In the photo, he was turned to her. My mother’s hands were on her knees and her face was frozen in an expression of wild delight, halfway between shock and laughter, as though he’d deliberately said something outrageous just as the picture was taken.
You can do so much better, you know?
I blinked, then gathered the photographs together and put them back in the box. When I thought of my mother, it was always as a presence—a role, almost—and it was strange to be faced with a truth that should have been obvious: that she had been someone with her own dreams and aspirations, who had felt the same as I had, and who had once had a life that existed entirely outside of her relationship to me.
None of which got me any closer to what I needed to know.
It’s in the house.
I walked out into the hallway and rubbed my forehead. Perhaps there should have been a sense of relief that I hadn’t found anything, but having committed to the enterprise, I felt frustrated. Absence of evidence was not evidence of absence. The fact that I hadn’t found anything didn’t mean there was nothing to find, only that I would never be sure.
The silence was still humming.
Come on, house, I thought. I’m trying here. Meet me halfway.
But of course the house said nothing.
The window here faced out onto the backyard and the face of the Shadows. I stared out for a time, looking at the trees that stretched upward, forming a wall of fractured foliage that seemed to go halfway to the sky.
And then I looked up a little farther. Directly above me, I saw the thin outline of a hatch in the ceiling.
The attic.
The humming in the house intensified a little.
In my mother’s present condition, there was obviously no way she could have gotten up there, but I had no idea when her physical health had started to fail, or how quickly it had deteriorated. And while I didn’t relish the prospect, the attic was the one area of the house I hadn’t searched.
So I reached up and pressed the edge of the hatch.
It lifted a little. There was a faint click, and when I moved my hand down, the hatch came with it. I expected to be showered with dust and cobwebs, but there was nothing. The space above was pitch-black, but I could hear a faint rush of air.
The ladder was built into the edge. I reached up again and rolled it out over the gap, then unfolded it down with a clatter, wedging its feet into the carpet. I’d been up in the attic a few times as a child, but as I climbed now, the metal seemed flimsy and far more insubstantial than I remembered. As I moved up into the darkness by increments, each rung bent precariously beneath my weight.
The air in the attic was musty and cool—full of the smell of old clothes and luggage and dampness. I put my hands on the rough wood of the first beam, then levered myself up. Once I was standing, I stepped forward, teetering slightly, suddenly conscious of height and distance. The hatch behind me looked tiny, and the sunlit hallway down there seemed to be miles below me rather than feet. It felt like I was in a different world from the rest of the house.
I reached out to the right and found the cord for the light.
Click.
“Shit.”
I was surrounded by a flock of bright red birds.
The sight was so overwhelming that I took a step back, my heart leaping, and I almost fell through the hatch. But then the vision around me resolved into what it really was. Not birds at all. Instead, the eaves of the attic were covered with crimson handprints. There were hundreds of them, pressed onto the wood at angles, the red paint overlapping in places, the splayed thumbs and fingers giving an approximation of wings.
They were all the same size. All small enough to be my mother’s. I pictured her coming up here, back when she was still able, flitting across the beams like a ghost, pressing her dripping palms against the eaves. And I noticed a different smell to the air up here, and a different feeling too.
It was like I was standing inside madness.
With my heart beating too rapidly, I looked away from the handprints, toward the far end of the attic. When I saw what was there, the world seemed to freeze.
It’s in the house, Paul.
Because I thought I’d found it.
NINE
BEFORE
A week after the experiment with dream diaries began, I remember heading down the stairs to Room C5b, with James following behind me. He was dragging his heels a little, and I could tell he was nervous.
“You okay?”
“Yeah.”
It was obvious he wasn’t. Even if he didn’t want to admit it, I could guess the most likely reason why. That lunchtime, we were supposed to be going over our efforts with the dream diaries, and it was clear from James’s anxious manner that he was worried about disappointing Charlie. The realization brought a pang of irritation. It shouldn’t have mattered to him so much.
“The whole thing’s fucking stupid,” I said.
“Did it work for you?”
“Who cares?”
The thing was, it had worked for me—at least to an extent. Each morning that week, I’d had increasing success recalling my dreams from the night before, and last night I’d had a dream I recognized. I hadn’t been in the dark market, but somewhere roughly equivalent: a cramped, maze-like place where I was lost, unable to find my way out, with the sensation of being hunted by something.
The fear from the dream had lingered upon waking. But there had also been a thrill of recognition. It felt as though I’d been given a strange kind of insight into myself: a glance at the cogs turning below the surface of my mind.
Charlie had been right.
Not that I would admit it to him, of course.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “None of this matters.”
When we walked into the room, Charlie was in his usual seat at the far end. Billy was sitting in one of the comfier chairs nearby, holding an old year planner, presumably repurposed for the experiment. When James got his diary out, I saw it was just a bunch of sheets of paper, folded in half and stapled at the crease. Charlie’s dream diary was on the table in front of him. It was a black notebook, exactly the same as the ones I used for my stories and the one I had started to use to record my own dreams. For some reason, this made it feel as though there were some kind of unspoken battle going on between the two of us.
“Okay,” Charlie said. “Who wants to start? James?”
James shuffled awkwardly in his seat.
Jesus, I thought. Pull yourself together, mate. I didn’t know whether I wanted to reassure him or shake him. But it turned out I didn’t need to worry about doing either, because there was no way Billy was going to let James steal his rightful position as Charlie’s second-in-command.
“I had a lucid dream.” Billy smiled, pleased with himself. “It really worked—it was just like you said. One night, I dreamed I was in my dad’s workshop, and then I dreamed the same thing the night after. And that time, it was like a switch flicked or something. I totally woke up in my dream. It was amazing. I used the nose trick and everything.”
“What’s the nose trick?” I said.
“We’ll come to that.” Charlie didn’t look at me. “Billy, I’m so pleased.”
Billy beamed quietly.
“How long did you dream lucidly for?” Charlie said.
“Not long. I woke up almost straightaway. It was the shock of it.”