When sleep came, its condition was fitful and harassed by an awful dream set inside his house, though the interior was enlarged enough to hold him and Ewan, and those others, forever.
Seb was much changed, into a naked thing, luminous as a pale worm in dark clay, a skeletal, hairless creature without genitals. A crude operation had been performed between his legs and the wound had been stitched shut with the brown twine that he kept under the kitchen sink.
Exhausted by the long marches down the never-ending hallways of the building, he had struggled to see through a mist. Dim light the colour of mercury illumined little.
Crouched behind Ewan, the ranting giant, whose crown of hair had stuck to his skull and neck, Seb had felt perversely safer.
Like a bearded prophet with a paunch, naked save for a loincloth, Ewan had forged ahead on his thin legs, and swept one arm about in the air as he read from a cluster of dirty papers. Incanting words that Seb never caught, Ewan forced a swift pace. He wanted no delays in their reaching the far-off stutter of pale light that soundlessly flickered ahead.
Behind Seb others crawled. They were old, filled with fear and eager for him to lead them to a place that he was unaware of. He preferred not to look at them, but heard their bare hands and knees bumping upon the floorboards that soon turned to wet bricks. He also caught snatches of their nonsensical entreaties as he moved.
‘Is the light over there?’ someone asked.
‘Have you seen my sister?’ another said, as if in answer.
‘I cannot get back,’ a voice uttered in a tone that verged on panic.
Up ahead something waited within the distant whitish static. Perhaps something on the ceiling was worshipped, or just longed for. It never became apparent to Seb, but the crowd considered the light to be a way out of the damp culvert that ran with cold, black water.
Eventually Ewan discarded the papers and took to swinging one of his old shoes like a priest’s censer. The shoe was filled with soil which Ewan used to fingerpaint a figure onto the moist bricks. Childish images of the same thing, but all the worse for the crude composition that depicted a long, hunched form that moved about on all fours, with its head concealed inside a bag.
‘We find ourselves and we find the way back,’ he said to Seb, and someone behind Seb shrieked, ‘Yes!’ in what sounded like a paroxysm of devotion.
Seb was soon holding aloft his best salad bowl, a vessel choked with filth so that he might resupply the tatty shoe in Ewan’s hand. And down that masonry chute they all stumbled while Ewan spread the graffiti.
At the threshold of the room of the flashing light, Ewan had leaned down and looped a belt around Seb’s throat. Then dragged him into a flickering space where the sound went backwards.
With his legs beset by a paralysing sensation of pins and needles, Seb was hauled around a floor that reeked like an ape’s enclosure in a sun-baked zoo. Whimpering with determination to reach the light, he found himself slipping back the way they had already journeyed, until he staggered anew across the wet bricks of the culvert.
Occasionally, someone would scream from above, someone hanging upside down and reaching for him with their long arms. But within the herd of thin, muttering people, Seb kept moving towards the light.
The end of the nightmare was horrible without containing much specific imagery. Seb woke, suffering an impression that his body had just been suspended within a dark space, where gravity had ceased to exist. His feet had risen above his head towards something close to his soles. Whatever was above him had suggested itself as a large, open mouth, moving in circles as he struggled to keep his body on the mattress.
When Seb awoke, his face was taut with dried tears. He sat up, panting for breath, afraid, and almost too alert to have been asleep. Fragments of the dream struck him with an unnatural vividness.
He sensed that his mother and father had been inside the stuttering light. Had they called out to him? He wasn’t sure when he woke up, but a sense of them had made him yearn for the intermittent light with a ferocity that should have broken him from the nightmare.
He remained dazed and shaken for several minutes. Recollections from the previous evening seeped into his mind. He hated himself for how quickly he’d become immobilized by cowardice.
Seb looked at the clock. It had gone two in the afternoon.
How?
He’d been exhausted for weeks. He then tried to explain the nightmare with the intensification of his feelings of victimization. They could be responsible for the awful claustrophobia of the dream, which made him resent Ewan even more than he already did, if that were possible. Ewan had reached deeper into his existence. His physical pollution of the house, and his maddening, autistic will was but the first level of torment. It was as if Ewan was now unwilling to be without him at any time, even as he slept.
Seb swung his legs out of bed.