Dreamside - By Graham Joyce Page 0,71

through the media of memory,

fantasy, neuroses, dreaming, and finally through

those unhinged kinds of love which themselves

spiral deeper and deeper into madness

—L. P. Burns

Somewhere in the Brecon Beacons, guided in the moonless dark by an infrared confidence and a blueprint memory, Ella found her mark. It was the early hours of the morning. The Midget, engine knocking wildly, stalled outside the house on the exact spot where an old Morris Minor had stood one summer thirteen years ago. Ella had already jumped out, leaving Brad to stare moodily around him. The house stood empty.

"Thirteen years on," she said to Brad, "and still a holiday home for some overpaid academic who's probably been twice since we were here."

Brad got out of the car. He didn't begrudge anyone a single brick of the place. "How will we get in?" he said, in a voice that suggested. "Let's turn back."

Ella lifted the boot of her car. "You've got a narrow experience of life, Brad Cousins." She lifted a slender chisel and a hammer from the boot, and marched around to the rear of the house. Brad followed at a distance of five paces. She slotted the chisel between the upper and lower frame of a sash window, swung the hammer once, hard, and the window catch flew open. The window required only a light push, sliding up as if by hydraulic gears.

"Where did you learn that?"

"From a cigarette card. Go and fetch those things from the car."

Brad trotted off obediently as Ella climbed through the window. When he reappeared with Ella’s bag, she had the back door open.

"No, don't switch on the lights. We don't want to attract attention. Anyway, it'll soon be light. Close the curtains and light some of these candles."

"Romantic," said Brad.

"You think so?"

"No."

With the candle flames flickering and darting long shadows across the room, they could see that the house had recently been renovated. Floorboards had been sanded, old cupboards replaced by units, and the enamel sink supplanted by one of stainless steel. They made coffee and played a nervous round of That-Wasn't-Here-Before.

"What time will the others come?"

"When they show up."

"Give me one of those ridiculous liquorice cigarettes, will you?"

Some time after three o'clock in the morning, a car pulled up outside the house. Ella went to the window and drew back a curtain. Then she opened the door.

"We got well lost," said Lee, "we've been driving in circles. Scary kind of circles." He gave Ella a special look.

So now Lee was getting a taste, Ella thought. Now he understands what's happening. "Don't tell me about it. You're here. Come inside, Honora,"

"Is he in there?"

Ella nodded, and they walked through. Brad sat stiffly in a corner of the room. Lee was only mildly surprised to see him shaved, shorn and kitted out in some of his old clothes. Honora simply erased his presence: he wasn't there. Brad might have flickered a glance in her direction, or maybe it was only the play of candlelight across his eyes.

Lee rubbed his hands with simulated gusto, paced the floor and chattered about making coffee and getting comfortable: anything to overlay the smoky bitterness in the room. Ella was wiser than Lee. She knew the exact nature of the ingredients that had to be brought together to bubble in the cauldron. Let them feel it, she thought, let them feel it.

Lee discovered what hard work it is to keep up conversation when three other people don't want to join in. He quickly ran out of counterfeit enthusiasm. The candles burned steadily, and the four sat silently, nursing empty coffee mugs, only their eyes reflecting the available light. Occasionally a flame would shiver in a draft, dispatching shadows across a wall and releasing a worm of black smoke.

"This is like a séance," said Lee. "Let's see if we can contact the living."

No one bothered to laugh. Lee was reminded of the early lucid dreaming seminars, where they would sit for twenty minutes in uncomfortable silence waiting for the professor to speak. He was about to wonder aloud what Burns would have made of their situation, but opted against unwise comment. Honora gazed down at the rug beneath her as if she saw something significant in its pattern, and it seemed to Lee that her silence was the deepest. Brad continued to find the far corner of the ceiling an image of satisfaction. Ella looked far too comfortable, and the corners of her mouth were turned up fractionally in what he thought was an incipiently malevolent