Rather than brave the unwelcoming streets with Dean, he ate the hotel stew again. The same lumpy casserole as before. The meat was tough for fish, odd lumps in places, the gravy waxy and thick. He would kill for a good old burger and chips, but didn’t really care. He thought only of seeing the conference out, enjoying the party, then getting home to Skye. Even the party now seemed like a chore. Skye had been right, it was grown adults trying to recapture lost childhood and it was sad. The hotel had used the company’s products to decorate in preparation and it all struck him as garish and tacky.
He promised himself he wouldn’t drink again, but Dean returned and bought the first round and anything seemed better than sobriety at that point. By around ten o’clock he was warmly inebriated, relaxing, when Darya appeared beside him.
“I’m sorry I left without saying goodbye. You were sleeping. You were… very deep.”
Howard licked suddenly dry lips. “I didn’t expect…”
“You didn’t expect me back? I had to work, but I came as soon as I finished.” She raised a glass, clinked it against his. He opened his mouth to speak, to say something about Skye, about his life, but she silenced him with cold lips over his. Her briny tongue caressed his and dizziness swept through him. Over her shoulder he saw Dean entwined with another woman, similar looking to Darya. Dean gave a thumbs up, then returned all his attention to his new friend.
Howard tried to glance around the bar. So many other people there, but they were so many blank faces in a sea of weirdness. Only Darya appeared solid. Only she showed any detail for his eye to lock onto. He swallowed hard, wondered if he was more drunk than he had realised. Darya kissed him again, cold and salty, and it inflamed every fibre of him. She pulled back, handed him another drink. Where had that come from? It tasted strong, at least a double measure. With an internal sob of frustration he swallowed it down and let his mind swim.
Darya pulled him by the hand, led him to his room, where they repeated the night before, faster, harder, better than ever. As he frantically kissed along her neck, thrusting powerfully, his lips passed over a row of thin striations. He leaned back to look and saw three almost imperceptible slits in the skin at the side of her throat that quickly closed together as though they had never been. Darya pulled his face down between her breasts, bucking up into him desperately.
Howard dreamed again of the serpentine temple, the tall, rangy priests exhorting the congregation with complicated signs. As he stared, he began to somehow understand the gestures, He is ready to rise and He has slept for long enough.
Something in the broken, truncated messages caused rills of terror to flood through Howard and he felt the intense pressure of his held breath. He wanted to breathe deeply and join the huddled masses and simultaneously wanted to run far away, to Skye, and feel the genuine warmth of her embrace.
The urge to run won out and he stumbled from the temple, along the softly winding streets. He remembered this ocean was not earthly, but a place in between, a place that flowed within all things. He kicked hard from the street and swam up, keeping only Skye in his mind, and found himself swimming over their shared bedroom, so far away. She slept there, alone in the bed, one arm thrown across where he should have been. Across her pillow was the shirt he had been wearing the day before he left, looking rumpled and unwashed. She must have it there for the scent of him. His heart ached.
He gasped, ice water rushed through him, and he woke.
Darya was gone.
The mood in the dining room was sombre, faces dark. It took a moment to find out why, but Howard soon discovered there had been a tragedy. Dean Stringer was dead.
“What happened?” Howard asked of Sarah Cheeseman, taking a spare seat at the table she shared with two others.
“Drowned,” Sarah told him.
“What?”
“But found in his bed!” Gary Clarke said, shaking his head.
“Drowned in his bed?”
Gary barked a laugh. “According to the authorities I overheard talking to the boss, he fell in the harbour and drowned late last night. A local carried him to bed, not realising he was dead, thinking he was just drunk.”
Howard frowned. “Who does that?”
Gary shrugged. “No idea. But you can’t actually drown in your bed, can you!”
“Geoff Day was here a moment before you arrived,” Sarah said. “Despite the horrible event, we’re to see through the conference and party.”
“It’s what Dean would have wanted, according to Day,” Gary said, his face bleak.
Howard mechanically forked wet, thin scrambled eggs into his mouth, not really tasting them.
Howard wanted to go home, but it was October 31, last day of the conference and Halloween. It was a long drive, he was prepared to make his excuses and leave, but Geoff Day opened proceedings with a request that everyone honour Dean Stringer by sticking together, considering the Day & Gohn Inc. family had meant so much to Dean. Had it really? Howard wondered. Haunted faces filled the auditorium, all wearing a mask of determination. He would look like a dick if he ran out now.
“Call me superstitious if you will,” Day said in a strong voice, “but this Halloween sees a planetary conjunction that occurs only once every few hundred years. And it’s happening on our day, on Halloween! That’s why we’re here, in this place, at this time. We’ll see our numbers grow!”
Day went on to announce the year’s best performers and Howard gasped when he was named again as Regional Sales Manager of the Year. Confused by the applause and faces that still bore shock under a veneer of celebration, he went to the stage, accepted his plaque and bonus cheque. How could he have outperformed everyone despite his crumbling life? Was his competition here that weak? He needed more from life than everything represented by this award. And he knew there was so much more to be experienced.
During lunch he called Skye and said how much he missed her, and he wasn’t lying. But something else had occurred to him and he knew it would appeal to her esoteric mindset.
“I’m going to swim the sea of dreams tonight and come to you,” he said, huddled for privacy in a corner under the polished stairs.
She laughed. “That right?”
“I’m serious. This place has been giving me crazy dreams. Last night I swam to you and watched you sleeping.”
“That’s a little creepy, love.”
“No, it was beautiful.”
“It sounds like a nice dream,” she said, amending her opinion.
He took a deep breath, ready to test his theory. “You’re sleeping with my blue shirt on your pillow.”
Her gasp at the other end was quickly suppressed, then a moment of silence.
“Skye?”
“How could you know that?”
“I think it’s wonderful.”
“But how could you know?”
“I told you, I’ve been dreaming, deeper than you could imagine. I’ll come tonight, in your dreams, and we’ll swim together.”
Skye laughed again, but there was an edge of nervousness to it. “You’re kinda freaking me out, but okay. I’ll look forward to that.”
The conference wrapped and when they emerged from the meeting rooms back into the bar, it was dressed up like a funfair haunted house. Cobwebs everywhere, bats and pumpkins and witches on broomsticks swung from every available point. Among the regular Halloween décor were bizarre chitinous creatures, like plastic parodies of lobsters and crabs with uncannily articulated limbs, set as if they crept across every surface, hunting for something.