Dreamside (16 page)

And it was
how it felt that mattered. Physically it felt like the skin had been peeled
back to expose nerves that sighed at every breath of wind. The mere proximity
or movement of others made teasing waves in the air. Every pore ached with
pleasure.
Yet underneath this sensuous carnival lay
something else.
It was an anxiety, a misgiving; one which they all felt
but to which, curiously, they never referred. This anxiety was always there,
like an unpleasant taste in the mouth, and grew in proportion to the level of
excitement or pleasure they experienced.

Ordinary
and trivial details seemed exciting, and exciting things were overwhelming. So,
when Lee kissed Ella and put his tongue into her mouth, the fabric of the dream
broke, like a bubble rising in the air and bursting soundlessly. And it broke
not just for Lee and Ella but unaccountably for Honora and Brad as well.

It was
against this degree of intensity that the message-passing experiments were
conducted. Competing against the narcotic pleasures of exploring other
dreamside powers, it became a dismal chore. Without the influence of the
professor, interest in these experiments degenerated into a games sequence of
feats and tricks performed only for amusement, such as Lee's discovery of how
to disappear behind the oak tree and reappear immediately somewhere else, like
an actor who could exit stage left and enter stage right. Then they found the
rowing boat drawn up against the shore as if they had conveniently left it.
Floating the boat on the water became an absorbing pastime. When at first the
touch of the boat on the skin of the water had been enough to puncture and end
the dream, it became possible to float the small craft and to clamber into it,
before the dream burst. All of this was enchanting and bewildering, and
altogether more fun as the discipline of scientific observation was neglected.

Autumn
term passed in a goldening and withering of leaves barely noticed by the four
students, whose disdain of studies did not go unnoticed by university
authorities.
But written warnings only became certificates
of bravado in the collective dreamwork enterprise. At Christmas that year they
went home on shortened holidays, returning early to recommence the programme
of dreaming.

Then
came
a disruption to the scheduled program, introduced so naturally that if anyone
was immediately aware of its irregularity they forgot to, or chose not to,
comment on it.
At least not until later.
Somewhere
between the strict
pattern
of the weekly rendezvous a
second meeting quietly inserted itself and became established as if by tacit
agreement. No such additional rendezvous had ever been discussed in waking
time, yet the four arrived at that same lakeside location in no state of
surprise, as if washed back there by cool currents or unnoticed tides. Then
one unofficial rendezvous became two or three, or more, until any regular
pattern or monitored schedule was lost.

The
second disruption was of a more human order. Brad started to look upon Lee and
Ella's amorous dreamside behaviour with a dangerously jealous eye. Honora
meanwhile was determinedly preserving from him the virginity she thought worth
keeping. She had so far managed to resist Brad's playful and charmless advances
as emphatically on dreamside as she did in waking time.

Brad's
seduction line—delivered in the thinkspeak of dream-time, a combination of
thoughts and mouthed utterances into which millions of ambiguities and
misunderstandings could seem to fly— failed to persuade her.—You're the
luckiest girl ever to have lived— he murmured to her on one dreamside
encounter—I mean have your cake and eat it won't you; have the beauty of
knowing what it's like and still being a virgin, it doesn't count on dreamside—

—Oh
yes?—

—Yeah!
 
there's
no sin
on dreamside—

—I
don't know about that. Let's just take the boat on the lake instead—

Brad
didn't regard that as much of an
instead.
At times he took to following
Lee and Ella around, making a crowd of himself even in the vast space of
dreamside. Lee and Ella got as tired of Brad's prurient interests on dreamside
as they would have done in waking time. It wasn't simply a question of finding
a quiet spot out in the woods somewhere, because space and distance didn't
count the same. Brad was just a thought away if he wanted to be, and he often
did, warm on their warmth, breathing on their breath. Until then neither a
cross word nor an unkind thought had passed between them on dreamside, but Ella
this time thoughtspelled it out for Brad.

—Can't
you leave us alone we've got some private experiments to conduct which require
the presence of two people only
—

—Don't
mind me. I'll make notes—

At
which Ella turned and spoke to Brad. Not in the thinkspeak unique to dreamside,
but in clear loud English as she successfully transmitted an old and
unambiguous message: "FUCK OFF, COUSINS!"

Brad
was deeply shocked, as was Lee, at the waves of hard energy that radiated from
the violence of Ella's words. Ella too was surprised and held her hands at her
mouth as if to stop anything else which might want to come out. The very air
around them seemed appalled; but to their surprise the dream absorbed the dull
explosion of Ella's words as if they were shells detonating against the membrane
of its walls, leaving Brad to turn his back and cross some threshold which
would dissolve it all for him anyway.

FOURTEEN

0 God! I
could be bounded in a nutshell

and
count myself a king of infinite
space
—

were
it not that I have bad dreams

—Shakespeare

Was it before Ella
dreamcursed Brad
Cousins,
or
was it
sometime
after his
rupture of the dreamside idyll that events there took a dark turn?

"Something's
not quite right about the place," Ella said to Honora about dreamside.
"Not quite the same as the
real
place, the original place.
Something I can't put my finger on."

"No birds for one."

Ella
instantly knew that Honora was right. No birds for sure, try that out for size;
and therefore no insects either to play on the mirror surface of the lake. But
it wasn't only that, there was something in the substance, the resin of the
place, under the surface of things. It was a constant presence, attendant and
right in front of you, but which only became more elusive the more you tried to
identify it.

What was it?

But no one
could recall exactly when the first
elementals
started to take hold. One
rendezvous ran into another with no sense of chronology to slice them apart, no
sequence of night or day. There was only the dreamed sun that never burned, and
all note-taking discipline had gone.

Now they
were able to sustain and control the dreaming long enough to feel tired by
their efforts, knowing that their energies were sapped by the work of fixing
and holding the dream in place. This fatigue always came as a signal that perhaps
they had stayed too long this time, and in the form of a lapse in control of
events,
a confusion
, a loss of purpose. Then, in one
deep-dreaming fog, Honora laid her head back on the grass under the protection
of that giant oak and closed her eyes.

Shaking her
mass of brown curls from under her she felt the touch of the warm grass and the
exposed knots of tree root on her neck. She could feel the warmth of the fixed
sun on her face. The lapping water spread a deep sense of calm, and she thought
that even within sleep it might be possible to test for another sleep, dream
within lucid dream.

The other
three had moved off somewhere, faded into the periphery of the dream, her dream
or their dream. In the peace around her she heard a drowsy whispering, a rustle
like a breeze in the leaves of the trees but something more intimate, almost a
murmuring coming from the lake or from the tree roots, but soothing, and
whispering unrecognizable, comforting words. She relaxed, letting go
completely. The air was scented with balm and she felt good about the warm
grass and the exposed tree roots touching her white neck like the gently
exploring fingertips of a lover's hands, then intertwining in the spilled
ringlets of her long hair, stroking, winding into her hair, gently pulling her
deeper into the grass, weaving her hair into the grass and the roots of the
tree, pulling it downwards and into the black soil. It was easy just to go with
it, let it play, let it take you down, become part of it, let it become part of
you. Honora heard a tiny splash from the lake far off, and realized what was
happening.

She had to
swim her way back to consciousness. It was a fight. It felt as if she were
actually struggling to pull her hair from the grass and the roots dragging her
down. It became impossible to distinguish between the loom of hair, grass,
root and soil, so perfect a woven fabric had they made in the natural carpet at
the foot of the tree. Honora fought for breath in a rising panic, thrashing
wildly, her heartbeat echoing aloud in the earth from which she tried to tear
loose. At last she felt her hair snapping and her scalp searing as she wrenched
herself upright, screaming, arms flailing, to find Brad, Lee and Ella all
stooped over her.

—Was
it a dream, a nightmare? I mean within this dream, did you close your eyes and
sleep?—

Lee
helped Honora to her feet. They could see wisps of her hair still entangled in
the roots.

For a while
the horror of it shook them, until they dismissed the event as some kind of
nightmare taking place within the wheel of the dream. They were wrong. Their
complacency was further shaken when Lee had a similar experience of his own.

Lee and Ella were out
on the lake, drifting in the small boat, its keel not piercing the still skin
of the water.
While the excitement of being on dreamside
never waned, the exhaustion of consciously sustaining the dream was closing
in.
They lay in the boat, fighting off the second sleep, the surrender
that might take them back, Ella humming softly, Lee dipping a hand in the water
over the side of the boat. The scene was lit by a pallid disk that could have
been the moon but was the unshifting sun burning without energy. Lee sensed a
low breathing from the trees or the water, or maybe from the gentle swell and
fall of his own lungs. Maybe the secret was inside him, so easy was it to be at
peace, to merge with the background, give up, yield and become fluid, like the
stir of water between his fingers. A gradual loss of temperature permeated his
hand, blood pulsed gently at his fingertips, his veins leaking, flesh and blood
dissolving without pain and commingling with the lake water in a sweet
seduction that could take everything.—NOOO!— Lee sat up in the rowing boat and
screamed. His arm was paralyzed. He struggled to lift it from the water, his
muscles refusing to unlock until, gasping with pure terror, he felt his arm
release with a scorching pain and a sound like newspaper tearing.

—What is it? What
happened?—Lee's scream had caught Ella mid-song, and now she sat up in the boat
taking Lee's head in her hands.

—I don't know I don't
know—Lee looked in horror over the side of the boat at the thin eel-like trails
of blood already diffusing into the blue-black water.—I want to get out—

There the dream broke.

They all experienced it
in different ways. For Brad it began with a perspiration that grew into a sweat
which threatened a melting as if he was made of plastic; for Ella the earth,
seeming to want to become part of her, reconstituted her feet as the warm soil.

These lucid nightmares
were more terrifying than anything in ordinary dreaming: for what might happen
if the absorbing process continued to its conclusion? The implications for
waking time were not to be contemplated. So, they guarded themselves. Their dreaming
became circumspect, as they proceeded in fear of another attack.

It was Brad who showed
them how to deal with these
elementals.
He called them together on
dreamside.

—Watch—he said,
bringing them over to the trunk of the oak, and pressing the palm of his hand
against its rough bark. He closed his eyes as they watched. At first nothing
happened. Then his fingernails slowly took on a glaucous colour, changing
slowly to moss-green, which moved imperceptibly down his fingers until the
lines and folds and knuckles of his hand deepened and cracked, and his
fingernails split. Then his hand absorbed the texture of solid bark spreading
across the back of his hand to his wrist, his fingertips transforming into a
stunted branch of the tree itself: gnarled, knotted, living tree:

— Stop it—Honora
whispered.

—Not yet—
The
creeping bark inched up his arm, cracking and resetting
his bones as it went, twisting at a point below his elbow.

—Stop it!—

—Now!—said Brad, and
the metamorphosis stopped dead. His hand was organically joined with the trunk;
the rough bark texture of his limb indistinguishable from the bark of the tree.
But the process had been halted.