Dreamside (17 page)

—You've become sloppy!
Forgotten the art of lucid dreaming!—said Brad with contempt.—There's no time
here, you just have to think it back, reverse the process, think it back, just
like rewinding a film. Watch—

The growth which had
taken possession of Brad's limb retreated exactly as it had advanced, moving
back down the arm and across the hand like a long glove being peeled off, the
rough texture dissolving, the moss-green tincture vanishing until his hand
reformed itself entirely.

Brad held up his
unscathed hand for all of them to see.—
Learn
it—he
said.

F
I F T E
E
N

There is no law to judge of the lawless,

or
canon by which a dream may be
criticized

—Charles
Lamb

Harmony and security were
restored to dreamside, at least
for a
while. Brad
had demonstrated, and the others were able to reproduce, the powers that would
keep the frightening encroachment of those elemental forces at bay. Lee and
Ella were free to persist with their "orgasm project": the sexual
adventure of making it happen
on dreamside. But they had
difficulty with sustaining the dream long enough to contain such a high pitch
of excitement. The dream always seemed to crack at a crucial moment.

This
left Brad to look on, and Honora to resist. It wasn't long before Brad decided
that just
being
on dreamside wasn't enough.

—Know what they're doing, Honora?—

—Of course. Enjoying it, I hope—

—Doesn't it make you curious?—

—About them? No—

—No,
not about them. I mean about it.
It.
It must be
different here.
Incredible.
Different.
The end of the world—

—I wouldn't know—

—No, you
wouldn't would you? Maybe you should watch them, find out how it's done—

—I don't
think they'd like to be watched; any more than I would—

—C'mon. There's just you and me here—

—Perceptive—

—Know what? I want you badly—

—Don't start—

—Don't
start? It never stops! What am I supposed to do? What about me?—

—Poor Brad; he isn't getting any—

They had
rehearsed this discussion before, both on dreamside and in waking time.

—Am I so obnoxious?—

—I prefer you as a friend—

—I hate people who say that—

—So if you hate me you can't want me—

Uninterested
as she was, Honora knew anyway that Brad's real feelings were for Ella. She
could see what Ella would have dismissed out of hand; what Lee preferred not
to see; and what Brad could never admit. Yet there was no question. Brad was
secretly in love with Ella, and because he had no chance of getting close he
made a mask of perpetual antagonism towards her. He was the only one suffering
from this conspiracy to deny the obvious.

Honora felt
some sympathy for him, if only because she alone could see what was burning him
up. Brad could only vent his feelings destructively. When Ella was around, he
would mock or goad or challenge her in ways which at least won some form of
contact, even if it was negative. He drew strength from the friction. And when
Ella disappeared with Lee, he paced around Honora in a froth of agitation. He
was a danger to himself.

—Honora, think of what you could be
missing!—

—I thought of it—

—And?—

—I'll pass—

—It's an experience denied to other
people! It's like being specially chosen for something! It's one of life's
great miracles and it's only available to us! Don't throw it away!—

—Still, I'll pass—

—You're a stupid naive silly little
country virgin who doesn't know anything—

—Oh I'm not so naive; all the other
things maybe—

She got up and moved away from Brad's hot
attention, leaning her back against the oak tree. She thought of Lee and Ella,
briefly, naked in the long grass.

—I'm not that naive—she said again.

For Lee and Ella were
only a thought away, stretched amid the daisies and the long grass, shivering
at each other's hot breath and warm touch. It was as if they had cast off not
just their clothes but also their living skin, leaving them a bundle of exposed
nerve endings, detonating at every breath of air, kiss, or light caress.
Achingly sensitive to subtle changes in the air currents around them, Ella
leaned across Lee and pressed her tongue on his stiffened penis, flicking at
the dome with her tongue,
here is the church,
her lips settling and
lifting and resettling on him like a butterfly's beating wings,
here is the
steeple,
Lee in an agony of tumescence, the unstoppable swelling, the
ecstatic unknowable voice in his ears until he thought the whole thing would
explode, not just his cock but his brain, his head, his body, the dream, life
outside the dream, life beyond that, until Ella brought him sharply back under
control, coaxing and reminding him to hold it together.

—Slow it—she said.—Slow.
Breathe deep. Imagine I've got a knife at your throat and I'm making you do
this, now do it, put it inside me—

—Prove
it—said Brad.

—What?—said Honora.

—Prove that you're not. Not naive—

Brad stood
up. His gaze locked on her and she felt unable to look away, mesmerized, as if
he were holding her head so that she couldn't turn away. The air around was
absolutely still, not a whisper of wind in the air, but she felt a strange
shift in the currents, something akin to a breeze lift gently at the nut-brown
curls nestling on her neck. Although he stood fully ten feet away, she knew it
was some force that Brad was exerting.

—What are you doing?—

—Prove it to me—Brad said again.

—Don't—said Honora, unable to take her
eyes from his.

Brad
didn't take a single step closer, but he continued to fix her with his gaze.
She was unable to move. She felt the silver buckle of the patent leather belt
around her skirt open, the belt passing itself through the loops of her skirt,
moving off her like a live thing, like a snake which dropped at her feet. Then
she felt a button of her blouse gently popping open above her breasts, followed
by the next, and the next down to her waist, and the blouse being lifted back
from her shoulders exposing her breasts to him.

—Don't—Honora
said again, her arms fallen at her side, held down by a strange paralysis, not
knowing how to resist, wanting to fight back and reverse what was happening,
think it back as with the elementals, but not finding the strength.

—You can stop it any time you want—he
said.

—God, I just can't move! Don't you see I
don't want this?—

—Any time you want—

Was he right? Could she
stop
it?
She tried, but couldn't.
There was nothing she could do. Then she felt the button go at the side of her
skirt and heard the tooth rasp of the zip opening, and the skirt fell around
her legs, lying in a hoop at her feet. At last she felt the elastic of her
panties being rolled down her thighs and falling to her feet.

Brad stepped forward.

Control.
Lee fought for control, imagining that Ella's sharp
fingernails on his throat were indeed a knife, until in the dream it was the
gleaming blade she would plunge into his neck if he failed to please her;
open
the door,
I love you for ever, he pushed inside her and she squeezed him to
her, laying her head back on the grass. It was unbearable this dreamside sex,
like making love on a live cable of electric wire. Stay with it, she was
whispering, stay with it, but he knew it would have to finish or stop or the
dream must break. He was clenching handfuls of her hair in his fists and the
grass and daisies growing at the side of her head were mixed up in her hair,
and she became a human shape of glittering white-hot energy, pulsating and
glittering and burning. He felt they were making love astride a howling wind
and over a rushing current and then when he felt her coming he gave in to the
current and the wind and felt his body spurting light from every pore of his
body as the dream imploded and was over.

The next morning Lee woke up
next to Ella, feeling strange, dislocated and energized. She was still
sleeping. He kissed her, and in her hair he found a daisy head, two daisy
heads, and torn blades of grass. He woke Ella to show them to her.

Grass and
daisy heads on the pillow: evidence in the day's eye of what had been
transported from dreamside.

Honora
Brennan woke up alone in her bed and pushed back the bedcovers to inspect the
speckled crimson stains on the sheets, as if a pressed flower had been squeezed
into the linen.

Honora felt inside herself for
the blood of the broken hymen.

S
I XT E
E
N

Thus have I had thee, as a dream doth
flatter,

In sleep a king, but, waking, no such matter

—Shakespeare

Honora was not seen on dreamside
again. It was obvious to the
other three that
she had made a conscious decision not to return there. It must have taken some
struggle. Entry into dreamside had once required considerable discipline and
effort; now they were caught in an undertow which delivered them there unasked,
and not to be drawn there whenever they slept required serious resistance.

Ella
had her suspicions about what was happening. She sensed that Brad Cousins was
in some malevolent way responsible, though she was unable to guess why. And he
wouldn't be drawn.

"What
happened between you two?" she asked for the fifth time. They sat in a pub
with ultraviolet strip lighting and a jukebox belting out Motown classics. Brad
offered a shrug.

"Don't try to dismiss the question,
Brad."

"I'm
not
trying
to dismiss the question, I
am
dismissing the
question."

"Something
happened on dreamside that's made her cut herself off from us, and I know it's
something you did."

"How do you know
that?"

"Because
you've the guts of a sewer rat."

"Ease up
Ella," said Lee, bringing in the beer. "Tell us what happened when
you went to her room."

"She was in there.
I know it. She pretended she wasn't. I even shouted that I knew she was there,
but she wouldn't open the door and she wouldn't speak to me." She jabbed a
finger dangerously close to Brad's face. "He's responsible."

"It's been nearly
five weeks," said Lee.

"You know what
it's about, don't you Brad?"

"Get off my back.
Go and ask her for Christ's sake."

"No, I'm asking
you." Ella turned to Lee. "Honora won't speak to us, so we've only
got this reptile to tell us."

Brad suddenly slammed
down his pint glass sending a tide of beer cascading across the table. Lee and
Ella jumped back. "Why don't you get a muzzle on that rabid mouth of
yours, jealous
bitch.
" He stormed out of the bar,
slamming a foot into the jukebox and bouncing the stylus into silence.

"You asked for
that," said Lee.

Ella had actually paid
three unanswered visits to Honora's room. Each time there had been a light on
and a radio playing, but Honora had consistently refused to respond. They never
saw her around the university campus and she didn't attend lectures.

Visits to dreamside
were never quite the same again. There was a marked down-turn in the excitement
of just being there. The sense of expectation had died. Before, the place had
always been seeded with the scent of honeysuckle. Now it was flat and
perfumeless, and troubled by underlying anxieties more felt than understood.
They never referred to this anxiety, and the more it went unspoken, the more it
grew. Without saying anything, they found themselves resisting the powerful
undertow that had been taking them unasked for so long. They were shocked at
the effort required to stay away, but eventually their visits thinned out,
then
dried up completely.

In waking time, things
started to go badly for Ella and Lee too. Perhaps this deterioration in their
relationship caused the dreamside sag. When it came down to it, the best part
of their romance had been conducted on dreamside, and sometimes, now, they were
at a loss with each other's ordinariness.

One afternoon Lee
looked at Ella, and where he had formerly seen an exotic priestess, there was
now a girl with scuffed shoes and hastily applied lipstick.

Ella woke
up one morning, and where she had once lain with a young warrior bearing a
flaming torch into the dark labyrinths of the psyche, she now found herself in
bed alongside a boy with a fluffy beard, who hadn't much to say for himself.