The knife wavers between us in my unsure grip.
‘I don’t understand,’ I tell her.
‘You don’t have to,’ she says. ‘Maybe you don’t even know what Solomon’s Eye is. It doesn’t matter at all. What matters is that you need to give me all the songs. Not just the ones you used on the album. I need the complete map, William.’ Her smile fades, becoming something sinister instead. ‘And trust me when I tell you that I am willing to do whatever it takes to get them from you. I have a great deal of respect among nightmares. And even if you do something silly here – try and wake yourself, maybe – my nightmares will find you again. They will hound you every night for the rest of your life, until you give me the songs I need. Neither March, nor January, nor any of the other Sleepwalkers can stop me, either. Yes, I know you’ve met March. But he’s just a boy looking for a war.’
I try to back away, but June reaches out and gestures at the knife in my hands. At once, like sorcery, the wooden handle bursts into life – growing leaves and small branches. It clatters to the ground and I stumble, hands thrown wide. June advances.
‘Wait!’ I cry, and she halts.
Reaching into the pocket of my leather jacket, I grab the old notebook – that remnant from the waking world – and pull it out, flicking through. Because June was correct about the album I put out. There were something like 18 songs in total before I trimmed it down, and though only 11 eventually made it onto the finished piece, they are all still scrawled down here: the complete set of songs from my fever dream.
I locate the right page and hold the notepad out. The nightmares surrounding us raise their broken voices in a terrible crescendo, echoing wildly around the flooded station. But I am not giving June the songs she wants to preserve my own health. Rather, I am giving her the notebook so that she will not search me and find March’s compass – a device, I am sure, which is far more important than a mere set of songs.
‘Here,’ I tell her. ‘They’re all here.’
The small Sleepwalker takes the notepad and flicks through. Then, she smiles broadly – a genuine, attractive, youthful smile, and she turns on the spot, her arms outstretched, dancing in celebration. Her nightmares howl louder and stamp their feet, and the whole station rattles as it fills with the noise. I cringe back. ‘Oh, William,’ she says, laughing, golden-star earring glittering as it turns. ‘You have no idea how important this is. What a wonderful thing it is you’ve done here. With this… with this, I’m going to see God.’ She rushes across to me, grabbing the back of my neck with her free hand and kissing me deeply.
‘I’ll see you again, I hope,’ she says afterwards, breathless. ‘In another dream.’
Then, she turns to her nightmares, skipping away among them. ‘Wake him!’ she calls.
And in a calamitous confusion of terror, they rush me all at once, to grab at me, to tear me apart – all those wretched creatures howling in delight. I wake in fright.
Thyme
I wake feeling dazed.
Today is Thursday, which means that after I am done with breakfast, I must head to the record shop with a friend of mine called Vinnie. We go slow because Vinnie’s legs have seen better days, but despite his disability Vinnie still walks with a rhythm. Vinnie has a weakness for jazz that runs all the way to his bones, as if his years listening have affected his speech – given it a music. ‘Hop to it,’ says Vinnie, hustling as quickly as he can. He is excited.
At the record store – a wonderful, wood-panelled place just off the Royal Mile – Vinnie settles into the armchair they keep set out for him and listens through headphones to the first of the stack of records he has gathered for himself. He clicks his fingers, bobs his head and scat sings along with the instruments, all with such an enormous smile across his face that it makes the journey, every week, worth while.
With the help of the store’s owner – David, who makes a point of coming in on Thursday mornings to help us because I once taught his son how to play the violin – I gather my own small stack of records and sit down on my wooden chair beside the front door, where I can see people passing by. One by one, David puts the records on for me, and I spend the morning absorbed in the music and the movement of the city – the faces of passers by – and recovering from my dream. I am fond of jazz, but today I am mostly listening to quartets dug up from the dusty corners of the record shop: forgotten records by forgotten musicians.
‘You all right, Will?’ asks David, before we leave. ‘You’re very quiet today.’
Vinnie pats me on the back. ‘Chin up, Will. Life ain’t so bad.’
In the afternoon I take a train with Valentine across the Forth Bridge to Queensferry, to where there is a Deep Sea World. It is unusual to see Valentine this far away from our home, because he struggles with long distances. The home keep asking him whether he would like a frame or a walking stick to support him, but Valentine always refuses, and uses me to lean against when the going gets tough. ‘Why on earth would I need a lump of wood,’ he says when offered a cane, ‘when I have Manderlay?’
The two of us make the rounds of Deep Sea World, walking through the glass tunnels, with all manner of pretty fish swimming about above us. I used to take Samantha here, when the glass was still shiny and new, and I remember the way she pressed her nose so close to it that she left little marks wherever she went. Sammy was always fascinated by the creatures of the sea.
‘What’s that?’ asks Valentine, pointing at a fish.
‘That’s a barracuda,’ I tell him.
And further along, ‘What on earth is that?’
‘That’s a stingray.’
‘And what about that, then?’
‘That’s a diver, Valentine.’
He squints through the glass. ‘So it is.’
By the time we are done perambulating through the tunnels we are both too tired to take the train back, so Valentine orders us a taxi at the front desk. I have to gently nudge him awake when we arrive, and when he pays for the absurdly large taxi fare using my wallet I barely put up a fight. We join the others in the hall for dinner, and Valentine looks absolutely exhausted, but happy – his cheeks ruddy.
‘What’s bothering you, Manderlay?’ asks Valentine, over his soup. ‘You’ve been stomping about all day, head full of storm clouds.’ He aims his spoon at my shirt pocket. ‘Got something to do with that old notebook of yours? Barely had your hands away.’
I place an aching hand over the pocket, again surprised to find the notebook there.
‘I had a bad dream,’ I tell him. ‘Someone took it.’
Valentine stops eating his soup, and puts his spoon down, his mirth fading. ‘The problem with you,’ he says, tapping his temple, ‘head in the clouds. Always dreaming about this or that. Running off to sea. Now, I don’t know anything about any bad dreams, but you just keep a close eye on yourself, eh? Keep that noggin of yours healthy. Remember what happened to Donaldson? Don’t think I could go through all that again.’ He goes back to slurping at his soup and glances up at me from time to time, as if I am some kind of firework that might go off at any moment and startle him.
‘I’m not losing my mind,’ I say, with a sigh.
But I do remember what happened to Donaldson, and the memory is still tender. Donaldson was a windswept aviator, always with a bit of white hair sticking out at an angle as if he’d just dropped out of the sky. He was a good friend of ours, all the way up to the end. The problem was that Donaldson started forgetting things. Only small things at first, like names and places, and his befuddlement was nothing serious, as if he had simply misplaced his memories somewhere about his person. But by the end, there was not very much of poor Donaldson left. Just a frightened and confused old man.
Once I am done with dinner I head upstairs to my room and try to get some sleep. And I wonder if I will be afflicted by further strange dreams. It is beginning to feel rather like a storm gathering in my head.
As I drift away, beset by memories, I feel the frown across my for
ehead, creasing up my brow with worry.
*
Tonight, I dream of Donaldson.
He is close to death. His family – a kindly collection of farmers – took him from our care home and deposited him in his old room at their farmhouse. The room was small, but it overlooked the hills of the farm, and there was always a beam of sunlight lying across some part of him.
Right now, as I am dreaming him, he looks lost among his excessive pillows, and fragile, as if he has become the sketch of a man instead of a full portrait. Donaldson’s eyes are closed and he does not look out of the window – as he was often found doing – at the open skies he liked to fly in his little planes and gliders.
This was the last day I saw him before he passed away. I had taken it upon myself to flee the care home and go in search of him. Somewhere out there, a gathering of worried nurses and a frantic old soldier named Valentine are trying to hunt me down, but I have a while yet.
I had the idea that I would bring my violin along with me. Donaldson always used to love me playing it and I thought it might evoke some memory in him. The instrument is on my lap and I am attempting to tune it, but my arthritis is making it difficult and painful. The first three strings are at their correct tensions – their sounds filling the box room with song remnants – and though my hands are sore beyond belief, and though I can barely see any more for all my tears, I am now trying to tune my violin’s most fragile string, plucking at it as I turn the last peg.
There is a new sound, a voice calling out in distress, a wrong note, as the string snaps. I open my eyes to see the blood rolling from the mark the broken string has left across my hand. But worse is the nakedness, the absence, along the neck of the violin – a black void where once a line was drawn. I bow my head, and let my useless hands drop, giving in to my sorrow completely.
‘Will?’ A voice. Donaldson’s voice. He has awoken and is sitting up.
I wipe at my face with the back of my sleeve. He says, ‘When did you get so wrinkly? You look like an old leather boot.’
He was never a handsome man, chin so flat it might be mistaken for a second throat. ‘Oh yeah? Well you look like a prune,’ I tell him.
‘Are those meant to be tattoos?’ he says. ‘They look more like ink stains to me.’
‘Didn’t your hair used to have colour? Looks like you’ve had a terrible fright.’
His Adam’s apple yo-yos as he laughs, until his smile fades and he grows serious.
‘You should be out there,’ he says, nodding at the open window, at the sky. ‘Sailing away to distant seas. What are you doing here? This is no place for you.’ He frowns. ‘I should be out there. Wings like a bird.’ And with that, all expression fades from his face until his jaw is slack and his eyes are glassy. I help him as best I can to lie down again, and not soon after, he has returned to sleep.
I pack my violin away and shuffle the case across my shoulder.
Pottering downstairs one step at a time, I find the rest of the farmhouse empty. In the living room there is a set of china laid out upon the coffee table. And, inexplicably, as if it has been set out with the rest, there sits March’s compass, in stark contrast to the doilies and varnished wood it lies upon. The compass confirms what I already knew. I am alone here. This is my memory of the death of Donaldson and he is not real.
Just a figment.
‘You silly old fool of a man,’ I tell myself.
I stamp my feet, and shake my head to clear it. The last time I held this compass I was being set upon by a horde of nightmares. And the girl… that girl, June, who took my notepad and called it a map. I feel angry at myself, that I just gave my notepad to her with no idea why it was so important. And I am angry that I still have March’s compass, leaving him without the means to navigate dreams and hunt the nightmares of others.
‘Well, enough of that,’ I say to myself. ‘Pull yourself together, Manderlay.’
I pick up March’s compass, fumbling and clumsy because of my arthritis, but managing to find a comfortable place to make it sit, wedged in between my fingers and palm. And with that I go in search of a door through to another dream. I will find March – go all the way to the Capital where he said he would meet me, if I have to – and return his compass. And I will ask him what June meant by using my notepad to see God, as well.
*
Beyond the first door, I come to a school.
Japanese characters are inscribed above each doorway. Through the windows I pass I can see children playing outside, and behind them is a backdrop of moss-covered rooftops and strange soft mountains. I am reminded of picking Samantha up from school almost every weekday, at precisely 3.15, for nearly six years back in Edinburgh.
A bell would ring, a distant tolling, and children would rush out in a stream. They would fling themselves with abandon towards us. I would stand with my hands tight around the black bars of the fence, my forehead against them, and wait for her there. Always the same conversation between the bars, as if I was a prisoner and she was visiting. How was school today? All right, Pa. Did you learn anything new? No, Pa. Always the same smile as well, a sly slanted line angled beneath shy eyes. She took after Lily, that way.
The compass is leading me through the school.
At an open doorway I pause and see the dreamer. She is a girl of around six or seven, sat at her desk in complete solitude. The desks of the other pupils sit empty around her, and through the far window those figments are visible at play. Her head is bowed over a set of loose papers and she clutches her pencil in a fist. She keeps glancing over at the window in longing.
I make to go on, but something stops me. My memory of Samantha, perhaps.
In what I know is a grave breach of March’s instructions, I head across to the dreamer and crouch down beside her desk. ‘Hullo,’ I say. ‘I’m William. How are you?’
She says soft words in a language I never learned, despite how many times I visited this country.
It takes her a while to realise what it is that I am trying to teach her, but when she does, her uncertainty fades and her eyes grow wide in fascination instead. There is no way that I can fold paper myself; my old hands refuse to work properly in the best of situations these days. But through a series of gentle motions – palms brought together, shaking fingertips pressed along lines – I instruct her in the art of origami. Nothing special, of course, and her first plane leaves a lot to be desired, but by the time she has folded the third we have at least two little aeroplanes to race.
My throw is clumsy, and so is hers. The paper planes barely fly.
‘Still the best use of maths papers,’ I tell her. She grabs her plane and leads me to the cloakroom. From her coat, she pulls out a clutch of coloured pencils, and then she waits at the back door, paper crumpling in her grip. I smile and open the door for her. The light from the sun is bright and brilliant. And with a skip, she rushes out to join her classmates, and show them her plane. I am forgotten instantly.
At the other end of the school, I walk out through the open gates and step across a stream that runs through the middle of the street, where large carp swim and shimmer in reds and golds.
I pass through more doors, through a dusty desert village, where the sun bakes the back of my neck, and through a huge prison complex, where the inmates reach through the bars and leer at me, and the dreamer is the only guard. And further still, through a wedding, with guests dancing and laughing, and on past that, through a ranch, where I stop and watch the horses on the ridge of the far hill dance, their manes coiling and uncoiling in the wind like the long grasses that swish across their hooves. The nightmare-hunter’s compass leads me on and on, through so many doors, and so many wonderful dreams, and I wish that I was young again – young enough to have a compass of my own and tread the dreams of others every night.
Until at last, I come to a dream like no other. March was correct in telling me that I would know it when I saw it; I have no doubt that this is his Capital.
I find mysel
f paralysed by the view that greets me, awed in its presence. The new city is laid out before me, but its gem, its centrepiece, its crowning glory, stretches out above me. There is a tower here, at the heart of this tremendous city, and try as I might, I cannot see its end. It is the tallest tower I have ever seen, vanishing into the heights and clouds above.
The tower here dominates the city. It is more than a landmark.
Tall houses and teeming streets seem to have tumbled from its edges, as if they are fallen pieces of masonry, shadows made long by the golden sun. They sweep away on every visible side, made in all manner of different designs. The roads I can see are arranged haphazardly, as if spun by a careless spider, but in such a way that all of them seem to lead to the tower. There is no telling where the tower begins and the city ends, however, because the tower rises from the city gradually.
There are long slopes to every side of the city, some of which lead to distant plains and mountains, and some of which lead to crowded docks beside a glittering sea. I can see the black silhouettes of dozens of sailing ships, steam ships, tankers and all kinds of seafaring vessels.
The tower itself is impossible; it should not be able to support its own weight. It seems to be made up of the same amalgamation of different designs and architecture as the rest of the city, with parts of it resembling castles and forts from various periods of history. And there are more improbable sections, as well: an enormous statue of Buddha embedded in the side, and, further up, I can see the many arms of Vishnu supporting a length of stained-glass windows. I can see workers and scaffolding and cranes all along it, labouring at making it taller by supporting its lower length. There are balloons rising alongside carrying huge girders, but they are lost to sight when they reach a certain height. They become dots beside the needle-point tip.
I stand and stare and lose track of time in awe of the tower, before carrying on.
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