Looking over their shoulder I could see that on the far side of the island a narrow bridge, foot-long lengths of wood strung loosely together with rope, stretched precariously to the next island. I can't help it if that sounds fortuitous, like an escape route from nowhere: that's the way these things work. You have to forget all this detection, follow-the-clues stuff. Remember I said a long time ago that A-Z plans aren't possible, that you have to take what you get when you get it? I knew what I was talking about. I usually do. You would do well to take me a bit more seriously.
The indecision on their faces lasted only a second, but by the time they lunged towards me it was too late. I dodged to the left as a feint, balanced long enough to see the policemen lurch that way, and then slipped round to the right. Constable Perkins skidded right to the edge of the island and stood poised there for a moment, arms pinwheeling. Constable Jenkins reached out and grabbed him, and by the time they were after me again I was halfway across the island, careering towards the bridge.
It looked terribly unsafe, as if held together by chance more than physics, but it was the best I could hope for in the circumstances and I ran onto it, hands loosely circling the guide ropes. The planks pitched and swayed as I pelted across them, and my heart gave a lurch as I felt one of the supporting ropes snap. I covered the last few yards in two large strides, and the moment my foot touched the next island a similar bridge appeared on the other side. I ran towards it, casting a quick glance back. The two policemen were on the bridge now, running after me with nightmarishly small steps, paces which were about nine inches long but so quick that they covered the ground as fast as mine. I slipped on the wet grass of the island and spilled over onto my knees for a moment.
'We'll get you, you bastard!'
I scrambled to my feet again, hearing the squeak of shoes on damp vegetation and feeling a veneer of water on my stinging hands. For a moment I had a sudden, random twist of thought, something about being late. I ran on, concentrating on that thought, soaking it up. I don't have a huge lateness problem, it's never been one of my big neuroses. There was that one time in the hotel room, but that's old news now, old, irrelevant news. The nightmare in the castle was worse than it should have been. The feelings I was getting didn't feel like they were all mine.
I leapt onto the bridge and scampered along it, trying to place my feet near the sides where it should be stronger. The bridge began to sway markedly from side to side, rocking so violently it nearly pitched me off, but I made it to the next island and saw another bridge appear. Seeing that I was still an island ahead of the police, I ran for the other side. Islands stretched out into the distance in front of me, and I wondered how many I was going to have to cross, how many bridges were going to appear.
Suddenly I felt that in the far distance, just beyond the furthest island in the infinite distance, there was a meeting I was supposed to be at. It wasn't my fault I was late. Something bad had happened, something I should have stopped. I shook my head to try to dislodge the feeling, because it wasn't mine. Then I got the merest splinter of a memory, a less than a second glimpse of blonde hair in the sunshine, a little girl's laugh and an iron rocking horse with an odd face and I knew for sure what I had begun to suspect. I was heading in the right direction. Our dreams had intermingled, and I was being cross-patched, mixed up, messed around by dying vestiges of Alkland's dreams, which were lingering on the air like smoke in a hazy room.
As soon as I stepped on the next bridge I knew it was in worse shape than the others. The planks were a mixture of dark, rotten branches and pale dried-out husks. Each careful step was a noise, a wet crump or a twisted crack, and I had to slow down to find a rhythm to carry me over the breaking footsteps. The light, never bright, was failing quickly and the huffing of the red-faced policemen pursued me like a runaway train.
A branch gave out of rhythm and I had to swing to one side to avoid plummeting through the gap it created, then rotate swiftly to the other side as the breaking spread. The policemen, faces glowing with fury in the darkness, were halfway across the island now, getting closer. Another crack beneath my feet and the rhythm was lost, and all I could do was pull myself along the reducing remains of the bridge by my hands, clutching the rope and trying to pull the island closer. I was still yards away when a tall man appeared in front of me, standing at the end of the bridge in a black coat. He was bending down slightly, as if talking to someone only a few feet high. I heard a snatch of huddled conversation and halted a moment too long, not knowing what was me and what wasn't.
'No, please don't.'
'Which one of you first, I wonder?'
'I'll tell.'
'No, you won't, or I'll kill you both.'
The noise of the policemen pounded in my ears and I felt the bridge finally forget the prayer it was held together by. As what had been substance became nothing and left me spinning in the air, I thought I heard the sound of a sneeze.
Everything was blue and out of focus. Not out of focus, exactly, but double-imaged. Hazy light streamed through the windows, but the light was coming from nowhere, and it was not making anything less dark.
I staggered vaguely to my feet, on an arbitrary assumption as to which way was up. Thick mist covered the floor, swirling and climbing of its own volition in a breezeless crypt. My leg gave way temporarily, swinging me round to face a man standing looking at me. For a moment I was sure he was going to have no head, but then I saw that it was only me. The mirror was tall, at least door height and as I stared at it I saw a flicker of movement from behind. I turned and caught a glimpse of someone disappearing round a corner, a tall woman in a white gown tinged blue, a volley of hair and no face, her steps tiny and spastic. I lunged towards the corner but it led into darkness, a dead end of wall. Feeling an unplaceable grief I pushed against the wall, but it would not give.
Turning back I saw that beyond the mirror on the wall was an archway. I lurched towards it and stepped out.
Into a meadow, a rolling blue meadow of high grass with pinpoints of white rounded beneath a blue-black sky. The meadow was beautiful but dead, and no birds sang there. I cut my way into the high grass, reeling and staggering, carving a ragged path out into the dark afternoon.
After a hundred yards I stopped and turned: there was no building behind me. As I stood fighting away dizziness in the heavy air, snow began to fall, huge flakes of perfect white cutting channels down the leaden sky. With the snow came a little more clarity in the air, and I felt together enough to fumble in my pockets and dig out a cigarette. Sometimes I feel like my life is just a way of filling time between lighting the damn things.
As I lit it shakily, shivering a little, I remembered how at first I'd felt bad about smoking in here, throwing down man-made butts onto an earth made of dreams. Then I dropped some coins once, while trying to barter a client's favourite jacket back, and when I looked down at the floor the coins weren't there. They were real coins, City coins, and where they went I have no idea.
After that I didn't think so much about cigarettes or matches: if metal could find no hold here, then surely they wouldn't either. Over the years I came to feel that it didn't matter much, that whatever was dropped passed through the insubstantial ground and fell down into somewhere else. And I couldn't pretend by then that Jeamland hadn't been changed by our presence anyway, that it would ever be the same again.
'No! Please don't!'
'If you make another sound I'll cut your throat open and put spiders in it.'
I turned back to face the way I was going, feeling a pull. The voice floated past, dropped down with the snowflakes, as clear as if the speaker was on my shoulder. But there was no one there. For a second a feeling of utter revulsion ran through me, oiled and slick in the crisp air, a sensation of warm dark terror stirred round with shame. Then the feeling was gone, rolling sickly over itself into the distance, leaving me soiled and dirty, the world's bright lights all pissed on at once. Taking a deep drag on my cigarette, I followed the feeling.
The flakes fell heavily as I walked, feet swishing against the bowing grass. I walked for about an hour, I think, following my instinct, following inaudible sniggers beyond the curtain of tumbling white. I could not be far behind Alkland now. The threads of his dreams were too thick to have been left there long.
I've lost people before in here, and I know how little I have to do to find them. How little, because finding them is not such a good thing, for me. It's not like everything is coming out surprisingly and suspiciously well when I come upon them again, because each bad dream they have becomes a part of me. I can find people, lead people, because I can share their dreams. If that sounds like so much hippy bullshit, then too bad. And if losing people makes me sound incompetent, then you don't know what you're talking about. Next time you dream, try doing anything of your own free will, never mind taking someone with you, never mind reaching into their dreams and pulling out fistfuls until, you get the right one, never mind doing that when guilt is stabbing at you from every corner and all you want to do is just go home again. There's nobody else who can do this, and I do it as well as I can. I didn't ask for this. All I wanted was something different. I found it. And I lost everything else, absolutely everything, apart from what I really wanted to lose.
I came upon a car. It was an old-fashioned model, with generous curves and humps, long dead and covered with nine inches of snow. I walked slowly round it, trying to prise open the feeling of recognition it gave me. Flickers of memory began to darken the air around me, because Memory is very close to Jeamland, and you can get there too if you know how.
I tugged one of the doors and with a wrenching squeal it opened, releasing a smell of old leather out into the snow. There was something else too, a light scent that seemed somehow brown and exciting, and I poked my head into the car, leaning on one of the red leather seats, trying to catch the remembrance.
It came soon enough. This was my grandfather's car, the first and only car I owned. The smell was the smell of cigarettes on cold air, early cigarettes. Youth, and foolishness, and family. I ducked back out of the car quickly, in time to see it fall in upon itself. It had never been there, just a pile of snow and icicles in a chance formation. In falling the snow assumed a shape, the shape of a man sitting as if in a car, the head turned towards me. The face was old and lined, a face I barely remembered. Then the snow slipped and the image dissolved and slid apart.
'Do it!'
'No,' and the sound of desperate, hitching sobs followed by a slap.
I pulled myself away from the pile of snow and stumbled through the drifts as quickly as I could towards the sound.
I found him.
I tripped over him, in fact. When I heard the sound of the cry it was close, and I hurried towards it, even though it was the sound of a little girl and not a grown man. I ran for twenty yards, fifty, my cold breath aching in my lungs, ran as quickly as I could before something else happened and we were ripped apart again. Normally keeping track of people isn't that difficult. But things were different now. Now Jeamland was not itself any more, but structured, reformed, mangled by someone I knew. Someone I thought was dead. No, damn it, someone I knew was dead.
I knew that I had to do everything I could as quickly and well as possible. The time for second chances was running out. Rafe was a bad man when he was alive. Now that he was dead there was no telling what he would be like.
After a hundred yards I was beginning to doubt my intuition and was walking more slowly, turning as I went, peering into the snow falling all around me. Then suddenly I saw a snowdrift that looked like a playground roundabout and ran to it. The snow flicked and swirled and the shape disappeared. My feet caught on something as I backed away from it and I stumbled and almost fell flat on my back. It was a figure curled in a foetal position, heavily dusted with snow and slipping deeper all the time. It was Alkland.
Casting a quick glance around I knelt down by him and touched his shoulder. Cold though my fingers were I could tell that he was colder still.
'Alkland' I said, and jogged his shoulder. He didn't respond. The folds of his jacket were creased hard with ice, and he chimed as I turned him over. One side of his face was burnt, and the other had a long gash on it. The skin was a blotchy dark green, the colour of something that is about to burst. I looked at his palms and saw that they too were green now.
Suddenly I heard something and looked up. There was nothing to be seen, nothing in the few dozen yards of sparkling visibility the snow allowed me. It looked a little like a waterfall, and for a moment I almost smiled, and then I heard the sound again. It was the sound of a sneeze. It was quickly followed by a cough, too quickly for it to have come from the same person.
'Come on, Alkland, it's the sneezing policemen again' I said urgently, shaking him. Time to wake up.'There was no response. I placed my hand over his mouth and squeezed his nostrils together tightly. For a long moment nothing happened and then I thought I felt the tiniest hint of movement from one of his hands.
But he wasn't going to wake up. I wasn't even sure he was going to survive. I heard the sound of another sneeze and knew that I was going to have to do something I swore I'd never do again. It was something I'd done without thinking back in the old days, before I knew the damage it was doing.
I lay down next to Alkland in the snow and wrapped my arms around him, shuddering as his cold seeped into me. I could feel no breath from his face so close to mine, and for a moment I felt despair settle into me. A gurgling laugh in the distance told me this had been picked up and I slammed a lid on it quickly, closed my eyes and kicked my mind, took a sledgehammer to it, pushed a glowing metal spike into it until it hurt enough to give me the strength I needed. It was a long time since I'd tried to do this, and it almost didn't happen. But then I felt a sensation like falling slowly out of bed, and I woke up on my sofa.