by Ben J Henry
‘Was it me that killed Anna Harrington?’ she asked with wide eyes and a bashful smile, flattered by the implication. ‘No. We have your great-grandparents to thank for that.’
Joe stepped between them, thumbs in the belt of his trousers.
‘I tried to convince her to return the book. I want no part in this.’
‘Yet you play it so well, Sergeant Crow.’
She held out her slender white hands and waited. Joe lifted the package from the bottom of the stairs and lay it across her palms. A gold bow was curled on top of the white paper: it was a birthday gift.
‘So very well.’ She toyed with the bow and then placed the gift in her lap, raising her eyes expectantly. ‘And the book?’
Gus’s breath petrified in his lungs.
‘I searched Anna’s house,’ said Joe. ‘Nothing.’
‘Not to worry,’ Rainn said with a wink. ‘Melissa is quite confident that Alicia will be able to find it.’
Returning her eyes to Gus, Rainn whispered: ‘You’re always welcome to join, you know.’
‘Join what?’ Gus asked.
Rainn raised an arm to present him with the symbol on her wrist.
‘The Order of Chaos.’
Joe balled his fists and growled: ‘You can leave now.’
Humour danced in her eyes, as if he were performing a charade and doing a very good job. But she said nothing. Whatever power she held over him, Joe could rip out her throat if he decided to. She brushed her thumb against the tattoo and it was then that Gus understood what it was: a reality check. Had this been a dream, the symbol would have smudged.
She rose from her seat and drifted towards the door, turning on her heel in the doorway.
‘I’ll tell Aldous and Morna that you send your love.’
Joe closed the door behind her and leaned his forehead against it, breathing heavily. Gus cleared his throat, unused to his uncle displaying any sign of weakness.
‘That was Alicia’s birthday present?’ he asked quietly.
Joe eyed Gus as if surprised to see him there. He nodded and retrieved a new bottle from the globe.
‘Anna was writing letters for Alicia. All that she knew. She planned to give them to Alicia for her birthday, so that she could…’ Soft glugs as Joe filled his glass. ‘Choose.’
‘Choose what?’
‘To finish what Anna had started. To find my grandparents.’
Gus stepped closer now, a fierce intrigue burning in his eyes.
‘Those letters lead to them?’
‘She won’t need them anyway,’ Joe said, waving his glass and wishing that he had not mentioned it. Gus asked why that was, noting sorry resignation in his uncle’s face.
‘Alicia won’t need to find them. They will find her.’
Gus watched his uncle deliberate.
‘There’s a man working for them. He will lead her to them. If you want to protect Alicia, you’ll warn her against lucid dreaming. And you’ll hand that book to Rainn.’
How can a dream be dangerous?
It was time to face Alicia.
You don’t have feet
She needed to get out of the house. She was not deserting her grieving father; she would be back in the morning, before he even knew she was missing. For months, Alicia had lain in bed with her ears trained on the front door, listening for the sound of her mother returning. But now, if she were to hear the soft click of the front lock or the gentle squeak of the back door, it would not be Anna Harrington coming to answer her questions. It would be Winter Hazelby, breaking in to paint messages on her walls; Melissa Lawson at her bedside, suggesting that she move in for a while; Gus Crow sneaking up the stairs to steal her mother’s book, her birthday present, or whatever else he could get his thieving hands on.
She needed to get out of the house, so she crept past the family photographs lining the corridor, each a parody of her home life. She silently wished her father goodnight as he slept on the sofa—like the world’s most useless guard dog—and slipped through the front door.
Her feet faltered. The light in Gus’s bedroom was on. Perhaps a guilty conscience kept him awake at one on a Sunday morning? Her fingers twitched as she considered marching up to the door and demanding the items he had stolen, but it was her mother’s voice that rang between her ears, quieting her own. Anna Harrington was never hot-tempered, always managing to squeeze that moment of pause between the situation and an emotional response. She would maintain a positive outlook and consider all options before jumping to conclusions; hers was the voice of reason that cut through the drama.
Alicia suspected that Gus had taken the book, since he was the only other person who knew where it was hidden. Or was he? Might Joe Crow or Melissa Lawson have taken it? Gus wanted to know if his parents were on the list, but what would he gain by keeping it?
She stood in the light, staring up at the bedroom window. Even if Gus had taken that hit list, what would she do if she got it back? Hand it into the police station where his uncle worked? The book linked Anna, Melody, Jack and a number of suspicious deaths, suggesting that they were connected; not accidents, but murders. But what else might be drawn from it? It was, after all, just a list of names that anybody could have written, herself included. If she handed in the book, it would likely end up on the desk of the man who had done an admirable job of making Anna’s murder look like a tumble down the stairs.
Alicia knew why she deliberated: she wanted to speak with Gus. A shadow obscured the light as he stepped up to the glass. Their eyes locked and she felt nothing but anger and distrust. He opened his mouth to call out to her, but she turned from the window and marched down the road, barely a shadow under the overcast sky. Gus did not have the answers that she sought. Her answers lay beyond the waking world.
In the living room of her grandmother’s cottage, the faint light of the now-uncovered moon broke through the boarded windows and fell in bands on the dustsheet on the sofa. She tugged the sheet and gave it a quick shake, wary of spiders that might have taken cover beneath it. Chastising herself for muddled priorities, she carried the sheet upstairs to the bedroom.
Nudging Winter’s sleeping bag aside, Alicia removed her shoes and lay down on the cold mattress. She wrapped the sheet around her, tucking it under her feet.
‘Am I dreaming?’ she whispered at the skylight overhead, where a strip of stars was visible through a break in the clouds. She conducted a final reality check using the clock on her phone, drew her knees to her chest and closed her eyes.
Without intervention, I fear that she may lose her mind.
She had not lost her grip on reality; her fingers had not slipped from that which was real, reaching out to snatch at ghosts. With every ounce of her being, she had pushed reality away, determined to disconnect from the hostile environment that the waking world had become.
With each whisper of wind that caught the front gate, a donkey’s bray carried through the walls. The hooting of owls, a set of ghostly footprints down the side of the cottage and a cacophony of illusory horrors pulled Alicia from the edge of consciousness. But when her imagination was finally exhausted, heavy eyelids fell and sleep welcomed her.
So frequent were her reality checks, Alicia’s subconscious carried the pattern into her sleeping mind. She was chasing her brother on moonlit railway lines, marvelling at his ability to balance, when she questioned if she was dreaming. She pulled a mobile phone from her pocket and the digits scrambled on a second glance. Once lucid, she latched her focus to the open door of the shed, not daring to see if her brother’s image remained on the tracks behind her. She leaped through the doorway and dived into the well.
From the veins that ran through the leaves drifting across the fields in a breeze generated by her own expectation, to the ground that stood so firm beneath her bare feet, Alicia felt the intense, living presence of Vivador. She had closed her eyes and fallen awake.
She ran her fingers across the gooseflesh on her lower thigh, just beneath the hem
of her sweater-dress. Leaving her body insensate on a mattress in an abandoned house did not sit well with her; she nodded to Ryan on the rim of the well and set off down the hill in the direction of the forest. He caught her by the hand.
‘Close your eyes.’
She obliged.
‘Picture yourself on the edge of the forest, facing the marked tree. Feel the breeze that travels through the branches of the pines.’
Hair swept her brow and the scent of pine filled her nostrils. A fallen needle brushed the back of her hand.
‘Now be there.’
Opening her eyes, Alicia stood at the edge of the forest.
‘In Vivador, I cannot take you where you have not been. But it is possible to blink between the places you have visited, as you might move through memories in a dream.’
She gazed from A + E Forever in the foot of the pine to the vast forest that awaited them. Was this the purpose of the inscription? So that Anna and Eloise, or whoever it was, might blink from the well to the edge of the forest?
Ryan marched through the trees. He appeared to have no interest in conversation, only in delivering his lines as instructed, and delivering her to whoever had instructed him. She walked behind him, like a dog, anxious thoughts insisting that she realise the danger of following this stranger into the unknown. But—honestly, Alicia—what choice did she have? She pushed the thoughts aside and strode behind him, forcing her attention out of her mind and into the forest, where a deep, eternal silence reminded her of the full moon. She chose to break it.
‘I’m sorry I took so long. To get back here. I couldn’t sleep.’
She had no intention of telling him why. Some things were better left in the waking world.
Ryan made no response, though he studied her for a moment.
Does he think I’m pretty?—What a juvenile thought! How embarrassing to hear her insecurities so clearly. She considered her drop-shoulder chenille sweater-dress: an item she had seen in a store window last month. Had her subconscious dressed her in clothing that she coveted, or to impress this figment of her imagination?
‘You must have wondered where I was?’ she asked.
Had he sat on that well for three days? How slowly had time passed since her last visit to the immaterial realm? It was difficult to believe, or perhaps to accept, that he was really there, and that Vivador continued to exist while she was awake.
‘Have you been waiting here all this time?’
‘I have been here all this time,’ said Ryan, ducking a low branch. ‘But there is no “waiting” here. Waiting would imply boredom. Why would I be bored?’
She could not have created Ryan: she did not understand him. It was his eyes that troubled her, not their arresting beauty, but their absolute vacancy. When David was an infant, she had stared into his sightless eyes and counted backwards from ten to one, believing that, when the countdown ended, a spark of recognition would light those empty pupils and, for the first time, he would see her face.
Mouths twisted and nostrils flared, a myriad of micro-expressions could express and betray emotions. But there was something deeper in the eyes: some indescribable connection that fascinated her, and in them she sought the connection that she and David had been denied. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and secrets in the eye of the beheld.
In the eyes of Gus and Winter, she had seen calculation and concern as they delivered their lines and assessed the impact of their words: Was that funny enough? Was that cruel enough? In contrast, Ryan’s eyes were at peace, without want or need. No ego lay within them.
Faced with his profound serenity, she prickled with irritation: this man could never understand her. Without desires of his own, how could he understand that hers were so painful that, were she to face them head on, they would break her? Ryan could have sat on that well for all eternity, wanting for nothing. She needed to find her brother.
‘Tell me where he is.’
‘I have to test you first.’
They stopped on the edge of a broad clearing. Shards of glass were strewn in a layer so thick that Alicia could not see the ground beneath. It looked as if someone had taken a million clear bottles and dropped them from a great height.
‘What am I supposed to do?’ she asked when her guide stood motionless before the stretch of broken glass. Light streaming from above fell upon the razor-sharp edges and split into prisms. The ground shimmered.
‘Cross it.’
She looked from his impassive face to her bare feet. Tentatively, she raised a foot and brought it down on the glass. The sharp edge of a large fragment dug into the ball of her foot.
‘It hurts,’ she whispered, unable to put her weight on it.
‘Only because you expect it to.’
Driven in part by his indifferent manner and in part by her desire to prove what she was capable of, Alicia put the full force of her weight onto her foot and took another step. With both feet on the broken glass, her mouth was wide and her eyes watering.
‘It’s cutting my feet!’ she turned her head with a hand outstretched, ready to grab Ryan’s shoulder. He took a step back, out of reach, and folded his arms across his T-shirt.
‘You don’t have feet.’
Alicia faced ahead. She felt the glass in the soles of her feet and knew that she was bleeding. She also knew that she was bleeding because she knew that she was bleeding. Had she not assumed that she was bleeding, she would not have bled. Amid the pain that shot through her feet and up her legs, it struck her as ironic that she was at once trying to believe in this reality—to commit to the idea that Vivador existed outside her mind—whilst trying to understand that neither the glass nor her bleeding feet were more tangible than the pain she was imagining.
‘I have no feet,’ she hissed, taking a step forward and cursing the strength of her imagination. She almost buckled as something sank into the heel of her right foot. She thought of her feet in the waking world, curled under the dustsheet, and denied the pain with every step she took. Determined to pass this test, believing that every step took her closer to her brother, Alicia dragged her mind over the matter.
Ryan caught her arm and she lowered her eyes to see that she had walked several paces on bare soil.
‘Shoes would have sufficed,’ he said, striding on.
‘Is…was that a joke?’
Ryan led her through the thinning trees at the far edge of the forest. Alicia picked up her pace to walk alongside him. Bubbles of irritation rose at his staunch placidity.
‘How is walking over glass supposed to help me reach David?’ she asked as they stepped between the outer trees and reached the edge of a cliff.
‘In denying pain, you have shown that you can rise above expectation, and that is essential here. But if you are to reach your brother in Vivador, you must do more than resist it.’
Standing on the lip of the cliff, Alicia saw a flat plain below them, stretching to the horizon. Directly ahead, a stone’s throw away, a solitary door stood in the grass. This large wooden door appeared to be attached to no outer structure. Four metres wide and over twice as tall, it broke the empty landscape as if somebody had removed an enormous castle but forgotten to take the entrance.
‘The Unbreakable Door was designed to withstand any attack that a human mind can conceive. Your next task is to destroy it.’
Aldous & Morna
This is becoming a habit, Gus thought as the back door of Eloise’s cottage scraped the kitchen tiles. He had knocked on the front door, politely at first and then heavily. If this was where Alicia had fled in the middle of the night, she was either ignoring him or locked in sleep.
It was six in the morning and he had not slept. He had not taken his pills. Waiting at the window for Alicia to return, he had watched his uncle drive off down Gardner Road. Had Joe received another call from Melissa, this time concerning Alicia? The police officer’s mobile phone went straight to voicemail. Unable to wait any longer, he had pulled up his hood and left the house to sku
lk between the last rays of the street lamps.
Fatigue followed the sleepless night. His senses laboured underwater: muffled sound, blurred vision, dampening the fear of facing his neighbour. Pacifying the urge to retreat to his bed.
She was not on the sofa. He scanned the room, furrowing his brow, breathing through his nostrils as his uncle would have done. Had the window to the right of the fireplace been cracked? Where was the dustsheet? In the corridor, his foot disturbed a floorboard near the stairs and he froze, fearing he might wake her, before remembering that was his intention. Unless, of course, she was not here. Unless she was lying at the foot of Melissa’s—
She was here. Alicia was curled on the mattress with her knees tucked and her hands clasped beneath her chin as though in prayer. She looked smaller and younger. Fragile. He flicked a switch by the door and a bulb below the skylight cast a stark light over the bedroom. As he approached the figure sleeping alone in an abandoned house, his heart tightened as if someone had given it a rough squeeze. He crouched beside her, balanced on the balls of his feet, lifted a hand to shake her shoulder, and hesitated.
Fine strands of dark hair fell across a face too peaceful for a girl who had just lost her mother. No frown troubled her thin brows, no tension hardened her lips. Would it not be cruel to wake her to a reality she had escaped?
Gus ground his teeth. He was not deliberating for her sake; he feared her accusations. He pushed back his hood, shook her shoulder and whispered her name. Her body was limp and he might have checked her pulse had her chest not risen and fallen beneath the dustsheet. Shaking her shoulder with more confidence, he continued to call her, urging her to return from wherever lucid dreams had taken her.
Malachite eyes snapped open and she sat up abruptly. There was no groggy, hypnopompic look on her face. Focused and determined, Alicia gripped Gus’s outstretched arm.
‘Where is it?’