Dinah

The Dreamworld

After dinner, Dinah follows him through the cavity of the castle. She pulls the duck feathers from her hair. They fall like confetti in the corridor, the ornate candle holders are gone, but the gloom remains. Slips of brown paper find their way into her pocket. When Dinah empties them, they are still there. The Dream Devil is intent on keeping her there, for reasons she knows not.

“Forget about the feathers,” he reminds her. “It's all an illusion.”

“No, I don't believe that”, she says back, picking feathers from her tongue. Their voices are two dimensional and hollow, absorbed by the rotten cherries under their feet, peaches slashed open to reveal their black cores. The feathers are everywhere. All around the black glass pulsates like the hidden cavity of a whale, dark and deep.

With every step Dinah and Alden take, they creep closer. They…but who? Pine needles crunch under their feet and the mist breathes like a slow deliberate sigh.

“It's like Mercy Lane, the abandoned house,” she whispers. “It’s time I told you something”, she adds. She stops and to her disgust sinks further into the feathers. “You know I'm determined right?” It comes out as a whisper. He gives her a strange look.

“Dinah, that's the reason why you're here.” Alden makes a turn to the right and opens a door. Just by their feet, a casket girl lies on the path.

“How did you know she would be here?”

“I know the castle better than you know the number of fingers on your hand. There are corpses on the loose. This one,” he gestures to the one by his feet, “is Sofia, Josie's cousin.” The Dream Devil sighs. Josie; ruthless, calculating, a force to be reckoned with. Now, her beloved cousin is dead.

Dinah peers round the courtyard, a quaint French style garden with trimmed hedges and frost like icing on the grass under a wet cloud of mist. The birds are chirping and not too far away; there is the trickling of a fountain. It is a perfect English morning. But it isn't morning, and they aren't in England. An ant scurries along the brickwork.

“You have to do something! How is it possible…they are real, beautiful girls, but they change into old, frail, corpses...?”

“Dinah, once out of their casket, they cannot survive. Nature will catch up, take its course. Is that morbid curiosity I hear in your voice? But when you have the secret of living in dreams, you find loopholes, ways to bend it to your will. You see, the caskets are woven with the power of the jade, it is this which keeps them alive, for now. Sadly, the jade is lost.”

“How did you transport them? They’re centuries old.”

“The transportation part is but a nuance. I was able to do so, and now, I have preserved them, as they wished.”

“A nuance? That’s the most important bit! It defies everything…”

“Science? Rational thought? When have your lucid dreams ever followed rules Dinah?” He says, nodding her back towards the castle where it is dusk; and there are no ants to distract her. “You have much to learn my dear if your powers here are to grow.”

‘I don’t want my powers to grow,’ she thinks sullenly to herself. ‘I want to go home.’

There is a scrape by the garden wall, high on the rooftops.  Josie Carmichael has Marian Mayworth on the edge of the roof. Marian, sweet Marian; so eager to please and the first to repent of her sins. Her old woman scream ripples the air. It is something tragic. Marian begs her to stop. But Josie doesn't stop. She makes sure he is watching; and with one swift movement, snaps her neck. Marian's body falls; a broken puppet.

She is dead before she hits the concrete.

The silence that follows is palpable.

“She blames me, oh of course, she thinks it’s my fault. But if she thinks murdering Marian will hurt me-”

“Let me out. Why won’t you let me go? I’ll be missed if I don’t wake up soon.” Dinah finds herself appealing. “Please…I don’t want to die here.” Sweet girl, she had been warned, Marian and herself, they had shared a solidarity. Fearful of the Dream Devil, whose lack of empathy and callousness was clear even now. He sneered up at the parapet, chuckling.

“Not until you realise your potential. Not until you learn not to fight me.” Alden hands her a toffee apple. The sugar is an opalescent brown, a memory of the fairground. “They came to me for help, the diseased, dying, they begged me to save them. Should I have turned them away? I need your help Dinah. Together, we can rebuild this world...”

She can resist. Decline his invite. Or she can give herself up willingly to the darkness that surrounds her with the breath of the night.