Dreamside (27 page)

Honora
staggered over to where Lee lay on the floor. She hoisted him up by his waist.
Breathing heavily she said, "Come on; you've got to get up; you've got to
get up."

"It
was real," he panted. "You saw it. It was real. It wasn't a hallucination
at all." His ear was bloodied and torn.

"Of
course I saw it. You must get up. It's time for us to go isn't it? Ella was
trying to tell us it's time. They're both going to be there, aren't they?"

Lee
nodded. He was beginning to understand why Ella had been in so much of a hurry.

"Get
some overnight things; get some blankets and covers. I'll get the rest. Then
get in the car."

They
loaded up the car in silence. Then they drove away, dusk slipping into
darkness, leaving the gaping hole of the smashed window in the empty house
behind them.

A
foul wind came up, assaulting the room they had left, like a raid made a few
moments too late. It flapped the heavy curtains beside the broken window and
flipped Honora's unread cards, dealing a new sequence, one darker and full of
portents which only the wind could read.

T E N

We
may need to characterize and distinguish
respectively between the deceptions and
distortions

of
our desires; through the media
of memory,

fantasy
, neuroses, dreaming, and
finally through

those
unhinged kinds of love which
themselves

spiral
deeper and deeper into madness

—L. P.
Burns

Somewhere in the Brecon Beacons,
guided in the moonless dark
by an infrared confidence and a
blueprint memory, Ella found her mark. It was the early hours of the morning.
The Midget, engine knocking wildly, stalled outside the house on the exact spot
where an old Morris Minor had stood one summer thirteen years ago. Ella had
already jumped out, leaving Brad to stare moodily around him. The house stood
empty.

"Thirteen
years on," she said to Brad, "and still a holiday home for some
overpaid academic who's probably been twice since we were here."

Brad
got out of the car. He didn't begrudge anyone a single brick of the place.
"How will we get in?" he said, in a voice that suggested.
"Let's turn back."

Ella
lifted the boot of her car. "You've got a narrow experience of life, Brad
Cousins." She lifted a slender chisel and a hammer from the boot, and
marched around to the rear of the house. Brad followed at a distance of five
paces. She slotted the chisel between the upper and lower frame of a sash
window, swung the hammer once, hard, and the window catch flew open. The window
required only a light push, sliding up as if by hydraulic gears.

"Where
did you learn that?"

"From a cigarette card.
Go and fetch those things from the car."

Brad
trotted off obediently as Ella climbed through the window. When he reappeared
with Ella’s bag, she had the back door open.

"No,
don't switch on the lights. We don't want to attract attention. Anyway, it'll
soon be light. Close the curtains and light some of these candles."

"Romantic,"
said Brad.

"You
think so?"

"No."

With
the candle flames flickering and darting long shadows across the room, they
could see that the house had recently been renovated. Floorboards had been
sanded, old cupboards replaced by units, and the enamel sink supplanted by one
of stainless steel. They made coffee and played a nervous round of
That-Wasn't-Here-Before.

"What
time will the others come?"

"When they show up."

"Give
me one of those ridiculous liquorice cigarettes, will you?"

Some
time after three o'clock in the morning, a car pulled up outside the house.
Ella went to the window and drew back a curtain. Then she opened the door.

"We
got well lost," said Lee, "we've been driving in circles.
Scary kind of circles."
He gave Ella a special look.

So
now Lee
was
getting a taste, Ella thought. Now he understands what's
happening. "Don't tell me about it. You're here. Come inside,
Honora,"

"Is
he in there?"

Ella
nodded, and they walked through. Brad sat stiffly in a corner of the room. Lee
was only mildly surprised to see him shaved, shorn and kitted out in some of
his old clothes. Honora simply erased his presence: he wasn't there. Brad might
have
flickered
a glance in her direction, or maybe it
was only the play of candlelight across his eyes.

Lee
rubbed his hands with simulated gusto, paced the floor and chattered about
making coffee and getting comfortable: anything to overlay the smoky bitterness
in the room. Ella was wiser than Lee. She knew the exact nature of the
ingredients that had to be brought together to bubble in the cauldron. Let them
feel it, she thought, let them feel it.

Lee
discovered what hard work it is to keep up conversation when three other people
don't want to join in. He quickly ran out of counterfeit enthusiasm. The
candles burned steadily, and the four sat silently, nursing empty coffee mugs,
only their eyes reflecting the available light. Occasionally a flame would
shiver in a draft, dispatching shadows across a wall and releasing a worm of
black smoke.

"This
is like a séance," said Lee. "Let's see if we can contact the
living."

No one
bothered to laugh. Lee was reminded of the early lucid dreaming seminars, where
they would sit for twenty minutes in uncomfortable silence waiting for the
professor to speak. He was about to wonder aloud what Burns would have made of
their situation, but opted against unwise comment. Honora gazed down at the
rug beneath her as if she saw something significant in its pattern, and it
seemed to Lee that her silence was the deepest. Brad continued to find the far
corner of the ceiling an image of satisfaction. Ella looked far too
comfortable, and the corners of her mouth were turned up fractionally in what
he thought was an incipiently malevolent smile.

That
Ella was in charge was unquestionable. The other three had by now surrendered
themselves to her. They all knew why they were here, but they were waiting for
Ella to summon them to order. She seemed to have the power to draw something
out of them, to distil something from the brooding silence. When Ella did
speak, the others were steeled to listen.

"No
one's in any mood for sleeping; and we all know why that is. In any event I'm
wide awake, and the dawn will be up in an hour or two. Better save it for
tomorrow night, when we will need to sleep. We have to take that walk together
on dreamside." Ella paused for effect, and released a deep sigh.

"Tomorrow,"
she continued, "or rather when it gets light, we'll go and take a look at
the lake. We'll just spend the day together, however much effort that takes.
It's what Burns showed us. It worked before and it will work for us again.
Tomorrow night we sleep, and we do it. Agreed?" Ella looked from person to
person but all eyes were averted. "There can't be any stragglers."

"Ella,"
said Brad self-consciously, making a waving sign at his mouth.

"Sure,"
said Ella. "Lee, I hope you didn't forget Brad's medicine?"

"What?"

"Did
you bring anything for him?"

"Oh
sure," said Lee, glad to do something useful. He went out and returned
with a half-empty bottle of whiskey. "Don't scowl at it; there's more in
the car."

"Don't
give him ideas," said Ella, but not before Brad had hooked back a good
belt of Scotch.

Before
the candles had burned down, the first grey light of the day leaked into the room.
The dawn chorus was in song before they realized it, followed by a brighter
light. Honora went round snuffing out candles, slowly, like a church acolyte.
Ella watched her and was afraid for her. She had spent most of the night in
complete silence, haunting everyone else with her inward stare. Now she stood
poised over the last candle, thumb and forefinger moistened to nip out the
flickering light, but arrested in the motion. She gazed steadily into the flame
without blinking. It was as if her soul was a fine thread being unwound from a
thick spool and pulled in toward the heart of the flame.

"Look
at her," Ella whispered to Lee, "
something
is taking her, a little at a time."

"What
is it?"

Ella
shook her head. "Stop her."

Lee
moved up behind Honora, gently reaching over her shoulder to nip out the
candle flame. She seemed to wake up.

"Have I been sleeping?" she asked.

Lee looked over at Ella, but
they said nothing. Then Ella pulled back the curtains, looked up at the sky and
pronounced that it was going to be a fine day. Brad snorted.

"We'll go for a walk," said Ella. "Take
a look at the lake."

'I’ll stay here," said Brad.

"No. We need your cheerful company."

The
sun came up fast, blood-red. Just as quickly it mellowed to a pallid disk. They
were a strange troupe, filing down the hill of the country lane without
speaking. Honora walked on a few yards in front. Brad straggled behind. Ella
and Lee wanted to grip hands but were for some reason impelled against it. It
was no short distance to the lake, and in the chill, damp air of the early
morning they completed the hike in silence.

When
they got there, the lake was dead.

Or
if not completely dead, it was locked in a state of suspended, strangled
ugliness. The breath of spring, which abounded in everything else, had passed
it by.
A yellow
, oily foam like detergent had
collected in raked scum patterns on the surface of the water. It clung to dead
branches and Coke cans and other debris at the lake's edge. The towering oak
had failed to come into leaf and the rough bark was stripping itself on the
side leaning over the water. The willow that had once dipped into the lake
would never recover; it had withered into dry twigs and run the colour of
rust. The colonies of birds and insects that should have regenerated had either
died with the lake or had migrated, never to return.

"Where
did all this pollution come from?" said Brad. He sounded as if he took it
personally.

Ella found
some kind of an answer pinned to a tree. It was a notice of a public meeting,
placed there by a Conservationist group.

POLLUTION

If you are disturbed by the pollution of
this and other areas of local beauty by the illegal dumping of chemical wastes,
please attend the public inquiry to be held in
Penmarthern
Town Hall. Representatives of the
Lytex
chemicals
company will be in attendance.

The notice
was already out of date: the meeting had gone by two days earlier.

"Lytex?"
said Lee, puzzling over the notice.
"Sounds
familiar."

"Forget
it," said Brad.

Honora
stood at the very edge of the lake. "It's poisoned," she said, gazing
into its depths. Then her face set in that same expression Ella had identified
earlier. She swayed slightly on the bank above the polluted water, as if played
on some invisible cord, with some still, small part of
herself
unwinding into the lake. Ella saw it again. Honora looked pale, beautiful and
unearthly, but anaemic, as if her life-blood was leaking away. This time it was
Brad who made a move to save her, but Ella stopped him with a gesture. Then she
stepped forward, put an arm around the other woman and turned her away from the
water.

"I'm
losing myself," said Honora.

"It's
all right. I'll watch over you."

Lee
fingered the diseased bark of the tall oak. Ella peered from the bank as the
iridescent scales of a detergent slick writhed slowly on the water. Even amid
the corruption and pollution she could see the shining scales of a dragon, or a
winged serpent, or a beautiful, silver-armoured company with banners fluttering
below the surface of the water. It was difficult to look away. "Let's get
out of here," she said.

She led
them from the lake over to the woods, where afternoons had been spent strolling
in Burns's company, when they were wide eyed and receptive to his sharp
definitions of life and to his quiet revelations. Even in waking time on those
afternoons, Burns had made the woods a place of jewelled cobwebs, a place
inhabited by satyrs and dryads. Now they were wandering without purpose through
the mouldering scrub of a thin damp copse.

Ella was
circumspect as they walked; constantly glancing around her as though she
expected to discover something or to encounter someone. If the others noticed,
they made no comment.

They took
the path back to the house, Honora still in advance and decisively separated
from Brad by the other two. Occasionally they changed positions. Ella was
anxious about leaving Honora alone with her thoughts, where she was like a weak
swimmer at risk from strong currents. She sent Lee up to talk with Honora; Ella
dropped back to talk with Brad; then Lee talked to Brad and Ella with Honora;
but Honora and Brad never talked. And all of this was conducted against the
rumbling, prophetic thunder of what the night held. On this night, they must
sleep and dream.