How had I come to fall asleep in the first place? I hadn’t meant to. I had been going to stay awake all night, guarding Mia.
Yesterday, after her dream collapsed and I woke with a start, gasping for air, Mia had looked at me indignantly, with her nose only a few inches from mine.
“You woke me,” she complained. “Since when have you been tossing and turning so wildly in your sleep?”
I sat up. The faint light of the streetlamp fell into the room, and everything looked as it ought to look.
All the same, I demanded, “Pinch me!”
“What?”
“I want you to pinch me!” I held my arm out to Mia.
“My pleasure,” she said.
“Ow! Not so hard!” I’d have a big blue bruise there. But thank goodness, I really was awake, and this was real life in Mia’s real room. No tropical sunlight outside, no monkeys screeching.
“Ouch! That’s enough.” Mia had pinched me again.
“That one’s for waking me.” She looked at her alarm clock. “Oh no, we’ll have to get up in half an hour.”
“Do you remember what you were dreaming?”
“Before you woke me thrashing around like that, you mean?” Mia plumped her pillow up again and made herself comfortable. “No, not really. It was all confused stuff, with snakes in it … and you were in it, too, I think.…”
“And Arthur, right?”
“Arthur Hamilton,” repeated Mia, sounding cross. “The guy who has all the girls in my class sighing in chorus at the sight of him? Why would I dream about him? He looks like someone whose baby picture is used to sell diapers. Can we please get a few minutes’ sleep now?”
“Don’t you really remember your dream? The earthquake? Benedict Cumberbatch?”
Mia had closed her eyes again. “I’m sorry if you dreamed of an earthquake. If it happens again, try to keep your elbows under control, okay? And not so much wriggling…” The rest of what she was saying was lost in an indistinct murmur.
“Mia…”
“I want some sleep. You’re getting on my nerves.”
I sighed. “Sorry. But if you dream of Arthur again, then … then you must wake at once, understand?”
Mia just growled. A second later she began snoring quietly.
Henry had said we mustn’t let it prey on our minds, but that was easier said than done. Even if, considered in the light of day, Arthur’s threats were very slightly less terrifying, I knew that he meant them in deadly earnest. And we could do little or nothing to prevent him from carrying them out.
Henry might think differently, but as I saw it, Arthur should be in a psychiatric hospital along with Anabel. Only, how were we to get him sent to one? If we said he’d stolen one of Mia’s gloves and could now control her in her dreams like a puppet, we’d be the ones taken into psychiatric care, not him. The only person who’d believe us would be Dr. Otto Anderson, alias Senator Tod, and he was a psychopath himself.
There was another thing that hadn’t occurred to me until now: even if something happened to Mia, Arthur couldn’t be prosecuted for it. He’d have been lying in bed asleep half a mile away at the time. No one would think he had anything to do with the case.
On the other hand, if Mia did have a terrible accident, that wouldn’t matter much, anyway.
In the morning, Grayson had turned pale with fury when Henry and I told him what had happened in Mia’s dream. His first reaction was a strong wish to charge straight off and knock Arthur down. It took quite a while to make him see how useless that would be—Arthur could still go on sleeping and dreaming, and he’d be even more vengeful.
Apart from which, since last night Arthur seemed to have disappeared from the face of the earth, anyway. He didn’t turn up at school, no one had seen him anywhere else, and if you rang his cell phone, you only got his voice mail. That scared me even more.
“Nothing’s going to happen to Mia,” Henry had repeated about a hundred times. He meant it to be reassuring, but it wasn’t. Everything Arthur had said last night kept going around and around in my head, like a tune that you can’t forget. I can do anything I like with her. Anything! At any time!… Isn’t it weird to think that she could simply get up one night and hang herself in your garden shed?
And I couldn’t think of any solution. Mia and I couldn’t sleep roped together like those poor working elephants in India forever. And how was I to be sure that Mia wouldn’t undo the rope while I was asleep?