Under Plum Lake

by Lionel Davidson

  The first dream was a problem. I could hardly read it. The writing slanted everywhere on the page. The words seemed to be: Racing down Mount Julas. Window went over the side. The second one read: Sitting in a car and it starts stretching all round me.

  I could just remember that. I thought I'd had it before. I had a strange memory of being in something that started changing into something else. There was something familiar and dreamlike about it.

  Mount Julas was familiar, too, and I thought I must have read it somewhere. I couldn't understand the window that went over the side. I wasn't even sure it was window. The w's were badly written. It could be Dindor, or Dindo, even Dido. The only clear letters were the i, the d, and the o.

  I didn't bother with it, but I thought about Mount Julas. I thought about it all morning. I looked it up during lunch, in the school library. I found a Mount Julier in Switzerland, and a Mount Julijske in Yugoslavia. There was a Julius in Alaska, and some other places, but there was no Mount Julas.

  I didn't know what to make of it. I knew I hadn't invented it. I couldn't understand it. Just then I was having a bad time, anyway. I thought any day now the doctors would prove I was crazy, so I was trying to prove I wasn't. I was living two lives. At school I was acting normal, doing the best I could. I stopped looking out the window. I did all my homework. The rest of the time, I was thinking. I'd pretend to read a book or watch television, but I was thinking.

  I'd had a fantastic idea. I had the idea the dreams weren't separate dreams. I thought they were one big dream, and that night after night I was having bits of it. Some of the bits were even repeating themselves! I'd be dreaming, and I'd know exactly what was coming.

  And that wasn't all. I knew the trouble had started in the cave, but I could hardly remember it. There was nothing I'd done that I could properly recall. It was just a blur in my mind. Yet I'd been stuck there for days. I wondered what I could have done all that time.

  I wondered if I'd hurt myself there, if I'd knocked myself out and had the dreams while I was unconscious, and that this was why I remembered the dreams but not the cave.

  I couldn't believe that. It seemed ridiculous. Anyway, I remembered the first dream I'd had, the one about flying in a purple sky. It had struck me as strange when I had it. I knew I'd never had it before. I'd had it afterwards. I'd kept having it afterwards.

  So I'd had the dreams after the cave; not in it, and not before. Yet they obviously came from something that had happened while I was there.

  I worried at it. I worked out all I'd done before the cave. I remembered taking the flashlight, and going out the window. I remembered finding the “rabbit hole”, and the tunnel, and going down the cliff, and jumping off the step; and taking my clothes off. I couldn't think why I'd taken them off. I just knew I had done.

  The strange thing was, I couldn't remember putting them on again.

  I thought about that. I went over it again and again. I wondered when I'd put them on again. I had an idea that if I worried enough I'd maybe dream it. And I did.

  We were into the spring term. I woke up one night and knew I'd dreamed, and that I could remember it easily. I didn't even bother reaching for the notebook. I just lay there in the dark and thought of it.

  I remembered jumping in the cave and seeing the hole in the floor, with the chain attached to the rungs. I'd had a feeling I had to try the chain. I did it, and found I had to take my shoes and socks off. I took everything off. I took off my watch and my windcheater and pullover, then the rest, and wedged the flashlight near the hole, and just then a light shone back at me.

  A kid came out of the hole. He had nothing on.

  I said, “Who's there?”

  He said, “Who's there?”

  I said, “How did you get there?”

  He said, “How did you get there?”

  It went on. It just kept going on, in the dark. We went in a flooded tunnel. It was emerald green in the tunnel. I saw my hands big and pink in front of me. I saw a barrel and a box, both painted with tar, suspended and bobbing from the chain. We ducked under them. We went out to the sea, and a canoe was there, and we swam to it. It was a little canoe, six or seven feet. All around the breeze was wrinkling the water. He said, “Come and dry off,” and went to the end of the boat and I followed. We went down steps and he opened a door.

  It was a room about thirty feet long. There was a carpet on the floor and a sofa all along one wall. There were easy chairs and a low table, and music was softly playing.

  In my own room now, I was scarcely breathing. I was afraid the dream would vanish. But even then, with a mixture that was half fright and half relief, I felt something else.

  I felt I hadn't dreamed.

  I felt I'd remembered.

  I felt it had happened.

  Could it have happened?

  29. Going Back

  Nothing made sense to me then. I knew I had to go to Polziel. I had to go in the tunnel and see if there was a barrel and a box there. I knew I hadn't been there before the night of the storm, and I'd not been since. I'd never even known about it except from my . . . “dreams”. If it was there, if the barrel and the box were there, then I hadn't dreamed it, then it was real, and all of it was real.

  I couldn't believe it. I couldn't even understand it. Night after night, day after day, I kept trying. And just then we had exams.

  I did badly, of course. I did so badly, they thought of throwing me out. My father went up and saw them at school, and they said they wouldn't throw me out, but I'd have to do extra holiday work.

  I didn't care about that. I couldn't care about anything. All the time now I was figuring out more. I found I couldn't “force” it: I couldn't deliberately try and figure it out. I got it wrong when I did. I dreamed once I was in a rocket and I saw Earth and knew I was in space. I tried to push it further. I tried to see what happened next. Once before I'd dreamed of being in a place where fish swam in air and angels played harps on clouds. I thought that's what happened next. I thought I'd landed on a planet where they did that, and I forced myself to remember how I got there, and couldn't.

  (I put that to show the difficulty. The dreams were coming in a crazy order, in snatches. It didn't help to go through my “dream book”. I couldn't put the dreams together.)

  I decided just to let the dreams come. I'd go to bed and lie there waiting. I'd say to myself, I am going to dream now. I am going on a dream journey. I must have gone twenty journeys before we took off for Polziel.

  I knew my parents were worried, and I was bothered they'd be watching me all the time at Polziel. But that worked out, too. My father said I had to do the holiday tasks in the morning, and nobody had to disturb me; so right away I took advantage of it.

  Right after breakfast, the first day, I was back in my room. Inside five minutes I was out of it again. I went out the window.

  I took a flashlight. I looked round to see no one was watching, and started off for the cliff. I was trembling so hard my legs shook. I got to the cliff and heard myself breathing a strange shivery way. I thought I was going to be sick. I thought I wouldn't find the hole. I thought I'd imagined it, and there wasn't a hole.

  But I hadn't imagined it. The hole was there. Even the bits of slate I'd taken off the top were still there, exactly where I'd left them, almost a year ago. I just looked at them, and licked my lips, and shone the flashlight in the hole, and went down.

  The hairs rose at the back of my neck as I swung the flashlight round. Everything as I remembered! There was the doorway into the tunnel. There was the gun lying where I'd dropped it. There was the breeze still sounding like someone blowing a bottle.

  I started down the tunnel, and got to the blank wall, and poked the flashlight round, and followed it, round and round, till I came out to daylight and the west face.

  There was the path again, zig-zagging down; and the birds flapping up in alarm, and the last step far below, with the wrinkled sea beneath it.

  I started down right away
, my heart banging. I slipped on the first few steps, and remembered how I'd done it before, and did it the same way, on my behind. At the last leg of the zig-zag I got to my feet again, and reached the bottom step, and just for a moment wondered how I'd get back. But I couldn't care about that, either, so I jumped, and landed on the platform, and in one glance took in the lot.

  There were the two steps down to the cave, and the stone shelf at the back, with the old flashlight still on it. There was the barrel of hard tar secured to the wall; and the hole in the floor. . .

  I went to it immediately, saw sea water at the bottom, and stripped off. I went down the rungs, gasping at the chill, and took a breath and ducked.

  It was pitch black there and I couldn't see a thing.

  But I felt the chain dangling where I knew it would be, and pulled myself along it.

  After a few yards the blackness wasn't so black. There was a blur ahead, the colour of pea soup. Daylight filtering through the sea. The end of the tunnel was ahead.

  Something was bobbing in front of it.

  Two things were bobbing.

  I didn't have to go any farther, but I went. I felt them. I felt the barrel and the box.

  I felt the smooth tar painted all over them, and turned and went back.

  It was black all the way, this way, no light at all. I couldn't see where the tunnel ended. I just kept reaching up, and found the rungs, and climbed out.

  I dried myself with my jeans and put them on, and went out on the platform and reached for the step. I hauled myself up easily. I'd grown this year. I went back up the cliff on hands and knees, and got to the tunnel, and went through it, and up the steps and out of the hole.

  I didn't want to think yet. I was trying not to.

  I was looking for a bigger piece of slate to cover the hole when I was suddenly sick.

  I was sick as a dog, all over the grass.

  I crouched on hands and knees, trembling, and couldn't help myself then. I thought of it.

  I thought that all year nobody had known what was wrong with me, and I knew now. I thought that all year I'd felt I'd lost something, and I knew what that was, too, now. I'd lost a world.

  I stayed there a few minutes, recovering, and then went home. I listened a while to make sure they were all at the front, and I went in the back. I climbed up the post, and over the tiles and into my room, and sat there all morning, looking out the window.

  A fantastic thing had happened to me that had not happened to anyone in the world, and I didn't know what to think.

  I couldn't tell anyone. It wouldn't help if I did, and I didn't have enough to tell, anyway. I had a few pieces of a jigsaw that needed hundreds of pieces. I didn't know where to put the pieces I had.

  I wasn't the only one who'd been to the other world. He'd told me that. But I was the only one to remember it, and I wondered why.

  That's what I thought in the end. I thought: why?

  I thought it all week. I was like a zombie all week. I didn't hear what people said. I didn't know when it was meal times. I couldn't eat at meal times. (It's when they started talking of doctors again.) I kept thinking: why? And I kept dreaming.

  I knew they weren't dreams now. I had them by day and by night. I had them everywhere. Mainly I had them in the cave.

  I cleaned up the cave, and started clearing the steps. I went there and back through the flooded tunnel. One day I went to Penzance and looked up Polziel in the library. It said the place had been a fishing port and the little harbour had been destroyed in a storm in 1790. Nothing was known of where the people had gone (except they hadn't fallen in the sea and weren't ringing any church bells there). Also they hadn't gone to Seele because a centuries-old feud existed between the two villages. The villagers of Seele had always accused Polziel of smuggling. They accused them of wrecking ships for their cargoes of brandy and tea; though Customs officials had found no evidence of it.

  The same night I went down again and inspected the evidence. I did it in darkness. I felt the barrel and the box. I felt the tar painted over them and knew it was there to keep the contents safe under water. If I hadn't been under water myself I'd have laughed, because at last I'd found something about a place that no one had found before.

  But even when I came out of the water I didn't laugh.

  I sat in the cave and looked at the moonlight.

  I looked at where I'd seen his canoe first.

  “Dido,” I said aloud. “Why did you do this to me, Dido?”

  Then I knew it would happen again. I knew it would have to happen.

  30. Making it Happen

  Polziel, Cornwall, August 28

  My time's running out now. We go back in three days. He knows that. He knows all I know. He knows he shouldn't have done it. He shouldn't have got me in the first place, and he shouldn't have brought my memory back, even for minutes. A mind is so active (this is what he told me) that even if you take out ninety-nine per cent of it, the one per cent left can start remembering all over again. And it happened.

  He did it wrong, and it happened.

  I remember what I'm not supposed to remember. And I don't want to. I don't want to know it.

  I know the future is wonderful, and the idea behind it is, and life is. But I want to get on with my own!

  Yet I want to see his again! I want to see the mountains in the sea and the canyons and the millions of fish. I want to see Plum Lake and the tigra forests and the glowing buildings of Egonia. I want to see it all just once, and then have it taken away.

  He said they brought people down overnight and had them back in their beds again by morning; and I want him to do it for me.

  I know he'll be my good angel, and watch me all my life and “be” with me. And he is. He's in my mind now — I feel him. And I feel him watching, in the same way I felt him last year.

  He's out there somewhere.

  So I've done it now. I've written it, and he knows it. He can't leave me like this. He has to come and get me — if only to get what I've written. Every night now I go down and tell him so.

  I say, “Dido, you can't leave me like this.” I say, “Dido, I'm not in my time, and I'm not in yours.” I say, “Dido, you have to come and get me.” I just keep saying it, as I'm saying it now. I say, “Dido!” I say, “Dido . . .”

  Copyright

  This edition published in 2013 by reinkarnation under licence from the estate of Lionel Davidson

  First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape 1980

  © Lionel Davidson 1980

  ISBN 978-0-9563689-7-3

  All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without the permission of the copyright owner

  Lionel Davidson (1922 – 2009) was a highly regarded crime and thriller writer. He won the Golden Dagger award, for best thriller of the year, three times. He also wrote children’s books under the pseudonym ‘David Line’. Under Plum Lake is the one exception to this rule. Further information about the author and his books at

  www.reinkarnationbooks.com

  Table of Contents

  Part One: Under the Mountains

  1. Going Down

  2. A Face I Couldn't See

  Polziel, Cornwall, August 4

  3. The Face Again

  4. The Face by Night

  5. Through the Face

  6. Who's There?

  7. Where Do We Go?

  Part Two: Under The Sea

  8. There

  9. Through the Projector

  10. The Stone Brain

  11. The Fabulous City

  12. The Anemone Palace

  13. I Walk Round Me

  Part Three: Under Plum Lake

  14. The Lake

  15. The Power Slopes

  16. The Switched-On Mountain

  17. The Lake Begins to Glow

  18. The Pleasure Drome

  19. My Time Has Come

  20. Dying

  21. Who Am I Now?

 
Polziel, Cornwall, August 18

  22. What I Knew

  23. The Timeless Caverns

  24. The Billions of Worlds

  25. Stretch Stretch

  26. Into Nothing

  Part Four: Dream Journeys

  27. The Planted Memories

  28. The Book of Dreams

  29. Going Back

  30. Making it Happen

  Polziel, Cornwall, August 28