Dreamside

by Graham Joyce

"Get a grip on reality," he had urged.

  "You've forgotten everything you learned," Ella hissed. "Try telling that to Honora. In reality, in the dream, in the mind," prod­ding her own head for effect with an angry, stiff finger, "you're sure you know the difference?"

  "There's a clear difference. A very clear difference."

  "Is there?"

  Lee had remained awake for hours, staring into the gloomy shadows of the darkened bedroom, looking for very clear differences.

  But it was only when he had the house to himself that he had the space to think things through. He wanted to chart his own course. After all, who was this Ella? Not the same person he knew thirteen years ago, in the days when the desire to believe anything (so long as it was bizarre enough) far outweighed any interest in see­ing things clearly. Lee had heard precious little about what had hap­pened in the intervening period, only that it was X-rated. What was he supposed to make of that? And what was he to think about being rewritten into the script? So much had happened to them; they couldn't possibly be the people they once were.

  But why had it taken only moments to put the clock back, make love on the rug and reopen this obsession with dreaming? The answer to that, he knew, was Ella: it was what Ella wanted. He only ever seemed to figure passively. She blew into his house like a high wind, undressed on his rug and stood over him: she slept in his bed and she made him dream again. Then after that she dragged poor ill Honora all the way over from Ireland to be mad in the house with them.

  Lee began to suspect that it might be Ella, after all, who was in the business of dream resurrection. He strode out to the garden shed and emerged with a stepladder. He brought it indoors and set it up on the landing directly beneath the hatch to the attic. Then he went off in search of a torch.

  Inside the church Father Boyle was watering a vase of irises. Other­wise the church was empty. On a blue wall, painted in golden letter­ing were the words HERE I AM LORD.

  He was a couple of years younger than her, with a freckle face and close-cropped sandy hair. His piercing blue eyes were moist with enthusiasm. Honora had only ever experienced priestly powers vested in men much older. She had never been expected to respect the spiritual authority of someone younger than herself.

  He looked up as he heard the door close. "Come in, Honora; see, I didn't forget you. You know, a funny thing happened last night. I went to sleep and I had a dream, well it was all mixed up; but the thing is, I knew that I was dreaming." He set down his watering can with a bump.

  "At least, that was the only thing that was clear. What do you make of that? Isn't that something like you were saying to me yes­terday? "

  "Something like that, Father." It seemed slightly ridiculous to call this smiling boy "father."

  "Do you want to tell me again? Not as in the confession; I think we dealt with that—as far as I understood it to be a mountain of mortal sins." He seemed to make light of it. "But I got a bit confused about whether or not these sins were actually committed or dreamed about."

  "You're not going to be much clearer whichever way I tell it." Try me.

  She could see that he wanted to help. Not in the ritualized way of the priests she remembered, or at least not just in that manner, but through some more earthly, human contract. He looked even younger than she had at first thought as he leaned towards her solic­itously. Suddenly he said, "Put aside what may be sin or sinning— you're here and I'm here, let's talk it through."

  "You're kind, Father. Here goes." Honora took the priest through the story, leaving out nothing. He listened attentively, nod­ding throughout and stroking his beardless chin. He interrupted her only twice; once to clarify what she had said about the discovery of blood, and then to ask her for some details concerning her attempted suicide.

  "You probably think I need a psychiatrist, not a priest," said Honora.

  "Not at all."

  "Yes you do. You think I'm an hysteric."

  "No. I'll admit I'm baffled, bewildered, confused by what you've told me. It goes beyond my . . . beyond the range of my con­fessional. But I have to believe in your unburdening."

  They were silent for a while. The priest coughed and started uncertainly, "A lot of people, when they want to .. . unburden, can't face the realization of their own sin. They often tell me that they weren't... in possession of themselves at the time. They were drunk, perhaps had taken drugs, or sometimes they tell me they were sleepwalking or in a trance, a daze, a fog; and occasionally they tell me . .."

  "They thought they were dreaming." Honora looked away.

  "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to be so banal."

  "It's not in my head, Father. There are other people who were involved who can tell you; I've already said that. One of them is sit­ting outside in a car waiting for me."

  "The other woman—is she a Catholic?"

  "Ha!"

  "But it was her idea for you to come? Interesting!"

  "The point is that if it was just me, I might believe that I was off my head; but there were a number of others involved. We weren't hallucinating, or drunk, or stoned, and in those days we were all reasonably sane God forgive us, we were just . . . dreaming, dream­ing, I want to say dreaming but there should be another word for what was happening!"

  "I was just trying to fit things into a way of understanding it."

  "Don't try! I've been trying for thirteen years and all it gives you is the shakes before you go to bed at night."

  "Do you believe in the sins of omission as in those of commis­sion?" said the priest.

  "Of course," said Honora, "that is I understand the difference. As for belief, well I don't know where I am with that these days."

  "The sins of commission, the things we have done wrong, belong to the world as it is, as we have made it. The sins of omission, the things we have failed to do, belong to the world as it might have been. Isn't it the same with your dreams? They belong not to this world as it is, but as it might have been."

  "But the miscarriage . .. and I tried to kill myself. That was all real."

  "Honora, perhaps everything is a dream," he leaned his face closer to hers, still smiling, "but a dream in the mind of God.

  "Consider," he said. Heavy spots of rain began to fall, tapping loudly on the roof. Honora made an effort to concentrate. "Consider that the world, the universe, is a dream in the mind of God. When He awakes, it's all over. But maybe it's not a universe, but a multi-verse, what about that? You know, dreams within dreams within dreams, smaller and smaller or larger and larger whichever way you like. Meanwhile, us sinners go about our business in His dream, dreaming ourselves. Here's where it gets complicated. If our dreams are out of our control, that's one thing: and wasn't it Saint Augustine who thanked God that he was not responsible for his own dreams! But if we start to be able to control our dreams, and therefore are able to choose between sinful and righteous acts at this other level, that's another. Only in the multiverse, you would have to make a choice. Which level, I mean. And you would choose Him and His dream."

  "Are you telling me it doesn't matter what happens in the dream world, even if you know what you are doing? That there's no right or wrong in the kind of dream world that I'm telling you about?"

  "I'm telling you that God has placed it beyond the range of our theology," he said, still smiling.

  "Father, has the Church changed at all in the last thirteen years?"

  "Why do you ask that?"

  “Because you don't sound like the priests I used to know in Ireland. I mean, are you sure, about this dreaming thing, that there's nothing . . . demonic?"

  "Is that what they taught you in Ireland?"

  "No. I didn't mean that."

  "Then I wish you hadn't said it." His lovely boyish smile had faded. He went cold on her. "Look, I thought we could better exor­cize . . . pardon me, chase away these dreams of yours by talking it through. If you prefer we could pray and I could give you a penance."

  The priest made this last remark as if he wer
e a village GP offer­ing to prescribe coloured water to another doctor. Honora felt as though she had let him down. "Whatever you think best, Father," she said meekly.

  "Let's kneel together under the statue of Our Lady," he said gently, evidently reconciled to the idea. They went and kneeled together in the shadows of an alcove, under a plastic statue of the Virgin Mary. It frightened Honora a little. It was too realistic, the blue-robed, white-cowled icon hovering over her, one hand raised in doubtful benediction. It seemed to glow slightly in the candlelight of the darkened alcove. She avoided its gaze.

  "Close your eyes," said the priest, "and I want you to think of these dreams. Then I want you to empty your mind of them, and fill it with thoughts of God."

  With Ella and Honora out of the house Lee found it easier to dis­count anything he had ever believed about dreams. When you added it up it didn't amount to so much. These recent disclosures about a dreamside conception and a dreamside birthright ... it was all so far back. At best he wouldn't be prepared to swear that they didn't invent most of it, or, to be more accurate, didn't deceive them­selves into believing things. The point was that they had all wanted to believe in it, badly wanted it. So when you came to check it out, what exactly happened?

  There was the undeniable fact that some kind of out-of-body liaisons were taking place, and at some consciously agreed location which they had come to call dreamside; but the corroboration of this could only ever happen after the event. Maybe the agreements they all reached were not concerned with a secondary plane on which real experiences took place, but were no more than the result of a rough telepathy in the group. Certainly the results achieved in the days when the professor was around would square with this theory. It was only after the death of Professor Burns, when discipline was lost and things started to slip, that the whole experience went haywire.

  As for the four of them, hell they were so wrapped up in their bloody experiments that they hardly spoke to another soul. They were always prepared to support—uncritically—the most outra­geous claims about what could be accomplished. A classic case of isolation sustaining a group delusory system. Was there a real basis for thinking that anything had happened at all? Had they just fired themselves up into a frenzy of delusion?

  He climbed the stepladder and pushed open the trap door to the attic. He switched on the torch and flashed the beam around the unplastered walls. There was something there he wanted, some­thing he'd stored there years before, after dreaming had been for­gotten—or had been pretended to be forgotten . . . Lee's attic had not been disturbed for years. Opening the hatch was like breaking into someone's sleep.

  In the most recent episode of dreaming, when he and Ella had accidentally drifted back to dreamside, they had not found the place where all their previous rendezvous had occurred but somewhere different. This confirmed for him that dreamside was not a real place, but a projection. Sometimes our needs are so strong, he thought, they will stop the sky from falling.

  And now Honora claimed to have left something behind on dreamside. Plainly she was ill.

  Making love on dreamside: what was that all about? He and Ella had been so obsessed with the projection of their relationship on this other level that their real relationship, the one made of blood and tears, had been eclipsed. Perhaps it had all been a way of mak­ing themselves seem more important. Incense and candlelight can only ever transform the cave so far. Then you need help in the fan­tasy game, and they had gone out and called in the heavy artillery.

  Lee crossed the attic floor carefully, stepping from one unboarded joist to another. At the far side was a tea chest draped by an old blanket. A small dust storm billowed up in the beam of the torch as he removed the cover.

  Brad snorting, sweating, turned in a fever somewhere between sleep and stupor, swimming against a tide that pulls him back and back to that dreaded place. His sea of sleep is full of sharks these days and he gulps down mouthfuls of salt water as he swims frenziedly. He woke up shivering and felt a warm patch turning icy on his leg. He'd pissed himself again in his sleep.

  Through the window all he could see was the mist rolling in from the moors. It was 11 a.m., Easter Saturday, and the mist had laid thick trails of moisture over the grass outside and had breathed vaporous patterns on the windows. He was cold. He looked for the tiny cone of blue flame in his single paraffin heater and saw that it had gone out. He buried his head in his hands and allowed himself the luxury of tears.

  Then he remembered Lee Peterson. Or was that all another dream? Another bad dream? He had woken up on the sofa to find Lee standing over him like a boxer who'd just put him on the canvas. Thirteen years older and looking more, gone a bit porky, with hair thinning and face fattening, stiff with respectability, but more than that, looking like someone who had never been capable of dreaming in his life.

  "Wherever you came from, fuck off back there." He said it to the snakes and scorpions of his delusions and it always seemed to do the trick.

  But Peterson had been there in the flesh: he'd left a business card on the mantelpiece. Brad read it and tossed it away in disgust. He couldn't remember the details of their conversation, but he did know what it was about. No doubt Lee had some kind of an angle on the things that were stirring on dreamside; and that bitch Ella Innes was probably mixed up in it somewhere too. Brad leaned against the windowsill and blinked at the squat, derelict cottage across the yard.

  It was shrouded in mist, but someone was looking back at him through one of the broken windows. He had to squint to make it out in the poor visibility, but it was a face he knew. He thought he might race across the yard and grab her by the hair; but he knew that by then she would be gone. She was always gone. The face at the window vanished.

  "Why won't you talk with me?"

  The mist rolled over the yard, muffling all sound. Brad saw a tiny light flicker and then go out in the upper windows of the cottage.

  "Dreamwalkers."

  Sometimes he saw blue and yellow sparks through the windows, and red glowing embers in midair. He'd had dreams about the cot­tage: elementals came up through the earth and into the house, cross­ing over the threshold of dreams and into the realm of waking life, childlike, malignant, massing for an attack, bursting and spilling across the world. Every time he allowed himself to sleep he feared he gave the dreamwalkers more power, more time to marshal their forces, a route across an unguarded bridge from one realm to another. He saw the light flicker again. He pushed his feet into some shoes, grabbed an almost empty bottle of whiskey and rushed out into the yard.

  "Wherever you come from, fuck off back there!" he bellowed, draining his bottle and flinging it at the cottage. It smashed and the light went out. "I know your game. It was me that let you in; it's me can send you back! Back!"

  Lurching back inside, he grabbed the can of paraffin and marched across the yard to the cottage. Hanging from broken hinges, the door was wedged open. He squeezed inside. Bricks, rub­ble and fallen plaster obstructed his progress, and he stumbled and climbed over the debris in darkness, stirring the smell of decompos­ing plaster. There was a wild scuffling in the shadows.

  "Rats, bats and dreamwalkers," he muttered.

  Groping his way, he found the staircase and set foot on the first step. The house reeked of dry rot. He was afraid his weight might send him crashing down to the cellar. At the top a door stood ajar. He pushed and saw broken rafters, and black puddles on the floor­boards; gaping holes to the floor below. He turned to the other door.

  In the second room, windows, ceiling and floorboards were all intact and unbroken. It was tidy, swept, and on its walls someone had hung a poster and a few bleached, twisted shapes of wood as ornament. Opposite the door, huddled in a single sleeping bag and clinging to each other in terror were two young people, boy and girl, sitting with their backs to the wall, their wide eyes like huge silver coins in the grey light.

  "Human form," said Brad from the doorway.

  "We're not hurting anything," said the gi
rl.

  "Dreamwalkers! What's your name? Quick now!"

  "Victoria."

  "Victoria," mimicking her squeaky voice. "No it's not, it's Honora Brennan. What's your name lad?"

  "Keith."

  "No it's not, your name is Brad Cousins. Dreamwalkers!"

  "He's drunk," said the girl.

  "Issat your little girl? Eh? Eh? Is she yours?"

  "What girl?"

  "Don't play with me, son. Is she yours? Dreamwalkers? Little girl eaters?"

  He marched into the room, twisting the top off the paraffin can.

  "Whoever you think we are, we're not!" shouted the youth.

  Brad stopped for a moment and looked at him. Then he shook his head. "I can't take the risk." He started flinging the paraffin around the room.

  "Jesus, is that petrol? Vicky get up!" The two students grabbed their clothes and the sleeping bag and fled naked out of the room. Brad emptied the can before discarding it, struck a match and dropped it on the spilled paraffin. Then he followed them down the stairs and out into the yard, where they were struggling into their jeans. His breath reared in the mist.

  "Stay and watch," Brad invited generously. "Burn her up!"

  But they declined, running down the road as they buttoned their clothes. Brad waved goodbye and turned, with enormous satis­faction, to watch the growing blaze.

  While Honora was inside the church wrestling with the young priest's theology, Ella yawned and stretched and fiddled with the car radio. Something crackled and stuttered through the wavebands, a child-woman's voice, singing:

  And your dreams are like dollar bills

  in the pocket of a gambler

  and they whisper in your ear

  like those good-time girls

  Ella tried to catch a better reception, but the signal drifted out again. She snapped off the radio and was startled to see someone looking at her through the passenger window. It was a girl, stand­ing in the rain a few yards away from the car. Their eyes met. She was pale and thin, not quite into her teens and wearing what looked like left-overs from a church jumble sale. She had a bruised look, the eyes of a kid who has taken a beating for stealing sweets. Ella, soft on street waifs everywhere, instantly felt a surge of pity. Wanting to give the girl something, she reached for her purse and got out of the car.