The Nightmare Sonata III

Disaster: they are both asleep. The one the brakes of the other, and neither can apply themselves: cannot yank the handle, stamp on the floor. Anticipating a grim resolution to the torture of fifteen minutes here and fifteen minutes there, the rain pushes against the windows and through the hole in the ceiling with renewed vigour. Their luck has run out: in five minutes' time they would both be mad.

There is a cry outside, not enough to wake them. As if picking up the smell on the air some fool shouts, victory! Another victim, and Another---but the shout doesn't break the spell. Dampened by the rain the voice swallows itself, and perhaps its owner goes back to smashing up a shop, or tearing into some packaged food in a vacuum of sanity filled up by hunger and fear.

The steps, the fields, the sunshine, the reunion. Like two television sets side by side they receive the first symptoms of the nightmare that trapped them both. Gladly he runs, gladly she is scooped up by her father. She remembers what his coat smelled like again, the rough tweed against her skin and she tries to hug him closer this time, knows any minute now he'll reluctantly move her to arm's length and look into her eyes and say that he's running towards the cottage, flying almost. The sun sits on the nape of his neck like a benediction or a warm hand---

---A drop of rain has travelled all the way to the end of Luke's nose. As his head nods it wobbles, gains weight and then falls. Inside his head he is falling, tripping somehow towards the inside of the cottage, waiting to hear the sounds upstairs. He knows something is wrong. Somehow he's colder, in the land of Nod. Where is his guardian angel, he thinks dreamily, and then immediately wonders why: even in his sleep he knows the dream by heart and this isn't in it. Why is it different?

Who is in the billiard room, she thinks. A pop-star? If it's a tutor, where's her suitor? Why isn't he here, she wonders; because he is looking at the rough farmhouse table, smelling the mould again, listening to the tick of a mantlepiece clock in vain. Although he is in this house again and again, it is always abandoned, never a foot across its threshold, and he is lonelier here than he has ever been before, treading softly across the tiles and waiting for the sound to lead him upstairs. His curiosity lies in wait, is snared by a shuffling as the doors loom before her, judging and finding a lack.

Luke's head nods further forward and begins to loll towards Jessica's, resting on his shoulder and oblivious to the rain and motion. It isn't going to stop this time, he thinks, and it isn't going to stop, she thinks, both their hearts crashing like an orchestra as the steps pass him by floating upwards, and the doors open in front of her---

---his head rests against hers---

and at the top of the stairs, not behind him, not behind him is a man all in black but he's looking away at someone else, a young lady, and behind her multiple murderer is someone else, who leaps and he leaps on this intruder. Who rustled for so long in the attics of his head and kept him awake. Who plotted in the comfort of her ancestral home and spread a black stain over her eyes. This man drops his knife and raises his hands to Luke's arms (wrapped round his head) and she picks up the knife, and it is Jessica's hand, Jessica's, that plunges the knife through black cloth stretched tight over ribs, between ribs, deeper, into the heart, and Luke feels him struggle and stop---

With a start they leap apart. He breathes. So does she, gulping the air that wanted to wring itself of rain all the way into her lungs. Not dead in their dreams, not unsound in their heads. They sit for a while, drawing in breath and wondering at the miracle they dreamt up together. Their heads are now no longer touching but the secret still shared: if not the why, then the how....

"Shit", he gasps. "That's it."