Dreamers

By Ted Farrar

She was completely unresisting as the huge, calloused hand clamped over her mouth and pulled her head back. The last thing she saw was the devil himself standing over her before the blade slashed a long, smooth arc across her throat with such force it grated across her cervical vertebrae, and everything faded to black.
Wilson Cole is having enough difficulty distinguishing between what’s real and what’s imagined, but he’s inclined to believe the experts when they tell him his Dreamworld is just a figment of his imagination. But his nightmares reach a whole new level after a run-in with the ‘imagined’ Greenspite and the subsequent murder of his closest friend.
To a veteran cop like Alex Gumbold there’s nothing new under the sun, until he meets Wilson Cole and everything he believes is turned on its head. Cole is the common denominator and prime suspect in the Sleep Institute murders, but as the body count rises he discovers how little his 37 years as a policeman have prepared him for the ensuing revelations, as he’s torn between enforcing the law and discovering the truth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ted Farrar
• Release date: Dec 14, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311196842

Ted Farrar

Ted Farrar was born in Leeds, Yorkshire in 1956 but grew up in South Africa. He has travelled widely in Europe, the Middle East and particularly in Africa where his other passion – frogs – often takes him. So far he has discovered and named 16 new species of frogs, and written a number of papers, articles and a book on the subject. Ted’s curiosity for the paranormal stems from a number of supra-natural first-hand experiences including an out-of-body experience, a miraculous healing, and several encounters with UFOs, ‘angels’ and ‘demons’. He is a committed Christian, but you won’t find him in a church as he is an avowed nonconformist. He has a wide range of interests including travel, politics, religion, the paranormal, history and natural history. He has two grown-up daughters and married his partner of 19 years in December 2013.

Book preview

cover.jpgimg1.jpg

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2015 by Ted Farrar

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the author.

Cover design by Jacqueline Abromeit

For Arthur Coleman

R.I.P 2011

PROLOGUE

Killing Amelia had always been the plan, but with opportunities few and far between two years had been a long time to wait. By this one act he hoped he’d wrested his fate from the hands of the gods and put it firmly back in his own, and the feeling was both exhilarating and frightening at the same time. Some might say he’d taken a terrible risk, but he’d done it before and gotten away with it: the police in general were really incredibly stupid. And now Amelia Brennan, nursery school teacher and Sunday school leader, was quite clearly dead and those beautiful green eyes, now rolled up in their sockets, would corrupt, liquefy and ultimately turn to dust. If there was such a thing as universal justice it was right that that body, surely too good for any man, should remain untouched by any, but sod’s law was equally good as an explanation.

He began clearing up, but the thought of Amelia’s body lying there like that made him pause. Her beauty seemed to transcend death, but in a couple of hours there’d be no mistaking it. He memorised the image of that cloud of red hair framing her face, the paleness of her skin and her curves. He’d never dared touch her while she was alive, but why not now? Surely she belonged to him now?

The wrongness of the act was an irresistible compulsion. His heart pounded in his throat like a trapped rabbit as hesitantly he ran his fingers through her hair, touched her still-warm cheek. His fingers stroked her neck and throat, then slid over the swell of her breast under her bra. But there was no heaving intake of breath. Her breast was unresponsive, disgusting, a lump of flesh, the nipple flat and rubbery. He withdrew his hand with a shudder and quickly rearranged her clothing with his fingertips, as though the physical contact would somehow dirty him.

It would be worth concealing his involvement in Amelia’s death. Although logically it didn’t matter if they knew it was him because he’d be dead too, he still desired to maintain his reputation. It was one of those silly games people played – that he was forced to play. Although morality had never been a controlling force in his life he knew how to imitate it, and his earthly legacy was important to those who in years or centuries to come would view him as one of the greatest visionaries that had ever lived. Perhaps even ‘Redeemer’ wasn’t too strong a word, because through his actions death could indeed forever lose its sting. However, this train of thought involved uncomfortable contradictions. He shook his head in irritation and refused to pursue it further.

He remembered the first time, almost a decade ago. There was so much blood then, so much mess. Not his fault: she’d woken from the chloroform and screamed and fought. He asked her very kindly to keep quiet but she screamed even louder, and he lost his patience and grabbed the first heavy object to hand. Luckily she was still alive when he slit her throat, and while the others stood immobile with stupid, shocked expressions, he was on hand to catch enough blood to go around.

He remembered how quickly it congealed around the rim of the glass: vividly he recalled the thick, milky redness of it. He’d retched after one small sip, but he wasn’t alone in this: most of the others had gagged too, even though he noticed they barely touched the liquid to their lips.

In the end it was their loss. It was supposed to have been the start of a more powerful communion and for him that was just what it became, because something mysterious had happened that night. Not during the ceremony – they might just as well have been play-acting, and looking back he was now convinced most of them were – but afterwards when they were tidying up and he was on his knees in the inner sanctum scrubbing away the sticky blood. Abezethibod himself appeared to him in the form of an ornate golden chalice from which sparkling water bubbled up and overflowed onto the floor. Drink me in, Abezethibod had commanded in a voice like thunder, and he had taken the chalice and drained every salty drop.

The vision – for that was what it was – was for him alone; the others said nothing, saw nothing, and so he had said nothing.

Thereafter was a parting of ways and, for him, a realignment of allegiance: as followers of the Ancient Ones they had known each other for many years, but the scales had fallen from his eyes. The others were unwilling to take their convictions seriously and he had little appetite to commune with them again. Besides, most of them quickly left town, keen to escape the association, or the horror, or the guilt, of what they’d done.

For himself, he’d stayed put and grown very rich. Abezethibod gave him power and opened doors, showed him many things and taught him many mysteries, but asked nothing in return. And the greatest mystery he learned was this: that the power of the God of this creation was absolute, and that Lucifer and his fellow-rebels were doomed from the very beginning, from the moment they were cast from heaven, even before man was created. There was no fiery kingdom of lust and debauchery to look forward to for Satan’s followers; the only thing that was guaranteed was darkness and loneliness and ultimate extinction. Only through Abezethibod was there a way to escape this fate.

There was no blood this time, nor was there any ceremony involved. But the first one had been for the Ancients; for Abezethibod. This one was for him, and if he felt the vaguest stirring of regret at taking the life of one so beautiful, so rare, he quickly shrugged it aside as yet another relic Judeo-Christian emotion.

CHAPTER 1: Friday 14 November

Are you ready to do this? Jim asked as he stuck the last of the electrodes on my forehead. I’d attended the Sleep Clinic every Friday as regular as clockwork for almost two years and he still asked me this every time.

Twenty-four hours without sleep works every time, I said. I was shattered. Already I could feel myself sinking into the oblivion of mini-death, the mattress claiming me.

Yes, well I wish you’d not leave it so long. I’m sure if you weren’t so tired we’d get better results, he said.

That was as close to a stern reprimand as I’d ever heard from Jim, a man of august statements and trite ripostes generally belied by a mischievous twinkle in the eye that made it difficult to take his comments seriously. I noticed for the first time how tired he looked, like a man with a lot on his mind.

Yeah... Well you look like you could do to follow your own advice. Anyway, you know how I feel about sleeping, but I like to make a special effort for you.

For the money you mean.

Well, yeah – that too, but mostly ‘cause I’m blown away by your professionalism and conscientiousness.

"Right... Jim stood back and gave me a wry smirk. There you go. You know where I am if you need anything. Sweet dreams, and I’ll wake you at six."

The creak of a floorboard outside the bedroom door resonated with anonymous menace. It could just have been the house settling but it woke me from my doze, and the sickening realisation that I was back in my worst nightmare soon followed.

I’d been there many times before, in that same grubby little bedroom, dimly lit by a bare forty watt bulb seemingly suspended by dusty cobwebs from the smoke-yellow ceiling. Gone were the aseptic white walls and dove grey curtains of the Institute: the wallpaper hung in sad tatters, bloomed with mildew and damp. In an over-stuffed chair in the dim corner beside the door, barely illuminated, sat an enormous, moth-eaten gollywog with an enigmatic white smile sewn onto red felt lips. His good eye stared unseeing in my direction; the other button dangled by a thread on his cheek. The last few times it had been a man-sized white-faced clown with a pointy hat and black stitches for eyes. The gollywog was scary, but the clown was worse.

I got up and threw off the blanket and it disintegrated into dust and fibres.

The darkness outside was like treacle, seeping into the room: where the thick velvet curtains should have been drawn to keep the night at bay, instead each drape was tied into a thick knot along the length of a now-vast series of windows that stretched off into the gloom in both directions. I don’t think it was a fear of the darkness or what might be outside looking in, but whatever they represented, the knots terrified me so much that I was prepared to turn my back on the room’s other terrors to confront this greater horror. I had to undo the knots.

The feel of those great, tight knots instantly shrinking like melting ice between my fingers to tiny, hard, pricking points, impossible to unpick, filled me with despair, and my distress grew exponentially with each failed attempt. Just one – just one – success would have given me hope, might have allowed me to rise above the nightmare; instead, after a few failed attempts I was left a whimpering wreck, almost incapacitated with a sense of my own worthlessness.

A premonition of heightened danger made me turn. Still sitting in its corner, still not moving, but the gollywog was changed, somehow. There was flesh and bone inside that body – a watching eye behind that button. In nightmares you just know such things. It didn’t move, but I knew it could. Knew it would. Overwhelmed with fear to the point where animal instinct takes over I ran for the door as if all the demons of hell were after me, turned the loose, fingerprint-grubbied doorknob and dashed down the stairs as black shadows detached themselves from their hiding places and chased me all the way.

I was in a kitchen from my childhood. It was almost homely in a dilapidated, abandoned sort of way: a stone-flagged kitchen floor, a few red Formica units with a white trim, like, crappy olden days stuff, you know? Blue faded curtains with a pattern of white and orange colanders and mugs hung limply against grimy windows. There was an upright washing machine with a mangle in the corner, and the sink was white-enamelled stoneware, large and oblong and deep, and etched with a million little grey cracks. I used to bathe in one of those when I was little. I kept my eye on the stairs but the shadows didn’t appear. I hadn’t imagined them. I knew they were waiting to ambush me if I should be foolish enough to turn my back.

Stepping through the door into the sitting room, the sense of being in a familiar environment was still with me. There was an old lady knitting in the chair by the fire, a bonnet on her head and little pebbly glasses distorting rheumy eyes. Her hands were a blur of motion, the click of knitting needles an unbroken rattle like hailstones on glass. She was supposed to be my mother. I knew she wasn’t, and the disappointment was thick and bitter. Every instinct told me not to approach her, yet I found myself picking my way to her side through a carnage of half-gnawed human bones, blood and abstract lumps of tissue. I accidentally kicked a severed human foot which rolled wetly across the rug and settled upright in front of the fire.

The old woman reminded me of a character from Little Red Riding Hood and the closer I got the less like my mother – in fact, the more wolf-like – she became. Her snout, jaws and the front of her dress were soaked with blood. She glanced up as if she was expecting me and smiled. She looked better with her mouth shut. Don’t forget to take your lunch this time, she scolded in a motherly way. You know His Lordship likes you to work hard.

Despite my deep unease I reached out and took the proffered sandwich box, the fear that she might suddenly grab my wrist notwithstanding. She didn’t, but the cold, soft, parchment touch of her hand made me shiver involuntarily, almost as if it had sucked life out of me, and I couldn’t stifle a groan of revulsion as I pulled my hand away.

Throw it away, my mind cautioned. Instead, I opened the box. In it were two large, oval, semi-transparent eggs, with something maggot-like with eyes just visible and writhing inside, and the box itself was vaginal, pink and slippery like raw meat, bleeding slightly from the wound of its opening. With a shudder of disgust I threw it away and wiped my hands on my jeans. Knew you couldn’t trust a woman with a tail hanging out of her skirt, dirty bitch. If I’d had any control over my actions at that stage I would’ve made a gun and shot her. As it was I exercised the only freedom my nightmare would permit and shouted You could’ve cooked ’em, you old cow!

She raised her eyes from her knitting and smiled. Come and give your old mother a kiss before you go, she said as if she hadn’t heard me, and presented her cheek.

Instinctively I knew that if I did, it would be the last thing I ever did. I backed away towards the door, and the room, the chair and the old woman telescoped into the distance, she spotlit briefly in a sea of blackness and still knitting furiously before the light blinked out and the darkness swallowed her. I reached for the door handle and stepped out onto a bustling thoroughfare, and the nightmare’s thrall left me.

God dammit! I cursed, hanging my head between my knees as the waves of nausea and horror washed over me hot and cold. Too often the dreams I had at the Institute were preceded by the same nightmare; by comparison, the dream world itself with its darkness and its monsters was a cake-walk. Thankfully most of my sessions at the Institute were dreamless.

My head wasn’t right so I wasn’t ready to manufacture a weapon yet. It’s something to do with re-orientation, and it’s a curse. You have to sharpen your mind and believe in yourself, accepting where you are but knowing where you belong, otherwise you’d be very vulnerable. I reckon there’s a real danger you could lose it altogether and not be able to wake up if you didn’t have a very strong sense of self and place. The thought made me shudder: I hated the place.

As far as dreaming goes, I’ve only been doing it since I got back from Africa. My guess is that it had something to do with whatever cosmic cock-up happened between Johan and me, but that doesn’t explain why I only started dreaming after his death. I mean, if Johan was a Dreamer and I inherited his ‘talent’, surely it would have manifested itself at some point over those long ten years? I did my best to help him adjust, but sadly Johan couldn’t get his head around his transposition to 1978 Leeds and I found him hanging from the banister in the stairwell barely a week later. He’d stuffed a dishcloth in his mouth so he wouldn’t wake me as he choked to death. Anyway I don’t suppose this makes much sense to anybody reading this and I don’t want to dwell on it.

Did I really believe I could travel in my sleep to a strange dark place where I shot goblins dead just for pissing me off? Honestly? Fuck knows. Other people seemed to live such enviably mundane lives. They didn’t even have to strive to make it happen – they just got on with it. But me? Weird things happened, and what with psychiatrists fucking me over and a lack of sleep because of the dreams, I really wasn’t in a good position to say what was real or normal anymore.

Before they referred me to the Sleep Clinic they were all Oh, don’t worry Mr. Cole, we’ll get to the bottom of it, and Don’t worry, we’ll soon get you back into a normal circadian rhythm. They never did. Drugs, hypnotism, psychoanalysis – even ECT: none of it worked. The thing is, when your dreams were like mine you’d do anything to not go to sleep, but they never could seem to grasp that. I just wanted the dreams to stop, and that’s something they were unable to help me with.

My head was all over the place at the time so I can’t remember quite how it happened, but somehow I sort-of drifted away from being a patient and became a paid guinea-pig in Jim’s post-doc project, with regular Friday day sessions. That was stretching the interpretation of my early release conditions and the only reason I got away with it was because Jim personally agreed to act as my Supervisor at my hearing.

Turning my dreams into hard cash was something of an anchor to reality, but no cure: I still got massive highs and monstrous lows, but self-medicating with nicotine and alcohol helped, and if I was psychotic as one or two so-called experts insisted then they could save their ‘I told you so’s until I’m dead. At least the psychiatry was all behind me. Well, apart from the first Tuesday of every month anyway.

Jim? I wasn’t sure what he thought – why I kept dreaming of the same place, and why too often my dreams were preceded by horrific nightmares. He’d strung me along for ages, promising me answers; promising to let me in on his theories, and after two years he’d had plenty of time to come up with a few. I knew he was just doing his job and I liked him more than anyone else I knew, but sometimes I felt he was just messing with my brain. When I got back I resolved that I was gonna drag some answers out of him.

Well, the dizziness soon passed and my mind was sharp again, so I was ready to move. I put my hand to my thigh and drew a lightweight, long-barrelled percussion pistol. A nice-looking weapon, but too noisy. I re-holstered it and when I grabbed it again it was a multi-charged light pistol. Well, that’s what I called it. I suppose really it’s like a laser pistol although I don’t think they’ve been invented yet. I’d made them before and liked the look and feel of them, and the light intensity was adjustable to a large degree without a great reduction in stopping power. Usually when I thought ‘gun’ and reached for my holster I got one of these, but sometimes not. I pointed it at the ground and squeezed the trigger twice, and the soundless pulse of white light and the thud and smell of it burning into the damp earth helped to etch it into my mind.

One of the great advantages of not being too technically-minded was that I could make things that work where a scientist couldn’t, because he had to struggle with the physics of the process. Well, hell – if you’re gonna struggle with the physics of a hand-held laser gun you’re sure as hell gonna have a problem with creating things out of thin air. All I can say about my light pistol is that somehow it condensed and amplified light, batteries were probably involved, and it had a lens instead of a bore. Aw, what the fuck – it worked.

Time was passing and I was ready to move, but first I needed to lay some of my spooks to rest: I was sick and tired of being scared shitless by my nightmares. I never wanted to find out what the creaking noise from the other side of the bedroom door was – never wanted to have to fumble with the knots or see the clown, or look that gollywog in its blank button eye ever again. If anything scared me once, I determined from then on it’d never get the opportunity to do it again.

Although I hadn’t moved from outside the front door I could see straight away that something had changed: in my nightmare it had been a Victorian back-to-back terrace house and the décor inside had been fifties cheap tat, but now from the outside it was a crumbling stone cottage, one of a short terrace of similar buildings. I had to see if the inside had changed too.

It took all my determination to open that door and face my demons again, but I did. The anticlimax – and, let’s be honest, relief – was profound: as I expected the inside didn’t look anything like in my nightmare. The old lady wasn’t there; neither was the hearty fire or the blood. Instead there was a cold hearth and a couple of items of rough, straw-stuffed furniture, a rug woven from cloth scraps, a wood-framed bed against the far wall with a chamber pot shoved underneath and a drop-leaf table with a stained and faded red gingham tablecloth. Where the kitchen door and stairs to the upper rooms had been was now a solid wall.

I walked over to the hearth, just to confirm that the coals were cold. They were – not only cold but old and damp. Behind me a stray breeze played with the open door and whistled briefly through the room, and as the door slowly started to creak shut my boot connected with something soft on the floor. It was a ball of knitting yarn, and for a split second my mind froze. It could have been there for days or weeks but I wasn’t in the mood to speculate, and within two bounds I was at the door before it closed on itself.

My cold sweat was wholly disproportionate to the situation, as probably was my reaction: I blasted one of the chairs several times until it started to blaze, then did the same to the bed, and then the thatch through the ceiling beams. When I shut the door and set off at a good pace up the main street, wisps of smoke were already rising from the roof. My heart was pounding from guilt, although I don’t really know why – I’d done much worse things in the dream world. I hoped the flames wouldn’t spread to any of the other dwellings.

Nearly every dream I had at the Institute started off with the same nightmare, and I always ‘woke up’ outside the same house in the same squalid little village that looked like it belonged in the Dark Ages, a ramshackle accretion of stone and wood at its hub with shanties, tents and traders’ stalls spreading amorphously outwards. The impression from this and other settlements was one of temporariness as though few of the inhabitants expected to be around for very long. Given the random violence that I often witnessed even on my brief excursions, their expectations were probably realistic.

I got the same impression of making-do from the way the goblins went about their business – those that weren’t obviously insane or drunk, that is – seeing first-hand how apathy, violence and industry rubbed shoulders in an edgy, heartless mix. They’d haggle and argue over the meanest provisions, then weapons would be drawn and the blood would fly.

What can I say about the goblins? All of ‘em pasty-skinned, but running a whole gamut of physiologies and intelligences. They lived in mansions, in shanties or amongst the rubbish in the streets. The better-off ones – priests and merchants with retinues of servants, body-guards and monstrous dogs – appeared quite comfortable in the immunity their good fortune brought them and lorded it over the commoners. At the bottom end of the social scale were the outcasts, dwarfish gargoyles that skittered between the darker shadows and survived on animal cunning and whatever flesh they could find. It was no place for kids, but I can’t say that I’ve seen any anyway.

In that hellish place where the sun never rose above the horizon and brightest day was just another shade of night, the corpses were kicked into the gutters or lay where they fell. There was little sympathy for the mutilated and dying as they groaned and bled by the roadside. Woe betide those still alive when the shadows deepened and the streets emptied. That’s when those that dwelt among the shadows grew bold and the vermin came out – goblin and dog and beast and everything in between – and sucked and gnawed the bones clean.

Goblins they may have been but I found it hard to ignore their suffering. Call me a softie if you will, but whenever I came across a particularly hopeless case and circumstances permitted I felt obliged to put him out of his misery.

There was a dwindling stream of traffic on the muddy street, hand carts and pedestrians hurrying to find shelter before dark and a single drover with a donkey-wagon and an anxious whip. The animal was skin and bone, starved of decent grazing in the dormant darkness of unending winter.

I wasn’t going to head into town this time: I’d got into a bit of a scrape the last time and ended up killing half a dozen goblins and had to wake myself up pretty smartly, and I didn’t fancy a repeat of that. Besides, the fire I’d started was already attracting too much attention and a crowd was gathering, and while so far my strange appearance hadn’t attracted anything more than a raised eyebrow from a passing goblin, I wanted it to stay that way. If they did turn on me like the last time I wanted to be away from the madding crowd, in a place where I could control the situation. I set off up the main road in the opposite direction and soon the blaze and the crowd were far behind me.

There were still one or two goblins around and that was more than I cared for, so past the last straggle of houses I took a narrower cart track that branched off over barren fields. It was already too dark to travel in safety, so now that I was unlikely to bump into too many goblins it was safe to magic myself a torch, and I was chuffed to find it was one of those new Maglites – not a cheap and unreliable Chinese job. I could tell from the weight of it that it probably didn’t have any batteries in it, but it didn’t matter because somehow it still worked.

Although the moon was up and the track was easy enough to follow even without a torch, its crown and verges were choked with rangy yellowed weeds, and I’d learned from past experience to keep well away from these, particularly the biting flowers, the bloodsucking, thrashing brambles and the parasitic grass. Especially the grass: I once found a goblin still alive, rooted to the ground with this grass growing out of his mouth, ears and arsehole. I still see him when I close my eyes. Every time I woke up after getting those grass seeds in my legs I’d scratch for days, and the first time I was so worried I even went to the doctor, but of course there was nothing there. Fair enough: I know the plants were no more real than the dream world I created, but I liked to keep my dreams as uneventful as possible and my rule of thumb was, if a plant looked lush and healthy in a land with no sunlight, it’s because it was getting its sustenance from something else.

I remember once, oh, a little while after I started dreaming, when I felt sure I was gonna learn what the place was all about – you know? I was in that contemplative mood after I’d smoked a couple of spliffs and got this profound sense that the answers to all my questions were filed away somewhere in my own grey matter, just a synapse connection away, closer than a hair’s breadth… Then damn me if I didn’t find myself in the dream world: no nightmare – I was just there. As usual it was dark, but not far away and almost hidden from view in a depression in the terrain was a glow that I took to be a fire. As I got closer I did wonder why the firelight didn’t flicker, but when I topped that last rise and looked down I was surprised to find a bunch of kids silently dancing around in the light, with James Stewart in range-worn chaps and a beige Stetson, seated on a log next to a camp fire in their midst. He looked up and gave me his trademark lop-sided grin.

Howdy, stranger! he said in a voice like a creaky basket, Caw-ffee’s hot!

Okay, he looked like James Stewart but I knew it wasn’t really him. I mean, he was middle-aged even when he acted in The Far Country, and the guy in my dream was barely in his forties. In fact his name was on the tip of my tongue – the Sunshine Man – but I didn’t say it because it sounded stupid. I was quite trigger-happy in those days, but the fact that there was something indefinably good about him made me not want to kill him.

He poured me a coffee and it was bitter and gritty, and I wondered at the little oasis they’d managed to find in that dismal place, with its green, lush grass and flowers and – sunshine. As if waking from a drugged stupor I noticed that the light didn’t come from the fire – didn’t come from anything: it was just there, and those kids with their disturbing young-old faces danced and skipped in it tirelessly, like moths in candlelight.

Before I could ask a question the Sunshine Man turned those ageless, sparkly eyes on me. Ya know what they say about them that live by the gun, stranger? It wasn’t a threat – just a statement of fact. I expected him to say more, but he didn’t.

Do you know why I’m here? I asked. It was my dream, and it seemed a reasonable question to ask a dream character that I’d created.

Again the smile. One thing at a time, stranger. Bad things are afoot so I sure hope you’re handy with that thing. Maybe we’ll talk again sometime, he said, but now you need to mosey on home.

Then I woke up and opened my eyes to the late afternoon sunshine, kids laughing and screeching outside and the ever-present traffic noise of Bramley.

That was the closest I ever got to the Sunshine Man although rarely I’d catch a glimpse of his whereabouts in the distance like a sunset or come across a patch of flowers still clinging to survival in the gloom. I guessed there was a point to that meeting – my mind trying to tell me something, maybe – but I never figured out what it could be. I was at home at the time, and somehow I never got ’round to telling Jim about that dream.

The countryside had opened up and the wind keened across a bleak rural landscape silvered by the waxing moon. The feeling of isolation was almost paralysing. I looked up at the stars and picked out the Plough, and from it, the North Star. I imagined myself floating out there in that dreadful icy blackness and reckoned it couldn’t feel much lonelier than I felt now.

When I found myself questioning my sanity it was that night sky with its familiar constellations that convinced me I was in some as yet unrecognised form of dream sleep, rather than on some distant, alien planet – because what other explanation was there? Only in dreams was anything possible: monsters and flesh-eating plants and magic; just because I was able to think and function as if I was awake didn’t mean I wasn’t still dreaming. I only ever discussed my dreams in the most general terms with my psychiatrist, but he once told me the key to curing my problem would be to find out the name of my dream world. He said it would open up a whole bunch of memories that were locked away in some traumatised part of my mind, and confronting and rationalising those memories would probably stop the dreams. Well, if anyone knew what the place was called it would be the Sunshine Man, and since our first meeting he seemed to be steering well clear of me.

The outline of buildings up ahead offered a welcome illusion of civilisation. The track headed that way and soon joined a broad and well-used highway of sorts – I guessed it was the main road out of town again – partly flagged and in places heavily rutted by cart tracks. At the intersection was a cluster of buildings, including what I took to be a church of some sort, a textiles establishment, an inn, a smithy and a stable. There were faint incandescent lights behind many of the curtained windows: the long nights were a time of madness and murder, with the more civilised goblins safely barricaded within their houses. Only the smithy showed any activity: smoke was billowing out of the chimney and I could hear the dull clank of hammering and the regular whooshing of bellows behind closed doors. Outside were several barrels in various stages of completion, and a couple of broken wagon wheels rested against the wall.

Despite the diseased-looking ivy growing fungally over walls and windows alike the inn across the road appeared well-frequented, judging by the moving shadows through the windows.

On the street just beyond the door lay a goblin face down in the mud, dead drunk or maybe just plain dead, while a little wizened goblin, seemingly oblivious to both the cold and his kin laying in the mud, stood beside the door contentedly puffing on a long-stemmed pipe. Only his eyes moved as he followed my progress: I bet he’d never seen a battery-powered torch before. It was such a natural scene that I found myself raising my hand in greeting just as I might’ve done back in Leeds, and I was amazed when he responded in the same fashion. Most of the time in the dream world you might as well be invisible, and but for the fact that goblins actively avoided eye contact you could be forgiven for thinking you were a ghost – it begins to affect you after a while – so if I was ever going to communicate with a goblin this looked like the ideal opportunity.

I turned off my torch so as not to scare the old feller and started across the road, and I almost jumped out of my skin when a posh-looking black carriage clattered by at speed, narrowly missing me. It could have come straight from the set of a Dracula movie, the driver in a top hat whipping furiously at the horses, the passengers a wealthy-looking couple who could have passed for human except for their deathly pallor. Beside the driver sat an enormous hairy creature with a long snout like a dog, but that sat like a person. Its eyes caught mine and remained fixed, its head turning almost 180 degrees to maintain eye contact even when the carriage was far up the road.

When I’d regained my wits and looked again the old goblin was gone.

Ahead of me the road forked at an enormous yew tree, in one direction continuing around a bend and visible farther on as a ghostly streak across more dry-stone-walled fields populated with a few skinny sheep, while the broader, better-used fork vanished over a small wooded rise. A degenerate creature was sitting under the tree where the road forked, filthy and stark naked despite the cold, giggling to herself as she attempted to slice her forearms with a sharp stone. I paused beside her.

Hey! I said, trying to catch her attention, but if she was aware of me at all she didn’t show it. Hey! I said again, louder this time, but there was still no response.

I’d determined to take things easy since the last dream and not get into any scrapes if I could help it – just bide my time long enough to keep Jim happy, observe and keep a low profile – but some residue of pity must’ve surfaced in me and despite my better judgment I got down on my haunches a couple of yards away. I tried to make eye contact but she resolutely refused to look at me, and when I moved to put myself in her line of sight again she flicked her head in the other direction, just like a sullen kid.

She’d stopped giggling and was now muttering to herself, but I could barely hear and couldn’t make out if she was speaking English or just gibberish. She didn’t look up when I got up and passed on. Nor did she when I thought better of it and returned and shot the top of her head off.

The carriage had followed the left-hand fork of the road. That werewolf creature had freaked me out so I took the right fork, passing the last of the cottages as the road crested the rise and made a long descent to the river bottom, crossed a substantial stone bridge over the river then rose up the other bank.

At the bottom of the dip near the bridge a child was playing with a dog in the middle of the road. Or at least I thought they were playing: the dog was snapping at the child’s hand and the child was giggling. As I got closer I discovered they were neither dog nor child. Two pairs of red eyes reflected briefly in my torch beam, before the enormous rat thing snarled and vanished into the undergrowth.

If the child-like creature was a goblin it was the most grotesque one I’d ever seen: what I took to be a long white nightdress was in fact a pulsating, maggot-like rear end, and the creature squirmed and crawled itself towards me with strange mewling cries, its sharp nails clicking on stone. Its face was almost luminous in the moonlight, like nothing I’d ever seen before – small and round with no nose, ears or hair, enormous bug-like eyes and a mouth full of tiny, sharp teeth that it tried to sink into my shin. Revolted, I kicked its head hard enough to hurt my toe and the creature arced through the air like a football, hit the nearest tree trunk with some force and splattered yellow, custard-like matter, but even that didn’t stop it. As it landed in the grass it shook its head, then with a determined look on its little alien face and trailing its guts behind it in the grass it came after me again. I spitted it with a blast from my pistol, and it shuddered and collapsed into a foetid pile of brains and bones and pus. God knows what creature had spawned it, but I doubted she’d miss it.

I’d covered about two miles by now, the last mile constantly uphill. I’d hoped to get some perspective on my surroundings, but the last thing I expected to see as I got to the top and squinted across the black chasm of the next valley was an honest-to-God castle. Perched between the crest of the hill and the valley beyond, its forbidding castellated ramparts and turrets brooded against the smokily luminescent sky. There was an artificial moat, presumably diverted from a local stream, and immediately beyond were the castle walls. There was a large green standard with a one-winged golden dragon embroidered on it above the portcullis.

Despite it now being fully dark, the drawbridge was down and the castle gates open. Standing guard were two of the most intimidating goblins I’d ever seen: armed with lethal-looking metal tridents and dressed in identical leather jerkins and red woollen breeches they stood at least six feet tall, their bodies gleaming pallidly in the moonlight. The fact that they were there at all, presumably following orders, was new to me: I’d not seen much evidence of organisation in the dream world before.

As I approached I expected them to challenge me or attack me, but they stood passively at either side of the entrance with no indication they saw me as any different from the scores of goblins already in the courtyard beyond.

What was going on? There were no high-class goblins here: these were the mangiest wretches you could imagine and utterly out of place with the surroundings – gutter goblins, street goblins, some in rags, most of them naked and many of them missing limbs or otherwise terribly scarred. Normally as twilight faded the countryside would swarm with these critters; tonight for some reason most of them were here at the castle and more and more were coming from all directions, ignoring me, shuffling past the guards and into the courtyard. There was an indefinable air of expectation that even I picked up, and it piqued my curiosity.

In retrospect it was a stupid idea to join them. I’d had it in mind to just nosy around outside and make a quick exit if the guards got curious, but before I knew it I was inside. Now at least I could identify the focus of their attention: a fenced-off section of the courtyard and beyond it what appeared to be a stage, along with various other wooden structures.

I’d never allowed myself to get too close to a street goblin before – there’s no room for complacency because in an instant they can change from prey to predator, their stupid blank expression transformed to one of malevolent intent: when they look you in the eye, you know you’ve got trouble. And now I was surrounded by them. Maybe I was just too complacent because of my pistol, and the fact that I could instantly wake myself up if I felt threatened. Even so I felt distinctly uneasy. I figured I’d make my way back to the wall where the crowd was thinner and I’d feel less vulnerable.

At first they cleared a space around me, passively avoiding me. Some were nakedly scared of me and backed away as I approached so that they bunched up and fell over each other to get out of my way. One held his ground, staring with huge golden eyes like a rabbit caught in the beam of headlights, his mouth dribbling black slime. I stopped in front of him and said You look like shit, and he seemed to come to his senses and with a whimper darted out of my way.

At that moment one of those behind me decided to take a sample bite out of my backside, and it bloody hurt. Without thinking I spun ’round and smacked it across the chops and it got up and slunk off into the crowd licking its lips, with a thoughtful glance I didn’t fancy.

So much for keeping a low profile. I began to appreciate how vulnerable I was. I’d allowed myself to be lulled into a false sense of security because I was armed and they were generally thick and apathetic. Well, individually that was true, but now I was thronged in by the creatures and the touch of their skin against mine revolted me as I found myself being herded along by the sheer flow of goblins to the wooden railings, on the other side of which I could see now was a deep pit bristling with upward-pointing sharpened stakes. Opposite me was a dais, raised to the level of the wooden barrier, decked out with iridescent green velvet decorated with gold braid, with an ornate golden throne that was currently unoccupied.

A few feet away from the dais was a scaffold of bare, rude wood, easily as high as the walls, with a ladder up to a platform like a diving board on the top. Two of those muscular troll-like goblins stood ready beside the ladder, with two more on the top platform.

There was a fanfare of trumpets. From my position I could see only one of the trumpeters high up on the ramparts, dressed in an immaculate gold tunic and looking almost human, but there must’ve been three or four of them. Then the crowds around the dais parted as four muscle-bound trolls dressed in red breeches and leather jerkins mounted the dais carrying a black-lacquered sedan chair, and I was flabbergasted when they put it down and the door opened and a human stepped out.

He looked to be in his sixties, a tall, striking figure with a high forehead, slightly hooked nose and an Abe Lincoln beard, raised even further above the ordinary by the most piercing eyes and fine, dark brows. His cloak was a lustrous bottle green with gold squiggles, the enormous hood with bright orange lining pulled back and reaching halfway down his back. He raised his hand in theatrical salute and there was an animal roar from the crowd. As soon as he took his seat on the throne the trumpets sounded again, and an expectant silence fell over the throng.

So that had to be ‘His Lordship’ – Greenspite (how did I know his name?) – and more proof surely that this was still just a dream: in my nightmare the old crone always told me ‘his lordship’ expected me to work hard, and because it was a nightmare I’d never questioned it, but I’d never understood what she meant until now.

By the light of the flaring, spitting brands mounted everywhere about the courtyard he looked unimaginably healthy and almost luminously pink. Well, I’d never seen another human being in the dream world before – I suppose I must’ve looked the same. I contemplated the likelihood of breaching whatever social protocols existed by introducing myself and saving myself the trouble of evading these bum-biting slimeballs, but figured I’d have to wait until whatever ceremony was about to begin had finished first. Man, he certainly seemed to like his protocols. I was quite uncomfortably aware that Greenspite hadn’t taken his eyes off me since he’d sat down, but that was good, surely, because then he’d probably be the one to initiate introductions.

I didn’t have long to wait. There was another screeching blast on the trumpets, and immediately after there was a commotion in the crowd from the other side of the pit, and a communal intake of breath as they hauled yet another human onto the platform at the base of the scaffold. He was tall and handsome and naked, covered with open wounds like he’d come off worst in a fight with a pack of wolves, and he was so scared he was crying. His ankles were chained together, and his wrists were bound by a thin golden cord that I took from its colour to be some sort of metal – maybe copper or brass. He was obviously Greenspite’s prisoner, and he must’ve pissed him off big time, and now Greenspite was going to make a spectacle of him.

I didn’t like the way this was panning out: what had started out as silly, pretentious, over-the-top theatrics was beginning to make me feel uncomfortable. My hope was that Greenspite would jump out of his seat and laugh and say Gotcha!, then invite us both in for a cold beer, but somehow I knew that wasn’t going to happen.

I was attracting quite a bit of attention myself and was torn over whether to wake up or stick around a bit longer and see what happened, but then Greenspite cleared his throat and began to speak and all eyes turned to him. I wasn’t wrong about him – he was a pompous arsehole with a crisp, precise Highlands accent. The acoustics were good but the goblins were noisy so I missed a lot of what he