Then he stepped forward and walked through the door.
The solidity of the wood gave way. It was like getting into a swimming pool, shifting from one element to another. Then he was on the other side, in Mum and Dad’s room. He turned and looked at the door. He stepped back so that he was in it. He remembered going through the wall during the fish dream. Tucker had seen him, which meant that perhaps Mum would be able to see him, even if he could pass through walls. He went to her bed. He glanced at the digital clock on her bedside table. Two-fifty-one a.m. She was not going to be happy…if he managed to wake her.
She was curled up on her side, her head on one pillow, her arms wrapped tightly around another. He prodded her shoulder. No response. She swayed a little but did not stir.
Then he grasped her shoulder and gave it a shake. Nothing. Then he bent down and whispered in her ear.
“Mum, it’s me, Joe. Please go upstairs and wake me up. Please go upstairs right now and wake me up. Please, Mum, it’s really urgent.”
But she did not move. He sat beside her. He wasn’t sure what to do next. He supposed he could try Ben and Liesel, but he was certain that if he couldn’t wake Mum, they’d be impervious too. Still, he should try.
He went into Ben’s room first. He’d fallen asleep with the light on. The room was really tidy, with work laid out for the next day and a lever arch lying open on his desk, his steady, even handwriting crisscrossing the page, complete with bullet points, numbered items and highlighting for key dates, names and events in three different fluorescent colors. He lay in bed, one foot escaping from the duvet, his book open on his chest.
Joe went over and eased the book from under his hand. At last, he had some effect on a real object. He picked up the bookmark lying on the floor, marked Ben’s page and positioned the book on top of the lever arch. It gave him an idea. He found Ben’s notepad and a pen and scrawled a message. Go and wake up Joe right away. Please. Then he tried waking Ben, but like their mother, he was immune to Joe’s proddings and pokings.
And when Joe walked past the desk, he noticed that his message had faded into invisibility.
There seemed little point in trying to rouse Liesel, but Joe went to her room anyway. She was spread-eagled on her stomach, her loose plait of hair snaking down her back, one arm hanging over her bear. For the first time that Joe could remember, he felt a wave of tenderness for her. He leaned over to stroke her head. She muttered and turned her head away before settling down into a deeper, calmer sleep. There was nothing Joe could do here. He walked back onto the landing.
It seemed all too likely that Eidolon was spying on him and laughing, perhaps maniacally like a hammy villain in a horror movie, but Joe decided it was time for Plan B. He hadn’t yet established what Plan B was, but that would come, he thought, as soon as he began another dream.
He sat back on the stairs where he had entered the house, rested his head against the wall and closed his eyes. When he woke, he was curled up in the hideous four-poster, the bedclothes tangled about his body. He lay there for some minutes, then shook out the sheets and blankets and wriggled about until he was comfortable again. As he closed his eyes, he decided it was time to try Karabashi.
He found himself in a marble hall, spotted by rosettes of sunlight shafting down from the great vaulted dome overhead. All around he could see curved Moorish arches receding into the distance, their pillars striped in gray and red marble.
Beneath the dome spouted a small fountain, sending delicate ripples into a marbled pool. A wiry man with an abundant moustache—a tellak, or bath attendant—signaled to Joe to follow him.
They walked down one of the arched corridors into another domed area. Here, the man gestured to Joe to remove his clothes. Then the tellak wound him in a towel and placed before him some wooden clogs. Joe put them on, and they rattled down another row of arches until they came to a chamber wreathed in steam. In the center was a huge octagonal slab where several men in their towels lay, their clogs in neat pairs at the foot of the steps leading up to the slab. The attendant indicated that Joe too should remove his clogs and lie face down on the slab. Joe complied and lay prone, waited for whatever was meant to happen next. Every pore was absorbing heat, and he felt his limbs loosening and relaxing, his pores opening, his mind emptying. He lost track of time and his bones all seemed to be dissolving, leaving nothing but a puddle of jellied skin on the slab, but the attendant came and led him to another room where men were being pummeled and kneaded like so many loaves of bread being prepared for the oven. The tellak showed Joe to a bench then clicked his fingers. Another small but formidably muscled man appeared. He poured oil on his hands and began gouging his thumbs along Joe’s spine, in and around shoulder joints, lifting his arms and twisting them around, slapping and pounding at Joe’s flesh, molding and squeezing his muscles. He was bent and stretched into different positions. At first he tried to resist, but then he realized that this caused more pain and diminished the pleasure of being released into a normal position once the hold was complete.
Next he stood while an attendant doused him with water and, with long sweeps of the arm, scraped at his skin with a coarse glove. Joe felt as though he was a horse being groomed. Afterward, his skin tingled, and he felt cleaner than he’d ever been in his life. He was allowed one final dousing before being taken to a great pool into which he climbed and sat, his body weightless and limber. He leaned back, propping his head on the edge of the bath, gazing upward at the shafts of sunlight shooting down toward the water. Then the attendant ordered him out, toweled him dry and handed him his clothes. Instead of his own pajamas and singlet, he was given a starched kaftan in heavy white cotton with dozens of white silk embroidered buttons. When he had slipped this on and some baggy white under trousers, he followed the servant to a cool room where there were cushions and small boys operating huge fans. Joe curled up cross-legged, his back against a wall opposite the door. He waited, loose-limbed and relieved to be visible and tangible again.
Karabashi came and stretched out beside Joe. His long fingers were meshed and resting on his stomach. He had the air of a cat that has hunted successfully, slept soundly and stretched thoroughly.
“So, you have found me again.”
Joe nodded. Karabashi smiled and continued. “I have read now of one man who was able to travel through the land of his dreams. This he documented, but whether it is true is impossible to say, for the book claims to be history, but it has several inaccuracies that cast doubt on its reliability.”
“Can you tell me more?”
“I will tell you as much as I am able, but before I do, I must warn you that this individual did not come to a happy end. He was ambitious, he was foolish and he was eventually arrested, tried and executed for treason.”
“Where did he travel to?”
“He claimed he traveled into the past. He claimed he traveled to distant and savage lands, far to the north, far to the west. He noticed certain things—that in some dreams he was visible and in other dreams he was not. In some dreams, he was accompanied by his friends, in other dreams he was alone. He could repeat his dreams and alter them. At times, he could dream what he wished. At other times, he was at the mercy of the dream. He wrote this book in prison, as he was awaiting execution. In it, he said that his physical death would not matter for he would have departed his body by the time they came to kill him. And this was true, for he was found dead the morning of his execution, but still they took his body, beheaded it and threw the remains in separate sacks into separate rivers, for the sultan wished to extinguish the evil that was breeding in this man.”
“What was his name?” asked Joe, but he thought he knew already.
“He had a Greek name.” Karabashi paused. “Eidolon.”
Chapter Sixteen
Know Your Enemy
There had been a certain grim inevitability to Karabashi’s response, Joe thought. Now he needed more information.
“What evil was breeding in him?”
/> “Eidolon had acquired great power. He had become Grand Vizier to the sultan, and he used this position of command purely for personal gain. He took revenge on those he felt had obstructed him. He orchestrated the downfall of anyone he believed was his enemy. He sated his own unpleasant appetites in a hundred different ways, and he had many unpleasant appetites. He enjoyed watching the suffering of others in both body and mind. He wrote of all this, of all the means he had at his disposal in his own world and in that of his dreams to torture anyone he considered a threat and many that he did not consider any threat at all, but were too insignificant for notice. He wrote of all this with pride. You may read it, if you wish to accompany me to the library in the palace.”
Joe agreed, and they went into the streets of Stamboul, climbing until they arrived at an unobtrusive door in a great white wall. Karabashi unlocked it and held it open for Joe.
They went through walled courtyards and along corridors, up some stairs and around corners. Snatches of conversations and songs and wrangles accompanied their passage through the back ways of the great palace. Joe heard the cries of children and the calling of nursemaids, the slap of wet cloth as they passed the steaming laundry, hammering, the sizzle of cooking, gusts of laughter and the gurgle of fountains mingled with women’s giggles. As they neared the library, the sounds died away, apart from the ever-present murmur of water.
The library was a huge, shelved cavern, protected from external light, cool and dim. On the shelves were ancient books bound in tooled leather, some tiny enough to fit into the palm of the hand, others huge tomes that would need more than one man to carry them. There were also scrolls and maps and paintings and all the tools for book-binding—the knives and scissors, needles, thread and stamps, paints, ink, brushes, pens and all the paraphernalia associated with making books. The place smelled of glue and spirit, leather and fresh paper, a heady mix as though all the knowledge contained on the pages of the books created there could be inhaled simply by standing in the center of the room.
A skeletal man who towered over Karabashi approached them. He bowed and indicated that Karabashi should follow him. Joe and the scholar were seated at a table. Then a lamp on a stand was brought over. Only after it had been lit was the book they had come to examine brought to them.
It was very ordinary compared with the rest of the library’s tomes, scrolls and manuscripts. No exquisite miniatures colored with lapis lazuli and gold graced its pages. It was a simply bound volume about the size of a paperback.
Joe picked it up and went immediately to the back of the book and started reading the text. It was several minutes before he looked up at Karabashi and said, “How is it that I can read this? I can’t read Arabic script. But in my dreams, I can speak Turkish and read this script.”
“Do these words have meaning for you?”
“They do.”
Karabashi went to find another book, sat back down again and left Joe to his perusal of Eidolon’s memoirs. The man’s dreams had started as Joe’s had, when he was fourteen, at first random and unmanageable. Eidolon simply stated that he had gained mastery of his dreams, frustratingly failing to describe this process for his readers. His dreams had been full of pneumatic dancing girls and wine drinking before he had turned his attention to the acquisition of money and power. Eidolon was chillingly self-seeking, happily causing the deaths of first his parents and siblings, then his cousins and uncles, allowing him to inherit their possessions, before moving on to the seizure of goods and whole estates belonging to friends and acquaintances. He wrote of betrayals and double-dealing with delight, displaying an insouciant relish in the downfall of his victims.
By and by his tastes darkened and his interests kinked.
He described in loving detail how the people at his mercy writhed and moaned in torment. He devised ever more elaborate and cruel tortures for them, seeming to forget that he was a man inflicting suffering on his fellow men. For Joe, the book was almost impossible to read, and Karabashi turned in concern when he winced and pushed the text away. The fear that he too might be afflicted with the desire to bring pain to other people sickened Joe.
“We read so that we learn. What is it you need to learn from this memoir?”
“How to defeat him. How to avoid becoming like him.”
Karabashi looked at Joe warily. “But he is dead. It is documented.”
“He is not dead. I have met him. He is keeping me prisoner.”
“How can you be here?” The scholar fidgeted uneasily with the clasp of the manuscript he had been reading.
“In much the same way as I have been here before. In my dreams. But I believe I am also a prisoner in his dream.” Joe’s gaze did not waver. “I need your help. I have to defeat this man. He is alive. I don’t know how, perhaps by inhabiting someone else’s body, but however it comes about, he is still alive.”
“You are not the same as he is?” Karabashi half stated, half asked of Joe.
“I am not. I don’t want to do any of these things that he does. He’s vile and revolting. He’s wicked. He deliberately dreamed that his family was killed, so that they really died. I’d never do that. Never.”
“Does that mean you could not dream that he is killed?”
“I don’t think I could. I think I’d have to try to kill him myself, without dreaming it, otherwise what proof would I have that it was true?”
“But if it takes place in a dream, then it will still be a dream. You must discover how his spirit survived his execution.” Karabashi stroked his beard and thought. Then he took Eidolon’s book out of his hands and examined it carefully. He returned it to Joe and said, “Continue reading, if you can bear to. I know when the book was written, and there will be traces of this creature in other histories of the time. Let me find these out and perhaps we will discover enough to help you.”
Karabashi rose. With a swirl of his robes, he went to the bony librarian and was directed to a corner of the library. Joe returned to Eidolon’s boastful, repellent account of his loathsome life. The accounts of dreams dwindled but not the accounts of horrific acts. Then Joe stopped and reread a section. He flicked back through several pages, read them again and began to think.
Any challenge issued by Eidolon would undoubtedly feature the subject’s humiliation. The challenge would be organized in one of three ways—Eidolon would demand the fulfillment of an impossible task, perhaps clearing the Augean stables or sending a camel through a needle’s eye. Except that Joe knew that a needle was another name given to one of the horseshoe-shaped gates which marked the entry into a walled city in the Middle East. Eidolon set riddles, and riddles could be solved.
Alternatively, Eidolon might require Joe to go into unequal combat, to fight a lion equipped only with a net and a short sword or perhaps duel with a fully-trained swordsman. But it occurred to Joe that if he could read Arabic script in this dream, he might be able to fight, even if he were in Eidolon’s dream.
Finally, he might have to seek out some unattainable item—a phoenix or its egg, a dragon’s eye or its hoard, the feathers of a winged horse or the horn of a minotaur. But Joe thought that kind of challenge unlikely as Eidolon would have to send him out of captivity to find whatever item he wanted.
From Eidolon’s memoirs, his favored option seemed to be grossly unequal combat. After all, most of his victims were not warrior material, Joe included. But perhaps, if Eidolon nominated a champion, he too might name someone else to fight on his behalf. Whatever challenge Eidolon picked, however, he was likely to cheat to win it.
Karabashi approached Joe. “I have discovered more about this man. On the night before his execution, he had a visitor. The guards saw the visitor depart. They saw the prisoner before his final night’s sleep. He protested that he was not what he seemed. His hysteria was dismissed as the ravings of a condemned man. When the guard changed, they did not check the prisoner. But by the morning, he was dead.”
“So Eidolon used the visitor. He switched bodies. Is there
any record of the visitor’s identity?”
“There is. The jailer noted the arrival of the executioner. He always visited his victims the night before their death. This particular executioner was extremely effective. His career was long and his pension substantial. He was succeeded by his son, who was equally competent.”
“Eidolon would have enjoyed being an executioner. But it can’t have held his interest for long, not if he’d been the second most important person in the kingdom.” Joe looked at Karabashi. “I wonder if I could switch identities?”
The scholar’s gaze and tone were dry. “I do not propose offering my identity.”
Joe grinned. “Of course not.”
But it gave him enough of an idea to be going on with. He wasn’t sure that he wished to be exiled from his own body, but if that was what it took to fool Eidolon, he was prepared to do it. The next thing he wanted to discover was exactly whose body Eidolon was currently using.
Although Joe thought about taking Eidolon’s memoirs with him, he doubted he would be able to read the text outside his dream, rendering the book useless. Instead, he spent as long as he could be reading and memorizing Eidolon’s traits and twisted plans. But as evening approached, even Karabashi could not keep the librarians from pointedly suggesting that his young friend had spent enough time with his book and that it might be time to leave.
Karabashi led Joe away from the library. They found a deserted courtyard and sat in the shadows as the faltering sun gleamed on the rippling water of a rectangular pool.
Joe bade farewell to the scholar. “I hope we meet again, but if we don’t, thank you very much for all your help.”
Dream Guy Page 15
