EVEN FROM A DISTANCE, I could see Henry outside the green door, discussing something with Lottie, who was standing in the doorway and apparently didn’t want to let him in. She had her hands on her hips and was wearing her best dirndl, the one with the black taffeta apron.
“The presence of the gods?” asked Henry.
Lottie shook her head. “Very pretty, but no. Not so elegiac. Right, what’s not certain?”
Henry sighed. “Is it something by Goethe?”
“No.” Lottie put her head to one side and plucked flirtatiously at the enormous taffeta bow at her waist. “Neither Goethe nor Schiller.”
“You’re only supposed to ask the question, Lottie, not give him hints,” I told her. Henry spun around to me. “There you are at last,” he said.
“Oh, but I like talking to him,” said Lottie. “Such a polite boy.” She beamed at me. “And he comes here every night. That sly lizard doorknob bit his finger, so it needed treatment, and we made friends.”
“Yes, that really is a malicious touch to your barriers,” Henry told me. “Since when do lizards have teeth?”
“Since they’ve had to keep unauthorized visitors out of my dreams,” I replied. “It’s a vampire lizard. A killer vampire lizard. And obviously a more reliable doorkeeper than my au pair.”
“Did you know that Henry likes baking?” Lottie gave Henry a smile full of maternal pride. “He was very interested in my all-the-year-round vanilla crescents, and in return he gave me the recipe for making his walnut cake. And he asked if I could dance waltzes and whether I would teach him how. Wasn’t that sweet?”
For a second I was left speechless. Now was the moment to raise my eyebrows and dart scornful looks at Henry.
He awkwardly scratched his nose. “The things one will do to solve a riddle,” he murmured.
“Don’t give up, young man. You must think of literature less, or let’s say of folklore more,” said Lottie encouragingly. “Go on, then, try again. What’s not certain?”
Indignantly, I gasped for breath. “You’re not the real Lottie, you’re only a dream Lottie, and I appointed you my doorkeeper. If you don’t do your job properly, I’m going to fire you and appoint Mr. Wu. He not only knows the tiger’s claw technique, he won’t be taken in so easily. Walnut cake! Huh!”
Lottie was offended. “I thought I’d brought you up to show more courtesy and respect,” she said. “Do you want to come in? It’s rather drafty out here.”
“No, I’ll stay outside for a while. Close the door,” I told her sternly. “And don’t let anyone in, understand?”
“The gratitude of the Germans?” Henry asked quickly before Lottie could go in and shut the door.
Regretfully, she shook her head. “Think more along folklore lines, I told you.”
“Lottie!”
“All right! See you soon, Henry.” Very slowly, and with many sighs of protest, she closed the door.
“The gratitude of the Germans?” I repeated, when we were finally alone.
Henry waved that away. “I found it on the Internet in some manifesto or other. Churchill was saying that the ingratitude of the Germans was certain.”
“So you turned it on its head to say that the gratitude of the Germans was not certain?” I giggled. “Imagine thinking that up. But what does it have to do with Hans?”
“Oh, hell, this is a really difficult puzzle. I’ve looked up ‘Hans’ and ‘not certain’ hundreds of times on search engines, but … oh!” Something seemed to have occurred to him, because his eyes began to shine.
“What?”
“But I didn’t look it up in German!” He slapped his forehead with his hand. “To think that didn’t strike me before!”
“So what are you going to do now? Wake up and turn on your computer? Or take your dream cell phone out of your pocket and look it up here and now?” I laughed, and Henry laughed as well.
“You’re in a good mood for someone who’s just joined the club of lost souls,” he commented.
“And you’re pretty pessimistic if you’ve given yourself up as a lost soul,” I retorted. “Although…” Suddenly I remembered exactly what I had just heard from Anabel, and my laughter died away. “Did you know Anabel’s ex-boyfriend Tom?”
“Tom Holland? Yes, of course. He was one class above me. Why?”
“Well, because…” Because Arthur hated him, and now he’s dead. No, I couldn’t possibly say that. Unable to make up my mind, I bit my lower lip.
“Why don’t we go somewhere more comfortable?” Henry gave me an inquiring glance. “For instance, through this green door?”
“Nice try,” I said.
“Then at least let’s go for a little walk.” Henry smiled and held out his hand. I hesitated for only a second before putting my own hand into it. It was simply too nice a feeling for me to resist.
We slowly strolled down the corridor. As we came to the corner down which I had turned with Anabel recently, I asked, “What do you think will happen when the last seal is broken?”
Henry shrugged his shoulders. “You heard it for yourself today: the Lord of Shadows will break his chains, rise from the blood that has been shed, and show his gratitude to those who have kept faith with him.”
When was I supposed to have heard that, then?
“That part seems to have escaped me,” I said.
“Oh, yes, you don’t know any Latin. At least, cruor means blood—but unlike sanguis, it means blood shed by violence.…”
“Don’t you think that could be just metaphorical? Like the breaking-his-chains bit—I mean—what was that?” I’d heard a sound like the quiet squeal of a door hinge.
“No idea,” said Henry, letting go of my hand and looking over my shoulder. “But maybe we’d better go somewhere we can talk undisturbed. To your place, for instance.”
I turned around. Doors as far as the eye could see. But I couldn’t see movement anywhere. So why did I suddenly feel I was under observation all the same?
“Come along!” Henry took my arm, a little too roughly, I thought, and led me on in the direction of our own doors. Normally I’d have protested, but right now I was very ready to follow him.
“There isn’t anyone else here, is there?”
“You can never tell,” he replied, and for the first time since I’d known him, his voice sounded a little grim. “If you have enough imagination and you can concentrate well, then you can take any shape you like in a dream.”
“I know.” After all, I’d been a barn owl. My imagination was strong enough; it was just my powers of concentration that left something to be desired. But all the same, the corridor was entirely empty.
The only question was why, in that case, Henry kept quickening his pace. And why was he whispering? That didn’t exactly do anything to reassure me.
He looked over his shoulder once more. “If you’re good enough at it, you can turn into someone else, or into a tiger, a gnat, a ceiling light, a tree, a breath of air.… For example, I could look just like Henry while I was really someone completely different.”
Oh God. That was really the worst possible thing he could say to make me feel better. As we walked along I looked closely at him, examining the contours of his face, the gray eyes with their thick eyelashes, the straight nose, the delicate curve of his lips, the way they crinkled at the corners.
No, this was Henry sure enough.
“Shh.” He stopped.
I had heard it too. A kind of rustling. Like a curtain being drawn aside. I clung to Henry’s arm. There it was again. Yes, it sounded like fabric. Or as if someone was taking a deep breath through clenched teeth. Difficult to say where it came from. But never mind that, it was far too close anyway.
Henry kept leading me on, and I was very glad of that, because my knees were threatening to give way. That was typical: whenever someone was pursuing me in a dream, my knees tended to fail me. And the ground underfoot was suddenly like sand or deep snow, and I could move only in slow motion. I hated dreams like that.
That curious rustling sound again. What was that Henry had said just now about a breath of air? Could you be pursued by a breath of air—a rustling breath of air? With teeth?
“Don’t you think it’s somehow darker than before, Henry?”
Henry didn’t answer. We’d reached our own doors again, but he didn’t stop. He led me a little farther on, to a wooden door painted pink with flowers in many different colors all over it. Even the doorknob was shaped like a flower.
“And it’s colder, too.” I realized that I was beginning to sound a little hysterical. “Or am I just imagining it? Please say I’m just imagining it.”
“I can do better than that: you’re just dreaming all this.” Henry ran his fingers over a yellow flower. It looked as if he were tickling it; at least, I heard a giggle. The bolt of the door shot back, and Henry pushed the door handle down.
I hesitated for a moment.
“Come on. You’ll like it here.” Henry drew me through the doorway, and the door latched softly after us, shutting out the corridor and whatever might be in it.
I sighed with relief. But my relief lasted only about a second.
Something damp plopped into my face, and I let out a small shriek of alarm.
Then I saw the soap bubbles. Hundreds of them! They were hovering in the air over a grass-covered, hilly landscape, with the bluest sky I’d ever seen above it. All the colors here were as intense as if someone had turned the color regulator of the TV set up to maximum. There were flowers everywhere, the leaves of the trees weren’t just green, but sometimes yellow and pink, and in the distance I could see the towers of a palace. Golden towers.
Only a few yards away a carousel was going around to the soft music-box tune of the Disney song “It’s a Small World.” A fair-haired little girl was riding one of the brightly painted carousel horses, smiling to herself as she went around and around in circles. In spite of my shriek of alarm, she didn’t seem to have noticed us.
“Where are we, in the Land of Oz?” I asked, wiping the dampness left by the soap bubble off my cheek. “But how come Shaun the Sheep is grazing over there? And look—a balloon tree!”
“I said you’d like it.” Henry laughed. “Welcome to Amy’s pink world of dreams. Isn’t it wonderful?” He steered me away from the carousel into the shade of a tall apple tree bearing both blossoms and red-cheeked apples. And a few oranges as well, I noticed.
“Who’s Amy?”
“My little sister.” He pointed proudly to the carousel. “She’s four, and she has the most relaxing dreams in the world, as you can see. I sometimes come here when it all gets too much for me, or I have a feeling that the world is a bad place. It’s always in order here, anyway. Nothing at all happens. Have an apple?”
I shook my head. “You can’t taste things in a dream.”
“That depends on your powers of imagination.” Henry grinned. “But I’m not much good at tasting and smelling in dreams either,” he admitted. Suddenly he bent down and buried his nose in my hair. “Which is a pity, really.”
I felt the blood rise to my face and sighed. “What was that thing outside?”
“Nothing good, presumably.” Shrugging his shoulders, he sat down on a soft cushion of moss under the tree.
“And how was I able to get through that door? I don’t know your sister, and I don’t have anything personal belonging to her.”
“What a good thing you were with me, then.” A large soap bubble settled on Henry’s hair without bursting. “Or you might still be wandering around out there, desperately shaking doorknobs and getting scared.”
“Don’t laugh. It was really creepy.” I sat down beside Henry and wrapped my arms around my knees. “Do you think it’s waiting for us outside the door? And if it is, how are we going to get home?”
“Who says we have to go out through the door again? We can simply stay here until we’re awake.”
The soap bubble was still there.
“There is just one moon and one golden sun,” sang Amy up on her carousel. “And a smile means friendship to everyone.”
“She’s really sweet,” I said.
“You’re really sweet too,” said Henry, with his eyes turned to my face. “Sometimes I can hardly believe just how sweet.”
My heat began beating faster. And not very steadily.
“Even when I first saw you, at the airport with your cheese, I thought you were sweet.”
Oh great, now I was finding it difficult to breathe steadily too. And when he leaned forward to me, I stopped breathing entirely. The idea that had just come into my head dissolved into its separate parts. Something about airports … Zurich … wasn’t Anabel’s school very close to Zurich? And … my God, Henry had lovely eyes. If he was going to kiss me now … maybe first I should … My hand went out quickly, and I touched the soap bubble on his hair with my forefinger.
His eyes widened in surprise.
“Sorry, but it looked funny, like a fruit dish upended on your head,” I murmured, and sighed with disappointment as he sat up straight again. As if he’d never been going to kiss me.
And maybe he hadn’t.
Also, what was it I’d just been thinking? It had been important in some way.
I heard hoofbeats behind us, and the next moment two ponies galloped past, one of them brown and white, the other pure white. At the sight of their flowing manes, Amy broke into peals of laughter as wholeheartedly as only small children can.
My breathing calmed down a little, but scraps of ideas were still whirling wildly around in my head. Suddenly it was all too much for me. All these secrets—there seemed to be more and more of them every day. Dreams that eluded any kind of logic. Henry, who turned my brain into pink candy floss as soon as he came close to me. Anabel and her strange confession. Arthur, who looked like an angel but also, for some reason, frightened me. And that … something outside in the corridor.
I rubbed my eyes. All at once I felt terribly tired, even though I was already asleep.
“Is everything all right?” asked Henry.
I took a deep breath. Then I instinctively reached for one of those scraps of ideas whirling through my head and dragged it into the light of day.
“Tom Holland,” I said. “Is it true that Arthur hated him?”
Henry raised an eyebrow. “That’s what I call an elegant way of changing the subject,” he said. “Hated? I don’t know that I’d go as far as that. But he couldn’t stand him, that’s true enough. To be honest, Tom wasn’t exactly a sympathetic soul himself, more of an arrogant bastard. Arthur was jealous of him because he’d been in a relationship with Anabel before him. Tom used that fact to provoke Arthur whenever he could. Once they had such a violent fight that, when we intervened to separate them, Grayson got a black eye. When it comes to Anabel, Arthur’s not entirely responsible for his own actions. He genuinely idolizes her.”
“Hmm,” I said. “Still? Anabel has told me how she … er … broke the rules of the game. Do you think he’s forgiven her? For being unfaithful to him, I mean.”
Frowning, Henry looked at me. “Liv—Arthur is one of my best friends. I’m not going to discuss him with you, certainly not when something so intimate’s involved. And by the way, where did you meet Anabel?”
No, no, no—no counterquestions! I’d asked my question first. And I was very glad that, for a change, I could think clearly again. “But … don’t you think it’s strange that Tom Holland is dead?” I persisted.
Henry looked away. “Apparently the truck driver was drunk. That’s terrible, but these things do happen.”
“I know. But couldn’t it be a fact that Arthur’s dearest wish was granted when that car accident happened?”
His hesitation told me that this idea was not by any means new to him. Then he slowly shook his head, “Arthur couldn’t stand Tom, that’s true enough, but actually wishing him dead—no. That wouldn’t be like Arthur.”
At that moment there was a loud noise, and a shrill female voice drowned out the music-box tune of the carousel. “Which of you damn kids left those damn Lego bricks lying around here?”
I looked around for whoever had said that, or rather shouted it. But there was no one in sight.
“Do you want me to break my neck? That would suit your father nicely!” bawled the voice. It seemed to come from all sides at once. “Then he’d be rid of me forever—he could live happily ever after with that floozy of his!”
The carousel had stopped going round, and Amy was no longer looking serene, but rather worried.
“What’s…?” I began, but when I turned to Henry I saw that he had disappeared. I jumped up. Where the hell was he? Not a trace of him anywhere.
“Henry? Henry?” I cried, with panic rising in me. “Please come back! This isn’t funny!”
But there was no sign of him.
“Go away! Just bloody leave me alone to lie here and die!” shouted the woman’s voice, and Amy gave a start where she was sitting on the carousel. “No one’s going to miss me anyway. No one!”
And then, as if someone had turned off the electricity, all around me went dark. The ground gave way under my feet, and I fell into the depths.