Dreamside (26 page)

"I
mean about that one time.
Us.
On
dreamside."

"
It
 
never
happened,
Brad. Not between you and me."

"I
know different. We discussed it years ago; you denied it then."

"And I
deny it now. Whatever dream you had that time, even if I was in it, I wasn't
there."

"You
can say that now." He flicked water from his eye.

"You're
wrong."

"No,
I'm not."

"Careful
while I'm holding this razor. I'll say it again: I wasn't there."

Brad went
to contradict her; but he saw a cold gleam in her eyes like a reflection of the
razor she was wielding. It made him stop. It was so long ago even he couldn't
pretend that the contours of truth hadn't folded a little. Lucid or otherwise,
it was all dreaming. "I'm getting cold," he said.

Ella stood
him up, poured another pan of cold water over his head and wrapped him in a
towel. She gave him sweet-smelling lotions together with instructions for
liberal use; and a complete set of clothes belonging to Lee. He disappeared
from the kitchen to try them on.

When he
returned, with his cropped hair combed back and wearing the oversized clothes,
Ella started giggling. Brad retreated angrily, slamming the door, refusing to
come out again and threatening not to make the return journey to rejoin the
others. But finally she got him into the car. He climbed into the passenger
seat and sat with arms crossed and with head bowed.

"I
need to tell the others we're on our way," said Ella.

She stopped
the car at a telephone kiosk to make a progress report to Lee. Stepping out of
the car, she had a second thought, and reached for the keys.

"What's
that for?" Brad demanded. It was the first time he had spoken since
leaving the cottage.

"Reflex."

"What's
the matter with you? Do you think I'd drive off in the car or something?"
He was angry.

"Relax.
I'm just going to make one phone call."

"You're
taking the keys anyway, I see!"

Inside the
booth, and away from Brad for the first time in over six hours, she sighed,
leaning her head against the dial. Brad's behaviour was still unpredictable,
and he was in a suggestible state. So far he had followed, but if he was to
have a change of heart she would never be able to bring him back again. If she
could keep her own head clear she might do it. She was terrified by the idea of
what might happen if he or she experienced an attack en route.

She carefully
phoned Lee's number. When the answer came, it was Honora on the line, though
her voice could hardly be made out. The line was full of interference, strange
electronic chirpings, and innumerable unfathomable ghost conversations, as if a
hundred other people were trying to claim the line. Ella put the receiver down
and tried again, but got the same results.

"Phone's
out of order," she told Brad, back in the car. "It'll have to
wait."

Brad only
stared sulkily ahead of him. "This car will never make it," he said.

Ella could
sense two forces working in Brad. One surrendered him completely to her
judgment, and with blind faith asked her to take charge and deliver him from
his nightmares. The other was a palpable terror, growing so fast she could
smell it on his breath: a fear both of facing the source of his horrors, and of
facing his fellow dreamers with whom he had brought the living nightmare into
being. This terror, she knew, was already telling him that in coming with her
he had made a mistake; and his apprehension of that mistake was increasing with
each mile of their journey.

It was
beginning to get dark. At a service station half-way up the motorway she
stopped and tried to phone again. She got no better results—a line awash with
interference, busy with sounds like whispered conversations which changed as
soon as you tried to listen in on them. When she returned to the car park,
Brad was gone.

She found
him in the reception area of the service station, hanging over an electronic
arcade machine. A space patrol game. His hand fumbled with the joystick as he
peered darkly into the kaleidoscope of shifting pin-lights behind the black
glass.

"Time
to go," said Ella.

"But I
haven't beaten the invaders. The earth's in peril."

"You
have to put some money in to do that."

"Oh . . . sure."
He released the stick and followed her back to the car.

Shortly
after she had turned off the motorway, Brad suddenly seemed to emerge from a
daze. "I need a drink," he said.

"Brad;
it would be a good idea if you stayed off the pop."

He gripped
her wrist hard enough to make her stop the car. "I need a drink."His
eyes were almost crazy with fear and lack of sleep.

"Maybe
you do. I'll find a pub."

She had to
drive for a while along a winding and deserted country road. Dusk was slipping
away quickly into darkness. She found a place with a dimly lit sign saying The
Corn Man. It had the expectant hush of a pub just opened and too early for
most customers. Brad marched up to the bar and ordered himself two large
brandies, both of which he drank, leaving Ella to order herself
a tonic
water. He repeated his order, and the barmaid eyed
him quizzically as she nudged his glass under the optic measure.

"Ease
up," said Ella. "Lee will bring enough to keep you satisfied."

"Lee
Lee
Lee
.
Lee
schmee
."

Brad kept a
hand on one of his brandy glasses, as if someone might want to take it away
from him. Ella waited patiently, in silence. At length he got up. "Must
take a leak," he said.

Ella sat
nursing her tonic water until she realized that he wasn't coming back. She even
stood outside the gents' toilets, calling to him, but she knew he wasn't in
there. She returned to her car and sat behind the wheel, not knowing what to
do. Half an hour had passed before he walked out of the shadow and climbed back
in the passenger seat. She thought he had the smell of vomit on him.

"What
are we waiting for?" he said.

N
I N E

It has
been often remarked that a hen is only an egg’s

                                      
way
of making another egg

—Samuel Butler

"I'm sure it was Ella."
Honora didn't sound at all sure.

"What did she say?"

"I
didn't hear anything. She sounded like she was phoning from another planet. I
couldn't make her out."

Lee hadn't quite
recovered from his vision of Honora as a Gorgon, his second attack of
elementals within the space of minutes. For the moment he was less concerned
with Ella's difficulties than with his own. He hadn't drawn breath to consider
what might have happened between Honora and himself if the hallucination hadn't
intervened. What's more, he was no closer to having explained Ella's absence.

"Where would she be phoning from?"

"She wouldn't be too far away."

"Why
won't you tell me where she's gone? Why won't you answer me?"

Lee was
running short of escape lines and changes of subject. He actually contemplated
faking another attack of writhing snakes in order to divert her questions. A
deep intuition told him not to play games.

Fortunately
Honora backed off. He tried to distract himself by shuffling playing cards on
the coffee table, pretending to deal rounds of patience, but lacked
concentration. Still shaken from that last attack, he felt sick to his stomach.

His anxiety
was exacerbated by Honora, who gave him the jitters simply by sitting still
with her hands gently clasped in an attitude of such perfect serenity that it
could not fail to betray the deep agitation within. Worse, it had dawned on Lee
that Honora had become aware, either by intuition or by the simple application
of common
sense, that
Ella had gone to recruit Brad
Cousins into her latest scheme. A disconcerting feeling came over him. He felt,
irrationally, that he was unwittingly projecting mental pictures to Honora, or
that she had found some ghoulish means of bleeding him of information.

It
was difficult enough being subject to these random mental distortions without
fearing that there was some kind of telepathy going on. It could be another
overspill from dreamside, the residual thoughtspeak of dreamside. Anyway, it
was happening. And when Lee admitted this, he felt a corresponding wave in
Honora. They sat up and looked at each other, and there was a dovetailing of
insight. He knew she knew, and she knew he knew she knew, and so it went, back
into infinite space.

Lee
continued to turn cards, gnawed at by visions of his earlier hallucination.

Honora
stepped over to the window, peering out at the dusk. She snatched the curtains
closed.

"Shall
I tell your future?" she said suddenly.
"From the
cards.
Shall I?"

"I don't want to know it under the
circumstances."

"You don't have to believe it!"

"That's
what I told myself the other night. I don't have to believe in the power of
dreaming. 1 told
myself
several times, but it didn't
help."

"Nonsense.
Give me the cards." Honora knelt alongside the coffee table and
gathered up the pack. Lee sat back, putting a respectful distance between
himself
and any possible repeat hallucination. Briefly
shuffling the cards, Honora started placing them across each other on the
table, intoning as she turned them up. "This crowns you, this crosses you,
this circles you; this is beneath you and this is behind you; this speaks for
you, this will deceive you, this will defend you, and this is all before
you."

 
Lee didn't get to see his future because the
phone rang. This time he answered.

"It's
Ella," he said. "Ella, you'll have to shout; I said you'll have to
shout; I said . . . Jesus this is hopeless ... I said I still can't hear
you!"

Lee
could just make out that it was Ella, but her message was lost in a flurry of
static and signal interference. There was a wall of sound crackling from the
earpiece. From the middle of it Ella's voice piped through, but was distant and
stripped of tone and amplitude. Her voice had been reduced to the narrowest
frequency, a single oscillation playing along a fine wire that could have been
stretching half the length of the galaxy. Ella was there and he could hear her,
but he couldn't identify a single word she was saying. The line seemed full of
breathing and whisperings, and waves of static, all conspiring to crowd her
out. Lee pressed his ear closer to the receiver.

"YOU'LL
HAVE TO SHOUT, ELLA!" The electronic piping of her voice continued,
sounding like the noise an electronic or mechanical bird might produce, against
the unabated interference. "ELLA? WHAT IS IT YOU'RE SAYING?"

Lee
felt his earlobe, pressed tight against the earpiece, start to get hot, then
smart and sting. Then he felt a sharp sensation like a pin being inserted into
the tender part of his ear. As he pulled the phone away from his head it jerked
at him, as if his ear had become glued to the receiver. Pulling at it only
produced a searing pain, like flesh tearing away in strips.

"Honora!"
he shouted. This time he knew what was happening. Honora jumped to her feet.

But
the stinging continued, until it felt like a razor cutting his ear, or
something gripping him tightly like a pair of scissors. He tried to breathe
deeply and control the hallucination, as he had done on dreamside many times,
thinking in detail down the procession of events, smoothing back the sequence
of the attack. Then he felt himself begin to panic as he felt out of control.

"There's
something inside the phone!" Honora shouted.

Lee
felt it now; and as he inched the receiver away from his head he could almost
see at the periphery of his vision the dull gleam of yellow blades snapping and
twisting and bringing blood to his ear. A black feathered head squeezed out of
the earpiece, shaking frantically, eyes bulbous with fear, and he realized
that what was tearing at his ear was not a razor, not scissors, but the sharp
pecking beak of a bird. Honora screamed and stood over him, not knowing what to
do to help. Lee wrenched the phone away from his head. The bird, large, the
size of a blackbird, squeezed out of the earpiece, its wings flapping wildly as
they came free, first one then the other, still pecking and cutting at Lee's
bloodied ear in wild panic.

Dropping
the phone and lashing out with his hand, Lee smashed it up and away over his
head. The bird flew frantically around the room, disastrously, crashing into
walls and thrashing against the window. Lee crumpled and retched and vomited.
The bird swooped crazily, and flew into objects around the room. The black rag
of its wings was magnified by the confinement of space, fanning them with
ice-cold waves of air. Torn feathers came floating down around them, until at
last Honora, screaming and crying, in utter desperation picked up the coffee
table and hurled it through the central window. The glass shattered
spectacularly, and the table fell back into the room. The bird flew out of the
smashed window and away into the dusk outside.