I stood up and drifted past the building site, and then the tennis courts and the corrugated huts. The dream had added layers of rust to the latter, and positioned them at odd angles in the grass, as though they had been dropped carelessly from the sky.
The bench was a little way along.
Jenny was waiting there for me. She appeared exactly as my mind had created her a few nights earlier: still recognizable as the girl I remembered, but aged to match the years that had passed. Even just sitting down, there was a confidence and poise to her. But her old school bag was at her feet, and there was a notebook open on her lap. The past and the present, superimposed.
Not a line, I thought. A scribble.
And my heart ached to see her.
She closed the notebook and smiled at me. “Hey there, you.”
But both the smile and the greeting seemed slightly more forced than the previous times I’d dreamed her. I remembered walking down here for the first time as a teenager, and how I’d been worried I might be disturbing her. That hadn’t been true then, but I had the strange sensation it was now. That even though this was my dream, and she was only a figment of my imagination, she would rather I wasn’t bothering her.
“Hey there,” I said. “Do you mind?”
“Not if you don’t.”
I sat down beside her on the bench, allowing a little distance between us.
“Are you okay?” I said.
“Honestly?” She looked away. “I’m tired, Paul. I want to go back to sleep.”
The way she phrased it, it was as though she were dreaming me rather than the other way around, and I felt a stab of guilt at conjuring her: an old sensation. Why did we lose touch? Jenny asked me last night. Thinking back on the times I’d dreamed of her after her death, here in Gritten and then at college, the answer was clear: because it had begun to feel like this. Whatever else he had done, Charlie had given me a tool to use, and I had. In a lucid dream, you could do anything, and so I had brought Jenny back to life in an attempt to assuage the pain and the grief I felt. But my subconscious had known, and it had become clear it was time to stop.
I had thought it would be harmless to see her again now. That it would make being back in Gritten, and everything I had to do and face here, easier to bear. And I supposed that, for a time, it did. But I knew it couldn’t last, and that it was time to let her go again now.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“You don’t need to be. I know you miss me.”
“Always.”
“But I should leave. Before I do, though, I wanted to give you two things.”
“What?”
“Do you remember when the police arrived?”
I thought back to that day. The two officers couldn’t question me without one of my parents present, but they asked if they could come in, and of course I said yes. They wouldn’t tell me what had happened to Jenny.
Oh, she’s dead.
The words had echoed in my head, but that had been all they were, and they didn’t seem to relate to anything that could possibly be real. If they were true, then the world should have ended.
And yet the world was carrying on.
“They thought it was me that killed you,” I said.
Jenny smiled. “Of course they did. I was coming to see you, after all. And it’s often the boyfriend, right?”
“Right.”
It had been about half an hour before my mother got home, at which point she insisted on driving me to the police station so I could be interviewed under supervision. I remembered how numb I had felt, and how the officers had forced us to stop at the playground so I could see what I had supposedly done. The way my mother had protected me so fiercely. She knew me. Even without me saying anything, she knew I hadn’t done that.
The whole time, there had been other officers searching our house for evidence that would incriminate me. A weapon, perhaps. Bloodstained clothing. There was nothing for them to find, of course, and it wasn’t long before Billy wandered into the town, his own clothes saturated with blood, carrying his dream diary and the knife he and Charlie had used to murder Jenny.
Jenny smiled at me sadly now.
“You never showed me your town before,” she said. “I was so excited to see you that day that I arrived about half an hour early. And I figured I’d walk around a bit.”
“Why?”
“I wanted to see you in your sauce.”
I closed my eyes at that—at my mother’s phrasing coming from the image of Jenny my sleeping mind was generating—but it was a mistake to close your eyes in a lucid dream. You needed sensation to make the world around you solid. So I opened them again, gripped the rough edge of the bench, and listened to the distant tapping of the drill, trying to anchor myself.
“When I got to the playground,” Jenny continued, “James was gone. He obviously took your warning seriously. But Charlie and Billy were there. They were waiting and they had their plan. They were angry.”
“I don’t need to hear this,” I said.
“Yes, you do. They beckoned to me. I’m not sure why I went over. I guess I was curious what they wanted, after everything you’d told me about them. By the time I saw the knife, it was too late.”
Again, I wanted to close my eyes.
“They held me down and took turns stabbing me,” Jenny said. “It almost didn’t hurt at first, because I couldn’t believe what was happening. I think I was in shock. But then it did. Whichever one wasn’t stabbing me was putting handprints of my blood on the ground. I fought so hard, because I remember realizing I was going to die, and how much I didn’t want to. I wanted to live so very much.” She looked at me sadly. “But I didn’t.”
A total of fifty-seven wounds were recorded on the body, I remembered.
The victim’s head all but severed.
“They stuffed my body under one of the bushes when they were done,” she said. “And then they went off to the woods and took sleeping pills, imagining they were going to escape this world forever. Which is ridiculous, of course.”
“Except that Charlie really disappeared.”
“Nobody disappears, Paul. Nobody is ever really gone.”
I thought about it and nodded.
“The police were right though,” I said. “It really was me who killed you.”
Jenny shook her head.
“Paul, you didn’t know what would happen. That’s the first thing I want to give you. You did your best, which is all any of us can do. You were helping a friend. And you were just a kid. It wasn’t your fault. None of this is.”
She sounded so earnest that a part of me almost believed her.
“I’ve spent so long wishing,” I said.
“Wishing what?”
“That I’d kept walking that day. That I’d said nothing. Because it’s not fair. It should have been James they killed, not you. And it would have been if it hadn’t been for me.”
The underlying sadness of what I’d just said hit me. For years I had blamed myself for what I did. I had wished I hadn’t spoken to James that day, and that things had been different.
What a waste that seemed now. Why had I never wished that Charlie and Billy hadn’t killed anybody that day? Perhaps simply because they had, and so the act had taken on an inevitability: the murder becoming something that couldn’t be avoided, the effects only mitigated and shifted in favor of different people, different lives. But the truth was that there would have been a death on my conscience whatever I’d done.