs, a place inhabited by satyrs and dryads. Now they were wandering without purpose through the mouldering scrub of a thin damp copse.

Ella was circumspect as they walked; constantly glancing around her as though she expected to discover something or to encounter someone. If the others noticed, they made no comment.

They took the path back to the house, Honora still in advance and decisively separated from Brad by the other two. Occasionally they changed positions. Ella was anxious about leaving Honora alone with her thoughts, where she was like a weak swimmer at risk from strong currents. She sent Lee up to talk with Honora; Ella dropped back to talk with Brad; then Lee talked to Brad and Ella with Honora; but Honora and Brad never talked. And all of this was conducted against the rumbling, prophetic thunder of what the night held. On this night, they must sleep and dream.

Brad hung his cropped head, eyes fixed on the narrow path before him as Ella walked at his side. “Why are we doing this?”

“To make a connection,” said Ella, glancing hopefully about her.

“I’ve made a connection. Can I be excused now?”

Ella took his arm. She was softening to his helplessness.

“Do you really not remember, Ella?”

“Remember what?”

“That time. Of dreaming. Just the once.”

“Don’t start that again.”

“It’s important to me.”

“I’m sure it is.”

“There’s a reason why,” he said softly, even shyly. “You say that it didn’t happen—”

“Which it didn’t.”

“So I can’t change that; it’s what you remember, and anyway it was only on dreamside, but Ella it was lucid, there was no mistake, we all of us know the difference between those dreams and ordinary dreams, but you and I were there, alone and it was special, happy, for both of us, and for me it was the only time it ever happened…”

“What?” cried Ella.

“I don’t mean the only time it ever happened, I mean the only time it happened—and I’m talking about waking time as well— that was real or good.”

There was a frightening urgency about what Brad was saying. Ella closed her eyes. She wondered whether she could in fact recall such a situation with Brad, and conceded that underneath their old antagonism something sexual might have been afoot. Was there a fragment of a dream she had wiped out, repressed completely? Ella knew how easy it was to erase lucid dream experiences. She forced the thought back.

Up ahead, Lee and Honora were engaging in another version of that same conversation.

“What’s the purpose of this?” Honora asked.

Lee didn’t know, except that Ella wanted it. Sometimes he thought that Ella was just too complicated for him. He didn’t understand half of the things she said and did, but he always went along with them. She acted and he reacted. She was quicksilver, he was lead. He had allowed himself to live too vaguely, and consequently she had led him since day one, often into places where he didn’t want to be, and he was still following her now. How strongly Honora contrasted with Ella. She looked pale and vulnerable, but lovely in her simple woollen dress and plaited hair.

“Do you still think it could have been us?” said Lee.

“No point thinking of it now.”

“No.”

But after a pause she admitted, “I’ve always hung on to secret thoughts about you. Not love, or maybe not, at least let’s not call it that. And I think you knew all about it.”

“Never,” said Lee. He kissed her lightly. This time there were no visions of serpents. Only a fresh smell like clear rainwater, and the diffuse sunlight a-play in her copper hair. Ella watched from a short distance behind.

Late in the walk, Brad dropped behind Lee and Ella to talk to Honora. She shivered as he approached.

“I wanted to speak to you, Honora.”

“What in hell would I have to say to you?”

“What about some recognition? What about sorry?”

“Sorry? You think I should apologize to you? You’re demented as well as a drunkard.”

“All of the times I tried to reach you; to help you. You never once bothered to answer. Time after time, over the years. Not once. Not a single word. Do those two know that? Not a bit of it. They’re much happier to see me as the villain. It’s all poor bloody Honora.”

“I owe you nothing at all; nothing.”

“You’re wrong, Honora. You owe me the recognition. Did you tell them I was with you when it happened? Did you tell them I was there, and that I held your hand and warmed you, and cleaned you and delivered the baby on dreamside for you-did you tell them that? Did you tell them?”

She stopped and turned to face him. “It was a different dream. You were never there. It could never have been the same dream.”

“It was the same dream. I was there. You could never have done it alone, you would have died. That’s why you ignored all my letters. You’ve just changed the dream. You’ve edited it, blocked me out, that’s all. You all block me out!”

“It’s not possible.”

“It’s the truth. My dream and your dream were the same dream.”

“Why in God’s name did you want to go stirring it all up, waking us all again? It was all dead and buried! Why couldn’t you just leave us all in peace? It was all in the past until you brought it on us again. You brought it all back. They thought it was me, all of this time they thought that it was me doing it out of guilt. But I knew it was your doing. I just hoped it wasn’t.”

“You don’t understand, I couldn’t leave it. There was something belonging to us there which had to be settled, had to be put right. I didn’t choose it; I was taken there and shown it time and time again. I couldn’t hold it off.”

“Like you can’t hold off a drink you mean?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. But I didn’t intend to drag everyone else back in.”

“You didn’t ‘intend’.”

“Listen to me, Honora, I’m trying to make amends.” He took hold of her arm. “It doesn’t make any difference what you say, I’ve run out of fight.”

“Brad Cousins, I don’t care if you run out of breath.”

Brad dropped her arm, and walked off in the opposite direction.

They had almost reached the house when Ella and Lee realized that Brad had disappeared.

“Where is he?”

“Gone.”

“But is he coming back?”

“I don’t know,” said Honora.

She thought not.

ELEVEN

With Brad gone, Ella thought that her plan had collapsed. But Lee found him back at the house a couple of hours later. He turned up in the old shed at the bottom of the garden, where the rowing boat had originally been stored.

When Lee had first tried the door he’d found it unlocked, but something barred his way in. Hammering the door open a few inches, forcing enough space for him to put his head around, he saw a faded relic of their summer idyll: the rowing boat, its paint cracked and peeling. It was carrying a strange load: Brad Cousins, sleeping heavily, legs draped across the stern. He was cradling an empty bottle of good malt whiskey. A second bottle lay discarded on the floor. Broken rays of sunlight stroked his bloated cheek.

“Hey Captain!” Lee shouted, relieved to have found him in any condition. Brad only slept on. Lee called again. There was no movement, and he returned to the house.

“Sleeping beauty just turned up. We’d better organize some coffee.”

“Black?”

“Black as the pit.”

Lee felt heartened; Ella’s plan might still be salvaged. He returned to the shed with a chipped mug of sweet, steaming black coffee. Squeezing into the shed, he set the coffee down on the workbench and tried to wake Brad gently.

First he tried shaking him by the arm. Then he patted his cheeks. Even bellowing loudly in his ear produced no result. His pats turned to hard slaps, but Brad slept on. It was only as a mischievous last resort that he considered a bucket of icy water.

With protracted ceremony, Lee filled the bucket. Ella and Honora followed behind him to enjoy the show, giggling through the shed window as he raised it aloft. They watched Brad get a thorough dousing. But where he was expected to scramble awake, puffing and groping blindly, he slept on. For the first time it occurred to Lee that getting him to wake up might be beyond their ability.

Manoeuvring Brad’s sleeping body out of the shed was a difficult task. The shed doors were blocked by the boat, and they were unable to move it because of Brad’s considerable weight. Getting Brad out of the boat was no simpler. There was precious little room to stand alongside, let alone hoist Brad out, and he was a dead weight. Finally Lee managed to drag his lifeless, soaking body clear, as Ella manipulated the boat free of the doors, and eventually, sweating and swearing, Lee laid Brad down on the damp grass outside the shed. Ella kneeled beside him. His face felt dry and was bruised and bloated. There was a bubble of vomit at the corner of his lips. “His hands are freezing, and his breathing is very shallow. We’d better get him to a hospital.”

“I’ll take him,” said Lee. “Bring a blanket and help me get him to the car.

It was late afternoon when Lee returned. “Alcohol poisoning. He’s in a coma.”

“This much we already know,” Ella said sharply.

“It’s all they could say. He’s comatose.”

“When will he not be comatose?”

“They pumped his stomach. He didn’t revive. The doctor said he could come out of it in five minutes. But it could be weeks, months, years. They’ve got him all wired up. There was no point in me hanging around drinking coffee from a plastic cup. So I left. Wasn’t that the best thing to do?”

“And they said that it was the booze for sure?”

“They said so. But they were surprised it was such a heavy coma. They asked me a lot of questions about his lifestyle, most of which I couldn’t answer. We just have to wait until he comes out of it. They said it’s a condition beyond…”

“Beyond the help of medical science.” Honora supplied the phrase.

“Something like that.”

“Where does that leave us?” said Ella.

“One down, three to go?” said Honora.

The remark was left unanswered.

Evening drew in, and little was said. The silences prickled against the walls and crawled into every crevice and corner of the house. Every sound or movement was an affront. Mattresses had been dragged downstairs and covered with bedding so that later they could sleep side by side in the living room. This arrangement was made by tacit consent, an indication not of their closeness but of their fear of the night ahead.

Ella was the most worried. This strange turn in events had deflated her plans. She had staked everything on the idea of them taking the dreamside walk. She looked defeated.

Candle flames flickered from the mantelpiece, imparting shadows and inflaming imaginations that needed dampening. Outside a gate banged. Then it banged again and again in a mischievous wind, until Lee went out to fasten it.

It was a clear night. A moon was up, a slender crescent amid a scattering of bright stars, like the sable flag of a strange country. Lee looked into the sky for omens, portents. It was a moon for dreamers, cutting through the night sky and bearing strange cargo.

A scattering of lights burned in the distant village. They seemed a long way off, and something was stirring out there in the dark. Something was in this new wind, something which would never be seen nor smelled nor tasted, but which Lee sensed, fattening all around them.

“When will you leave us alone?” he said.

He was exhausted. Lack of sleep hung from him like chains, and played tricks with his eyes. As he looked up, everything took on a brilliant hallucinatory property. The moon hovered over him, bright, massive, leaking light everywhere, silver moonstain running from it like hot wax from a candle. The wind whipped up high, and he had a notion that he could see it, etched in rich, dark colours against the night sky. He could see its spiralling contours, its playful currents and its fan-shaped terraces. Then he shivered and went back inside.

TWELVE

The house was like a camp under siege, with the enemy tents of ghost armies pitched in the garden outside. Ella tried to kindle a fire in the hearth, a brave attempt to smuggle some cheer into the room. The fire took at the third effort, smoky flames licking without relish at a damp log dropped on Ella’s criss-cross of smouldering twigs. The key of a sardine can broke and Lee cut himself trying to extract the contents. They consumed a dismal meal in silence.

Lee suggested that someone should telephone the hospital ward, to get a report on Brads condition. Since no telephone had been installed in the house, this involved a short drive to the nearby village. This small task took on the prospect of a minatory expedition with all attendant dangers. Lee’s recent tangle with telephones was a strong disincentive. He seemed to think that Ella should be the one to go, and said so. But Ella had been looking for an opportunity to speak privately with Lee. She needed some minutes alone with him, even though she was disinclined to leave Honora, whose capacity to remain in complete possession of herself seemed to be deteriorating fast.

“Look at her!” she said. She’d addressed Honora twice, without getting any response. Honora was staring into the fire with an expressionless, unfocused gaze. Her eyes lacked lustre, seemingly dried out by the smoke. She was away. “You can see her uncoiling. It’s almost physical!”

Ella took Honora’s hand and broke the enchantment.

“Come away from the fire.”

“It happened again? I’m like smoke. I’m coming apart.”

“We’re going to phone. Come with us.”

“I’d rather not go out there.”

“It would be better if you came.”

“Don’t make me go out there, Ella.”

Ella hesitated. “We’ll be ten minutes at the most.”

Ella made the call, with Lee hovering in the background. Brad’s condition was unimproved. Ella sighed and replaced the receiver. She told Lee what she had heard and they agreed to telephone again in the morning. Before they climbed back into the car, Ella took Lee by the sleeve.

“She’s right isn’t she? What she said about it today. She just knows it.”

Lee nodded. “Honora is all intuition. She’s the most susceptible.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning she knows how it will be. The danger of being overwhelmed. Of dreaming and never finding our way back. Of being stitched into the fabric of dreaming, frozen in perpetual dreamside.”

“It’s the worst scenario. The worst nightmare.”

“It’s what we face now.”

“I just didn’t want to admit it. To myself.”

Lee looked at her. Where did she get her courage from? He grabbed her cold white hand and kissed it. “Like you said, it’s the worst nightmare of all. Perhaps one of us will have to stay awake, while the others dream. Perhaps that’s the only way.”

“Short straws? Or volunteers?” Ella shook her head. “It won’t work. We all have to be there on dreamside. We’re all implicated.”

“If only we had someone on the outside of our dreaming, someone to anchor us. If Burns was here, what would he tell us? What clue would he give us?”

Ella recalled her motorway encounter with the professor—if indeed it was the professor—and saw him vividly: agitated, cryptic, wringing his hands; saying nothing she could understand.

“Listen to this. I had an encounter on the motorway. I have to tell you about it, only there’s an uncertainty. I met the professor: that is, I met him—or he came to me—but I don’t know if it was really him. Maybe it was someone else. I know I’m sounding confused and maybe I’m making a mistake here… Only it was the professor who came to me in the car, after a nasty experience I had. I felt sure he— she, it—was trying to help us.”

“What did he say?”

“Nothing we can use. Something about undoing what was done. He got very agitated.”

“But that’s all that was said?”

“‘Undo what was done.’”

“Not exactly a lifeline, is it?”

“Wherever it came from, I looked back and saw not Burns, but… Oh, why are we afraid to name it? I saw not the professor, but the Other.”

“But it still doesn’t help.”

“No.”

“We need a thread. Something to take into the labyrinth which will lead us out again. It’s got to be you, Ella. You’re the seer out of all of us, you’re the one. Can’t you weave us a golden thread?”

“Made out of what? You overestimate me Lee, you always did. Maybe Honora will be the one who finds the way. Come on, let’s go.”

At that moment Honora was in need of a golden thread of her own.

The moment that the door had closed after them, Honora regretted her decision to wait behind. The damp air inside the house chilled her, and she was terrified of what might be stalking them outside. Her nerves shivered.

The house felt strangely hollow, like a burial chamber. She got up and moved around the room, arms folded defensively, self-consciously avoiding the seductive powers of the fire and the candle flame. The wind got up again outside, moaning in the tall trees and swinging the gate back and forth.

From the open doorway she could see the gate swaying slowly in the shadows. Then it slapped hard against the gatepost, and swung open again. It was possible to make out the silhouette of a small figure crouched over the gate. It was no more than a shadow, bobbing backwards and out of view as the gate swayed open.

“Who’s there?” said Honora. She hesitated on the doorstep, and then tentatively touched her foot on the path. There was the figure again, like a small, cowled thing. The gate stopped moving and the silhouette ducked behind it. Honora moved slowly down the path, one hand outstretched towards the gate. It banged violently shut.

Honora recovered. It was only the wind, the figure just a waving rhododendron bush behind the gate. With relief she secured the stiff latch and slid home the rusting bolt.

But back indoors she heard a scratching at the window pane. Someone was at the window. She moved slowly towards it.

It was the wind, riffling the straggling ornamental bushes, pressing their branches against the glass. Then there was a sighing in the garden—the wind in the ragged strips of broken fencing. A scuffling behind the house—only the wind, chasing a scrap of torn newsprint. The sound of banging at the front of the house. The wind again, slapping the gate back and forth. The gate which, only a moment earlier, Honora herself had carefully secured.

She looked out of the window, through her own reflection. The gate had somehow freed itself. It swung gently back and forth. An arched silhouette rode it, like a child on a wooden horse—surely only the curved back of the rhododendron, a trick of the shadows. Honora let the curtain fall and sat down before the fire.

The sound of scratching on the window returned. It was a sound like fingernails drawn down the pane of glass. She ignored it. It persisted. It was followed by a tapping, a slow, regular beating. Then a sound like that of a child breathing hard, a child misting up the glass with her mouth. Small, scuffling feet darted from front to back of the house. Honora pressed her hands to her ears.

The scratching and tapping on the window moved to the back of the house. Honora looked up. Now she saw the sickly, whey-colored face, mouthing at the glass, darting from one window pane to the other and tapping, almost playfully.

“No,” moaned Honora covering her ears again, “no no no.”

Then it stopped, and the figure went away. All Honora could hear now was the throaty rasp of her own breathing. She looked around her. There was nothing. She busied herself, becoming frantically methodical. She put another log on the fire, reeled to the kitchen, watched a kettle boil, brewed coffee and tried to talk herself into a state of calm.

She returned to the fireside, hugging her coffee to her like a shield. She counted off the seconds, as if each one were a sword-blow parried with diminishing strength. Slowly she became aware of a flicker at the edge of her vision, a dull phosphorescence: something had come into the room.

It filled the room and infected it with cold. Its presence was strong. Like tart moonlight, like acid frost, like sour, congealed breath. It was the colour and taste and odour of neglect and decay masquerading as a human child. Honora’s coffee slipped to the floor, a dark stain expanding in four directions.

Sitting in the chair opposite, the girl didn’t speak. Her head was tilted to one side like a marionette. Her sheenless eyes were fixed on Honora. She was only too human, a waif in a sad cut-down dress. Her jaw was slack and her hair unkempt, not lovable, no, but infinitely pitiable. Her sand-coloured eyes were fixed on Honora but looking through and past her, as if waiting for the answer to some question posed long ago, patiently but insistently waiting for the answer which never comes.

Honora was paralysed, like the very first dreamside paralysis. Her words choked. “When will you be done with us?”

The fixed expression on the girl’s face slowly changed, twisting into a sneer. She stood up and moved towards the fire. Honora felt a wave of cold. There was the same phosphorescent halo about her, the glow of moon on water. It pulsed briefly before fading, and with the pulsing the girl diminished in size and substance, transforming at last into a small, hard lozenge of blue flame which arced like a tiny meteor, dropping into the fire.

Honora’s eyes followed it into the heart of the fire. She had no will to resist, to look away. Even knowing the danger, and remembering Ella’s warnings, that single conjured spark had been enough to draw her back. The fire held her, trancelike, and was drawing her in. She was a single thread; the fabric of her being was a many-textured, spectrum-colored tapestry, unravelling a fibre at a time, unwinding on to a vast spool held by hands within the fire, one fine strand carefully wound in after another. As if that is where it starts, at the eyes, where the threads of the soul hang in their slackest stitch; stitches which can be hooked free of weft and warp, and pulled through, drawn out, spooled in. She was lost to it. She was coming apart.

She knew the danger. The idea of resistance fashioned itself into a sword in her mind, a bright-edged sword, a way out. But the sword itself became smoke; and the thing she would slash free of became smoke. The effort to resist required too much, too mighty a cut, too great a mental stroke. Her mind was coming apart.

Honora belonged to the fire. She was enslaved by the ritual dance of the aromatic flame. Fire, first and most martial of all elements, the hierarchical prince. She saw in the fire the tapered banners of his glorious armies, the swallowtail pennants a-flutter, flags of crimson, ochre, sapphire, armies spilling into valleys and camped along the plains. They pinioned her and they held her. The flame engaged with her. She was fire. She was smoke. She was coming apart, like smoke.

“Burning! What’s burning?” Lee and Ella stood over her, shaking her.

“Honora!” They were calling her as if from a great distance.

Lee dragged her to her feet, shaking her violently, stripping off her outer clothes. Slowly she became aware of a thick, acrid smell, and realized that the room was fogged with dense, grey smoke.

“Are you burned? Honora, are you burned?” Lee was frantically stroking her arms.

“No.”

Miraculously she wasn’t. At her feet she saw, still smouldering but not even charred, the skirt and pullover which Lee had torn from her. Wisps of smoke writhed from the clothes. Ella was running around opening windows.

“What happened?” Honora was still dazed.

Lee and Ella just looked at each other. Ella folded Honora in her arms as the other woman wept.

“It has to be tonight,” said Ella. “It has to be tonight.”

THIRTEEN

Surely tonight sleep will come. But sleep is choosy these days about the company she keeps. And those who may have been caught in the past with a stolen fistful of her soft plumage can’t complain if now she makes them wait for favours. So the three lie on their mattresses in the dark, and wait.

Lee shifts in a half-sleep, perspiring heavily, unable to find the elusive groove. Honora doses herself with another of her pills, frets, hugs her knees, stifling her own whimpers. But long after sleep has finally taken them, Ella lies awake. She curls stiffly in the darkness, disturbed by a stroboscopic flickering behind her closed eyes. Responsibility weighs on her. She feels accountable for them all, a burden which comes from being the strongest of the four dreamers. She suspects that in the end they might stand or fall by her efforts alone.

“Make us a thread,” Lee had pleaded. “A golden thread. Something to take in with us that might lead us out.”

She dredges the limits of her memory. There had to be something from which she could create Lee’s golden thread. A special kind of thread. A thread which could span from outer world to inner mind like a glittering bridge, as light and fluid as dream itself.

She swoops back over her encounter on the motorway. There is only a vague conversation, leaving here with nothing more than instructions to undo what was done.

It’s hopeless. There’s nothing there. Nothing.

Night marches on, and sleep eludes her. Occasionally, one of the others stirs under their blankets. Ella looks up briefly and sinks back on to her own bed of nails.

She can see Burns with perfect clarity, offering her his unhelpful advice and wringing his hands in anguish. In her feverish vision he grows more and more impatient, more anguished, twisting his arthritic fingers together: Can’t you see, Ella, it’s you, it’s you, I can’t do it for you, can’t you see that it’s not in my—

HANDS.

Ella sits bolt upright.

There’s a moment of panic. She’s terrified that the idea which just came to her might slip away, snuff out like a candle flame. She’s trying to hold on to something. Hold the idea there, gently, carefully; she looks at the other two sleepers for help. They don’t stir. She leans back on the pillow.

Yes Ella, its in your hands.

That’s what Burns was trying to tell you all the time.

The dream exercise comes back to her. The hand manipulation game. It’s a fragment of childhood, something taken from the bottomless toy chest of the mind at play. The dream exercise. The one they had created between them. The one that had formed the original bridge, the bridge between early lucid dreaming and true dream-side control.

That’s how it was, how it always was. Dreaming from the head through the hands, miraculously working to transform the external world… Slow down! thinks Ella. Slow down! Her mind is struggling against something which wants her to deviate from the track, stray off course, lose her fix.

Undo what was done, Burns’s phantom had said to her. But what was done? And how was it done? Let’s take it slow. Very slow. And with all the power of childlike lucidity. For this is how it was.

Here is the church.

She sees two women talking in the ruins of a bombed-out cathedral. They are disputing, or perhaps testing out, the reality of a dreamside birth. A child, a thing—no, a child—was conceived and delivered on dreamside. The church, that’s the womb, the woman, thinks Ella, her eyes raking the darkened ceiling. And the tower, the steeple tall and erect, that’s the man. It’s so clear. Here is the church, here is the steeple. A woman and a man.

Open the door. Yes, that’s lovemaking all right. Open the door, call it by another name, sex, or here a violation where love is absent, but open the door. And here are the people. There it is, the birth, the propagation of the people, born to start the cycle of life all over again.

But where does all this lead? It’s just a child’s game, isn’t it? A shadow play, a sleight of hand. A little story with a twist and nothing else. Or is there more? Another strand to the thread? Like the words changing in the books on dreamside, can the thread change to give more?

Try again.

Here is the church. Why yes, that’s our belief, our faith in brave dreaming. Here is the steeple. There is our aspiration, the wish to dream, the soaring desire to make it happen. Open the door, the door of sleep, the door to the place of dreaming. And here are the people. Who are the people? We are the people. Born out of faith and desire, we are the dreamers, the dreamers of dreams.

It’s easy. The golden thread has as many strands as you care to make, as many as there are interpretations. Ella is feverish. She can see a golden thread spinning out to a point beyond her vision. Sparks of pure golden light shimmer and dart from it as it spins in rapid style from the turning of her mind. This is the thread they will transport to dreamside, as light and as fluid as dream itself. But there is one essential strand to the thread which must be strong enough to lead them out again afterwards.

She knows she’s on to something. If it can be found, it will be found here. Only now tiredness closes her in. It folds down on her. She feels the edges of consciousness retreat like the outposts of an empire. Now she has to fight sleep.

Perhaps it’s just a question of viewing the thread in reverse. Like examining the stitching on the reverse side of an embroidery. The question is, does the key fit the lock from both sides of the door? And can the thread pay out a third time?

Church. And if the church was our faith in dreaming, then mistrust must be its opposite. What if that mistrust itself has become the instrument of oppression? A church which has become a prison, wasn’t that the measure of their dreaming now?

Steeple. We made a Babel of vanity and an arrogance out of out desire to dream, to climb as high as God. Indifference is the opposite of desire, and the worst crime of all. And we fell asleep. We made a crisis of faith out of mistrust and indifference. Will we ever find our way back?

Door. How do we open the doorway back? How do we recover our faith and our desire?

But Ella can go no further. She is too drained to think it through; too tired to spin the thread any longer; too exhausted to finish weaving the strand. The last flickering candle has burned down to a gob of wax. Her mind closes down like a square of paper neatly folded in on itself, and then once again, and then again.

FOURTEEN

Ella only knew that sleep had finally taken her when she became aware she was on dreamside. Lee was standing close by. He was looking at her strangely.—I’ve been waiting—he thoughtspoke.—You’re here. It feels cold—

He touched her, and brought her to him. In the embrace they rediscovered that shivering intensity, the tremulousness beneath the surface of things, but with something else, something extra.

A colourless, tasteless, odourless sense, oppressive and insistent. It grabbed like a hand inside the stomach, itching at the very membrane of dreamside. It was the claw of a dread anxiety. Something predatory hung watchful on the air.

—Is anyone else here?—Before Ella had even completed the thought, she saw Honora standing under the oak, looking out over the frozen snow-covered lake. She seemed carved from ivory. The scene was encompassed in still mists.

Everywhere was ice; mist-bound and ice-locked. Dreamside was precisely as Honora knew it, and exactly as Ella and Lee had glimpsed it on their single fleeting return visit. It was a mockery of the place it had once been, and a snowbound shadow of the polluted lake as it was now.

They waited, scraping their boots on the frozen grass at their feet. Even those small movements seemed ready to burst the dream as they waited for the one who was missing.

—Must we have him here Ella?—

—We all have to be present—Ella was firm, authoritative. Perhaps she knew more than she was saying. She seemed certain in the knowledge that the fourth member of the group would appear. They waited; and they waited.

Brad came from nowhere. He came wide-eyed, and in a dangerously befuddled state. He stopped short of them, like a nervous animal, staring at the ground. They all watched him, but were afraid of him. They didn’t dare to speak to him, and even sought to disguise their thoughts. They stood rigidly, like figurines carved from a single piece of horn.

Brad seemed confused, lost. He looked from one to the other as if he was about to speak. Then he looked wildly over his shoulder. He moved closer to Ella, mouthing words that failed to come. Then:—Help me—

—What is it Brad?—

—Can’t awaken. Can’t wake up. Help me Ella!—

Brad was stricken with panic. His eyes were all black pupil and they leaked frosty tears. He stood close enough for Ella to feel his cold breath on her face. She put out a hand to touch him and was shocked to find him stiff with frost. He snatched at her hand and gripped it fiercely. The cold from his fingers burned, and her skin seemed to sear and stick fast to his. Their eyes locked as he dared her to snatch her hand away.

At last he relaxed his hold. Ella felt a blistering pain as she withdrew her hand: she felt a fine layer of skin ripping from the back of her wrist where he had gripped her.

—The dream won’t break Ella, the dream won’t break—

—We’re all here Brad. We’re not going to desert you—

—You can’t do anything. The dream won’t break. I’m tired from staying awake. So tired. And we have to stay awake. Awake. They’re waiting for me to sleep. The ice. The frost. The cold. They wait for you to sleep. And then they take you—

Ella saw it clearly. She didn’t need to be reminded of the predatory nature of the elementals. She could recall their attacks with vivid horror. How they waited for the moment before sleep within the wheel of the dream. How they silently infiltrated invisible tendrils into the blood and fibre and flesh of your dreaming body. Transforming you, until you were lost to earth or water or fire or ice. But now she saw for the first time that the elementals were not a group of entities at all, not a colony of predatory beings. They were all a single expression of the same force, the life-creating and life-devouring, birth-giving and soul-sucking power of dreamside.

And now the toughened membrane of the dream wouldn’t break. Brad had been trapped, to walk in terror of the sleep within sleep, of being imprisoned for ever in the ice-sleep. No one could stay awake indefinitely, here as within the waking world. Brad was merely postponing the inevitable. Even now the frost was squeezing him, congealing his blood. This was the fate of those who stayed too long on dreamside.

—This is how it will be for all of us—It was Honora. She seemed strangely resigned.—This is how it will be—

—None of us will wake! There is no waking!—A tear welled at the corner of Brad’s eye. In a moment his anguish gave way to laughter echoing eerily across the mist-shrouded lake, jagged laughter which ricocheted back at them, and sliced through the air. Ella shot a panicked look at Lee.

But Lee was pointing at something on the edge of the lake. The other three turned, their eyes following the direction of his finger. Brad’s laughter stopped.

—It’s her—He swayed unsteadily.

—I knew it—Ella breathed.

—She’s the one!—Brad shouted.—She’s the one who is keeping me here. She’s the one who will keep us all here!—

But they already knew. She stood twenty feet away from them, in her ill-cut dress, her skin the colour of milk and her eyes like black holes. Only here she looked stronger, stronger than them. They all knew her, and they were all afraid of her. They gazed at her stupidly. Her eyes blazed back at them. An aching loneliness blew from her like an icy wind.

—Speak to us—Honora approached timidly.—Please speak to us—

But the girl tossed her hair and set foot on the frozen lake, glancing over her shoulder as if daring them to follow. Honora took a few steps towards her.

—Honora, don’t!—It was Lee calling her back.

—Wait! Wait and watch!—This time it was Ella, unsure whether to trust the girl; unsure whether their roadside encounter had been a snare set with treacherous clues.

The girl paced farther out on to the ice. Honora hesitated at the edge of the frozen water.

—Don’t go!—Lee commanded.

—It’s a trap! She wants you to go out on the ice!—Brad was hysterical.—It’s a trick! You mustn’t trust her! Don’t trust her! I know who she is!—

The girl stopped and turned to them, as if she was waiting. She mouthed something incomprehensible. As she saw Honora set a tentative foot on to the ice, she turned and proceeded out into the middle of the lake. Honora looked back at Ella, who nodded almost imperceptibly. She began to walk across the ice. Ella left the others and followed her.

Lee’s protests strangled in his throat. He found himself following the two women out on to the lake, with Brad staying close behind him. It was if the four of them were roped together. When the girl came to a halt, they all stopped short.

She looked back at them again. Then she scuffed at the ice with the edge of her shoe. She scraped away a layer of snow and scratched at the ice, never averting her gaze from them. She looked away only to stoop and to rub at the tiny clearing she had scratched in the snow. Then she moved away from the clearing she had made and stood at a distance.

Honora was the first to approach. She looked through the cleared patch to the gluey grey formations of ice beneath. What did it mean? Honora and Ella looked to the girl for an answer, but she had turned defiantly towards the shore.

Brad had reached the cleared space and was on his knees, rubbing at the surface of the ice with an outstretched hand and peering at the geometric shapes below.

—There’s something there—he said.

The others turned slowly.

—There’s something there. I can see it. Under the ice—

—What? What is it?—Lee kneeled beside him.

—It’s under the ice. It’s trying to get out—

—What can you see there?—

—It’s trying to get out! IT WANTS TO GET OUT FROM UNDER THE ICE!—

—Tell us what you see!—Ella commanded.

But Brad was half-crazed. He seemed to detect a new movement.—It’s moving! It’s trapped. Look! It’s trying to get out of there! It wants to get out!—

Suddenly his body went rigid, his breath coming in short gulps.

Lee bundled him aside and began pawing at the ice himself, clearing away the snow on the surface. In mounting horror he saw what Brad had seen. It was an image of Brad beneath the ice, hoary and encrusted, bruised and blackened and floating like a corpse— but it wasn’t dead. It was waving rigidly, pressing against the under surface, mouthing silent words that distorted the face, trying to find a way out.

The image of Brad was not alone. Three other figures floated there. Images of Lee, Ella and Honora, all pressing against the ice and mouthing unheard cries. They were all prisoners.

Now they all saw it. They were hypnotized by the revelation. They were fixed, locked into the images of themselves, gazing down in horror at this shivering incarnation of their enjoined destinies. They felt the elemental cold slowly beginning to transfer itself to them, to still the flow of their blood.

—We’re trapped—whispered Honora.—It’s the dream within the dream—

Lee looked to Ella, but her eyes were on the little girl. The girl was kneeling on the frozen lake, hands clasped in anguish beneath her chin like someone at prayer, eyes streaming with tears as she sobbed uncontrollably. Ella was mesmerized. Lee saw in Ella’s eyes a glitter, like sunlight on frost, of the mad priestess. He realized with shock and admiration that she was about to take charge. Her confidence fluttered around her like a protective cloak.

—Keep moving! Don’t stand still! We have to undo what was done!—Ella’s words eclipsed everything. She had remembered the golden thread she had been spinning before falling asleep. It came out like a formula, like a spell.

—Church and steeple! Door and people!—She was yelling at them, without shifting her eyes from the kneeling, weeping girl.— Faith and desire! We have to end our mistrust! No more indifference! Honora, take your curse from Brad’s head! Do it now!—

—How can I?—

—Just lift it! Lift the curse!—

—But it’s only words! Words are not real things!—

—Just! Lift! It!—

—I unmake it I unmake it I unmake it!—Honora was screaming. She was hysterical. She wanted to run to the girl but Ella held her back.

—Open the door! We must open the door! Can’t you see it! Open the door and the people will escape! Here are the people! We are the people! Dream a hole in the ice!—

But Ella didn’t wait for the others. She turned her gaze on the clearing of snow, at the figures floating beneath the ice. Remaining perfectly still she recalled all the forgotten powers of dreaming and focused them on the submerged figures. She was willing the ice to melt. Lee and Brad were activated by her raw energy. They followed her lead blindly, standing perfectly still, concentrating their minds, dreaming a hole in the frozen water. And slowly the ice began to melt.

None of them heard Honora moaning softly.—I’ve been in this dream before! You must stop! I’ve seen this!—

It was too late. Tiny hairline cracks suddenly began to appear in the ice, multiplying and discharging in all directions. There was a thudding sound from somewhere beneath them, like the banging together of great ice floes or the grinding of huge rocks.

—No! No!—

Now Lee saw what Honora was most afraid of. It was his turn to panic.—We have to get off the ice!—

—Not yet! Break open the ice! Dream open the door! Release the people! Here is your golden thread, Lee!—Ella still commanded the situation.

The lake answered. From deep, deep under the ice came a low, blasphemous groan. There was a series of dull, sonorous thuds like distant detonations, followed by a terrible tearing sound. The ice began to tremble.

—Wait! Wait!—

This time the sound of groaning and splitting sounded loudly in their ears and a violent tremor in the ice sent them rocking. Ella staggered backwards. The cracks in the ice expanded into jagged black forks, splitting off in all directions. Lee saw that Honora and Brad were paralyzed. They wanted to escape from the lake but were unable to tear themselves away. Ella was still locked into the consummation of the ritual she had initiated. He couldn’t seem to make her hear him. She was entranced by the ugly, multiplying fractures in the ice. Lee shook her violently. She looked back at him as though he were someone from another world. It was like looking across time.

The ice was splitting everywhere. Ella came to her senses. She took hold of Honora. Lee propelled both of them towards the bank. They clung to each other, slipping and skidding as they tried to scramble off the ice. With the sound of ice splitting and splintering around them, Lee hoisted Brad off his knees; but in flailing and staggering wildly Brad brought them both down. Lee tried to struggle to his feet but Brad clung desperately to his legs. The two men slithered hopelessly.

Ella and Honora stood on the edge of the bank screaming at them. Brad groped blindly at Lee, dragging him back. At last they scrambled to the edge, where the two women pulled them to safety.

—The girl!—said Honora.—Where is the girl?

No one answered. Behind them was a mass of deep interlacing cracks, darting across the lake like snakes’ tongues and splitting still farther as they watched. Then the ice began to groan like a wounded primeval beast, folding against itself and crushing upwards, breaking up in huge slabs which collapsed in clouds of steam. Churning grey waters tossed in the air, waters that broiled and bubbled and released billowing jets of cloud.

A wind of hurricane strength blew up from nowhere, or from within the depths of the lake itself. It threatened to pick them up like straws. The willows screamed as the wind tore through their dead branches, and the old charred oak creaked and leaned with the wind. Ella stood behind its huge trunk, her hair whipping in her eyes as she called to the others, urging them to make a chain around the tree. But the wind stole the words off her mouth as she reached out for Lee and pulled him to her. Honora saw them, and with the hurricane shrieking and raging around her and the water boiling behind her, she took hold of Brad’s outstretched arm and battled to reach Lee and Ella.

—Circle the tree! Circle the tree!—Ella was mouthing orders that none of the others could hear. The lake was now a boiling cauldron, releasing great geysers of water and steam thirty feet into the air. Huge waves radiated from the centre, buffeted by the wind and crashing on the banks of the lake, hissing and sizzling as they fell on frozen earth. Lee guessed what Ella was trying to do. He threaded his way around the tree trunk, inching into the full force of the hurricane, pulling the chain of the others after him. Circling the tree, he was able to link arms with Honora, but the force of the wind pressed him flat against the blackened trunk like a pin on a magnet. On the other side, Ella linked arms with Brad.

The earth at their feet was scooped up in giant handfuls and flung around their heads and into the lake. The wind was digging them out. The ruined oak creaked and groaned and leaned. The angry wind clawed like a live thing at the ground, throwing up earth and exposing its roots. It seemed that even the tree might be dug out and dragged into the lake. The four clung grimly to each other’s arms, faces pressed against the charred trunk. Ella thought that if only they were able to hold on they might have a chance.

But the hurricane shrieked and howled like a thing enraged, and Ella slipped and fell as the earth was dug out from under her feet. The wind ripped up clods of earth and loose soil, tossing it in the air and lashing it at their faces. The others held her up as she found new footing on the exposed roots. Then the roots themselves curled and bent in the wind as if twisted by a giant fist. They began to snap, were torn off and bulleted into the lake. The tree groaned and leaned with the wind. It was being dug out of the earth.

Then Lee felt Honora stiffen, and saw her mechanically turn her head towards the boiling lake. Her features reset themselves in that familiar gaze. Her face was ivory. He felt her loosen her grip, as if she wanted to be taken by the wind, as if her resistance was exhausted. He knew that she was going into the lake.

—No Honora! No!—The wind lifted the words from his lips.

Ella saw what was happening.—Stop her!—

—I can see her in the water! She wants me! I’m going to her!— Honora slipped Lee’s arm. He lunged to pull her back, but she fell away easily.

—Hold her! Keep her there!—Ella called out to Brad, knowing that somewhere in the storm he too was holding Honora. Then she felt Lee stumble towards her and a sudden absence of pressure at her other hand.

Brad had slipped Ella’s hold and had gone with Honora. Ella and Lee slithered to the base of the tree, clinging to its exposed roots. They saw Honora plunge into the raging water, crying out unintelligibly into the heart of the storm. It was Brad who plunged in after her and dragged her, kicking and thrashing and screaming, out onto the bank. Then he fell or dived back into the water. Fell or dived they would never know, but they saw him look back at them as he was dragged under. Lee grabbed Honora and brought her weeping to the tree, where the three of them clung like survivors of a shipwreck groping for a plank of driftwood.

As quickly as it had appeared, the wind dropped, and the waters on the lake calmed. Brad did not come up again. The three lay panting, exhausted on the bank of the lake. Already it was beginning to ice over. Then the dream broke.