Dreamside (29 page)

Lee
suggested that someone should telephone the hospital ward, to get a report on
Brads
condition. Since no telephone had been installed in
the house, this involved a short drive to the nearby village. This small task
took on the prospect of a minatory expedition with all attendant dangers. Lee's
recent tangle with telephones was a strong disincentive. He seemed to think
that Ella should be the one to go, and said so. But Ella had been looking for
an opportunity to speak privately with Lee. She needed some minutes alone with
him, even though she was disinclined to leave Honora, whose capacity to remain
in complete possession of
herself
seemed to be
deteriorating fast.

"Look
at her!" she said. She'd addressed Honora twice, without getting any
response. Honora was staring into the fire with an expressionless, unfocused
gaze. Her eyes lacked lustre, seemingly dried out by the smoke. She was away.
"You can see her uncoiling. It's almost
physical!"

Ella
took Honora's hand and broke the enchantment.

"Come
away from the fire."

"It
happened again? I'm like smoke. I'm coming apart."

"We're
going to phone. Come with us."

"I'd
rather not go out there."

"It
would be better if you came."

"Don't
make me go out there, Ella."

Ella
hesitated. "We'll be ten minutes at the most."

Ella
made the call, with Lee hovering in the background. Brad's condition was
unimproved. Ella sighed and replaced the receiver. She told Lee what she had
heard and they agreed to telephone again in the morning. Before they climbed
back into the car, Ella took Lee by the sleeve.

"She's
right isn't she? What she said about it today. She just knows it."

Lee
nodded. "Honora is all intuition. She's the most susceptible."

"Meaning
what?"

"Meaning
she knows how it will be.
The danger of being overwhelmed.
Of dreaming and never finding our way back. Of being stitched into the fabric
of dreaming, frozen in perpetual dreamside."

"It's
the worst scenario.
The worst nightmare."

"It's
what we face now."

"I
just didn't want to admit it.
To myself."

Lee
looked at her. Where did she get her courage from? He grabbed her cold white
hand and kissed it. "Like you said, it's the worst nightmare of all. Perhaps
one of us will have to stay awake, while the others dream. Perhaps that's the
only way."

"Short straws?
Or volunteers?" Ella shook her head. "It
won't work. We all have to be there on dreamside. We're all implicated."

"If
only we had someone on the outside of our dreaming, someone to anchor us. If
Burns was here, what would he tell us? What clue would he give us?"

Ella
recalled her motorway encounter with the professor—if indeed it was the
professor—and saw him vividly: agitated, cryptic, wringing his hands; saying
nothing she could understand.

"Listen
to this. I had an encounter on the motorway. I have to tell you about it, only
there's an uncertainty. I met the professor: that is, I met him—or he came to
me—but I don't know if it was really him. Maybe it was someone else. I know I'm
sounding confused and maybe I'm making a mistake here . . . Only it
was
the
professor who came to me in the car, after a nasty experience I had. I felt
sure he— she, it—was trying to help us."

"What did he say?"

"Nothing
we can use. Something about undoing what was
done.
He
got very agitated."

"But that's all that was said?"

" 'Undo
what was done.' "

"Not exactly a lifeline, is it?"

"Wherever
it came from, I looked back and saw not Burns, but. . . Oh, why are we afraid
to name it? I saw not the professor, but the
Other
."

"But it still doesn't help."

"No."

"We need a thread.
Something to take into the labyrinth which will lead us out
again.
It's got to be you, Ella. You're the seer out of all of us,
you're the one. Can't you weave us a golden thread?"

"Made out of what?
You overestimate me Lee, you always did. Maybe Honora will be the one who finds
the way. Come on, let's go."

At that moment Honora
was in need of a golden thread of her own.

The moment that the
door had closed after them, Honora regretted her decision to wait behind. The
damp air inside the house chilled her, and she was terrified of what might be
stalking them outside. Her nerves shivered.

The house felt
strangely hollow, like a burial chamber. She got up and moved around the
room,
arms folded defensively, self-consciously avoiding
the seductive powers of the fire and the candle flame. The wind got up again
outside, moaning in the tall trees and swinging the gate back and forth.

From the open doorway
she could see the gate swaying slowly in the shadows. Then it slapped hard
against the gatepost, and swung open again. It was possible to make out the
silhouette of a small figure crouched over the gate. It was no more than a shadow,
bobbing backwards and out of view as the gate swayed open.

"Who's
there?" said Honora. She hesitated on the doorstep, and then tentatively
touched her foot on the path. There was the figure again, like a small, cowled
thing. The gate stopped moving and the silhouette ducked behind it. Honora
moved slowly down the path, one hand outstretched towards the gate. It banged
violently shut.

Honora recovered. It
was only the wind, the figure just a waving rhododendron bush behind the gate.
With relief she secured the stiff latch and slid home the rusting bolt.

But back indoors she
heard a scratching at the window pane. Someone was at the window. She moved
slowly towards it.

It was the wind,
riffling the straggling ornamental bushes, pressing their branches against the
glass. Then there was a sighing in the garden—the wind in the ragged strips of
broken fencing.
A scuffling behind the house—only the wind,
chasing a scrap of torn newsprint.
The sound of
banging at the front of the house.
The wind again, slapping the gate
back and forth.
The gate which, only a moment earlier, Honora
herself had carefully secured.

She looked out of the
window, through her own reflection. The gate had somehow freed itself. It swung
gently back and forth. An arched silhouette rode it, like a child on a wooden
horse—surely only the curved back of the rhododendron, a trick of the shadows.
Honora let the curtain fall and sat down before the fire.

The sound
of scratching on the window returned. It was a sound like fingernails drawn
down the pane of glass. She ignored it. It persisted. It was followed by a
tapping, a slow, regular beating. Then a sound like that of a child breathing
hard, a child misting up the glass with her mouth. Small, scuffling feet darted
from front to back of the house. Honora pressed her hands to her ears.

The
scratching and tapping on the window moved to the back of the house. Honora
looked up. Now she saw the sickly, whey-colored face, mouthing at the glass,
darting from one window pane to the other and tapping, almost playfully.

"No," moaned Honora covering her ears again,
"no
no no
."

Then
it stopped, and the figure went away. All Honora could hear now was the throaty
rasp of her own breathing. She looked around her. There was nothing. She busied
herself, becoming frantically methodical. She put another log on the fire,
reeled to the kitchen, watched a kettle boil, brewed coffee and tried to talk
herself into a state of calm.

She
returned to the fireside, hugging her coffee to her like a shield. She counted
off the seconds, as if each one were a sword-blow parried with diminishing
strength. Slowly she became aware of a flicker at the edge of her vision,
a dull
phosphorescence: something had come into the room.

It filled
the room and infected it with cold. Its presence was
strong.
Like tart
moonlight, like acid frost, like sour, congealed breath. It was the colour and
taste and odour of neglect and decay masquerading as a human child. Honora's
coffee slipped to the floor, a dark stain expanding in four directions.

Sitting in
the chair opposite, the girl didn't speak. Her head was tilted to one side like
a marionette. Her sheenless eyes were fixed on Honora. She was only too human,
a waif in a sad cut-down dress. Her jaw was slack and her hair unkempt, not
lovable, no, but infinitely pitiable. Her sand-coloured eyes were fixed on
Honora but looking through and past her, as if waiting for the answer to some
question posed long ago, patiently but insistently waiting for the answer which
never comes.

Honora was
paralysed, like the very first dreamside paralysis. Her words choked.
"When will you be done with us?"

The fixed
expression on the girl's face slowly changed, twisting into a sneer. She stood
up and moved towards the fire. Honora felt a wave of cold. There was the same
phosphorescent halo about her, the glow of moon on water. It pulsed briefly
before fading, and with the pulsing the girl diminished in size and substance,
transforming at last into a small, hard lozenge of blue flame which arced like
a tiny meteor, dropping into the fire.

Honora's
eyes followed it into the heart of the fire. She had no will to resist,
to look
away. Even knowing the danger, and remembering
Ella's warnings, that single conjured spark had been enough to draw her back.
The fire held her, trancelike, and was drawing her in. She was a single thread;
the fabric of her being was a many-textured, spectrum-colored tapestry,
unravelling a fibre at a time, unwinding on to a vast spool held by hands
within the fire, one fine strand carefully wound in after another. As if that
is where it starts, at the eyes, where the threads of the soul hang in their
slackest stitch; stitches which can be hooked free of weft and
warp,
and pulled through, drawn out, spooled in. She was lost
to it. She was coming apart.

She knew
the danger. The idea of resistance fashioned itself into a sword in her mind, a
bright-edged sword, a way out. But the sword itself became smoke; and the thing
she would slash free of became smoke. The effort to resist required too much,
too mighty a cut, too great a mental stroke. Her mind was coming apart.

Honora
belonged to the fire. She was enslaved by the ritual dance of the aromatic
flame.
Fire, first and most martial of all elements, the
hierarchical prince.
She saw in the fire the tapered banners of his
glorious armies, the swallowtail pennants a-flutter, flags of crimson, ochre,
sapphire, armies spilling into valleys and camped along the plains. They
pinioned her and they held her. The flame engaged with her. She was fire. She
was smoke. She was coming apart, like smoke.

"Burning!
What's burning?" Lee and Ella stood over her,
shaking her.

"Honora!"
They were calling her as if from a great distance.

Lee dragged
her to her feet, shaking her violently, stripping off her outer clothes. Slowly
she became aware of a thick, acrid smell, and realized that the room was fogged
with dense, grey smoke.

"Are
you burned? Honora, are you burned?" Lee was frantically stroking her
arms.

"No."

Miraculously
she wasn't. At her feet she saw, still smouldering but not even charred, the
skirt and pullover which Lee had torn from her. Wisps of smoke writhed from the
clothes. Ella was running around opening windows.

"What happened?" Honora was still dazed.

Lee
and Ella just looked at each other. Ella folded Honora in her arms as the other
woman wept.

"It has to be tonight," said
Ella. "It has to be tonight."

T
H I RT E
E
N

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything

would
appear as it is, infinite

—William
Blake

Surely tonight sleep will come.
But sleep is choosy these days
about the company
she keeps. And those who may have been caught in the past with a stolen fistful
of her soft plumage can't complain if now she makes them wait for favours. So
the three lie on their mattresses in the dark, and wait.

Lee shifts
in a half-sleep, perspiring heavily, unable to find the elusive groove. Honora
doses herself with another of her pills, frets, hugs her knees, stifling her
own whimpers. But long after sleep has finally taken them, Ella lies awake. She
curls stiffly in the darkness, disturbed by a stroboscopic flickering behind
her closed eyes. Responsibility weighs on her. She feels accountable for them
all, a burden which comes from being the strongest of the four dreamers. She
suspects that in the end they might stand or fall by her efforts alone.