T W E L V E
Thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever
—Herman Melville
The house was like a camp under siege, with the enemy tents of ghost armies pitched in the garden outside. Ella tried to kindle a fire in the hearth, a brave attempt to smuggle some cheer into the room. The fire took at the third effort, smoky flames licking without relish at a damp log dropped on Ella's criss-cross of smouldering twigs. The key of a sardine can broke and Lee cut himself trying to extract the contents. They consumed a dismal meal in silence.
Lee suggested that someone should telephone the hospital ward, to get a report on Brads condition. Since no telephone had been installed in the house, this involved a short drive to the nearby village. This small task took on the prospect of a minatory expedition with all attendant dangers. Lee's recent tangle with telephones was a strong disincentive. He seemed to think that Ella should be the one to go, and said so. But Ella had been looking for an opportunity to speak privately with Lee. She needed some minutes alone with him, even though she was disinclined to leave Honora, whose capacity to remain in complete possession of herself seemed to be deteriorating fast.
"Look at her!" she said. She'd addressed Honora twice, without getting any response. Honora was staring into the fire with an expressionless, unfocused gaze. Her eyes lacked lustre, seemingly dried out by the smoke. She was away. "You can see her uncoiling. It's almost physical!"
Ella took Honora's hand and broke the enchantment.
"Come away from the fire."
"It happened again? I'm like smoke. I'm coming apart."
"We're going to phone. Come with us."
"I'd rather not go out there."
"It would be better if you came."
"Don't make me go out there, Ella."
Ella hesitated. "We'll be ten minutes at the most."
Ella made the call, with Lee hovering in the background. Brad's condition was unimproved. Ella sighed and replaced the receiver. She told Lee what she had heard and they agreed to telephone again in the morning. Before they climbed back into the car, Ella took Lee by the sleeve.
"She's right isn't she? What she said about it today. She just knows it."
Lee nodded. "Honora is all intuition. She's the most susceptible."
"Meaning what?"
"Meaning she knows how it will be. The danger of being overwhelmed. Of dreaming and never finding our way back. Of being stitched into the fabric of dreaming, frozen in perpetual dreamside."
"It's the worst scenario. The worst nightmare."
"It's what we face now."
"I just didn't want to admit it. To myself."
Lee looked at her. Where did she get her courage from? He grabbed her cold white hand and kissed it. "Like you said, it's the worst nightmare of all. Perhaps one of us will have to stay awake, while the others dream. Perhaps that's the only way."
"Short straws? Or volunteers?" Ella shook her head. "It won't work. We all have to be there on dreamside. We're all implicated."
"If only we had someone on the outside of our dreaming, someone to anchor us. If Burns was here, what would he tell us? What clue would he give us?"
Ella recalled her motorway encounter with the professor—if indeed it was the professor—and saw him vividly: agitated, cryptic, wringing his hands; saying nothing she could understand.
"Listen to this. I had an encounter on the motorway. I have to tell you about it, only there's an uncertainty. I met the professor: that is, I met him—or he came to me—but I don't know if it was really him. Maybe it was someone else. I know I'm sounding confused and maybe I'm making a mistake here . . . Only it was the professor who came to me in the car, after a nasty experience I had. I felt sure he— she, it—was trying to help us."
"What did he say?"
"Nothing we can use. Something about undoing what was done. He got very agitated."
"But that's all that was said?"
" 'Undo what was done.' "
"Not exactly a lifeline, is it?"
"Wherever it came from, I looked back and saw not Burns, but. . . Oh, why are we afraid to name it? I saw not the professor, but the Other."
"But it still doesn't help."
"No."
"We need a thread. Something to take into the labyrinth which will lead us out again. It's got to be you, Ella. You're the seer out of all of us, you're the one. Can't you weave us a golden thread?"
"Made out of what? You overestimate me Lee, you always did. Maybe Honora will be the one who finds the way. Come on, let's go."
At that moment Honora was in need of a golden thread of her own.
The moment that the door had closed after them, Honora regretted her decision to wait behind. The damp air inside the house chilled her, and she was terrified of what might be stalking them outside. Her nerves shivered.
The house felt strangely hollow, like a burial chamber. She got up and moved around the room, arms folded defensively, self-consciously avoiding the seductive powers of the fire and the candle flame. The wind got up again outside, moaning in the tall trees and swinging the gate back and forth.
From the open doorway she could see the gate swaying slowly in the shadows. Then it slapped hard against the gatepost, and swung open again. It was possible to make out the silhouette of a small figure crouched over the gate. It was no more than a shadow, bobbing backwards and out of view as the gate swayed open.
"Who's there?" said Honora. She hesitated on the doorstep, and then tentatively touched her foot on the path. There was the figure again, like a small, cowled thing. The gate stopped moving and the silhouette ducked behind it. Honora moved slowly down the path, one hand outstretched towards the gate. It banged violently shut.
Honora recovered. It was only the wind, the figure just a waving rhododendron bush behind the gate. With relief she secured the stiff latch and slid home the rusting bolt.
But back indoors she heard a scratching at the window pane. Someone was at the window. She moved slowly towards it.
It was the wind, riffling the straggling ornamental bushes, pressing their branches against the glass. Then there was a sighing in the garden—the wind in the ragged strips of broken fencing. A scuffling behind the house—only the wind, chasing a scrap of torn newsprint. The sound of banging at the front of the house. The wind again, slapping the gate back and forth. The gate which, only a moment earlier, Honora herself had carefully secured.
She looked out of the window, through her own reflection. The gate had somehow freed itself. It swung gently back and forth. An arched silhouette rode it, like a child on a wooden horse—surely only the curved back of the rhododendron, a trick of the shadows. Honora let the curtain fall and sat down before the fire.
The sound of scratching on the window returned. It was a sound like fingernails drawn down the pane of glass. She ignored it. It persisted. It was followed by a tapping, a slow, regular beating. Then a sound like that of a child breathing hard, a child misting up the glass with her mouth. Small, scuffling feet darted from front to back of the house. Honora pressed her hands to her ears.
The scratching and tapping on the window moved to the back of the house. Honora looked up. Now she saw the sickly, whey-colored face, mouthing at the glass, darting from one window pane to the other and tapping, almost playfully.
"No," moaned Honora covering her ears again, "no no no."
Then it stopped, and the figure went away. All Honora could hear now was the throaty rasp of her own breathing. She looked around her. There was nothing. She busied herself, becoming frantically methodical. She put another log on the fire, reeled to the kitchen, watched a kettle boil, brewed coffee and tried to talk herself into a state of calm.
She returned to the fireside, hugging her coffee to her like a shield. She counted off the seconds, as if each one were a sword-blow parried with diminishing strength. Slowly she became aware of a flicker at the edge of her vision, a dull phosphorescence: something had come into the room.
It filled the room and infected it with cold. Its presence was strong. Like tart moonlight, like acid frost, like sour, congealed breath. It was the colour and taste and odour of neglect and decay masquerading as a human child. Honora's coffee slipped to the floor, a dark stain expanding in four directions.
Sitting in the chair opposite, the girl didn't speak. Her head was tilted to one side like a marionette. Her sheenless eyes were fixed on Honora. She was only too human, a waif in a sad cut-down dress. Her jaw was slack and her hair unkempt, not lovable, no, but infinitely pitiable. Her sand-coloured eyes were fixed on Honora but looking through and past her, as if waiting for the answer to some question posed long ago, patiently but insistently waiting for the answer which never comes.
Honora was paralysed, like the very first dreamside paralysis. Her words choked. "When will you be done with us?"
The fixed expression on the girl's face slowly changed, twisting into a sneer. She stood up and moved towards the fire. Honora felt a wave of cold. There was the same phosphorescent halo about her, the glow of moon on water. It pulsed briefly before fading, and with the pulsing the girl diminished in size and substance, transforming at last into a small, hard lozenge of blue flame which arced like a tiny meteor, dropping into the fire.
Honora's eyes followed it into the heart of the fire. She had no will to resist, to look away. Even knowing the danger, and remembering Ella's warnings, that single conjured spark had been enough to draw her back. The fire held her, trancelike, and was drawing her in. She was a single thread; the fabric of her being was a many-textured, spectrum-colored tapestry, unravelling a fibre at a time, unwinding on to a vast spool held by hands within the fire, one fine strand carefully wound in after another. As if that is where it starts, at the eyes, where the threads of the soul hang in their slackest stitch; stitches which can be hooked free of weft and warp, and pulled through, drawn out, spooled in. She was lost to it. She was coming apart.
She knew the danger. The idea of resistance fashioned itself into a sword in her mind, a bright-edged sword, a way out. But the sword itself became smoke; and the thing she would slash free of became smoke. The effort to resist required too much, too mighty a cut, too great a mental stroke. Her mind was coming apart.
Honora belonged to the fire. She was enslaved by the ritual dance of the aromatic flame. Fire, first and most martial of all elements, the hierarchical prince. She saw in the fire the tapered banners of his glorious armies, the swallowtail pennants a-flutter, flags of crimson, ochre, sapphire, armies spilling into valleys and camped along the plains. They pinioned her and they held her. The flame engaged with her. She was fire. She was smoke. She was coming apart, like smoke.
"Burning! What's burning?" Lee and Ella stood over her, shaking her.
"Honora!" They were calling her as if from a great distance.
Lee dragged her to her feet, shaking her violently, stripping off her outer clothes. Slowly she became aware of a thick, acrid smell, and realized that the room was fogged with dense, grey smoke.
"Are you burned? Honora, are you burned?" Lee was frantically stroking her arms.
"No."
Miraculously she wasn't. At her feet she saw, still smouldering but not even charred, the skirt and pullover which Lee had torn from her. Wisps of smoke writhed from the clothes. Ella was running around opening windows.
"What happened?" Honora was still dazed.
Lee and Ella just looked at each other. Ella folded Honora in her arms as the other woman wept.
"It has to be tonight," said Ella. "It has to be tonight."