Wychetts and the Dungeon of Dreams

by William Holley

“You can hear it,” whispered Magister. “Tell me you can hear it.”

  “Yeah, I can hear it.” Edwin put a hand to his forehead. “And I’ve heard it before. It’s like… snoring.”

  “That’s right, lad. That’s him. The ruler of this realm. You’ve been hearing him all along.”

  “But who is he?” asked Edwin. “And how come I can hear him?”

  “You can hear him because you’re a very gifted Guardian with a psychic link.” Magister bowed in salutation. “Well I suppose something had to make up for the legs and hair. And as to the identity of our mystery snorer, I believe you are already acquainted with the Guvnor.”

  The wall behind Magister crumbled, the plaster peeling away to reveal a massive face. A familiar half human, half animal face carved from wood…

  “Inglenook!” Edwin and Bryony shrieked the word together.

  “He can’t hear you,” said Magister. “Well actually he can, because you’re in his dreams. But he can’t answer because he’s asleep.”

  “Let me get this straight.” After recovering from his shock, Edwin thought he finally understood. “We’re in Inglenook’s dreams?”

  Magister nodded. “Or to put it more technically, in his subconscious mind.”

  “Which is why we could do magic.” Bryony now got it as well. “We’re still at home.”

  “It was the only way I could see my family again,” confessed a tearful Maddy. “To drug Inglenook with Hypnoflax spores, then use magic to enter his mind whilst he slept. Once here, I could tap into his magic energy to create my own world of dreams.”

  “So all this was just a dream?” Edwin frowned as he pondered Maddy’s revelation. “We never travelled back in time. You were lying to me all along.”

  “I didn’t mean any harm,” sobbed Maddy. “I just wanted to be with my family again. Just for a couple of hours.”

  “Liar!” growled Edwin. “You planned to stay here for weeks!”

  “Don’t be too hard on her,” said Magister. “Time moves at a different pace in the dream realm. What seems like hours here is only a matter of minutes in the real world. And it was a very clever plan. Would have scored her ten out of ten in creative magical theory class.”

  “So throwing me in that dungeon was part of your plan too?” Bryony glared at Maddy, but Magister raised a hand.

  “Actually, I think that was down to me. Or rather, Boney. You see, when Malady and Edwin entered Inglenook’s subconscious, their magic tore open the barrier between the real and the dream worlds. It meant they could get in, but also that something could get out. And that’s how Boney brought you here. He reached out with his own subconscious, drawn to your fears about something called… the Moon of Magister.”

  “I was thinking about that in the taxi.” Bryony nodded. “And then we went onto that roundabout…”

  “And that’s where you were supposed to stay,” muttered Maddy. “Trapped in a nice little magic vortex I created. But somehow you got out.”

  “It was Boney who brought you to the dungeon,” continued Magister. “Although he didn’t realise he was doing it. It was his faded memories connecting with your fears, forming a magic link that pulled you physically into the dream realm.”

  “But not my dream.” Maddy shook her head firmly. “The dungeon wasn’t anything to do with me. It was part of Inglenook’s dreams all along.”

  Bryony found that hard to believe. “How could that horrid place be part of Inglenook’s dreams? The slunge, the cockroaches, the death traps? That ugly troll Globb? And all those skulls?”

  “Everyone has nightmares,” said Magister. “Even Inglenook.”

  “But…” Bryony looked at Magister. “What was Boney… I mean what were you doing in Inglenook’s nightmare in the first place?”

  “I’d been there a very long time.” Magister stared into space, his voice a husky whisper. “A dark memory, languishing in the depths of his mind. Locked away in the dungeon of his dreams.” Those silver eyes snapped back to Bryony. “The old French, they had a word for ‘dungeon’, and that word was ‘oubliette’. It came from the word ‘oublier’, which meant ‘to forget’. And that’s what dungeons are. Places to put things you want to forget about.”

  Bryony’s forehead wrinkled. “But why would Inglenook want to forget about you?”

  “You’ve asked him about me many times. You must have wondered why the Keeper of the Ancient Wisdom never talked about me, why he couldn’t bring himself to even mention my name.”

  “So tell me,” pleaded Bryony. “Tell me what he couldn’t speak about.”

  “You saw it.” Magister’s silver eyes bored into Bryony. “In the Dream Well, you saw it.”

  “I saw lots of things.” Bryony shrugged helplessly whilst trying to remember. “I saw a battle. And your face in the moon. But what does it mean?”

  Magister turned away from Bryony, just as another tremor struck the hall. Cracks appeared, flickering across the floor and walls.

  “These earthquakes.” Edwin stepped nervously away from a widening crevice. “Are they part of Inglenook’s dream?”

  “Only in the sense that we all are.” Magister paced around the hall, seemingly unworried by the worsening state of the floor beneath his feet. “Malady wasn’t powerful enough to create her dream world all by herself, so she needed your magic to help. She needed your trust, Edwin. Once that trust weakened, the magic spell was broken and the illusion was shattered. And her dream world is now crashing down around her. Literally.”

  There was another wave of tremors, and the floor became a mosaic of widening cracks.

  “But is it dangerous?” Bryony spread her arms to keep her balance as the whole building shuddered. “It’s just a dream, after all.”

  “Everything here is just a dream.” Magister still strode around the hall. “Including us. We’re as much part of this world as this building.”

  As he spoke, a portion of ceiling collapsed nearby.

  “So yes.” Magister stopped to look at Bryony. “It is dangerous.”

  “So how do we stop it?” said Edwin.

  “It will stop itself,” said Magister. “When Inglenook awakes. All this activity is disturbing his subconscious. As I’m sure you all know, the worst part of a nightmare comes just before you wake up.”

  “Then it’s OK.” Edwin sighed with relief. “When Inglenook wakes up we’ll all be saved.”

  “I wish it were that simple,” sighed Magister. “But remember that you are part of his dreams. And when his dreams stop, you stop with them.”

  “You mean…” Bryony could hardly say the words. “We’ll die?”

  “Not so much die, as cease to exist in a physical sense. Which is technically the same thing. And that was always the flaw in Malady’s scheme. You had to get out before Inglenook woke up, and there was no telling when that might happen. The plan might have scored her a perfect ten for creative spell theory, but I would have to deduct several thousand points for practical application and sheer hare-brained stupidity.”

  The tremors were constant now. The walls heaved, stone grinding and timbers groaning in protest.

  “But we can do magic.” Bryony wasn’t going to admit defeat. “All of us. So we can escape.”

  There was another shake of Magister’s grey head. “As Inglenook wakes up his dreams fade, and all the magic power returns to the Dream Well. So I’m afraid magic alone won’t be enough to save us.”

  “But…” Bryony couldn’t believe it would end like this, not after everything she’d been through to escape the dungeon. “You made a promise. That I’ll see Mum again.”

  “And so you will,” said Magister. “If you believe it.”

  “Just believing it won’t be enough.” Bryony was growing impatient with Magister’s riddles. “We need magic to get us out of here. That’s how we escaped the Dream Well, right?”

  “There is no magic potent enough to resist the power in the Dream Well.” Magister answered coolly, just like the teacher
he was. “Your escape was due to something else entirely. Another force within you, one you never knew you possessed until today.”

  Confused, Bryony wrinkled her nose. “What kind of force?”

  And it was at that moment, as she stared into Magister’s silver eyes, that Bryony remembered where she’d seen him before.

  “You were there, at Mum’s house. When I visited her on my first day at Wychetts. And in the Dream Well. You answered the door. You… you’re Mum’s butler!”

  “Butler?” Magister’s grimace suggested he found the idea distasteful. “I’d like to think my role in all this would involve more than answering the door and polishing spoons.”

  “It’s not a joke,” snapped Bryony.

  “You’re right,” said Magister. “I’m not Boney anymore. The jokes have stopped. Things get serious from now on.”

  “So you are involved. But how?” Bryony gritted her teeth. “Tell me!”

  “Don’t waste your breath on him,” Maddy told Bryony. “He’s not the real Magister. He’s just a memory, part of Inglenook’s nightmare.”

  Bryony’s eyes narrowed whilst she studied the silver eyed man. “Is that true? Are you real, or a dream?”

  Magister pressed a finger to his smiling lips, just as another tremor shook the building. The floor split where he was standing, and he dropped from view without a sound.

  “Boney!” Bryony peered into the crack that had swallowed Magister. “Don’t leave me now!”

  Her cries were masked by another loud rumble. The floor tilted, and she would have followed Magister into oblivion if Edwin hadn’t grabbed her arm.

  “We’ve got to get out of here.” Edwin held onto Bryony. “We’ll stand more chance if we can get out of the building.”

  Bryony wasn’t so sure, but was too shocked to respond in any way other than a dumb nod.

  “Maddy!” Edwin looked round the hall, but there was no sign of the green haired girl. Then he heard a scream, and saw a hand grasping the edge of a widening crack in the floor. “There she is!”

  Edwin and Bryony made their way across the trembling hall, hopping and jumping whilst more cracks opened beneath them. They found Maddy gripping the edge of a precipice, her legs dangling into an empty black void.

  “Give me your hand.” Edwin knelt at the edge of the crack, reaching down to Maddy. Bryony clung to his other arm, ready to take the strain.

  But Maddy didn’t move. “It’s too late,” she cried. “This dream world is finished.”

  “We can’t give up,” said Edwin. “There has to be a way we can escape.”

  “There is for you.” Maddy still refused to raise her free arm. “Remember what Magister just said?”

  Bryony and Edwin looked blankly at each other.

  Maddy sighed. “He was right, you do need to pay more attention in class. You escaped from the Dream Well, remember? Can you remember how you did that? What did you see there? What were you thinking?”

  “I saw Mum’s house. Then a battle. The moon. Magister’s face. Then…” Bryony’s mind went blank. “I can’t remember the rest…”

  Another violent tremor tore great shards of masonry from the ceiling, which sliced the air close to Maddy’s head as they dropped into the broadening crevice.

  “Never mind about all that.” Edwin leaned further over the precipice, his fingers brushing the knuckles of Maddy’s clenched hand. “We don’t have time for games.”

  “The game’s over,” said Maddy. “At least for me. You see there’s nothing for me in the real world. Nothing for me to go back to.”

  “Don’t talk rubbish.” Edwin leaned forwards as far as he dared, trying to wrap his fingers around Maddy’s wrist. “If you stay here you’ll die.”

  “I’ll live on as a memory. No one dies if you remember them.” Maddy’s smile belied the tears that streamed down her green freckled cheeks. “You have to go. Both of you. Back to your world, your home and family.”

  “But I can’t leave you.” At last Edwin took hold of Maddy’s wrist. “You’re my friend.”

  “And always will be.” Maddy grinned. “Pity. It would have been a great wedding. And you would have looked so sweet in that dress.”

  There was a jolt, and Edwin felt Maddy’s wrist slide through his fingers. He made a desperate grab, but couldn’t stop her falling into the crevice. In a heartbeat she was gone, consumed by the blackness below.

  “Maddy! Nooooooo!”

  Edwin lurched forwards, but Bryony managed to wrap an arm around his waist as the floor dissolved below him. She dragged her sobbing stepbrother onto what remained of the hall floor, an island of solidity in a sea of encroaching emptiness.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “But Maddy got us into this mess in the first place.”

  “She only wanted to see her family again.” Edwin stared mournfully into the darkness below. “I don’t expect you’d understand that. You’ve never cared about anyone or anything except your precious Mum.”

  “That isn’t true,” countered Bryony. “When I was in the dungeon I wished you were there.”

  “Instead of you, I bet.”

  “No, not like that. I meant I wanted to be with you. And then, in the Dream Well…”

  Suddenly Bryony remembered her vision.

  “I saw Wychetts. The house was on fire. You were there. I saw you run into the flames. There were gravestones…”

  And then she realised how she had escaped the Dream Well, and what had brought her to Edwin.

  “It was you! I was thinking of you, Edwin.”

  Edwin found that hard to believe. “So what?”

  “So that’s how we get out of here. We need to think of Wychetts. Our home, our life as a family.”

  “But we’re not a family. Not like the Maddergrubs.”

  “Forget about them. Think about us.”

  “There isn’t any us.” Edwin glowered at Bryony. “There never has been. You only ever cared about your mum. As soon as that letter turned up you couldn’t wait to leave. It didn’t matter what anyone else thought, or that I’d spent the past two weeks cooking all the food for your surprise party.”

  Bryony was confused. “I didn’t know you were planning a party. You should have said.”

  “Then it wouldn’t have been a surprise, dumbo.”

  Bryony didn’t know what to say. Except maybe one thing.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Edwin looked away from her. “It doesn’t matter about the party now.”

  “Not just about the party.” Bryony took a deep breath. “You’re right that I only thought about my mum. I didn’t realise how much you all meant to me until today. When I was lost in that dungeon, it wasn’t Mum I wanted.”

  Edwin looked at Bryony again. He was surprised to see she was crying.

  “It’s no use,” he told her. “We’ve never been a family, and we never will be. It was just a dream. It was never real.”

  Another tremor made their island of floor lurch perilously.

  “This will go any second.” Resigned to failure, Edwin knew there was no point continuing the argument. “There’s one thing I haven’t said to you today, and this will probably be my last chance.” He touched Bryony’s arm. “Happy birthday.”

  Bryony smiled at Edwin through her tears, then saw a flash of silver when she leaned forwards to put her arms around him.

  “The leaf pendant.” Bryony had forgotten all about her birthday present. “Edwin, the pendant.”

  “Hope you like it. But I kept the receipt just in case.”

  “This is it.” Bryony grasped the pendant with her free hand. “This is how we get out of here.”

  “The pendant? How?”

  “You bought it for me. You, your mum, Dad. All of you.”

  “Yeah. Stubby chose the wrapping paper. Although he ate most of it.”

  “This is how I got out of the Dream Well.” Bryony pulled Edwin to her, showing him the leaf pendant on her upturned palm. “I was holding on to it, t
hinking about you. If we both focus on it now, maybe it can take us home.”

  “It’s just a pendant,” said Edwin.

  “But it’s something real. It represents us. Remember why you bought it for me?”

  “It’s a bryony leaf. It seemed fitting. It was either that or a joke plastic wart.”

  “Not just that. Remember why you wanted to buy me a present in the first place. Why you bothered with my surprise party. We need to focus.”

  “Why?” snorted Edwin. “So you can go to your mum in America?”

  “I don’t want to go to Mum.” Bryony lifted Edwin’s hand and clamped his fingers around the pendant. “I want to go home with you.”

  Edwin had never seen Bryony like this, her dark eyes so wide and pleading, her lips curved in a trembling smile.

  “We need to focus, Edwin. Inglenook is waking up. If we don’t get out now we’ll be stuck in here forever. Focus on the pendant, on what you felt when you walked into that shop and chose it for me.”

  “I bought it online,” confessed Edwin. “And it was on special offer.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Bryony squeezed Edwin’s hand. It was like she could feel the pendant radiating energy through his clenched fingers. “Focus, Edwin. Focus on the pendant.”

  Edwin focussed, remembering all the hours he’d spent making the food for Bryony’s party. Mixing the dough, icing the cake, cleaning out the washing machine. He thought about how he’d felt at the time. And as he thought these thoughts, a warm sensation radiated from the pendant.

  Bryony closed her eyes, concentrating all her thoughts on the pendant, on her father, Jane and Edwin. On Wychetts, and the carved wooden face above the hearth.

  She felt warmth from the pendant too; a warmth that enveloped her like a comforting embrace.

  But then there was a crash as the floor gave way, and a yell from Edwin when they went sliding into emptiness…

  23 Just a Dream?

  Bryony sat upright, blinking in the sunlight that peeked through a gap in the curtains. She was breathing heavily, sweat dripping from her furrowed forehead as she gazed around in bewilderment.

  She was in a bed. Her bed. In her bedroom. Back home in Wychetts!