“…they had many legs—and I was the same… I had many legs… and a trunk… a tentacle… growing out of my throat…” Ennda suddenly ceased rocking, tucked her right shoulder under her chin and extended her arm forwards. It made a gentle, boneless rippling movement which was mimicked by something in the deeps of Bartan’s consciousness, making him unaccountably afraid.
“Well, I’ll just put the basin away,” he said, feeling like a traitor, knowing that he intended to get out of the house and leave the two unfortunates to deal with their own problems, none of which had anything to do with him. He evaded Harro’s hand, walked briskly into the kitchen and set the slopping basin down on the sideboard. He turned and was on his way to the bright sanity of the front entrance when he was snared by Ennda’s psychic web. She had risen to her feet, unmindful that the sheet was slipping down her torso, and could have been performing a strange new dance, her arm snaking and wafting before her.
“It began oddly,” she murmured. “Very oddly indeed, and it’s wrong to call it a beginning because I kept going back to the house. It was an ordinary farmhouse… whitewashed, green door… but I was afraid to go in… and yet I had to go in…
“When I opened the green door there was nothing there but some old clothes hanging on a hook on the wall… an old hat, an old cloak, an old apron… I knew I should have run away at that stage, while I was still safe, but something made me go in…”
Bartan halted at the bedroom door, chilled.
Ennda looked straight at him, through him. “You see, I was wrong. There weren’t any old clothes. It was one of them… that tentacle reaching towards me… ever so gently…”
Harro closed with his wife and gripped her shoulders. “Stop this, Ennda. Stop it!”
“But you don’t understand.” She smiled again, her arm coiling around his neck as the sheet dropped to the floor. “I wasn’t being attacked, dear one… it was an invitation… an invitation to love… and I wanted it. I went into the house and I embraced the horror… and I was happy when I felt its pale grey penis entering me…”
Ennda surged against Harro, her naked buttocks pumping and contracting. With one imploring glance towards Bartan, Harro used his weight and size to force his wife down on to the bed. Bartan stepped into the room, slammed the door behind him and threw himself down against the couple, helping to imprison Ennda’s threshing limbs. Her teeth clicked as she bit the air and her pelvis drove upwards again and again, but now with diminishing power. Her eyelids were drooping wearily, peace was returning to her body. Bartan took the initiative and covered her, using the sheet that had fallen to the floor, but his mind was elsewhere, wandering in a strange continuum of doubt and confusion.
Could coincidence ever be stretched far enough to explain two people dreaming the same thing at the same time? Perhaps, if the subject were a very commonplace one, but not when… And at first mine was not a dream! Bartan’s brow prickled coldly as he remembered that he had been to the house and had walked through the green door in actuality. But in reality his monster had been a delusion, and in Ennda’s delusion her monster had been a reality. The universe does not work this way, Bartan told himself. Something has gone wrong with the universe…
“She looks better now,” Harro whispered, stroking his wife’s brow. “Perhaps a couple of hours of proper sleep is all she needs. In fact, I know that is what she needs.”
Bartan stood up, trying to anchor his thoughts in the solid present. “What of the celebration? Are you going to send everybody away?”
“I want them all to remain here. It will be best if Ennda has her friends around her when she awakes.” Harro got to his feet and faced Bartan across the bed. “There’s no need to talk too much about all this, is there, lad? I don’t want people to think she has gone mad—especially Jop.”
“I won’t say anything.”
“I’m grateful to you,” Harro said, leaning forwards to shake Bartan’s hand. “Jop has no time for all this talk of dreams and nightmares that we’ve had of late. He says that if people worked as hard as they ought they would be too tired to dream at night.”
Bartan forced a smile. Were other members of the community having bad dreams? Was this what Reeve Karrodall had foretold? Could this be only the beginning, the beginning of something terrible, something which could drive the new wave of settlers away—as had happened to their predecessors?
“When I lay my head down at the end of the day,” he said ruefully, pushing aside his memories of the night’s disturbing dream, “I experience a small death. There is nothing until daybreak.”
“Anybody who tried to start off a whole section on his own is entitled to be exhausted, more so somebody who wasn’t brought up to this work.”
“I get some help from the neighbours,” Bartan said, eager to talk of commonplace things while he strove to come to terms with his new internal picture of the world. “And after I’m married there will be…”
“I must put a bandage on my war wound,” Harro interrupted, gingerly prodding his cheek. “You go outside and say I want to know why they are all standing around with both arms the same length instead of preparing for the festivities. Tell them this is to be a day to remember.”
News had come that Jop Trinchil and his family would not be arriving until near the middle of the day, so Bartan passed the time by joining in where he could with the various preparations going on around the farm. His efforts were received with good humour, but the women soon made it clear to him that he was hindering rather than helping, especially as he was abstracted and prone to error. He withdrew to a bench facing the kitchen orchard, where several men were already sunning themselves and sharing a jug of green wine.
“That’s right, lad,” Corad Furcher said companionably, handing Bartan a full cup. “Leave the women to get on with it by themselves.” He was a middle-aged man whose yellowish hair betokened a blood relationship with the Phorateres.
“Thanks.” Bartan sipped the sweet liquid. “It’s all confused back there, and I did seem to be getting in the way a little.”
“There’s the source of the trouble, up there.” Furcher made a gesture which took in the clear blue dome of the sky. “The onset of littlenight was the obvious time to begin a revel when we lived on the Old World, but here the sun goes on shining and shining and shining, and you can’t regulate yourself properly. It isn’t natural, you know, this living on the outside. I’m as loyal as the next man, but I still say King Chakkell was interfering with the right way of things when he scattered us all around the globe. Look at that sky! Empty! It makes me feel I’m being watched all the time.”
The men farther along the bench nodded in agreement and began a discussion about the disadvantages of being on the hemisphere of Overland which was permanently turned away from the sister planet. Some of the theories they put forward about the effects of the uninterrupted day on crop growth and animal behaviour sounded highly dubious to Bartan. He found himself longing for Sondeweere’s company more than ever, and in between times wrestling with the problem posed by Ennda Phoratere’s terrible nightmare. Coincidence had to be ruled out, but perhaps the key to the mystery lay in the very nature of dreams. Was it possible, as some claimed, that the mind roved out from the body during the hours of sleep? If it were, then perhaps two discarnate personalities could meet by chance and commune briefly in the darkness, influencing each other’s dreams.
Bartan was reluctant to abandon his vision of a perfectly happy future, and the new idea seemed to offer its salvation. As the strong wine began to do its work he began to see the episode as rare and unpleasant but perfectly explicable, a manifestation of some of nature’s complexities and subtleties. The resurgence of his optimism was aided by the sight of Ennda emerging from the main house and taking part in the seemingly endless preparations for the forthcoming party. She was a little sheepish at first, but soon she was laughing with those around her, and the message for Bartan was that the black humours of the night were dispersed and forgotten. The day would be all the more joyful in comparison.