Dreamside (24 page)

"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.

S E V E N

I
have
observed that in some individuals, the high-

est
aspirations are for no more than
the sovereignty

of
dreams above fantasies. In
seeding to define this

condition
we might also ask whether there might

return
some form of psychological
retribution for

the
crime of living so vaguely.

—L. P.
Burns

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.