“Yes, an accident called Liv Silver,” said Arthur bitterly.
I supposed it wouldn’t be any use reminding him of the circumstances leading up to that. A dark cloud came in front of the sun. More clouds were towering up above the meadow where the sheep were grazing. A summer storm was brewing. Uneasily, I looked around at the cottage. This was probably the time to go out into the corridor and tell Grayson and Henry what had happened.
But there was one thing that I wanted to know first.
“Why—” I began, but Arthur didn’t let me finish.
“I hope you’re not going to ask why I’m doing all this, are you, Liv? It’s simple: I’m not stopping until you feel worse than I do. Why should you keep your friends when I’ve lost mine? Why should you have a happy relationship when I can’t?”
A flash of lightning shot out of the storm clouds on the horizon, and soon after that there was a loud rumble of thunder. Leaves whirled through the air. The sheep had disappeared, and the birds seemed to have gone into hiding somewhere as well. I’d heard enough, and I turned to go.
But I didn’t get far, because the ground broke apart in front of me, and within seconds I was facing a broad, deep pit.
“An earthquake!” cried Mia, reaching for my hand.
Hot vapors rose from the pit. By now the sky had clouded over entirely.
“It’s not an earthquake,” I said, looking furiously at Arthur. “Oh, really, Arthur! The apocalypse? Couldn’t you think of anything better?”
“I like it.” Arthur laughed. “Particularly because it’s a lot of fun for me to watch you fail. And this is only a dream. Think how helpless you’ll feel if you lose your sister in real life. If she gets up one night to throw herself in front of a moving car. Or…”
The pit was getting broader and broader. An apple tree crashed down into the chasm, taking with it the washing line complete with the picturesque white garments drying there.
“Oh, wait a minute. You want it apocalyptic, right?” Arthur snapped his fingers, and a huge yellow snake crawled out of the pit. Mia screeched.
“Stop it,” I said to Arthur, and concentrating as hard as I could, I turned the snake into a brimstone yellow butterfly. It flew away, lurching through the air.
Arthur laughed briefly and made two more snakes crawl out of the pit. This time I didn’t manage to turn them into something else. Mia was clinging to me in terror. By now there were more cracks in the ground, too wide for us to jump over them.
“You needed something personal, though, didn’t you, Arthur?” If I couldn’t control Arthur’s imagination, at least I could distract his mind. I tried to breathe calmly, which wasn’t so easy, because snakes came right after spiders on my personal horror scale, and they were winding their way straight toward us, even if slowly.
Arthur’s eyes lit up. “That was simple!” He raised his hand and showed us a glove with a pattern of gray spots.
“Oh!” said Mia, her mind taken off the scene for a moment. “My favorite gloves! I wondered where I’d lost one.” But that was as far as taking her mind off it went. She pointed frantically to the snakes. “I think those are yellow tiger pythons. Why don’t we climb a tree? Or could they climb up after us?”
“Lost it? I took it out of her coat pocket.” Arthur smiled at us. “And I’ve been wearing it almost every night since then in my sleep.”
“Yuck!” said Mia. “That’s kind of … perverse, if you ask me.”
Another fruit tree sank into the depths of the pit, with loud creaking and groaning and splintering noises, and sparks flew over the meadow where we were standing.
“You’re welcome to wake up,” I told Mia, while I feverishly wondered what I could do. Maybe make a bridge grow over the pit so that we could run to safety in the cottage? Or even better, turn myself into a huge bird of prey so that I could pick up Mia and …
“You’re not so good under pressure, Liv,” said Arthur, making another crack in the ground appear, this time running right between my legs. “I’m almost disappointed in you.”
I jumped aside, but it was no use. With a growl like thunder, the crack was growing all the time, and the place where we stood was getting smaller. Any moment I would be bound to fall into the abyss, dragging Mia down with me.
And then the light was brighter. The storm clouds had gone away as quickly as they came, and the sun was shining down from the sky again.
The cracks in the ground slowly began closing, one by one.
A muscle in Arthur’s face twitched; I saw him concentrating, and for a moment everything seemed to stand still. Nothing moved. Even the snakes froze where they were.
Then they weren’t snakes any longer, but fluffy yellow baby chicks cheeping as they ran over the meadow, while the sides of the pit came closer together again, and the grassy ground closed over them as if they had never existed.
“Oh, how cute!” squealed Mia as I looked around with a sigh of relief.
“Henry!” growled Arthur.
“Henry!” I repeated. I couldn’t help it, I had to say his name, and that in itself made me feel much better. I could have hugged him as he stood there on the path bordered by flowers with his hands in his pockets, as if he’d had nothing to do with it. He smiled at me. I really could have kissed him for those baby chicks. Which of course would not have been a good idea.
“It was Arthur. The whole time it was Arthur,” I said instead, and Arthur imitated my accusing tone of voice at once.
“Yes, it was Arthur the whole time. And it’ll be Arthur who makes sure that Liv’s smile is wiped off her face forever.”
Henry took a step closer. His casual expression gave way to genuine tension. “I regret every minute I have to spend with you, Arthur,” he said slowly. “And don’t imagine that I trusted you for a single second. What’s the point of all this?”
“There isn’t necessarily a point to everything.” Arthur was giving him a nasty look. “It’s enough for me to feel satisfaction. For Liv to suffer the way I’ve suffered. For her to lose everything she loves.” He gave a breathless laugh. “Although you two managed there without my help. Nice of you to dump her, Henry. I think that hit her hard, didn’t it, Liv?”
Yes. Unfortunately he was right.
Henry glanced at me briefly, then turned back to Arthur. “Natural catastrophes … snakes … Your repertoire hasn’t changed much, anyway,” he said. “And I can dream rings around you any day.”
That was true too. Anyway, conjuring up a white horse at this point would have been very suitable (and it would have harmonized so well with my nightgown).
Arthur nodded slightly. “Maybe,” he said. “But, Henry, believe me, I’m going to see this through. One way or another. No one will keep me from getting my revenge.” He pointed to Mia, who had picked up one of the baby chicks and was stroking it, enchanted. I didn’t want him to go on, but I didn’t know how to stop him. Now he was smiling again, and it was the most unpleasant smile I’d ever seen.
“Look at my little puppet there,” he said. “You do realize that you won’t be able to guard her around the clock every night, don’t you? I can do anything I like with her. Anything! At any time!” He looked around for Mia’s door. “And I can end it soon, but I can just as easily wait.” His eyes wandered carelessly over me. “Waiting can sometimes really wear you down, Liv. Yes, I think I’m going to enjoy that.” He laughed again. “To be honest, I’m quite enjoying it now. I wish you could see your faces. See it dawning on you slowly but surely that there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, you can do to stop me.”
I bit my lip. He was right—I felt totally helpless, and I had no plans. There was nothing to be done about so much hostility.
“It will give me pleasure to watch you suffering, Liv,” said Arthur solemnly.
“And it will give me pleasure to thwart every last one of your projects,” said Henry.
“You may be overestimating yourself, my old friend,” said Arthur. With a huge leap, he crossed the mead
ow and landed right outside Mia’s door. “Now, excuse me. I have to go and tell Secrecy how Liv once wet herself in a bus in Hyderabad.”
We waited until the door had latched behind him and then looked at each other.
“He’s out of his mind,” I said. “Just like Anabel.”
“No, he isn’t,” Henry contradicted me, coming closer. For a moment I thought he was going to take me in his arms, but luckily I noticed just in time that he was only going to take a leaf out of my hair. “He’s just a vengeful egomaniac who hasn’t learned from his mistakes, and so vain that he can’t bear to have been knocked out by a girl.”
“Kicked,” I corrected him.
Henry smiled slightly. “Whatever you say.” He was still taking leaves out of my hair, although there weren’t any left now.
“I’m scared,” I whispered. “He wants Mia to harm herself. And I’ve seen that it works. She very nearly jumped out of that window.”
“It won’t happen, Liv, I promise you. I … we…” He took my hand and pressed it. “We’ll think of something.”
I’ve no idea what would have happened if the ground hadn’t suddenly disappeared from under us at that moment. Everything went dark. For a fraction of a second, I could still feel Henry’s hand in mine, and then I fell alone into a bottomless abyss.
28
THIS WAS AT least the tenth door I was opening, and the tenth room I was crossing. There were doors in all four of its walls, just as there had been in all the other rooms before it, and I had no idea where I was really going.
I stopped, out of breath. My heart was in my mouth, the palms of my hands were sweating, my leg muscles ached. All that even though I knew for sure that this was only a dream. Although not my dream; I was in Mia’s dream.
“Mia?” I called, and my voice echoed back from the walls. “Where are you?”
No answer. Instead I heard a soft laugh somewhere. Arthur’s laugh.
I pulled myself together and moved on. The door opposite would do as well—or as badly—as any other. It led into another empty room with doors, all of them in their own turn leading into more rooms with more doors. I knew this would never end. I felt that I had been wandering in this labyrinth forever, while valuable minutes passed, and all I wanted was to wake at long last. But I simply couldn’t do it, never mind how desperately I tried.
How had I come to fall asleep in the first place? I hadn’t meant to. I had been going to stay awake all night, guarding Mia.
Yesterday, after her dream collapsed and I woke with a start, gasping for air, Mia had looked at me indignantly, with her nose only a few inches from mine.
“You woke me,” she complained. “Since when have you been tossing and turning so wildly in your sleep?”
I sat up. The faint light of the streetlamp fell into the room, and everything looked as it ought to look.
All the same, I demanded, “Pinch me!”
“What?”
“I want you to pinch me!” I held my arm out to Mia.
“My pleasure,” she said.
“Ow! Not so hard!” I’d have a big blue bruise there. But thank goodness, I really was awake, and this was real life in Mia’s real room. No tropical sunlight outside, no monkeys screeching.
“Ouch! That’s enough.” Mia had pinched me again.
“That one’s for waking me.” She looked at her alarm clock. “Oh no, we’ll have to get up in half an hour.”
“Do you remember what you were dreaming?”
“Before you woke me thrashing around like that, you mean?” Mia plumped her pillow up again and made herself comfortable. “No, not really. It was all confused stuff, with snakes in it … and you were in it, too, I think.…”
“And Arthur, right?”
“Arthur Hamilton,” repeated Mia, sounding cross. “The guy who has all the girls in my class sighing in chorus at the sight of him? Why would I dream about him? He looks like someone whose baby picture is used to sell diapers. Can we please get a few minutes’ sleep now?”
“Don’t you really remember your dream? The earthquake? Benedict Cumberbatch?”
Mia had closed her eyes again. “I’m sorry if you dreamed of an earthquake. If it happens again, try to keep your elbows under control, okay? And not so much wriggling…” The rest of what she was saying was lost in an indistinct murmur.
“Mia…”
“I want some sleep. You’re getting on my nerves.”
I sighed. “Sorry. But if you dream of Arthur again, then … then you must wake at once, understand?”
Mia just growled. A second later she began snoring quietly.
Henry had said we mustn’t let it prey on our minds, but that was easier said than done. Even if, considered in the light of day, Arthur’s threats were very slightly less terrifying, I knew that he meant them in deadly earnest. And we could do little or nothing to prevent him from carrying them out.
Henry might think differently, but as I saw it, Arthur should be in a psychiatric hospital along with Anabel. Only, how were we to get him sent to one? If we said he’d stolen one of Mia’s gloves and could now control her in her dreams like a puppet, we’d be the ones taken into psychiatric care, not him. The only person who’d believe us would be Dr. Otto Anderson, alias Senator Tod, and he was a psychopath himself.
There was another thing that hadn’t occurred to me until now: even if something happened to Mia, Arthur couldn’t be prosecuted for it. He’d have been lying in bed asleep half a mile away at the time. No one would think he had anything to do with the case.
On the other hand, if Mia did have a terrible accident, that wouldn’t matter much, anyway.
In the morning, Grayson had turned pale with fury when Henry and I told him what had happened in Mia’s dream. His first reaction was a strong wish to charge straight off and knock Arthur down. It took quite a while to make him see how useless that would be—Arthur could still go on sleeping and dreaming, and he’d be even more vengeful.
Apart from which, since last night Arthur seemed to have disappeared from the face of the earth, anyway. He didn’t turn up at school, no one had seen him anywhere else, and if you rang his cell phone, you only got his voice mail. That scared me even more.
“Nothing’s going to happen to Mia,” Henry had repeated about a hundred times. He meant it to be reassuring, but it wasn’t. Everything Arthur had said last night kept going around and around in my head, like a tune that you can’t forget. I can do anything I like with her. Anything! At any time!… Isn’t it weird to think that she could simply get up one night and hang herself in your garden shed?
And I couldn’t think of any solution. Mia and I couldn’t sleep roped together like those poor working elephants in India forever. And how was I to be sure that Mia wouldn’t undo the rope while I was asleep?
The best thing would be if I stayed permanently awake to keep watch over Mia. But putting that idea into practice was just as impossible as getting Arthur committed to a psychiatric hospital. No one could live forever without sleep.
I for one obviously couldn’t manage to stay awake even for a single night, in spite of the three double espressos I’d drunk just before ten, and even though I wasn’t lying down in bed, but leaning back against Mia’s headboard. I had borrowed a book from Ernest, a thriller, but that wasn’t a good move. It just confirmed the dim view I took of the world. When the serial murderer’s third victim was buried alive, and I was feeling as baffled and helpless as the woman detective inspector investigating the case, Mia complained of the bright light. Reluctantly, but slightly relieved, I closed the book and switched off the bedside lamp. I could work out the rest of the plot, anyway. In the end, the young detective inspector would be buried alive herself in the same kind of casket, and of course she’d be rescued just in time, but she’d be afraid of the dark for the rest of her life.
I looked in turn at the sleeping Mia and the dial of her alarm clock. At some time between 2:20 and 2:21, I must have dropped off to sleep. Because ot
herwise I wouldn’t now be wandering helplessly in this labyrinth of rooms, feeling desperate. The rooms all looked the same, or at least that’s how they seemed to me. Once, examining the way the doors were arranged, I thought I’d been in a room before, but as this was a dream labyrinth, there was presumably no point in trying to find my way by logic.
Why didn’t I please, please just wake up? If only Spot would come and jump on the bed. And why didn’t Mia’s alarm clock ring? I’d set it to go off every hour, just in case I did go to sleep.
I didn’t know exactly when I’d begun to dream—at first it was a relatively peaceful dream, with elephants and monkeys in it—but when I saw my green door and suddenly realized that the caffeine hadn’t worked, I had rushed out into the corridor, panic-stricken.
Grayson, who was standing outside Mia’s door with a shotgun, had jumped in alarm when my door banged shut behind me.
“Weren’t you going to stay awake?”
“Yes,” I cried in despair, “but it didn’t work, and now I can’t wake up. You’d better slap my face. As hard as you can.”
“I don’t think that would do any good. Anyway, I don’t hit girls.” Grayson scrutinized me, frowning. “Calm down, Liv. Everything’s all right here. I went to bed long before Mia—and believe me, Arthur hasn’t shown up. But Henry will be here any moment. We agreed to meet outside Mia’s door. He said there was a way of stopping Arthur once and for all.”
I took a deep breath.
“If I could, I’d imagine you a nice soothing herbal tea,” said Grayson.
“Why doesn’t that silly alarm clock go off?” I tried to remember what time I’d last set it for. Was it three? Or three thirty? “I should have told Mia everything so that she could protect herself,” I said.
“No, you shouldn’t. You wouldn’t have helped her that way; you might even have put her in worse danger. Don’t you remember what it was like for you? How long it took you to get used to the idea of this place existing? And how much longer it was before you could manipulate dreams to go the way you wanted?” Grayson sighed. “I don’t quite have the hang of that yet myself.” He showed me the shotgun. “This was meant to be a really cool machine gun, but instead it’s the old thing that Grandpa and I used to take duck hunting when I was nine.”