Neil Gaiman & Caitlin R. Kiernan & Laird Barron (7 page)

“You dreamed of a city,” Hilary said.

“The same one. I told him about it next morning, details of it he hadn’t told me, that were the same in both our dreams. I was watching the sea, the same place as always. Don’t ask me how I knew it was always the same. I knew. One moment I was watching the moon on the water, then I saw it was trembling. The next moment an island rose out of the ocean with a roaring like a waterfall, louder than that, louder than anything I’ve ever heard while awake; I could actually feel my ears bursting. There was a city on the island, all huge greenish blocks with sea and seaweed pouring off them. And the mud was boiling with stranded creatures, panting and bursting. Right in front of me and above me and below me there was a door. Mud was trickling down from it, and I knew that the great pale face I was terrified of was behind the door, getting ready to come out, opening its eyes in the dark. I woke up then, and that was the end of the dreams. Say they were only dreams if you like. You might find it easiest to believe my father and I were sharing them by telepathy.”

“You know perfectly well,” Hilary said, “that I’d find nothing of the sort.”

“No? Then try this,” he said sharply. “At the exhibition I visited today there was a painting of our dream. And not by either of us.”

“So what does that mean?” she cried. “What on earth is that supposed to mean?”

‘Well, a dream I can recall so vividly after all this time is worth a thought. And that painting suggests it’s a good deal more objectively real.”

“So your father read about the island in a story,” she said. “So did you, so did the painter. What else can you possibly be suggesting?”

“Nothing,” he said at last.

“So what were the other strange things you were going to tell me?”

“That’s all,” he said. “Just the painting. Nothing else. Really.” She was looking miserable, a little ashamed. “Don’t you believe me?” he said. “Come here.”

As the sheepskin rug joined their caresses she said “I don’t really need to be psychic for you, do I?”

“No,” he said, probing her ear with his tongue, triggering her ready. Switching off the goose-necked steel lamps as she went, she led him through the flat as if wheeling a basket behind her; they began laughing as a car’s beam shone up from Mercy Hill and seized for a moment on her hand, his handle. They reached the crisp bed and suddenly, urgently, couldn’t prolong their play. She was all around him, working to draw him deeper and out, he was lapped softly, thrusting roughly at her grip on him to urge it to return redoubled. They were rising above everything but each other, gasping. He felt himself rushing to a height, and closed his eyes.

And was falling into a maelstrom of flesh, in a vast almost lightless cave whose roof seemed as far above him as the sky. He had a long way still to fall, and beneath him he could make out the movements of huge bubbles and ropes of flesh, of eyes swelling and splitting the flesh, of gigantic dark green masses climbing sluggishly over one another. “No, Christ no,” he cried, gripped helpless.

He slumped on Hilary. “Oh God,” she said. “What is it now?”

He lay beside her. Above them the ceiling shivered with reflected light. It looked as he felt. He closed his eyes and found dark calm, but couldn’t bear to keep them closed for long. “All right,” he said. “There’s more I haven’t told you. I know you’ve been worried about how I’ve looked lately. I told you it was lack of sleep, and so it is, but it’s because I’ve begun dreaming again. It started about nine months ago, just before I met you, and it’s becoming more frequent, once or twice a week now. Only this time I can never remember what it is, perhaps because I haven’t dreamed for so long. I think it has something to do with the sky, maybe this planet we’ve been hearing about. The last time was this morning, after you went to the library. For some reason I don’t have them when I’m with you.”

“Of course if you want to go back to your place, go ahead,” Hilary said, gazing at the ceiling.

“In one way I don’t,” he said. “That’s just the trouble. Whenever I try to dream I find I don’t want to sleep, as if I’m fighting the dream. But today I’m tired enough just to drift off and have it anyway. I’ve been getting hallucinations all day that I think are coming from the dream. And it feels more urgent, somehow. I’ve got to have it. I knew it was important before, but that painting’s made me sure it’s more than a dream. I wish you could understand this. It’s not easy for me.”

“Suppose I did believe you?” she said. “What on earth would you do then? Stand on the street warning people? Or would you try to sell it to your paper? I don’t want to believe you, how can you think they would?”

“That’s exactly the sort of thing I don’t need to hear,” Ingels said. “I want to talk to my father about it. I think he may be able to help. Maybe you wouldn’t mind not coming with me.”

“I wouldn’t want to,” she said. “You go and have your dream and your chat with your father if you want. But as far as I’m concerned that means you don’t want me.”

Ingels walked to his flat, further up Mercy Hill. Newspapers clung to bushes, flapping; cars hissed through nearby streets, luminous waves. Only the houses stood between him and the sky, their walls seeming low and thin. Even in the pools of lamplight he felt the night gaping overhead.

The building where he lived was silent. The stereo that usually thumped like an electronic heart was quiet. Ingels climbed to the third floor, his footsteps dropping wooden blocks into the silence, nudging him awake. He fumbled in his entrance hall for the coat hook on the back of the door, which wasn’t where Hilary kept hers. Beneath the window in the main room he saw her desk spread with her syndicated cartoon strip—except that when he switched on the light it was his own desk, scattered with television schedules. He peered blearily at the rumpled bed. Around him the room felt and moved like muddy water. He sagged on the bed and was asleep at once.

The darkness drew him out, coaxing him forward, swimming softly through his eyes. A great silent darkness surrounded him. He sailed through it, sleeping yet aware. He sensed energy flowering far out in the darkness, vast soundless explosions that cooled and congealed. He sensed immense weights slowly rolling at the edge of his blindness.

Then he could see, though the darkness persisted almost unchanged. Across its furthest distances a few points of light shone like tiny flaws. He began to sail towards them, faster. They parted and fled to the edge of his vision as he approached. He was rushing between them, towards others that now swooped minutely out of the boundless night, carrying cooler grains of congealed dust around them. They were multiplying, his vision was filling with sprinkled light and its attendant parasites. He was turning, imprinting each silently blazing vista on his mind. His mind felt enormous. He felt it take each pattern of light and store it easily as it returned alert for the next.

It was so long before he came to rest he had no conscious memory of starting out. Somehow the path he’d followed had brought him back to his point of origin. Now he sailed in equilibrium with the entire system of light and dust that surrounded him, boundless. His mind locked on everything he’d seen.

He found that part of his mind had fastened telescopically on details of the worlds he’d passed: cities of globes acrawl with black winged insects; mountains carved or otherwise formed into heads within whose hollow sockets worshippers squirmed; a sea from whose depths rose a jointed arm, reaching miles inland with a filmy web of skin to net itself food. One tiny world in particular seemed to teem with life that was aware of him.

Deep in one of its seas a city slept, and he shared the dreams of its sleepers: of an infancy spent in a vast almost lightless cave, tended by a thin rustling shape so tall its head was lost to sight; of flight to this minute but fecund planet; of dancing hugely and clumsily beneath the light of a fragment they’d torn free of this world and flung into space; of dormancy in the submarine basalt tombs. Dormant, they waited and shared the lives of other similar beings active on the surface; for a moment he was the inhabitant of a black city deserted by its builders, coming alert and groping lazily forth as a pale grub fled along a path between the buildings.

Later, as the active ones on the surface had to hide from the multiplying grubs, those in the submarine city stilled, waiting. Ingels felt their thoughts searching sleepily, ranging the surface, touching and sampling the minds of the grubs, vastly patient and purposeful. He felt the womb of the sea lapping his cell. His huge flesh quivered, anticipating rebirth.

Without warning he was in a room, gazing through a telescope at the sky. He seemed to have been gazing for hours; his eyes burned. He was referring to a chart, adjusting the mounting of the telescope. A pool of light from an oil lamp roved, snatching at books in cases against the walls, spilling over the charts at his feet. Then he was outside the room, hurrying through a darkened theatre; cowls of darkness peered down from the boxes. Outside the theatre he glanced up towards the speckled sky, towards the roof, where he knew one slate hid the upturned telescope. He hurried away through the gas-lit streets, out of Ingels’ dream.

He awoke and knew at once where the theatre was: at the edge of Brichester, where his mind had been tugging him all day.

III

He rose at dawn, feeling purged and refreshed. He washed, shaved, dressed, made himself breakfast. In his lightened state the preamble of his dream seemed not to matter: he’d had his inclination towards the edge of Brichester explained; the rest seemed external to him, perhaps elaborately symbolic. He knew Hilary regarded his dreams as symptoms of disturbance, and perhaps she was right. Maybe, he thought, they all meant the theatre was trying to get up through my mind. A lot of fuss, but that’s what dreams are like. Especially when they’re having to fight their way, no doubt. Can’t wait to see what the theatre means to me.

When he went out the dawn clutched him as if he hadn’t shaken off his dreams. The dull laden light settled about him, ambiguous shapes hurried by. The air felt suffocated by imminence, not keen as the cold should make it. That’ll teach me to get up at cock-crow, he thought. Feels like insomnia. Can’t imagine what they find to crow about. The queues of commuters moved forward like the tickings of doom.

Someone had left a sheet from the telex on his desk. Photographs from the space probe were expected any hour. He wrote his reviews hurriedly, glancing up to dispel a sense that the floor was alive with pale grubs, teeming through the aisles. Must have needed more sleep than I thought. Maybe catch a nap later.

Although his dream had reverted the streets, replacing the electric lamps with gas, he knew exactly where the theatre should be. He hurried along the edge of Lower Brichester, past champing steam-shovels, roaring skeletons of burning houses. He strode straight to the street of his dream.

One side was razed, a jagged strip of brown earth extending cracks into the pavement and into the fields beyond. But the theatre was on the other side. Ingels hurried past the red-brick houses, past the wind-whipped gardens and broken flowers, towards the patched gouge in the road where he knew a gas lamp used to guard the theatre. He stood arrested on it, cars sweeping past, and stared at the houses before him, safe from his glare in their sameness. The theatre was not there.

Only the shout of an overtaking car roused him. He wandered along, feeling sheepish and absurd. He remembered vaguely having walked this way with his parents once, on the way to a picnic. The gas lamp had been standing then; he’d gazed at it and at the theatre, which by then was possessed by a cinema, until they’d coaxed him away. Which explained the dream, the insomnia, everything. And I never used to be convinced by
Citizen Kane.
Rosebud to me too, with knobs on. In fact he’d even mistaken the location of the lamp; there it was, a hundred yards ahead of him. Suddenly he began to run. Already he could see the theatre, now renamed as a furniture warehouse.

He was almost through the double doors and into the first aisle of suites when he realised that he didn’t know what he was going to say. Excuse me, I’d like to look under your rafters. Sorry to bother you, but I believe you have a secret room here. For God’s sake, he said, blushing, hurrying down the steps as a salesman came forward to open the doors for him. I know what the dream was now. I’ve made sure I won’t have it again. Forget the rest.

He threw himself down at his desk. Now sit there and behave. What a piddling reason for falling out with Hilary. At least I can admit that to her. Call her now. He was reaching for the telephone when Bert tramped up, waving Ingels’ review of the astronomical television programme. “I know you’d like to rewrite this,” he said.

“Sorry about that.”

“We’ll call off the men in white this time. Thought you’d gone the same way as this fellow,” Bert said, throwing a cutting on the desk.

“Just lack of sleep,” Ingels said, not looking. “As our Methuselah, tell me something. When the warehouse on Fieldview was a theatre, what was it called?”

“The Variety, you mean?” Bert said, dashing for his phone. “Remind me to tell you about the time I saw Beaumont and Fletcher performing there. Great double act.”

Ingels turned the cutting over, smiling half at Bert, half at himself for the way he had still not let go of his dream. Go on, look through the files in your lunch-hour, he told himself satirically. Bet the Variety never made a headline in its life.

LSD CAUSES ATTEMPTED SUICIDE, said the cutting. American student claims that in LSD “vision” he was told that the planet now passing through our solar system heralded the rising of Atlantis. Threw himself from second-storey window. Insists that the rising of Atlantis means the end of humanity. Says the Atlanteans are ready to awaken. Ingels gazed at the cutting; the sounds of the newspaper surged against his ears like blood. Suddenly he thrust back his chair and ran upstairs, to the morgue of the
Herald
.

Beneath the ceiling pressed low by the roof, a fluorescent tube fluttered and buzzed. Ingels hugged the bound newspapers to his chest, each volume an armful, and hefted them to a table, where they puffed out dust. 1900 was the first that came to hand. The streets would have been gas-lit then. Dust trickled into his nostrils and frowned over him, the phone next to Hilary was mute, his television review plucked at his mind, anxious to be rewritten. Scanning and blinking, he tried to shake them off with his doubts.