Dreamside - By Graham Joyce Page 0,73

areas of local beauty by the illegal dumping of chemical wastes, please attend the public inquiry to be held in Penmarthern Town Hall. Representatives of the Lytex chemicals company will be in attendance.

The notice was already out of date: the meeting had gone by two days earlier.

"Lytex?" said Lee, puzzling over the notice. "Sounds familiar."

"Forget it," said Brad.

Honora stood at the very edge of the lake. "It's poisoned," she said, gazing into its depths. Then her face set in that same expression Ella had identified earlier. She swayed slightly on the bank above the polluted water, as if played on some invisible cord, with some still, small part of herself unwinding into the lake. Ella saw it again. Honora looked pale, beautiful and unearthly, but anaemic, as if her life-blood was leaking away. This time it was Brad who made a move to save her, but Ella stopped him with a gesture. Then she stepped forward, put an arm around the other woman and turned her away from the water.

"I'm losing myself," said Honora.

"It's all right. I'll watch over you."

Lee fingered the diseased bark of the tall oak. Ella peered from the bank as the iridescent scales of a detergent slick writhed slowly on the water. Even amid the corruption and pollution she could see the shining scales of a dragon, or a winged serpent, or a beautiful, silver-armoured company with banners fluttering below the surface of the water. It was difficult to look away. "Let's get out of here," she said.

She led them from the lake over to the woods, where afternoons had been spent strolling in Burns's company, when they were wide eyed and receptive to his sharp definitions of life and to his quiet revelations. Even in waking time on those afternoons, Burns had made the woods a place of jewelled cobwebs, a place inhabited by satyrs and dryads. Now they were wandering without purpose through the mouldering scrub of a thin damp copse.

Ella was circumspect as they walked; constantly glancing around her as though she expected to discover something or to encounter someone. If the others noticed, they made no comment.

They took the path back to the house, Honora still in advance and decisively separated from Brad by the other two. Occasionally they changed positions. Ella was anxious about leaving Honora alone with her thoughts, where she was like a weak swimmer at risk from strong currents. She sent Lee up to talk with Honora; Ella dropped back to talk with Brad; then Lee talked to Brad and Ella with Honora; but Honora and Brad never talked. And all of this was conducted against the rumbling, prophetic thunder of what the night held. On this night, they must sleep and dream.

Brad hung his cropped head, eyes fixed on the narrow path before him as Ella walked at his side. "Why are we doing this?"

"To make a connection," said Ella, glancing hopefully about her.

"I've made a connection. Can I be excused now?"

Ella took his arm. She was softening to his helplessness.

"Do you really not remember, Ella?"

"Remember what?"

"That time. Of dreaming. Just the once."

"Don't start that again."

"It's important to me."

"I'm sure it is."

"There's a reason why," he said softly, even shyly. "You say that it didn't happen—"

"Which it didn't."

"So I can't change that; it's what you remember, and anyway it was only on dreamside, but Ella it was lucid, there was no mistake, we all of us know the difference between those dreams and ordinary dreams, but you and I were there, alone and it was special, happy, for both of us, and for me it was the only time it ever happened . . ."

"What?" cried Ella.

"I don't mean the only time it ever happened, I mean the only time it happened—and I'm talking about waking time as well— that was real or good."

There was a frightening urgency about what Brad was saying. Ella closed her eyes. She wondered whether she could in fact recall such a situation with Brad, and conceded that underneath their old antagonism something sexual might have been afoot. Was there a fragment of a dream she had wiped out, repressed completely? Ella knew how easy it was to erase lucid dream experiences. She forced the thought back.

Up ahead, Lee and Honora were engaging in another version of that same conversation.

"What's the purpose of this?" Honora asked.

Lee didn't know, except that Ella wanted it. Sometimes he thought that Ella was just too complicated for him. He didn't understand half of the things she