TWO
"Ditto, ditto!" cried Tweedledee —Lewis Carroll
Honora Brennan, still recovering from Ella's unexpected visit, is frightened. She wanders round the house drinking from a glass of stout and swallowing temazepam. In her back room she stands before the covered easel and removes the tablecloth.
Sitting back on a high stool, she contemplates her work, squinting at it through the soft-focus lens of alcohol and tranquilizers which gives the painting a fluid quality all of its own. The canvas shows a familiar scene: a sturdy, spreading oak leaning out across a lake that seems to have no farther shore. But the view is changed in some way, as if Honora has painted a different dreamside, one in the grip of a new authority, which leaves even her guessing.
Honora covers up the painting before the answer comes to her. She climbs the stairs to bed. The hinge on the gate outside whines and she glances down into the street. A child has climbed on to her gate and is swinging on it, gently back and forth: a girl, a little older than those she teaches at school, neglected, wearing a cut-down dress from a fashion at least a decade past, with lank hair framing sad eyes. The girl looks up at her. Honora draws the curtains.
Curled up in the dark, Honora wishes that Ella had stayed longer. Maybe she would go to England, and spend some time with Ella. Her visit has turned up buried secrets, memories that sit up and point at her like corpses out of coffins; but it has also brought the warm companionship they enjoyed in the early days on dreamside.
Honora spends half the night drifting between waking, sleeping and dreaming. She is shaken by the wind rattling the window. Ella, Lee, Brad, Professor Burns and countless other voices all take turns at owning the hand that rattles the window, until in exasperation she gets out of bed. Taking a school copy of the prayer book from her bookshelf she levers open the staples that bind it, carefully folding the leaves into paper wedges and forcing them between the gaps of the window frame. She climbs into bed and drifts back into sleep.
The familiar branches of the giant oak loom large, as if from out of a mist, swaying gently and beckoning her on; she's carried in by the currents. She just goes with it, not part of it but with it, that's all it ever took, all it ever wanted, without struggle or without any more need to help it along, until, breaking into substance like the gentle breaking of an insignificant wave upon a beach it is delivered to you or you to it.
But this is not the same dreamside. The oak is dead, the willow a cluster of bony twigs in ugly gestures; the trampled grass a crust of hard frost; and the lake itself a solid, frozen feet-thick sheet of ice.
This is the dreamside that Honora has been visiting these last twelve months, searching for something she doesn't understand. She patrols the lakeside looking out across the frozen water for signs that never come. She walks clear out onto the frozen lake about twenty, thirty yards. Her boot scrapes the sprinkled layer of snow: the ice underneath is a grey paste with impenetrable darkness immediately beneath it.
Then, as before, she hears the dull thump of an explosion under the ice: dooomphh way out from the shore; a thud, maybe, of ice shifting and resettling. There it goes again, doooomphh, only nearer this time. Honora is spooked by the sound, even though she's heard it before a thousand times.
For the first time (every time she comes it's for the first time) Honora sees hairline cracks in the ice, though it's feet thick with no sign of a thaw. She sees more shadowy movements beneath the ice, strange shapes forming and reforming, something live. DOOOOOMMPH! There goes that noise again, much closer this time, and she feels the ice shiver beneath her. What thing is under the ice, thrashing around, trying to get out?
Honora bends down to take a closer look then— DOOOOOMMPH!!—that thudding explosion happens right under her feet and this time she feels the ice shaking beneath her and is almost thrown off balance. She sees a large crack opening up and zigzagging towards her, passing between her legs, racing towards the shore. Now the crack is opening up wide and Honora begins to run, slipping as she goes, her legs becoming paralyzed as she tries to escape the opening ice behind her. Her running slows. Her muscles freeze. The ice is locking in to her. She is becoming ice herself. Only by a monumental effort of will is she able to throw herself on to the shore, and out of the dream.
She wakes up in a temazepam-and-stout-induced sweat, wishing for someone to hold, to speak to, the someone she denies herself by way of self-punishment. She even contemplates phoning Ella and making a clean breast of it. She picks up the clock. It's 4:40 A.M. Maybe she will go over to England, to see if Ella and Lee can help her with this madness. She sinks back down on to the pillow, hoping for unviolated sleep, clean in the knowledge that the dream, like the little girl swinging on the gate, won't call on her in the same night twice.