Dreamside Read Online Free PDF Page A

get Honora to pick up the ball. "So you haven't been
troubled by any of that . . . weird stuff? No repeaters. No flashbacks. None of it?"
    "Not at all." Honora's eyes were too wide open to be telling the truth.
    "Never, over the years?"
    "Not
since what happened at university. For a year or two after that I did have the
occasional nightmare, but that was more of the regular order of bad dreams. If
you want my opinion, I'm glad I can't help you. It's dead and gone, and I'd
like to keep it that way."
    Honora said
all of this too cheerfully, working a fraction too hard at trying to keep it
light. She was smiling at Ella with those delicate features, but now she was
looking like a toy left out in the rain. Yes; there was a
pallor under the skin left by the sleeping pills, Ella could guess that;
but most revealing were the very fine lines, a tiny chain of folds in her skin
which she saw as knives, daggers turned inwards on the subject.
    "And
over the years you've never had any contact with—"
    "None." Honora
cut Ella very short. "I don't even want to think about him, far less talk
about him. Can we pay this bill?"
    Ella sat
back.
    "I
wasn't going to ask you to stay," said Honora with a smile, "but I
can't really not, now can I?"
    "No, you can't really not. We've got a hundred other things to catch up on."
    They
threaded their way through the streets of the town, Honora once again linking
arms with her old friend. Her house was a two-up two-down brick terrace, its
interior painted in bold primary colours. It was almost obsessively tidy,
except in the back room which was cluttered with the unframed canvases and
rolls of cartridge paper which Honora used for painting and drawing.
    "In
the summer I still go into town and paint portraits for American and German
tourists," Honora explained. "And sometimes I get commissions to
paint people's pets. Dreadful!"
    "Stinking!" Ella
agreed brightly.
    One
painting rested on a chair, draped with a chequered tablecloth. "Can I
see?" Ella asked. But Honora ushered her gently out of the room and
switched off the light. Ella suddenly knew exactly what lay under the cloth, as
if she herself had splashed it on the canvas in luminous paint.
    "What
would you like to do while you're here?" Honora asked hurriedly.
    "You
mean apart from talking about dreams?"
    Honora
looked defeated.
    "Why
did you lie to me, Honora? You never used to lie."
    Honora
turned to the window. "All right, the dreams have been back. I don't even
like talking about it. I don't know what's happened, why the
. .. repeaters are frightening me
again. I hadn't experienced them for over ten years. I thought you must have
been doing something, perhaps you and Lee, cooking something up together,
resurrecting the dreaming. I thought you might want to include me in some
scheme or other . . ."
          
"I told you; Lee and I don't want it any more than you do."
         
 "Oh I realize that now. But I just want to black it out, hide
somewhere, not talk about it, not think about it. When
you came I thought: Oh God no, this is why the dreams have been coming back,
leave me out of it."
         
"Do you think us coming together can make things worse?"
        
 "I don't know anything; it just triggers a lot of...
associations."
        
 "The point is, if it's not you or Lee or me ,
then it must be . . ."
          "Yes. I was afraid
of him. My God Ella, what's happening to us?"
          Ella didn't answer.
"We should go out tonight," she said, trying to brighten things.
         "I never go out."
        
"You do this evening. I want Guinness and didley-didley music, and you can
show me where to get it."
         All protests were brushed aside, and
Honora, who an astonished, high-spirited Ella later discovered hadn't been
outside her house socially for two whole years, was dragged out in a state of
excitement and nervous terror mixed. When they left the house it was snowing;
soft, light flakes of snow falling under the