THE SHINY GREEN DOOR attracted my eyes in a bleak street lined with gray, shabby terraced houses. I had no idea what I’d been dreaming up to this point, but the moment I saw the door I was sitting on a bicycle, pedaling hard to pull a heavily laden trailer behind me. Uphill.
The door! In my dream last time it had led me to the cemetery.
Mom overtook me. She, too, was riding a bike with a trailer. “Feeling tired is no excuse,” she called to me.
“What are we doing here?” I asked.
“Moving house,” replied Mom, looking over her shoulder. “Same as usual.”
“I see.” I braked and got off my bicycle to take a closer look at the green door. Yes, no doubt about it, this was the same door as last time, and it was also the door that had turned up in Aunt Gertrude’s dining room. Suddenly it was all as clear as day: if I wanted to find out the meaning of these mysterious dreams, then I had to open it. And go through the doorway.
If I was brave enough.
“No dawdling, mousie!” cried Mom. “We have to go on! We always have to go on.”
“But without me today,” I said. The lizard doorknob felt warm when I turned it. I took a deep breath and went through the doorway.
“Olivia Gertrude Silver! Come back this minute!” I heard Mom calling a moment before I slammed the door in her face. Just the same as last time, I was standing in a corridor that seemed to go on and on forever. Fascinated, I looked at all the doors. They looked like the windows of an Advent calendar and were equally individual in their size, shape, and color. There were plain, white-painted doors, there were the front doors of modern houses, and others that looked like the doors of elevators, nothing decorative about them. Others could have been shop doors, or the magnificent portals of castles and palaces.
The bright-red door opposite seemed to be a new one, or at least I couldn’t remember seeing it here on my last visit. It was a very striking door with a showy golden doorknob shaped like a crown; you wouldn’t forget it in a hurry. I didn’t find Grayson’s door, which had been right next to mine before, until I’d gone a little farther down the corridor. So the doors here obviously didn’t stay in the same spot but played a kind of hide-and-seek. Next to Grayson’s door I saw one painted pale gray, with glass panes in it and ornate lettering. The lettering said MATTHEWS’ MOONSHINE ANTIQUARIAN BOOKS. BOOKS TO LAST YOU A LIFETIME. OPEN FROM MIDNIGHT TO DAWN. That sounded enticing. For a moment I was tempted to press the handle down and explore the inside of the antiquarian bookshop, but then I reminded myself why I was here, and I went on to Grayson’s door. It looked just the same as in my last dream, a perfect copy of the front door of the Spencers’ house. Frightful Freddy spread his wings and squeaked, “No one can come in unless they say my name three times backward.”
“Ydderf, Ydderf, Ydderf,” I replied, whereupon Freddy folded his wings and curled his lion’s tail around his feet.
“You may enter,” he squeaked solemnly.
I hesitated. Somehow I felt I’d better arm myself for what was to come. Whatever that might be. Maybe I ought to imagine Lottie’s hatchet out of the last dream. Or at least dream that I had a sharp knife in my pocket. Or hang some garlic around my neck, or …
“What are you waiting for?” inquired Frightful Freddy.
“I’m on my way.” If things got too dangerous, I could always just wake up. That had worked last time. (And this time, for safety’s sake, I had padded the floor beside my bed with cushions.) Taking a deep breath, I went through the doorway. Instead of darkness and the spooky peace of the cemetery, I walked into bright light, the noise of a lot of people shouting, and metallic clanking. My foot missed a step, and I lost my balance and reached for the nearest thing I could grab, which turned out to be the shoulder of a red-headed girl.
“Watch out,” she said, but she paid me no further attention. Instead, she leaned forward and shouted, “That was a foul, ref! Do you have tomatoes for eyes or what?”
I’d regained my footing, and I looked curiously around. Aha—a sports hall. I was standing on the steps between the tiers of seating for spectators, all of them full, and a basketball game was in progress on the court in front of me. It wasn’t difficult to guess that the boys in the black and red stripes were the Frognal Flames. Arthur was just catching a ball passed to him by Grayson, and he passed it on to Henry, who dribbled it skillfully past the member of the opposing team who was marking him and then threw it to Jasper. Jasper leaped up in the air right under the basket, and as he came down he shot the ball through the hoop. The crowd shouted with glee. According to the scoreboard, the Frognal Flames were eighteen points in the lead. It looked like it was about to be a landslide victory. Two of the spectators kindly moved up a bit to make room for me in the front row, right behind the substitutes’ bench. If I turned around, I could still see Grayson’s door at the far end of the tiers of seats. However, apart from me, no one seemed bothered by the sight of a front door in the middle of the wall of a sports hall. And the spectators took no notice of me, either, as if it were perfectly normal to turn up at a basketball game barefoot and in a nightdress. I didn’t know just what I’d been expecting, but I felt a sense of relief. In any case, this was more comfortable than being in a cemetery by night, with people reciting gruesome incantations to conjure up spirits.
I watched the game, feeling almost relaxed. At first it looked as if the opposing team didn’t have the slightest chance against the magnificent form of the Frognal Flames, but then Grayson began passing poorly and losing the ball, and the other team was catching up. I didn’t understand basketball, but as far as I could judge, Grayson was suddenly playing incredibly badly. He missed the basket, didn’t pass the ball to members of his own team, and committed foul after unnecessary foul. The spectators booed him. Someone shouted, “Go home, Grayson, you total loser!” and threw an empty soda can onto the court. Grayson looked absolutely miserable, but he went on systematically making every wrong move in the game. The other team’s fans were yelling with delight, shouting, “Number Five’s our man!”
I could hardly bear to watch, but it wasn’t until the score was 63–61 in favor of the other side that the coach of the Frognal Flames substituted another player for Grayson, looking at him icily as he trotted off the court, his shoulders stooped. In all the noise I couldn’t make out what the coach was saying to Grayson, but there was contempt all over his face. Grayson seemed to be near tears and was obviously trying to apologize, but the coach had already turned away to shout tactical orders over the court. From then on he ignored Grayson.
The Flames seemed to be doing better again without Grayson, but it looked as if it was too late for the team to reverse the damage. Grayson dropped onto the substitutes’ bench, looking terribly ashamed of himself, and the other players moved away from him as if he had an infection.
He buried his face in a towel.
Although it was only a dream, I felt really sorry for him. I leaned forward and patted him on the shoulder from behind. “Hey, it’s only a game,” I said, trying to console him.
Very slowly, he raised his head and turned around to me. “It’s not only a game,” he said, “it’s the game. And I’ve botched it!”
“Well…” Unfortunately he was right. He really had botched it. “But all the same, it’s just a game between two high school teams.”
“A game in which I’ve failed.” His eyes wandered along the rows of spectators. “Of course you had to be here to see it too. And Emily won’t even look my way, she’s so ashamed of me.”
“Silly cow,” I said spontaneously, following the direction of his eyes. “Which one is she? The dark-haired girl in the blue sweater beside Florence?” I hesitated for a moment. “And is that by any chance Henry coming down the steps? Hang on a moment!” I turned to look back at the court, where Henry was just passing the ball to Jasper. Then I looked at the steps again. No, I hadn’t made a mistake. There was Henry waving to me. “Grayson? Does Henry by any chance have an identical twin brother?”
But Grayson had buried his head in his towel again and didn’t hear me. Or was pretending not to hear me.
I looked once again from the Henry in his basketball shirt to the Henry coming toward me in jeans and T-shirt from the other side of the hall, and then from one to the other again, before shrugging my shoulders. After all, it was a dream; I didn’t have to take it literally.
“Sorry, could you move up a bit? Thanks.” Henry squeezed into the second row and sat down right behind me. “Hi, cheese girl. Good game?”
“Depends how you look at it. You two are losing,” I said, as if it were normal for there to be two of him. “And do stop calling me cheese girl.”
Henry watched his alter ego sinking a three-pointer in the basket and whistled appreciatively through his teeth. “Hey, I’m playing pretty well!” He leaned so far forward that his head was almost level with mine. I tried not to let that make me nervous. This was good practice. Training for reality.
“Okay, cheese girl, I’ll call you Liv from now on.” Henry’s voice was soft and deep, right beside my ear. “I have an idea it was Grayson who made a mess of the game, right?”
Grayson’s head emerged from the towel. “I made a total mess of it,” he agreed. It didn’t seem to bother him that there were two Henrys here. “I let the coach down, and the team, and you … and Emily and Florence and my father and … listen to what they’re saying!”
The opposing team’s fans were still chanting. “Grayson Spencer, the losing Flame, send the Frognals a sympathy card!” And “The fire of the Flames is going out, Spencer the loser’s a layabout.”
Grayson was pale as death.
“The first couplet doesn’t rhyme,” I said.
Henry nodded. “And the meter of the second one’s all wrong. Idiots.”
That didn’t seem to cheer Grayson up. He disappeared under his towel again. I suspected that he was shedding tears into it.
“I’m afraid he has this dream quite often,” said Henry sympathetically.
“What, about sniffling into a towel?”
“No, of being a total failure on the basketball court, so that we all lose and everyone turns against him.”
“Has it ever happened, then? In real life, I mean?”
Henry shook his head. “No, never. Grayson is brilliant at all kinds of sport. Last season he went on playing even with a badly bruised shoulder and scored eight points. What are you actually doing here?” That last bit came out so unexpectedly that I didn’t have time to think my answer over properly.
“I wanted to see the game—what do you think?” I felt a little uncomfortable under his piercing gaze.
He grinned broadly. “Barefoot and in a nightdress? And isn’t that Grayson’s sweater you’re wearing again? I told him he’d better get it back. It’s rather too large for you, I’d say.”
“Well, and you’re here twice—that’s rather too often, I’d say,” I replied, imitating his mocking tone of voice. But secretly I was annoyed. I really could have worn something else. The nightdress was old and ugly, and with Grayson’s sweater over it I probably looked as if I’d run away from some kind of madhouse. But I could always alter that—after all, this was a dream. I briefly narrowed my eyes, and when I opened them again I was wearing my favorite jeans, sneakers, and a red T-shirt with I AM PROTECTED BY THREE INVISIBLE NINJAS on the front of it. I was also wearing mascara and a touch of lip gloss.
So it worked.
“You’re really good,” said Henry, standing up. “Or, alternatively, I am. It all depends.” He looked at me with his head to one side. “How about going for a walk?”
“But we can’t leave poor Grayson in the lurch.” Particularly not now, when the fans of the Frognal Flames were joining in with their opponents’ chanting. “Bad, worse, Spencer’s the worst!” they were yelling, and, “Never trust Grayson Spencer!” A white-haired old lady in a Chanel suit was standing at the top of the tiers of seats, in the back row, shouting, “Grayson Ernest Theodore Spencer, I am severely disappointed in you!” and angrily waving an umbrella in the air.
Henry climbed over the seat beside me and shook Grayson by the shoulder. “Hey, Grayson! Pull yourself together. This is only a nightmare.”
Grayson lowered the towel. “You can say that again,” he muttered.
“No, really, you’re only dreaming it. Or do you seriously think Tyler Smith of the stupid Hampstead Hornets could bring off a spectacular dunk like that? Look at him!”
“Well,” said Grayson doubtfully, “people sometimes rise above themselves in the heat of a game.…”
“But Tyler Smith? Not in a hundred years.” Henry straightened up again. “Do me a favor—dream something else! Something nicer! But wait until we’re out the door, okay?”
Grayson looked at us undecidedly. “You mean this is a dream?”
“Of course it’s a dream,” I said. “Or do you think there could really be two of Henry here?”
“Hmm, yes, that is odd,” admitted Grayson.
“Come on!” Henry reached for my hand. “We must go, Liv.”
“Grayson can come as well.” My heart was beating a little faster, and I didn’t know why.
“No, I can’t.” Grayson shook his head. “I’m not backing out now! I’d never let the team down. It would be cowardly and unworthy.”
“But, Grayson, none of this is really happening.” I had to shout over my shoulder, because Henry was already leading me up the steps, and the noise in the hall was terrible.
“Grayson will be fine by himself,” Henry assured me.
“But … it sounds as if they’re going to kill him any moment now!” We’d reached Grayson’s door, and I turned back again. “Listen to that!”
“I’m not deaf!”
“Burn him now, burn the traitor. Burn him now, not a day later!” chanted the mob, while Henry flung the door open and pushed me out into the corridor on the other side. He energetically slammed the door behind us, and the shouting and noise in the hall fell silent at once.
“You’re a fine kind of friend,” I said reproachfully.
“And you’re still here.” I didn’t know if he was saying that to me or to Frightful Freddy, who now spread his wings and fluffed up his feathers slightly.
“No one can come in unless they say my name three times backward.”
“Yes, sure, maybe next time, Fatty,” said Henry. He had obviously forgotten to let go of my hand, and I decided not to remind him. Not yet, anyway, because it felt rather good.
Surreptitiously, I glanced at Henry sideways. The lighting conditions in this corridor were like the light on a summer evening when the sun has just sunk beneath the horizon and it isn’t really light or really dark. There were no windows or lamps anywhere, so it wasn’t clear where the light came from. But it made Henry look rather good. I hoped it did the same for me, because he was subjecting me to a thorough examination as well.
“You’re still here,” he repeated.
“Is that a good thing or not? And shouldn’t we go back in again and help poor Grayson?”
“Don’t worry about Grayson. He’s fine. He won’t even remember his dream tomorrow morning.”
“How about us?”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out.” He smiled at me. “Coming for a little walk?”
“We’ve been doing that for some time.” And in fact we had. We strolled down the corridor side by side, holding hands. A brand-new experience for me, both in a dream and in real life. I didn’t mind if it went on a little longer.
“Let’s hope Lottie doesn’t come around the corner with her hatchet,” I murmured.
“What?”
“Oh, nothing.” Only now did I see that several other passages branched off this corridor, all lined with doors and all of them infinitely long. We ought to have passed my door long ago, but it must have changed places again. “If we were in Grayson’s dream back there, whose dream are we in now?”
“Interesting question,” said Henry, and at first I thought he was going to leave it at that. But then he added, “There are only two possibilities: Either this is my dream, in which case I’m dreaming about you. Or…” He fell silent again.
“Or it’s my dream, and then I’m dreaming about you.” It was a very nice dream at that. I smiled up at him. “You know something? I’ve never held hands with a boy before.”
He stopped and raised an eyebrow incredulously. “Really not?”
“No.” His voice had sounded so intrigued that I was quick to add, “But of course I’ve kissed and so on. Lots of times.” At least in my dreams. Once—and I was ashamed of it to that day—once even with Justin Bieber. On the other hand, my experiences in real life could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Well, to be precise, on two of the fingers of one hand.
“Oh, well, that reassures me,” said Henry ironically, but I had the impression that he was holding my hand a little more firmly as we strolled on.
“This feels different from a normal dream,” I said. “It’s like the other night in the cemetery. I know all the time that it’s a dream. So I can say things that I’d never say otherwise.”
“That kind of thing is called lucid dreaming. When you realize that you’re dreaming…”
“I know, I read up on it on the Internet. But the Internet didn’t say anything about other people being able to have the same dream at the same time.”
“No, you won’t find anything on the Internet about that.”
“Where will I, then? And what does it all have to do with Grayson’s sweater and these doors? Do you have one too?”
“Of course.” Annoyingly, my last question was the only one he answered.
We went a little way farther in silence. Then he said, “I’ll show you my door if you show me yours.”
“I think that one could be my mother’s.” I pointed to the pale-gray shop door that I’d noticed earlier.
“Matthews’s Moonshine Antiquarian Books? I’ve never seen that one before. Looks pretty.”
“I’m sure it’s Mom’s. It even has her name on it. She went back to her maiden name of Matthews when she and my father divorced. And a bookshop like that suits her down to the ground, only if I went through that doorway, I wouldn’t be in a bookshop, would I? I’d be in the dream that my mother is dreaming at this moment.”
“If you could get through the doorway at all…”
I shook myself. “I bet she dreams of Ernest all night—yuck. Just remind me of that so I never happen to go in there by mistake!”
Even as I was saying that, I realized how absurd it was, but Henry only laughed.
“Yes, there are some dreams one really wouldn’t want to share. Take Jasper, for instance. Most of the people in his dreams are stark naked.…” He suddenly stopped. “This door is mine, by the way.”
“How funny. Right opposite mine,” I said. “There was a red one there a little while ago.”
“Yes, they keep changing places. I still haven’t entirely worked out the system behind it.”
His door, like mine, looked rather old, but it was taller and broader than mine, and painted black. There was a classical knocker shaped like a lion’s head, and the words DREAM ON were carved into the lintel of the door, which made me smile. The only odd thing was that instead of a single keyhole, Henry’s door had three of them, one above the other.
Meanwhile, Henry was scrutinizing my door. “Looks as if it led into a cottage in the Cotswolds,” he said. “Except for the lizard. Does the lizard have some deeper meaning?”
“How would I know?” I shrugged my shoulders. “Why do you have so many locks on your door?”
He didn’t answer at once. Then he said, “I just don’t like having unexpected visitors.”
I tried to think about that, but it was difficult to work it out clearly. Maybe because Henry was still holding my hand. “If these are the ways into our dreams, then why are we out here?” I asked. “And what’s going on in there without us?”
“I’ve no idea. I suspect that without us nothing goes on in there, but of course we can’t be sure. It’s something like the light inside the refrigerator.…”
The sound of a door latching made us both jump. Jump away from each other, to be precise. But there wasn’t anyone in sight. The corridor was empty.
“We’d better go home now and … er … get a bit of sleep.” Henry gave me a crooked grin. He had let go of my hand and was taking three keys out of his jeans pocket.
“Why are you whispering? There isn’t anyone here.” I stared back the way the sound had come from.
“You never know.” Henry turned the keys in their keyholes, one by one, and each time there was a loud, metallic click. “Sleep well, Liv. It was nice sharing a dream with you.”
“Yes. I thought so too.” Sighing, I turned to my lizard doorknob. A pity the dream was over. I still had so many questions. And after all … “Thanks for holding hands.”
Henry was half into his doorway when he turned back to me again. “You’re welcome. Oh, and Liv?”
“Hmm?”
“If I were you, I really wouldn’t go to Arthur’s party.”
“Oh.” I tried not to show that my feelings were hurt. First Grayson, now Henry.
“Unless you’re really, really keen on something dangerous with an uncertain outcome,” he said, his eyes twinkling.
I felt rather as if I’d been caught out in something.
“Seriously, if you’re clever, you’d better stay away from us. We’ll just have to find someone else to take Anabel’s place.”
“Take her place doing what?” I asked, but the black door had already closed behind him, and I could hear him bolting it on the inside. Three times.
If you’re clever … Well, I wasn’t stupid, anyway. So I also knew that people who said things like You’d better stay away from us had something to hide. But that had been clear to me all along. There was more than one mystery to be revealed here. And it was in the nature of mysteries to be a little dangerous as well.
Maybe it was only my imagination that made me think it was suddenly turning cold. The light seemed to be paler, the shadows in the corridor deeper, and I was overcome by an unpleasant sense of not being alone. I quickly opened my green door, slipped inside, and let the latch click shut behind me. Not a second later, I heard knocking on the wood from the other side of the door, a very soft, gentle sound, hardly more than scraping or scratching. Something told me it would be better not to look and see what made that sound.
“There you are at last, Livvy,” someone said behind me, and when I turned around, I saw Mia, Lottie, and Mom sitting in the Finchleys’ brightly lit kitchen, with playing cards on the table.
“Did you hear that?” I asked.
“What?”
“Well, that strange scraping at the—” I hesitated, because when I turned again, the door had disappeared. Where it had been I now saw the kitchen window, framed by what were probably the most hideous tartan curtains in the world.
Somewhere or other, an alarm clock was going off.