Ewan’s grin became a smile though it was less pleasant than the previous expression. ‘I’m tired. If you want to know more, you’ll have to read my book.’
Even after what he’d just listened to, Seb found it difficult to want to know that much. ‘So what happens now?’
‘That’s entirely up to you.’
‘You can’t stay here.’
‘Only until you’ve worked on my book. This is a great opportunity for you.’
‘I’ll be the judge of that. And I don’t believe you, or trust anything that you say. That’s my main problem. There is also a massive collection of fragments in my living room, scattered inside two bin bags. I don’t have the time to work on that. So I’m happy with a synopsis of the remainder of your story. The part that takes you from your mother’s spare bedroom to here.’
‘That’s far too complicated. You wouldn’t understand, or believe it for that matter. I’m afraid that would be a bit too much for you. Better to read it. The manuscript is a bit more considered.’
‘It’s the bit more that concerns me. And you clearly have no intention of going anywhere, and neither do I, so spill.’
Ewan immediately became uncomfortable and adopted a more serious tone. ‘I don’t feel comfortable talking about it. Not right now. I don’t feel well. For fuck’s sake, I’ve had a massive bloody fit and you’re interrogating me.’
‘That’s not why you won’t talk.’ Seb wanted to be more than a little astonished by the story he’d just heard, but he found that he couldn’t get past the situation, nor past what use Ewan’s great ‘gift’ had ultimately been put to. He also knew that he had heard an incomplete version of events. An embellished version probably existed inside the bin bags too. Ewan was not an honest man and he was playing for time.
‘Let me guess, Ewan: the next chapter ended badly for you. Just like everything else in your life. Yet no lessons were learned. So here’s an interpretation of my own: you are attempting some desperate last resort at my expense, because you’ve nowhere else to go. This is the end of your line. Right here.’
Ewan had closed his eyes before Seb finished.
Seb woke. Sat up quickly. Fought his way free of the duvet and clambered off the mattress as if that could remove him from where he had just been while asleep.
He had not registered seeing any walls in the large, partially lit space that he’d just dreamed of. Behind the figures surrounding him, the borders had dissolved to black. Those others had been suspended in the air.
Seb couldn’t recall a single face now, only suggestions of the naked and grey condition of the bodies bumping together, up there.
From each navel, including his own, a snaking silvery cord had disappeared into the darkness of the floor. The stems had appeared as flexible and rubbery as flesh, while shining like liquid mercury.
Awake, he now thought of those cords as strange metallic weeds. He also thought of fungal growths in caves, mushrooming from out of rock.
All of the people in the dream had been agitated. They had talked in hurried whispers while moving their arms in small circular movements as if they were underwater. Beneath them, where a floor should have been, water had flowed. Black water without a trace of foam or a reflection. An underground stream in some kind of cavern and the people had been anchored to its bottom by the silvered cords extending from their abdomens. The water had rushed across the bottom of the room and travelled into a darkness without definition or relief.
He’d scraped his fingers at the ceiling and slapped it with his hands. The surface had issued a hollow sound but been too hard to break. He’d known that he would never escape the tunnel.
The only illumination in the space had come from a dim, metallic light issuing from the figures themselves and from their silver cords, as they all drifted. And either the surface above them was lowering or the water was rising. An elderly man beside Seb had wept, as if knowing they would soon submerge in the fast current and be swept away into nothingness.
Nearby, out of his view, a woman had said, ‘Sink. Heavy, heavy. Sink deep.’ She’d seemed excited by the prospect of doing so.
Others had begun to repeat that phrase as if it were a command or prayer. As his anxiety had also turned to a dreadful joy, Seb had felt a compulsion to contribute to the chorus.
The water rose and his cord shrivelled like a disused umbilicus. Where it grew out of his abdomen the flesh had turned black. The stem then issued a far weaker light.
He’d woken.
What had Ewan said earlier about it being time he was involved in something more ambitious? Involved in something dangerous; had that been the inference?