“I don’t know,” he admitted.
Goodwin nodded, put his hand on Seymour’s shoulder. “Some of us in the hotel argue about the Somnambulists, about why they’d agree to spend their short lives dreaming for other people. They don’t get to experience things like the rest of us, don’t get to visit far off places or try new things, fall in or out of love. Sure, they could do these things in a dream, but is it really the same? I spoke to one of Dressler’s men once and he told me that according to their research the Somnambulists have always been like this, even in the waking world. Their dreams so consumed them that eventually the only way they could perceive the outside world was through their dreams. Always one step removed from the immediate, from the here and now. I don’t know. It doesn’t sound like much of a life to me. No wonder they agreed to withdraw into the one place they felt real.”
But that’s not why his parents withdrew. It wasn’t to feel real, because they were real. What they wanted was escape—not from the world, but from him.
His parents abandoned him. They sank into the depths of anger and spite and sneers, slowly wearing away any happiness that lingered, until it was only a memory. Until it was less than a memory. When Seymour tried, he couldn’t recall it ever being different. The memories were nothing, burning flash paper floating on air, consumed instantly and utterly.
Seymour approached the beds, taking care not to touch the humming equipment, the wires and lights. He realized his parents’ arguing voices, so loud before, were now gone, leaving a still emptiness for the hotel’s hum to occupy. Before him were the two sleeping Somnambulists, their faces buried in their pillows. They looked strange, like discarded string puppets waiting for life to be poured into them. The unbearable sadness of seeing them so mortal overtook him; he was witnessing the ineffable transformed into flesh and blood, into the everyday. He reached out to touch his sleeping mother’s cheek, to take his father’s inanimate hand, and as he did so he realized neither of them had any features. Their faces were blank.
Seymour stood disoriented in a lightless room. It was the size of a shed, walled in by glass and surrounded by counters faced with candy. Pine tree air fresheners hung over his head and gave the enclosure a sickening stench that nevertheless could not disguise the gasoline fumes. He spun around but there was no trace of the hotel, no indication he’d been anywhere else. Even Goodwin was gone, leaving Seymour alone in the shuttered gas station, lit only by the head and tail lights moving along Front Street. He felt tired, as though he’d just woken from a fitful sleep; grimy slickness coated his fingers and crept into his bleary eyes. He didn’t understand what happened; it made less sense the longer he thought about it.
In his pocket he found his notepad, not lost at all, and was surprised to discover it was filled with scribbles and half-formed scrawls he had no memory of writing. His phone was there, too, but he could not remember the Ministry’s number.
Seymour tested the lock on the gas station door, then searched frantically for the key. He found it eventually in a small dish behind the cashier’s plexiglass shield, which filled him with relief. He’d escaped whatever insanity he’d been suffering, the terrible somnambulistic dream that had led him unbelievably to a gas station on the other end of the city. Already, the dream was fading, and he was anxious to return home to the warm safety of his own bed. He slid the key into the lock, felt the tumblers click into place, and turned the bolt. The glass door’s lock clapped open and swung aside.
And the dark that met him was fathomlessness and unbroken.
“What the hell?” Seymour said, then turned and found the gas station gone as well. The void stretched over everything, leaving nothing but a single red light, flickering in the distance.
“What’s going on in here?” he asked.
Goodwin’s voice cracked.
“I tried to tell you. Those two Somnambulists are an issue we’re trying to resolve. We just can’t figure out how yet.”
“Do you know who they are? Do you know their names?” Seymour asked, though he already suspected the answer.
“I don’t even think Dressler knows their names. They’re just Somnambulists, they’re all the same. All except Russo. It’s his dream they’re all building on.”
Seymour looked back into the room they’d come from.
“Which one was Russo?”
Goodwin didn’t bother looking.
“I have no idea.”
But didn’t he? Because Seymour had been here before, in this spot, watching the ground beneath him in constant flux, listening to the voices arguing, and he didn’t see how it was possible to not know who Russo was. If he was the primary Somnambulist, the one onto whose dream all others adhered, then what sense did it make to not protect him? Why even bring him to the hotel at all, to the centre of his own dream? And how could he exist in a place he was creating? If he woke and the hotel disappeared where would he go?
“The dreamer inside the dream,” Goodwin said from beneath the red light, dressed in a matching black winter coat with grey fur trim around the collar, and when Seymour looked at him, baffled, Goodwin laughed. Everything was so much colder, so much darker and drabber, that Seymour thought nothing of the snow that dusted the upturned ground and uneven bricks. Goodwin flickered in and out of sight under the unstable glow of the red exit sign. It was as though he might not even be there at all.
And then he wasn’t.
Seymour stood alone in a crumbling room with a small red light in the far corner, illuminating nothing but a twin pair of hospital beds in the middle, the machinery between them inactive. Seymour made his way across the broken chunks of concrete and rock that buckled and sagged toward the beds, toward the two shapes lying there beneath a pair of thin snow-dusted blankets. Seymour’s breath clouded before him but those two shapes did not stir, and he felt out of scale with the world, as though he’d diminished in their presence. Seymour could see only shadows of their hair in the red light, and when he reached forward to peel back the blankets he wondered what he would say if they woke. If he would ask them what happened, how they got there. Seymour took a corner of each blanket and drew them back to reveal the Somnambulists’ faces, only those faces were blank.
He grew more confused the longer he stood next to Goodwin.
“What’s going on in here,” he asked.
Goodwin’s voice cracked.
“I tried to tell you. Those two Somnambulists are an issue we’re trying to resolve. We just can’t figure out how yet.”
“Do you know who they are? Do you know their names?” Seymour asked, though he already knew the answer.
“I don’t even think Dressler knows their names. They’re just Somnambulists, they’re all the same. All except Russo. It’s his dream they’re all building on.”
Seymour looked back through the long series of rooms they’d come from.
“Which one was Russo?”
Goodwin didn’t bother looking.
“How many times do I have to tell you?”
Seymour looked at him, baffled, and Goodwin laughed from beneath the red light, dressed in a matching black winter coat with grey fur trim around the collar. Everything was so frigid that Seymour thought nothing of the inches of snow that blanketed the upturned ground and uneven bricks. Goodwin flickered in and out of sight under the unstable glow of the red exit sign. It was as though he might not even be there at all.
And then he wasn’t.
Seymour stood alone in a crumbling snow-filled room with a small red light in the far corner, faintly illuminating nothing but a single occupied bed in the middle, the machinery beside it inactive.
The air held no warmth as Seymour attempted to cross the broken ground. He’d been here before. He’d been here many times before. Over and over again, a nightmare of continuous waking, a dream inside a dream inside a dream, all leading him forward a step at a time toward some inexorable truth, some understanding that he wasn’t able to grasp. That he’d never been able to grasp, not when
his mother and father refused to see him, not when the Ministry sent him to investigate a hotel he could barely remember. All of it meant something, was a stone in the road leading him here, to this room, in this snow and cold that bit so hard he could no longer feel his hands. At the bottom of the hotel, buried beneath so many dreams, where nothing made sense because a dozen people could not agree on anything. Because even two people could not agree on anything, too distracted by their dreams and their dream’s dreams to find that one place where they could mesh together. All they did was fight and bicker and make snide comments until Seymour felt four-foot tall. Until he shrank even further than that. And their faces became as large as moons and as red as dusk, and he shouted and stomped and cried in hopes they’d see him, that they’d listen to his frail little voice, that they’d acknowledge he was there, that he was real. Because he was. He was real. Real as anyone. Made of flesh and blood and bone. He was real and present and demanded to be seen. Demanded to be heard.
But there was no one to listen. There was only the single hospital bed. There was only the tiny red light. And it read “exit” over and over again as he stood beneath it, the only light left. And under its nascent glow he saw the bed and the twisted lump of blankets upon it. He searched for some sign of who it was hidden in the folds, dreaming and dreaming and dreaming, but there was nothing. Just the rise and fall of someone breathing. The machinery around the bed hummed and lit up, little colored lights flickering on and off and Seymour reached forward to take a corner of the blanket—to do what he had done so many, too many, times before—and slowly peeled it back to reveal the bald pale head beneath. Then pulled further until the sleeper’s full face was revealed. He stared at it a long time, trying unsuccessfully to remember where he’d seen it before.
The Sound of the Sea, Too Close
James Everington
• • ∞ • •
There were kids in the abandoned school again, Jack realised as he approached. He always knew. He paused now at the locked door, keys in his hand, then turned away. Not yet. He walked past the sun-faded sign marked Haffield Primary and down the side of the building. He was looking for smashed windows or other signs of forced entry, although he knew there’d be none. He rounded the corner to the rear of the school, stepped from shade into sunlight; the day already too hot despite the early hour. He heard the sound of waves; he tasted both salt and smoke in the air. He looked straight ahead rather than towards the cliffs as he hurried along the pathway to get round and out of the heat. It wasn’t a big building, as schools went: there were only two classrooms, a central assembly area, a staff room, boiler room, small kitchen. All on one level, pressed down by a low flat roof like a hand pressing down on them from the sky. So Jack thought when he’d been a pupil at Haffield, decades before. There were enough kids in the village then to make it seem a real school.
Having circled the school he reached the main door again, tried not to admit to any nerves—or anger or guilt—before he unlocked it. Maybe he was wrong and the school would be empty. When he put the key in the lock he was surprised to find it was stiff to turn, and his hands flickered with a premonition of arthritis. He’d have to lubricate the lock; the school had only been abandoned a few months but already lack of use meant things were seizing up, falling into disrepair. Which hardly mattered: the building would be knocked down if the sea didn’t claim it first. But for now it was still Council property, for now he was still a Council employee, and they paid him to look after the place. No one would know if he didn’t, but he was responsible, and after all he’d barely leave the house otherwise: his silent mid-terrace house devoid of neighbours either side. And now the kids were appearing, so didn’t he have to check the school each day?
“Hello?” he called as he stepped inside the small waiting area by a shuttered-up reception window. “Just me, the caretaker. Hello?”
Of course, I shouldn’t think of them as ‘kids’, he thought. Like with Kevin—no matter the years gone, he and Mary always spoke about him like he was still a child.
He opened the inner doors into the assembly area, an empty and dim space that took his eyes seconds to adjust to. (The school had shutters on the back windows to protect against the salt in the air, and it was too much hassle to open and close them each visit so Jack left them shut.) Red plastic chairs were stacked against the far wall; most hadn’t been sat on in years. An old clock made a half tick-tock sound on the wall, the second hand jerking forward then back again, frozen at the same point in time.
“Hello?” he called into the room, in case one of them was hiding there. His hearing wasn’t good enough to be certain no one replied. Jack sometimes wondered if his eyes were going the same way, the things he saw.
He did a brief circuit of the room, clenching and unclenching his fists to stop them seizing up. To delay looking round the rest of the school, he fetched his stepladder from the adjacent boiler room, and climbed up to the clock and took it from the wall, silenced it by removing its battery. The ticking sound was replaced by that of the sea—you’d not been able to hear it in this room before, Jack knew. He’d loved that sound as a kid, used it to tempt Mary to the village; to the terraced house just the right size for a family. Now, like the few others left in Haffield, he wished he could block the noise out.
He’d clenched his fists again without realising; the pain as he unfurled them was like penance. It’s not my fault, he thought, didn’t I try and stop things? Think what we gave up, to stop things! Yet still. It was best not to think about it, for all that fear and guilt were the background to all his thoughts, to his every action no matter how mundane. He sighed, and wondered if in doing so he’d covered up a noise from elsewhere in the building. There was no point in delaying further; he turned and walked towards the first classroom. They were normally drawn to one of the classrooms.
When he entered, his eyes were drawn to the back of the room, to see if the far door was already opened. If they’d already got out to the rear of the building, to the bright sunlight and salt smell, he might be too late. But the door was shut. He’d left the blinds drawn the last time he’d been here; sharp blades of light still intruded through the gaps. He couldn’t see anyone present, although the room still gave the impression it might be filled with chattering kids at any moment. Posters and notices still lined the walls; toys and books were stacked neatly on the shelves as if in expectation they’d be taken down and played with again soon. There had been too much leftover stuff in the school for the staff to remove it all on that last day.
Jack moved further into the room, walked around the low tables and short chairs still laid out as if for a lesson. He noticed one chair was overturned; he was certain it hadn’t been yesterday. When he tried to call out again, his voice failed him.
He stepped forward, cursed as he stumbled; he’d not noticed the tub of crayons scattered over the floor. He put his hand out to steady himself, touched a wall marred with old Blu-tac and dusty curls of tape. Only one picture remained: a child’s drawing of a house, a nuclear family outside, a large sun with stick-like rays reaching down to the people, and around their feet the sea, the sea.
Jack swore again as he righted himself; any tumble now and it sent his heart racing.
“That’s a naughty word,” a voice said, and giggled. A figure was sitting at one of the tables near the back door, its form broken by the alternating light and shade from the blind. It was far too big for its surroundings; when it stood it did so clumsily, comically pulling its adult body from the small plastic chair. But Jack didn’t laugh; he felt sick. For although the person looked full grown its movements seemed child-like, and he remembered small sticky hands pulling at him to be lifted up, the trusting grip around his neck.
It hadn’t been until they’d taken Kevin away that they’d told Jack and Mary they wouldn’t be getting another chance. That they’d been struck from the list. The whole of Haffield had, in fact. Mary had screamed and thumped his chest when they left. The last of the m
oors beyond the village had been black with smoke that year, and everyone’s eyes had been tearing up all the time.
The person stepped towards him, still giggling at his ‘fuck’ even as it stumbled in its heeled shoes, as if unused to them. As if playing dress-up. Jack guessed the woman’s age to be about thirty-five: her hair was in a tight bun, and she wore a charcoal-grey trouser suit. Around her neck hung a pass for some corporate office no doubt miles from Haffield. One ear still had a wireless earbud in, the other presumably fallen on her journey from there to here.
She stank of piss and shit.
She stared at him with eyes wide with a hectic imitation (if it was imitation) of child-like excitement familiar to Jack. As if staying up past their bedtime, a treat verging on misbehaviour.
The woman held something in her hand, which she raised and rubbed on her lips, then chewed. Her teeth, her mouth, were stained bright red with a mixture of saliva and crayon.
“Look,” she said, “look.” Her voice pitched high so that it sounded artificial, put on. “Lipstick like Kay-Kay’s.” Her eyes gleamed in the slatted light, darted back and forth as if seeking approval.
In the resulting silence, they both heard the sound of waves. The woman stiffened then clapped both her hands together, the crayon falling to the floor. She turned her head with exaggerated movements left and right looking for the source of the noise, one hand absently scratching at her arse. Her lips smacked together, and more of the frothy red wax dribbled from her mouth, down her suit.
“Bockit spade!” she shouted, darting with alarming speed through the room to the storage units of toys, which she started rummaging through with great excitement. Plastic swords and toy planes and hair brushes cluttered the floor as she let each drop. Jack saw on the table she’d been sitting at an expensive leather handbag.
Shadows & Tall Trees, Volume 8 Page 6
