by Kerstin Gier
“Yeth!” Fuzzy-Wuzzy clapped his forepaws. “Rethite it! Rethite it for Fuzzy!”
“Any old nursery rhyme?”
“A nithe one! One that Fuzzy liketh!”
“Okay. Er … Sing a song of sixpence, a pocket full of rye…”
“Nooo! Fuzzy not like zat whyme. Want uvver pome! Want pwoper pome! Or Fuzzy eat you up!” He opened his mouth wide, baring those enormous teeth.
Hmm—maybe the security precautions here weren’t so bad after all. Fuzzy-Wuzzy was a creation of Mia’s unconscious, so he presumably had some particular poem in mind. One that Mia had loved when she was little. I could think of about a hundred and twenty of those, some in English, some in German—an intruder would have difficulty getting the right one before being eaten alive by Fuzzy. Always supposing that the intruder went to the trouble of talking to him at all, because in spite of his alarming appearance and his threat to eat me up, I could think of many ways and means of getting past him unnoticed.
“As a breath of air I could have made my way into Mia’s dream three times by now,” I said regretfully. “Or I could have turned into a squirrel to get in through the letter box.”
“Zat’th not a pome! Now Fuzzy mutht eat you.” He began making for the doorway. “But Fuzzy not like girlth to eat. Fuzzy only like cawwotth to eat,” he added with a triumphant giggle, slamming the door in my face.
I sighed. Great—at least that cleared up one point: any reasonably experienced dreamer, like Anabel, for instance, would easily be able to get into Mia’s dreams, holding a carrot. I thought it over. As I could hardly keep watch outside Mia’s door myself every night, I must think of something else. I snapped my fingers.
“Miss Olivia!” Mr. Wu was bowing to me in his black fighting gear, as if I’d just plucked him out of a martial-arts film. I nodded, pleased. This was better than a silly toy rabbit.
“I want you to guard this door tonight,” I explained. “Don’t let anyone in or out. And raise the alarm at once if an intruder tries it. Loud enough for me to hear you, anyway.” I imagined a gigantic gong outside the door and handed Mr. Wu the beater that went with it.
Mr. Wu tossed the beater up in the air and skillfully caught it as it came down. “The best-locked door is the door that you can leave open,” he lectured me.
“Yes, I’m sure you’re right. But this one must stay locked tonight, whatever happens. You mustn’t let even a breath of air through. Do you understand, Mr. Wu?”
He performed a couple of kung fu moves against an invisible opponent so fast that my eyes could hardly follow him. “My other name is Lightning—the Tiger’s Claw of the sky.”
“Terrific,” I said, impressed. I’d done well there. (And if I ever met the real Mr. Wu again, I’d apologize for all this.) I just wasn’t sure whether this Mr. Wu would function without me there. By way of experiment, I went around the nearest corner and came back as a breath of air. This time it worked even better than at my first attempt. I floated several yards along the corridor, no problem, making straight for Mr. Wu.
“Stop, windy intruder!” A well-aimed blow in the air right in front of me, and I was blown a few yards back. “You shall not pass!” With his other hand, Mr. Wu struck the gong. A deep note, kind of solemn but above all deafeningly loud, sounded all the way down the corridor and was thrown back from the walls again and again as an echo. I floated a little way farther. Yes, that was quite loud enough to put even someone as cool, calm, and collected as Anabel to flight. Mr. Wu—’scuse me, the Tiger’s Claw of the sky—was the perfect guard to station at Mia’s door. If I hadn’t been a breath of air, I’d have rubbed my hands with glee. Mia’s door seemed secure enough for now, and I could go back to my own dream—and sleep! And woe betide anyone who woke me before lunch tomorrow, which was Saturday.
But I wasn’t to get to bed just yet. The sound of the gong hadn’t quite died away when Henry’s door opened and Henry came out. I stopped right in the air where I was, motionless. The corners of his mouth lifted slightly as he glanced at my door, but he didn’t stop outside it; he went on down the corridor.
“He who believes in his dreams will sleep his life away, young man with untidy hair,” said Mr. Wu as Henry passed him.
Henry cast him and the enormous gong a surprised glance, but he didn’t slow down. He went purposefully around the next corner.
I followed him without a moment’s thought, as the best, most invisible, and fastest breath of air the world has ever seen. Or not seen, rather. I could even turn somersaults—invisible, inaudible somersaults. How surprised Henry would be when I materialized right in front of his eyes! But first I’d try wafting through his hair and stroking his cheek, as breaths of air do when they’re feeling in a good mood.
It had taken me just five minutes to find out what Senator Tod’s real name was. Henry had done it faster only because he’d used an anagram generator on the Internet. Senator Tod Nord. Dona dents rotor … Tornado, nerd, sot. All of them anagrams of one and the same name. For fun, I’d made up a couple more. Finally I had come to the names we were really concerned with as possibilities, and after some attempts with names like Tad, Ned, Ron, and Don, I was left with only one. It even had the man’s title; he was Dr. Otto Anderson.
The search engine had given me two Otto Andersons in the United Kingdom, and one of them was a specialist in psychiatry at a hospital in Surrey. The very one to which Anabel had been sent.
It was a nasty thought, being treated by a crazy psychiatrist when you were crazy yourself. But maybe this Dr. Anderson wasn’t as crazy as he seemed. One way or another, I couldn’t help admiring Anabel for convincing her psychiatrist that it was possible to meet in dreams. How had she done it without making him think her even nuttier than she was, anyway? Because of the sleepwalking business, I’d thought of taking Mia into my confidence but decided not to, because I could just imagine her reaction—she’d go looking for a hidden camera at once. No one in her right mind would believe what was going on.
But this Dr. Anderson had not only believed Anabel—he’d tried the whole thing out himself, and now he was prowling up and down the corridor making trouble. The question was, what exactly did he want from us? And also, why hadn’t we seen anything of Anabel?
So far we had not told Arthur anything about our sensational discovery. I was in favor of letting him in on the secret, but Henry wanted to wait a little longer.
And speaking of Henry—I’d taken my eyes off him (Eyes? Better not think too hard about that, Liv!) and had lost sight of him. Not that that’s any problem for a breath of air. I blew around the corner at gale force ten, and there he was again. He was standing outside an elegant door covered with lavishly embroidered brocade, looking all around him. I hovered in the air above him and admired the tendrils, flowers, birds, and butterflies embroidered in pale pastel shades. Rather kitschy, but attractive.
If I’d had to guess, I’d have been one hundred percent sure this was a woman’s dream door.
Henry bent down and carefully touched a bird embroidered in pink silk. With a faint creak, the door opened.
Oh no.
Of course this was the moment when I ought to have revealed myself, laughing, and Henry would have explained—also laughing—whose this door was.
But in fact, it was the moment when Henry went through the doorway, and I went through it with him as a breath of air. Into the dream of some female entirely unknown to me.
The door latched quietly behind us.
17
AT FIRST I thought I’d landed inside a blue-and-gold Fabergé egg, because the walls were curved, and a huge, glittering, domed roof rose above us. In fact, there was glittering, shimmering light coming at us from all sides. And splashing, trickling sounds, and the faint hiss of vapor escaping. On closer inspection, I saw that we were in some kind of spa, a very luxurious place with the atmosphere of a Turkish bathhouse. The floors were covered with mosaic tiles, midnight blue sprinkled with gold, while the walls had been plastered an
d then painted in tones of shining light blue. Gaps in the walls, with elaborately ornamented golden frames around them, led from one room to another, and everywhere there were pools for swimming and relaxation, exotic green plants, huge gilt-framed mirrors, mountains of folded towels, and a great many broad, well-upholstered lounge chairs.
And people. Any number of people. Some were wearing bathing things or a bathrobe, a few had just a towel wrapped around them, but most of them were naked. Like the man just getting out of a sauna who was red as a lobster. If I hadn’t been a breath of air, I’d have closed my eyes for a moment.
Who on earth would dream a thing like this? And—eeek!—what had happened to Henry’s clothes?
I’d been looking around with such interest that I hadn’t noticed how he did it—but anyway, now he was wearing a soft blue bathrobe, obviously just the thing for these surroundings. But he was far from being invisible. Hadn’t he recently told me that there wasn’t much point in walking around in a dream undisguised if you wanted to spy on someone? Because people can lie about themselves even better in dreams than in real life. As an invisible observer, you can learn a lot about people in their dreams, he had said. So what was he doing here if he didn’t want to spy on anyone? It looked to me almost as if he had a date to meet someone here.
He strolled slowly past a group of lounge chairs and toward a large whirlpool. I followed him, trying not to pay any attention to the lobster-red man, who had made himself comfortable on one of the chairs. Anyway, I had to concentrate much harder on floating than before, because in all the steamy vapors here, I had mutated from a breath of air to being a small cloud. No more hovering and swirling—and with my ease of movement, my high spirits had also left me. The sound track intensified that effect: whoever was dreaming this dream had ghastly taste in music. The sound of Celine Dion singing “My Heart Will Go On” was coming from hidden loudspeakers. Lottie used to make us watch Titanic with her at least four times a year, so I knew the song much better than I liked. Lottie always wept buckets over that film, but she said that kind of crying was very healthy and important for your mental hygiene.
When I saw David Beckham sitting beside the whirlpool, dangling his legs in the water, I was relieved for a second or so. For that tiny second, I thought all this must be David Beckham’s dream, and the next moment Henry would out himself as a keen football fan and ask for his autograph, or something like that. Even Celine Dion seemed to fit the context—after all, David Beckham had married a Spice Girl, so anything in the matter of musical taste seemed possible.
But then, even before I could take a closer look at Beckham’s tattoos, someone said, in a husky voice, “Henry! Dear boy!” and it wasn’t David Beckham, but a naked woman stretching in the whirlpool. That is, I couldn’t really see if she was entirely naked—the water was bubbling too much for that—but she had nothing on from the waist up, anyway. With her smooth, slightly tanned skin, her golden-brown shining hair and her huge green eyes framed by long, thick lashes, she could easily have passed for a mermaid. Only her dark-red lipstick added a slightly vulgar touch.
Henry smiled at her. Not just as if he’d expected to find her here, as if he were happy about it. I felt myself getting a little heavier. I was slowly sinking toward the floor.
“Hello, B,” said Henry. He didn’t have even a brief glance to waste on Beckham. Bee, Bea, or B? Was it a code name? It wouldn’t have been her cup size if she’d been wearing a bra, anyway.
B poked one of her long legs out of the whirlpool. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d had a fish’s tail instead.
“Don’t you want to come into the water?” She smiled seductively.
“No, he wouldn’t,” I felt like saying, but clouds can’t talk. Henry undid the belt of his bathrobe, let it drop from his shoulders to the ground with a casual gesture, so purposefully that B sighed happily in the whirlpool, and I found I was having problems staying in the air. Without doing anything about it myself, I had dissolved into something between a cloud and condensation, and I knew I couldn’t stay in that peculiar state for long. But that was the only thing I knew—what the hell was going on here? Secrecy’s snide remarks shot into my head. What was it she’d written? That Henry wasn’t exactly known for being backward where women were concerned?
Without really noticing what I was doing, I turned into a dragonfly and settled on the leaf of a spider plant beside the pool. That was better. As a dragonfly, I could at least breathe and cling to whatever was under me with all six legs.
Meanwhile B narrowed her eyes and looked Henry appreciatively up and down. “You have a fantastic body,” she purred. She was right too. Even David Beckham paled beside Henry, literally, because he had already disappeared without a trace.
At least Henry was wearing bathing trunks, I saw, not that that really reassured me right now.
“What are you waiting for?” Laughing, B flung her head back. She had beautiful teeth too. “Not afraid of me, are you?”
No, Henry definitely didn’t look afraid of her. Far from it. I felt my wings begin to quiver. Was this maybe why Henry was so happy to wait before our relationship got any closer? Because he was seeing other …
Don’t go into the water, I begged him in my thoughts, all the same. I wished I could have put my front legs over my eyes (why did I always have to turn into creatures with excellent vision?), but I did no such thing. Instead I stared at Henry as he slid into the water, submerging as slowly as a male model in an aftershave ad. When he came up again, tiny drops of water shimmered around him in slow motion with the light breaking on them, and larger beads of moisture stood out on his smooth skin. With a satisfied smile, Henry settled down comfortably in the pool opposite B. They had it all to themselves now. And Celine Dion started up again. Every night in my dreams, I see you, I feel you, that is how I know you go on.…
Could dragonflies throw up? Because that was what I felt like doing right there and then.
Now an elderly man in a crumpled suit had taken over for David Beckham beside the pool. He was sitting on a shabby plastic chair that didn’t suit the grand surroundings in the least, and he was saying something in a foreign language, maybe Russian, but anyway, he sounded gruff and unfriendly.
B was reluctantly listening. She frowned. “Am I leading children astray?” For the first time, I heard the slight accent in her voice. “Well, look at him, Papa. He’s more of a man than you ever were. And I have a right to a bit of fun.”
The old man answered in his own language, sounding even less friendly than before, and to reinforce whatever he was saying, he spat on the ground.
“That’s not true,” cried B indignantly. “I don’t look a day older than twenty-nine, and this young man has come of age and knows exactly what he’s doing.”
“Absolutely,” said Henry, although that was a lie. He hadn’t quite come of age; he wouldn’t be eighteen until February, a week later than Florence and Grayson. “And now I’ll ask you to go away and leave your daughter in peace, or I’m afraid I’ll have to lend you a hand.”
B’s father didn’t look as if he felt like doing as Henry asked. He opened his mouth to reply, but Henry raised a hand, and it was as if he had muted the sound track: B’s father was talking volubly, with much gesticulation, but you couldn’t hear a word he was saying, even when he shouted harder and harder with his mouth wide open, and the veins on his forehead stood out. At another wave of Henry’s hand, two white-clad pool attendants appeared, picked up the old man, chair and all—he was still shouting silently—and carried him away.
“That’s that, then,” said Henry, turning back to B, who was looking at him admiringly.
“How did you do that?” she asked. “No one else has ever managed to silence him.”
“Then it was about time,” said Henry, shrugging his shoulders in a way so typical of him that I began trembling again on my spider plant leaf, and this time the leaf trembled too. What was I really doing here? Why had I followed him? I didn’t want
to watch any of this. All I really wanted was to wake up.
By now the whole plant was shaking, but Henry didn’t notice.
“You really don’t deserve that kind of thing, B,” he went on. “A woman like you shouldn’t let anyone treat her so badly.”
“Oh, you wonderful, wonderful man!” B was obviously about to swim over to him, and over the next few days, I kept wondering what would have happened next if I hadn’t grown larger on the spider plant leaf and then, slowly, slipped backward off it. I landed with a loud splash in the bubbling water between Henry and B. She let out a little shriek and spluttered, while Henry stared at me blankly.
I’d had no control at all over turning back into my own shape, so I wasn’t surprised to find that I was naked, too, although my skin shone in metallic green and blue, and there were still four delicate dragonfly wings on my back, drenched with water and hanging uselessly down.
But that made no difference now.
B was the first to recover from the shock. She coughed and spat out some water. “Oh no, no!” she said indignantly. “It was so nice just now. Perfect! We can do without a weird sort of elf, or something out of Avatar. What’s all this about?”
Yes, what was it all about? I didn’t know either. I didn’t know anything anymore.
The guilty look in Henry’s eyes only made everything worse, and it also made me so angry that I entirely forgot to be embarrassed.
“No idea,” I snapped as I corrected my skin color and got rid of the wings. “Why don’t we ask Henry?”
But Henry wasn’t saying anything. The sight of me had obviously deprived him of speech.
I swam to the side of the pool, climbed out, and marched away, dripping water, past all the other naked figures. My feet were still green, and everyone in the place seemed to be staring at me. Well, let them stare—I could guarantee we’d never meet again!
Why couldn’t I wake up? Where was the door leading into the corridor? I wanted to go home, that was all—I just wanted to go home.