The door was real. He could see scratches on the green paint. He could see smudges on the nine white tablets of the lock’s keyboard. The door was real!
“This is a dream,” he said aloud, relieved at having explained the inexplicable. “This is one of those cognisant dreams, and to prove it—”
He punched the edge of the deck beside him with careless force and gasped as pain swept back through his nervous system from the point of impact. He looked at his knuckles and saw that patches of skin had been curled back. Tiny lentils of blood were appearing on the subcutaneous tissue.
There was no doubt that he was wide-awake—and the engine access door was still in place.
My memory for numbers has gone haywire, he extemporised as he stepped off the ladder and went to the door. A little molecule of the grey stuff has flipped or sprung a leak or whatever it is they do when they’re starting to wear out. You always could reach the engines from 17 Deck. The fact that I don’t remember it that way is neither here nor there, and to prove it…
He tapped the admittance number into the lock—8949823—and smiled as he heard the lock solenoid operating. Still got a few numbers left! He slowly pushed the door open and found himself looking into an enclosed space not much larger than a telephone kiosk. The arrangement was wrong, absolutely and totally wrong for the Tara, but he was now committed to proving to himself that wrong was right, and he stepped over the high threshold with a certain amount of brashness.
As the door sighed shut behind him he saw another door in the left-hand wall, and beside it was a small niche of the type which normally held fire-fighting equipment. In the niche was a body-curved flask of silver, upon which somebody had enamelled the words: DRINK ME. The lettering was excessively ornate and Nicklin grinned as he recognised Scott Hepworth’s handiwork.
So you forgot about one of your stashes, you boozy old sod!
Still amused, he picked the flask up. It felt warm, and when he shook it he heard and felt the sloshing of a small amount of liquid. On impulse he removed the cap and took a drink of what proved to be tepid gin.
A real Hepworth special, that was. He loved his geneva zvitk fresh tonic and all the trimmings, but when necessary he would take it any way it came. As some playwright or other put it—when the mood was on him he would drink it out of a sore. I bet old Scott would be turning in his plastic wrapper if he knew he had missed this last drop.
There’s just one thing I don’t understand, though.
How come the gin is still warm?
Moving like a man in a dream, filled with premonitions that he was doing the wrong thing, Nicklin opened the inner door. Beyond it was a dimly lit space which seemed too large to be contained within the five-metre radius of the engine cylinder. Nicklin went in, allowing the door to close behind him. Above the door was a single bulkhead light casting a wan glow over a semicircle of empty deck. That was wrong, too, because most of the space within the cylinder should have been taken up by massive engine components. He tried to see beyond the vague boundary of illumination, but the outer darkness was impenetrable. An air current tugged momentarily at his hair and clothing, and it seemed sweet and pure, as though he were standing at the edge of a midnight plain.
After a few seconds a figure appeared in the darkness, coming towards him, and he groaned aloud—cowering back with knuckles pressed to his mouth—as he saw that it was Scott Hepworth.
“Good man, you found my medicine!” Hepworth said, taking the flask from Nicklin’s inert fingers. “Where did I leave it?”
Nicklin groaned again as Hepworth raised the flask to his lips and took a drink. His neck seemed intact beneath his rumpled collar, but as he swallowed a clear fluid welled out through the front of his shirt.
“Go away,” Nicklin mumbled through his knuckles. “You’re dead!”
“Don’t be so plebeian in your thinking, my boy,” Hepworth said jovially. “Do I look dead?”
Nicklin studied the apparition before him and saw that it was perfect in every detail, from the smudged shoddiness of the clothing to the blue-rimmed blackhead at the side of the nose. “Get away from me, Scott,” he pleaded. “I can’t look at you.”
“Very well—but I must say I’m deeply disappointed in you, Jim.” Hepworth began to back off into the darkness. “I could have helped you with what’s coming next. There are others waiting to meet you, and I could have helped you deal with them…”
As the Hepworth thing faded out of sight Nicklin grabbed the door handle and twisted hard. It refused to turn, just as he had expected, and now two other figures were approaching. One was Corey Montane—grinning a wet, lop-sided grin—and the other was a pretty young woman who looked quite wholesome and normal, except that the handle of a kitchen knife was protruding from her chest. The knife was moving in tune with her heart beats.
“Milly and I are happy now, Jim,” Montane said, slipping his arm around the woman’s waist. “And I want you to know that you can be happy, too. All you have to do is—”
“You’re dead too!” Nicklin shouted. “Don’t come near me! You’re dead, and you’re trying to make me think that I’m dead as well, but I’m still alive and this is only a dream!”
Montane and his wife exchanged concerned glances, all the while moving closer to him. “I hate to see you like this, Jim,” Montane said. “And it’s all so unnecessary. All you have to do is listen to—”
“Fuck off!” Nicklin screamed, covering his eyes. He remained that way for as long as he dared, afraid that the two dreadful beings were stealthily closing in, bringing their sympathetic faces closer to his. But when he lowered his hands Montane and his wife had gone. The surrounding darkness was intact again, except that he could now see farther into it and his former impression of standing on a vast plain was reinforced. In the spurious, half-perceived distance there was the hint of an enormous presence, black curvatures imposed on blackness. Could it be a hill, a mountain of obsidian, repelling the light of unseen stars?
What have I done to deserve this? Nicklin asked himself, making another futile attempt to open the bulkhead door.
“I’ll tell you what you’ve done,” a familiar and yet unidentifiable voice said from just beyond the pool of tallowy light. “You have filled your head with negative thoughts and false concepts, little Jimmy Nicklin—and now you must suffer as a result.”
“Who are you?” Nicklin quavered, sickened by a new premonition. “And why do you call me Jimmy? Nobody has called me Jimmy since—”
“Since you were a little boy, isn’t that right?” The towering shape of Nicklin’s great-uncle Reynard advanced into the cone of dismal light.
Nicklin cringed as he saw that this was not the figure of the scarcely-remembered real Uncle Reynard. This was the fearsome Uncle Reynard of the dream. This was the terrifying shape that his mother had insisted on treating as a perfectly acceptable human being in spite of the fact that it was over two metres tall, had spiky red-brown fur, feral yellow eyes, and a long snout surmounted by a Disney-animal nose which resembled a shiny black olive. And, as had happened before, recognition robbed the animated image of its oppressive power.
“You can’t frighten me,” Nicklin challenged.
“And why should anybody be frightened of a fine, handsome fellow like me?” the fox said, preening in his nineteenth-century wing collar and patched frock coat. “I fully understand why you wanted nothing to do with those other characters—especially the woman! Did you see the knife?—Ugh!” A look of revulsion passed over the fox’s stylised features. “Between ourselves, Jimmy, you did the right thing in getting rid of that lot.”