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  DREAMSIDE

  by Graham Joyce

  G&S Books

  Dreamside is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this novel are fictitious or used fictitiously.

  Copyright © Graham Joyce 1991. All rights reserved.

  This E-book edition first published 2012 by G&S Books.

  Graham Joyce is a multiple award winning author. He grew up in the mining village of Keresley near Coventry. In 1988 he quit his job as a youth officer and decamped to the Greek island of Lesbos, there to live in a beach shack with a colony of scorpions and to concentrate on writing. He sold his first novel while still in Greece and travelled in the Middle East on the proceeds. He is a winner of The World Fantasy Award; is five-times winner of the British Fantasy Award for Best Novel; is twice winner of the French Grand Prix De L'Imaginaire; and was the winner of the American O Henry short story award in 2009.

  His website is: www.grahamjoyce.co.uk. He tweets as Grahamjoycebook

  Other novels by Graham Joyce:

  Dark Sister

  House Of Lost Dreams

  Requiem

  The Tooth Fairy

  The Stormwatcher

  Leningrad Nights

  Indigo

  Smoking Poppy

  The Facts Of Life

  The Limits Of Enchantment

  Memoirs Of A Master Forger by William Heaney/ How To Make Friends With Demons

  The Silent Land

  Some Kind Of Fairy Tale

  Short stories:

  Partial Eclipse & Other Short Stories

  Tales For A Dark Evening

  (Children & Young Adult novels):

  Spiderbite

  TWOC

  Do The Creepy Thing

  Three ways To Snog An Alien

  The Devil’s Ladder

  (Non-fiction):

  Simple Goalkeeping Made Spectacular

  TO SUZANNE: THERE WHEN THE DREAMING STARTED

  Dreamside

  P R O L O G U E

  Behold, this dreamer cometh —Genesis

  Lee was having trouble sleeping. It was already near dawn, and blades of light were slipping between the ribs of the blind. He'd spent the night on the edge of sleep, but every time he let go, some­thing stirred in the dark and shook him awake. Not scary exactly, but enough of a jolt to flip him out of sleep. He opened his eyes. It was easier to give up.

  The luminous dial on his clock blinked: outside a horn blared. He felt sticky and sweaty. His bed was a knot of sheets, his eyes were pasted half shut, and his hair stood up in a quiff. Fumbling to the bathroom, he turned on the shower and scalded himself.

  It had been a strange night. A dervish of unfathomable, fevered images had crowded his dreams. Now they were sluicing away, as though painted on his skin. He threw on his once white towelling robe and went into his kitchen. Somewhere a time-set radio switched itself on and a breakfast voice piped feebly. He took an egg and cracked it on a pan but it didn't break. He tried a second time. Again it didn't break. "Oh, no," he said, "oh, no ..." Raising the egg close to his face, he blew on it sharply.

  Then he woke up.

  Daylight streaming in through the blinds picked out needles of perspiration on his face. The luminous clock dial winked at him. A horn blared outside, someone with their hand pressed down hard. He sat up, bedclothes slithering to a heap on the floor, and staggered to the bathroom. The shower made him catch his breath, gooseflesh popping as he walked into the icy pyramid of rushing water. This time he had a clear impression of what he had been dreaming the moment before he woke up.

  In his kitchen, the time-set radio switched itself on. His eggs frying in the pan looked back at him with cartoon eyes, and he lost his appetite. He got dressed for work and pulled on his overcoat.

  Outside, the earth was in the grip of its own dream, February frost that sucked the sound out of everything. He broke its spell with billows of exhaust that had the frost imps hacking and cough­ing and running for cover. Awake awake awake; that was what his wipers said. Awake awake awake. Slipping the clutch he put the car into gear.

  And woke up.

  The clock blinked. A horn blared. He was afraid to turn on the shower in case he should wake up back in bed. He looked in the mirror. A frightened face looked back at him.

  His nerves were torn and he had a bad taste in his mouth. In the kitchen a radio switched itself on, and something fell away inside him. He turned, looked at the radio, then at the plug. He discon­nected the plug from the socket and the radio died. He reconnected the plug and the voice picked up where it had left off.

  He got into his car and sat behind the wheel in silence for a moment. Lee was the habitual early bird, always driving to work with his radio turned up loud, always first there. He turned into the empty car park behind the advertising agency and parked.

  And woke up.

  He lay in the dark of his room, panting, pressing himself into his mattress. The clock dial winked mutinously. The horn of a car sounded outside, falling away into the distance. This could go on for ever, he told himself. He wished he could tunnel out of it by going back to sleep, but he knew it was futile to try. There was no choice.

  So he did it all again. Shower; oh no. Radio; not that. Breakfast; please God- Knowing all of the time that this could, and maybe would, go on for ever.

  Dreaming. Would he ever wake up?

  He needed something to convince him that he was awake, really awake. He brushed the back of his hand across the flame. He felt the hairs on his wrist begin to singe and got an unmistakable whiff of burned hair. It was a wide-awake smell.

  Outside was the same frost-crisp morning. The car coughed into life. He drove to his office with excessive caution, and parked in a different place. The three flights of stairs left him short-winded, and he was breathing hard when he heard his phone ringing. Hur­rying down the corridor, he pushed open the office door and reached across his desk to take the call. As he stretched, the expanse of desk seemed to grow and the telephone retreated from his fin­gers. He was unable to reach it, and, with each ring, the signal prick­led with renewed urgency.

  He woke up with his bedside phone ringing. It had the clarity of sound of a razor sawing on bone. He jack-knifed awake and reflex-caught the receiver.

  "Lee?" A woman's voice. "Lee Peterson? Is that you?"

  PART O N E

  February 1986

  ONE

  I had a dream, which was not all a dream — Lord Byron

  There was no forgetting her voice. After more than twelve years, it was Ella Innes.

  "Ella! Oh, Ella! I know why you've called me. It's happening isn't it, it's all happening again!"

  "Hold on Lee; it'll be OK. Listen, we've really got to talk."

  "Yes. Only it's not OK Ella. I don't know if I'm awake or if I'm dreaming; or if we're even having this conversation."

  "You're awake now. This is real. Remember how I used to wake you? This is just the same, remember."

  Remember. It was a kind of code word. Remember. I remember it all. Your voice. Your scent. How I felt every time you came near me.

  "Sure." But he sounded more than doubtful. "Let me just get my thoughts together will you? It's been a wicked night."

  "I had to get in touch with you. I couldn't think of anything else." He heard her take a deep breath. "I want to come and see you. Today."

  "Today? Where the hell are you anyway?" (Who the hell are you after all this time?)

  "I'm living in Cumbria, by the sea. Nice scenery and nuclear seepage. What else do you want to know?"

  "But that's over two hundred and fifty miles away, Ella."

  "We live in a world of cars and motorways, Lee. It's incredible how easy it is to travel around."

  "OK, no need to be funny with me." B
ut that was Ella. He thought for a moment before giving her some muddled directions. "All right. I'll be waiting for you."

  "Do it." That's how she always used to talk. Just do it.

  "One thing before you go, Ella. How did you track me down? I mean it's been a long time."

  "Not so difficult. I started at the university and followed a very orthodox career trail." Old note of criticism, not fair. "Lee? Are you afraid?"

  "I had a terrible night, Ella. Yes, I am afraid."

  He put down the phone. It had been twelve going on thirteen years since they had seen or spoken to each other. He stared at the wall, dumbly. His astonishment and dismay conflicted with the acute fear of waking up and finding himself back in bed, which he knew would stay with him all day.

  Then he remembered the trick with the book. He took, at random, a paperback volume from the book­shelf. Letting it fall open naturally, he read the first few lines to pres­ent themselves:

  But his dominion that exceeds in this Stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man: A sound magician is a demi-god.

  Glancing away, he squeezed his eyes shut, then looked back at the open page. He was relieved to see that the lines were unchanged. He repeated the exercise. Hoping that it counted for something, he returned the book to the shelf.

  When he checked back down the sequence of false awakenings, the most bizarre thing had been Ella's voice striking out of the past and talking to him as if they had spoken only yesterday. When they had parted in their youth it had not been on bad terms, or at least where there had been pain there had been no anger. Parting had happened by inevitable unspoken contract, for the simple reason that they had come to hold each other's company in a mutual despair which outweighed even their terror.

  Lee inspected his face in the mirror and awarded himself a high slob rating. That man in the mirror, with the lantern jaw and the pouting bottom lip which girls had once found endearing, was now getting jowls. He could do with losing a few pounds. Would Ella be able to see the winsome, athletic, wise-alec twenty-year-old that he had once been?

  It didn't occur to him that Ella herself would have aged. It wasn't as though he hadn't thought of her in the decade since she had fled the university, putting two thousand miles and an even greater psychic geography between them; but in his mind she had remained always the same. Unforgettable Ella; delicious, hypnotic, superior, erotic Ella; Ella undressed, Ella with her clothes on. There came, in equal measure, deep tormenting sentimental memories and sharp sexual reminiscences. Ella vibrant with arch cleverness and smouldering undergraduate sexuality.

  Memories clung to him like the tentacles of a deep-sea crea­ture; or perhaps that was him, sucking at memories that should have drifted free long ago. But the problem was his. All relation­ships post-Ella had been held up to her light by way of comparison, and inevitably in those dazzling rays they palled. Scratch the sur­face of Lee's feelings for any woman and you would find Ella, impossible to erase or surpass. What could others hope to do, when she ghosted the shores of his memory and seeded his dreams like that?

  The only consolation to Lee, if consolation he was looking for, was that he knew that Ella could never get over him. They could live neither with nor without each other.

  And now she had contacted him, after nearly thirteen years. He was going to meet her, and he was afraid, just as he knew she too would be afraid.

  Ella Innes. Why did you have to come back?

  TWO

  To dream of holding eggs symbolizes vexation —Astrampsychus, AD 350

  Ella was late. Lee had been expecting her at around seven, and it was already after nine. He had spent two hours twitching in his armchair, jumping up from time to time to look out of the window. It had been dark for several hours and the winter sky was folded with snow.

  He was physically afraid of meeting her: if she didn't show up, he wouldn't be in the least dismayed. He was already prepared to dismiss the morning's telephone call as a phantom, another dream; it would be better, far better, if the whole thing had never really happened.

  Then there was a roaring underneath his window. He leaped from his seat to see headlamps blazing in his drive, clouds of exhaust in the frosty air. Lee hurried outside.

  She was already climbing out of her car, an open-topped vintage sports model. She wore a flying jacket three sizes too large and a red scarf wound around her neck. She closed the door and stood motionless in the dark, looking at him.

  What were they supposed to do? What was appropriate? To hug her, of course; he wanted to, but he couldn't. He couldn't even look her in the eye.

  "You came down in this?" he said surveying the car. It was a fully restored spoke-wheeled 1935 MG Midget. "With the top down? In the middle of winter?"

  Her breath was visible on the cold air. "It's broken. I couldn't fix it."

  Lee walked around the car and began fussing with the convert­ible roof. "It's probably just a clip," he said.

  "Lee," said Ella gently. "Leave it."

  Lee looked down at his hands. He felt ridiculous. When he looked up, he saw that her eyes were fixed on his. "Of course. Let's go inside."

  With the door closed behind them, Ella looked around her as if she used to own the house. When she nodded, it was as if to confirm that she found everything much as expected. Lee took her bag. "Your hands are freezing!"

  Ella's smile was a reflex. "It's been a long drive."

  "Maybe a drink of something?"

  "Yes, something, thanks."

  That was how she was; always ironic. Silver moon-and-stars earrings glimmered at her ears. They left momentary tracers in the air as she flicked her hair from her eyes. Her hastily applied lipstick looked as if it came in one piece and could be lifted off like the milk-skin from hot chocolate. Ella looked interesting rather than beauti­ful, and she dressed neither for the attention of men nor for the critical approval of other women. Lee was hypnotized; she was more compelling now than she had ever been as a girl of twenty.

  He didn't miss a detail: her nose perhaps a couple of degrees too steep; her dark hair, long then, now worn shorter; and something like a faint cloud of suspicion in brown eyes. Underneath her flying jacket she wore a baggy pullover and slacks. She was busy unwinding the red scarf from her throat.

  Her bag, a large, split-leather holdall with a broken zip, was stuffed full. Lee stowed it against an armchair. "Bohemian; you look bohemian," he said, trying to imitate her teasing manner.

  Ella followed him into the kitchen, where he poured overlarge brandies and set coffee to brew. "I know I'm a mess," she said. "You look smart, that's good; and you look well." She flashed him a microsecond smile and bandaged the scarf around her hand.

  "I don't know why, but I feel dull against you."

  "You haven't got what it takes to be dull." In her flying jacket she looked like a wounded refugee from some fiery aerial combat. "I see you work in advertising."

  "It's a job. I turn in every morning. Then I come home."

  She looked at him. He felt compelled to carry on talking. "I mean it's narcotic. That's how I like it."

  "You sound disappointed."

  "No; I really do like it like chat. But when I'm happily numb, narcotized, nodding my way through life, then the you-know-what starts over again."

  Ella stuffed the scarf into her pocket. "That's what I'm here to talk about."

  "Oh dear. Pandora wants a little chat about her box."

  "Not my box; our box."

  Lee turned towards her. "Ella, I don't want it opened up. I don't know what's going on, but it scares the liver out of me and I really don't want it opened up."

  Ella put down her glass and took hold of his wrist. "Look, I don't want it opened up again any more than you do. I'm as frightened by it as you are. I guessed—hoped, even—that you'd be having some of the same experiences as me. I only got in touch with you because—"

  Lee put his hand to her mouth. "Can we sit down?"

  They moved through to the living room, Ella
discarding her scarf and jacket as she went. They sat and nursed their brandies.

  "I got in touch with you," Ella continued, "because of what we had together. What we did."

  Silence. "I'm starving," said Ella suddenly. "What have you cooked for us?"

  "Cooked? God!" He hadn't even thought about food. "I'll phone for takeaway, shall I?"

  "No food in the house, eh?" She smiled. "I couldn't help notic­ing the bachelor feel to the place."

  "I noticed you noticing." Then Lee bit the biscuit. "Ella, will you be staying here tonight?"

  "I thought I might. Unless it would be easier if I found a hotel."

  "Don't be ridiculous. You'll stay here."

  "Fine."

  "Fine."

  "Only . . . Just so that it's clear."

  "So that what's clear?"

  "Look; I didn't drive two hundred and fifty miles with my foot flat down on the accelerator after an absence of twelve years to start our relationship up again. I couldn't stand to have that opened up, as well."

  "Understood," he said, waving his hands in the air, "I was just about to say that the spare room is ready for you. So you can calm down."

  "I'm already calm. You don't need to tell me to calm myself."

  "That's settled then."

  "Right, that's settled."

  Lee took this concert of understanding as a suitable moment to escape to the kitchen. He closed the door behind him, putting his back to it as he expelled a deep breath. He was furious about that business of renewing their old relationship, not with Ella but with himself. He had made his feelings transparent, trailing her with spaniel eyes from the moment she had come into his house. He wanted to bury his head.

  Their meal arrived. "Tell me," she said, "what was happening before I phoned?"