“Wait behind, Miss Brennan,” he whispered as he refilled her glass of white wine from the bottle of dry red he was carrying, “after all the others have gone.” He winked, then cha-cha-cha’d back to the corner of the room. Honora, speechless, colouring, looked around to see if anyone else had noticed. Ella drifted by.
“L. P. is pissed,” said Ella.
“I know; he’s trying to chat me up.”
“No! What did he say?”
“He wants me to stay behind afterwards.”
“Then we’re in for three-in-a-bed; he asked me to stay, too.”
“What can he want?”
“We’ll probably have to suck his balls.”
“I’m not going to!” cried Honora.
“No, don’t,” said Ella, already regretting the joke. “But he’s a sharp old cookie. He must be up to something.”
Ella knew that Burns had also invited Lee to stay. She had a sneaking suspicion that Brad would also be asked. Indeed, when Burns shepherded out the last of the guests, Brad was still looking very comfortable in a large high-winged armchair, nursing his very own wine bottle. Honora looked deeply relieved.
“Yes, help yourselves to that; I don’t really want the incriminating stuff hanging around here.” Burns was carrying out empty and half-empty wine glasses four in each hand. Then he returned and closed the door behind him. “I did intend,” he said, holding out his glass to Brad, “to keep a clear head, but the road to Hell blah blah.”
“Blah blah.” Brad poured from his bottle, stealing a glance at the others.
“Quite right. Point being, why did I ask you four to stay behind?”
“Because we four are your most lucid dreamers—we’ve got nothing else in common.”
“Too right,” someone else agreed.
“Too right indeed. But the question is are the four of you interested in continuing?”
“Continuing? Continuing how?”
“Yes, Ella, continuing. Carrying on,” said Burns as if he was having to explain an obscure concept or an arcane word, “progressing, doing more, not stopping, going further. Some rather more intensive exercises, under more testing conditions, exploring the true potential of these… talents of yours.”
“Sounds interesting,” said Lee, “but I’d got the idea we’d taken things as far as they could go.”
“Oh, I don’t think that’s the case at all. Remember, it wasn’t until half-way through the seminar program that you discovered your capacity for lucid dreaming.” Lee looked at Ella. “Likewise Ella. Come on, don’t look quite so sheepish. It’s not important; I know your later accounts were genuine enough. What I’m more concerned about is whether you four will stay on over the summer vacation and do some real work.”
“The thing is,” said Brad, swirling wine dregs in a smeary glass, “we don’t all have the luxury of the academic cushion.”
“Pardon?” Burns’s eyebrows were twin Norman arches.
“He means some of us have to spend the summer working,” said Lee.
“I thought of that. And not wanting any of you to suffer the indignity of having to work for a living, I thought of a way of keeping you on as temporary research assistants. At least until the new term begins. Of course I’d want some results out of you; but from what I’ve observed of your academic activities, Brother Cousins, it won’t squeeze out your studies.”
“You mean we’d get paid?”
“A grant?”
“For dreaming?”
“And for writing up your results with a little more rigor than we’ve seen hitherto.”
“What do you get out of it, apart from seeing your name under an article in The Spoonbender’s Gazette?”
“Let’s say, Brad, that I’m easily satisfied.”
“Done,” said Lee.
“Done,” said the others.
“Good,” said Burns, getting out of his chair, “next week we’ll see if we can’t start a program of real dreaming.”
Ella was the last to file out through the hall. The door stood open to admit a wedge of cool night air, and a glimpse of a new moon hanging low over the graveyard opposite. The light played without sympathy on the old academic’s cable-veined forehead as he helped Ella on with her coat.
“By the way,” shaking her hair free of her collar, “how did you know when we, that is Lee and I, started lucid dreaming for real?”
“Oh,” Burns smiled slyly, closing the door to behind her, “I’m a sharp old cookie.”
SEVEN
“How do you mean, ‘meet up’ with each other?”
Term was over, the students had all gone home, summer was delivering its promise. Lee and Ella had abandoned their plans for combing the Mediterranean beaches of the Aegean islands; the plump faces of German and American tourists went unflattered by Honora’s quick pencil sketches; and Brad’s medical tomes lay unstudied on the shelf.
The sash windows of Burns’s lounge were pushed up to admit the sweet summer air. Lee held out a hand for one of Ella’s hand-rolled liquorice-paper cigarettes which he had taken to smoking, and Ella grudgingly passed him the one she had just been about to light for herself. Honora reclined in a heavy armchair, her cotton dress sticking to her moist skin as she fanned herself with an Erich Fromm paperback she had plucked from the professor’s shelves. Brad looked on glumly with his eyebrows raised in the expression of barely tolerant boredom that he had cultivated of late.
“I mean exactly that: arrange a meeting, a rendezvous between the four of you at some pre-arranged location, just as you would in normal waking life.”
“Can it be done?” Ella, not looking up from her tobacco.
“It’s already been done,” Burns said impatiently, “many times, under laboratory conditions.”
“If it’s such a well-trodden path,” said Brad, “why are we bothering to do it?”
Burns, looking tired, rested his head against the wings of his armchair. “I don’t care to continually justify my interests; if you want my rationalizations then you’ll have to earn them. If you do manage to rendezvous in dreamtime”—Burns used the new language, the conspiratorial argot of this small cell of lucid dreamers, dreamside dreamtime dreamwork dreamthought dreamspeak, to reaffirm his membership of the group—“then exchange a phrase, a song or a proverb. Something you can bring back as an objective correlative. Confirmation. Words that will become real things in waking time. That’s all for tonight. Thank you.”
He rose and escorted them to the door.
“Tetchy.” Brad spoke against the background of a pulsating pub jukebox. “Very tetchy.”
“You have that effect on people,” said Ella. “In any case, it’s time to move this thing into a different gear. Let’s agree a rendezvous point, a meeting location which we could head for during dreaming. L. P. says others have done it, so why don’t we give it a serious shot? We all manage to shift locations in dreamtime; let’s agree on a place to meet.”