Dream a Little Dream (The Silver Trilogy) (F) (18 page)

Arthur gave a hollow groan.

“Well, Liv, so now you’re in the loop,” said Henry sarcastically. “Are you well and truly scared?”

Unfortunately I wasn’t. If anything, the opposite. I was burning to ask a few concrete questions, but I didn’t yet want to admit how much I already knew. Particularly as most of what I did know came from some very dubious dreams.

“I think I’d like to know something about the advantages of the dreams,” I said. “You mentioned those.”

“Oh, there are plenty of
them
! Let’s see…” Jasper frowned, thinking hard. “If you join the game, for instance, you’d have four potential partners for the Autumn Ball right away. Any girl at our school would be envious of you!”

Henry laughed briefly. “You’re using the Autumn Ball as bait?”

“Why not? Other girls would commit murder for such a choice of partners. I should have mentioned that first, shouldn’t I?”

“Oh, Jasper, you’re a hopeless case.” Arthur put his hand out. “Give me a glass of that.”

“I haven’t finished mixing the drinks yet,” said Jasper, rapping him on the knuckles. “They still need Campari and a slice of orange. And a sprig of mint. We were going to get sozzled in style, remember?”

At that moment the door was opened, and bright light from the corridor fell into the home cinema.

“Hi, Grayson.” Arthur fished up the gin bottle from Jasper’s seat.

“‘Hi, Grayson,’ is it?” repeated Grayson angrily. “Have you all lost your marbles? Simply going off with Liv when for once I don’t keep an eye on you for a minute?”

“It was much more than a minute,” murmured Henry.

“The drinks are ready now,” said Jasper.

“You’re the utter end, all of you!”

Arthur heaved a deep sigh. “Come on in and shut the door, Grayson.”

But Grayson shook his head. “It’s getting late. I must take Liv h—oh, for heaven’s sake, Arthur, are you drinking gin straight from the bottle?”

“Get off your high horse, Grayson,” said Henry. “Nothing’s happened to Liv.”

“Exactly.” Arthur draped his legs over the armrest of the seat next to him and offered Grayson the bottle. “Have a swig of that and don’t look at us as if we just robbed a bank. We were only trying to initiate Liv into our mystery.”

“Oh yes? I hope you didn’t leave anything out—Anabel’s dog, for instance, and the nightmares, and what—oh, forget it!” Grayson looked as if he’d explode with fury any moment now. “Come along, Liv. We’re leaving,” he said through his teeth.

I didn’t move from the spot. He was looking rather desperate, but I just couldn’t leave yet, not when I was so close to finding out what was at the heart of the mystery.

“It’s only ten fifteen, man. Relax,” said Arthur, glancing at his watch. “Please,” he added almost pleadingly.

Grayson closed the door. “I’ve told you a hundred times, we have to find another solution—but you just ignore me, of course. Why won’t you listen, for once in your lives—oh, damn it! Whatever they’ve told you, Liv, you must simply forget it again!”

“I’d like to understand it first,” I said.

“That’s the trouble,” said Arthur. “It’s really hard to understand if you haven’t experienced it.”

“And I explained it very well,” said Jasper, offended. “Particularly considering that I don’t understand it myself.”

Grayson was going to say something, but I got in first. “So you were playing a game last Halloween—a game that isn’t a real game, and at least one of the players still has to be a virgin,” I said hastily. “Right?”

“Right!” Jasper cast a triumphant look around the rest of the company. “There, you see? She
does
get the idea!”

The others didn’t react. Grayson rubbed his forehead with the back of his hand, Arthur took another swig from the gin bottle, Henry picked separate leaves off the bunch of mint and rubbed them to pieces in his fingers.

“But
why
?” I asked.

Henry looked up. “Why are we playing the game, or why do the rules of the game say that at least one of the players must be a virgin?”

“Both,” I said.

The silence went on for some time. Even Jasper didn’t answer me but took a pocketknife out of his jeans and tried slicing one of the oranges with it. He wasn’t very successful.

“Well, let’s put it this way.” It was Arthur’s voice, slightly metallic and hollow, that finally broke the silence. “It was Halloween, and there was a power cut all over North London, so our party ended earlier than expected. We were all wound up and in love and ready to do something crazy.”

“You were in love,” Henry corrected him. “The rest of us were just drunk.”

“True.” Grayson, resigned, leaned back against the door.

“Anyway, we were in a really good mood,” Arthur went on. “It was the middle of the night, we were on our own in Anabel’s house, and the red wine from her father’s cellar was good stuff.…”

“And don’t forget to tell her it was really scary Halloween weather outside, dark and misty and so on.” Jasper was taking center stage again, although he was still slaughtering the orange. “Anabel had lit a lot of candles, and when she brought out that mysterious book and suggested trying something quite different for a change, it kind of felt, well … the right thing to do. Conjuring up a demon on Halloween—I mean, sounds perfect, doesn’t it? It was fun, too, at first, and it seemed to me as harmless as … as telling your fortune by reading the tea leaves. No one expects the tea leaves to develop an independent life of their own and come tormenting you in your dreams by night. Or go about murdering dogs…”

Ah, we were coming to the point at long last.

“So that’s your game? Conjuring up demons?” And what did the dog have to do with it?

Jasper nodded. “I know it sounds totally idiotic.”

“It
is
totally idiotic,” said Grayson.

“It was only meant to be a joke. None of us expected it to work.” Jasper sighed. “We simply repeated the words after Anabel, added a few drops of our blood to the red wine we were drinking, drew a funny sort of penta-thingy on the floor—”

“Pentagram, Jas, for about the thousandth time,” said Henry.

“Whatever you say.” Jasper rolled his eyes. “Then we made our wishes. No one could have guessed that the whole thing would turn out so … so
real.
”

It sounded to me like they needed an exorcist more than a virgin. “You mean conjuring up this demon really worked?” I was making such an effort to banish any doubt or mockery from my voice that I sounded like a psychotherapist in a bad TV film, doing her level best to understand. A psychotherapist whose voice shows how crazy she thinks her patients are. “Exactly how do I picture this scene to myself?”

No one told me. Henry, apparently lost in thought, was letting scraps of green mint leaves drop to the floor, a frowning Arthur was watching the ice cubes in Jasper’s glasses melt, Grayson was biting his lower lip, and Jasper was still murdering the orange.

I was beginning to feel tired of working so hard to winkle their secrets out of them, especially since an answer always gave rise to another ten questions. “So on Halloween last year you conjured up a demon, for fun,” I said, summing up the results to date. “According to a game that you found in an old book, with instructions saying one of the players must be a virgin. But because your virgin turned out not to be a virgin anymore, you need a substitute player. And for some reason or other, that’s why you picked me.”

But I knew the reason: it was because I’d landed right in front of them during that dream on Monday night.

“Assuming you
are
still a virgin,” confirmed Jasper.

“Yes, I get that bit. What I don’t get, apart from just how the game works, is why you don’t stop playing it. Simple.”

“No, it’s not simple at all. That’s why.” Jasper leaned forward and went on, lowering his voice, “We did try, but you see, you can’t make a pact with a demon and then just wriggle out of it.”

“I see. Of course you can’t,” I replied in my best psychotherapist’s voice, looking inquiringly at Henry. For a moment I felt as if I were back in Highgate Cemetery. Henry suspected that they hadn’t been dreaming
of me
, they’d been dreaming
with me
, I was fairly sure of that—but the way it looked, he hadn’t shared his suspicions with the others. Apart, maybe, from Grayson, who kept on asking for his sweater back.

I tried to phrase my next question in such a way that they’d be forced to give me more information. “But what, exactly, did this demon do to you? Looks like you really believe in it, right?”

Once again, all I got was silence. Silly mistake. I ought to have refrained from asking that second question. I sighed. I wasn’t about to get any further this way.

“Okay,” I said, to cut the whole thing short.

“Okay?” Jasper wasn’t the only one to give me an inquiring glance.

I took a deep breath and looked all around at them. “Okay, I’ll do it. I’ll take over for Anabel in your game, but only if you answer all my questions, and believe me, I have a whole lot of them.”

The moment I’d said that, the atmosphere in the room was entirely different. They suddenly all began talking at once.

“Do you mean you really are still a virgin?” cried Jasper. “I knew it! An ugly pair of glasses like that must be good for something!”

Arthur put the gin bottle down, stood up, and said solemnly, “Liv Silver, you’ve saved our lives! And I promise to answer all your questions as well as I can.” He laughed. “Oh, I’d just love to give you a hug—only, if I do that, I bet Grayson will land a punch on me.”

Grayson did indeed look as if he’d like to hit Arthur. “You don’t know what you’re doing,” he said, adding something else, but it was lost in all the noise his friends were making.

Only Henry said nothing. He just looked at me and shook his head almost imperceptibly. Then he smiled.

19

“I’LL TAKE YOU UP,”
said Grayson after he had managed, as if by magic, to maneuver Ernest’s wide Mercedes into a tiny little parking space. “So you won’t be in trouble for staying out so late.”

“Are you crazy?” I slammed the passenger door much harder than necessary. “It’s ten past eleven, and we’re here only because you made up that fairy tale about my strict mother and I didn’t want to show you up in front of your friends.” And I’d have liked so much to stay there. In the time I had left to me, I hadn’t been able to ask even a fraction of the questions whirring around in my head. On the short drive back Grayson had said nothing to help in clarifying the situation; he had just told me off, saying “damn it all” and “downright stupid” with above-average frequency.

Even so, however, I’d been given a few answers that I needed to think over thoroughly. To be honest, I couldn’t wait to open my notebook and write it all down—this time maybe with the help of clearly organized graphs.

Grayson had climbed out of the car too. “We’re in London. Do you know how high the crime rate in this city is?”

“Yes, sure, it’s hardly safe to walk a step in this run-down area.” I pointed to the nostalgically old-fashioned streetlights ahead of us in the sleeping street, which looked like an advertising brochure for idyllic town living. “Street gangs indulging in shoot-outs the whole time, sex fiends lurking in front gardens, and isn’t that Jack the Ripper just coming around the corner—oh, shit!”

It wasn’t Jack the Ripper, it was Mom, who’d been taking Buttercup for her evening walk, just coming around the corner. But that was about as bad.

“If I were you, I’d get right back in that car and drive away, Grayson!” I hissed.

“Don’t make such a damn fuss. I only want to take you to the damn door, because that’s damn well the right thing to do!” Grayson wasted his last chance of flight by shooting furious glances at me from his caramel-colored eyes.

And by then Mom had seen us. “Yoo-hoo,” she called, letting Buttercup off the leash so that she could run on ahead and jump up at us.

I was able to relish the surprised expression on Grayson’s face for two seconds. “Your own fault, if you ask me,” I said sweetly. “Now you can explain why we’re back at only just after eleven.”

“Because her daughter always says yes when she ought to say no?” Grayson bent down to pat Buttercup and imitated my voice. “What? You’re doing something forbidden and dangerous that I don’t understand, and in addition I’ve been expressly warned against it? Yes, sure, I’d just love to join in!”

“You are such a…” As I was searching for the right word, Mom reached us.

“Hello, you two! Back already? Wasn’t it a good party?”

“Yes, it was great.” I smiled as maliciously as possible. “But Grayson wanted to get rid of me.”

“I only wanted to keep you from having to go to Accident and Emergency with alcohol poisoning after your first party in London,” Grayson retorted. “One of Jasper’s drinks would have been quite enough for that.”

I wasn’t smiling anymore, certainly not maliciously. “I beg your pardon? I didn’t even have a sip.”

“No, because I brought you home in good time. If they’d offered you one, you’d have been unable to say no, because it’s such a difficult word for you to understand.”

“Oh, my dears!” Mom looked positively moved. “You’re behaving just like a real brother and sister! I must call Ernest and tell him.”

I rolled my eyes. Typical! She saw only what she wanted to see. I climbed the steps to the front door of the apartment block, shaking my head. Buttercup followed me. “See you sometime,” I said as haughtily as possible.

But Grayson wasn’t through with me yet. “I’d like to come in with you,” I heard him saying. “If I may.”

“Of course you may, dear,” said Mom before I could spin around and strike Grayson dead with a look. She fished the front door key out of her pocket and unlocked the door. “Lottie’s been baking blueberry muffins. Baking soothes her nerves, so she had to bake three trays of muffins today.… I’m afraid meeting Charles has turned her ideas upside down.”

My own ideas were turned upside down as well.

“What are you looking like that for?” Grayson pushed his way past me at the door and ran upstairs ahead of me. Buttercup followed him, flapping her ears happily. I didn’t catch up with the two of them until just before the door of our apartment.