Dreamside - By Graham Joyce Page 0,50

her, he thought, just look at her.

They talked the evening away, without mentioning the dreaming. The subject itched to be scratched, but Ella was patient. She knew that Honora had come to tell her something, and she waited for the moment to be right.

That moment came the next day. Ella had arranged to take Honora for a drive, anything to distract from the burden of anticipation. In the morning they drove to Warwick Castle, and crept giggling around the dungeons and waxworks. In the afternoon they visited Coventry cathedral, where the giant new building stands shoulder to shoulder with the war-blitzed shell of the medieval Gothic version. Inside the ruin, Honora turned to face the altar with its cross of charred beams.

"I had it," she said. "You knew, didn't you?"

"The baby miscarried. You lost the baby."

Honora turned to face her. "I lost the baby. I also had the baby."

"What are you talking about, Honora?"

"I had the baby and I didn't have the baby. You still don't understand? Do you need me to spell it out for you?"

"Maybe I do. Maybe I'm not as clever as you think."

They stood facing each other, Ella searching Honora's disappointed eyes until suddenly, she understood.

"On dreamside?"

Honora didn't flicker.

"You had it on dreamside? It couldn't be!" Ella suddenly felt out of her depth. She was first to look away.

"Are you sure it wasn't. .."

"Wasn't what? A dream?"

Ella took the other woman's arm. "Let's go. I need to sit down somewhere and think about this."

They walked across the hollowed-out shell of the old cathedral, down the steps and out across the face of the defiant new monument. They found a bench. Honora stared downwards.

Have it? How can you have it and not have it? But that's how it was.

"It was November. Cold November. Ma and Da thought I was going mad. Maybe I was ... I remember everything. Mostly I remember how cold it was. Bitter winds and mists rolling down from the loughs. Rain. All that.

"It was my barren year. My lost year. After I'd tried to kill myself at university, I was just idle. I felt. . . cauterized. All nerves gone. Spring and summer slipped into autumn and I didn't even notice. Ma and Da fussing over me the whole time, I had to shut them out to stay sane. There was a weekly appointment with a psychologist. A nice man. I told him everything about myself. I opened up to him like a flower, told him all about my childhood, all that stuff. And in all the candour he didn't see I'd kept this other thing quiet."

"You didn't tell him about dreamside?"

"Not a thing."

"Didn't he guess you were hiding something?"

"I don't know. I kept him busy with masses and masses of information about other things. It just came pouring out. It seemed to keep him satisfied. But the more I talked, the more I kept it a secret, the more I could feel it swelling inside me. I knew I had an appointment on dreamside. It was inflating me, insisting, summoning me.

"I stopped fighting it, and then one night I was back there. You know, it's funny: it was always night, and I couldn't change it. And the moon was always full, and on dreamside I had this huge, soft, roundness growing inside me. It was all different. A cold place. Frost, and moon washed nights, and trees all silhouette. And the lake was calm, like oil.

"I was terrified, Ella. Every time I was drawn back there, I was bigger. I tried to hold it off. Have you ever tried to stay awake, days at a time? Try it. You start to break up. First there are little slips, with your words faltering and fusing together. Then there's all the dithering, unable to perform simple tasks. And you lose concentration, you're 'away' somewhere else; and then you start to laugh at yourself, but with hysterical laughter that cuts back at you. You forget why you're trying to stay awake. So that's what you do, fight it, fight it. In the end, of course, you give in.

"Then I arrived there with the awful realization, you know, this is the time, this is the moment. It was so cold there. And there was something else ... a shadow ... a bad echo. The trees were ugly charcoal silhouettes and the moon was like a gob of candle wax dribbled across the lake. I was thinking I would rather be anywhere but here when I felt