Dreamside (30 page)

"Make
us a thread," Lee had pleaded.
"A golden thread.
Something to take in with us that might lead us out."

She
dredges the limits of her memory. There had to be something from which she
could create Lee's golden thread.
A special kind of thread.
A thread which could span from outer world to inner mind like
a glittering bridge, as light and fluid as dream itself.

She
swoops back over her encounter on the motorway. There is only a vague
conversation, leaving here with nothing more than instructions to
undo what
was done.

It's hopeless. There's nothing there.
Nothing.

Night
marches on, and sleep eludes her. Occasionally, one of the others stirs under
their blankets. Ella looks up briefly and sinks back on to her own bed of
nails.

She can see
Burns with perfect clarity, offering her his unhelpful advice and wringing his
hands in anguish. In her feverish vision he grows more and more impatient, more
anguished, twisting his arthritic fingers together:
Can't you see, Ella,
it's you, it's you, I can't do it for you, can't you see that it's not in my
—

HANDS.

Ella sits bolt upright.

There's a
moment of panic. She's terrified that the idea which just came to her might
slip away, snuff out like a candle flame. She's trying to hold on to something.
Hold the idea there, gently, carefully; she looks at the other two sleepers
for help. They don't stir. She leans back on the pillow.

Yes Ella,
its
in
your hands.

That's what Burns was trying to tell you all the time.

The
dream exercise comes back to her.
The hand manipulation game.
It's a fragment of childhood, something taken from the bottomless toy chest of
the mind at play.
The dream exercise.
The one they had
created between them.
The one that had formed the original
bridge, the bridge between early lucid dreaming and true dream-side control.

That's
how it was, how it
always
was. Dreaming from the head through the hands,
miraculously working to transform the external world . . . Slow down!
thinks
Ella.
Slow down!
Her mind is struggling
against something which wants her to deviate from the track, stray off course,
lose her fix.

Undo
what was done, Burns's phantom had said to her. But what was done? And
how
was
it done? Let's take it slow.
Very slow.
And with all the power of childlike lucidity.
For this is
how it was.

Here is the church.

She
sees two women talking in the ruins of a bombed-out cathedral. They are
disputing, or perhaps testing out, the reality of a dreamside birth. A child, a
thing—no, a child—was conceived and delivered on dreamside. The church, that's
the womb, the woman, thinks Ella, her eyes raking the darkened ceiling. And the
tower, the steeple tall and erect, that's the man. It's so clear.
Here is
the church, here is the steeple.
A woman and a man.

Open
the door.
Yes, that's lovemaking all
right. Open the door, call it by another name, sex, or here a violation where
love is absent, but open the door.
And here are the people.
There it
is,
the birth, the propagation of the people, born to start
the cycle of life all over again.

But
where does all this lead? It's just a child's game, isn't it?
A shadow play, a sleight of hand.
A little
story with a twist and nothing else.
Or is there more?
Another strand to the thread?
Like the words changing in the
books on dreamside, can the thread change to give more?

Try
again.

Here
is the church.
Why yes, that's our
belief, our faith in brave dreaming.
Here is the steeple.
There is our
aspiration, the wish to dream, the soaring desire to make it happen.
Open
the door,
the door of sleep, the door to the place of dreaming.
And here
are the people.
Who are the people? We are the people. Born out of faith
and desire, we are the dreamers, the dreamers of dreams.

It's
easy. The golden thread has as many strands as you care to make, as many as
there are interpretations. Ella is feverish. She can see a golden thread
spinning out to a point beyond her vision. Sparks of pure golden light shimmer
and dart from it as it spins in rapid style from the turning of her mind. This
is the thread they will transport to dreamside, as light and as fluid as dream
itself. But there is one essential strand to the thread which must be strong
enough to lead them out again afterwards.

She knows
she's on to something. If it can be found, it will be found here. Only now
tiredness closes her in. It folds down on her. She feels the edges of
consciousness retreat like the outposts of an empire. Now she has to fight
sleep.

Perhaps
it's just a question of viewing the thread in reverse. Like examining the
stitching on the reverse side of
an embroidery
. The
question is
,
does the key fit the lock from both sides
of the door? And can the thread pay out a third time?

Church.
And if the church was our
faith in dreaming, then mistrust must be its opposite. What if that mistrust
itself has become the instrument of oppression? A church which has become a
prison, wasn't that the measure of their dreaming now?

Steeple.
We made
a
Babel
of vanity and an arrogance out of out desire to dream, to climb as
high as God. Indifference is the opposite of desire, and the worst crime of
all. And we fell asleep. We made a crisis of faith out of mistrust and
indifference. Will we ever find our way
back ?

Door.
How do we open the doorway back? How
do we recover our faith and our desire?

But Ella
can go no further. She is too drained to think it through; too tired to spin
the thread any longer; too exhausted to finish weaving the strand. The last
flickering candle has burned down to a gob of wax. Her mind closes down like a
square of paper neatly folded in on itself, and then once again, and then
again.

FOURTEEN

"If
that there King was to wake"

added
Tweedledum, "you’d go out
—
bang!
—

just
like a candle!"

—Lewis
Carroll

Ella only knew that sleep had
finally taken her when she became
aware she was on
dreamside.
Lee was standing close by. He was looking at her strangely.—I've been
waiting—he thoughtspoke
.—
You're here. It feels cold—

He touched
her, and brought her to him. In the embrace they rediscovered that shivering
intensity, the tremulousness beneath the surface of things, but with something
else, something extra.

A colourless, tasteless, odourless sense, oppressive
and insistent.
It grabbed like a
hand inside the stomach, itching at the very membrane of dreamside. It was the
claw of a dread anxiety. Something predatory hung watchful on the air.

—Is anyone
else here?—
Before
Ella had even completed the thought,
she saw Honora standing under the oak, looking out over the frozen snow-covered
lake. She seemed carved from ivory. The scene was encompassed in still mists.

Everywhere
was ice; mist-bound and ice-locked. Dreamside was precisely as Honora knew it,
and exactly as Ella and Lee had glimpsed it on their single fleeting return
visit. It was a mockery of the place it had once been, and a snowbound shadow
of the polluted lake as it was now.

They
waited, scraping their boots on the frozen grass at their feet. Even those
small movements seemed ready to burst the dream as they waited for the one who
was missing.

—Must we have him here Ella?—

—We all
have to be present—Ella was firm, authoritative. Perhaps she knew more than
she was saying. She seemed certain in the knowledge that the fourth member of
the group would appear. They waited; and they waited.

Brad came
from nowhere. He came wide-eyed, and in a dangerously befuddled state. He
stopped short of them, like a nervous animal, staring at the ground. They all
watched him, but were afraid of him. They didn't dare to speak to him, and even
sought to disguise their thoughts. They stood rigidly, like figurines carved
from a single piece of horn.

Brad seemed
confused, lost. He looked from one to the other as if he was about to speak.
Then he looked wildly over his shoulder. He moved closer to Ella, mouthing
words that failed to come. Then:—Help me—

—What is it Brad?—

—Can't awaken.
Can't wake up.
Help me Ella!—

Brad was stricken with
panic. His eyes were all black pupil and they leaked frosty tears. He stood
close enough for Ella to feel his cold breath on her face. She put out a hand
to touch him and was shocked to find him stiff with frost. He snatched at her
hand and gripped it fiercely. The cold from his fingers burned, and her skin
seemed to sear and stick fast to his. Their eyes locked as he dared her to
snatch her hand away.

At last he
relaxed his hold. Ella felt a blistering pain as she withdrew her hand: she
felt a fine layer of skin ripping from the back of her wrist where he had
gripped her.

—The dream won't break Ella,
the dream won't break—

—We're all here Brad. We're
not going to desert you—

—You can't do anything. The
dream won't break. I'm tired from staying awake.
So tired.
And we have to stay awake. Awake. They're waiting for me to sleep.
The ice.
The frost.
The cold.
They wait for you to sleep. And then they take
you—

Ella saw it
clearly. She didn't need to be reminded of the predatory nature of the
elementals. She could recall their attacks with vivid horror. How they waited
for the moment before sleep within the wheel of the dream. How they silently
infiltrated invisible tendrils into the blood and fibre and flesh of your
dreaming body. Transforming you, until you were lost to earth or water or fire
or ice. But now she saw for the first time that the elementals were not a group
of entities at all, not a colony of predatory beings. They were all a single
expression of the same force, the life-creating and life-devouring,
birth-giving and soul-sucking power of dreamside.

And now the
toughened membrane of the dream wouldn't break. Brad had been trapped, to walk
in terror of the sleep within sleep, of being imprisoned for ever in the
ice-sleep. No one could stay awake indefinitely, here as within the waking
world. Brad was merely postponing the inevitable. Even now the frost was
squeezing him, congealing his blood. This was the fate of those who stayed too
long on dreamside.

—This is
how it will be for all of us—
It
was Honora. She seemed
strangely resigned.—
This
is how it will be—

—None of us
will wake! There is no waking!—A tear welled at the corner of Brad's eye. In a
moment his anguish gave way to laughter echoing eerily across the mist-shrouded
lake, jagged laughter which ricocheted back at them, and sliced through the
air. Ella shot a panicked look at Lee.

But Lee was
pointing at something on the edge of the lake. The other three turned, their
eyes following the direction of his finger. Brad's laughter stopped.

—It's
her—He swayed unsteadily.

—I knew it—Ella breathed.

—She's the
one!—Brad shouted.—She's the one who is keeping me here. She's the one who will
keep us all here!—

But they
already knew. She stood twenty feet away from them, in her ill-cut dress, her
skin the colour of milk and her eyes like black holes. Only here she looked
stronger, stronger than them. They all knew her, and they were all afraid of
her. They gazed at her stupidly. Her eyes blazed back at them. An aching
loneliness blew from her like an icy wind.

—Speak to
us—Honora approached timidly.—
Please
speak to us—

But
the girl tossed her hair and set foot on the frozen lake, glancing over her
shoulder as if daring them to follow. Honora took a few steps towards her.

—Honora, don't!—It was Lee calling her
back.

—Wait!
Wait and watch!—
This
time it was Ella, unsure whether
to trust the girl; unsure whether their roadside encounter had been a snare set
with treacherous clues.

The
girl paced farther out on to the ice. Honora hesitated at the edge of the
frozen water.

—Don't go!—Lee commanded.

—It's a
trap! She wants you to go out on the ice!—Brad was hysterical.—It's a trick!
You mustn't trust her! Don't trust her! I know who she is!—