‘They’re very good to us,’ Dolores said, her voice full of hurt disappointment. No doubt she often wished she had a colleague more like herself.
Lucy experienced a pang, which began as a warm kind of feeling, but quickly hardened to resentment. ‘They keep you comfortably on your perch,’ she said, ‘but you could be flying free.’
Dolores stared owlishly at Lucy, clearly attempting to decipher this cryptic statement. Lucy saw her truly then. She was not a bird, but certainly bird-like, dressed in disintegrating rags of red, yellow and blue, her hands scaled like the claws of an eagle, her face drooping with pendulous jowls that were very similar to the wattles on a chicken. Lucy stared at Dolores, who had now dropped her attention back to what lay on her desk. The desk itself was different: an ancient, carved table, covered in leather-bound ledgers and dusty, glass candlesticks, coated with thick wads of colourless stale wax. Long, yellow flames burned steadily up from the mess. Lucy lifted her eyes. Around her, the office had transformed from beige and cream tidiness to a high, cavernous room of grey and brown. It was enormous - Lucy could not see its nether end - and filled with huge, shadowy, metal machinery. She was sure these machines were the photocopier, computers, printers and coffee machine, all evolved from some kind of alternative technology, which was massive where modern technology was small. The scene before her was horrifying and beautiful, alien and endless. Tilting back her head, she could see that far above, cracked sky-lights provided a dim illumination, augmented only by the sputtering candle-light. The ancient panes were occluded by the dust and grime of centuries. Lucy became aware that beyond the office walls, there was a thumping sound, as of vast machinery churning and grinding.
The boss came out of his office, which was now a yellow-paned booth, reached by a flight of wooden steps. He looked like a corpse, clad in a robe of rotting brown sacking, his hands bound with flaking bandages. Lucy stood up and walked slowly across the room. She saw a small window frame, covered by fraying brown fabric, which she lifted with one hand. Outside, a limitless horizon of unfamiliar buildings reared up in Gothic spires, or spread low in curling labyrinths. Dominating all was the huge dark factory she had seen near the phantom bar. Tiny figures moved in and out of it in regular lines and sometimes an orange glow would ignite behind its myriad windows. Steam issued from rusting conduits in its walls, while behind it roiled a yellow-black sky, punctuated by the reaching limbs of metal cranes, so gigantic they disappeared into dirty cloud. Lucy’s eyes ached for the scene before her. She wanted to drink it all in.
Only when she had opened the window, to let in the unsmelled odours of the true city, did she realise Dolores had her hand upon her arm and was repeating her name. Time and space jerked, with a feeling like a cricked neck, sudden and sharp. The awareness had gone.
‘What were you doing?’ Dolores sounded panicked.
Lucy shook her head. ‘I saw something.’
‘That was obvious!’
‘Take the rest of the day off,’ said her boss, clearly discomforted by what he perceived as women’s strange behaviour, perhaps connected to hormones.
‘No,’ Lucy said. ‘I’m fine.’
Friday evening, Lucy dressed with care, faintly depressed that this riskless gathering was going to be the high-light of her month. Her apartment, she felt, was a bubble of normality within a plasmic mass of uncertainty outside. Soon she would enter into it, step out into the dark and potential.
As she’d anticipated, her walk to the appointed restaurant was surreal. Sometimes, it seemed as if there were more than two realities pulsing in and out of her perception, but none of them gained a hold. Realities overlapped. Along the normal city street, a troupe of women dressed in black feathers stalked, wearing grimacing masks, their hands sheathed in scales of dull metal. A shining dark vehicle streaked by like an instrument of torture; barbed and sickled. Lucy saw an old woman, dressed in a sensible camel-hair coat and flat brown shoes, gazing into the window of a shop where a naked, shaved-headed boy pirouetted on a plinth. His limbs were oiled and gleaming in a ruddy light, his chest and arms laced with cuts that leaked dark liquid, which did not look exactly like blood. Lucy laughed out loud at this particular tableau, which caused the old woman to glance around in fear. The shop before her sold tasteless clothes, Lucy could see that now, and the window display was only of stiff, tired mannequins from an earlier age that gestured blindly at one another in the dark.
As she strolled, almost drunkenly, toward her destination, Lucy realised her life had become interesting again. She might be going mad, and this indeed seemed the most likely explanation, but if so, she welcomed it. Anything was better than the non-life she had slipped into. Perhaps this acceptance was part of the madness, and soon she’d be found, mindless and drooling, lost to the ‘other place’ that tantalised her senses. She tried to imagine how Dolores and the boss would cope if this should happen at work. She’d be carted off to the funny farm. And would that mean that, one day, she’d wake up, in a bare white room, cured of her delusions and thus sentenced to eternal tedium in a world she had grown to despise? The thought of that frightened her more than anything her mind might be doing to her now. She must learn to control her episodes of awareness, or hide them. Incidents like that which had occurred in the office today must not be repeated. If the awareness came to her, no-one must know it but herself.
The meal, surprisingly, took place entirely in the realm of the ordinary. Lucy, though deprived of weird sensations, felt utterly dislocated from her companions. Strangely, this made her feel unexpectedly warm towards them. Her boss and his wife were absurdly happy celebrating this anniversary of perpetual dullness. Their innocence and ignorance touched Lucy’s soul. And sad Dolores, manless and childless, caring so much about others, when no-one was prepared to care about her.
After the meal, Dolores suggested that she and Lucy might share a cab home, even though they lived fairly widely apart. Lucy, however, liked to walk everywhere nowadays. The awareness never came to her in cabs or on buses. She could see the disappointment in Dolores’ face as she refused the invitation; the woman did not want the evening to finish. For Lucy, it was yet to begin.
Out on the street, she somehow guessed that tonight something was scheduled to happen. Desperate for revelation, she forgot about going home, and ventured down any narrow, dark street that yawned before her. Instinctively, she sensed that these places were the most likely gateways to the ‘other place’, among the trash-cans, beneath fire escapes where desperate measures had been taken in lives devoid of all hope. Walking down unfamiliar alleys, where the buildings pressed close together in damp darkness, it would be difficult to tell when she crossed over. She must not strain for it. She must just walk.
She heard the music first: jangly piano. Then the red light spilled across her shoes, and she looked up. There was the bar almost directly beside her. Victory crashed through her body in a hot wave. She virtually ran into the building, determined to ensnare it in her senses before it vanished.
Inside, the bar was full of people, and Lucy realised it was not the same one she had stumbled across the first time. This place was more brightly lit, and less shabby. Huge fans turned slowly in the low ceiling, carving the smoky air into amorphous lumps that caught the light - red and green - and became twisting vaporous creatures, alive only for a minute. Bloody light glinted off crystal and gold; the carpet beneath her feet was like red velvet. The clientele all looked as if they were on their way to somewhere else. All wore coats, drank rapidly from glasses of every shape and size, talking animatedly, making sharp, thrusting gestures with their hands. Lucy was slightly disappointed that they all appeared so ordinary. She would have expected to see a collection of people like those you’d find in a fetish club; leather and straps and spikes. But then, she reasoned, such fads and fashions were the trimmings of her own, hated city. Here, it would have to be different. When she looked closer at the people around her, she realised they were not ordinary at all, but the differ
ence was in their eyes and in their movements; a sense of danger and threat and promise.
I am home, Lucy thought, and then, Am I home?
She walked up to the bar and a thin, sallow-skinned girl in a black, halter-neck dress came to take her order.
‘Do you have wine?’ Lucy asked.
The girl shook her head, and behind her Lucy saw an array of ornate bottles come sharply into focus, dream bottles that had perhaps not existed a moment before.
‘Give me something red,’ she said.
The girl said nothing, but swung away to plunge her arms in among the sparkling bottles, delving for something too far back to be reached.
Lucy looked around herself. For a moment, she thought she saw Dolores sitting on a stool a short distance away from her, then realised it was only a very similar woman; large and fading, with her hair tumbling out of confinement around her neck and shoulders. Dolores’ hair, Lucy realised, was created to tumble, but she always pinned it up severely, so that it had to strain to escape. Perhaps this stranger was Dolores, but a Dolores who had never allowed herself to exist. The woman before her sensed Lucy’s attention and directed a smile at her. Something in the expression, which was not exactly predatory, but very akin to it, made Lucy shudder and turn away.
The bar-tender was putting a glass down before her - a small globe of crystal on a twisted stem, its bowl blistered with vitreous crusts of gold and green.
‘How much?’ Lucy asked.
The girl jerked her head. ‘Paid for. By him.’
Lucy glanced down the bar and saw the thin-faced man raise his glass to her. Two coils of long, black hair framed his face. He was grinning. She knew then that she had to go to him. It was time, at least, for that.
‘Thank you for the drink,’ she said.
‘Taste it.’ His voice was low, and balanced on the edge of laughter.
Lucy was afraid it would taste of blood, but it didn’t, not entirely. This was a taste of ecstasy, of passion, of intense hatred, a road accident, a field of burning poppies. ‘Different,’ she said, and waited for him to respond with the words, ‘Curiosity or fear?’ but he didn’t.
‘You were waiting for the taste,’ he said.
‘Tell me,’ Lucy said, ‘I need to know where I am.’ She felt he knew she was a stranger to this reality, a visitor.
The man shrugged. ‘There are many junctions.’
‘That is not an answer.’ She sighed, fixed him with a stare. ‘I wonder whether, one day, I’ll be able to stay here, and not go back.’
Again, a shrug. ‘That is your choice.’
‘Who are you?’
He smiled more widely, showing very white teeth. ‘A catcher of dreams. And you?’
‘Perhaps a spinner of dreams.’ She laughed uneasily. ‘This is all so weird. I can’t believe I’m accepting it.’
‘Are you accepting it?’
Lucy looked into his face. It was like looking down a long tunnel. ‘Yes. Anything is better than nothing.’ She paused. ‘Were you waiting for me?’
He put his head on one side. ‘I have suspicions about you, that’s all. A hunch. There’s no pressure.’
‘I want to see this world,’ Lucy said. ‘I don’t want to hover on the edge. I want to be in it. I know that it exists.’ She faltered. ‘I don’t want to go back.’
‘Why not?’
‘My life is hell back there. It is nothing. I might as well be dead.’
The man raised his brows. ‘Oh!’ He turned toward the bar, signalled the skinny girl, before glancing back at Lucy. ‘Another drink?’
‘I haven’t finished this one yet,’ Lucy said, and then realised that she had. ‘Oh, all right.’
He put a glass into her hand, and this one was the size of a normal wine-glass and filled with a rich green liquid. When she tasted it, summer fields soared over her like a wave. It was an innocent drink and tinged only faintly with the fever heat of tortured jealousy.
The Dream-Catcher led her out of the bar, onto a terrace at the back of the building. Here, the city spread before them, an impossible jumble of tormented shapes and sounds and smells. Lucy breathed it all in, through every pore. It was ugly, yet entrancing; a fantasy world, where anything was possible. The people here would not be dull or obsessed with trivia. She sensed they all led dangerous lives, were tragic and fey, cruel and mysterious. Like the man beside her. She looked at him.
‘Tell me I’m not mad,’ she said.
‘You’re not mad.’ He leaned upon the rusting railings, which were entwined with dead stalks of a plant that looked like the bodies of desiccated serpents. Fragile, withered blooms rustled like paper among the fibrous coils. ‘One day, you became aware of the worlds beyond the narrow imagination of the ordinary, that’s all.’
She sensed he could tell her much more, but perhaps she had to ask the right questions to invoke the information. ‘But why me? I’m not that imaginative. Does this happen to many people?’
The Dream-Catcher looked at her askance. ‘Only the hungry,’ he answered, ‘the very hungry.’
Lucy turned round and leaned back against the railings, her arms spread out to either side. ‘I feel like I’m being given a second chance.’ She shook her head. ‘I really don’t think I could bear to go back. That is... only if I can’t come here again.’
‘You come here often,’ the Dream-Catcher said. ‘You see this world all the time.’
Lucy shook her head. ‘I see glimpses of it. That’s not enough. I want more. I want to meet people, talk to them. I want to explore every corner. Just an evening a week would do. I could put up with my ordinary life then, I’m sure.’ She didn’t know whether the Dream-Catcher was a powerful figure in this world, but she suspected he had the ability to grant her request if he wanted to. What must she do to convince him? She asked him this.
‘You do not have to convince me of anything,’ he replied, ‘but you do have to be sure, for once you decide there is no going back. You cannot exist wholly in two worlds. You have become aware of this one, and the gate is open, but you are just sampling the place at the moment.’
Lucy uttered a scornful laugh. ‘I have nothing to go back for. My life is empty. Here...’ She gestured widely to encompass her surroundings. ‘Here, there is life and adventure and purpose.’
‘How do you know that?’
Shrugging, she turned away, feeling embarrassed. ‘OK, I got carried away. But you just have no idea what my life has become.’ She glanced at him. ‘Then maybe you do.’
He shook his head. ‘I do not know you,’ he said. ‘There are far too many people to know.’
‘Are you happy here?’ Lucy asked him sharply.
He smiled. ‘There is a colour for happiness, and it resides in a pearly bottle. It may be drunk. There are an infinite number of colours.’
‘I think I want to go back now,’ Lucy said.
‘So much for exploring.’
She gave him an arch glance. ‘I only need to think.’
Everyone had moved on; the bar was empty, but for the skinny girl, who was wiping the counter with a rag in lazy, circular movements. She did not look up as Lucy passed her. A clock was ticking loudly and the music was silenced. Do I want to leave? Lucy wondered. When she stepped outside, it was probable she’d walk back into her mundane life. What if she couldn’t find the gateway again? Did she really need to think? There was no fear inside her. She wasn’t really sure why she was hesitating over the decision. Tomorrow, being Saturday, she’d have to go to the supermarket and stock up on her meagre supplies. Then, she’d spend the evening walking around again, perhaps without success, looking for a way into this other world, a place where she could hold onto it. What was the point in that?
She walked back out onto the terrace, half expecting the Dream-Catcher to have vanished, but he hadn’t. He was still leaning against the rail, staring out over the city.
‘I’ve made up my mind,’ Lucy said. ‘What do I do?’
He turned round slowl
y. ‘Are you sure?’
She walked toward him, and rested her forearms upon the rail. Out there, she heard the echoes of screaming, and a gout of flame spurted up, followed by muffled thunder. There were gun-shots, and the crack of leather against flesh. There was hysterical music and crazy laughter. Below, on the street, a young, pale girl danced by in the arms of a tall, dark man. They were followed by a grotesque child, banging a tambourine, and a monkey in a waist-coat, strewing petals from a little basket. Behind them, soaring high, was the great dark building Lucy had thought was a factory. She could see now that it was a palace. Enormous black statues of winged men flanked its yawning, dark entrance. Fire burned within, flickering behind panes of crystal.
Lucy surveyed this scene for a few moments, then said, ‘I am sure.’
The Dream-Catcher nodded. Now, he wasn’t smiling, and appeared tense. Was he afraid she’d change her mind again? ‘Then take off your coat, for you are home.’
It was only a light over-coat, insubstantial against the winter chill of the streets she knew and wanted to forget; a garment bought cheap in a sale because she could afford nothing better. Lucy undid the buttons and, with a feeling of abhorrence, wriggled out of the coat, letting it fall to the ground. As she did so, it seemed something larger than a mere garment fell from her shoulders. She felt taller, and already the tide of memory was turning, reeling in the life of Lucy, going back and back, to the time she had entered the gray world of the mundane. The Dream-Catcher handed her a glass. This was filled with a purple liquid. When she tasted it, it was the essence of kings.
‘Well?’ said the Dream-Catcher.
Slowly, Lucy felt herself settling into a persona who had been sleeping. It felt slightly uncomfortable and unused, but familiar. Not all of what she had experienced was clear yet, but she knew what the Dream-Catcher wanted to hear. ‘I was right,’ she said. ‘But I had to see for myself. They claim to avoid the unspeakable, yet in their greed and ignorance, they have created all the worst possible forms of what they perceive as hell.’ She shook her head, smiled quizzically. ‘Famine, slaughter - they are some of the faces - but there are others too, the gray faces of conformity and dead minds and hearts. It is bizarre, but the process must work in reverse now. Hell’s torments are torments no longer. In that world, I have seen people attempting to emulate the extremes of the inferno in an attempt to escape the horror of their predicament, which is nullity. They have created a void for themselves. It is terrible.’ She reached out for the Dream-Catcher with one long, sinuous, bronze-skinned arm. How beautiful her flesh felt to her soul. He nestled to her side, and she kissed him. ‘Dark angel, I have missed you!’ she said.
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