“You don’t have anything to feel guilty about,” she said.
“Yeah, I do.”
I looked at her, and a different memory came back to me. The first lucid dream I ever had happened a couple of weeks after Charlie and James appeared to have shared their first dream. It had started out as one of the recurring ones I kept having about the dark market—wandering along narrow aisles as something huge and dangerous hunted me—but this time had been different.
I’ve been here before, I thought.
I recognize this.
I had pinched the sides of my nose shut and tried to breathe. There were various ways to test whether you were dreaming or not, but Charlie had told us the nose trick was the most reliable. In real life, you wouldn’t be able to breathe, but in a dream you always could. I was met with the startling, impossible sensation of my lungs filling with air.
God, I’d thought. I’m dreaming right now.
I had looked around at the gray stalls, the dimly illuminated crates, the rickety tables and dark, creaking canopies, and they had all seemed completely real. The world had been indistinguishable from the one around me while I was awake, and I had felt a profound sense of wonder. Everything was so intricate that it had been ridiculous to think my brain was capable of constructing something so elaborate.
Show me the way out of here, I thought.
“Paul.”
Jenny’s voice had come immediately from over to my left.
“This way.”
It was Jenny whom my subconscious had conjured up to help me during that first lucid dream. If it hadn’t, things would have turned out very differently.
You don’t have anything to feel guilty about.
“I do,” I said again now.
Jenny frowned at me.
“Is that really how you’ve felt all this time?”
“No,” I said. “That’s a new thing. When I left here, I made the decision to pack it away—to leave it all behind me. Guilty is just how I should have been feeling.”
“God, you should talk to someone.”
“I am.”
“Someone proper, I mean. Someone who can help.”
“Yeah. Maybe.”
“That word again. Like I said, you used to be more decisive.” She sighed and stood up. “I have to go.”
“I know.”
“But seriously. Think about what I said.”
As I watched her walk away to the door, I did. You don’t have anything to feel guilty about. I thought about it over and over, and tried to believe it, but it didn’t feel true.
* * *
Later, I woke suddenly in the middle of the night, unsure what was happening. The bedroom around me was almost pitch-black. I was sure I had been pulled out of a state of deep sleep—jerked awake by something—but I didn’t know what.
I lay there, my heart singing.
The bedroom revealed itself gradually, shadowy shapes emerging slowly, as though stepping forward out of the darkness toward me. My old room. The sight of it brought a disturbing sensation I had become used to in the days since I’d arrived back. I was not where I should be, and yet the room was so familiar that it felt like someplace where I had always been.
THUD.
THUD.
THUD.
I sat up quickly, my heart pounding now.
The sounds had come from downstairs—someone knocking at the front door. Except it had been more rhythmic than that: the noises spaced out, as though it took an effort for whoever was out there to lift their arm. From the weight of the blows, it seemed as though they were trying to hammer the door off its hinges.
I swung my legs out of bed, then scrabbled on the floor beside me. My phone came alive in my hand as I found it; it was just after three o’clock in the morning. Panicking slightly, I pulled on the jeans from last night and padded out onto the upstairs hallway.
Downstairs, the floor by the front door was illuminated by a wedge of weak light from the street outside. I stared down at it for a moment, expecting to hear the noises again and see the door rattle in its frame from the force of the impact.
Nothing.
I hesitated.
You used to be more decisive.
So I headed down carefully, the phone still in my hand. When I reached the front door, I swiped the phone open and flicked on the flashlight option. Bright light filled the hallway, then the beam flickered around as I unhooked the chain and opened the door.
There was nobody outside. The front path was empty and the street beyond was deserted.
The gate was open, though.
Had I left it like that?
I couldn’t remember. I stepped outside, the night air cool on my skin and the stone path rough beneath my bare feet. I shone the flashlight left and right, flecking the overgrown yard with light and shadow. Nobody hiding there. Then I made my way down the path, and through that open gate onto the sidewalk. The street was bathed in a sickly sheen of amber, empty in both directions.
I listened.
The whole town was silent and still.
I closed the gate, and then headed back to the house. As I reached the front door, the beam from the flashlight passed over it.
I froze, my heart beating quickly now.
Then I steadied the light, and my skin began to crawl as I shined the beam over the wood and thought about the knocking I’d just heard.
And as I took in the marks that had been left on the door.
FOURTEEN
BEFORE
After my first lucid dream, there were more and more in the weeks that followed. I never mentioned any of them to Charlie or the others. That was partly because they felt too personal to share, but also, as time passed, I found myself resentful of the way the experiment began taking over our lives.
Charlie had started leading discussions on our findings increasingly often, and it had become clear that, whatever was happening, it was not one of his passing interests. Looking back, I find it hard to remember exactly how it all happened. The idea of sharing dreams was impossible, but they did—or at least, they claimed to. It resembled a kind of arms race. Charlie might read from his dream diary first, say, and then Billy would describe his dream, and there’d be a connection there. Charlie would be pleased, which of course would spur James on to find a connection in his own. Or else James would go first, Charlie would describe a similar dream, and then Billy, not wanting to be left out, would make out that he had experienced something similar. They never showed each other their dream diaries after the first time. Perhaps they didn’t want to puncture the fantasy world they were developing between them.
And increasingly it did feel like the three of them. My reluctance to join in began to open up a division in the group. I kept hoping that my indifference might sway the others, but it didn’t. James, especially, seemed to be falling harder under Charlie’s spell with every passing day.
Which was another thing I resented.
I had the uncomfortable sensation that we were all building toward something. There was a purpose to what Charlie was doing, and while I couldn’t figure out what it was, it made me more and more uneasy.
But as stupid as the whole thing seemed to me, I remember thinking: What harm can it do? Like I’d told James on the day we compared dream diaries for the first time, none of it meant anything. Dreams were just dreams. And so I figured that eventually the whole thing would burn itself out and life would get back to normal.