The questions mustered like infantry on a plain preparing for battle.
Am I the Dream Master? How does one become a Dream Master? Who had been the guy in America who had died? How had he died? How did the pictures get drawn?
Joe flipped back and surveyed the whole section where he’d been in Eidolon’s Elizabethan world. He reached for a magnifying glass and began to examine each picture, millimeter by millimeter, scrutinizing the draftsmanship and the coloring. The work was painstaking. He leaned back and checked again—then he saw it. The pictures were optical illusions. One was like the picture of a young woman who turns into an old lady if you alter your perspective slightly, but if you looked, first it was Eidolon then it became Joe, dressed in sixteenth century clothes. Another was like an Escher print of white and black birds crossing from night to day, showing the dawn coming over the horizon of Eidolon’s manor house. A third was a portrait of Eidolon made up of fruits and vegetables, like an Arcimboldo painting. In the great blue bowl, the pattern of flowers and stems reformed to become readable script. It said,
He who dreams walks alone by ways no other men can roam
. The next picture showing the bowl was angled differently. Joe’s eyes ached as he deciphered the miniscule script.
Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails.
Then there was a third—
Dreaming is nursed in darkness
.
Joe was conscious of his rising irritation. It was maddening to find these cryptic aphorisms. They could be read in any way. If Eidolon had come across them already, he must have taken them as a sanction, providing him with a license to sow mayhem and reap lives wherever he chose.
He reached for a pen and began to jot down a list of things he wanted to do.
Dream Nell alive.
Dispose of Eidolon.
Discover the identity of the Dream Master.
Under each heading, he wrote down his options.
Dream leaving school again, but this time, stay at the bus stop outside school, then Charlie won’t be able to isolate us.
Dream the attack again, but this time, get in front of Nell so that Charlie doesn’t actually stab her.
Dream that I find her body in the hospital and see if I can wake her up.
The latter didn’t appeal to Joe at all. He’d have to find her in the morgue, and he had some vague idea that she would be undergoing a postmortem and if he tried to rouse her, she’d be all opened up with her internal organs in basins and it would be messy and disgusting. It would make the dismembering of that boar look like a school outing.
Then he moved onto disposing of Eidolon.
Go into a dream as some incredible superhero and attack him there.
But then he’ll just jump through into some other dream.
Track him down in school and fight him there.
No way… I’m not meant to be in school for at least a fortnight, and even if I do get him to attack me, he’d probably get me kicked out.
Find some way to talk to him and work out what his plans are.
Did he manipulate Charlie into attacking us? Did he give him the whiz? Figure it out…how?
Offer him something to leave me alone. Offer him the Lamborghini.
We can’t report it as stolen because it’s not technically a real Lamborghini. Mum would get the insurance money. It doesn’t matter because I can’t drive it anyway.
He had to get rid of Eidolon in this world. That was the only way to stop him from jumping around other worlds and trying to drag Joe into them.
As for discovering the identity of the Dream Master, the only way Joe could see of going about that was to dream more. Which might worry Mum, but if he claimed he was using the pills the doctor had given him and that was what was making him dopey, he might get away with sleeping much of the next fortnight away.
He glanced at the pills he’d dumped on his desk. He picked them up and went into the bathroom. He ran the water, filled a glass and drank it down. One pill would do. Then he crushed the pills to powder in the basin before running the water again and washing them away. Tonight, the last thing he wanted was to be doped out of his dreams. It was time to try to get Nell back.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Ostinato
He closed his eyes and he was back at the bus stop with Liesel and Nell, all three shivering and shrinking from the chill afternoon air, but he did not say anything about walking to the next bus stop. Liesel and Nell talked in a desultory fashion about teachers they both knew, and the shadows lengthened as the bus still failed to come.
“Let’s go to the next bus stop,” said Liesel. “I’m so cold and at least if we walk, we’ll warm up a bit.”
Joe objected but Liesel and Nell set off at a brisk trot and try as he might to get them to turn back, they would not, so he followed protesting, moaning, whining. At the next stop, they sat on the stiff reinforced plastic seats, the cold seeping back into their bones. Then Joe looked up and there was Charlie again, with his mates.
Joe forcibly dragged himself out of the dream and into wakefulness. If Nell died again, perhaps she would be doubly dead or there would be two Nells to save instead of one. Either way, the prospect of holding her again, watching helplessly as blood ebbed along with her breath, was unbearable. It had taken eleven minutes for her to die. The paramedics and police had worked it out. He remembered it was like looking through a rotating telescope. It seemed to have taken no time at all—or an eternity—depending on which end of the lens he was looking through.
He tried again.
This time, he found himself leaving school with Nell and walking up to the primary school to wait for Liesel. She came as before but this time, he tried to provoke her into a fight, then Nell butted in, smoothing things over so by the time they were back at the school bus stop, all was calm again and now, Nell suggested walking to the next stop.
Joe wrenched himself out of sleep again before they’d even set off again for the fifteen-minute walk.
The third time he went back to the peal of the bell and tried to lose Nell before she could accompany him over to Liesel’s academy. But she tracked him down as he was striding toward the primary school. He turned in exasperation and said, “For God’s sake, Nell, don’t come with me. We’re going to be attacked by Charlie Meek, and you’re going to get killed.”
“I know.” She was serene and superior, her favorite attitude. “You can’t change that, Joe. I am dead except for here in your dream. And I will die in your dream just as I did in life.”
“That is no help at all.” Joe dumped his bag. “I’m going to stop right here. Liesel will just have to wait at the school until you have gone.”
“You can’t change this, Joe. You can change other things, but you can’t change this—not by dreaming it and not by living it.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I’m dead. I know the things you aren’t supposed to know yet.”
“But you’re going to tell me.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what I know. Joe. Where I am, there is absolutely nothing. I’m here because of you, but when you wake up, I’m not there. There’s nowhere for me to go. But feel free to ask me anything you like, and I’ll see if I can answer.”
“Can I bring you back to life again?” It was the only question to which Joe really wanted an answer. Nothing else mattered.
“Only if you give up something you need. I don’t understand what that means. I don’t know what you have to give up or how, but that’s what you have to do. What I do know is that if you go and see Karabashi again, he’ll help you.” She shook her head as if clearing it. “It’s weird. Maybe this is how computers are. You’ve fed me data, and I feed you an answer. I don’t feel as if I have any control over what I say or do. My brain doesn’t function anymore.” She reached out and touched him. Her fingers were frozen and slightly blue. She sounded pleasantly amused. “I can’t feel a thing. I wonder how long I’ll stay like this. Maybe you shouldn’t try to dream me back if this is the best you can do.”
It was like having the real Nell but at her most irritating and, with added weirdness, transparent. It was like talking to a life-size Princess Leia hologram. “If I wake up now, you’ll still be dead, even though I’ve left you alive.”
“Yes, because I’m not alive. I’m dead. When you wake up, I won’t exist anymore. When you dream about me again, I’ll come back, but I’ll be like this. Incorporeal. Insubstantial. Nothing. It’s quite amusing for now, but I don’t just want to be a projection of your image of me for the rest of eternity. How’s my mum?”
“I can’t talk about that, Nell. ‘How’s my mum?’ is the sort of question that just requires an ‘oh, doing fine’ response and the last thing she’s doing at the moment is fine. I have to get you back for real.”
“If you don’t do it before they cremate or bury me, I’ll never be able to get back.” She frowned. “That’s so weird, having my tongue taken over like that. By the way, Dolon gave Charlie his ice. Charlie had been taking it before, but he’d stopped for a while. Then Dolon gave him some, and he went and shared it with his lovely pals.”
“If I’d stopped him from taking it, then maybe he wouldn’t have been there at the bus stop.”
“Joe, you’ve got to get over the idea of stopping the actual chain of events that led to me getting stabbed. That won’t work. I can’t explain why it won’t work. It’s just something I know. I was stabbed. Get over it. Move on.”
“Stop talking like some crappy soap, Nell. If you’d had somebody die in your arms, you wouldn’t be saying ‘get over it’ the evening it actually happened. It was traumatic, you know.”
“Well, yes, actually, I do know. I was certainly very traumatized, in fact I traumatized all over the pavement and Liesel’s pink scarf. That’s real trauma for you. You’re the one who’s alive, Joe. Now go and speak to that Karabashi guy and get the rest of the information you need.”
Joe sighed. There was no arguing with Nell. Death had given her a hotline to the planet hyper-smug. He turned away and walked back into wakefulness.
He lay in the dark, digesting what Nell had told him. Nothingness appeared so irrevocable. Nell’s words had seemed to surprise her, so they must have come from somewhere, but that might plausibly be Joe’s own mind. He could be making her say what he wished to hear, filtered through her inimitable, irritating, gloating superiority. When he got her back, that was going to have to stop.
The dark seemed to intensify. He wanted to carry on remembering Nell a little longer, to think of her mobile face, her skin as pale as a white rose, her slanting eyes, the straight brown hair behind which she screened off the more aggravating aspects of her world, the lips that Joe had never actually kissed, although he had thought about being allowed to.
Before he went to Karabashi, he wanted something of Nell’s. He got up, hauled out the golden carpet and lay back, his mind filling with the image of her room, fresh and full of her life, her books, her notebooks, her photographs, her perfume and lip gloss and the bangles she wore hidden under the cuffs of her school uniform.
Once he was there, he stood in the middle of the room as though getting too close to any actual object might jar him awake and back into reality. He turned his dark and heavy eyes on the world she had inhabited only this morning, clothes still dangling on the back of her chair, an unmatched pair of earrings on her dressing table adrift from their butterflies, a list of things to do over the weekend tacked above her desk in her firm, spiky handwriting, as precise and even as the ticking of a metronome, the book she had been reading still lying open, spine upward, pages splayed open on her rumpled bed.
On the bulletin board where she’d pinned her list were photographs of her with her mother and father before the split, with Kieran, with her best friend Emily, who had moved to London two years ago, with her grandmother in Ireland last summer. There was only one of her on her own, gazing across a sand-swept winter beach, breakers foaming in the distance, her hand shading her eyes and her hair whipping away from her face. He touched it, traced the outline of her face. He wanted it, but it would be missed. Mrs. Brennan and Kieran would want to keep that image of Nell near them, surrounded by wind and water, safe forever from stupid boys high on drugs.
He returned to the carpet and carried himself away before he took anything. Everything in the room had been heavy with Nell and to remove something would have been to dilute her. She had been sufficiently diluted for one day.
Besides, once he’d gotten her back, he’d never hear the end of it when she worked out that he’d taken something from her room.
* * * *
Arriving in K
arabashi’s world, he thumped into a starry night in the courtyard where they had last talked at length. He missed the rectangular pool by a handbreadth, but the fringes of the carpet were soaked and he leaped up to flick them out of the water. Karabashi was there on the same marble bench where they had last sat.
“I’ve been waiting for you. How inconvenient it is being unable to summon you.” The scholar was nursing three books as if he feared a thief might run through the courtyard and wrest them away. He beckoned Joe to sit beside him. “I have found extraordinary things in these books—things I could never have imagined. And I have something you will need if you are to defeat this Eidolon.”
Karabashi did not seem to be aware of Nell’s death. Of course, he’d never known Nell, but since Nell had known about him, Joe had rather assumed that the scholar would know about her.
“I didn’t come to you for that. I came because somebody suggested it to me. Someone who has died. She thought you might know of a way for me to get her back.”
“Get her back?” repeated Karabashi. “From where?”
“From nowhere. From death. I have to bring her back to life, I really have to. It’s essential.”
“If she has died, it is too late.”