by Ben J Henry
At 20:09 on her eighteenth birthday, this flame was a raging fire and the fragile hope a burning desire for the truth. According to that lucid dreaming guide, the more frequently you conduct a reality check while awake, the better the chances of your dreaming mind repeating this pattern. Alicia had been glancing between the clock and the back of her door sporadically for half an hour, having finished sharing a pizza and strained smiles with her father in the living room. Conversation had been stilted, the pair pausing mid-sentence, eyes shooting to the window as each car passed by. Neither had turned on the television. Alicia had not mentioned her mother’s absence, and Rory made no comment when she announced at half past seven that she was off to bed.
‘A tired body and an alert mind,’ said Gus as they strolled up Gardner Road. ‘That’s what you need for a light sleep, prime for…’ two small lines appeared between his dark brows. ‘Why do you want to lucid dream anyway? That wolf was leading you to the shed, right? And we found it.’
‘Right,’ said Alicia. The wolf was a means for her subconscious to remind her what she had forgotten; she had no reason to believe that there were other memories waiting on shadowy shelves. So why was she so eager to return to the cottage in a dream?
Outside her home, Gus had asked if he could come inside. He wanted to check whether his parents were in the book.
‘I’ll let you know,’ Alicia promised with an affirmative nod. ‘As soon as I’ve spoken to her. I—’ she peered through the window to see the empty sofa in the living room. ‘I don’t want to take it out again, and risk my Dad seeing it. Not till she’s back.’
Two lines returned between his brows, but Gus did not argue.
‘Happy Birthday, Alicia.’
‘Happy Birthday, Gus.
It was with a tired body and an alert mind that Alicia climbed under her bedcovers. She lay her head on the pillow and watched the glare of the street light brighten on the ceiling as the remnants of daylight faded. With ears trained on the front door, she considered what Gus had said in the cottage. His parents would never return home. A flurry of guilt and her eyes creased; she could have shown him the book. Rory would have wondered what they were doing, and where they had been—it would have been awkward. But not impossible. She could have checked the list of names while he prepared dinner. The flurry became a dull pang; she could check it now, if she was quiet, but what to look for? She had not asked Gus for their names.
20:17. She rolled onto her side, pulled the plug from its socket in the wall and the digits disappeared. When she closed her eyes, half-formed questions rattled in her skull like a ball across a roulette wheel, spinning indefinitely. A defeated sigh escaped her lips as she opened her eyes and turned to face the green glow at her bedside: 18:18.
It took her a moment to spot the inconsistency.
Allaying the rise of excitement, Alicia focused on her dressing table, where an ornamental stone monkey was draped with the cheap jewellery that she never wore. When she looked back at the clock, the digits were unintelligible: this was a lucid dream. She stepped from the covers and crossed to the door, where the cold brass handle was invigorating in its realism. Knowing that her accelerating heartbeat threatened to destabilise her, she rushed down the corridor.
Alicia reached the top of the stairs and a large crow shot over her shoulder. She turned to watch it flap its wings in mid-air like a hummingbird, shedding black feathers on the carpet. The bird disappeared through her parents’ bedroom doorway and the hammering of Alicia’s heart drew the texture of the pillow to her cheek. In her lucid state, she recalled what Gus had said about spinning on the spot. Feeling the weight of the duvet on her chest, she spun gently in the dream, letting the solid landscape soften and blur. The trick was a success: the weight of the bedding was gone. She had anchored herself in the dream.
Outside, a morning sun peered through the trees, spilling a prism of light on Gardner Road. She crossed the front lawn in bare feet and ran the pad of a forefinger along the rough brick on top of the gatepost. Leaves on the rosebush beside were thick with aphids. With no wolf to guide her, she ventured to her grandmother’s house alone.
The red paint was flaking and the window boxes overgrown: her memory had filled in the gaps. Stepping over the low wall at the back of the property, she heard a donkey’s bray behind her as the wind toyed with the gate. The fallen leaves of silver birches drifted between thistles and Alicia considered the strength of her memory: she could never have sketched this scene so comprehensively had she been asked to recall it, but the details unlocked one after another as she walked through her mind.
Day had fallen inexplicably to night when she left the cover of the trees. A large moon bathed the clearing in a cold light as she strode towards the open door of the small wooden shed. Inside, the stone well was showered with dust motes that drifted through slender moonbeams permeating the ceiling. She had made it through the shed door without waking, completing a challenge that she had set herself unconsciously.
Still under, still lucid. What next? She was about to peer over the moonlit rim when another compulsion seized her and she took three paces back. Decisively, recklessly, she raced forward, leaped into the air and threw herself down the well.
I am awake, Alicia thought as blades of grass brushed her chin. The light of a midday sun was hot on her jeans and glowed a deep red behind her eyelids. She opened her eyes to find herself on a grassy knoll. At the foot of the hill, a lamb tugged at green shoots.
I am asleep, Alicia thought when she turned her head to see the smooth bricks of a well beside her, rising from the summit of the hill. She pulled herself into a sitting position and drew up her knees, studying the marks that the grass had left on her bare arms. She cast her eyes across an eternity of rolling hills: a still shot of a green ocean undulating into the distance.
When her roving eyes returned to the well, a young man was sitting on it. A daisy poked between the toes of his bare feet and a pair of athletic calves disappeared beneath blue denim shorts. The contours of a defined chest were visible beneath his white T-shirt. But it was his eyes that immobilised her: circlets of a glacial blue so sharp that they contradicted the realism of the landscape.
She rose to her feet, spotting a long, sharp dagger on the brick beside him. The roulette wheel spun, expanding with the questions that it generated. It landed on its primary question and she opened her mouth to speak, but the stranger broke the silence in a deep voice that resonated through her bones.
‘Welcome to Vivador.’
Ryan, age 8
On my birthday Dad told Sam about the dollhouse. Mum had told Sam that she was trying to clean it for him but she dropped it on the patio. She did not want Sam to be cross with me. But Dad said I had spoiled Sam’s birthday and it’s only fair that my birthday should be spoiled too. He says that people get so much attention on their birthdays that it goes to their heads.
I could tell that Sam was so mad with me. I thought that he might drop me from the window. When Dad was telling Sam what I had done I could not look in Sam’s eyes, so I looked at the gold letters on Dad’s briefcase: P.S. Lawson. Peter Samuel Lawson. It made me wonder if that’s why Dad likes Sam the most. You can’t choose your children but you can choose your orphans and I think he probably would have chosen Sam instead of me.
Dad says he chose Sam because he has dark hair so it would be easier to tell us apart. I think he was joking because we look very different. His eyes and skin are darker than mine and he is also taller. I felt bad for spoiling both our birthdays, so I drew Sam a picture of all four of us at Burnflower—that’s the name of our house. Sam’s hair was black like Dad’s and mine was gold like Mum’s. I was colouring my eyes when Dad said I should be outside playing like a boy, not drawing in my room like a girl, but I think he just likes it better when he can work upstairs all by himself. Even Mum gets told off when he’s working and she sings while she hoovers the stairs. Sometimes her singing goes to my head and gives me a headache.
&nb
sp; I told Dad that I can’t play cricket with Sam because he’s mad at me for smashing his dollhouse. Dad said that a boy needs friends and that friends should not keep secrets from each other, which actually did not make sense. The only secret I had was the mirror upstairs and I did not want to show Sam where Dad hid the key for me. That’s when I knew my birthday had gone to my head.
I waited until it was dark and this time I was really sure that Dad was not in his study. Then I went downstairs and woke Sam up.
On and off the light flashed, faster and faster until I could not tell whether the bright flashes were coming from the mirror or inside my head.
‘Stop it!’
Sam’s hands were strong against my back and my head hit the metal corner.
On and off, faster and faster—
—darkness.
Mum says that Sam had an epileptic fit. I wish I could remember what happened. I wish I knew if it was me that killed him.
CHAPTER THREE
Glass dagger
Alicia surveyed the foreign landscape. Round and alert, her eyes roved from the patch of woodland visible beyond the crest of a distant hill to the tiny lamb nibbling at the grass by her feet, before returning to the dagger on the rim of the well. The handle of the weapon was white, perhaps ivory; the blade was transparent, crystal or glass. Its brilliant edge glinted in the light of an unseen sun.
Lying awake at night, one ear on the front door, she had contemplated the difference between waking life and a dream. In waking life, one event led to another: cause and effect. If you saw a fish in a store window, you might remember to feed the fish; once home, you would toss pellets of food into the garden pond. In a dream, the mind played connect-the-dots, linking associated thoughts. You might see a fish, remember your fear of drowning, and find yourself in the garden pond, drowning—as a fish. There is no control in a dream, no conscious choices. Imagination plays tag with memory and results in chaos.
Lucid dreams were different. It was not clarity that distinguished them from a regular dream; Alicia had experienced vivid dreams in which every bristling hair of the wolf was visible, every detail from the drop of saliva hanging on its jaws to the bloodstained claws. It was the sense of awareness that differentiated the two: the knowledge that she was lying in her bed while the world around her was a construct of her mind, open to manipulation.
In dreams both common and lucid, the environment was as fragile as smoke, a heartbeat away from vanishing irretrievably. The landscape in which she now stood was unnervingly solid. She raised a hand to her chest, pressed fingers against her vest and felt the acceleration of her beating heart. But the adrenaline pumping through her body did not draw the sensation of the pillow to her cheek; she did not straddle the conscious and unconscious dimensions, walking that tightrope along the impermanence of a lucid dream. The landscape remained as stable as the waking world.
‘Where am I?’
The stranger rose from the rim of the well and spoke in a rehearsed manner: ‘Through lucid dreaming, the conscious element of your self—your spirit, your soul, however you wish to call it—has detached from the physical mind. While your body remains in bed, your soul has entered a space beyond the waking world. Vivador is the immaterial realm, where consciousness can interact in its purest form.’
Alicia’s knees wobbled and she held out her hands, palms down, to steady herself.
‘I’m dreaming.’
The stranger’s eyes were calm as he lifted the dagger from the rim of the well. The glass blade was long and curved, like a ceremonial artefact. He turned the weapon in his hand and offered it to Alicia.
‘Kill the lamb.’
Stepping back instinctively, Alicia bent down and lifted the beast into her bare arms. Its coat was incredibly soft as it struggled against her, its wild eyes searching for the grass at her feet.
‘No,’ she met the stranger’s eyes. The rapid patter of the lamb’s heart pulsed against her shoulder.
‘It’s just a dream,’ he uttered. ‘It’s not real.’
The lamb had given up struggling and bleated nervously, puffing warm air against her earlobe.
‘It would feel real.’
He stepped forward and Alicia raised a palm: ‘Please!’
He nodded and the hint of a smile played across his face. Alicia lowered the animal to the ground and when she raised her eyes the dagger was gone. The stranger joined her at the bottom of the hill and crouched down, gesturing for her to do the same. She did so tentatively, glancing from the rim of the well to the pockets of his denim shorts in search of the weapon.
‘In the physical realm, we are limited by language. Words reduce the world around us to a series of labels insufficient to represent what we see. If I were to describe a rose to you, drawing from every word in existence, the image in your mind could never match the image in mine. I could sketch it, paint it—’ he shook his head, ‘—no tool available could reproduce the rose in my mind’s eye. But here…’
He lowered his eyes to the ground between them. The blades of grass shifted as an infant bud nudged its way to the surface before rising upon a strong and thorny stem to burst into flower. Alicia ran the back of her fingers across a velvet petal. Its irrefutable beauty challenged her belief that this rose was anything but real.
‘In Vivador, you see what I see.’
Betraying his professional demeanor, delight danced in those glacial eyes. She studied the short strands of hair on his head, flecks of cinnamon-brown amid a tawny-gold, and scanned his flawless, symmetrical face. She searched for evidence that she had unconsciously generated these features based on others that she had seen; but she recalled nothing.
‘How did I get here?’
He stood up and faced the well, where the lamb grazed at the long shoots about its base.
‘If I say Red, you say Six.’
Alicia stood and crossed her arms.
‘Red,’ he said.
‘Six,’ said Alicia.
‘That is a link that we now share: a connection in our minds between the colour red and the number six. A conscious pathway, private to us. If I were to say Red to anyone else, there would be no such response.’
He gestured to the top of the hill.
‘This well represents one of these conscious pathways. It is a link between two far greater concepts: Vivador and the waking world. Through this well, you hijacked the conscious pathway of whoever established this link—of one who had found Vivador through a lucid dream.’
Alicia considered her body under the bedcovers and looked down at her projected self: the olive ribbed-knit crop top that she wore around the house on warm days; the blue jeans with a hole on the left knee where she had caught herself against a nail. As her mind had filled in the inconsistencies when she visited her grandmother’s cottage, so had it generated the details of her outfit. And these had been generated subconsciously, like characters in a dream. She scanned the hills that lay between the well and distant woodland, so bare and unremarkable. A blank canvas.
She strolled to the base of the nearest hill and settled her focus on the blades of grass at its crest. Narrowing her eyes, Alicia summoned a deep, meditative concentration. The hilltop trembled and from it erupted the trunk of a tree. The upper half of the trunk split, unfurling like a plastic wrapper over a naked flame. Branches twisted into thick boughs and buds blossomed from their gnarled fingers. The barren tree shivered under an explosion of leaves: a gamut of natural colour ranging from rusty saffron to olive green. Where nothing had stood moments before, a great oak towered above her.
The stranger climbed the hill, stepping beneath the canopy of the tree to place a palm against its trunk. Alicia watched him study her creation. Fine hairs on the back of his neck disappeared beneath his T-shirt. If he was not the product of her subconscious, then who was he?
She blinked and surveyed the landscape, turning on the spot. No dreamlike quality of light, nothing that might differentiate this environment from the waking world.
Except for the words between her ears. While awake, her mind was an inchoate mass of tangled thoughts, a backlog of half-baked, unprocessed ideas, crushed down to make more space like a bin in need of emptying. Here, the space behind her eyes was as clear as the unreal air in her projected lungs.
Jack was here—a reminder, a warning, three words heavy as cinder blocks.
Jack is dead.
‘Who are you and what do you want from me?’ Alicia demanded of the figure standing in the shade of her tree.
‘My name is Ryan. I’m here to take you to your brother.’
Collective nouns
Joe returned to the living room with a tumbler in each hand, both filled just above the crystal pattern inscribed halfway up the glass. He placed the water beside Gus’s pot of pills and settled into a leather armchair by the liquor globe. Resting the glass of whiskey on his knee, he shot furtive glances at the book on the table as though the lightning-struck eye might blink at any moment.
‘Take a pill,’ he urged, nodding to the unopened pot. ‘You’re about to slip off that chair. We’ll talk once you’ve slept.’
‘We’ll talk now,’ Gus said, straightening his back. ‘Tell me what you know about this book.’
‘What do you think it is?’
‘Don’t start that crap—’
‘Augustus.’
Lines of impatience furrowed Joe’s brow from his bushy eyebrows to his bald scalp. Gus had studied the book before Joe returned, and his parents were not in it. Like Alicia, he had keyed dozens of names into the browser on his phone and found a string of sudden deaths: healthy individuals who had fallen from horses in Ireland and cliffs in Portugal, drowned in bathtubs in Wales and riptides off the Cornish coast.
‘It’s a hit list—’ Gus stifled a yawn, ‘—a list of people who are being targeted. One by one.’
