Dreamside (22 page)

"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:

And your dreams are like dollar bills

in
the pocket of a gambler

and
they whisper in your ear

like
those good-time girls

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.

F I V E

"I'm afraid you are rather a careless dreamer,"

said
Bertie resentfully

—Saki

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: