“IS THAT FOR SCHOOL?” asked Lottie, pointing to my notebook.
“Yes,” I said untruthfully, hoping she wouldn’t read what I had just been writing.
TIME OF DAY: 2 a.m.
GRAYSON’S SWEATER: on
MEMORY OF A DREAM: yes
MEMORY OF GREEN DOOR IN THE DREAM: yes
DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE DREAM:
A flood. Lottie, Mia, Mom, and I are drifting through an unknown city on a raft. Buttercup is swimming along at the same time. I see the green door on one of the flooded houses. I know that for some reason it’s important, but I don’t feel like swimming over to it. The water looks cold. I’m sure there are crocodiles in it.
“Schoolwork on a Saturday, and before breakfast at that? Aren’t you overdoing things a bit? I’m worried about those dark shadows under your eyes.” Lottie stroked my hair. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you weren’t getting enough sleep. But it can’t be that. You’ve been in bed before ten every evening.”
“Yes, so I have.” For the last two days I’d hardly been able to wait until it was evening and I could go to bed. That was because I’d decided to investigate the dream phenomenon by deliberately experimenting on myself. Because what did Sherlock Holmes say? “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”
So I had started a series of experiments. Dreams with Grayson’s sweater on and dreams without it. I had set my alarm clock to go off on the hour, every hour, and kept careful records. Now I was reading through the notes I’d made again, so as to evaluate them scientifically.
TIME OF DAY: 3 a.m.
GRAYSON’S SWEATER: off
MEMORY OF A DREAM: yes
MEMORY OF GREEN DOOR IN THE DREAM: yes
DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE DREAM:
My kung fu teacher Mr. Wu and I are standing at Adliswil aerial cableway station in Switzerland with a lot of tourists, and Mr. Wu wants me to demonstrate the lift kick, using the strength of my neck, on a fat American woman tourist in a lilac T-shirt. When I ask him if he’s gone right off his rocker, he says, “Confucius says the wise man forgets insults just as the ungrateful man forgets good deeds.” The green door is part of the cableway, so it is hanging in midair. All the same, I go through it and find myself in the corridor. It all looks peaceful and harmless. Not a trace of any sinister, scraping, or scrabbling creature. I look for Grayson’s door and say Freddy’s name three times backward. But the door is locked. I shake the handle hard. Frightful Freddy says I have no manners. I say the wise man forgets insults just as the ungrateful man forgets good deeds. Then I shake the handles of two more doors, just for fun, so to speak. They are all locked. An alarm clock rings loudly. My alarm clock. I curse it.
I suppressed a groan. All this read more like the notes of a lunatic than something that could be scientifically evaluated.
“My bet is iron deficiency, but she could have something else.” Lottie had turned to Mom, who was just wandering across the living room half dressed. Family Meeting Number Two was planned for today, minus quails but plus Lottie, Buttercup, house-clearing operation, and choice of color for walls (also presumably plus more nervous breakdowns from Florence). There was still a good half an hour to go before we had to set out, but Mom’s nerves were already shot to pieces. Buttercup was trotting after Mom, with her dog leash in her mouth.
“We ought to make an appointment for Liv to see the doctor,” suggested Lottie.
“Hmm?” As usual, Mom had heard only the last thing anyone said. She seemed to be searching for something. “Aren’t you feeling well, mousie? Today of all days, when you want to go to that party?”
“I’m feeling fine. Lottie’s just worried about the rings under my eyes.”
“Oh, you can borrow my concealer. Then no one will notice them. Has anyone seen the dog leash?”
“Woof,” went Butter, but Mom paid no attention. Instead, she turned to Lottie. “Don’t worry, I had much worse rings under my eyes at Liv’s age.”
“Because you were smoking pot, Mom.”
“Nonsense. I never smoked pot until I went to college.” Mom turned frantically around on her own axis. “Mia, do put that thing down and get dressed! I don’t want us to be too late. Ernest’s youngest brother is going to be there, and the painters, and where the hell is that…”
Lottie took the leash out of Buttercup’s mouth and handed it to Mom.
“At the age of fifteen, anyway, I had rings under my eyes for entirely different reasons,” said Mom, still following her own train of thought. She looked at the dog leash in surprise. “No, not what you may be thinking. I was sitting up at night writing poetry. I was unhappily in love.”
“Poor you. What was his name?” asked Mia.
“Whose name?”
“The name of the boy you were writing poetry about when you were fifteen and unhappily in love.”
“Oh, there were so many of them.” Mom made a throwaway gesture, and Buttercup took the chance to retrieve her dog leash. “At that age you fall in love with someone else every three weeks.”
“Maybe you did,” said Mia. “Liv and I aren’t so susceptible. Right, Livvy? We’re not hormone-driven dimwits with brains made of pink candy floss.”
I wasn’t so sure of that any longer. I feared I was thinking about Henry and the way he looked or smiled too often … but, okay, I was still far from being a hormone-driven dimwit with a pink-candy-floss brain. There was no reason to be that way either. When Henry had passed me in school yesterday morning, all he’d said was a friendly “Hi, cheese girl,” and nothing, absolutely nothing, about him had shown that we’d been holding hands in a dream. My sound human reason told me the same thing, but there was still that funny feeling in the pit of my stomach, and I simply couldn’t ignore it. That was another reason why I’d begun my series of nocturnal experiments: one way or another, those dreams were driving me nuts.
TIME OF DAY: 4 a.m.
GRAYSON’S SWEATER: on
MEMORY OF A DREAM: No. Oh God, I feel so tired. Stupid experiment.
MEMORY OF GREEN DOOR IN THE DREAM: no
DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE DREAM: —
TIME OF DAY: 5 a.m.
GRAYSON’S SWEATER: on
MEMORY OF A DREAM: yes
MEMORY OF GREEN DOOR IN THE DREAM: yes
DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE DREAM:
I’m lying in a hammock in a beautiful garden, under cherry trees in blossom, surrounded by high brick walls. I see the green door in one of the walls, and I know I ought to go through it so as to carry on with my empirical investigation. But my eyelids are so heavy, and the hammock is so comfortable, and the buzzing of the bees makes me all sleepy … wonderful … Grrr!!! The darn alarm clock goes off.
TIME OF DAY: 6 a.m.
GRAYSON’S SWEATER: on
MEMORY OF A DREAM: yes
MEMORY OF GREEN DOOR IN THE DREAM: yes
DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE DREAM:
Right, so I may be tired to death. Guess I fell asleep only about a minute before the alarm went off, so only a short dream. Slipped through green door in corridor, went over to Grayson’s door, quick chat with Freddy, went through Grayson’s door, landed in a classroom. Grayson’s English class, every bit as boring as the real thing, horribly realistic. Was woken before anything interesting could happen.
So what did that mean? Except that I’d been propping my eyes open for two nights running just to check exactly when I had gone through what door in my dreams? I felt like tearing my hair out.
“Woof.” Buttercup was standing in front of me, her leash in her mouth, her head to one side. Clever dog—fresh air was exactly what I needed at this moment. I closed my ring-bound notebook and stood up.
“I’ll take Butter out for a little walk,” I offered. “Then you can get dressed in peace.”
“Mind you don’t get lost again,” said Lottie anxiously, and Mom backed her up. “Make sure you’re here on the dot.”
Their warning against getting lost, unfortunately, had more sense in it than you might think, because here in London, my usually reliable internal navigation system had let me down badly several times. It wasn’t just that the streets in this part of town all looked to me just like each other, with their old-fashioned rows of brick houses, especially in the rain; I was also inclined to go the wrong way when I got off the bus, and I pointed confidently south when I really wanted to go north. Obviously my brain was having difficulty in adjusting to the Northern instead of the Southern Hemisphere.
But with Buttercup beside me, I was sure to find my way back. There was a Labrador retriever somewhere in her gene pool, and they were excellent tracker dogs.
She scampered happily off in the direction of Kenwood Park (or so I hoped, anyway). It was a bright September morning, and a fresh wind blew the hair away from my face and ruffled Buttercup’s coat. We turned into a street called Well Walk. It really lived up to its pleasant name; there was a broad green central strip down the middle of the carriageway, with tall trees and benches, and even two picturesque red telephone boxes looking as if they’d been put there specially for tourists. The houses on the right and left of the road all had beautiful doors that could equally well have turned up in my mysterious corridor.
Slowly, the chaos inside my head was sorting itself out a little. When I looked at the notes I’d made on the last two nights, they did allow me to draw a few general conclusions. First: The green door turned up in every dream sooner or later. It was sometimes quite a while before I actually noticed it, but when I did I also knew that I was dreaming, and then I could decide much of what happened next in the dream for myself. For instance, I could go through the door into the corridor. Second: If I was wearing Grayson’s sweater, I could go through his door, but if I wasn’t wearing it his door was locked. Third: In fact, all the doors along that corridor seemed to be locked. Fourth: I could clearly dream in great detail of people I’d never met in real life. I’d recognized the girl who had been sitting in the stands beside Florence in Grayson’s basketball nightmare the next morning, from a photo in the Tittle-Tattle blog, and only half an hour later I’d seen her in person, standing in the schoolyard. With Grayson. She was Emily Clark, editor of the school magazine reflexx. So she was both Grayson’s girlfriend and his boss, if Secrecy was to be believed. After this discovery, Mia had put Emily at the very top of her list of suspects for people who might be Secrecy. It made sense: first, as editor in chief of the magazine, Emily had access to all kinds of sources and a great deal of information; second, she wrote well; and third, she was very close to Florence and Grayson and was sure to hear all the latest news of the Spencer family.
And last night, Friday night, I had met Anabel Scott, Arthur’s girlfriend (or ex-girlfriend, according to Secrecy), in another dream. Judging by my notes on my dreams, that had been between three and four in the morning, and it had been the most interesting dream of all. The trouble I’d taken was kind of worth it for that dream alone.
Once again, in the dream, I’d been on the aerial cableway with a philosophical Mr. Wu, so I’d been happy to go out of my green doorway into the corridor. After I’d dutifully made small talk with Frightful Freddy and shaken Grayson’s locked door—I wasn’t wearing his sweater—I walked aimlessly along the corridor, looking at the doors and wondering who they belonged to. Matthews’s Moonshine Antiquarian Bookshop (closed) was of course the way into Mom’s dreams, and I could imagine that the door painted sky blue, overgrown with ivy, and decorated with carved owls on the lintel was Mia’s, particularly as it had a pot of forget-me-nots outside it, and they were Mia’s favorite flowers. I passed Henry’s door again too, and when I pushed down the door handle—after all, this was part of my series of experiments—someone spoke behind me.
“He never forgets to lock it,” said a girl’s soft voice.
I spun around, one hand on my racing heart.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you,” said the girl. She was small and delicately built. Golden-blond, wavy hair framed her regular features and flowed over her slender shoulders almost down to her waist.
“You look like Botticelli’s Venus!” I exclaimed.
“Yes, but only when I’m standing around in a seashell with no clothes on.” The girl smiled and offered me her hand. “Hi. I’m Anabel Scott. Are you Henry’s girlfriend?”
“Er … not exactly.” I had to pull myself together if I was going to take my eyes off her. Anabel Scott was one of Secrecy’s favorite subjects for a good gossip, and even I—to be honest—had already felt very curious about her. She was immaculate from head to foot. No wonder Arthur had fallen in love with her. Optically, at least, they were the perfect couple.
I returned her smile, took the hand that she was still holding out, and shook it, which made me feel very odd. But, hey, this was a polite sort of dream. For a moment I wondered what to say next. “Nice to meet you, even if it’s only in a dream”? “Aren’t you studying in Switzerland?” “Are you really lying in bed right now, fast asleep?” And “are the rumors about you and Arthur splitting up right?” Instead I said, “I’m Liv Silver. I’m … er … new here.” In this corridor.
Anabel’s green eyes widened. “Then you’re the girl Arthur was talking about.… The girl who can help us.”
“Help you with what?”
She looked cautiously around, and I wondered what she was expecting. Did she think Frightful Freddy was going to creep up behind us and pinch our bottoms?
“I’m not really supposed to tell you anything about it,” she finally whispered, biting the perfect curve of her lower lip. “But it’s my fault, after all. I got the boys into this situation.”
There are some phrases that have an irresistible effect on me, whether in real life or in a dream. One of them, anyway, was “I’m not really supposed to tell you anything about it.” It came right next to “You’d better keep away from us.”
“You’re right,” I whispered back. “It’s certainly safer for you not to talk about it.”
Anabel hesitated. A tiny frown appeared on her perfect brow.
“Well, I’d better be going,” I said casually. “It was nice getting to know you.”
As I turned to walk away, she started talking nineteen to the dozen. My word, that had been really easy.
“I convinced the boys to do it at Halloween last year. You do understand that, don’t you?” she exclaimed. “It was really meant to be just a game. How was I to guess that…?” Once again she looked anxiously around. “You mustn’t lie to him. He can see right into your soul, and he’s pitiless if you don’t follow his rules.”
Who? What? What on earth are you talking about? Those were only a few of the questions on the tip of my tongue. I started with the first.
“Who?” For the sake of dramatic effect, I leaned forward and spoke in as mysterious a whisper as hers. “Who’s pitiless?”
She shook her head and avoided answering my question. “I do love Arthur—you must believe me. I always thought all that stuff about the one great love of your life was nonsense—until I met Arthur.… It was like a tsunami rolling over us. I knew we were meant for each other, I knew he was the man I’d been waiting for all my life.” She faltered and bit her lip.
Good heavens. You could hardly get more theatrical. Quite apart from the fact that I was always suspicious of anyone baring her heart about her great passion to a total stranger, hadn’t there been something different about it in the Tittle-Tattle blog? Arthur was the one great love of her life? She had to be kidding. How about that ex-boyfriend Tom Something? And wasn’t he dead?
She let out a sigh. “At least, I ought to have known that you can’t lie to him.”
“You mean Arthur?”
Anabel looked at me in surprise. “No! I’m talking about him.” Only now did I notice that the pupils of her eyes were enormous. Her words went wandering down the corridor and were thrown back from the walls as a whispering echo. “I mean the one we conjured up by playing the game.”
I stared at her. “Conjured up? Who did you conjure up?” And why?
Anabel said nothing for a couple of seconds, and then she whispered, “He has many names. Lord of the Winds. Keeper of the Shadows. Demon of the Night.”
The corridor became noticeably darker. A cold draft of air touched my arms, and I felt the little hairs on the back of my neck standing on end. Not so much because of what Anabel was saying as because she was clearly frightened. I could see it in her eyes.
“He is lord over dreams. The Akkadians called him Lilu. In Sumerian his name is Lulila, in Persian mythology he is…”
“Lulila, Lord of the Winds?” The little hairs on the back of my neck lay down in their usual position, and I burst into a fit of the giggles. I really couldn’t help it.
Anabel was staring at me, wide-eyed. “You shouldn’t … No one makes fun of a Demon of the Night.”
“I’m sorry…” I gasped, trying to control myself. “But if he doesn’t want to be laughed at, maybe he ought to give himself a more terrifying name.” Oh, this was useless. Another peal of laughter made its way out of me. “Really, I mean, Lulila! Sounds like something out of a lullaby for Teletubbies.”
The fear in Anabel’s face had given way to incredulous astonishment, along with something else that I couldn’t identify because my vision was blurred by tears of mirth. Lulila, Lord of the Winds … There was no stopping my laughter—it was as if I’d never heard anything funnier in my life.
Anabel seemed to be frozen rigid with horror.
I knew myself that my reaction was totally inappropriate. Particularly as the light in the corridor had turned so atmospherically gloomy and the temperature had distinctly fallen lower. But before I could pull myself together and apologize to Anabel, the alarm clock went off.
And I found myself awake, still laughing.
Even now, out taking Buttercup for a walk, I couldn’t help giggling so loudly that she turned her head and gave me an inquiring glance.
“It’s all right, Butter,” I told her. “Do your business, then we’ll go back, and I’ll give your coat a little brushing.” I looked at the time. “Anyway, you’re going to see your future home today. And your new patchwork family, along with the patchwork family cat. We want you to look cute, so that all of them will love you.”
Buttercup stood still, put her head to one side, and looked so cute that even the most conservative tomcat in the world would take her into his patchwork heart. Even the Pope’s cat, if he happened to have one.
Then she barked at a cyclist so suddenly that he almost collided with a lamppost.
I giggled again. That dog was a real little devil.
Speaking of which, it was quite difficult to bring Lulila up on the Internet (there were any number of children’s-wear stores with that name), but I did finally find a list of Sumerian gods and demons. Lulila, Sumerian demon of the night. Unfortunately that was all. However, I was able to add another point to the scientific evaluation of my dreams on record. Fifth, I was obviously able to dream of things that I couldn’t possibly know.