The rest of us were stunned and, to my knowledge, Burst never spoke or moved again.
Unable to leave well enough alone, Leap raided Burst’s notes. The only related items he found were a drawing of the flask setup, a belligerent account of Burst’s emergence from the primordial stew and a scrawled speculation that the carbonised freeze-impression of that event could be found on the crust of a solar satellite. This was years before I saw the Viking Probe photographs of what appeared to be a giant face on the surface of Mars. This face, too, was unmistakably Snapper’s.
BRAINFOLD
‘We all have a cage of bone around our heart,’ said Adrienne. ‘But you take the biscuit. Anyone with enough sense to fill a bird’s ear would tell you this is the spice.’ She was referring to the enfolded sunny glade of pollen and opening century flowers, surrounded by hedge-doors and a vale of entrances and dripping gardens which riddled into mazes so distant in all directions that the landscape streaked into mist. The pearl-blue sky showed no sign of abating. The ground sat still, covered in grass. Blown-out watches lay around like shells of snails. Adrienne was drowsing, gold mothdust in her hair — scratch her surface and you’d glimpse heaven.
As we lay in the blurcolour and the shade of leaves, I thought of mossy graveyards and forgotten patients. ‘You’re not angry at me are you?’
‘Ofcourse not — what an idea. You worry too much.’
‘I worry subject to requirements,’ I said. ‘This world’s about to spring like a steel trap.’
‘No it isn’t,’ she said sleepily. ‘I’ll keep it open…’
She was drifting off. I felt cheated — we had set up a shared dream to be together and now she was falling asleep inside it. Could she have another lucid dream inside this one? How much dreamtime could she cram in this way, like the layers of a Russian doll? I felt excluded, and stood, storming off through an arched topiary door.
Slowing away down a hedgepath of crimson litterleaves, I thought about the moon and how any emotion there had to be imported. I watched corrosive gushes furnacing in the sky and thought of skulls tumbling like popcorn. I thought of unsuccessfully killed fence wood growing again. I thought of the skeletons of angels. I thought of giant bonsai. And that people should dream in many ways or one dream would sterilise the world.
Around a corner was a marble bench with an inscription on the backrest: ‘We live in an infinitely untidy universe.’ I sat down and, finding the seat refreshingly cool in the close heat, I recalled a poem of Adrienne’s:
A beggar sat on a marble bench
And bit off the head of a dead, raw tench;
A bigot sat on a marble bench
And bit off the head of a whippet.
The trees hushed in a breeze. Chuckling fondly, I remembered when I was younger and me and Billy Verlag played with marbles golden as the molecules of lions.
I awoke with a start. I was in the hothouse, on a chair. The glass was blurred with condensation. Infuriated that I’d popped out of the dream — and was now two dream layers away from Adrienne — I bounded up and stormed out. ‘Living myself down to their level,’ I snarled aloud as I crossed the empty courtyard. ‘Hello?’
The house seemed deserted. Some of the windows were open. Everything seemed real enough. The detailing on the walls remained the same when I looked away and back again. I flipped through a book, reading and rereading certain sentences. They never altered, but what did this prove? For some time now I had been accurately transcribing reams of phantom text.
In tutoring me in the lucid arts Adrienne had surprised me by stating that in the last ditch a practitioner may indeed pinch himself to determine whether he is dreaming or awake. I had thought it amusing that we gauge our presence in the world by the ability to suffer. Toying with the idea of using other people’s pain as a gauge I had kneed Snapper in the face during a particularly nightmarish conversation, accomplishing nothing but my own entertainment.
Now here I was in the Hall without even an uncle to strike. I pinched myself on the arm. Felt a twinge which may have been a mere recollection. Sat in the quiet kitchen, I punched myself in the face. Terrible face-ache, some blood, but it seemed such a strange, dreamlike thing to do. I hammered a nail through my hand. I smashed my head through a sheet of glass. I slashed my wrists with a bolt cutter. I smiled my throat with a circular saw. I painted the wall behind me with a level action shotgun. I unravelled my intestines like a bog roll. Sheer agony all of it, but I wasn’t convinced. I sat listlessly sorting a duodenum which gleamed like porcelain. Clearly I should be dead by now, or at least unconscious. Everything was reversed. Emotional pain is the stuff of real life as there’s no blackout point. This was surely a dream. The kitchen resembled an abattoir.
Then Adrienne entered, stared in utter shock, walked unsteadily to the table and sat down as though medicated. ‘Laughing boy,’ she said. ‘Why such a loss of blood?’
A loud explosion went off in what was left of my ears. ‘Are you saying this is real?’ I demanded aghast, shaking a ribbon of gut.
‘Oh, laugher,’ she said mournfully.
‘It’s a shrieking nightmare,’ I gasped, surveying the gore.
‘Yes,’ said Adrienne. ‘You haven’t woken up. You fell asleep inside the dream, like I did — you followed me. This is a replica of the Hall where I go to be alone.’
I saw the full horror of what I’d done. ‘I’m really sorry, Adrienne,’ I said, replacing my spaghetti-like innards. ‘I didn’t mean to intrude. You’re not angry at me are you?’
Adrienne stood, reached over, and slapped me so hard I woke up on the marble bench, the heavy purr of bumble bees thrumming the air. I stood and walked down the hedgelined path to the sunny clearing, where Adrienne stood waiting. She tenderly pushed the fringe from my eyes, then slapped me so hard I awoke in bed.
It was dark, rain was hammering the windows amid low grumbling thunder.
The door opened quietly and Adrienne padded in, squirming in under the covers. ‘It’s cold,’ she said and softly stroked my cheek. ‘Your poor face.’
‘Are we awake now?’
She made the same tilted, listening expression she made when cutting her own hair. ‘Yes,’ she concluded. ‘Let’s not fight again, laughing boy. Look how much time we’ve wasted.’ She showed me the bedside clock. We had been asleep nearly two minutes.
MANDIBLE
New arrivals at the Hall were a cause of excitement and concern and this was never more apparent than the day we were joined by Mr Mandible, who sat in Father’s study like a principled man.
‘You were referred to me by Roger Lang,’ said Father. ‘What can you say to redeem yourself?’
‘I would like a room here.’
‘You and a million others. How old are you Mr Mandible?’
‘Thirty-four.’
‘Correct. Do you heal quickly?’
‘In a flash. Unless the wound is open, as with a triangular chunk-blade.’
‘Or a tubular coral injury,’ suggested Father, ‘sustained off the Hawaiian islands.’
‘Precisely.’
‘I should tell you that the meals here are acutely poisonous.’
‘I intend to grow cress on the mantelpiece and pretend to be happier than I am.’
‘Excellent. This all seems to be in order.’ Father regarded an action shot of Mr Mandible booting a terrier off a cliff. ‘You understand that the ground floor of the west wing is crawling with nuns?’
‘This won’t be a problem.’
‘And that my mother-in-law is made of metamorphic rock.’
‘That, with all due respect, is not my concern.’
‘Well answered.’ Father held out a hand. ‘And welcome aboard sir. I think you’ll find our little nation a fertile chaos of throbbing trash.’