They are somewhere overgrown, a place where nature has been given back to itself. Humankind has lost dominion here. There is a bench smothered with a rose bush, a path, and—
And this is my dream.
Rook is down the slope from her, moving quickly towards her with a look of excitement. He has seen something that he wants to share. But…
But this is my dream, I saw this happening, and soon there will be—
The naked man swings between them from the trees, and this time Lucy-Anne takes time to examine him and the rope he uses. He is smeared with a heavy dye, like coloured mud. Yet he still wears glasses, and she is sure his earrings are the red and yellow of Christmas. The rope is thin and blue, the kind used for tying down loads on the back of trucks. He ends his swing and clambers into a tall tree to her left.
I'm steering this, she thinks. Already this dream is not progressing like it ever has before.
She moves forward and looks for the man, but he has scrambled higher into the tree and is hidden from view.
She sees the dog-woman sniffing along at the foot of a tree farther away.
She'll piss, and then Rook will fall into the pit, I'll hear him scream and then look and that horrible worm-thing will be chewing at him, and he'll be dying.
“Rook, wait!” she shouts, and it is the first time she finds her voice.
Rook hesitates, then runs faster towards her.
Not long now. He'll fall.
“Stop running!” she screams. Rook's expression falters, and he skids to a stop twenty feet from her but not far enough away. He slips forward as the ground gives way.
“Grab something! Don't fall! Don't let yourself fall!”
Lucy-Anne is running forwards in her dream, in full control. She feels a gleeful rush of power, and even as Rook is scrabbling for his life she glances to the left. A tree explodes into colour, raining down a thousand fat red blooms that splash across the ground. She looks right and imagines a fully-laid dinner table, and there it is, meats and vegetables steaming all across the crisp white tablecloth.
She screeches in delight, and when she reaches Rook he is hauling himself from the edge of the pit. Something crawls around down there. Something hisses.
“I did it,” she says. Rook is silent, almost not there. “I did it.” But then she realises that this is a dream, and remembers what she has already seen in real life. She looks sadly at Rook, and he sees his own death reflected in his eyes. He starts to fade away.
There is a jump. Her surroundings change, and though there is no external jolt, inside she feels the shock of displacement. It is a blink between dreams, but Lucy-Anne now knows that she has some say in what she is seeing and experiencing, and that makes the change so much more shocking.
She and Rook are on a wide area of scrubland. London is in the distance so this is still the Heath, but a part of it she has never seen before. It is surreal. A huge table and chair stand before them, fifty times normal size, with long grasses growing around the legs and creeping plants trying to gain the tabletop.
What once were people move across a tree line farther up the hillside. They seem to be crawling on all fours, but she can't quite tell, because there is something so alien about their movements.
So what's this? Lucy-Anne thinks. She urges herself to wake—actually pinches herself in the dream, feeling the sharp sting of pain—but the dream still has more to show her.
Rook says something she can't quite hear. His voice is distant, and she experiences a moment of complete panic. Perhaps he really is dead, and this dream is simply an unconscious wish.
Of course he's dead! I saw him fall, saw that thing eating at him, so he must be dead, and now—
Nomad appears. She steps from the top of the huge square table and drops to the ground, landing with knees slightly bent and yet seeming to cause and experience no impact. The grasses around her feet barely move.