Amidst the shale of Holmstowe Strand
Long stood a tower dark and grand.
Raised not to warn the ships of shore,
But men of that which wakes no more.

The first trick was falling asleep, but Zoe had always been rather good at that. Day or night, at home or at school: if there was warmth in the air and somewhere to rest her head, sleep had never wandered far beyond her grasp.

The second trick was waking up. Not an easy feat for any teenager, but manageable all the same. The transition from the foggy realm of dreams to the awareness of reality was, at the very least, a well-practised ordeal.

It was the third trick that Zoe had so far failed to master.

The third trick, after cracking the other two, was to remain asleep. To wake up without truly waking up. To disentangle the return to consciousness and the rousing of the body that eighteen years had taught her were inseparably conjoined events.

It was something so simple, and yet, all the same, so maddeningly contradictory that it could only have been impossible. But she was persistent. Determined. There was something behind that veil of dream-fog that she needed to find, and if it took achieving the impossible to get there, then that was exactly what she planned to do.

She just had to focus.

‘Zoe!’ The familiar tenor voice was followed by a short series of raps on the bedroom door.

‘What?’ Zoe called back, frowning in annoyance as she glanced down at the history homework on her desk and tried to remember what she’d been thinking about before the interruption. It felt… important…

The door opened, and a boy in his late teens leaned inside from the hallway.

‘Dad called,’ he said, scratching at the side of his unruly mop of golden hair, ‘he’s not gonna make it home on time, so you need to walk Scout before tea.’

‘Why?’ Zoe asked, fiddling with the ring on her right middle finger, ‘are your legs broken? You do it. I’m busy.’

‘Nuh-uh,’ the boy replied, ‘I walked him yesterday.’

The feeling of the warm metal between her fingers made Zoe stop and take stock. Yesterday… What had happened yesterday…? More to the point, what had happened today?

‘I… don’t remember…’ she muttered, glancing back down to her homework and frowning at the mathematics textbook that she could have sworn had just been for history. She didn’t take mathematics.

‘Kit…?’ she asked, taking a second to calm herself as her heart rate spiked. Equal parts excitement and apprehension.

‘Hm?’ the boy responded.

‘You’re not… real, are you,’ she stated.

‘Rude,’ her brother replied, shaking his head, ‘but no. Of course not. Just make sure you walk Scout, or Dad’s gonna be mad.’

‘Right…’ Zoe nodded, carefully getting to her feet and putting all of her effort into focusing. Her thumb and ring finger pinched periodically at the ring between them. An unsteady anchor: don’t forget, and don’t wake up.

‘One thing before I go, though,’ she added, stepping across the room to the door and opening it a little wider so she could see Kit more fully. Her brother was shorter than her by a few inches, younger by a year, and was wearing a comfy pullover hoodie and silt-stained jogging bottoms. She pulled him into a hug.

‘Uhhh…’ Kit mumbled, tentatively patting his sister’s shoulder, ‘okay…?’ She gave the boy a firm squeeze before letting him go and gently pushing him back out into the hallway.

‘See you soon,’ she told the boy, giving him a sad half-smile, closing the door, and taking another moment to steady herself.

Okay, she thought, going by what she’d read, all she had to do was visualise where she needed to be. Shouldn’t be hard, right?

She eyed the now-closed door with determination. Supposedly she should just be able to close her eyes and go there, but, somehow, she didn’t trust that she wouldn’t forget. Closing her eyes felt dangerous, like she’d lose her already tentative grip on that flimsy anchor to awareness she’d worked so hard to achieve.

No, the door would offer a more stable method of travel. Doors led places, after all. The concept was practically archetypal. Extremely easy to accept. She only had to forget where she was, just for a moment, and a door could lead to anywhere.

Zoe took a deep breath and did her best to clear her mind, heart still hammering softly in her chest as she let the room around her fall away and the door in front of her fill her awareness. This wasn’t her bedroom door. It didn’t lead to the landing. When she opened it, she wouldn’t see her brother standing there watching her with a sceptical gaze.

No, it was just a door. And this door led to…

She reached forward and turned the handle, wilfully ignoring every preconception as light spilled into the room and she stepped outside into the cold, springtime air of Holmstowe’s seaside promenade.

Salt and decay filled her lungs as the door behind her clicked shut, and she glanced back to see that she had just stepped out from the Mariner Café. She swallowed dryly at the undeniable proof that none of this was real, and took another moment to steady herself, clinging heavily onto the ring on her finger.

Once she was ready, she cast her eyes about the familiar promenade before her. A road before another pavement, and then a set of stairs leading down to the beach. Shale around the narrow tidal strip that led out to the tiny island with the ruins of the old lighthouse, and then coarse sand and rock pools on either side to the far reaches of the cove.

Zoe squinted up at the sun, hidden behind clouds in the hazy grey sky. Damn it, she needed it to be night… From what she’d read, that seemed like the sort of thing she should be able to control, but it wasn’t like she’d had much practice.

Deciding she’d have to work it out as she went, she took her first step away from the café and made to cross the road. She’d stick to her original plan: the tide was low, and Drey Island had a good, wide view of Holmstowe as a whole.

She descended the stairs, trying not to get too caught up in marvelling over just how real the metal of the handrail felt against her palm, or how uncannily the weathered stone of the steps curved beneath her feet.

Rough sand crunched under the soles of her shoes as she trudged her way over to the tidal bridge. Even more so than usual, carving a path through the uneven sand felt like walking through treacle. There was a moment when panic almost overtook her as she realised her destination wasn’t getting any closer for her efforts, but she stopped to calm herself before focusing on where she wanted to be and carrying on.

Whatever happened, she couldn’t panic. Panic would wake her up, and all of this would end up just another failure. A highly informative failure, perhaps, but a failure nonetheless.

Soon enough, she felt shale crunching under her, and she breathed a sigh of relief as she followed the raised path out to the island.

Kit… the real Kit… had described a tower. Something tall and imposing that didn’t fit in the small, sleepy old fishing town of Holmstowe. Something that only showed up at night, under the light of the moon.

If Zoe could locate where in the town Kit’s tower appeared, then, at the very least, tonight’s attempt would be a step in the right direction. Of course, she couldn’t rule out that some tower or other would just show up because she expected one to, but if she’d started out with no faith at all, then she never would have come this far in the first place.

Shale gave way to rock, and then to the overgrown, hardy tufts of grass that clung to Drey Island like limpets to the hull of a boat. Finally, coarse, stony dirt. By the time Zoe reached the ruins of the old lighthouse, it was starting to spit with rain. How long had that taken her…? It felt impossible to tell either way. For all she knew, her time here was already running short.

Turning back to the mainland, she cast her gaze across the shore. Holmstowe looked… wrong. Slightly too big. Too many buildings. Whole areas of town that didn’t feel like they’d always been there.

But no tower. Nothing so obvious and out of place as Kit had described.

Zoe squinted up at the concealed sun again. Damn it. She should have visualised the promenade at night when she’d walked through that door. She glanced around her for inspiration amongst the ruins. There weren’t any doors nearby, and she was hardly experienced enough to force her will on the world without a prop to aid her.

She looked down at the rain-slick grass, watching as the sunlight glistened from the blades as they swayed in the wind.

The door had just been a trick, she thought. A way to fool her mind into accepting what it was she wanted it to do. All she really needed to do was trick it again. She narrowed her eyes and concentrated on the grass.

That wasn’t sunlight, she thought, blocking out all the distracting sensory information flooding in from around her and focusing solely on the dancing blades. She let the idea play through her mind, leaving it to sit and ferment until she really believed it.

‘Moon sure is bright tonight…’ she muttered, once more glancing up and seeing that the promenade was now dotted with the warm orange glow of streetlamps. Lights twinkled from a thousand windows across Holmstowe as misaligned stars peeked out from between the clouds that veiled the dark sky above in a daunting, silvery shroud.

Suppressing her excitement, Zoe pinched at the ring between her fingers and squinted out across the now moonlit town. Still no tower.

‘Goddamnit Kit…’ she grumbled, tutting to herself as the disappointment washed over her like the first wave of an encroaching tide. Of course there wasn’t any mysterious tower that only showed up in dreams on a moonlit night. She couldn’t fault herself for being desperate, but in hindsight it was still a stupid thing to have believed.

She turned to let her frustration out through a kick against the fallen stonework of the lighthouse ruins, but instead found herself staggering back in surprise as a vast silhouette loomed rapidly into her view.

The lighthouse was no longer just a weathered foundation and a small field of scattered stones. It was tall. Proud. Dark against the moonlit sky. It had been a ruin for a hundred years before she’d been born, but there it stood, a great stone tower, entirely out of place and built to a strange, almost Gothic architectural style that didn’t fit anything else in town.

Zoe swallowed in anticipation. Kit’s tower. She’d been stood in front of it the whole time.

An imposing, salt-stained oaken door stood ominously before her, and, for the first time since coming here, Zoe realised she wasn’t anxious or excited… she was… afraid.

The sky darkened behind her as the dream warped around her emotional state, but Zoe swallowed the lump in her throat and took a step forward. She had to know, after all. She hadn’t expected to come this far all in one go, but… this had always been the point, right?

She reached a hand out and wrapped it around the cold, wrought iron handle, leaning her full weight back away from the heavy wood of the door and forcing it to shudder open to the sound of a protesting hinge.

The base of the tower flooded with moonlight. Carved stone stairs spiralled against the inner walls of the lighthouse, and Zoe felt her stomach lurch as she saw that the steps didn’t lead upwards as she’d expected, but down. Leaning forward as she felt her heart rate climb, she traced the spiral deeper and deeper until the steps faded away into a dread and nauseating black impossibly far below.

‘You shouldn’t be here.’

The voice was dry, male, and entirely too close to her ear. Already on-edge, Zoe couldn’t help but cry out as she felt a firm hand clasp down on her shoulder. She twisted around in a fright so sudden and instinctive that the very world around her flinched away in response.

Her body jolted and her eyes opened, and all that was left of the dream was a fading afterimage of spiralling stairs against the battered wood of an old school desk in the orange light of the afternoon sun.