by Ben J Henry
In the glass, Gus caught Winter’s reflection in the window on her side of the cabin. The fear in those chestnut eyes was pitiable. Winter was a loose end, a threat. Rainn would have tried to convince her that Jack’s death was the tragic mistake that the police claimed. But there was only one way to silence her now.
Rainn could have pulled the trigger and left the girl in Melissa’s basement. Another murder for his uncle to cover up. Had she taken Winter along for the ride so that Aldous and Morna might decide what to do with her? Or would Gus be the one to choose? How might his loyalty be tested?
‘My uncle’s a policeman,’ he said, catching her gaze in the reflection.
‘I think I’ve seen his car…’
‘He’ll be able to track this boat. There’s nothing to worry about.’
Her nostrils flared and her upper lip curled as fear burned to anger.
‘Oh good. That’s reassuring. I’ll just settle in, try to catch a tan when the sun comes out.’
With their eyes locked in the reflection, Gus did not merely see the ire in Winter’s eyes: he felt it. He was drawn to it as the embers of a fire within were stoked and burned anew. He filled his lungs, taking in the salty, petrol-laced air that stung his nostrils. But the cracks in Winter’s confident façade sent a churning through his gut. Wherever Rainn was taking them, Joe would never find them before they reached the Crows.
‘Vivador,’ said Gus, recalling the name on Winter’s notepad. ‘What did Jack tell you about it?’
From the expression on her face, you would have thought she had found him rifling through her memories.
‘She killed him, didn’t she?’
The boat hit a wave and water sloshed across the floor, soaking through Gus’s jeans and into his underwear.
‘I don’t think so. I think that Jack, and Anna Harrington, were killed by my great-grandparents.’
Winter said nothing. Somehow through the sound of the engine Gus could hear her breathing. And then: ‘Why?’
‘My family were hiding something down that well, and they found it. Everybody who found their secret was written in that book and then killed.’
‘And that’s where she’s taking us? To your great-grandparents?’
‘I think so.’
‘Blackout.’
Silence followed as the pair let the enormity of their predicament press against them in the confined space.
‘So, your relatives murder people and your uncle drags you around the country covering for them? No wonder you’re so angry.’
The curve of a smile lifted the corner of her mouth. He had never raised his voice before her; he had never shown her any sign of anger. Only behind the closed door of his home had his uncle seen it surface. A wave struck the side of the boat and echoed through him, hot and acidic. Was the emotion that he harboured so obvious? Did he wear it on his face like some baroque theatrical mask? Turning from her piercing gaze, he met his own reflection. How freely available our faces are to others, he thought; and yet—without a mirror—they are hidden from ourselves.
He coughed, straining against the cable ties with an unconscious desire to bring a hand to his face. He wanted to rub his eyes or scratch the corner of his chin.
‘You literally threatened to bite me,’ he said.
Winter laughed weakly and her shoulders brushed against his. She raised her head to the metal panels above, to the crack by the pole through which the petrol leaked.
‘Your uncle had better get a move on,’ she said, closing her eyes.
Gus surveyed his prison, small details sharpening as his eyes continued to adjust to what meagre light permeated the clouds. Screw-holes in the wooden planks around the pole appeared recent, and he imagined the table that had been removed to make room for the pair of them. It had been shortly after noon when he drew the chloroform into his lungs; and now, on the brink of nightfall, it must be around seven in the evening. How long had he been on this boat? How many hours would it take this vessel to reach Portugal? Without the pills he was accustomed to, an intense fatigue crept over him. His will faded with the last rays of daylight, and heavy eyelids fell like iron shutters. With a start, he cracked his head against the pole and his eyes snapped open. The moment he had lost consciousness, the collar had delivered an electric shock.
‘Is that so?’ he uttered.
If the collar prevented him from sleeping, then Rainn feared him entering Vivador. This left him one option, though it was not an inviting one.
When Winter opened her eyes, Gus’s reflection was sharp against the black sky: consternation on his parted lips, studying her as if weighing up his options.
‘Don’t look at me like I’m already dead,’ she said.
‘We need to tell Alicia where we are.’
‘I’ll ready my carrier pigeon.’
The young man’s eyes scanned the floor, watching the water slosh left and right. Bubbles in the screw-holes.
‘You’ve got a thing for her, haven’t you?’ she asked.
Gus frowned. ‘She’s my cousin. Or something like that. We share a grandfather.’
Winter opened her mouth and then looked away, confusion playing across her face. More than confused, she was defeated: so little made sense to her now. And this was exactly where he needed her.
Above their heads, footsteps crossed the deck.
‘People used to believe the Earth was flat,’ said Gus. ‘And not the stupid ones. Everyone did. It was a fact: the Earth was flat.’
Winter said nothing.
‘Five hundred years ago, people believed that the Earth was the centre of the universe. It was common knowledge. And those who disagreed were tied to a post and set on fire.’
‘Have you been drinking the petrol?’
‘A hundred and fifty years ago, nobody knew that we evolved from apes. They thought the world was, like, six thousand years old and that every species was created as it is now, right out of the packet.’
‘Unsubscribe,’ said Winter flatly, closing her eyes in an attempt to shut him out.
‘A couple hundred years from now, they will laugh at everything we think we know. Do you get that? Every single thing we think we understand about how this universe works will be a joke. History is just a string of people believing that what they know is true.’
‘So?’
‘So you’re not going to believe what I’m about to tell you.’
Winter yawned. ‘Will it get me off this boat?’
On the deck above, a dog barked. The sound reverberated down the steel pole and into their bodies, making the pair flinch, each savage warning a shock to the heart. Gus spoke between these barks, just louder than the engine, so quietly that Winter had to lean back and press her ear against the pole.
‘I need you to fall asleep, enter a lucid dream, and find Alicia.’
A final bid
Why did you barbecue your phone?
‘Alicia, get back in the car.’
On either side, dark woodland encroached upon the country road, heavy boughs shouldering the black scar that man had laid upon it. Alicia stood between two aspens at the roadside, her arms folded like a petulant child.
‘You kidnapped my brother.’
Her voice was hard yet she sounded younger than her years. Melissa cut the engine and silence flooded the woodland. The headmistress exited her vehicle, closed the door with a soft click, and brushed creases out of her white jacket as if entering a boardroom meeting. She walked around the car to where Alicia waited on loose stones at the edge of the tarmac.
‘And I would do it again if it brought me closer to Ryan.’
She was careful to meet Alicia’s eyes. It was her intention to drive the point home, to present the facts. A black bird emerged from the shadows, swooping over the road and into the trees on the far side.
‘Is that what this is?’ Alicia asked, keeping her voice low and adult. ‘An exchange?’
‘Would it matter?’
Alicia dug a hand into th
e pocket of her jeans as though her phone might materialise if she continued to search for it.
‘I’m calling the police.’
‘If you thought that there was any sense in that, you would not have said it aloud.’
Their heads turned at a light in the distance. A car approached the bend that led to their stretch of the country lane, its full beam scattering through the bushes like torchlight through a colander. Melissa’s gaunt face tightened.
‘Why do you think I’m still alive?’ she whispered.
Alicia knew why her great-grandparents had spared Melissa: she had struck a deal with the Crows. Following Anna’s death, she would take Alicia under her wing, caring for her when her disabled father was unable to. She would invite Alicia into her home and into her confidence, convincing her to hand over the stolen book.
‘If Rainn has Anna’s letters,’ Melissa continued, ‘then she knows that I was trying to help your mother. There are more than cars on these roads tonight, Alicia. They know where I am heading and if they find me before I get there…’
The car turned the corner and its headlights struck the surrounding trees. Alicia expected heavy shadows to splinter into thousands of feathers: crows bursting from the boughs. But the branches were as bare as the pines in Vivador. Melissa watched the vehicle slow and spoke through clenched teeth.
‘If you want me to take you to your brother, get in the car.’
Alicia had painted Ryan’s image on Melissa’s wall to coerce the woman into taking her to David; if her son was leading Alicia through Vivador, Melissa must know where David was held in the waking world. But Melissa was not working with Ryan. Ryan was working for the Crows and his mother’s name was on their list. The headmistress had not broken speed limits and ran red lights, racing to the Lake District before Alicia came to her senses and called the police. Melissa’s time was up: she was driving to her death. This was a final bid to rescue her son.
The car stopped beside them. A middle-aged man, too tall for the low roof, stooped slightly over the steering wheel and wound down his window. In the back seat, a young girl slept with her head against the door, a tangle of dark ringlets for a pillow. The driver’s friendly face ducked through the window and Melissa tensed as Alicia locked eyes with the stranger.
‘You ladies all right?’
What might he find in her eyes? In her dilated pupils, could he see the fear of a girl disappearing into the night with the woman who had kidnapped her brother? Did the aftershock of her mother’s death linger in bloodshot corners?
Anxiety creased his homely face. Perhaps his boss had failed to recognise his efforts. Perhaps he was late for dinner. Same mind, different problems: so Gus had been taught by his father. Anna had taught Alicia that each of us believe our struggles to be greater than those of others. In children, this is exposed through heated tantrums at ‘unfair’ situations; in adults, self-awareness limits the outbursts, yet the underlying resistance remains the same. We magnify our problems until they fill our minds, consuming our thoughts and disconnecting us from those around us. Battling alone, we are unable to see that each person we encounter is suffering from the same delusion.
Alicia found no connection in those kind eyes. Whatever challenges the stranger faced, his world remained intact. How could he see that hers had ended?
‘There was a spider,’ she replied in a monotone.
Melissa cleared her throat and peered through the window of the Jeep.
‘Oh look, it’s gone.’
The man gazed from one face to the other as if watching an exceptionally poor play. Melissa thanked him for stopping and opened her door as Alicia rounded the bonnet. She had just enough time to click her seatbelt into place before Melissa accelerated towards the bend.
The woodland gave way to a large basin, revealing a sheet of black water under the overcast night sky. The twin beams of their vehicle disturbed the night like a siren through the darkness.
‘Why is your name in the book?’ Alicia asked.
Melissa’s grey eyes narrowed, glaring at the road ahead as she unearthed the past.
‘Your mother had this belief that David could be found through lucid dreaming. Peter was fascinated with dreams—he’d written a paper on it, Dreaming: Pattern and Potential, pillaging the content of dreams in order to map subconscious desires. Anna was struggling. That book she found at her mother’s, it was a comfort. It was something. And if anyone were to believe that lucid dreaming might make the intangible tangible—that bond between mother and son…
‘I slept in my car a lot last summer. Outside Burnflower, waiting. I had nothing to lose. Or so I thought. Nothing else to try. So I experimented with lucid dreaming, as Anna had suggested. I found the well. And I found Ryan.
‘When I saw him there, I thought he was just—I thought I had created him. Subconsciously. He was so far away, on his back, by the trees. Watching clouds cross the sky. I made to approach him, afraid to call his name, and Rainn appeared between us. Her warning was clear: return to Vivador, and they would terminate him.
‘I didn’t know what to do. I never saw him at Burnflower, and started to wonder whether he was in Portugal, with Aldous and Morna. So that’s where I sent Anna. I thought she might find Ryan there. Instead, she returned with that book. With my name in it.
‘I panicked. I spoke to Peter and he told me that Aldous and Morna would spare me if I got it back, the book. If I convinced Anna to return it. But I—they had made a promise to me. I had already given them David, why wouldn’t they give me Ryan?’
She took a hand from the wheel and ran fingers through her scalp, tucking loose strands into the chignon bun and tentatively adjusting the positions of hidden bobby pins. The ashen-blonde hair remained as taut as her skin. Her face was not merely blank like her son’s had been. Ryan’s face was absent of emotion; Melissa’s was devoid, as though drained. All that remained in her eyes were the vestiges of a cold, hard hope, like a gambler who had lost everything and everyone and was playing their life in one final bet.
‘My brother wasn’t enough?’
‘David was bait. It wasn’t your brother they were after. It wasn’t Anna. It was you.’
Leverage
Winter had ridiculed Jack over his interest in lucid dreaming. She had mocked and yawned, threatened his reputation and explained in no uncertain terms that if he bored her with one more account of his dreams, she would take a staple gun to his eyelids and leave him to it. Everybody had weird dreams and nobody wanted to hear about them.
Nobody but the art teacher.
Jack Henson had been funny, charming and attractive in a way that made the younger students stare and Winter’s friends simmer with envy. When Anna Harrington had chosen dreaming as the stimulus for their summer-term projects, Winter had rolled her eyes as Jack regaled the class with his latest nocturnal adventures, and his peers had listened as though he were recounting sporting victories. She had not rolled her eyes when Mrs Harrington had asked to speak with Jack after class, but she had been surprised that the woman had taken an interest in his childish fantasies.
When he died, one police officer suspected that Jack might have had a cramp in the water. Another informed her that accidental drowning was the third most common accidental death in the world. Winter had not been reassured by this information. She wanted to know why Alicia’s mother had found him in the pool that day, and she wanted to know why nobody was listening to her.
In her role as the new school counsellor, Rainn had pressed Winter to be honest when talking about Jack; Winter had affected a damaged smile, playing the role of the distraught but brave victim of an unkind world. She confided in this stranger: it had been her idea to take a walk in the woods with Jack, and she had opened the door to the shed to see what lay inside. Jack had found the well unfathomably interesting, trying to convince her that there was a unicorn skull at the bottom. The idiot. And then he dreamed of the well, and thought that he had woken up.
‘He wouldn’t s
hut up about how real it was.’
‘False awakenings are a common sign of psychosis.’
Though Rainn had pretended not to believe her, she had asked to see the well. Finally—unlike the teachers; unlike the police officers; unlike her busy mother—someone was listening to her. And Rainn understood: were students to see Winter frequent the counsellor’s office at school, it would spread like lice through a kindergarten. Winter had not hesitated when Rainn invited her over on a Sunday afternoon. Her stubborn belief that Anna was responsible had landed her in captivity.
What to believe now? Had her boyfriend travelled down that well in a lucid dream and found another realm? Could she blur the lines that she had drawn between fantasy and reality, the lines that separate unicorns from horses, dragons from lizards and magic from science? And, if she could believe in the world down the well, was she responsible for Jack’s death?
If Gus was not as deluded as she would like to believe, then Rainn was taking them to a pair of geriatric murderers. Between the weak beats of a tired heart, she strained to organise her thoughts. Whether Gus was right or wrong, she saw no harm in attempting a lucid dream, and agreed to listen to his instructions. What followed was proving difficult.
Gus yearned to rub his itchy eyeballs with the back of his hand as he waited for Winter to wake. Hours passed and he envied her slumber; each time he drifted off, a sharp shock returned him to reality. Incessantly, droplets of petrol hit the water beside him, forming a glossy sheen. He was staring at a rainbow floating in concentric circles, undisturbed by the rocking of the boat, when Winter finally stirred.
‘Truthfully?’ she answered through a yawn. ‘I fell asleep. You were there. I punched you in the face—I’m sorry, Augustus. The heart wants what it wants.’
Gus took a deep breath and Winter imagined him drawing his hands down his face, though his fingers brushed her belt as he shifted against the pole.
‘Try to stay aware of your surroundings,’ he dragged the pages of Lucid Dreaming: A Beginner’s Guide into focus. ‘If you hold on to where you are, consciously aware while your body enters the sleeping state—the rocking of the boat, the petrol dripping—then you’ll enter the dream lucidly.’
