by Ben J Henry
He delivered the line with a well-honed look of boyish innocence, knowing precisely the reaction it would provoke. And there it was: fear in those bullet-hole eyes as control slipped through his uncle’s iron grip.
‘I asked you to stay away from her,’ the man uttered in a low voice. Sergeant Crow had been relocated from Galway to Surrey the previous month. Gus had congratulated his uncle on rising to a rank of such unprecedented importance that the government was relocating him internationally, from one law enforcement agency to another. Oblivious to the sarcasm, his uncle had mumbled something about being trained as a British police constable, and that the return from Ireland to the UK was inevitable. The final twist in this unconvincing tale was that Joe had chosen to rent the house next door to the one girl in school with whom Gus was forbidden any interaction.
‘You did mention that, Uncle, I remember now. But I don’t think you ever gave me a reason?’ You never give me a reason. Gus swallowed a bubble of irritation and continued in a low tone: ‘How am I supposed to avoid the girl next door when you won’t even tell me why?’
‘This is why,’ said Joe, shaking the book before his nephew’s eyes.
Gus held his breath, leaving a space in which Joe might elaborate on the truncated response. He watched the struggle in his uncle’s eyes: truth filtered into fiction.
‘Her mother—she has funny ideas. She’s—’ He shook his head dismissively, as if it was too great an effort to generate another lie for Gus’s sake. Instead, he flipped the book to read the back cover and sighed.
‘What do you want with this?’
If Joe found that book so interesting, what might he make of the little secret that had fallen from behind Anna Harrington’s portrait? The policeman would likely have something to say about a list of names struck through, which included that of a recently deceased teenager. But whatever conclusions he drew would not be shared with Gus. The boy met his uncle’s gaze. Both kept their secrets and exchanged their lies.
‘You’ve heard of it then? Lucid dreaming? Waking up within the dream, creating whatever takes your fancy. I thought, since you’ll never dance for me, Uncle, I could envisage a glorious stage—an amphitheatre—with you pirouetting under a spotlight in the centre. Wouldn’t that be grand?’
‘You think this is a joke?’
‘A joke? I didn’t think you were familiar with the term.’
Joe said nothing. Gus rubbed his eyes and stared hard at the police officer’s face—a face that would mirror his father’s, had he the dark hair or any semblance of humour.
‘Total control of your dreams, that’s what the book claims. I thought, maybe if I can take control, then whatever you’re so bloody afraid of—’
‘Are you out of your mind?’ Joe raised his voice and Gus’s spine went rigid. ‘What do you think the pills are for?’
The pair looked at the white pot on the bedside box.
‘I don’t need pills,’ Gus uttered sourly. He drew both hands down his face, slowly, as though trying to remove a mask. ‘I need to sleep. Natural sleep. I can’t think straight.’
‘Then go for a run.’
Joe tucked the book under his arm and left the bedroom.
Marigolds
The walls of David’s bedroom were painted as the sea and sky. On a coat of light blue, Alicia and her mother had fixed large amorphous masses of cotton wool. The lowest of these clouds, within reach of grubby fingers, had greyed and balded. At the base of the wall, thick, sweeping strokes of dark blue had been coated with varnish, flowing like waves of glass.
Sitting against the waves, Alicia ran her fingertips over the golden symbol on the cover of the leatherbound book. From a young age she had mimicked her brother as he traced objects to study their texture. Most textures felt the way they looked, such as the coarse sandpaper that their mother used on wooden sculptures, and the dusty, warm cavity after a pool cue has been chalked. Others were surprising: the static electricity on the old television screen at their grandmother’s house; the loose, dry skin of the toads that nestled between rocks surrounding the garden pond. What did David picture when he explored such things with curious fingers and tentative lips?
With the book resting on her thighs, Alicia flicked through the pages. Dozens and dozens of names—how many had she keyed into the internet browser on her phone? Thirty? Fifty? Each name was struck through with a bold line; each person’s death had been unexpected and sudden.
Swallowing down the rising nausea, she turned to the page that she had studied for so long she could see it with her eyes closed. These final eight names were not written in her mother’s handwriting—of that she was sure. The lettering on the time-worn paper was looped and slender, like ancient wisdom set to parchment with a quill, left to dry and sealed with a wax stamp.
Of the six names struck through, she recognised only one: Jack Henson. The line drawn through his name was not in the black ink that bled into the page, but the mark of a blue ballpoint pen. A snake twisted through Alicia’s gut. Her rational mind struggled to generate plausible alternatives to the most sinister conclusion. Perhaps her mother had found the book and decided to conceal it, rather than show this incriminating evidence to the police? Perhaps Winter had placed the book behind the painting when she left her message, in order to frame her teacher? But each of these explanations was a fantasy, born of a mind unwilling to face the truth: Jack Henson was dead and her mother had struck his name from the list.
The page trembled between Alicia’s fingers. On seeing his name, she had chucked the book to the end of the bed and reached for the paintbrush. Surely Gus had spotted his headmistress’s name, but had he recognised Jack’s? Each had waited for the other to comment, complicit in their silence: nothing to see here. As they painted over the invisible word, Gus had caught her staring at the portrait on the floor, her mother’s smile promising that nothing is as serious as the world wants us to believe. Images of Jack choking on chlorinated water had obscured her vision.
In David’s bedroom, Alicia’s phone lay on the carpet with the colourful façade of a sweetshop on the screen. An elderly woman stood in the doorway, hands behind her back and smiling eyes magnified through glasses. Orange flowers hung in baskets either side of the store name: Marigolds. Jack Henson was the last name to be struck through, leaving two on the list: Melody Wilson and Melissa Lawson. Alicia had keyed ‘Melody Wilson’ into the internet browser to find that she was the sole proprietor of a confectionary store in Bristol. Was it jumping to conclusions or was it common sense to assume that this is where her mother had spent the last few days? Through Alicia’s sleep-deprived mind, drifting thoughts darkened like thunderclouds. If her mother was in Bristol, was Melody still alive?
She flung the book on top of her phone and was about to sink her head between her knees when something caught her eye. The corner of a loose sheet poked out from beneath the leather cover. She withdrew a sheet of bleached-white paper that had been tucked in the back of the book and, unfolding the paper, found a sketch in what was unmistakably her mother’s style. In thin charcoal pencil, Anna had drawn a garden shed. No title in the corner, no words on the front or back; an unremarkable structure of wooden planks with no windows and a narrow door.
Alicia had seen this shed before. She stared at the door as though willing it to open, trying to recall why it was familiar. This shed lay at the bottom of a field, possibly at school. She grasped at the corners of memory fragments, but drew none into focus.
Exhausted by curiosity, Alicia dropped the sheet and pressed the heels of her palms to her eyes, willing the darkness to swallow her and the world to disappear. She sat with her elbows against her knees, palms to her eyes, and listened to the empty silence of her broken home.
Minutes later, she withdrew her hands and watched with curiosity as the cotton wool clouds drifted across the sky. She could not remember how she and her mother had managed to make the cotton wool move, and followed the passage of a cloud from behind a poster in the c
orner of the room to the window beside David’s bed.
She stepped up to the open window, which overlooked the garden. In the centre of a well-tended lawn was the pond that she had requested for her eleventh birthday. Gawking at the inch of water at the bottom, she had wondered if fish could swim on their sides.
‘Can’t we fill it up more?’ she had asked as her mother walled the shallow pit with large rocks.
‘Your brother might fall in.’
‘He’d dry off.’
‘Honestly, Alicia. If he fell in, he might drown.’
‘He’d have to lie down flat and try really hard.’
Her mother had laughed and continued building her ramparts.
Overlooking the garden, Alicia saw a sun high in the sky, which was odd given that night had fallen while she and Gus had painted the wall. This peculiarity circled to the forefront of her attention and two thoughts struck her simultaneously: this was a dream; she was aware.
An explosion of clarity—and everything sharpened in the highest definition. Sunlight filtered through the branches of the oak at the far end of the garden, with green leaves that wore spots of russet-brown as they succumbed to the change in season. From the reflection of the hyacinth in the still waters of the pond to the pair of butterflies circling the head of a sunflower, Alicia was stunned by the resplendent lucidity of the dream. Reality was bleak in comparison.
‘You can control your dreams,’ Anna had said with excitement when Alicia asked about her newfound interest in lucid dreaming. ‘You can see anything, Alicia. Go anywhere. You’re limited by imagination alone.’
Alicia could think of only one thing that her mother would want to see in a lucid dream, and the thought both thrilled and terrified her. As a child, she had often dreamed that a wolf stalked her. As this fear intensified, the belief grew and the wolf presented itself. In a dream, what you get is what you see. Standing at the window, Alicia felt the eyes on her back. The garden view blurred as a current of fear assaulted her. What if she turned to find the image of her missing brother—to see that freckled face in perfect clarity—only to wake beside his empty bed? Steeling herself, she faced the room.
It was not David that stood in the bedroom doorway, but a wolf. The beast’s head was lowered to the carpet, hackles raised between broad shoulders, spittle on red gums and fangs bared, bright as the whites of its eyes. The snake twisted in her gut, but the room did not tremble. The dream was lucid and her mind as sharp as the claws that gouged the carpet: this nightmare could do nothing but wake her.
Deflated by her resilience, the wolf loped from the room. Alicia followed. The carpet was soft beneath her feet and the banisters smooth between her fingers as she descended the stairs. A silver tail swished through the open front doorway and it was not until she stepped on the doormat that Alicia realised where the wolf would lead her: to Valmont school. She was seeking the shed along the contours of her memories.
The wolf padded around the corner of Gardner Road as she reached the end of her driveway. The street was empty and, though she knew it was a dream, she could not quell the surge of self-consciousness that had her glancing down at her black top and blue jeans, relieved that her imagination had not left her in underwear. She followed the wolf along the pavement, marvelling at the serrated leaves on a rosebush and paint peeling on a fence-post. She was approaching the row of shops that marked the midway point of her journey to school when the wolf slipped down a path to the right. She picked up her pace, disoriented by the change in direction. This pathway led to the park where she used to play tennis, but she could not recall a shed here.
The dirt path was narrow, bushes encroached on either side and sunlight through the boughs speckled the animal’s back. When they reached the park, the wolf stalked between the tennis court and football field and to a small green on the far side. Crossing the cycle path to this triangle of grass, Alicia understood their destination. At the corner of this green, a solitary cottage nestled in the trees. Anna’s mother, Eloise, had lived there until the day Alicia was born. It had been empty ever since.
Alicia opened the gate in the stone-brick wall at the front of her grandmother’s cottage. She ran her eyes over the weatherworn bricks and down to the marigolds in window boxes that gave the property that quintessential cottage image, like a child’s drawing. She had not visited the cottage in years; it was unlikely that the abandoned house would be in the manicured state that she saw it now. The red door was gleaming in the sun as though newly painted, matching the colour of the tiles on the low roof. The wolf was nowhere to be seen.
The bright orange flowers reminded her of Melody Wilson’s sweetshop, which in turn reminded her of her mother’s hidden book. As this train of thought derailed her concentration, the cottage took on the quality of a gingerbread house. The golden-brown stone was soft and spongy, the stalks of marigolds striped like candy cane. She was losing herself in the dream.
Panic rose within her. Like ink through blotting paper, the acrid emotion tore through the fabric of the dream and she felt the wall of David’s bedroom against her back. She latched her focus to the dream environment: the red front door was gone, replaced by the wood-panelled door of a shed. She reached out and twisted the iron handle, pulling the door open. A wolf howled and darkness engulfed her as the dream ended.
She was lying on the floor of David’s bedroom. The ceiling light dazzled her eyes, bright as the sun. She glanced at the doorway, almost as surprised as she was relieved to find herself alone. Pocketing her phone and tucking the sketch in the back of the book, Alicia walked down the corridor, chased by the snores of her father from the floor below. In her parents’ bedroom, she returned the book to its hiding place and drifted to the window: one last glance to see whether her mother’s car had pulled into the driveway. While her driveway was bare, a police car sat outside the neighbouring property. Waiting.
Gus stepped through his front door wearing a neon-green vest and black shorts. Automatically, he raised his eyes to the neighbouring house and met Alicia’s gaze through the bedroom window. He lifted a hand to wave and the snake curled in her gut. Alicia returned the wave and watched him slip beneath the glow of orange street lamps and sprint into the night.
She released her breath: ‘One hundred…’
Ryan, age 7
I waited until everybody was asleep and I walked past the Leave-It door, where Daddy works. I walked right up to the Locked door and I put the dollhouse on the floor. I lifted the corner of the carpet and picked up the key. That’s where Daddy hides it for me. That was the first time I used the key because I was scared before, but now I had a reason.
The stairs were covered in spiderwebs but they don’t scare me, so I carried the dollhouse up them quietly. I was at the top of the house, where the walls are like under the stairs. There were broken shelves lying sideways and boxes with brown stains that looked like they were wet. There was only one window in the roof, and I stood right under it but only saw the black sky.
The dollhouse was actually very heavy so I put it down in front of the mirror. It wasn’t a mirror like for Mummy’s face and brushing teeth. It was taller than Daddy and when I sat on the floor it was so wide that I could only just touch the edges with my toes. I was pretty tired from carrying the dollhouse up the stairs, so I sat down and looked at the Ryan in the mirror.
I hadn’t seen me that close before and if I looked at my eyes it looked like another Ryan was looking back. Mummy says that my eyes are going to get me in trouble one day, but she says that with a smile so she doesn’t mean jail. Mummy says that I am her special little boy and that is our secret, because Sam does not have a mummy or a daddy. That’s why he lives with us, so that Mummy can teach him.
I wasn’t actually in the top of the house so that I could look at myself in the mirror. I pulled the torch from my pocket and I turned it on. The light went on and off, on and off, as I shone it in the mirror. Just like Mummy showed us in Science, the light reflected off the mirror and bou
nced back. I pushed the dollhouse in front of the mirror so that the light from the torch was shining in the windows. I pretended that there were people inside and the torch was the full moon.
It isn’t exactly fair that Daddy reads to Sam every night. Sam has epilepsy—that’s what makes him special. Daddy never reads to me. He tells me that I should reflect in the mirror instead—that’s why he hides the key for me. But he doesn’t mean I should throw myself against it and bounce back, no sir. He means that I should think about my problems. He says that the Ryan in the mirror will always help me decide what to do with the feelings that are too big for me.
Daddy gave Sam the dollhouse for his birthday. It wasn’t exactly fair because dollhouses are for girls, so I took it from his bedroom when he was sleeping. There are two beds in his bedroom, but I am not allowed to sleep in the other one. Mummy says you never know when there might be another orphan who needs our help.
Dollhouses are for girls, so I couldn’t give it back to Sam. This was my problem, but the Ryan in the mirror had an idea. I walked past the Leave-It door and to my bedroom. I opened my window so that the people inside could look out and see the fields and the trees that go on forever. Then I let go.
There was a terrible smash. I heard Daddy’s voice through the Leave-It door, yelling Mummy’s name—on and off, on and off.
‘Melissa!’
CHAPTER TWO
Happy birthday
When Alicia entered the kitchen to see her father with a fork in each hand and a grin on his face, uplit by the eighteen candles on a birthday cake, she very nearly screamed. She had spent the remainder of the night feverishly attempting to dream of her grandmother’s cottage, certain that beyond that wood-panelled door lurked the memory that would unravel her knotted world. Her efforts yielded little over three hours of sleep and no dreams that she could recall.
When she steadied herself against the back of the chair at the kitchen table and admired the Victoria sponge that her father had managed to bake independently and in secret, she very nearly burst into tears. She blew out the candles and Rory hacked at the cake with a fork.
