RIGHT, SO LET’S KEEP CALM and take another look at the facts, I told myself. I’d been having a confused dream, set against the background of Highgate Cemetery, about conjuring up some kind of spirits, in the course of which I had landed, unfortunately, on an altar in the middle of a burning pentagram. So far, so crazy. But not what you’d describe as unusual for a dream. But if Jasper could remember something I had said in the dream—well, that was unusual. Indeed, it was downright impossible. Jasper couldn’t have had the same dream as me.
But then how did he know what I’d said in my dream in the cemetery?
What was it that Sherlock Holmes said? “When you have eliminated the impossible, what remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Only, what remained if you couldn’t eliminate the impossible?
It wasn’t just that one remark that made me wonder what was going on. This very morning I’d had an odd feeling when Jasper made his silly remarks. And then there was the fact that I’d known Henry’s name. Plus Christina Rossetti, and Grayson’s “tattoo”—were they all mere chance and the work of my own brilliant unconscious mind? Hardly.
No, there was obviously something wrong with that dream. It hadn’t just been an unusually clear dream, it had been about things that I couldn’t know, places where I had never been before—and the worst of it was that I wasn’t the only one to have dreamed it. That was where the owl came into it. I’d felt flattered by the interest Grayson’s friends were taking in me, and by Arthur’s invitation, but I no longer thought they were just being nice. They wanted something from me—and it wasn’t because of my charms. It was all to do with that dream.
However, as I said, that was impossible. And whatever I thought about it, whenever I followed any train of thought, I came up against the word impossible like a wall that couldn’t be crossed. Twelve hours later I had a bad headache but still no satisfactory explanation.
I’d been in bed for hours now, afraid of going to sleep. I’d persuaded Lottie to lend me her iPad, but even the Internet, which usually knows everything, couldn’t come up with any answers. Dreams, I gathered, were as individual as thoughts. Or as Carl Gustav Jung, according to the Internet the expert on dreams and the way to interpret them, had put it, dreams didn’t take sides; they were nothing to do with how consciousness works, but spontaneous products of the unconscious mind. Jung, as I discovered, also went on about what he called archetypal dreams arising from a collective unconscious, and those were to do with our ancient tribal and human history. The word collective made me feel hopeful, but as I read on, I realized that try as I might, I couldn’t really classify my cemetery dream as the archetypal sort, if only because there weren’t any archetypes involved. No meetings with an old man, no falling down holes in the ground, no flowing water … and as for wise messages from the ancient wisdom of humanity, in my dream anyway they were a total loss.
As it got later and later, I went from website to website with less and less of a plan in mind. The search engine offered me some lines of verse by the poet Rilke:
They say life is a dream, but that’s not so;
Or not a dream alone. Dreaming is part of life,
Strange and confused, where we can never know
How truth and seeming both together flow.
My idea precisely. Rilke said just what I thought, at least about dreams being strange and confused. I yawned. I was tired to death, and so was the charge of the iPad. It gave up just as, in searching for the words “door” and “dreams,” I had landed on the website of a carpenter’s workshop promising me, “If you’re not happy with ready-made goods, we’ll make you the door of your dreams.”
I propped my chin on my knees and wrapped my arms around them. Maybe I was simply losing my mind? At least that would have been a logical explanation—and oh how I longed for a logical explanation.
And for sleep. Just as soon as I’d done a little more thinking …
I must have gone to sleep sitting up, because on my way to the bus stop with Mia in the morning I couldn’t remember coming up with a single clear idea. I hardly remembered my dreams, either, only that they’d been entirely disconnected, something about a tram and some bears. Just before waking, I dreamed of visiting Aunt Gertrude in Boston, where we had to eat fish soup, and Emma Watson was there too, wearing my glasses. As if that wasn’t strange enough, I saw my green door with the lizard doorknob from the last dream right in the middle of Aunt Gertrude’s dining room wall with its blue and gold wallpaper. Aunt Gertrude seemed much annoyed by it. She said, several times, that the door didn’t go with her color scheme at all, and would I kindly also eat the cuttlefish so that they wouldn’t have died in vain. The next thing I knew, I was awake.
* * *
“This is a really spectacular case.” Mia, in a very cheerful mood, was hopping along beside me, jumping over the cracks between the paving stones. And unlike me, she was wide awake. “But this Secrecy person won’t stay anonymous for long, not now that Mia Silver, private detective, is on the case.” Yesterday’s discovery of the Tittle-Tattle blog had excited Mia even more than me. She loved mysteries at least as much as I did, and Secrecy was a great challenge to our inborn curiosity.
A red double-decker bus braked a few yards ahead of us, and Mia began to run while I was still checking the number.
“Don’t we have to wait for the 603 bus?”
“No, the 210 goes the same way,” claimed Mia, already half inside the bus.
“How sure of that are you?”
“Seventy percent,” said Mia, undisturbed. “Come on! I want to sit on top this time.”
Sighing, I followed her into the bus and up the stairs, where she slipped smoothly as an eel past a man wearing a hat, to make sure of getting us two seats at the front.
“I’ll murder you if we’re on the wrong bus,” I said.
“Show a little more confidence in Mia Silver, private detective, please.” Mia contentedly stretched her legs out in front of her. “I’ll have solved this case by Christmas,” she solemnly assured me. “You can be my assistant if you like. And my decoy, of course.”
“I don’t know about that, Mia Silver, private detective—Secrecy seems to be up to all the tricks.”
“So am I.” The bus had begun moving, and sure enough the view from up top was great. You felt you were hovering high above the road.
“Up to now, anyway,” I said, “no one’s been able to work out what his or her game is.”
“Okay, but even Secrecy isn’t infallible,” Mia retorted. “For instance, she was dead wrong about Papa’s profession.”
“Yes, I thought that was odd myself. Can there be a famous nuclear physicist with the same surname?”
“No!” Mia’s face wore a mischievous grin. She glanced quickly around the bus. Then she bent over to me and whispered, “You can put the famous nuclear physicist bit down to me. I told Daisy the Chinese secret service was interested in Papa’s work. It kind of sounded more interesting to me than the truth.”
I couldn’t help smiling. “Ah—then could Daisy Dawn be Secrecy?”
“No, stupid, she didn’t come to Frognal until last year, and the blog had already been running for three years by then. But you can bet she passed the story on. To someone who then passed it on to Secrecy. I can’t wait to unpack the box with my detective gear in it. Think how useful we’ll find the ballpoint pen with the mini-camera built into it.…”
My little sister was in her element. Oh well, at least one of us was happy. I was still just confused. On one hand I was relieved that nothing special had happened in the night, on the other hand—and to my own surprise—I was actually a little disappointed. Even in the light of day I didn’t think what had happened was any less mysterious. But however terrifying the whole thing might have been—maybe the dream itself held the answers to all my questions.