by Alex North
“Paul Adams?” one of the officers said.
“Yes.”
He rested his forearm on the side of the door and peered inside past me, as though searching for something. Then he looked me up and down, his face set hard, devoid of emotion.
“Am I right in thinking you knew a girl called Jenny Chambers?”
“Yes.” I paused. “Why?”
He looked at me as though I already knew.
“Oh, she’s dead.”
THIRTY-TWO
NOW
I am dreaming right now.
Even after so many years, I had never lost the sense of wonder that accompanied that realization, and it arrived again now as I found myself staring at Gritten Park School, amazed as always that my sleeping mind was capable of conjuring up something so realistic. I’ve perfected it over all these years, and much of what Charlie originally said was true.
I crouched down and employed the environment technique: rubbing my palm over the ground and feeling the rough texture of the road. A tapping sound was coming from nearby. I looked to my right and saw the tarp stretched tight around the construction area. That was long gone in real life, of course. But this was the school as it had been then, not as it was now.
I stood up and drifted past the building site, and then the tennis courts and the corrugated huts. The dream had added layers of rust to the latter, and positioned them at odd angles in the grass, as though they had been dropped carelessly from the sky.
The bench was a little way along.
Jenny was waiting there for me. She appeared exactly as my mind had created her a few nights earlier: still recognizable as the girl I remembered, but aged to match the years that had passed. Even just sitting down, there was a confidence and poise to her. But her old school bag was at her feet, and there was a notebook open on her lap. The past and the present, superimposed.
Not a line, I thought. A scribble.
And my heart ached to see her.
She closed the notebook and smiled at me. “Hey there, you.”
But both the smile and the greeting seemed slightly more forced than the previous times I’d dreamed her. I remembered walking down here for the first time as a teenager, and how I’d been worried I might be disturbing her. That hadn’t been true then, but I had the strange sensation it was now. That even though this was my dream, and she was only a figment of my imagination, she would rather I wasn’t bothering her.
“Hey there,” I said. “Do you mind?”
“Not if you don’t.”
I sat down beside her on the bench, allowing a little distance between us.
“Are you okay?” I said.
“Honestly?” She looked away. “I’m tired, Paul. I want to go back to sleep.”
The way she phrased it, it was as though she were dreaming me rather than the other way around, and I felt a stab of guilt at conjuring her: an old sensation. Why did we lose touch? Jenny asked me last night. Thinking back on the times I’d dreamed of her after her death, here in Gritten and then at college, the answer was clear: because it had begun to feel like this. Whatever else he had done, Charlie had given me a tool to use, and I had. In a lucid dream, you could do anything, and so I had brought Jenny back to life in an attempt to assuage the pain and the grief I felt. But my subconscious had known, and it had become clear it was time to stop.
I had thought it would be harmless to see her again now. That it would make being back in Gritten, and everything I had to do and face here, easier to bear. And I supposed that, for a time, it did. But I knew it couldn’t last, and that it was time to let her go again now.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“You don’t need to be. I know you miss me.”
“Always.”
“But I should leave. Before I do, though, I wanted to give you two things.”
“What?”
“Do you remember when the police arrived?”
I thought back to that day. The two officers couldn’t question me without one of my parents present, but they asked if they could come in, and of course I said yes. They wouldn’t tell me what had happened to Jenny.
Oh, she’s dead.
The words had echoed in my head, but that had been all they were, and they didn’t seem to relate to anything that could possibly be real. If they were true, then the world should have ended.
And yet the world was carrying on.
“They thought it was me that killed you,” I said.
Jenny smiled. “Of course they did. I was coming to see you, after all. And it’s often the boyfriend, right?”
“Right.”
It had been about half an hour before my mother got home, at which point she insisted on driving me to the police station so I could be interviewed under supervision. I remembered how numb I had felt, and how the officers had forced us to stop at the playground so I could see what I had supposedly done. The way my mother had protected me so fiercely. She knew me. Even without me saying anything, she knew I hadn’t done that.
The whole time, there had been other officers searching our house for evidence that would incriminate me. A weapon, perhaps. Bloodstained clothing. There was nothing for them to find, of course, and it wasn’t long before Billy wandered into the town, his own clothes saturated with blood, carrying his dream diary and the knife he and Charlie had used to murder Jenny.
Jenny smiled at me sadly now.
“You never showed me your town before,” she said. “I was so excited to see you that day that I arrived about half an hour early. And I figured I’d walk around a bit.”
“Why?”
“I wanted to see you in your sauce.”
I closed my eyes at that—at my mother’s phrasing coming from the image of Jenny my sleeping mind was generating—but it was a mistake to close your eyes in a lucid dream. You needed sensation to make the world around you solid. So I opened them again, gripped the rough edge of the bench, and listened to the distant tapping of the drill, trying to anchor myself.
“When I got to the playground,” Jenny continued, “James was gone. He obviously took your warning seriously. But Charlie and Billy were there. They were waiting and they had their plan. They were angry.”
“I don’t need to hear this,” I said.
“Yes, you do. They beckoned to me. I’m not sure why I went over. I guess I was curious what they wanted, after everything you’d told me about them. By the time I saw the knife, it was too late.”
Again, I wanted to close my eyes.
“They held me down and took turns stabbing me,” Jenny said. “It almost didn’t hurt at first, because I couldn’t believe what was happening. I think I was in shock. But then it did. Whichever one wasn’t stabbing me was putting handprints of my blood on the ground. I fought so hard, because I remember realizing I was going to die, and how much I didn’t want to. I wanted to live so very much.” She looked at me sadly. “But I didn’t.”
A total of fifty-seven wounds were recorded on the body, I remembered.
The victim’s head all but severed.
“They stuffed my body under one of the bushes when they were done,” she said. “And then they went off to the woods and took sleeping pills, imagining they were going to escape this world forever. Which is ridiculous, of course.”
“Except that Charlie really disappeared.”
“Nobody disappears, Paul. Nobody is ever really gone.”
I thought about it and nodded.
“The police were right though,” I said. “It really was me who killed you.”
Jenny shook her head.
“Paul, you didn’t know what would happen. That’s the first thing I want to give you. You did your best, which is all any of us can do. You were helping a friend. And you were just a kid. It wasn’t your fault. None of this is.”
She sounded so earnest that a part of me almost believed her.
“I’ve spent so long wishing,” I said.
“Wishing what?”
“That
I’d kept walking that day. That I’d said nothing. Because it’s not fair. It should have been James they killed, not you. And it would have been if it hadn’t been for me.”
The underlying sadness of what I’d just said hit me. For years I had blamed myself for what I did. I had wished I hadn’t spoken to James that day, and that things had been different.
What a waste that seemed now. Why had I never wished that Charlie and Billy hadn’t killed anybody that day? Perhaps simply because they had, and so the act had taken on an inevitability: the murder becoming something that couldn’t be avoided, the effects only mitigated and shifted in favor of different people, different lives. But the truth was that there would have been a death on my conscience whatever I’d done.
“It’s not your fault,” Jenny said. “And now the second thing.”
She reached down and rummaged in her bag, then took out the magazine and passed it to me.
The Writing Life.
I remembered how touched I’d been that she’d brought this for me. How it meant she’d been thinking of me. But then the text on the cover swam out of focus, and I realized the dream was slipping out of my control.
“They’re all the same,” Jenny said. “That’s why he won’t find it.”
My mother’s words. I rubbed the pages of the magazine between my finger and thumb, desperate to stay.
“What does that mean?”
But despite my efforts, everything around me was beginning to fade. The awareness of lying in bed in the hotel room was becoming more real than my presence on the bench, and I was going to wake up. But even though Jenny couldn’t possibly know the answer to my question, it seemed urgent to hear her reply.
“What’s the same?” I said. “What won’t he find?”
As I stared at what was left of her, a sudden flash of revelation went through me, and I thought I might understand. And even though the dream was all but gone now, and the room in the real world was solidifying around me, I saw her smile one last time before I woke completely, her face mouthing words I felt as much as heard.
Goodbye, Paul.
THIRTY-THREE
I felt spaced out as I drove to my mother’s house—so intent on getting there that I barely registered the journey.
That wasn’t entirely due to the inevitable drowsiness that came with lucid dreaming. Now that the idea had occurred to me, it felt important to get there quickly and see if it could possibly be true. On the face of it, what I was thinking was madness, and yet something had clicked into place, and I needed to check in order to be certain. And as I drove, it was as though my mind were already ahead of me, waiting there at the house, urging me onward to join it.
They’re all the same.
That’s why he won’t find it.
When I parked and got out, the street was empty. But, while it might have been my imagination, the air right then seemed to have the same off-kilter feel as it had on the day of the murder.
Once inside the house, I paused in the hall. At the top of the stairs, dust was turning slowly in the air, casually disturbed by the front door opening. The place was as silent as ever, but the heaviness in the air had taken on a different texture today. It was quieter and emptier, and it felt like there was a sadness to the house, as though somehow it knew the person who had lived here for so many years was gone now, and the building itself was grieving for the loss.
I was still nervous about whoever had delivered the doll, but the need to know had overtaken that. I went upstairs to my old room and spread the contents of the box out onto the table.
The magazine.
The book with Jenny’s name on the cover.
The notebooks.
I looked at those now. There were eight in total, and I’d paid little attention to them until now. My dream diary had been on top of the pile, the first one I’d opened, and I hadn’t been interested in looking through the others and reading all my miserable teenage attempts at writing. All the desultory attempts at storytelling I’d long since abandoned.
But now I picked one up and opened it.
Nothing.
Another.
Nothing.
Then I opened the third. And before me, I saw not my own handwriting, but Charlie’s tight, black, spidery crawl.
I closed it instinctively, my heart beating harder.
My mind returned to the first time the four of us had compared results, the lunchtime Charlie had performed the seemingly impossible trick of appearing to share James’s dream. How that day I’d noticed he and I had exactly the same brand of notebook.
It’s in the house now, Paul.
They’re all the same.
That’s why he won’t find it.
But Charlie’s diary was supposed to have disappeared with him. He and Billy both had theirs with them on the day of the murder—presumably as part of the ritual Charlie had devised. Which meant that I was holding something that vanished from the world at the same time he did. There was an impossible piece of magic in my hands.
Magic.
I scanned through some of the entries toward the end of the notebook. They were all variations on the same theme: Red Hands; the woods; Billy and James. Most of them were vague, but two entries stood out as being more specific than the others. There was a lengthy passage describing the dream in which he’d killed Goodbold’s dog, and further back, a similarly detailed entry about knocking on James’s door in the night. In both cases, of course, Charlie had known what he’d done in real life and had been able to be more precise.
I flicked back further, until I found the entry I was most interested in.
I am sitting with him in the woods.
It is very dark here, but I can tell he is wearing that old army jacket, the one with the weathered fabric on the shoulders that looks like feathers, like an angel that’s had his wings clipped down to stumps.
It was exactly as I remembered from reading it that lunchtime. Charlie had told James to pass me his dream diary so that I could see the truth for myself. Back then, I’d looked down at the same tight, black handwriting, with that day’s date recorded at the top, and the dream had been so close to what James had already described that it had seemed impossible for it to be a coincidence. And yet I hadn’t been able to explain how it had been accomplished.
Charlie’s trick.
I turned back a page and started reading.
I am sitting with him in the woods.
And then another.
I am sitting with him in the woods.
I kept flicking back. The entries for that whole week were all but identical. While Charlie had changed some of the words, the subject matter was exactly the same. In each one, a boy and a monster emerged from the woods and saw James in his backyard, looking back at them.
And after all these years, I finally understood.
Incubation.
Charlie had spent weeks seeding us with stories about the woods being haunted. Every weekend, he’d taken us in there, always insisting on entering them through James’s backyard. So it had been almost inevitable that all of us, including James, would dream about them eventually.
I thought about Jenny giving me the magazine. At the time, I’d imagined it had been a coincidence that she had brought it in on the same day I decided to seek her out and talk to her. But she hadn’t, of course; I’d gotten it backward. That was the day she’d given it to me simply because that was the day I’d spoken to her. She had brought it in every day, and whichever day I’d spoken to her, it would have seemed like a coincidence then too.
And Charlie had done something similar. He had prepared entry after entry, so that he had one ready for whenever James finally described something that was a close enough match.
It happened much sooner than I was expecting.
Frustration rolled through me. How easily I could have stopped everything back then, if only I’d realized. That lunchtime, the three of them had been watching me, waiting for my response to the diary entry, and I re
membered how powerless I’d felt. The whole time, all I’d needed to do was turn back one single page.
And if I had, none of the rest of it would have happened.
I closed the diary.
“How did you get this, Mom?” I said quietly.
The house, of course, remained silent.
I walked through to my mother’s bedroom. I drew the curtains and stared out at the street. The sun was beating down so hard now that the air above my car was shimmering in the heat. There was still nobody in sight; the town was dead and silent.
At my side, the diary felt heavy in my hand.
How did you get this?
The question made me feel sick. Because, while there were numerous possible explanations for its presence in the house, they all ultimately came down to the same thing.
My mother had known more about Charlie’s disappearance than she had told me.
I looked up at the ceiling, picturing the red hands in the attic and the boxes of newspapers my mother had collected. When I’d first discovered them, I’d imagined she had hoarded them over the years, taking it upon herself to protect me from the knowledge and the guilt.
But now I wondered if that guilt had really been her own. If she knew what had happened to Charlie, then at least some of the blame for the copycat killings rested with her. She could have done something to stop them.
And yet, for some reason, she had not.
I looked down, out of the window again.
And the street was no longer empty.
A figure was standing at the far side of my car. They were slightly silhouetted by the sun behind, their features occluded by the haze above the vehicle, but I could tell they were staring back at me. I recognized them immediately, and twenty-five years fell away in the space of a single heartbeat.
The figure raised a hand.
After a moment of hesitation, I did the same.
I left the dream diary on the bed and then went downstairs. Outside the door, the warmth and brightness hit me. The figure was walking away now, heading slowly off up the street. But there was no need for me to chase them. I knew where they were going.