Dreamside - By Graham Joyce Page 0,78

the edge of her vision, a dull phosphorescence: something had come into the room.

It filled the room and infected it with cold. Its presence was strong. Like tart moonlight, like acid frost, like sour, congealed breath. It was the colour and taste and odour of neglect and decay masquerading as a human child. Honora's coffee slipped to the floor, a dark stain expanding in four directions.

Sitting in the chair opposite, the girl didn't speak. Her head was tilted to one side like a marionette. Her sheenless eyes were fixed on Honora. She was only too human, a waif in a sad cut-down dress. Her jaw was slack and her hair unkempt, not lovable, no, but infinitely pitiable. Her sand-coloured eyes were fixed on Honora but looking through and past her, as if waiting for the answer to some question posed long ago, patiently but insistently waiting for the answer which never comes.

Honora was paralysed, like the very first dreamside paralysis. Her words choked. "When will you be done with us?"

The fixed expression on the girl's face slowly changed, twisting into a sneer. She stood up and moved towards the fire. Honora felt a wave of cold. There was the same phosphorescent halo about her, the glow of moon on water. It pulsed briefly before fading, and with the pulsing the girl diminished in size and substance, transforming at last into a small, hard lozenge of blue flame which arced like a tiny meteor, dropping into the fire.

Honora's eyes followed it into the heart of the fire. She had no will to resist, to look away. Even knowing the danger, and remembering Ella's warnings, that single conjured spark had been enough to draw her back. The fire held her, trancelike, and was drawing her in. She was a single thread; the fabric of her being was a many-textured, spectrum-colored tapestry, unravelling a fibre at a time, unwinding on to a vast spool held by hands within the fire, one fine strand carefully wound in after another. As if that is where it starts, at the eyes, where the threads of the soul hang in their slackest stitch; stitches which can be hooked free of weft and warp, and pulled through, drawn out, spooled in. She was lost to it. She was coming apart.

She knew the danger. The idea of resistance fashioned itself into a sword in her mind, a bright-edged sword, a way out. But the sword itself became smoke; and the thing she would slash free of became smoke. The effort to resist required too much, too mighty a cut, too great a mental stroke. Her mind was coming apart.

Honora belonged to the fire. She was enslaved by the ritual dance of the aromatic flame. Fire, first and most martial of all elements, the hierarchical prince. She saw in the fire the tapered banners of his glorious armies, the swallowtail pennants a-flutter, flags of crimson, ochre, sapphire, armies spilling into valleys and camped along the plains. They pinioned her and they held her. The flame engaged with her. She was fire. She was smoke. She was coming apart, like smoke.

"Burning! What's burning?" Lee and Ella stood over her, shaking her.

"Honora!" They were calling her as if from a great distance.

Lee dragged her to her feet, shaking her violently, stripping off her outer clothes. Slowly she became aware of a thick, acrid smell, and realized that the room was fogged with dense, grey smoke.

"Are you burned? Honora, are you burned?" Lee was frantically stroking her arms.

"No."

Miraculously she wasn't. At her feet she saw, still smouldering but not even charred, the skirt and pullover which Lee had torn from her. Wisps of smoke writhed from the clothes. Ella was running around opening windows.

"What happened?" Honora was still dazed.

Lee and Ella just looked at each other. Ella folded Honora in her arms as the other woman wept.

"It has to be tonight," said Ella. "It has to be tonight."

T H I RT E E N

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything

would appear as it is, infinite

—William Blake

Surely tonight sleep will come. But sleep is choosy these days about the company she keeps. And those who may have been caught in the past with a stolen fistful of her soft plumage can't complain if now she makes them wait for favours. So the three lie on their mattresses in the dark, and wait.

Lee shifts in a half-sleep, perspiring heavily, unable to find the elusive groove. Honora doses herself with another of her pills, frets,