Dreamside

Dreamside is a work of fiction.
 
All characters and events portrayed in this novel are fictitious or used
fictitiously.

Copyright © Graham Joyce 1991.  All rights reserved.

This E-book edition first published 2012 by G&S Books.

Graham Joyce is a multiple award winning author.  He grew up in
the mining village of Keresley near Coventry.  In 1988 he quit his job as
a youth officer and decamped to the Greek island of
Lesbos
,
there to live in a beach shack with a colony of scorpions and to concentrate on
writing. He sold his first novel while still in Greece and travelled in the
Middle East on the proceeds.  He is a winner of The World Fantasy Award;
is
five-times
winner of the British Fantasy Award for
Best Novel; is twice winner of the French Grand Prix De
L'Imaginaire
;
and was the winner of the American O Henry short story award in 2009.

His website is:
www.grahamjoyce.co.uk
.
 
He tweets as
Grahamjoycebook

Other novels by Graham Joyce:

Dark Sister

House
Of
Lost Dreams

Requiem

The Tooth Fairy

The
Stormwatcher

Leningrad Nights

Indigo

Smoking Poppy

The Facts Of Life

The Limits
Of
Enchantment

Memoirs
Of
A Master Forger by William
Heaney/ How To Make Friends With Demons

The Silent Land

Some Kind
Of
Fairy Tale

Short stories:

Partial Eclipse & Other Short Stories

Tales
For
A Dark Evening

(
Children & Young Adult novels
):

Spiderbite

TWOC

Do
The
Creepy Thing

Three ways To
Snog
An
Alien

The Devil’s Ladder

(
Non-fiction
):

Simple Goalkeeping Made Spectacular

TO SUZANNE:
THERE WHEN THE DREAMING STARTED

                        
_Dreamside

P R O L O G U E

Behold, this dreamer cometh
—Genesis

Lee
was having trouble sleeping.
It was already near dawn, and
blades of light were slipping between the ribs of the
blind. He'd spent the night on the edge of sleep, but every time he let go,
something stirred in the dark and shook him awake. Not scary exactly, but
enough of a jolt to flip him out of sleep. He opened his eyes. It was easier to
give up.

The
luminous dial on his clock blinked: outside a horn blared. He felt sticky and
sweaty. His bed was a knot of sheets, his eyes were pasted half shut, and his
hair stood up in a quiff. Fumbling to the bathroom, he turned on the shower and
scalded himself.

It had been
a strange night. A dervish of unfathomable, fevered images had crowded his
dreams. Now they were sluicing away, as though painted on his skin. He threw on
his once white towelling robe and went into his kitchen. Somewhere a time-set
radio switched itself on and a breakfast voice piped feebly. He took an egg and
cracked it on a pan but it didn't break. He tried a second time. Again it didn't
break. "Oh, no," he said, "oh, no ..." Raising the egg
close to his face, he blew on it sharply.

Then he woke up
.

Daylight
streaming in through the blinds picked out needles of perspiration on his face.
The luminous clock dial winked at him. A horn blared outside, someone with
their hand pressed down hard. He sat up, bedclothes slithering to a heap on the
floor, and staggered to the bathroom. The shower made him catch his breath,
gooseflesh popping as he walked into the icy pyramid of rushing water. This
time he had a clear impression of what he had been dreaming the moment before
he woke up.

In
his kitchen, the time-set radio switched itself on. His eggs frying in the pan
looked back at him with cartoon eyes, and he lost his appetite. He got dressed
for work and pulled on his overcoat.

Outside,
the earth was in the grip of its own dream, February frost that sucked the
sound out of everything. He broke its spell with billows of exhaust that had
the frost imps hacking and coughing and running for cover.
Awake awake
awake;
that was what his wipers said.
Awake awake awake.
Slipping
the clutch he put the car into gear.

And woke up.

The clock
blinked. A horn blared. He was afraid to turn on the shower in case he should
wake up back in bed. He looked in the mirror. A frightened face looked back at
him.

His nerves
were torn and he had a bad taste in his mouth. In the kitchen a radio switched
itself on, and something fell away inside him. He turned, looked at the radio,
then at the plug. He disconnected the plug from the socket and the radio died.
He reconnected the plug and the voice picked up where it had left off.

He
got into his car and sat behind the wheel in silence for a moment. Lee was the
habitual early bird, always driving to work with his radio turned up loud,
always first there. He turned into the empty car park behind the advertising
agency and parked.

And woke up.

He
lay in the dark of his room, panting, pressing himself into his mattress. The
clock dial winked mutinously. The horn of a car sounded outside, falling away
into the distance. This could go on for ever, he told himself. He wished he
could tunnel out of it by going back to sleep, but he knew it was futile to
try. There was no choice.

So
he did it all again.
Shower; oh no.
Radio;
not that.
Breakfast; please God- Knowing all of the time that this
could, and maybe would, go on for ever.

Dreaming.
Would he ever wake up?

He
needed something to convince him that he was awake, really awake. He brushed
the back of his hand across the flame. He felt the hairs on his wrist begin to
singe and got an unmistakable whiff of burned hair. It was a wide-awake smell.

Outside
was the same frost-crisp morning. The car coughed into life. He drove to his
office with excessive caution, and parked in a different place. The three
flights of stairs left him short-winded, and he was breathing hard when he
heard his phone ringing. Hurrying down the corridor, he pushed open the office
door and reached across his desk to take the call. As he stretched, the expanse
of desk seemed to grow and the telephone retreated from his fingers. He was
unable to reach it, and, with each ring, the signal prickled with renewed
urgency.

He
woke up with his bedside phone ringing. It had the clarity of sound of a razor
sawing on bone. He jack-knifed awake and reflex-caught the receiver.

"Lee?"
A woman's voice.
"Lee Peterson? Is that
you?"

PART
  O
N E

February
1986

ONE

I had
a dream, which was not all a dream
— Lord Byron

There
was no forgetting her voice
. After more than twelve years,
it
was Ella Innes.

"Ella!
Oh, Ella! I know why you've called me. It's happening isn't it, it's all
happening again!"

"Hold on Lee; it'll be OK. Listen, we've really
got to talk."

"Yes.
Only it's not OK Ella. I don't know if I'm awake or if I'm dreaming; or if
we're even having this conversation."

"You're
awake now. This is real. Remember how I used to wake you? This is just the
same, remember."

Remember.
It was a kind of code word. Remember.
I remember it all.
Your voice.
Your
scent.
How I felt every time you came near me.

"Sure."
But he sounded more than doubtful. "Let me just get my thoughts together
will you? It's been a wicked night."

"I had
to get in touch with you. I couldn't think of anything else." He heard her
take a deep breath. "I want to come and see you.
Today."

"Today?
Where the
hell are you anyway?" (Who the hell are you after all this time?)

"I'm
living in Cumbria, by the sea. Nice scenery and nuclear seepage. What else do
you want to know?"

"But
that's over two hundred and fifty miles away, Ella."

"We
live in a world of cars and motorways, Lee. It's incredible how easy it is to
travel around."

"OK,
no need to be funny with me." But that was Ella. He thought for a moment
before giving her some muddled directions.
"All right.
I'll be waiting for you."

"Do it." That's how she always used to talk.
Just do it.

"One
thing before you go, Ella. How did you track me down? I mean it's been a long
time."

"Not
so difficult. I started at the university and followed a very orthodox career
trail." Old note of criticism, not fair. "Lee? Are you afraid?"

"I had a terrible night, Ella. Yes,
I am afraid."

He put down
the phone. It had been twelve going on thirteen years since they had seen or
spoken to each other. He stared at the wall, dumbly. His astonishment and
dismay conflicted with the acute fear of waking up and finding
himself
back in bed, which he knew would stay with him all
day.

Then he
remembered the trick with the book.  He took, at random, a paperback
volume from the bookshelf. Letting it fall open naturally, he read the first
few lines to present themselves:

But his dominion that exceeds in this
Stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man:
A sound magician is a demi-god.

Glancing
away, he squeezed his eyes shut, then looked back at the open page. He was
relieved to see that the lines were unchanged. He repeated the exercise. Hoping
that it counted for something, he returned the book to the shelf.

When
he checked back down the sequence of false awakenings, the most bizarre thing
had been Ella's voice striking out of the past and talking to him as if they
had spoken only yesterday. When they had parted in their youth it had not been
on bad terms, or at least where there had been pain there had been no anger.
Parting had happened by inevitable unspoken contract, for the simple reason
that they had come to hold each other's company in a mutual despair which
outweighed even their terror.

Lee
inspected his face in the mirror and awarded himself a high slob rating. That
man in the mirror, with the lantern jaw and the pouting bottom lip which girls
had once found endearing, was now getting jowls. He could do with losing a few
pounds. Would Ella be able to see the winsome, athletic, wise-alec
twenty-year-old that he had once been?

It
didn't occur to him that Ella herself would have aged. It wasn't as though he
hadn't thought of her in the decade since she had fled the university, putting
two thousand miles and an even greater psychic geography between them; but in
his mind she had remained always the same. Unforgettable Ella; delicious, hypnotic,
superior, erotic Ella; Ella undressed, Ella with her clothes on. There came, in
equal measure, deep tormenting sentimental memories and sharp sexual
reminiscences.
Ella vibrant with arch cleverness and
smouldering undergraduate sexuality.