Just Dreaming

  I couldn’t help laughing with him, but only briefly, because Mrs. Honeycutt lowered her knitting, turned, and looked at us thoughtfully. “I used to be afraid of death myself. But I think now there’s nothing to be afraid of. You just swim over into the next world.…”

  Even as she was speaking, the colors in the room changed, the bright hues of the patterned furniture and wallpaper paled, a cool, peaceful light streamed into the room. The ceiling seemed to lift and turn into glass, the room grew larger, and the flowers, the parrot’s cage, and all the ornaments hovered in the air and became translucent. I clung to Henry as the chairs were gently washed away from under us. Mrs. Honeycutt floated past us in hers, waving cheerfully. No doubt about it: her room was gradually but unmistakably turning into an aquarium. The furniture disappeared, the walls retreated, and with a touch of panic I saw that the door to the corridor was moving farther and farther away. I was going to say something to Henry, but only bubbles came out of my mouth. The room was full not of air, but of water bathed in light.

  Now I was really scared.

  “It’s dying itself that I fear,” I heard Mrs. Honeycutt’s kindly voice saying. Unlike me, she could obviously talk, but neither she nor her armchair was in sight any longer. Instead, wonderful shimmering fish swam past us, looking as transparent as if someone had drawn them in silver ink straight on the water. “No, I am not afraid of death, only of that moment when I must say good-bye to my body,” Mrs. Honeycutt went on. “The moment when I draw my last breath.”

  For me, that moment seemed to have come. I was in urgent need of a diving suit—or gills.… Help!

  Glancing at Henry, I saw panic in his face, which didn’t improve things. Henry was never afraid of anything.

  He pointed to the door in the still retreating wall. I couldn’t nod, but I let go of his hand and swam toward it as fast as I could. I was still short of air, although I knew perfectly well that this was a dream, and in a dream, you could breathe underwater even without anything to help you. Except that I couldn’t seem to manage it.

  Also, this was no ordinary water; it seemed to me like cool, liquid light, neither too cold nor too warm, in fact not even wet when I felt it properly.

  “And then you simply let go and drift away into the next world.” Mrs. Honeycutt’s voice seemed to come from very far away now, and it sounded so happy that all of a sudden I calmed down.

  Opening my mouth, I let the water simply flow into my lungs. It didn’t hurt at all. The water made me weightless, and like the fish, I had a silvery sheen, becoming part of the liquid light that was carrying me on wherever I wanted, into another world where there was nothing bad.

  Henry’s face appeared beside mine. He grabbed my arm, my head hit something hard, and the next moment I landed with a bump on my behind, gasping.

  “Damn it!” exclaimed Henry. We were on the other side of the door in the corridor, and we hadn’t brought a single drop of water from Mrs. Honeycutt’s dream with us. A strange sensation of regret came over me as Henry closed the door firmly behind us. It had been so peaceful in there. Whereas out here …

  Henry gave me his hand to help me up. “Are you all right?” His face was even paler than usual. “It looked as if … as if you were going to dissolve.”

  “Yes, that’s what it felt like too.” I was still busy getting my breath back and was surprised to find that I didn’t even have to cough. “Maybe dying isn’t so bad after all. Maybe you really do just swim over into another world where everything is peaceful and bright and good.”

  Henry took me by the shoulders. “Don’t say it so wistfully, Liv. You frighten me.” He drew me close. “I need you so much,” he murmured into my hair.

  I suddenly had a large lump in my throat, so I couldn’t answer. If I’d said something, it wouldn’t have been very original anyway, just an ordinary I need you too. So I wound my arms around his neck and kissed him. That was a kind of answer in itself, and maybe not a bad one.

  At least, Henry sighed quietly and held me even closer. Briefly, a hesitant little voice inside me spoke up, trying to remind me of the coming spring vacation, but I made it shut up. Henry kissed much too well for me to torment myself with such thoughts. Although the vacation really was very close, and furthermore …

  “Mrs. Honeycutt didn’t really die, did she?”

  “No, don’t worry. She just sometimes dreams of dying,” murmured Henry, ensuring in his own way that I stopped thinking of that. He really ought to patent his way of stroking the nape of someone’s neck, I thought. And he seemed to know exactly what he was doing, because he smiled with satisfaction, as he interrupted our kiss to look over his shoulder.

  Which—unfortunately—brought me back to reality.

  “Weren’t you going to show me something else?” I asked when he had turned to me again.

  “Was I?” Henry was looking intently at my mouth, and I was about to put my arms around his neck again, but then he himself seemed to work out that here and now wasn’t the right time and place for it.

  With a regretful sigh, he took his hand away from the back of my neck and turned me around in his arms until I had my back to him. “See that door over there?”

  I nodded as I leaned back against him. In his embrace, I felt as safe as I had felt in the water just now.

  I looked at Henry’s discovery. It was a wooden door painted a cheerful yellow and obviously led to a shop called “Little Sister’s Yarn Barn,” as an oval shop sign above the door frame told me.

  “Has that always been here?” I’d never noticed it before, but until now I’d always been in rather a hurry when I went this way. I admired the amusing door handle with its brightly colored knitted cover. The two flowerpots full of sunflowers to right and left of the door also had bright, striped knitted covers over them. There was a glass pane in the door, with wording in curved letters: ALL YOU KNIT IS LOVE. And under that: COME IN AND FIND THE WOOL OF YOUR DREAMS.

  “That shop could easily belong to Mrs. Honeycutt.”

  “Exactly.” Henry let go of me, took a few steps in both directions up and down the corridor, and came back to me after installing two of his mysteriously sparkling energy fields. “I just want to make sure that Arthur isn’t getting bored in his hospital bed and roaming around somewhere here,” he explained. Then he pointed to the door of the wool shop again. “See those initials on the doormat? I’m just about sure that M.H. stands for Muriel Honeycutt, Mrs. Honeycutt’s sister. In her dream, she obviously kept her maiden name.”

  I touched the knitted cover of the door handle. Yes, it was a perfect fit. “Mrs. Honeycutt said that Muriel was always knitting covers for everything, even her bicycle.” I hesitated. “But if she’s dead, what’s behind this door? Or…” I looked hopefully at Henry. “Or did she maybe die only in Mrs. Honeycutt’s nightmares?”

  But Henry shook his head. “No, Muriel is really dead. Died in 1977; I checked up on it. In real life,” he added with a little laugh. Then he turned serious again. “She died in her sleep. Apparently it was due to her asthma, but to this day Mrs. Honeycutt suspects her brother-in-law, Alfred, of hastening the process. He, too, died, not long after Muriel—not a nice death; he had cirrhosis of the liver.”

  I thought of our meetings with Alfred and his flowered cushion, and the fear in Mrs. Honeycutt’s eyes, and I nodded grimly. I thought cirrhosis of the liver was just what the man deserved.

  “How terrible that Mrs. Honeycutt still has nightmares about him.” Sadly, I stroked the painted wooden door. “The sisters must have been really fond of each other, if their doors are still so close, after all these years. Even the name Muriel gave her shop: Little Sister’s Yarn Barn. That’s sweet, don’t you think?” Of course it made me think of Mia, and before I got so sad that I started crying, I quickly turned back to face Henry. “But it’s strange that dead people keep their dream doors.” I let my eyes wander down the corridor. “I wonder how many of the doors here belong to the dead?”

  “None of th
em,” said Henry firmly. “That’s the point. When people die, their doors disappear along with them.”

  I looked at him doubtfully. “How do you know for certain?”

  “Do you remember hearing of Tom Holland?” asked Henry.

  “The boy who died in a car crash?”

  “Yes.” When I came to the Frognal Academy, Tom Holland’s death was already several months in the past, and I knew only what I’d read about it in Secrecy’s blog. Tom had been Anabel’s boyfriend before Arthur, and for a while I had suspected that the car accident hadn’t been chance but was directly or indirectly the demon’s doing.

  “Tom Holland had an unusual door—the kind you get in an old-fashioned elevator, with an ornate wrought-iron grating that you push aside, and one of those semicircular display panels over it telling you what floor the elevator is at. Arthur and I visited him once or twice.” Henry cleared his throat. “Arthur probably visited him more often. Only for … well, reasons of information.”

  The idea of Arthur and Henry once walking along the corridors together was something I could hardly imagine today. But it wasn’t all that long ago. At the time, moreover, Arthur hadn’t let his real nature show; his sadistic tendencies and crazy notions of conquering the world came to light only later.

  “I see,” I said. “For reasons of information. Of course. The same way as I’m always wandering around your ex-girlfriends’ dreams.”

  Henry grinned. “Speaking of that, have you found Rasmus’s door anywhere here?”

  Oh no! I wasn’t letting myself in for this. Not today.

  “You were telling me about Tom Holland and his door,” I reminded Henry.

  He sighed. “Yes, so I was. Tom’s door disappeared on the night when he died. We never saw it again. The same thing happened to our old janitor’s door when he died last August. When people die, their doors don’t exist anymore.”

  “That’s logical enough,” I said. “The dead don’t dream. Then why is Muriel’s door still there, if she died all those years ago?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that for a long time.” Henry rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I can find only one explanation, and it’s rather crazy.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll visit you in the nuthouse and hold hands in between the electric shocks,” I reassured him.

  The corners of Henry’s mouth twitched. “Let’s assume that Mrs. Honeycutt is right, and poor Muriel didn’t die a natural death but really was smothered by Alfred with a cushion in her sleep…”

  He paused for effect, as Grayson had done a little while ago, but this time I guessed what he’d worked out.

  “Just as she was dreaming,” I finished his sentence for him.

  “Exactly,” said Henry. “And so the dream simply…” He raised his shoulders. “I don’t know how to put it.”

  “The dream stopped. Like a clock. Or an old gramophone record.” I thoughtfully bit my lower lip. “Could be that’s what always happens if someone dies in the middle of a dream.” I thought again. “Or if someone’s murdered in their sleep.”

  “One way or another,” said Henry, “the fact is that Muriel is dead, but her door is still there.”

  “The only question is, what’s behind it?” I was getting goose bumps again.

  “That’s exactly what I want to find out today.” Henry put his hand out to the door handle.

  I looked at him in alarm. Okay, so now he really had gone crazy. “But you can’t just walk into a dead person’s dream! That would be like…” I swallowed. “And anyway, you’d need something personal of hers.”

  “What do you think I’ve been doing these last few days?” The corners of Henry’s mouth twisted, but his smile wasn’t quite as confident as usual. “Mrs. Honeycutt gave me the necklace Muriel got for her christening. That ought to be personal enough.”

  “She gave it to you?” I asked incredulously.

  “Well, she didn’t directly give it,” admitted Henry, pushing the handle down. “But she won’t miss it, let’s put it that way.” He obviously didn’t want to go into detail.

  I clutched his arm. “For heaven’s sake, Henry! You can’t do this. Please! We can’t simply walk in.”

  “Only me for a start. You must stay here. Someone ought to know where I am, in the unlikely case that…” Henry looked seriously at me. “Listen, Liv. I’ve thought this right through. We absolutely have to know what’s behind that door. It could open up entirely new opportunities for us.”

  “Or it could kill you,” I whispered, while Henry, ignoring me, let the door swing open. I imagined I heard a rushing sound; there was nothing to be seen. My hand was still clutching Henry’s sleeve. “It could … it could be the gateway to the world beyond the grave.”

  “Very dramatic today, aren’t we, Miss Silver?” said Henry mockingly, but he did hesitate for a moment. Then he took a deep breath. Gently but firmly, he took my hand off his arm. “I’m going in. See you in school, and I’ll tell you about the special offers in Muriel’s wool shop, okay?”

  Without waiting for an answer, he opened the door entirely and walked in. The hand that I put out to hold him back met empty air.

  Talk about pigheaded!

  But no way was I going to let him stay in there on his own. Before the door could close again, I closed my eyes, held my breath, and took a great stride into the unknown after Henry.

  For a moment nothing happened, and then I heard his sigh of resignation.

  “You can open your eyes again, Liv,” he said as the door latched behind us. “We’re still alive. At least, I think so.”

  I did as he said. “Oh, we’re at the seaside!” A great expanse of calm water lay before us, with a sunset sky veined with pink light above it. It was certainly beautiful. “But suppose it isn’t really the sea?” I asked with a slightly hysterical note in my voice. “It could easily be the next world. Eternity Beach, like where they made that movie with Deborah Kerr.”

  “More likely Clevedon Beach, my angel,” said Henry, pointing to his right, where a large, old-fashioned pier on stilts went out into the sea. He looked his usual easygoing self, but if you listened carefully, there was clearly something like relief in his voice. “I think we’re in Somerset.” He turned to me with a wry smile. “It was very sweet of you to want to follow me into the next world, Liv, but you do realize now we have no one out there who knows where we are, don’t you?”

  Yes, that might have been a little shortsighted of me. Never mind. I couldn’t have borne to stand outside without knowing whether Henry would ever come back. That made me look around for the dream door into the corridor. There it was—in the quay wall right behind us. I breathed a sigh of relief myself.

  Henry put an arm around my shoulders and gazed out at the sea. “Looks like Muriel was having a really lovely dream, when Alfred arrived with his cushion.”

  I was about to say, “That’s a comforting thought,” but at that moment I heard the noise. A shrill scream, excited voices, a dog barking, and it all got louder and louder, as if someone had turned on a radio right beside us. And then Henry, the sunset sky, and the sea had disappeared, and I was staring into darkness.

  Only the noise was still there.

  It took me a second to realize that I had woken up, and that it was Buttercup barking like crazy in the hallway.

  “What on earth is going on?” I heard Mom ask sleepily. “Hush, Butter! Oh, for heaven’s sake!”

  I threw off my duvet, jumped up, and flung open the door of my room. The first thing I saw was Florence, standing in the doorway to Grayson’s room as if turned to stone, with a hand to her mouth. The second thing I saw was feathers. Black feathers, lots and lots of them.

  For a moment I felt weak at the knees, but I managed to stagger past Florence and Mom and into Grayson’s room. Oh God—I remembered how Grayson had just vanished, and the parrot had repeated …

  “What’s this supposed to be—some kind of midnight meeting?” Grayson snapped at us, annoyed. He was standing in
the middle of the room, obviously busy picking up the feathers that had fallen all over the furniture, the rug, and Grayson himself, and stuffing them into his wastepaper basket. I was so relieved to see him alive that I almost burst into tears.

  “For heaven’s sake!” Ernest, wearing a pair of checked pajamas, put his head around the door. “Where did all that black stuff come from?”

  Buttercup was still jumping around in the feathers, very excited, but at least she had stopped barking. She was sneezing instead.

  “Such a shock!” said Florence with her hand still in front of her mouth. “Feathers everywhere…”

  “That’s no reason to scream the house down and rouse everyone.” Grayson was looking at her impatiently. As if to make his point for him, Mia now came out of her room and blinked in confusion at the sight of the chaos.

  “There are hundreds of them.” Mom picked up a feather from the floor, and I felt like snatching it from her hand and shouting, “Don’t touch! They’re dangerous!”

  “Yes, hundreds,” Grayson groaned. “When I woke, my door was open, and the ventilator was turned up to maximum. These feathers were flying all over the place. I’d have picked them up to spare the rest of you the sight, only Florence had to scream like a lost soul. You’d have thought she was auditioning for a horror movie.”

  As Florence indignantly gasped for air, Grayson cast me a brief glance and raised his eyebrows inquiringly. I helplessly shrugged my shoulders. I still didn’t trust myself to stay on my feet, so I was leaning back against his wardrobe.

  “Well, what would you have done in my place if you just wanted to go to the toilet, and you found feathers flying out of your brother’s room?” Florence defended herself. “In the middle of the night! Have you been killing crows in here, or what?”

  Being a practical person, Mom had picked up Grayson’s duvet and was shaking it. “Well, they didn’t come out of this, anyway,” she said.

  Yes, that would have been too easy. But anyway, what duvet is stuffed with black feathers?