‘Who are you?’ I ask him.
‘I’m March,’ he says, ‘and I hunt nightmares.’
The track continues for a while through trees. I push my bike as far as I feel able, before we come to a steeper incline. There, I pull the keys from the ignition and pocket them. Before us is a tall hill covered in long grasses, and at its apex is the silhouette of the old church standing at the edge of a cliff. Together, we tread through the grasses, moisture staining our trousers dark, until we come to the gravestones, scattered at odd angles like a mouth full of stone teeth grown wrong. The winds are stronger up here.
I notice the nightmare-hunter has raised his rifle, and feel my heart lurch when I see what it is he is aiming at. Standing in the doorway of the church is another one of those diseased and bandaged creatures from my dream of Gothenburg. Lurching from beneath the arch, it raises its arm towards me, pointing with a crooked finger. I take one step back for every step it takes forward, ready to turn and run back to my bike.
Only, when it notices March, it stops and parts its ripped lips, letting forth a word hatefully. ‘Sleepwalker!’
I nearly jump clear out of my skin when March opens fire. The rifle bucks in his hands. The first shot hits the leper in the torso, and its whole body spasms, jerking backwards. But before it can fall into the dark of the church, the second shot hits it clean between the eyes. There is no blood. And instead of landing with a thump, the terrible creature disintegrates as it falls, turning to a black dust that rolls away with the wind, like the last remnants of a bonfire.
I lower my hands from my ears, hearing the crack of those shots still echoing.
‘One down,’ says March, lowering his rifle.
I pull my jacket closer around me. ‘Holy hell,’ I say. ‘Please give me a bit more warning if you’re gonna do that again.’
At the nightmare-hunter’s direction, we begin to pile up loose stones in front of the church, like a crude bunker. I heave some from beside the cliff while March pauses to check his equipment. ‘You got a name?’ he asks, as I roll another stone around.
‘William Manderlay,’ I tell him.
‘Nice to meet you, William,’ he says. ‘Now. You’ve got a real bad nightmare problem here. One of the worst I’ve seen, actually. So what I’m going to do is go ahead and sort it out for you. Clear out the nightmares. But to do that, I think I’d rather have you somewhere out of harm’s way.’ He glances down at the valley and then back at me. ‘I’m going to do something really stupid to get them all up here, I think. So I’m gonna send you somewhere safe.’
‘I can help, though.’
He shakes his head, preparing his rifle. ‘The problem is that if you get hurt, you might wake up. And that’s a bad thing. Because if you wake up, then your dream collapses, and I get woken up as well. So I can’t finish the job, and it becomes a bit of a pain trying to find you again.’ March aims down the sights of his gun at the grassy hill before us. ‘There’s a lot of dreams out there,’ he says. ‘You got lucky I stumbled across this one. Finding a dream is like…’ He waves his hand vaguely about. ‘It’s like finding a needle in a haystack. Except the needle keeps shifting around, and sometimes the needle isn’t even in the haystack.’
At last there is a ring of stones in front of March’s flattened-out patch of grass.
‘Where can I go?’ I ask him, because we are at a dead end here. There is only the sea.
The nightmare-hunter nods at the church. ‘There’s a door in there. That’s how I got into your dream. Go through it, and you’ll be in somebody else’s dream. Keep going through enough doors, and enough dreams, and you’ll eventually find your way to the Capital. And that’s where I’ll come and meet you when I’m done here.’ March rearranges a few of the stones in his fort, before reaching satisfaction with his firing range. Then he stands and does some stretches. ‘Don’t worry about getting lost,’ he says. ‘Go through enough doors and you’ll always get to the Capital. Can’t miss it. Bloody great tower, right in the middle. You’ll know when you see it. It shouldn’t take me too long to finish up here, so just sit tight there and keep yourself busy.’ As an afterthought, he adds, ‘There’s some nice bars at the tower.’
I try and pierce the dark beneath the church’s archway with my vision, to see some kind of mysterious door, but there is nothing. Indeed, there is nothing behind the church but a sheer drop: nowhere for a door to lead.
‘All right, then,’ I tell him, still unsure.
‘Here,’ he says, and he throws me an item from his belt. I turn it over, and see that it is a compass. At first glance, it looks like standard military issue, green metal, worn at the edges. Except that its face is different. Still white, it has no markings – no North, South, East or West. Instead, it has an excess of needles, all in different colours. There are a couple of blue needles, three red, and, right now, more than two dozen thin black needles. None of them are spinning.
‘You can use that,’ he says. ‘The red needles are doors, and the blue ones are dreamers. If you spot someone and they don’t have a blue needle pointing at them, then they’re just a figment. Not real. Part of the dream. Got it? Your best bet is to follow the red needles from door to door until you get to the Capital, and avoid the blue needles. There’s no point in disturbing any dreamers.’ Finished with his stretches, March fishes around in his heavy pack. ‘You take real good care of that compass, though, William. There’s only twelve of them and I’m screwed if you lose mine.’
I move the device around, watching the needles fixed on me and March.
‘What about the black?’ I ask him.
At this, the nightmare-hunter grins – a boyish expression. ‘Nightmares,’ he says.
Drawing a bright red flare gun from his pack, March gets into position behind his fort, lying in a marksman’s pose. ‘You’d better get going,’ he says. ‘I’m going to do that stupid thing now.’ Lowering the bipod at the front of his rifle, he shuffles around until he’s comfortable, with his sights set down the long hill. The gravestones are lined up in shoddy rows to either side of him, and at the tree-line near the bottom of the hill, I can see my bike, gleaming in the half-light leaking through the clouds. Of course I am hesitant. ‘Don’t worry,’ says March, sensing my pause. ‘I’ve got this under control. I’ll see you at the Capital.’
One slow step at a time, I make to leave, not sure if I am doing the right thing. Maybe I could stay and at least play the spotter or something. Still, I obey orders and carry on up, and at the archway of the church, I turn and give him a feeble, ‘Good luck!’
He gives me a thumbs-up in return, then reaches for the flare gun at his side. Aiming it up at the sky, he pulls the trigger, and a tremendous point of red light streaks from the end of it, with a scream. The flare goes up and up, into the grey and white, until it pauses there like a red star, smoke drifting from its edges. I look back down into the valley and I see them there: nightmares. Dozens of them, running towards that bright beacon, towards the hill, with the red of the flare glinting in all their eyes.
Suddenly, I am very glad that I am leaving.
March brings his rifle to bear.
Inside the church, there is a door that does not belong, set into the far wall. It is painted white, and has a brass claw handle. I approach the alien door with caution, gripping hold of the handle and pausing for a moment. Logic is telling me that on the other side of this door is a sharp drop down to the sea, but I am not so sure any more.
I turn the handle and pull the door wide.
*
Through the door is a shopping centre.
I can tell that it is somewhere in the USA because of the announcements, and the noisy exchanges between shoppers. I stride aside sparkling fountains, where pretty girls sip from colourful cups and ignore one another, and I carry on past enormous pots filled with flora, drooping in the heat burning down through the windows above.
The shoppers continue and I am ignored. I feel out of place here, with my antique bi
ker goggles around my neck, and my leather jacket, far too warm in the heat. I am a young man from another time.
By the needles of the nightmare-hunter’s compass I am led past the dreamer, and he is a child of no more than five years old, standing alone and ignored beside a tall fountain. There is the glistening of snot fallen from his flared nostrils, mingling with the tears rolling awry of his reddened eyes, and gripped tightly in his chubby hand is the string belonging to a perfect round blue balloon, which floats like a buoy above his head. The dreamer is utterly abandoned by his figments, a hundred, or a thousand, men and women striding about their shopping without a care for the wails of the child. They seem like distant bodies, distant planets orbiting a lonely star.
I pause at a coffee shop and watch the boy for a while, wondering whether I should interfere. Every paternal instinct I have is telling me to part the crowds, pick the child up and go in search of his parents. Instead, I carry on, heeding the advice of the nightmare-hunter, until the child’s wails fade into the background. I come across a shop selling kitchen supplies, where I take a large kitchen knife and tuck it into the back of my belt, concealed beneath my jacket. Of course I feel a pang of guilt for leaving the child behind, but I tell myself that he will wake soon enough, and be comforted by folk who love him.
Beyond the refrigeration section, I locate the next door, and travel beyond the shopping centre.
The next dream is a festival. The wide street is a sea of bodies, shouting and laughing, and the air is a haze of colours as they throw brilliant neon powders over each other, and they all look like characters from some vividly inked comic book. The faces I see belong to India, and I realise that this is a dream of Holi.
Samantha insisted that I take her to a small celebration of Holi in Glasgow when she was eight, but she was not interested in the importance of the festival in Hinduism. She was only interested in the colours – in becoming neon. It is a dear memory to me, because it is the way that I remember Sammy as a child: as a rainbow girl.
I have to push myself through the street, rubbing up against people and feeling the heat of the stones beneath my shoes, overwhelmed by the mingled odour of flowers and spices and sweat. I am caught up in the laughter and joy despite my inability to understand the language, and find myself stepping to the same rhythm as the drums thumping over the crowd’s noise. Upon the balconies of the windows above there are bright depictions of the gods, and more powder streaming down from the laughing figments beyond, showering me and those around me, until I must look as if I am one of them. I move with the flow of the crowd, past folk with water guns and washing-up liquid bottles filled with more colour, spraying everywhere and all across me, and I laugh with them, ducking and weaving like an amateur boxer around the bright streams.
A dreamer is visible on March’s compass, the only other blue needle in the dream, but he or she might be anyone here – all people, including me, made anonymous in the colours.
At last, I successfully navigate my way to a thin alley, with the water from the drains streaming across the cobbles a swirling neon, where I catch a glimpse of my reflection. My hair is green and yellow and my face and jacket are stained pink. I have to laugh at myself as I try to remove some of the colour from my skin. What a fool I look.
Through a metal door with a bar handle I go, leaving the festival behind.
To where I stand blinking in the light of a dazzling new dream.
*
It is becoming increasingly difficult to remember that I am really an old man, fast asleep in my armchair at home. I stand solitary here, more awed by the sight before me than anything I have seen so far in dreaming.
I have stepped into a ruined and flooded London.
It looks as if the earth has broken open in the wake of an earthquake, shattering the city. There are the shapes of familiar buildings balancing at angles on shards of earth that rise from the high waters. Everything is coated in a layer of life.
I have emerged from a door facing London’s twin railway stations. From here the roof of St Pancras station looks like a gargantuan set of ribs, every window smashed, with lengths of vine draped between each curve. And King’s Cross station looks like an empty birdcage, its thick net of a roof stained so dark it looks as if it is made of wood.
As I wander forward, I see lily pads among crisp packets and plastic bottles, and in a way it is reminiscent of the London I knew as a young man – wealth and filth, violence and romance, crowds and loneliness – and I am struck by a strong memory of Lily.
She would come to every one of my performances with the London Philharmonic that she could, and I would see her in the audience. I remember Lily in winter, wrapped up warmly and wearing a little tinsel in her hair. I remember Lily in spring, wearing such bright colours that she already seemed ready for the warm months to come. I remember Lily in summer, confident enough to bare her collarbones and wrists, and that sly slip of a smile that always seemed to bloom in June. And I remember Lily in autumn, wearing the knitted cardigans she made herself.
And later on, in the darkness of my small apartment, she would trace the sounds she heard me play across my chest with the tips of her fingers.
I shake my head, to clear it of the memories threatening to slow me down.
The nightmare-hunter’s compass is leading me towards St Pancras, where there is another door. For a moment, I entertain the idea that this city is the Capital that March was telling me about, but there is no tower here. He said that the Capital would be obvious, and there is nothing obvious about this place at all. There is not a soul in sight, either.
There are a lot of nightmares showing up on the compass, however, making me nervous.
I keep my head down as I clamber up the fallen steps of the railway station, noticing that there are three blue needles – dreamers – on the compass. There is the needle pointing at me and the needle pointing at the dream’s owner, whoever and wherever they may be, but there is also a third needle, twitching along with the nightmares evident all about. I wonder if it perhaps belongs to another nightmare-hunter, emptying this dream of terrors.
Inside, St Pancras station is an acoustic joy. Birds fly from perch to distant perch, calling out and filling the place with vibrant noise. They have made their nests in every crevice available, including the almost unrecognisable statue near the entrance, which I hide behind.
The furthest arch of the station is open to the sky and makes the yellow sun look like a lidded eye. And it is beneath that arch that I see the silhouettes of a great horde of nightmares, shifting as if they are entirely composed of shadows. My breath draws short.
With my back against the statue’s base, I draw the kitchen knife and consider my options. The compass is telling me that the next door is beyond the shifting mirage of creatures in the near distance. I could sneak around, perhaps. Or just make my way back to the door I came in by, hoping to come across a different route to the Capital through other dreams. But then, I notice something upon the face of the compass that strikes fear through me.
I am surrounded.
Between the fallen pillars of the great entrance behind me shuffle a collection of terrible figures. More nightmares. I raise my knife and back away, well aware that I am being corralled towards an even greater mass of awful creatures in the station.
Backing up between glass barriers, I hear their collective wails.
None runs at me. They advance steadily, even as I try to back away, desperately seeking some means of escaping the horde. I step across fallen beams to where a great flood of light pours in through a gap in the roof. There I make my stand, concealing March’s compass as best I can and gripping hold of the kitchen knife with both hands. I turn on the spot, brandishing my knife, the nightmares reaching out towards me with their horrible hands, limbs stretched too long, shadows too dark, eyes like a pack of demonic wolves.
And yet they stop, having formed a great circle around me.
‘What do you want?’ I cry, and my voice ech
oes.
‘William Manderlay!’ calls a voice.
Stepping out from between the mass of nightmares comes a girl who looks like a burst of sunlight. She is small, and wearing bright yellow flowing garments lined in gold, including a veil across her dark hair. Her skin is the colour of fertile earth, and she is covered in jewellery and intricate piercings, which flash in the gloom.
The girl is holding a wooden compass.
‘You—’ I keep my knife aloft. ‘You’re another nightmare-hunter?’
‘We’re called Sleepwalkers,’ she says, ‘and not all of us hunt nightmares.’ The girl crosses the distance between us smiling a warm smile, as if I am not brandishing a knife at her. She seems to be examining me as she approaches. ‘You were very handsome when you were young,’ she says. ‘But roguish. A real heart-breaker. I can imagine you running off at the first sign of adventure. Still, it’s lovely to meet you at last, William. It’s taken me a long time to find you.’
The girl – the Sleepwalker – stops before me, but I keep my knife raised. I can feel a cold breeze across the back of my neck, and all the terrifying eyes of the gathered nightmares upon me.
‘Who are you?’
‘My name is June.’
‘What do you want from me?’
June licks her lips before she replies. ‘Your music really is something,’ she says. ‘I can’t tell you how many times I’ve listened to your album. I know all the songs off by heart, even if they don’t have words. One day, I’d love to hear them live. From your own hands. But right now, I’m here because you didn’t finish your album. It’s incomplete. Or maybe you just didn’t use all the songs. I’m not going to ask you where you got hold of them in the first place. I don’t really mind, to be honest. But I need the rest of them. I need every single song that leads to Solomon’s Eye.’
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