by Steve Voake
‘Me?’ he said.
Firebrand nodded. ‘That’s why they’re so keen to get hold of you. They think you’re the Dreamwalker’s Child – the one who’s going to spoil the party.’
‘And with our help,’ added Skipper, ‘that’s exactly what you are going to do.’
Sam’s mind was racing. Suddenly everything around him seemed to come into clear, sharp focus, as though someone had twisted a camera lens and transformed the blurred edges of his new world into hard, precise lines. He saw the red heat as it crawled slowly down the crisp brown sides of the cigar, saw the rough, hard calluses on Firebrand’s hands and saw the light from the screen reflected in Skipper’s eyes, shining like a pool full of sapphires.
‘But why didn’t they just kill me?’
‘Because of the first part of the prophecy. Odoursin believed he needed you alive in Aurobon so that his forces would be victorious. He saw the people on Earth as the Darkness and believed that in some way you would help him to defeat them. But Hekken and the rest of the Council disagreed, suspecting that the Darkness referred to their own forces. They believed that once you were in Aurobon, it would be safer to kill you. We’ve recently learned that they have been successful in persuading Odoursin to believe this too.’
Sam blinked and tried to focus on what Firebrand was saying.
‘When we realised that Odoursin’s forces had made a connection between the woman who walked in the forest and the Dreamwalker of the prophecy,’ continued Firebrand, tapping another column of grey ash into the ashtray, ‘we couldn’t be sure that the connection was a correct one, but neither could we take any risks. So we threw all our resources into finding her before they did.’
Sam shifted in his seat and thought how strange it was to hear his mother talked of in this way, hunted like some fugitive on the run. But he listened and said nothing.
‘We programmed her image into our most powerful computers, which analysed every scrap of data we had – hair colour, skin tone, height, bone structure – you name it, we analysed it. The most we got from that was a 78 per cent probability that the woman was of English descent, although for all we knew she could have moved to the other side of the world or been born to English parents who lived in Africa. We had no way of knowing for sure.’
Another image of Sam’s mother appeared on the screen, although at first he didn’t recognise her. It was night-time and she stood alone in the middle of a field, clearly terrified. She stared wildly at something in the distance and her face was smudged with dirt and tears. All she wore was a simple nightdress. Sam swallowed hard, then felt a small hand close around his own.
‘Don’t worry,’ whispered Skipper. ‘It’ll be all right, you’ll see.’
And although Sam couldn’t see how anything could be all right any more, her words calmed him and he squeezed her hand tightly in the darkness.
‘We took a chance and focused on England,’ Firebrand continued. ‘Every single piloted insect that we could spare was taken off normal duties and transferred to search squadrons. Fly populations soared that year, but luck was on our side. After seven months we found her.’
The handset clicked and the face on the screen merged smoothly into a much happier version of the same person. Sam’s heart leapt as he saw his mother smiling once more, stretching up in the sunlight and pegging clothes onto a washing line.
‘We don’t know why she walks through Aurobon in her dreams. But knowing that Odoursin was desperate to find you, we flew round-the-clock wasp patrols for your protection.’
The image changed to one of Sam’s face next to a dead wasp. Stretching away into the distance was a line of ants.
‘We’ve been watching you for quite a while, Sam. Remember this?’
Sam gave a half-smile and nodded. He had watched fascinated as the ants tugged the fallen insect across the patio towards their dark holes in the earth, little knowing that he too was being watched.
‘That wasp had one of our pilots in it, so the ant squadrons mobilised immediately. Standard search-and-rescue procedure. Got it down to a fine art, we have.’
Sam detected a hint of pride in Firebrand’s voice.
‘We knew that, sooner or later, Odoursin’s lot would find you. In the event, it turned out to be sooner.’
Sam watched as the picture on the screen cut away to a film shot at night from the cockpit of a wasp. The screen was filled with the image of a house approaching at high speed and Sam winced involuntarily as it seemed they must crash, but at the last moment the pilot climbed sharply and shot through a gap in an open window.
Sam recognised his own bedroom curtains just as two black lines appeared at the sides of the screen, pulsated once and then raced to the middle, shrinking themselves into a small, bright square beneath which the words ‘TARGET LOCK’ glowed fiery red. He just had time to register the unmistakable shape of a mosquito in the middle of the square before there was a sense of incredible acceleration and the mosquito was hit full on, bits of its legs and wings disintegrating beneath like grey, ghostly confetti.
‘Nice,’ said Skipper.
The screen flickered again and Sam saw himself standing on the lawn. A grey fly was circling above his head, although the Sam on the screen didn’t appear to be aware of it.
‘Ooh, horsefly!’ cried Skipper excitedly. ‘Go on, take him down!’
As if in response to Skipper’s instruction, the screen was quickly filled by the unfortunate insect as the electronic display locked onto its target once more and the wasp hit the horsefly dead centre. This time the large fly was brought crashing down to the ground, struggling among the long grass beneath the hedge until there was a glint of silver sting, a crunching of jaws and the struggle was over.
‘Isn’t nature a wonderful thing?’ said Skipper as Sam shut his eyes and tried to ignore the queasy feeling in his stomach.
‘Red in tooth and claw,’ agreed Firebrand as the wasp flew away from the lifeless insect lying broken in the long grass and up into a clear blue sky. ‘There were some bloody battles on Earth that summer, Sam, I can tell you.’ He got to his feet and rubbed the back of his neck. He suddenly looked very tired.
‘It was our belief that Odoursin would try and use mosquitoes to infect your Earth body with some deadly virus, so that they could bring your essence to Aurobon. They may not have developed the virus that will destroy all human life yet, but there are plenty of existing ones that will kill you quite effectively – yellow fever, for instance. We know that they’ve piloted Aedes aegypti mosquitoes in the past to infect key people with the yellow-fever virus – usually scientists in the tropics who are on the verge of some major breakthrough.’
‘They killed them?’ asked Sam in amazement. ‘Why?’
‘Because they’re afraid that the success of the new virus they’re developing might be threatened by these people. So they watch them in the labs and they wait. Then when a breakthrough cure is imminent, a few ants quietly come and bite a hole in the mosquito net. Night comes, the mosquitoes go in and no one knows anything until the target gets sick and dies. Just another unfortunate accident in the name of medical research.’
Sam gave a low whistle. ‘Does that sort of thing happen a lot then?’
‘Well, they’ve always done it,’ said Firebrand, ‘and in the past they’ve always been quite subtle about it. A scientist dying quietly in some tropical country isn’t the kind of thing likely to cause much of a stir in the wider world. But recently they’ve been more brazen about it, to the extent that we’ve had West Nile virus turning up in New York, for goodness’ sake. Which made us think that they wouldn’t worry too much about a case of yellow fever in rural England if it meant that they could bring their number one target back to Aurobon.’
‘That being you of course,’ added Skipper helpfully.
‘But I didn’t get yellow fever,’ protested Sam. ‘I didn’t get anything. I was fine. I was riding my bike. So please, someone tell me – how did I come to be here?’
‘Yes,’ replied Sam, rather taken aback by the question. ‘I have.’
‘Good,’ said Firebrand. ‘Then imagine for a moment that you are that balloon.’
‘What?’ asked Sam. This conversation was becoming stranger by the minute. ‘But I don’t look anything like a balloon.’
‘Forget about what you look like. Think about who you are: your thoughts, feelings, dreams and desires.’
Sam gave Firebrand a doubtful look, not unlike the one he had once given a supply teacher in drama who suggested he pretend to be a tree. He looked at Skipper for support.
‘Go on, Sam. You’ll see.’
‘Right,’ said Sam. ‘I am a balloon.’
‘Good,’ said Firebrand again, ‘very good. Now imagine that you are put into a box with a small hole in the side and your string is taped to the bottom of the box. The box is locked shut and taken into a room in a house. Can you picture it?’
‘Yes,’ said Sam, ‘I think I can picture that one.’
As Sam spoke he detected a hint of sarcasm in his own voice and hoped that Firebrand hadn’t noticed. If he had, he didn’t show it.
‘So you are the balloon in a box, in a room, in a house. You can see parts of the room through the hole in the box, but your view is quite narrow. What happens when the box is opened?’
Sam shrugged, resisting the temptation to point out that he had never come across a balloon that could see, hole in a box or not.
‘The balloon floats out into the room I suppose.’
‘That’s right. But the string remains attached so that it can be pulled back into the box at any time. Correct?’
‘Correct,’ agreed Sam, still wondering where this conversation was leading.
‘All right,’ said Firebrand. ‘Now think of your body as a box which contains all your thoughts and desires – your balloon. When you dream, the box opens and the balloon can float into the room – your world – and see it in a new way, although you are still tied to the box and must return to it.’
‘So the room is a world which I see differently in my dreams?’ said Sam, becoming interested in spite of himself.
‘That’s right,’ said Firebrand, ‘but it’s still only one room – your world. The balloon stays in one room, usually in its box but sometimes floating above it. But just suppose that the house has more than one room, maybe ten, maybe a thousand…’
Sam shook his head. ‘I’m lost,’ he said.
‘Think of Aurobon as another room in the house,’ explained Firebrand. ‘By rights you shouldn’t be here, because normally the door of your room is kept shut and you are tied to your box. But for some reason, your mother is able to open a door in your world and enter this one while still remaining tethered to her body. She simply dreams – or floats – in a different room from the one in which she lives and then returns to her own world. Why, I don’t know.’
‘But if she can get back then why can’t I?’ asked Sam. ‘If this is some sort of dream, why can’t I wake up?’ He looked up at Firebrand, noticed in that moment how sad he appeared and suddenly began to feel very, very afraid. ‘Why can’t I wake up?’ he repeated, his voice a whisper in the darkness. ‘Why?’
Firebrand placed a hand on his shoulder. ‘Because I’m afraid your string has been broken,’ he said simply.
Twenty-three
For a long time the words hung in the silence like frozen rain and Sam shivered beneath their shadow. At last, somewhere a long way off, he heard Firebrand say, ‘Look at the screen, Sam. You must face the truth before we can go on.’
Skipper put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Be strong, Sam.’
Sam looked at the screen.
‘This footage was taken from the cockpit camera of the lead wasp,’ said Firebrand.
A bright summer’s day.
A view from the air of open countryside and a redbrick house below.
Several passes at high speed, the camera searching for something.
A sensation of losing height rapidly.
A boy standing outside a house, holding a bike.
Sam.
Suddenly the air is alive with yellow and black, a swarming squadron of wasps spreading in all directions, the camera following them, climbing, sweeping, searching the blue sky.
The crackle of static and a voice fighting to stay calm: ‘Situation red, repeat, situation red. Enemy fighters engaged and destroyed, but others present, location unknown. Repeat, location unknown. All units, search and destroy. Situation critical. Repeat, situation critical.’
The cloud of black and yellow clears and the horizon tilts, climbing as the wasp dives. Trees, fields and a grey ribbon of road with two specks moving across it, converging: closer now, a white van and a boy on a bike.
Static crackles and roars. A voice, screaming now, ‘Enemy attacking! Repeat, enemy attacking!’ The horizon flips and turns, a green blur of leaves and tarmac, a flurry of smoky wings, blood, skin, metal and then blue sky once more.
‘Subject down,’ the voice is saying. ‘The subject is down!’
Silence follows.
The wasp turns and makes a final pass over the scene.
A bicycle, crushed beneath the wheels of a white van.
A boy lying still and quiet in the dry, dusty heat of the day and a man running down the road towards him.
Blood and glass.
Bright green flies begin to settle in the sunshine.
The screen fades to black.
Sam stared into the darkness for a long time and no one spoke.
At last he said, ‘I’m dead, aren’t I?’
Firebrand shook his head. ‘No, Sam. You’re not dead.’
‘But I saw it all. The crash. Me lying in the road. Please, tell me the truth.’
Firebrand glanced at Skipper and gestured towards the window. Skipper got up and drew back the curtains. Warm sunshine poured into the room. Sam rubbed his eyes and realised that they were wet with tears.
‘This is the truth,’ said Firebrand. ‘We thought we had the whole area covered, but then all hell broke loose. About thirty horseflies were sighted swarming a couple of miles down the lane from your house. A squadron of wasps was immediately scrambled to intercept them. Another twenty or so came in from the north, flying low over the fields, while a third group, maybe forty or thereabouts, came at us out of the sun. It was bedlam, but at that stage we still felt reasonably confident. There were four wasp squadrons operating in the area and we thought we could handle it.’ Firebrand sighed heavily. ‘But of course, it turned out to be a diversion.’
Sam remembered the huge swarm of wasps he had seen that morning, just before he set off on his bike.
‘What happened?’ he asked.
‘One of Odoursin’s horseflies had camouflaged itself on a telephone wire and somehow we missed it. It watched you cycle down the road, waited until the van came round the corner and then dropped like a stone onto your neck. It bit suddenly and viciously, causing you to lose control of your bike. At the same time, a whole squadron of horseflies flew through the open window of the van and attacked the driver, who panicked and crashed into you. We now believe that it was a scenario they had practised and planned for many times. But this time they had the element of surprise and all the conditions were exactly right: the van, the bike, the concealed horsefly – there was nothing we could do.’
‘But they didn’t kill you, Sam,’ said Skipper quickly, anxious to provide what reassurance she could.
‘Then what am I doing here?’ asked Sam.
‘In his obsession to fi
nd out everything he could about the Dreamwalker, Odoursin discovered something about human consciousness which enabled him to drag you out of your world and into this one,’ explained Firebrand. ‘You remember what I told you about the balloons?’
‘Yes, of course,’ said Sam. ‘When you dream, it’s like a balloon floating out of its box.’
‘Exactly. From his readings of the Book of Incantations and his cruel interrogations of the Olumnus tribe, Odoursin learned that death breaks the bond between the spirit and the body in which it resides. The string is cut and the balloon is separated from its box.’
‘You mean, like when people die they go up to heaven?’ asked Sam.
Firebrand smiled. ‘Well, quite where they go is anyone’s guess. Once their strings are cut they simply float out through an open window.’
‘Couldn’t they just float into one of the other rooms in the house that you talked about?’ asked Sam. ‘Like my mum did?’
‘Normally, no,’ said Firebrand. ‘As I said earlier, the door – if we can describe it as such – is always shut. But the fact that your mother somehow found a way into this world through her dreams convinced Odoursin that he could bring you here too. He believed that if he moved fast enough, he could cut your string, grab you before you disappeared off through the window and bundle you back through the door into Aurobon.’
‘Kill me, you mean?’
‘Well, your physical body, yes. But he wanted to bring the essence of you to Aurobon and make sure that it stayed here.’
‘But you told me I wasn’t dead!’ Sam shouted furiously, feeling the tears pricking at his eyes once more. ‘You promised me!’
‘And my promise holds true,’ said Firebrand. ‘As you have seen, Odoursin was able to take advantage of what we might call “the separation of spirit from body” at the moment of your unconsciousness. Somehow, at precisely the right moment when the van hit you, a gap in the fabric between our worlds was opened up and – how shall I put it? – the non-material essence of Sam was dragged violently through it.’
‘They got the balloon to go through the door instead of the window,’ said Skipper helpfully.