FOURTEEN
0 God! I could be bounded in a nutshell
and count myself a king of infinite space—
were it not that I have bad dreams
—Shakespeare
Was it before Ella dreamcursed Brad Cousins,or was it sometime after his rupture of the dreamside idyll that events there took a dark turn?
"Something's not quite right about the place," Ella said to Honora about dreamside. "Not quite the same as the real place, the original place. Something I can't put my finger on."
"No birds for one."
Ella instantly knew that Honora was right. No birds for sure, try that out for size; and therefore no insects either to play on the mirror surface of the lake. But it wasn't only that, there was something in the substance, the resin of the place, under the surface of things. It was a constant presence, attendant and right in front of you, but which only became more elusive the more you tried to identify it.
What was it?
But no one could recall exactly when the first elementals started to take hold. One rendezvous ran into another with no sense of chronology to slice them apart, no sequence of night or day. There was only the dreamed sun that never burned, and all note-taking discipline had gone.
Now they were able to sustain and control the dreaming long enough to feel tired by their efforts, knowing that their energies were sapped by the work of fixing and holding the dream in place. This fatigue always came as a signal that perhaps they had stayed too long this time, and in the form of a lapse in control of events, a confusion, a loss of purpose. Then, in one deep-dreaming fog, Honora laid her head back on the grass under the protection of that giant oak and closed her eyes.
Shaking her mass of brown curls from under her she felt the touch of the warm grass and the exposed knots of tree root on her neck. She could feel the warmth of the fixed sun on her face. The lapping water spread a deep sense of calm, and she thought that even within sleep it might be possible to test for another sleep, dream within lucid dream.
The other three had moved off somewhere, faded into the periphery of the dream, her dream or their dream. In the peace around her she heard a drowsy whispering, a rustle like a breeze in the leaves of the trees but something more intimate, almost a murmuring coming from the lake or from the tree roots, but soothing, and whispering unrecognizable, comforting words. She relaxed, letting go completely. The air was scented with balm and she felt good about the warm grass and the exposed tree roots touching her white neck like the gently exploring fingertips of a lover's hands, then intertwining in the spilled ringlets of her long hair, stroking, winding into her hair, gently pulling her deeper into the grass, weaving her hair into the grass and the roots of the tree, pulling it downwards and into the black soil. It was easy just to go with it, let it play, let it take you down, become part of it, let it become part of you. Honora heard a tiny splash from the lake far off, and realized what was happening.
She had to swim her way back to consciousness. It was a fight. It felt as if she were actually struggling to pull her hair from the grass and the roots dragging her down. It became impossible to distinguish between the loom of hair, grass, root and soil, so perfect a woven fabric had they made in the natural carpet at the foot of the tree. Honora fought for breath in a rising panic, thrashing wildly, her heartbeat echoing aloud in the earth from which she tried to tear loose. At last she felt her hair snapping and her scalp searing as she wrenched herself upright, screaming, arms flailing, to find Brad, Lee and Ella all stooped over her.
—Was it a dream, a nightmare? I mean within this dream, did you close your eyes and sleep?—
Lee helped Honora to her feet. They could see wisps of her hair still entangled in the roots.
For a while the horror of it shook them, until they dismissed the event as some kind of nightmare taking place within the wheel of the dream. They were wrong. Their complacency was further shaken when Lee had a similar experience of his own.
Lee and Ella were out on the lake, drifting in the small boat, its keel not piercing the still skin of the water. While the excitement of being on dreamside never waned, the exhaustion of consciously sustaining the dream was closing in. They lay in the boat, fighting off the second sleep, the surrender that might take them back, Ella humming softly, Lee dipping a hand in the water over the side of the boat. The scene was lit by a pallid disk that could have been the moon but was the unshifting sun burning without energy. Lee sensed a low breathing from the trees or the water, or maybe from the gentle swell and fall of his own lungs. Maybe the secret was inside him, so easy was it to be at peace, to merge with the background, give up, yield and become fluid, like the stir of water between his fingers. A gradual loss of temperature permeated his hand, blood pulsed gently at his fingertips, his veins leaking, flesh and blood dissolving without pain and commingling with the lake water in a sweet seduction that could take everything.—NOOO!— Lee sat up in the rowing boat and screamed. His arm was paralyzed. He struggled to lift it from the water, his muscles refusing to unlock until, gasping with pure terror, he felt his arm release with a scorching pain and a sound like newspaper tearing.
—What is it? What happened?—Lee's scream had caught Ella mid-song, and now she sat up in the boat taking Lee's head in her hands.
—I don't know I don't know—Lee looked in horror over the side of the boat at the thin eel-like trails of blood already diffusing into the blue-black water.—I want to get out—
There the dream broke.
They all experienced it in different ways. For Brad it began with a perspiration that grew into a sweat which threatened a melting as if he was made of plastic; for Ella the earth, seeming to want to become part of her, reconstituted her feet as the warm soil.
These lucid nightmares were more terrifying than anything in ordinary dreaming: for what might happen if the absorbing process continued to its conclusion? The implications for waking time were not to be contemplated. So, they guarded themselves. Their dreaming became circumspect, as they proceeded in fear of another attack.
It was Brad who showed them how to deal with these elementals. He called them together on dreamside.
—Watch—he said, bringing them over to the trunk of the oak, and pressing the palm of his hand against its rough bark. He closed his eyes as they watched. At first nothing happened. Then his fingernails slowly took on a glaucous colour, changing slowly to moss-green, which moved imperceptibly down his fingers until the lines and folds and knuckles of his hand deepened and cracked, and his fingernails split. Then his hand absorbed the texture of solid bark spreading across the back of his hand to his wrist, his fingertips transforming into a stunted branch of the tree itself: gnarled, knotted, living tree:
— Stop it—Honora whispered.
—Not yet—The creeping bark inched up his arm, cracking and resetting his bones as it went, twisting at a point below his elbow.
—Stop it!—
—Now!—said Brad, and the metamorphosis stopped dead. His hand was organically joined with the trunk; the rough bark texture of his limb indistinguishable from the bark of the tree. But the process had been halted.
—You've become sloppy! Forgotten the art of lucid dreaming!—said Brad with contempt.—There's no time here, you just have to think it back, reverse the process, think it back, just like rewinding a film. Watch—
The growth which had taken possession of Brad's limb retreated exactly as it had advanced, moving back down the arm and across the hand like a long glove being peeled off, the rough texture dissolving, the moss-green tincture vanishing until his hand reformed itself entirely.
Brad held up his unscathed hand for all of them to see.—Learn it—he said.