And yet here it still was, in my hands now.
I stared into the black absence of its face.
After giving us the dolls, Charlie had explained what we needed to do. The idea was that if we kept this doll close to us, and focused on it before we went to sleep, it would help the figure to find us in the night. When we were dreaming lucidly, we were to transport ourselves to Room C5b and find each other there, and then Charlie would show us what to do.
It was impossible, of course. I no more believed it could happen now than I had back in the woods, and I realized that the only reason I was entertaining the whole thing was because of James. Turning my back on Charlie would mean losing my best friend. And I was afraid that abandoning James would be placing him in danger.
So I needed to play along.
And how much further could Charlie realistically take this? There was no shared dream world. There was no way our dreams could have a tangible effect on the real world. And there was no Red Hands.
Which meant that nothing would happen.
And tomorrow would be the end of it.
Even so, there was a limit to how far I was prepared to go. Charlie had instructed us to sleep with the doll under our pillow, but that was too horrible an idea to contemplate. I put it in the desk drawer instead. In bed, I turned off the light and lay there for a time, and when I imagined the others in their own beds, I was unnerved by how easy I found it to visualize them. The day had spooked me badly. I rolled onto my side in the darkness, and then repeated the mantras that had become familiar to me now.
I will remember my dreams.
I will wake up in my dreams.
Nothing would happen to Goodbold. James would begin to see through Charlie soon, wake up from the spell he was under, and in a few weeks all this would be forgotten.
What else could happen?
I still had no idea what Charlie was capable of.
* * *
I’m dreaming.
I remember the familiar thrill that came from becoming lucid within a dream.
And I remember the unease that came next.
Because I was standing at the bottom of the stairs in the basement of the school, looking at Room C5b. The door across from me was closed, the meshed window to one side misty and gray. The alarm I felt made the dream blur at the edges and almost woke me up, so I knelt down and used the environment technique, placing my hand against the cold stone floor, rubbing my palm in a circle against the rough stone. The sensation anchored me.
I stood up again.
There’s nothing to be afraid of.
This was a dream, which meant I was in control of it now and there was no need to be scared. I’d been thinking about the events of the day while falling asleep, and so it was perfectly natural that my subconscious had conjured up this place.
But there was no reason for me to stay here. With my back to the stairs, I told myself that when I turned around there would be a door at the top, and when I opened that door it would lead me out onto a beach. It was easier than trying to teleport. In a lucid dream your brain could still cling to the familiar rules of what was possible, and this was a technique I’d used before that had always worked.
I visualized it clearly, and then turned around.
The area above was gray and dead, and—
Clank.
I heard a distant noise. It was like a pipe being struck with a hammer. The sound reverberated and faded. I couldn’t tell where it had come from, and I felt even more uneasy now. I was awake in my dream, but it felt out of my control in some way, as though somebody else were exerting their own influence on it, and they were better at it than I was.
Clank.
The noise again. Louder this time.
I turned around and walked across to the door to Room C5b. The window at the side was gray, but the air beyond looked like it was swirling, the room full of smoke. And there was something else there too, I realized now. A pale shape, close to the glass.
It was a face—or at least the nightmarish approximation of one. It was elongated into an oval, the eyes stretched and distorted into blurry smears, the nose little more than tiny vertical slits, and the mouth a thin black cut. As distorted as it was, though, I recognized James. His eyes widened at the sight of me, and his mouth began working in some alien fashion, forming odd shapes as he attempted to communicate with me across a divide neither of us could cross. He looked like he’d been drowned and left under the water, his image swimming before me on the other side of the window.
Clank.
And then suddenly a much louder noise from behind me. The awful, grinding sound of metal against metal. A screeching and scraping of rusted parts that hadn’t moved in an age snapping free of their inertia.
I turned around slowly.
In the shadows beside the stairs, there was now a faint yellow triangle glowing above the doors to the old elevator. The sound of shrieking metal was coming from there. My heart started pounding so hard in my chest that it seemed impossible for me not to wake up. But I didn’t.
The tone of the grinding noise changed.
Wake up, I told myself.
The metal doors began shuddering open.
I turned back to the room. James was still there, shaking his head from side to side now, his horrified features blurring into a slow-moving smear as he saw whatever it was that had risen out of the depths of the school and stepped out behind me.
Wake up.
I closed my eyes, picturing myself lying in my bed and willing myself to escape back there.
Wake up.
But when I opened my eyes again, the dream seemed even more vivid than before. The room was still right there in front of me, and now I could sense something standing right behind me. The skin of my back was crawling from its presence.
Wake up.
I smelled leaves and turned earth, and heard an awful rasping noise, like somebody breathing badly through a broken throat.
Wake up, wake up, wake up.
Then a wet red hand reached around my face, its rancid fingers closing over my nose and mouth and pinching them shut. I tried to breathe. Nothing came. And as I started to suffocate, I flailed around helplessly in panic.
Now I knew why I couldn’t wake up.
Because this was not a dream.
NINETEEN
NOW
Back in my mother’s house, I locked the doors and then leaned on the kitchen counter, staring out of the window at the Shadows, trying to control my breathing.
Apart from the flies flickering by the fence, the Shadows were completely still.
There was nobody out there now.
And yet I was shaking.
I remembered how, after I’d woken from the nightmare Charlie and his doll had given me years ago, I had done my best to explain it to myself. To rationalize it. Of course I had dreamed about the room in the basement, and about Red Hands. After the intensity of the day before, faced down by Charlie and his slingshot and the collective madness of my friends, it would almost have been strange if I hadn’t.
I tried to do the same now.
The marks on the door could be a prank. And people had every right to go walking in those woods. Perhaps it was a vagrant I’d seen—a man who lived out there because there was nowhere else for him. It wouldn’t be so strange for someone like that to be dressed that way, wrapped in a worn and tattered old coat.
I wanted to believe it.
But while I didn’t like to admit it, I had been scared just now. I could tell myself there had been no point pursuing the man—that the woods were so dense and impenetrable I would likely have lost him quickly—but however true that might be, I knew it was not a calculation I had made at the time.