There was a dog that bit her once. A long time ago. It’s really stupid. When she thinks of the dog, she makes it all big like a lion, with millions of teeth. And there was a man who she used to live with, who hit her sometimes. Lots of times.
“And you… you showed her…?”
The dog, and then the man, and then you. Again and again. And sometimes I gave you the dog’s teeth, or the man’s hands and arms, so the scaredness would get mixed up and she’d be scared of you too.
Like conditioning someone not to smoke by zapping them with an electric shock every time they light up, Jess thought. This was awful. Unbearable.
You have to take me with you, she told him. You have to, Alex. Right now.
Where?
Where do you think? Where you were when you did this. Inside Hannah. Inside the thoughts she has about the man and the dog and me.
The ghost scowled – really looking his age for the first time since she’d met him. I don’t want to go back there.
But you’ve got to. You made Hannah unhappy. You made her so unhappy that she tried to kill herself. You can see that’s wrong, can’t you?
Alex grimaced, but he nodded.
So you’ll take me?
Yes. He held out his hand and she took hold of it. Just like before, he tugged gently to release the ghostly part of her from the grip of her body. That grip felt a lot weaker now: she was learning the trick of it. They walked together out of the cell and out of the world, into the maelstrom that was made of other people.
It was different this time. The formless, foaming oceans of dream imagery were still there. But in among them there were glowing spires like lighthouses, irregularly shaped but for the most part solid and stable.
Alex felt the question in her mind. It’s earlier than last time, he said. Some of them are still awake.
The towers were a little frightening to look at. They were impossibly tall, without doors or windows. Did all waking minds look like prisons? Was every human soul a Fellside, self-enclosed and blind?
Every human soul except herself and this dead boy beside her, apparently. Their lives had become tangled together back when he was alive, but it was this that had let them come together again and stay together. This shared ability, or shared citizenship.
Over here.
Alex pointed towards a seething space close at hand that was like nothing Jess had seen in the night world. It was more like the oceans than the towers – changing rather than constant, breaking up and re-forming itself with each moment – but there was something terrible about it that marked it out as different and made her instinctively want to avoid it.
After a minute or so of staring, she realised what it was that was so unsettling. The movements of this piece of dream space made up a sequence, each expansion and contraction precisely echoing the one before it. It was stuck in a loop, repeating itself endlessly. There was less variation in colour too. A sludgy grey-brown dominated, and where other tones appeared, they didn’t last for long. The mass swallowed them back into itself, like sugar sinking into hot coffee and taking the colour of the coffee as it sank.
That’s her? Passmore?
Yes, Alex confirmed.
Then we have to go in.
She took a step towards the dark, shapeless mass. Alex didn’t move. She turned back to look at him. I don’t want to, he said. It’s not nice in there.
But that’s your fault, Alex. You did this.
It wasn’t nice before either.
We’ll be together. I won’t let anything hurt you.
The dead boy didn’t say anything. His unblinking stare told her how ridiculous that statement was. This was his element, awake or asleep, now and for ever. Being dead, he ranked her. If anyone needed protecting here, it wasn’t him.
Please, Jess said.
But it’s stupid. She doesn’t even like you.
Are we only nice to the people who are nice to us?
Alex laughed incredulously. That depends! Are we clever or are we stupid?
Jess was shocked, as she had been when he’d said that thing about the police deliberately fitting people up for crimes. It was this place, changing him. It had to be. Sometimes he talked like the Fellside women rather than how she’d expect an innocent child to talk.
She wanted to say that she was doing this for his sake, not Hannah Passmore’s. That they had to fix this so it wouldn’t be on his conscience. And that was a part of the truth. But it was true too that she was clinging hard to a sense of mission. If she wasn’t there to save him, then what was all this for? And since he was dead already, what could she save him from except himself?
I don’t need to be saved from anything, Alex said sourly. But he came to join her at the threshold of Hannah Passmore’s sleeping mind, its mud-coloured wings beating spastically over their heads. I’ll come, but I don’t want to stay long. It was horrible last time.
Jess took his hand again and they stepped inside together. It was a strange transition. They were in the same place but the perspective lurched and juddered sickeningly. Things that had been far away became close, and vice versa. Mostly what changed was the weather, both inside their minds and outside: the feel and sense and smell of it. Hannah Passmore had become, for the time being, their world.
One look was enough to tell Jess that Hannah was in a bad way. The repeating cycles, like the stammering of a broken record, played and replayed on all sides of them. Tight loops of colour, shape, sound, movement, blending into each other at times but always re-forming as themselves. These patterns didn’t resolve into coherent memories now that Jess and Alex were seeing them close up: they stayed abstract, and something about them made Jess certain that their touch would be toxic.
Where is she? she asked Alex. Everywhere, obviously, but also somewhere. She knew there was a centre to this maze and that Hannah would be there.
The boy looked around, getting his bearings. The sound of a siren from a police car or an ambulance came to them suddenly and clearly, but then it faded away into random squeaks and caws like discordant birdsong.
She’s here, Alex said. It was more like, She’s down here, except that the word he used didn’t really mean that Passmore was below them, and the direction that he took and Jess followed wasn’t really down at all. Or perhaps it started out as down and then became something else. In the process, all the other directions shifted in Jess’s head like an optical illusion where a hollow cube becomes a solid one or the space between two faces becomes a vase. It was scary, but it was a revelation too. As with the body she wore, this place was no place at all.
She remembered, out of nowhere, a moment from her childhood: not a dream this time, but a real memory, if that distinction still meant anything. A swimming lesson. She saw herself clinging to the brass rail at the side of the pool, her legs curled up under her, paralysed by the knowledge that if she straightened them and tried to put them down on the floor of the pool, it would be beyond her reach. Everything in the dream world was like that.
But once you let go of the bar, you could use your legs to kick off from the side. Where you couldn’t walk, you could tread water. And maybe, eventually, learn to swim.
More sights and sounds assailed them as they walked. And they must be walking in the right direction, because some of the sights and sounds now belonged to the group of images Alex had described to her in her cell. Jess flinched away from a dog’s muzzle that coalesced in front of her, snapping and drooling. A second mouth gaped behind and around the first, closed on it and swallowed it down. Then both were gone. The rumbling snarl came a few seconds later, sounding like distant thunder.
Alex slowed and stopped, looking around into the visual soup that surrounded them.
Are we close? Jess asked.
I don’t know.
But you said…