Green Monkey Dreams (28 page)

The ground lurched suddenly beneath her feet and there was a rumble that sounded as if it came from the depths of the earth.

‘Raven!' Gerhardt cried.

Raven . . .

She stopped, squinting against the butterflies. ‘Signe?'

I . . . cannot hold the gate more than a few moments.
You must take the Valoria through the rift for me.

Raven gasped and felt the butterflies against her lips. ‘But you . . .'

Are too far away. I have barely enough strength to reach you with my mindvoice. I have only a little time left. Too little.
Help my people. Help me.

‘But you said when the gate failed, there would be no way to reopen it. Will I get back before it collapses?'

A brief telling pause. Then:
I have read you
,
Raven. The Searchers were trained to quicken to magic so they could locate the Valoria
,
but your heart quickens to magic naturally. Are you not a Searcher
,
Raven
,
and would you turn aside fearing the risks when the thing you seek lies before you?

A sound rang in Raven's heart like a bell at the centre of her soul. A peal of radiance. A memory of the trembling moment of almost magic that she had felt once as a child. ‘What do I do . . .?'

I will open the rift. All you have to do is step through. Prepare yourself.

The ground shook again.

‘Wait!' She hurried towards Gerhardt, knelt by him. ‘I heard,' he said, struggling to his feet.

‘Come,' she said eagerly, startled to realise she did not want to leave him.

He shook his head. ‘I can't. I . . . I belong here. I have my brother and my work. I am a physicist.'

‘Oh, but Gerhardt. This is magic and . . .' She bit her lip against the other words, for there was no point in saying them now. This is the real world and that is what he wants, she thought sadly.

The ground shook again.

He reached out and took her hand again. That so unexpectedly precious hand. Kissed it. ‘Go. You can save Signe's people and help the Dakini.'

There was a cracking sound and the ground jerked impatiently.

Raven. I cannot hold it much longer. Your friend must . . . get clear.

‘Goodbye,' Gerhardt said. Then he heard a great ripping
sound as if the very fabric of the universe was being rent apart. Raven turned, called to the docile Dakini and, stone raised, stepped forward, flanked by the tigers and a multicoloured veil of butterflies. For a moment, Gerhardt caught sight of a green, verdant land, with a glimmering violet sky,
superimposed over the night and the pool.

Raven turned and looked straight into his eyes. He saw her lips shape his name, and a great surge of longing
dragged at him.

‘Raven!' he cried, and sprinted towards the rift.

Gerhardt wiped the sweat from his brow, turning away from remembering that last moment. There was too much pain in it. How many years had he thought of it, and cursed himself for stumbling, for taking too long to realise that she was the first real magic in his life? If only. The saddest
words in the English language. Too late. Of course.

He had barely escaped with his life. He had been in hospital for months recovering from what the authorities had judged as a bomb explosion. By that time, he could not even find out what had happened to Signe. Maybe she just became dust, the way Raven had envisaged it.

He smiled, and though it might have been bitter, it was not. There was pain in it, and loneliness. But there was hope too, because maybe this story of witchlights would be real. Maybe this time the rumour of magic would yield up a longed-for truth: a place where the skin between the world where Raven now dwelt, and this one, was torn.

Maybe this time.

He stepped down harder on the accelerator.

G
REEN
M
ONKEY
D
REAMS

So
,
you seek the key to the dream of life
,
hafting? Look deep
,
then
,
and accept the reflections of the dreamwindow
,
knowing the dreamer and the dream are indivisible. The visions you see in its many facets rise from you and are of your essence
,
no matter how alien or disconnected they may seem . . .

R
andom is straight and tall, with the sun in his face and shining from his eyes as he looks away to the
horizon.

‘I thought you went away,' Jilia says.

Random gives her his slashing smile and winks as if at a joke. Then, with sudden urgency, he says, ‘Follow me.' He starts up the hill with his long stride, leaving her behind. It takes her a moment to realise he really means to go up, and then she hurries after him. The hill is much steeper than it appears and by the time she gets to the top, she is panting hard. The walk has taken only minutes, yet it is night already. A dark plain is stretching out, anonymous and bare but for a few boulders, and far off there is another hill rising up. Together, the two hills must look from a distance like giant steps, and who knows if there is not another hill beyond the next, and then another.

Random is nowhere to be seen but Jilia notices a hut a little way from the edge of the steppe. She is puzzled that she did not see it at once, for it is quite close and a light shines in the window. She makes her way across the stubbled earth towards it, meaning to ask the inhabitants if they saw which way Random walked.

An old woman opens the door before she has the chance to knock, and gives her a surprised look. ‘Oh, it's you again. You'd better come in, it's nearly time.'

‘I am looking for . . .' Jilia begins.

But the old woman reaches out and pulls her into the hut. ‘Of course, but come in quickly.'

Inside, by a fire, there is a child in a nightshirt and a young woman in a stained apron. The woman looks familiar, and Jilia is puzzled by this, and by the way the old woman appears to recognise her. There is another knock at the door and a big man and three small girls enter the hut, and then a moment later a younger woman comes in with a handsome man who has full red lips. The woman is pregnant and from the way the man holds her arm, he seems to be her husband or perhaps her brother.

People keep arriving and before long the hut is full.

A small child comes to Jilia and holds a hand out to her. A little tarnished key rests in the grubby palm, and Jilia realises the child means her to take it. But a man with a moustache leans between them.

‘My daughter would not answer when I called,' he tells Jilia. ‘I had to come without her, but I can't be blamed.'

There is a vast muffled whirring as if the air outside is full of birds. Everyone in the hut grows silent and expectant, turning to stare at an enormous window Jilia has not noticed before. She sees a vague movement: a greenish flicker and a hairy little hand that flattens itself gently against the glass for a moment.

‘It is nothing, really,' says the man who has spoken of his daughter. ‘You need have no fear of them. They are nothing but winged dreams – illusions trying to intrude where they do not belong.'

‘Why don't you let them in?' Jilia asks, staring at the face pressed at the window, small and wizened with greenish fur. The creature's eyes are as white and soft as peeled grapes. Behind it, there is a milky blur that might be wings.

‘I am sure nothing would happen really. Indeed one does not like to see them striving against the glass like that. It is sickening. But we cannot let ourselves be confused by sentiment. They have to know there are boundaries and limits. There would be chaos if we let them in. No one would know where anything began or ended. Everything
would be blurred.'

Suddenly Jilia remembers Random is out there, and, alarmed, she steps towards the door. The old woman strikes a match to light a candle and the flare of the flame is momentarily blinding . . .

Jilia blinks and finds her mother is looking down at her from the door. ‘I'm sorry I woke you. I heard you call out and I switched the light on because I thought you were awake.'

‘It doesn't matter.' Already the dream is decaying into a few images. The grape eyes at the window, and the little wizened hand fringed at the wrist with greenish fur. Random smiling back at her. The child offering her the tarnished key and that man making excuses about
abandoning his daughter.

She realises suddenly that the old woman who opened
the door to the hut was her dead grandmother.

‘You were having the nightmare again, weren't you?' her
mother says with a slight tone of accusation.

Jilia smoothes the doona with one hand. She does not like talking about the dream to her mother. ‘It's not a
nightmare,' she says at last.

The older woman sighs as if Jilia is being difficult. ‘It's not your fault Random died. You didn't leave him. He went ahead of you and took the wrong trail. It might just as well have been you who took the wrong path and was lost, don't you see that? But I wanted to tell you something strange that happened tonight. I was talking about your nightmares and there was a woman there who has a child who was severely intellectually disabled in an accident, and she says he dreams constantly about monkeys at his window. Winged monkeys! What do you think of that?'

Jilia does not know what to think. She can only wonder why her mother is always trying to put things together like a string of beads. Life is random, Random always said in his slouchy voice, leaving the edge of his wit to show in his
gaze. Only fools try to make a story out of life.

If you didn't look at him, you might think Random was a fool because of the way he dribbled the words out, hardly
moving his lips.

‘Sometimes I think you go out of your way to be irritating,' Jilia's mother says. ‘Now get up and get dressed
because I want you to meet someone.'

‘A doctor?' Jilia asks warily, remembering the child psychologist who thought the dreams were because of Random falling off the cliff in the dark. Of course, no one really knows what happened to him because they never found the body. Sometimes Jilia thinks he is not dead at all, but just lost or wandering somewhere. There are times when she thinks she can hear him calling her.

In the sitting room, there are several people. Some are from her mother's reading group and others are colleagues. One of the women has a child on her knee who reminds Jilia of the child from the dream. It has a very red mouth as if it has been eating a red icy-pole, or smearing its mouth with cherry juice. She cannot tell whether the child is a boy or a girl.

‘Jilia!' her mother cries in a startled way, as if she is surprised to see her daughter living in the same house. Her mother is sitting beside a long limp noodle of a man with round glasses and white hair tied back into a ponytail. ‘This is my daughter, Professor Caleb.'

‘Jilia,' the man says in a wet raspy voice that reminds her of a cat licking her fingers. His glasses catch the light so that Jilia cannot see his eyes beyond them. She sees herself diminished and deformed in them.

‘As I was saying, Professor,' a woman on the couch says pointedly, ‘primitive cultures took their dreams very seriously. They believed they were another level of existence. They would see ours as a poor thin existence by comparison.'

‘Miss Allot specialises in primitive cultures,' Jilia's mother says.

The woman gives both of them an irritated look. ‘There is some evidence that their minds linked at some level in the fact that we find the same dreams in widely diverse cultures . . .'

Jilia begins to fear her mother has mentioned her dream to these people, and that she will soon be asked to recite it. Being woken so suddenly from the dream has made her feel restless and somehow sad because of Random's presence in it. He had seemed so real, and by comparison, reality seems so pale.

‘My research has been focused in a more individual way on the ability to dream, and the reason such an ability exists,' the professor says. ‘I have always been fascinated by the fact that anything we can imagine exists at the level of dreams – do we not fly and pass through objects and have great strength in our dreams? The ability to dream affords us enormous power.'

‘But it is not a real power,' Miss Allot says sharply. ‘It may allow some sort of other level of communication, but that is all.'

‘Is it all? I am less certain of that. I think dreaming holds a power which is yet unknown to us. It brings us to a plain of infinite possibility which might be tapped, if we had the key.'

‘Plain?' Miss Allot says, looking puzzled.

‘I am suggesting that most of the brain is merely a kind of immense storage place for all that we experience. Nothing is ever forgotten. The smell of bread baking in a store reminds us suddenly of a particular day when a friend's grandmother spread jam on her homemade bread for us. Such an insignificant memory, yet out it pops. And if our mind retains this small memory, why not every memory we have ever had – why not every memory that
anyone
has ever had, for are we not born of one another? Who knows that memories are not passed on, just as the ability to breathe is passed on, or the instinct to bear children, and perhaps all memories exist simultaneously in all minds? Or in some vast dark plain to which we all have access only through our unconscious mind . . .'