Of course it was the town, the dusty ghost town. Ji and I stood in the middle of the deserted square, bathed in the weak afternoon sun. Wind howled through a broken door and tumbleweed strolled listlessly past our feet. The sun glinted off broken panes in the windows of the buildings round the sides, and out of sight beyond the remains of the town was the desert.
'Here again,' said Ji. Here again, after eight years, eight years which had not made either of us any older. Eight years in which we'd changed but stayed the same.
We turned at the sound of a crack but it was only a shutter falling open in the wind and smacking against the wall. If we stayed still, if we just stood there in the middle of the old square, nothing would happen. We had to walk towards it. This was our doing, and we had to do it again.
I looked at Ji and he knew it too. He was not a strong dreamer before someone came to stay in his dreams, but he understands. We could just stand there, feeling young, feeling as if the years had not passed, and the square would stay as it was, trapped in a golden moment. I felt my neck twitch and held it firm, willing myself to keep it together. Ji just stood, knowing he would never understand, never know how this place had been before it all went wrong, never know how it had felt.
It didn't last long. I swallowed and then nodded. We started to walk across the square and Ji looked across at me suddenly and I saw something in his eyes. He had some idea of what he was walking towards, knew something about what was going to happen. It can only have been an intuition, but he reached out and gripped my hand hard for a moment, looking me in the eyes. Then he let go, with the faintest of smiles, and we walked on.
The wind picked up as we walked and the dust began to swirl around our feet, whirling up until we could no longer see the sun, until the sky began to darken with it. We couldn't see the corner of the square we were heading towards any more but that wasn't important, because it was not the corner that mattered. The walk we were on was not in space, would not even all be in Jeamland. The darkness grew and while the whirling dust still dulled the light now it was moonlight shining in the afternoon.
I felt the hair on the back of my neck begin to rise and for one brief, meaningless moment wished we had not moved, that we had just stood in the sun. But we could not have done. Today, finally, it had to all come down, and this time it had to be for good.
The dust flew and spun in front of us and the square was almost gone, just the faintest hint of structure off to the sides. The light came from the dust now, a black and beating red, and all around us soft sounds began to turn. I could feel the tension rising off Ji, and knew that he could not stand this for much longer. He knew some of what was going to happen, and he would not be able to wait. I didn't think he'd have to.
I met Ji after I'd been in The City a couple of years. I'd wandered around, trying to work out what I was going to do, how I was going to use up my life. I was running jobs in Jeamland by then, sorting out the mess I'd helped to create, and through that I met some odd people. I gravitated downwards, you might say.
I didn't have an office with my name on frosted glass, but I might just as well have done. I was a moron. I've always been a moron, but I was at my worst then. I'd found what I wanted and been left high and dry by it, and I had no reserves of character to fall back on. I was just a hurt little boy, wandering round looking for more excuses to feel sorry for myself. If you know someone well you learn to hate them, and I knew myself far too well. I'd looked inside, pulled myself apart and run hunting through the shreds hoping to find something left in there that I could hold onto, and there was nothing. I wasn't there any more. All that was left was memories, and the space between was filled with bitter sludge.
I used to hope to God that I would take some little job, some normal thing, and find myself in a back room one day, out-manned and out-gunned, that I'd feel my face smash apart as someone put me down, not knowing what I was and not caring. That was all I wanted for such a long time, just for someone to hurt me. I used to fantasize about it, about cutting myself or being smashed up. And then I stopped, because I didn't care about anything enough even to hate myself that much.
All I had to make me feel good in those days was what Rafe was doing, because he was the designated bad guy. With him around I could pretend to myself that I was on the right side, could magic up a white charger to ride on. Everybody needs to be a hero in their own life. Everybody needs to be the good guy, however many lies that takes. And the truth is you just do what you want to do, you protect yourself, and you kill the people who try to screw up what you want.
I never said that I was the good guy. There are no good guys.
It was just bad luck for Ji that I was working with him when it all hit crisis point, when Rafe decided to try to tear down the veils. Rafe stirred him up really badly, and so Ji had to be on my side, had to help me if he wanted to live. I saved Ji's life, and he saved mine. And now Rafe wanted them both.
As we walked I heard a car starting in the distance, a dog barking, the sound of a bottle smashing. All meaningless, all just fragments, like the sound of boots on stones. We heard a wet sound and looked to the side. A man with green eyeshadow and blue lipstick was squatting by the remains of a body, chewing, his jaws champing up and down.
'A Something?' asked Ji.
'Yeah, 'I said.' They're gathering.'
Something else scampered by in the darkness just beyond where we could see, and Ji's face twitched.
There was no fucking Dilligenz II, was there?'
'No' I said. There wasn't.'
'Do you think Alkland knew that?'
'No. He was just an innocent bystander with enough pain to work on. He had no idea what was going on. I had no idea. I carried him into Cat, remember. I carried Rafe in. That's why the gate wouldn't open. When Alkland told me about Dilligenz II, there was a question I should have asked him. I should have asked how he found out about it.'
'Why didn't Rafe come out before? I mean if he's been in Alkland for weeks, why didn't he come out and get you immediately?'
'I don't think he has been. I think he went in just long enough to plant the Dilligenz II idea, and to push Alkland out as bait. Then I think he got back in while Alkland was stranded in Jeamland by himself. Why he waited then I don't know. Maybe he wasn't strong enough. Maybe he wanted you and me together. I just don't know, Ji.'
'What happened in the hotel room back there?'
'That was a Something too. It must have been.'
'In The City? How the fuck did it get there?'
'I don't know. Rafe, I guess. That was what he was trying to do last time, remember? Tear down the wall.'
'Where's he now?'
'Ji, I really don't-'
Suddenly everything was noise, a smashing, screaming explosion of sound. The darkness disappeared instantly in a blaze of cruel red light. Hundreds of faces surrounded us, layer on layer in a circle forty yards across, and every face was an identical wide-mouthed scream of recrimination. For a stroboscopic flash of image and sound these faces towered over us in shrieking misery, and then we were in dark silence again. 'Shit' said Ji shakily. I had to agree. We walked on more slowly for a moment, and then the light crashed on again and the screams poured down, louder, more terrible. Then they disappeared. We glanced nervously around us in the darkness and then just as we were about to step forward the light belted on again and this time the shriek was louder still, clubbing down into our skulls like fists of ice. Blood spattered out of Ji's nose and onto the flagstones.
Dark silence snapped down again but we barely had time to move before the faces were back. The stroboscope quickened, crashing on and off, surrounding us with darkness and nightmare, flashing quicker and quicker until it was a perpetual flicker of sound and fury. As the flickers got closer and closer to- each other my own nose went and blood flooded down my shirt and we clamped our hands to our ears even though we knew that would make no difference. Still the stroboscope quickened until it was more light than dark, and as we bent under the weight of noise and pain it became possible to see beyond the ring of faces to see that tall dark towers loomed behind them. The towers were faceless, featureless, and stood in front of a sky that was swirling black, a sky that didn't stay behind the buildings but whirled and ran in front like shadows out of huge corners.
As the flickers got brighter the ring of faces started to glide in towards us and all the light was in them, a sickly red glow strung with threads of sallow yellow. Beyond was murky rich twilight, a twilight that ran with oily colours and spiralled up to join with the sky.
It was Turn, Turn Neighbourhood in a nightmare, and as we staggered and flailed I tried to push Ji down so he wouldn't see.
The circle got smaller and the faces came closer and every set of eyes was one I knew. Zenda's were there, and Shelby's, and my father and mother's, and they flicked from one interchangeable empty face to the other, stretched out of shape by the skin-tearing violence of the shrieks.
Suddenly there was a baby on the floor. It didn't have a lower jaw. Its face was running with brown sores and blood dripped out of its mouth onto the stones as it crawled towards us, leaving stains of falling flesh smeared in its wake.
Ji and I shouted helplessly, ripping shrieks of horror that were almost in time with the flashing of the light. Unthinking, uncontrollable screams, bodies without minds beating out a metronomic beat of helpless terror. The top of the baby's jaw caved in and dropped out as it reached for Ji's hand and he leapt to his feet away from it in a muscle spasm his mind had no part in.
We didn't really know each other was there by then, perceived each other only as a shape that shared this darkness. Ji's eyes flicked unseeingly past mine and up to the sky and his mouth widened in a howl as he saw where he was. He howled again and the tendons in his neck tightened to snapping point as every muscle in his body clamped at once, as his body tried to run in every single direction at the same time. His face whipped past mine again and he had no idea who I was, none at all.
He lurched forward towards the wall of faces and his foot crashed through the baby's back, punched through with his weight. He struck out blindly at the faces and they split on his hands, iridescent muck slipping out from under their smooth skins. Ji charged through the curtain and as he raised his foot again to run the baby went with it, impaled by his leg, caught on his foot. As I fell towards the wall, stumbling to follow Ji, the baby looked at me and gurgled.
'I would have been a daughter, Stark,' it sang thickly. 'I would have been a daughter.'
I swung a kick at it and the head ripped off and split on the wall, and as the mess dripped down it looked like a pattern, a pattern of a cotton dress from long ago.
At first Rafe and I were partners. We were the only people who knew how the thing worked, the only people who could share people's dreams. Jeamland was ours, and we revelled in it, getting to know it, finding out how it worked. It was marvellous, a playground, a summer. We were young again, and we remembered how it felt, basked again in the kind of suns you used to know when tomorrow was just a more exciting version of today, when summers seemed to last for ever.
Until we found our way out of it, we didn't really know what it was, of course. It seemed like a dream world, and worked like one, but we didn't really know. Then Rafe found that we could punch through the wall. It was always Rafe who found out things, apart from the very first time. He led, and I followed, as I always did. When I remember Rafe from those days I remember his back, and the panting of my breath as I tried to keep up with him.
As time went on I spent more of my time in The City. I'd run on wild empty for too long, and I'd burnt myself out. I needed a base, needed some sort of structure. I couldn't get it from home any more, I knew that by then, but I needed it from somewhere. I think that's when Rafe started to go off me, when I turned my back on everything we'd found, when I lost my courage, lost my need for adventure at all costs. And then I met Zenda.
I met Zenda, and I lost her. I never had her, in fact, and it was that which made me realise that I was still the same person inside, that fleeing and finding had not changed me at all.
That hurt me. That hurt me so badly. She was all I had ever wanted and I never reached out and tried to have it, never let her see what I felt, except once.
I suppose she was sad: after a while she stopped standing beside me, stopped wondering if we were supposed to be looking forward together, and she turned to the side and carried on with her life. She got on, moved forward but not away, and left me there standing in the coffin I'd built for myself. To have come all this way and to have stayed in the same place was more than I could take, and when I learnt what Rafe had to tell me, I snapped. All I had done was shred myself up, cut myself off at the roots. There was nothing coming up any more, and all I'd discovered was how long a tree can look strong after it's dead and dried inside.
Rafe, meanwhile, had progressed. He wasn't the same person, hadn't hung around. He'd gone on, changed, like everyone does. Everyone except me, and when I looked at him I found I didn't even know him any more, didn't know the only person in the world who knew who I was.
I don't know what his motivations were then. I didn't see him often enough, and after a while we only ever saw each other in dreams. By then it had all fallen apart and we hated each other so badly that we almost ripped the world apart in our need to kill each other. I swear I thought that I was the one who was in the right, and I still believe it.
But it's so difficult to tell, and when it came right down to it, who was right wasn't the issue. We'd changed Jeamland, and Jeamland had changed us.
I killed Rafe to save Jeamland, to save the memory of childhoods past. I also killed him because I wanted him to be dead. But we were strong dreamers, Rafe and I, and so I didn't kill him at all.