Dreamside (21 page)

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.