Bedtime Stories for Grown-Ups

by Ben Holden

  Mason ran along the pavement, losing sight of her as the road curved and the houses intervened. The water slackened and he caught a last glimpse of the woman’s icy-white profile through the spray. Turning, the tide began to ebb and fade, and the sea shrank away between the houses, draining the night of its light and motion.

  As the last bubbles dissolved on the damp pavement, Mason searched the headland, but the luminous figure had gone. His damp clothes dried themselves as he walked back through the empty streets. A last tang of brine was carried away off the hedges on the midnight air.

  The next morning he told Miriam: ‘It was a dream, after all. I think the sea has gone now. Anyway, I saw nothing last night.’

  ‘Thank heavens, Richard. Are you sure?’

  ‘I’m certain.’ Mason smiled encouragingly. ‘Thanks for keeping watch over me.’

  ‘I’ll sit up tonight as well.’ She held up her hand. ‘I insist. I feel all right after last night, and I want to drive this thing away, once and for all.’ She frowned over the coffee cups. ‘It’s strange, but once or twice I think I heard the sea too. It sounded very old and blind, like something waking again after millions of years.’

  On his way to the library, Mason made a detour towards the chalk outcropping, and parked the car where he had seen the moonlit figure of the white-haired woman watching the sea. The sunlight fell on the pale turf, illuminating the mouth of the mine-shaft, around which the same desultory activity was taking place.

  For the next fifteen minutes Mason drove in and out of the tree-lined avenues, peering over the hedges at the kitchen windows. Almost certainly she would live in one of the nearby houses, still wearing the black robe beneath a housecoat.

  Later, at the library, he recognized a car he had seen on the headland. The driver, an elderly tweed-suited man, was examining the display cases of local geological finds.

  ‘Who was that?’ he asked Fellowes, the keeper of antiquities, as the car drove off. ‘I’ve seen him on the cliffs.’

  ‘Professor Goodhart, one of the party of palaeontologists. Apparently they’ve uncovered an interesting bone-bed.’ Fellowes gestured at the collection of femurs and jaw-bone fragments. ‘With luck we may get a few pieces from them.’

  Mason stared at the bones, aware of a sudden closing of the parallax within his mind.

  Each night, as the sea emerged from the dark streets and the waves rolled farther towards the Masons’ home, he would wake beside his sleeping wife and go out into the surging air, wading through the deep water towards the headland. There he would see the white-haired woman on the cliff’s edge, her face raised above the roaring spray. Always he failed to reach her before the tide turned, and would kneel exhausted on the wet pavements as the drowned streets rose around him.

  Once a police patrol car found him in its headlights, slumped against a gate-post in an open drive. On another night he forgot to close the front door when he returned. All through breakfast Miriam watched him with her old wariness, noticing the shadows which encircled his eyes like manacles.

  ‘Richard, I think you should stop going to the library. You look worn out. It isn’t that sea dream again?’

  Mason shook his head, forcing a tired smile. ‘No, that’s finished with. Perhaps I’ve been over-working.’

  Miriam held his hands. ‘Did you fall over yesterday?’ She examined Mason’s palms. ‘Darling, they’re still raw! You must have grazed them only a few hours ago. Can’t you remember?’

  Abstracted, Mason invented some tale to satisfy her, then carried his coffee into the study and stared at the morning haze which lay across the rooftops, a soft lake of opacity that followed the same contours as the midnight sea. The mist dissolved in the sunlight, and for a moment the diminishing reality of the normal world reasserted itself, filling him with a poignant nostalgia.

  Without thinking, he reached out to the fossil conch on the bookshelf, but involuntarily his hand withdrew before touching it.

  Miriam stood beside him. ‘Hateful thing,’ she commented. ‘Tell me, Richard, what do you think caused your dream?’

  Mason shrugged. ‘Perhaps it was a sort of memory . . .’ He wondered whether to tell Miriam of the waves which he still heard in his sleep, and of the white-haired woman on the cliff’s edge who seemed to beckon to him. But like all women Miriam believed that there was room for only one enigma in her husband’s life. By an inversion of logic he felt that his dependence on his wife’s private income, and the loss of self-respect, gave him the right to withhold something of himself from her.

  ‘Richard, what’s the matter?’

  In his mind the spray opened like a diaphanous fan and the enchantress of the waves turned towards him.

  Waist-high, the sea pounded across the lawn in a whirlpool. Mason pulled off his jacket and flung it into the water, and then waded out into the street. Higher than ever before, the waves had at last reached his house, breaking over the doorstep, but Mason had forgotten his wife. His attention was fixed upon the headland, which was lashed by a continuous storm of spray, almost obscuring the figure standing on its crest.

  As Mason pressed on, sometimes sinking to his shoulders, shoals of luminous algae swarmed in the water around him. His eyes smarted in the saline air. He reached the lower slopes of the headland almost exhausted, and fell to his knees.

  High above, he could hear the spray singing as it cut through the coigns of the cliff’s edge, the deep base of the breakers overlaid by the treble of the keening air. Carried by the music, Mason climbed the flank of the headland, a thousand reflections of the moon in the breaking sea. As he reached the crest, the black robe hid the woman’s face, but he could see her tall erect carriage and slender hips. Suddenly, without any apparent motion of her limbs, she moved away along the parapet.

  ‘Wait!’

  His shout was lost on the air. Mason ran forwards, and the figure turned and stared back at him. Her white hair swirled around her face like a spume of silver steam and then parted to reveal a face with empty eyes and notched mouth. A hand like a bundle of white sticks clawed towards him, and the figure rose through the whirling darkness like a gigantic bird.

  Unaware whether the scream came from his own mouth or from this spectre, Mason stumbled back. Before he could catch himself he tripped over the wooden railing, and in a cackle of chains and pulleys fell backwards into the shaft, the sounds of the sea booming in its hurtling darkness.

  After listening to the policeman’s description, Professor Goodhart shook his head.

  ‘I’m afraid not, sergeant. We’ve been working on the bed all week. No one’s fallen down the shaft.’ One of the flimsy wooden rails was swinging loosely in the crisp air. ‘But thank you for warning me. I suppose we must build a heavier railing, if this fellow is wandering around in his sleep.’

  ‘I don’t think he’ll bother to come up here,’ the sergeant said. ‘It’s quite a climb.’ As an afterthought he added: ‘Down at the library where he works they said you’d found a couple of skeletons in the shaft yesterday. I know it’s only two days since he disappeared, but one of them couldn’t possibly be his?’ The sergeant shrugged. ‘If there was some natural acid, say . . .’

  Professor Goodhart drove his heel into the chalky turf. ‘Pure calcium carbonate, about a mile thick, laid down during the Triassic Period 200 million years ago when there was a large inland sea here. The skeletons we found yesterday, a man’s and a woman’s, belong to two Cro-Magnon fisher people who lived on the shore just before it dried up. I wish I could oblige you – it’s quite a problem to understand how these Cro-Magnon relics found their way into the bone-bed. This shaft wasn’t sunk until about thirty years ago. Still, that’s my problem, not yours.’

  Returning to the police car, the sergeant shook his head. As they drove off he looked out at the endless stretch of placid suburban homes.

  ‘Apparently there was an ancient sea here once. A million years ago.’ He picked a crumpled flannel jacket off the back seat. ‘That reminds
me, I know what Mason’s coat smells of – brine.’

  (1963)

  ★

  From The Tempest

  by William Shakespeare

  Full fathom five thy father lies;

  Of his bones are coral made;

  Those are pearls that were his eyes;

  Nothing of him that doth fade,

  But doth suffer a sea-change

  Into something rich and strange.

  Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:

  Ding-dong.

  Hark! now I hear them – Ding-dong, bell.

  (1610–11)

  It is the dead of night.

  After the furtive paddling out to sleep’s reaches, you are now away. Brainwaves roll with diminished frequency. Slower and slower. Your muscles shot, the body is now at its least responsive to external stimuli. It has given way to the inevitable, deepest of slumbers. This period of sleep is the hardest from which to rouse a person. You are dead to the world.

  Indeed, the dead spot, as it is known, is the point during our human sleep cycle when, of those who die in their sleep, the sick or elderly, most commonly pass away. Our body temperature and blood pressure are at their lowest. The iced physiological state at this juncture (usually between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m.) lends itself to an easeful death. Our bodies are at their least responsive to sensations, notably pain – no wonder such a mortal slippage is how most of us would wish to ‘pass away’ (which, after all, sounds so similar to ‘drift off’) . . . I’d certainly like ‘to go’ during my secondary life, during sleep. Death probably wouldn’t then feel like such an awfully big misadventure.

  Death and sleep have, of course, long been bedfellows. It is no wonder. On a physical level, after all (literally), a grave – horizontal, solitary, darkened, confined – is not unlike a bed in design; and on a more metaphorical or figurative footing, how else are we supposed to conjure what death must be like, than liken it to the sweet oblivion of a deep sleep?

  In Greek mythology, the goddess of Night, Nyx, had twin sons: Hypnos (Sleep) and Thanatos (Death). Writers through the ages have since extended the parallel and converged these states of being. It is comforting, I think, to picture the end in this way – ‘To sleep, perchance to dream’ – just as a ghost story, however chilling, is inherently consolatory as it implies an afterlife.

  Yet we rarely dream of the moment of our own death. Growing up, there was a playground rumour that if you dreamed you had died, you would indeed not wake up! I later discovered, one feverish night of the soul, that this was most certainly not true. Yet our darker dreams portending death do tend to halt just prior to the moment of truth. We wake up, suddenly, from such a nightmare. It is rare that we vault upright sweatily, as so often seen in movies when a character has a nightmare (cue thunderclap). More likely, as our brain is suddenly roused during deep REM sleep but our body left behind, our musculature still effectively paralysed – we freeze! We can’t move. Time zooms in and pans out. We swivel our eyeballs into the half-seen recesses of the room, where our darkling imaginations take flight: the tingling curtain is sinisterly silhouetted, the soft creak of footfall is heard creeping up the stairs . . . In these peripheral ways, crouching in the corners of our minds, our darkest fears jump from one world into another.

  Philip Larkin lurked often in such corners of the dead spot. For instance, in ‘Unfinished Poem’ and, here, ‘Aubade’:

  And so it stays just on the edge of vision,

  A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill

  That slows each impulse down to indecision.

  When advising screenwriters of supernatural thrillers, which I have had occasion to do a lot these past few years through my work with the horror studio Hammer Films, I usually say that they are allowed to show just one dream. Otherwise, the lazy screenwriter falls back on the dream sequence as a device to grab a scare. One nightmare provides illuminating characterization and an effective fright, catching the audience unawares (just like the dreamer who suddenly awakens). Two such sequences, however, suggests carelessness and, more worryingly, a lack of cinematic ideas as to how else to frighten us and depict a character’s inner life. We risk alienating the audience with the old lie, ‘and then he woke up and it was all a dream’. Or nightmare.

  The origins of that word nightmare lie, as with the word sleep (once called swefn), in Old English: mare meaning demon. The implication of its etymology is that our dreams can somehow be infected. Cultures around the world still believe this to be true: that – during our more lurid, darker dreams – a sort of possession takes place. Talismans, like dreamcatchers, are deposited above beds throughout the world to ward off such malign spirits.

  This reminds me of another playground myth – that a person who never has a nightmare will become insane. That one bad dream now and then is healthy, to expunge darker thoughts or baser instincts. This may just be schoolboy chat but Schopenhauer had a point when observing that ‘dreams are a brief madness, madness a long dream’. Indeed, who is more sane – or, for that matter, truly ‘alive’ – the waking drone or the sleeping Queen Bee?

  I would like to report back (perhaps in a future dream) to my playground self that a healthy inquisitive mind is reliant not so much on having nightmares as, more basically, on ensuring the brain receives a balanced and good amount of sleep. This will, from time to time, in dream states, lend itself to gothic imaginings: uncanny occurrences and unlikely coincidences; strange meetings, not least astonishing visitations from deceased loved ones; excruciating embarrassments also, when we are the Emperor wearing new clothes (‘Whoops, so sorry, Your Majesty, I seemed to have forgotten to put my trousers on this morning!’); grotesque animisms, conjurings and happenings. These darker shadows of dream are every bit as magical and crucial as the sweetest, brightest of reveries and should be celebrated. The gothic imagination offers really profound excavations of ourselves – and our doppelgängers – by delving into divided states of selfhood, identity, existentialism and consciousness. A chiaroscuro of the soul is brought into relief, under the penumbra of sleep and amid the echoed murmurings of our hearts.

  The physiology of the dead spot – when we are, on a daily basis, at our most physically relaxed and least susceptible to pain (due to the congealment of metabolic activity and body temperature) – does have a corollary to death, a happier flipside. Those wee hours are also traditionally the appointed time when most babies are born. In this brightly lit modern age, this ratio may statistically be on the wane, and yet it still makes symmetrical sense: that our body clocks should stop ticking at around the same time that they first began, once upon a time.

  ★

  This fabled tale is itself framed by accounts of storytelling, so that it becomes a story within a story, within a book (that you are now holding).

  Authorial subterfuge was a trademark of Washington Irving but his story structure in ‘Rip Van Winkle’ also reminds us of the later gothic literature that so frequently layered its narratives within letters, diaries and such, to lend levels of subjectivity, as well as credence or faux authenticity. There are, accordingly, also moments of the grotesque and uncanny in this story. Irving smuggles a nightmare into a dream into a reality, with a cloak of wit and a dagger of charm, his tone as unprepossessing as the beguiling, eponymous protagonist himself.

  Yet ‘Rip Van Winkle’ operates on so many different levels. Irving also invokes folk traditions, historical fiction and fairy tale in order to beg the age-old question – older than Rip himself – of whether our little life is lived while asleep or awake . . .

  Doesn’t time fly? The story is one of the longer in this collection and yet over before you know it.

  Rip Van Winkle

  by Washington Irving

  By Woden, God of Saxons,

  From whence comes Wensday, that is Wodensday,

  Truth is a thing that ever I will keep

  Unto thylke day in which I creep into

  My sepulchre.

  CARTWRIGHT

 
; The following Tale was found among the papers of the late Diedrich Knickerbocker, an old gentleman of New York, who was very curious in the Dutch history of the province, and the manners of the descendants from its primitive settlers. His historical researches, however, did not lie so much among books as among men; for the former are lamentably scanty on his favorite topics; whereas he found the old burghers, and still more their wives, rich in that legendary lore, so invaluable to true history. Whenever, therefore, he happened upon a genuine Dutch family, snugly shut up in its low-roofed farmhouse, under a spreading sycamore, he looked upon it as a little clasped volume of black-letter, and studied it with the zeal of a book-worm.

  The result of all these researches was a history of the province during the reign of the Dutch governors, which he published some years since. There have been various opinions as to the literary character of his work, and, to tell the truth, it is not a whit better than it should be. Its chief merit is its scrupulous accuracy, which indeed was a little questioned on its first appearance, but has since been completely established; and it is now admitted into all historical collections, as a book of unquestionable authority.

  The old gentleman died shortly after the publication of his work, and now that he is dead and gone, it cannot do much harm to his memory to say that his time might have been better employed in weightier labors. He, however, was apt to ride his hobby his own way; and though it did now and then kick up the dust a little in the eyes of his neighbors, and grieve the spirit of some friends, for whom he felt the truest deference and affection; yet his errors and follies are remembered ‘more in sorrow than in anger’, and it begins to be suspected, that he never intended to injure or offend. But however his memory may be appreciated by critics, it is still held dear by many folks, whose good opinion is well worth having; particularly by certain biscuit-bakers, who have gone so far as to imprint his likeness on their new-year cakes; and have thus given him a chance for immortality, almost equal to the being stamped on a Waterloo Medal, or a Queen Anne’s Farthing.