“You dreamed of a city,” Hilary said.
“The same one. I told him about it next morning, details of it he hadn’t told me, that were the same in both our dreams. I was watching the sea, the same place as always. Don’t ask me how I knew it was always the same. I knew. One moment I was watching the moon on the water, then I saw it was trembling. The next moment an island rose out of the ocean with a roaring like a waterfall, louder than that, louder than anything I’ve ever heard while awake; I could actually feel my ears bursting. There was a city on the island, all huge greenish blocks with sea and seaweed pouring off them. And the mud was boiling with stranded creatures, panting and bursting. Right in front of me and above me and below me there was a door. Mud was trickling down from it, and I knew that the great pale face I was terrified of was behind the door, getting ready to come out, opening its eyes in the dark. I woke up then, and that was the end of the dreams. Say they were only dreams if you like. You might find it easiest to believe my father and I were sharing them by telepathy.”
“You know perfectly well,” Hilary said, “that I’d find nothing of the sort.”
“No? Then try this,” he said sharply. “At the exhibition I visited today there was a painting of our dream. And not by either of us.”
“So what does that mean?” she cried. “What on earth is that supposed to mean?”
‘Well, a dream I can recall so vividly after all this time is worth a thought. And that painting suggests it’s a good deal more objectively real.”
“So your father read about the island in a story,” she said. “So did you, so did the painter. What else can you possibly be suggesting?”
“Nothing,” he said at last.
“So what were the other strange things you were going to tell me?”
“That’s all,” he said. “Just the painting. Nothing else. Really.” She was looking miserable, a little ashamed. “Don’t you believe me?” he said. “Come here.”
As the sheepskin rug joined their caresses she said “I don’t really need to be psychic for you, do I?”
“No,” he said, probing her ear with his tongue, triggering her ready. Switching off the goose-necked steel lamps as she went, she led him through the flat as if wheeling a basket behind her; they began laughing as a car’s beam shone up from Mercy Hill and seized for a moment on her hand, his handle. They reached the crisp bed and suddenly, urgently, couldn’t prolong their play. She was all around him, working to draw him deeper and out, he was lapped softly, thrusting roughly at her grip on him to urge it to return redoubled. They were rising above everything but each other, gasping. He felt himself rushing to a height, and closed his eyes.
And was falling into a maelstrom of flesh, in a vast almost lightless cave whose roof seemed as far above him as the sky. He had a long way still to fall, and beneath him he could make out the movements of huge bubbles and ropes of flesh, of eyes swelling and splitting the flesh, of gigantic dark green masses climbing sluggishly over one another. “No, Christ no,” he cried, gripped helpless.
He slumped on Hilary. “Oh God,” she said. “What is it now?”
He lay beside her. Above them the ceiling shivered with reflected light. It looked as he felt. He closed his eyes and found dark calm, but couldn’t bear to keep them closed for long. “All right,” he said. “There’s more I haven’t told you. I know you’ve been worried about how I’ve looked lately. I told you it was lack of sleep, and so it is, but it’s because I’ve begun dreaming again. It started about nine months ago, just before I met you, and it’s becoming more frequent, once or twice a week now. Only this time I can never remember what it is, perhaps because I haven’t dreamed for so long. I think it has something to do with the sky, maybe this planet we’ve been hearing about. The last time was this morning, after you went to the library. For some reason I don’t have them when I’m with you.”
“Of course if you want to go back to your place, go ahead,” Hilary said, gazing at the ceiling.
“In one way I don’t,” he said. “That’s just the trouble. Whenever I try to dream I find I don’t want to sleep, as if I’m fighting the dream. But today I’m tired enough just to drift off and have it anyway. I’ve been getting hallucinations all day that I think are coming from the dream. And it feels more urgent, somehow. I’ve got to have it. I knew it was important before, but that painting’s made me sure it’s more than a dream. I wish you could understand this. It’s not easy for me.”
“Suppose I did believe you?” she said. “What on earth would you do then? Stand on the street warning people? Or would you try to sell it to your paper? I don’t want to believe you, how can you think they would?”
“That’s exactly the sort of thing I don’t need to hear,” Ingels said. “I want to talk to my father about it. I think he may be able to help. Maybe you wouldn’t mind not coming with me.”
“I wouldn’t want to,” she said. “You go and have your dream and your chat with your father if you want. But as far as I’m concerned that means you don’t want me.”
Ingels walked to his flat, further up Mercy Hill. Newspapers clung to bushes, flapping; cars hissed through nearby streets, luminous waves. Only the houses stood between him and the sky, their walls seeming low and thin. Even in the pools of lamplight he felt the night gaping overhead.
The building where he lived was silent. The stereo that usually thumped like an electronic heart was quiet. Ingels climbed to the third floor, his footsteps dropping wooden blocks into the silence, nudging him awake. He fumbled in his entrance hall for the coat hook on the back of the door, which wasn’t where Hilary kept hers. Beneath the window in the main room he saw her desk spread with her syndicated cartoon strip—except that when he switched on the light it was his own desk, scattered with television schedules. He peered blearily at the rumpled bed. Around him the room felt and moved like muddy water. He sagged on the bed and was asleep at once.
The darkness drew him out, coaxing him forward, swimming softly through his eyes. A great silent darkness surrounded him. He sailed through it, sleeping yet aware. He sensed energy flowering far out in the darkness, vast soundless explosions that cooled and congealed. He sensed immense weights slowly rolling at the edge of his blindness.
Then he could see, though the darkness persisted almost unchanged. Across its furthest distances a few points of light shone like tiny flaws. He began to sail towards them, faster. They parted and fled to the edge of his vision as he approached. He was rushing between them, towards others that now swooped minutely out of the boundless night, carrying cooler grains of congealed dust around them. They were multiplying, his vision was filling with sprinkled light and its attendant parasites. He was turning, imprinting each silently blazing vista on his mind. His mind felt enormous. He felt it take each pattern of light and store it easily as it returned alert for the next.
It was so long before he came to rest he had no conscious memory of starting out. Somehow the path he’d followed had brought him back to his point of origin. Now he sailed in equilibrium with the entire system of light and dust that surrounded him, boundless. His mind locked on everything he’d seen.
He found that part of his mind had fastened telescopically on details of the worlds he’d passed: cities of globes acrawl with black winged insects; mountains carved or otherwise formed into heads within whose hollow sockets worshippers squirmed; a sea from whose depths rose a jointed arm, reaching miles inland with a filmy web of skin to net itself food. One tiny world in particular seemed to teem with life that was aware of him.