"So
what are your ideas?"
"Me?"
"Exactly.
How long do
you think it's going to be before these dreams, these repeaters turn into
something else?
Something more dangerous."
Lee felt
like a man in a paperweight snowstorm. Everything in his life had been settled
and silenced. Then Ella had arrived, had shaken the glass, and was now watching
him in his blizzard.
"When
push comes to shove," said Ella, "there's only one question. Is it
him? Or is it her?"
“Him, her;
what's the difference? It's happening."
"I
think it's her. I think we'll find that she's responsible."
"Look,
Ella, I'm really not convinced that we should get in touch with the others. It
might not do any good.
Sleeping dogs and all that.
It
might just make things worse.
A whole lot worse.
There
must be something else we can do without running to them."
"We've
been through this once already. It's not a question of running to them. It's a
matter of not running away from them."
Lee
wouldn't have minded running away from all of them, Ella included. He knew
where all this was leading and he didn't like it. Ella had that manic cast to
her eye. She wasn't going to be shifted.
"So
what do we do?" she said.
"You're
the one with all the plans."
"So it
appears. Listen, it's simple. You're going to have to go after one of them; I'm
going to have to go after the other. No, don't look like that. Neither of us
wants to do it, but neither of us wants this thing opened up again either. You
know where it can all lead, and you're just as afraid of that as I am. You also
know that one of the others must be responsible for starting it up again. There
can't be any other explanation. We'll have to track them down and find out
what's going on."
"How
the hell are we going to find them?"
"Just like I found you.
We're going to use a little bit of intelligence and a little bit of insight.
You'll have to take a break from selling washing powder or whatever important
thing it is you do."
"I
can't take time off from work! What will I tell them?"
"Tell
them you're ill! Tell them you're mentally disturbed! That's something like the
truth, isn't it? Our hold on reality is a little tenuous at the moment, isn't
it? What do I care what you tell them?"
"Are
you getting angry with me?"
"I'm
just trying to give you a sense of urgency, though God knows why. This morning
when I phoned you were hardly able to speak."
“I don't
need reminding."
"Lee,
we
could
simply do nothing about it. We
could
just forget it.
Until tomorrow morning, that is, when you're going out of your mind because you
don't know if you're awake or you're dreaming. Until you want to scream, and
then you open your mouth and wake up. Or think you've woken up, so you want to
scream again. Yes, we could do that. Then you could wonder if this conversation
was all a dream."
"You
can see right into my mind, can't you, Ella Innes?"
Ella
softened. "Remember that psychological test the professor gave us? You're
walking through the woods? You see a bear. What do you do? You always go around
it. I always approach it."
"Sometimes to get a mauling."
"That's
life," said Ella. "But sometimes the bear turns into a prince. You
need me here, Lee.
To push you on.
To make you face
up."
"Thanks
all the same but I never had any use for a prince."
"Only for a princess, eh?"
He hated
the way she reasserted her position so easily. She always seemed able to guess
his thoughts. More seriously, she was already in the driving seat. He had
planned not to let that happen.
He looked
at her as she gazed into the grate, her skin reflecting the firelight. Yes, the
years had left their mark here and there. Her face was touched with faint
runes, lines of personal history he wanted to read but couldn't. As for
himself, he had stopped pretending. These few hours with Ella had stripped him
bare. The scaling-over of the years had been uncovered, old feelings made new,
leaving him exposed, inferior, in love with her. How did she
do
that?
He leaned
forward and kissed her neck. He felt her stiffen, but she didn't pull away.
"What
are you doing, Lee?"
"I'm
kissing you."
She turned
around. "Let's not add confusion to a bad situation, eh?"
It seemed
to Lee that he had been, on the contrary, trying to straighten things out. He
said nothing. Ella closed the issue by standing up.
"I'm
very tired. Can we say that it's settled? You go after one of them, I go after
the other? "
Lee
shrugged.
"As of tomorrow?"
"As of tomorrow."
He looked unhappy.
"Dreams
won't wait, Lee."
"No;
they won't, will they?"
"I
think it would be better if I went for her. I can talk with her. You go after
him."
"You
make it sound like a bounty hunt."
"It
won't be as easy as that. Now, show me my room. It's late."
T H R E
E
I have
spread my dreams under
your feet;
Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams
—W. B.
Yeats
She had to move fast to be on
time for the ferry. With about
twenty minutes to
spare she drove the Midget on to the boat at Stranraer, and was glad to get out
to stretch
her legs. After spending the night at Lee's
flat she had driven back to her house in Cumbria, had a second bad night's
sleep before driving hard to catch the boat to Larne.
Slipping
out of the harbour at Stranraer, with the dockside diminishing with each blink,
she felt the sea breeze stir around her and along with it came her first
misgivings about what she was doing, doubts about her Northern Ireland mission.
All her energies had gone into persuading Lee to trust her instincts and follow
her lead. She hadn't thought to stand back and question her convictions.
She thought
about Lee, at his house, wanting to kiss her. She had no illusions about it. It
was an act of desperation. He thought that a renewal of their relationship
would be a way of holding off terror; he wanted to distil from intimacy the
bitter-sweet salve which offers protection.
Lee, stolid
Lee, had lowered his eyes in an attempt to disguise a disappointment that would
have been no more obvious if he had cried out loud and smitten his brow. He was
too gentle to do anything but accept her rejection and retire to his bed, where
he would curl up with his confusion. But in the night, when Ella had felt the
bad dreams thickening around her like storm clouds, she had thought of Lee,
lying asleep and vulnerable in the darkness of his room. So she'd confused him
even further by going to him and slipping into his bed.
Lee had woken up to feel her next to him.
"I'm
cold; go back to sleep." Which was what he did, happily; and for which
Ella was thankful.
In the morning Ella had felt
the muscular warmth of Lee's arms wrapped around her waist, though he slept on.
She could feel his erection becoming hard against the back of her thighs.
Sliding out of his unrestraining arms, she pulled on some clothes and opened
the blinds. She put coffee on to brew and walked out of the flat, leaving the
door open.
Lee was
woken by the telephone. He looked around for Ella. He could smell the fresh
coffee brewing.
"It's me."
"Where are you?"
"A
hundred yards down the street. Thought I'd pull you out of it with the
telephone. We don't want any bad starts to the day."
"You're a life saver, Ella."
"One day you might save mine."
Click.
Lee had showered by the time
Ella returned, clutching a bag of croissants. "It's good," he said.
"I feel more confident this morning. There's a clarity which I haven't
felt for a while.
The smell of the coffee and the croissants.
This is awake."
Lee's
confidence brought a lot of things back to Ella. But if she suspected that it
was neither coffee nor croissants that made Lee feel stronger, she didn't say
anything. Anyway, she had to agree with him. It was true; there was a kind of
sharpness, an extra definition about things today. Outside in the street she
had sensed a crackle in the morning air, and she had been confident that this
morning they would be untroubled by the nightmare procession of false
awakenings.
Experience
told her not to waste hope on this respite. Yet it was in that morning's spirit
of optimism that they had drawn up their campaign to contact the others. They
had already agreed that it should be Ella who would go to Northern Ireland.
Which was how she came to be standing out on deck on the ferry to Lame.
It was the last day of February, too cold to
spend more than a few minutes outside, too cold altogether for most people,
which left her with the deck to herself. Ella loved it, huddled in her flying
jacket, a bitter wind raking her hair, and the ferry dipping through the spume
of the waves.
But when
the sky darkened to the colour of a bruise, and the sea turned black, her
doubts started to thicken. She knew that the voyage would reawaken the one
thing that she least wanted. The thought sickened her. Then the wind picked up
a foul stench off the water. It was a whiff of corruption; a secret known only
to the sea.
The boat
rose and fell. Over the stern a ragged company of grey-backed gulls wheeled and
dived. But it was neither cruel beaks nor talons, nor the gulls' greedy eyes
that fascinated and terrified Ella as she stared out to sea. It was the
hovering nameless thing that went scavenging and sucking at the wake of her
journey, and in the wake of the bad dreams that would come to threaten them
all.
FOUR
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
—Wordsworth
This wasn't what he had wanted at
all, scuttling around trying
to
track someone
down without knowing if he was dead or alive, emigrated, gaoled, dropped out,
socially elevated or just erased from the face of the earth; trying to find a
character whose company he couldn't abide and who under normal circumstances he
would cross vast deserts to avoid.
Brad Cousins. Where the hell are you now?
The
trail was erratic. Ella had already exercised her powers by obtaining—against
university policy—an original home address and telephone number in Sale,
Manchester. It led to an odd phone call.
"Mr,
Cousins? My name is Lee Peterson. I'm an old ... friend of your son, from
university days. I'm trying to get in touch with him." The line started
crackling. "Do you know where I could get hold of him?"
"Nope."
"No idea?"
"I
don't ask; he
don't
tell." Lee could hear the
man's asthmatic breathing.
"Would
Mrs. Cousins know?"
“
She might; but she'll not tell; she's been dead six
year since."
The line
was beginning to break up.
"Where
was he last time you heard?"
"
Saudi .
.. Germany. .. Yugoslavia. .." He pronounced
this last with a J.
"Can't
you give me an idea?"
At last,
and with an air of crushing disinterest, the man yielded the name PhileCo, a
Midlands pharmaceutical company his son had worked for some time ago. From
PhileCo the unpromising trail led through four drug companies, for which
Cousins had been a sales rep in less than as many years. It ran cold with a
West Country firm called Lytex, where a chatty personnel officer admitted that,
yes, the man had been an employee of the company representing their product to
GPs in the region, but that after a few months of mediocre returns he had
stopped weighing in for work. Lee emerged from the conversation with an address
in Cornwall.
He made
careful preparations, packing a double change of clothes, a set of brushes, a
travel shaver and a gift manicure set. A manicure set? He wondered when he had
become so fastidious.
He took the
train to Plymouth, and spent the journey sipping weak tea and gazing gloomily
at the landscape. In the carriage window he had three or more ears, multiple
eyebrows and chins to spare. He almost liked himself better that way.