by Holly Race
I am standing in Ollie’s bedroom again. The needles on my skin have gone, the pressure has lifted. It’s all replaced by emptiness. My chest is a vacuum and the room is airless. Ollie is lying on the floor, fast asleep. His hand is closed tight around the locket.
There’s nothing more to be done. The light that wanted Ollie doesn’t want me, that much is clear. I am empty. Dry. Cracked. I go to my room and pull the duvet over my head. A dark calmness spreads over me; the sign that I am slipping into dreams. Then they take me.
I am back on Wanstead Flats, already trussed up like meat for roasting. A tree knot bores into my back. Jenny is there, of course, her twitch of a smile half coy, half cruel. Instead of lighting the match, though, she opens her mouth wide. Wider than a real human would be able to. From her gaping maw she draws a limp form. In shape, it is a baby, but like no baby I have ever seen. The skin is puckered from its long gestation in Jenny’s mouth, and its eyes are bulging white, a hybrid of human and insect. Jenny thrusts it at me and its boneless arms reach for me, its pale eyes bright with malevolence. I scream, throw myself backwards into the tree, and wake up.
Heart racing, I reach for the lamp next to my bed. My room is its usual mess, scattered sketchbooks and coloured pencils littering the floor. A sculpture of my guardian angel’s head sits on the desk, seemingly staring out of the window. In the darkness, the memory of the nightmare still fresh, it’s quite creepy. If I didn’t know I was awake I’d be terrified it was about to move. Funny, I don’t even remember making a sculpture.
The head twists to look at me. Backed against the wall next to my bed, I am frozen. The mouth moves. ‘The time is here, Fern,’ it says, every syllable weighty. ‘Now wake up.’
I do. My room is dark again, only a sliver of moonlight sliding through the curtains. But I am not alone. Someone is shuffling across the floor. It’s another nightmare, I tell myself. Shaking, I turn the bedside lamp on again. The intruder whisks around. They are clutching one of my sketches. Red, bird’s-nest hair; scars etching her face; poorly fitting armour. The sketch matches the face. The face that told me to wake up just seconds ago is no longer only in my dreams. She is here. My guardian angel has come for me.
6
She is standing in my bedroom, exactly as I’ve always dreamed her. I reach out to touch her armour. It’s cold but my hand doesn’t seem to be able to grasp it, as though it’s not truly there.
‘How …?’ I begin, and then I feel faint.
In an instant, the woman is by my side and her arm is around my waist. Up close, I see that every detail of her face is picked out by a halo of soft blue light that has no source.The wall feels cool and solid against my palm, but when the woman’s hair brushes against my shoulder everything else blurs. It’s the strangest feeling – as though my body is trying to sleep even when my mind is alert.
I’m shaking, my heart’s pounding, heat is filling my head. It’s not fear exactly, but it’s a close relation. This doesn’t make sense. How can she be here? ‘You’re the person from my dreams?’ I can’t say guardian angel. It’s too childish.
When she speaks her voice is like the end of an echo. ‘I have walked through your sleep, yes. Andraste is one of my names.’
‘Ann-drast?’ I ask, struggling to hear her.
‘Ahn-dras-teh,’ she corrects, leaning towards me. Her breath – a winter breeze – makes my skin tingle. She has a strange accent that I can’t place.
‘How are you here?’ I ask.
‘I’ve come to take you home.’
‘This is home.’
‘I mean my home. Annwn.’
I shiver. Annwn. The Underworld. Andraste notices my reaction. ‘You have been there before, Fern King,’ she says, ‘You walk in Annwn every night, while your body sleeps here in Ithr.’
At first I don’t understand her. Then I begin to piece it together. Mum dying in her sleep. Ollie’s inability to wake up. Andraste’s appearance in so many of my dreams.
‘Annwn is like … a dreamworld?’
‘That is right.’ Andraste turns away from me, looking for something.
‘So,’ I try to stand and follow her but my legs are having none of it, ‘are you … do the knights live in Annwn as well?’
‘The knights work in Annwn, but they are part of this world, like you.’
‘They work?’
Andraste sighs, as though she doesn’t have much time but knows it will be easier to tell me what I want to know.
‘The knights protect the people of your world in Annwn.’
I think of the way Andraste always turns up to rescue me when I’m having a nightmare.
‘You protect us from our dreams?’
‘I am not a knight, Fern King.’
I look pointedly at her armour, at the sword slung from her hip. She frowns. ‘I mean, I am not a knight in the sense you think.’
‘Then …’ My mind races. ‘So what are you?’ As soon as I’ve said it, I wonder whether I’ve made a faux pas. It sounds like such a rude question. Luckily, Andraste only raises an eyebrow.
‘I am one of the Fay,’ she replies. She pats my arm, seemingly done with answering my questions properly, and starts opening all my cupboards.
As her fingers – dirt embedded deep under the nails – shuffle through my socks and pants, I realise that I’m not at all outraged at the invasion of privacy. This woman has seen my darkest, most frightening nightmares. She has cut through the ropes that tied me to a burning tree and lifted me through flames. She has protected me when Ollie tried to drink my blood. When I killed my father, she threw the knife away and breathed life back into his wounded body. She’s my sister-mother-friend. Of course she can look through my private belongings.
‘But why do you – why do the knights – need to protect us from our dreams? I mean – they’re just dreams, right?’
Andraste looks back at me disapprovingly. ‘Just?’
‘That’s not what I …’ I’m not sure why I’ve offended her.
She starts rifling through the detritus on my desk, and alights on a square box covered in faded black velvet. She opens it. Inside is a golden pocket mirror, plain on the outside except for the letter U engraved in cloudy swirls on the front, and a quote from an old poem on the back.
‘This is what I sought,’ Andraste says, lifting it from its cushion. ‘I am pleased it is still whole. If it had been broken, in either world, I could not have helped you.’
The mirror once belonged to Mum. It was the one item she left me in her will. Dad gave it to me with an odd expression and when I pressed him, told me that Mum had been holding it when she died. ‘I didn’t want to keep it at all, to be honest, love,’ he’d said, ‘but your mother was so set on it going to you that I had to. Best put it away now, though, don’t you think?’ I’ve spent hours smoothing the surface in my palms during lonely evenings, wondering why on earth Mum left this to me.
‘This is the portal to Annwn,’ Andraste says, pressing the mirror into my hands. ‘Open the mirror and come with me.’ She smiles again, but this time the smile seems to reach beyond her mouth. The glow that surrounds her becomes more intense.
The mirror is hot but I’m not sure whether that’s the metal or the blood thumping through my body. The vertiginous feeling I had when I first saw Andraste in my room is back.
‘Is Annwn safe?’ I ask.
Andraste smiles, ‘Annwn springs from your dreams and your nightmares. It is formed from the imaginations of every creature in this world. Of course it is not safe for mortals.’
She reaches forward and unlocks the clasp. The mirror springs open in my hand. Blue light – the kind that enveloped Ollie – expands like a bellows until it is flooding my bedroom. It has a shining, glittering quality, like the glowing plankton that turn oceans into carpets of light. Maybe it isn’t light at all, but tiny, sentient organisms. Strange shapes, like living shadows, dance across the walls and ceiling. Spirits, cats and bears, old propeller aeroplanes and wolfhounds huntin
g.
I prepare myself for the pinpricks of a thousand needles and the feeling of being pulled apart, as I’d had with Ollie’s locket, but it never arrives. The light flows over my skin like a silk blanket. It creeps up my arm and across my chest, and I realise that if it continues it will suffocate me. I try to struggle against it, but my growing panic is mixed with an irresistible drowsiness. The last thing I see as the light winds its way over my hair and into my mouth is Andraste’s impenetrable gaze. Then I am drowning.
7
I thrash through black waters, unable to breathe but not suffocating. If I open my mouth the darkness pours in like tar, choking me. Sounds distort into vibrations that shudder towards me, my hearing the only sense I have left.
Buried alive.
The meaning of those words hits me a few seconds after I think them.
Can’t die like this. Swim up.
But I can’t tell which way is up.
Just as I begin to wonder if there is no way out, there’s a shift in pressure. My ears pop. My body feels weightier, or maybe the darkness is thinning. The sounds become more distinct. A woman screaming; the grating sound of metal on metal; a guttural sob. Then with an effort I didn’t know I needed to make, I push through the night and find myself in sunlight.
At first, all I can take in is that I am no longer in my bedroom. The shapes around me come into focus. Oh. I’m in London. An Underground sign perches overhead. Behind it sit the turrets and ranging windows of the Tower. The streets around us are empty save for a few strangers who, in typical city fashion, seem to be unaware of anyone else. Disappointment niggles. It’s all too familiar.
Actually, something is different. The people aren’t dressed in working garb after all, and they’re definitely not behaving in the stiff way they would do in the real world. It’s not just that they aren’t aware of me – they don’t seem to be fully in control of their own bodies. One woman is wearing a floor-length chiffon coat and a necklace of bright yellow flowers and nothing else. She’s twirling through the street, arms stretched out, laughing raucously at some invisible joke. As she passes me, the ground stirs.
An eddy of blue light slides over the cobbles. As though touched by magic, they transform. Dirty cobbles become thick beds of herbs and flowers. The ground isn’t the only thing that’s changing. Every piece of concrete and stone that makes this part of London so austere is morphing into a child’s idea of a forest. Ivy, purple moss and clematis wind their way up walls. The Underground sign becomes a sunflower, bigger than any in the real world. The hippy woman twirls her way onwards. In her wake everything returns to its normal state and the memory of what was here only seconds ago makes the stone feel even more grey than it did before.
I should come out with something profound and poetic.
‘Wow,’ I say.
Andraste beckons me to follow her. Only a few minutes ago I couldn’t stop staring at her, but now my attention is constantly caught by Annwn. At first glance everything looks like the London I know – there’s even graffiti scrawled across some of the walls – but if you look closely you see so much more. Exotic lizards scramble up the buildings. Secluded gardens rustle loudly with plants that erupt with blossom as we pass. Even the buildings shimmer oddly, sometimes solid, sometimes morphing into the old, beamed taverns that must have occupied these streets hundreds of years ago. I glimpse a golden statue down one alleyway, surrounded by ribbons of every colour imaginable.
As we move past other people acting strangely, I ask Andraste if they’re all right.
‘They are dreamers,’ she explains without looking.
I watch a boy about my age climb determinedly up a sheer wall that towers over our heads, the bricks turning to worms beneath his fingers.
‘We’re walking through dreams?’ I ask.
‘Dreamers sometimes see us, and sometimes not,’ Andraste says, ‘and sometimes they remember us when they wake, as you remembered me. And sometimes they forget us in the space between the worlds.’
‘Back in my bedroom, you said Annwn wasn’t safe.’
‘It is not. It can be deadly. For if you die in Annwn, you die in Ithr – in your world – as well.’
What was it Clemmie had said? She had lots of marks all over her.
‘So my mum might have been killed here?’ I ask, ‘But just looked like she died in her sleep?’
‘Yes,’ Andraste says, grasping my hand, ‘Yes, I think that is what happened to Una.’
Vertiginous grief sweeps over me. Andraste marches on, but I can feel that she’s only staying silent because she knows that any more conversation about Mum’s death would make me fall apart.
A little tornado of blue light gathers in the distance. In its wake a pack of pixie-like creatures scatter into the crevices of the neighbouring buildings. That’s when I notice that the air, too, is different from the real world. It’s visible, like dust caught in a sunbeam.
‘It is inspyre,’ Andraste says when I ask her about it. She opens her hand and lets some of that blue light pool in her open palm. ‘It creates Annwn. It comes from here,’ she says, placing a hand on my forehead, ‘and from here.’ She moves her hand to press against my heart.
‘Humans make it?’
‘In a way, yes. Your world, Ithr, makes everything in Annwn. We cannot exist without your thoughts and dreams. But you cannot exist without us. Without Annwn feeding your imagination you could not be yourselves. You would lose all sense of who you are. You would have no hopes, no fears, no ambition, no desires – nothing that makes humans different from each other.’
I reach a hand out as we walk, watching the inspyre play with my fingers. It weaves through them like a pet, eager to please. One particularly playful eddy seems to be enjoying rolling up and down my arm. Then it leaps over to my face, like a puppy trying to lick me. I swipe it away. And freeze.
Something is wrong. I stare at my hand, wondering whether the inspyre has done something to it. I touch my face again. Now with both hands. It can’t be. Fumbling in my pocket for Mum’s mirror I am almost too scared to open it. There must be some mistake. I hold the mirror in front of me. It takes a moment to focus it on the right part of my face. Red irises, blonde hair, white-as-bone skin. It’s me. But the skin is smooth. My burn has vanished.
‘It’s gone,’ I say hysterically. ‘What’s happened to me? What’s happening?!’ I can’t say why I’m so upset. I dreamed about the fire never happening. It’s just overwhelming. This is my world. A world where I don’t look like such a freak. I never, ever want to leave.
‘Why is the burn not there?’ I ask Andraste.
‘Because it is new,’ she says.
‘I don’t understand.’
‘It is not a part of you yet. You don’t imagine yourself that way.’
‘So I only look how I want to look?’ But no, I think, that can’t be right or I wouldn’t have my red eyes.
‘No,’ she says. ‘In Annwn, you look how you think you look. The burning is not old – you are not accustomed to it yet. Perhaps you never will be. So you do not see it on yourself when you come here.’
‘So I can’t change the rest of my appearance?’ I ask.
Andraste’s eyes twinkle strangely. ‘Is it so bad, looking different?’
I look at her scars and unkempt hair.
‘No,’ I say at last, although I think she knows I don’t mean it. ‘No, there’s nothing wrong with it, I guess.’
She sets off down the street once more. ‘We must keep going. We must go on to Tintagel.’
‘Tintagel?’
I try to remember where I’ve heard that name before.
‘Wait – isn’t Tintagel a castle?’
‘Yes. It is the thanes’ castle.’
‘But … isn’t that over the other side of the country? In Cornwall?’
‘That is not the true Tintagel. The true Tintagel is here, in Annwn.’
We round a corner, and all sense of direction leaves me. We should be passing St Pa
ul’s Cathedral, but all I can see is a deep moat brimming with murky water and a wooden wall beyond.
‘Tintagel,’ Andraste says, pointing above the wall.
I was wrong. There, just where it should be, is St Paul’s. But it’s not quite the building I know. The shape is the same – the dome perched on a crown of pillars. But it is a Frankenstein’s monster of materials. Patches of marble alternate with red brick and hewn rock. The grand columns are part stone, part scaffolding. Four crenellated towers mark the corners of the building. A flag, its emblem a five-pointed star inside a circle, billows from the top of the central dome. Suddenly I realise that I have caught a glimpse of this castle before, when I tried to snatch Ollie’s locket. Does this mean he’s inside Tintagel? What would the knights want with my brother?
I am so busy gaping at this new version of St Paul’s that I almost don’t notice the shadows passing overhead. They roll across the dome like storm clouds. It’s a huge flock of birds. Then one of them lands on top of the wall, folding its great wings across its back, and with a heart pound I realise it’s not a bird at all.
‘Oh my God.’
The sky is full of angels. They soar in many-coloured skins around the castle’s spires. More of them rest above the porch. Some gaze on me benevolently. Others land on all fours and grin through fanged teeth. A cherub plays amongst them, meaty and merry.
Andraste leaves me gaping and strides towards a gatehouse set into the wooden wall, beside a raised drawbridge. I trot after her.
‘Is this where the knights live?’ I ask breathlessly.