by Ben J Henry
‘Doesn’t it take Buddhist monks, like, their whole lives to do this?’
‘That’s enlightenment. I’m not asking you to become enlightened. This is serious, Winter. They want me—but you—if my uncle doesn’t—’
Winter was well aware of her predicament and did not need to be reminded. Her empty stomach lurched as they hit a wave and her throat burned like it had been left out in the sun to dry. Her underwear was soaked and, though she could not see her wrists, she imagined the red rings that the cable ties were scoring into them. These feelings coalesced in her forefingers and she prodded Gus in the small of his back.
‘You think I don’t know that I’m leverage—’ She cut herself short, her words too large for their cabin. The sheets overhead creaked. Leaning back against the pole, she lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘Jack was always looking at his watch. It drove me nuts. He told me that if he checked it in a dream, the numbers changed. That’s how you know you’re dreaming.’
‘Sure, but we don’t have a watch,’ said Gus. ‘Reality checking—that’s what Jack was doing. It works with writing too.’
He scanned the surroundings for anything that Winter might use for a reality check. There was a label near the sink and a fire-safety sticker peeling off the window, but it was dark and the text too small to read from a distance. His eyes turned to the stairs at the sound of footsteps.
The first thing he saw was a large husky that looked positively ravenous. The dog tugged at the leash as Rainn stepped into view wearing a white halter-neck dress. Gus pulled his feet to the right, away from the animal’s reach, as Rainn tied the leash to the metal leg of the work surface.
‘You poor things,’ she cooed, nudging the dog out of the way with her knee as she filled a glass with water at the sink. ‘You must be parched.’
Gus was too preoccupied with the straining metal leg to notice the folded sheets of paper under Rainn’s arm. She stepped across the sodden planks to Winter’s side of the cabin and pulled a low wooden crate through the inch of petrol-stained water. Winter watched the woman fold her legs under her dress and seat herself delicately on the crate. She lifted the glass of water to the girl’s cracked lips. Winter met those cerulean eyes and could not quell a flush of gratitude as cool water spilled down her dry throat. Rainn pulled the glass away and tossed the final mouthful against the wall.
She opened what appeared to be a set of letters in her lap and lit a small white candle to illuminate the pages. A drop of petrol hit the floor inches from where they sat and Winter’s body went rigid as the flame flickered.
‘Vivador,’ said Rainn, looking up from the letters with a twinkle in her eyes as if it were a magical word. ‘What a pretty name for the new world. When we met, I only asked Jack for his name. I wonder when Melody Wilson told him about Vivador?’
The candle dripped and a droplet landed on Winter’s bare thigh, just below the hem of her black dress. The white wax glowed against her dark skin. She had paid little attention to Jack’s tales of the elderly woman who gave him sweets. It sounded indescribably creepy.
She lifted her eyes to her captor’s, imagining Rainn’s seductive smile as she asked Jack for his name before adding it to the hit list. He had never mentioned dreaming of a beautiful blue-eyed woman, though that did not surprise her; better to avoid an inquiry over his subconscious choices.
‘I never went down that well,’ said Winter. ‘I couldn’t care less about funny dreams. What do you want with me?’
‘You’re leverage, darling,’ Rainn replied with a wink and patted Winter’s thigh.
Rising from her seat, she set the candle by the sink and filled the glass with water. When she stepped up to Gus, the dog issued a low, guttural growl.
‘Shhh, Sam,’ Rainn soothed, ‘this one’s family.’
But Sam continued to growl. As Gus accepted the water, he stared into the bright-blue eyes of the husky. The dog’s muzzle wrinkled as it bared its fangs. How had this animal learned such fear? Rainn left the glass in the sink and lifted the candle, waving it absentmindedly before the dog’s eyes while she studied Anna’s letters. The growling ceased.
‘You and Alicia were born on the same day? The day Eloise Grett took her own life?’
She peered at Gus over the top of the letters, curiosity in her candlelit eyes.
‘I gave you the book,’ said Gus. ‘I gave you what you wanted—now take this bloody thing from round my neck and let me sleep.’
‘So you can have a little chat with your cousin in the immaterial realm? I think not.’
Gus shook his head and spoke with impatience. ‘There’s no need for this. Dragging me kicking and—I want to speak with them.’
‘You want to kill them.’
Her smile was thin, knowing. Against his fingers, Winter trembled.
‘Let her go and I’ll do whatever you say.’
Rainn folded her arms, tapping the letters with a fingernail.
‘I let her go—splash—and I have your word that you will behave yourself. Or, as an alternative option, I don’t let her go, and you have to do whatever I say.’ She wagged a finger. ‘Bargaining is not your strong suit.’
‘You don’t need her.’
‘Whether either of you come out of this alive is of little interest to me, Augustus. But take some advice from someone who has outlived the odds. If you want great granny and grandad to trust you, you’d better make them believe that you don’t care what happens to this one.’
She blew out the candle, untied the dog and ushered him up the stairs.
The boat rocked, the petrol dripped and the water sloshed as the pair sat in silence. Winter’s eyelids opened with each creak of the bathroom door and each footfall above. At the sound of a distant growling, she opened her eyes to see a word painted across the window, glowing before her eyes: Liar.
It wasn’t fair, she thought: she was not a liar, she was mistaken. She would never have written that message on her teacher’s bedroom wall had she known the truth. How could she possibly have known?
She turned her head from the four glowing letters, wracked with what was unmistakably guilt. Anna Harrington had lost her son. She had returned to Valmont that day to try to help Jack. And in the last week of the woman’s life, Winter had accused her of murder. She tried to face the word on the window, but the writing was scrambled, unintelligible.
She was dreaming.
The cabin appeared to shrink as she ran her eyes around it, assaulted by the clarity of her surroundings. Tiny bubbles washed against her feet as the water seeped into the floorboards. If this was a dream, then she was in control. In a wave of excitement, she woke up.
‘I did it,’ Winter hissed, so abruptly that Gus jolted as he did each time the collar delivered a shock.
‘You found her?’
‘Of course not—shut up. I lucid-dreamed. Dreamed lucidly. What am I supposed to do next?’
‘You need to get to Vivador,’ Gus resisted adding: Remember? He opened his mouth to remind her of the well and then paused. Rainn knew he would try to gain their trust. She knew Winter had no collar and had visited the well with Jack; he must assume that she expected Winter’s arrival in Vivador. A conversation with Joe surfaced.
‘Have you been to Stonehenge?’ he asked Winter.
Their vessel buffeted over the ocean waves as Gus recalled what he could on how to change the environment in a lucid dream. He had paid this chapter little attention, since he had never dreamed lucidly himself. If Winter managed to find Alicia, they could get a message to Joe that they were on a fishing boat to Portugal. Joe could put out a search for unregistered vessels entering Portuguese waters and Winter might get out of this alive.
In so many words, Winter asked Gus to keep quiet so she could sleep. With a will bent on lucid dreaming and the precarious situation making deep sleep impossible, she was soon staring at a message on the window before her: her own name, struck through with a solid line. Pondering the cruelty of her subconscious, she stepp
ed up to the sink. The bulb of lucidity brightened and her critical-thinking skills came to the fore, analysing other inconsistencies in her surroundings, such as the full moon through the window and the fact that she was no longer tied to a post.
Despite her confidence that this was a lucid dream, Winter remained hesitant as she stepped before the narrow window and prepared to follow Gus’s instructions. The ocean swelled, black under the moonlight. It was the haunting realism of those cold, dark waves that troubled her. If she was not dreaming—if she was not still tied to that pole; if she had somehow managed to wriggle free and sleepwalk to the window—then her next move would be fatal. Taking a step back, she pictured Stonehenge. With tall sandstone blocks in the forefront of her mind and Salisbury plain stretching to the corners, Winter leaped forward and threw herself through the glass.
Burnflower
The Jeep turned abruptly from the road and bounced over the woodland debris, flattening ferns as it weaved between the trees. This was clearly not Melissa’s first venture through the undergrowth, and her choice in vehicle was justified. The pair jolted in their seats as the headmistress stopped the Jeep and pulled up the handbrake. Without a word, she killed the lights, cut the engine and left the car. Alicia opened the door and stepped into the centre of the forest in the middle of the night with the woman who had kidnapped her brother.
Melissa checked the buttons on her jacket and marched through the trees with Alicia following a few paces behind, climbing over rotting logs and dodging brambles. Conscious of the crackle of each twig and autumnal leaf, they reached the corner of a vast clearing. The overcast night sky did little to illuminate the field before them. Keeping to the edge of the woodland, Melissa led Alicia towards the shadowy outline of a farmhouse.
Burnflower: Alicia turned the word through her mind, the name that Rainn had adopted as her own. The farmhouse had been constructed from limestone, capturing what little light penetrated the clouds. Approaching the rear of the building, they passed tidy rows of cabbages and spinach, stalks of broad beans and the red bulbs of radishes. Not a whiff of manure hung on the crisp air; were this once a farm, it no longer held livestock. Alicia could not see what lay to the front of the house. Looking down the side of the building, she saw the edge of a slope that fell to the thick woodland encircling the estate. Burnflower was perfectly disconnected from the world.
Closer now, they moved through the cover of the outer trees. It was a little after one in the morning and all the inhabitants would be fast asleep. What might lie within those walls? Anticipation tightened Alicia’s chest. A coiled spring. A thread of positive energy tugging at her heart—
No: she swallowed the optimism.
Without slowing her pace, Melissa crossed the short stretch of grass to the left-hand wall of the farmhouse. Alicia joined her against the roughly hewn brickwork, an arm’s length from a ground-floor window. Melissa peered through the window and Alicia crept to her side, a heartbeat in her throat as she looked through the glass.
There were two beds in the ground-floor bedroom. In the bed nearest the window slept a teenage girl. Amira lay on her back with a frown troubling her brow. Thick, black hair tumbled down olive cheeks. On a chest of drawers between the two beds sat a glass terrarium. Whatever it contained was hiding beneath a sheet of bark half-buried in the red soil. In the corner of the room, a strappy top, a pair of leggings and a dressing gown decorated the arms and seat of a wicker chair. Alicia scanned these details in half a second before fixing her eyes on the empty bed by the door.
That thread of positive energy gave way to sharp splinters of disappointment. Beside her, Melissa’s impassive face was as grey as the clouds. Had she expected to find her son in that bed, or was she studying the face of the girl she had forsaken?
Through the silence, a faint music permeated the rectangular panes of the farmhouse window. Melissa raised a hand in protest as Alicia slipped her nails under the corner of the frame and pulled until the window had opened a crack. Immediately, a low feminine voice slipped into the night. Alicia recognised the voice as Rainn’s and released the window frame. The crack closed and the sound muffled. She leaned back against the wall, pausing to steady her heartbeat. Melissa attempted to catch her eye, but Alicia furrowed her brow and returned to the glass. The wooden door in the far wall was ajar, but there was no adult in the doorway. Gingerly, Alicia pried the corner of the window open again and listened. It was a lullaby, playing on repeat, issued through a hidden speaker.
Time to sleep,
Go to bed.
You’ve got no more space for the world in your head.
Time to rest,
Get undressed.
Climb under the covers and take a deep breath.
Time to dream,
Think no more.
Close your eyes and awake now, escape now, to Vivador.
Rainn’s words drifted across the bedroom like a soporific veil. Had this lullaby been recorded for sixteen-year-old Amira, or with a younger audience in mind? Alicia bent to dislodge a large stone from the long grass at the foot of the wall. She raised it to the glass and Melissa caught her wrist.
‘Wait,’ she hissed. Nails pressed into Alicia’s skin.
‘She’s in Vivador. I need to wake her up. If David’s here, she can tell me where he is.’
‘You need to trust me.’
A shadow stirred within Alicia like a dormant beast. Facing panic in those silver eyes, she remembered a poster crumpled in blue fingers. A moment of weakness. A depth of emotion that stilled her violent heart, drawing her to what she had mistaken for empathy.
There, there.
Not empathy, but guilt. Her breath held and her mind presented her with a single image: a large stone striking Melissa’s head. Denying the will of the shadow, Alicia let numb fingers slacken and the stone hit the soil. She leaned into those silver eyes and whispered:
‘You took him from us.’
Melissa’s grey eyes were steeled and a light within burned wild and desperate.
‘I have not seen my son in three years. They have kept him from me because they needed him. They took my Ryan to get to you.’ Fingernails broke the skin of Alicia’s wrist. ‘Now you will help me get him back. And you will have your brother. But you must listen: if Peter knows we are here, it will take a single phone call and we will be dead in minutes. We cannot break windows and doors, we must wait until morning. Amira will water the vegetables at the back of the house, and that is when we’ll make our move.’
A hot silence filled Alicia’s ears while the words burrowed into her logical mind, as caustic as they were inarguable. She stared at the farmhouse. How many stone walls separated her from her brother? She lifted a palm, longing to lock her mind upon those bricks and erase them like the Unbreakable Door.
If she must wait, there were other places to look. Heavy feet led her back to the forest. She climbed into the unlocked car and pulled a pillow from the back seat. Wondering how many nights Melissa had spent sleeping in this vehicle, she reclined the seat and lay her head on the pillow.
It might have been Rainn’s lullaby, or the combination of a tired body and an alert mind, but Alicia was lucid dreaming in minutes. In a moonlit forest, she raised the well in the ferns beside Melissa’s Jeep, wondering distantly what portal Rainn had introduced to Amira.
In Vivador, Alicia was about to close her eyes and picture a glass archway when she saw a distant building at the edge of the forest. She blinked to reappear before the church. For a moment, she was surprised to see the building before her. In the events that had followed the argument with herself, she had forgotten her replica of Anna’s grave. That she could leave something so personal for anybody to stumble across left her with an uneasy feeling in her gut. The feeling thickened when Rainn entered the scene.
Riding on the back of a horse so white it appeared luminous, Rainn rounded the corner of the church with an expectant smile on her face. The unseen sun struck her hair like polished obsidian as she l
ed the beast between the gravestones and towards Alicia. As she approached, Alicia stared into the horse’s eyes: a bright, glacial blue.
She’s not ready.
‘Is that…’ she eyed the horse and whispered, ‘Ryan?’
‘The horse? How funny. Wonderful idea. But no.’
‘Where is he?’
‘I thought you were looking for your brother?’ Rainn asked tartly as she stopped the horse beside one of the headstones, where it lowered its large head to graze on the green shoots of Anna Harrington’s grave.
‘Ryan was leading me to him.’
‘Was he now?’ Her smile was malignant. ‘Well, you just got upgraded.’
Rainn looked over her shoulder in the direction of the church, leading Alicia’s gaze to the horse’s shadow, which fell on a stretch of wall beside the back door. The shadow darkened until the brick was no longer visible. Shimmering in the light, the sharp silhouette rippled like liquid before taking on a new definition. It expanded into the third dimension, the liquid matting to hoof and hair until a fully-formed horse stepped from the wall. The steed crossed towards Alicia, hooves clip-clopping between the graves. Its coat was as dark as the large pupils in its mahogany eyes. Something lurched in her gut as the eyes reminded Alicia of her mother.
‘Hop on,’ said Rainn, her sapphire dress resplendent against the beast’s coat.
Alicia stood motionless.
‘You stole my mother’s letters.’
‘One of my lesser crimes. The letters lead to Aldous and Morna, and that’s where we’re heading. Your brother is with them, at their home in Psarnox. And since you’ve never been there, we’re going to have to take the long way. But don’t worry—’ she patted the neck of her horse, ‘—these boys are fast.’
Rainn glanced at Alicia’s steed and he stepped beside her obediently. The grass quivered and a set of three crystal steps rose to the height of her hip. Alicia’s sight drifted to where the white horse continued to feed on her mother’s grave. With an air of impatience, Rainn slipped from the horse and approached the grave, running her finger along the top of Anna Harrington’s headstone.