The two boys do not live here, but they visit often, sometimes together, sometimes alone. The old crofter plays games with them, lets them build dams or scrump for apples or tend to the sick lambs in late winter.
The croft is rude; simple. The recently-plastered stone walls, mid-brown Flotex carpet, are all chosen for practicality, and the boys can remember the old man hosing the floor clean after some messy escapade. The place is cut into two rooms, a kitchen-cum-work-area and a smaller darker sitting room with a cot bed in one corner. The boys have not been told to avoid this room but they do so anyway; it is the crofter’s place.
They are both up there today. It is midmorning, and the sky around the peninsula is dark with low clouds, rain distending their bellies. The air feels pregnant, waiting, and the old man is concerned.
The boys leave their bicycles against the wall of an outbuilding and go in. One is dark-blond, short, with an easy physicality and slightly fey air about him. A changeling, perhaps. The other is dark, saturnine for his age, pausing to think where the other does with innate understanding plugging the gaps in his knowledge.
They are not related by blood, but they are related as boys of that age can be. They never cut their palms and swore blood-brotherhood because there was no point. They knew, and that was all that mattered.
The old man – old but not infirm, strong still – leads them out onto the peninsula to watch the weather. It is warm and dryly humid, electric air, a wind blowing the grass where the sheep have not cropped it short.
"Why is it happening?" asks the dark boy.
"The Samite," replies the old man.
The other boy snorts. "But he lives in the Dreaming."
"Yes. Until now."
A wind shakes the hawthorns, carries the bleat of sheep and a crow’s call across the peninsula to the cottage.
"Come inside, boys," says the old man. "I’ll make tea."
The Samite. The Dark Man from the Dreaming. The bogeyman.
The Dreaming is real, here in the boys’ context, real though different in fundamental ways. And though they live in an isolated corner of the country, geography is one of the aspects of the interface between the Dreaming and the Waking that is most malleable; the sticks are still well-connected.
The boys, who dream as boys do, know of the dreaming helmet and the Muse who inspired men of science to create it. The Samite’s inverse twin, a woman with the glittering tough fragility of frosted quartz, radiant in millennial white. The helmet is a biotech curiosity, a waking-world device designed simultaneously by a dozen scientists in a dozen countries. They are told that it is alive, has feelings, works by inductive empathy. It looks like the head of a squid, a mass of fused tentacles that meet at the crown and spread across the head of the wearer. It has the translucency of cephalopod flesh, though it is dry to touch.
The helmet, incredibly rare, has transformed the Dreaming. It cuts past the blur of wish-fulfilment and offloading and randomness that plagues the dreams of average people and lets them walk in the Dreaming – and understand where they are. It has opened up another world, a whole deck of worlds, and has simultaneously almost caused the downfall of objective science and dogmatic religion.
The boys, being boys, do not need the helmet to visit the Dreaming.
People, explains the old crofter, are meant to visit the Dreaming occasionally, but they are not meant to stay there. At best we can be visitors, at worst unthinking tourists. The inhabitants of that place are meant to be there, and we are meant to be here. We do not really go there so much as send avatars. Our bodies, of course, stay here.
"What if…" begins the dark boy.
"Don’t even think it. It is wrong." The old man sighs heavily. "Not wrong in the way that it’s wrong to pull your sister’s pigtails, or to steal… Wrong in the way it is wrong for a fish to breathe air. It is just not the way things are.
"And the Samite is going to try and change that."
"Oh yes. He dreamed of waking men."
"So what?"
"Imagine what would happen if fish could breathe air. Do you think you could still breathe it?"
"Is he evil?"
"No. Not evil." The crofter fills his pipe, lights it thoughtfully. "Just out of place."
The cinema lets out its small crowd, ordinary people making for their cars or the last bus home. Above them, perched upon the illuminated sign, the Samite pulls his helmet off, the black-red tentacles caressing his shaven head. He smiles. His is big, powerfully built without overdoing it, tall and dark. And he is here.
A block away, a siren sounds. The streetlights die. A cold wind begins to blow the trash in miniature vortices.
Outside the cottage, the wind batters the windows. The sheep huddle against the low dry-stone wall.
The dark-blond boy looks out of the window. The storm is gathering, forming a thick bolus of dark, angry cloud that is slowly swallowing the Land. Coloured lightning plays within the mass.
"I have to go and send him back, don’t I?" he says.
The crofter says nothing, and the boy opens the door. The wind, hugely powerful, slams it open. They have to shout now to be understood over the noise.
"Don’t go!" yells the dark boy to his brother.
"I have to!" comes the reply. Both boys forge a way out onto the ridge, leaning into the wind, staring in horror at the consuming blackness that heaves and lurches up the ridge towards them.
Langoliers, thinks the saturnine boy.
"I don’t know if I’ll make it back," yells his brother, "I’m scared!"
"Let me come with you!"
"No! I’m the one who knows how to send him back!"
The dark boy fumbles in his jacket, into deep boys’ pockets, and pulls out his compass. He presses it into his friend’s hand.
"Take this! It might help you get back!"
Both boys share a flicker-memory of the discovery of compasses, of the Spring when they discovered that the ridge ran south-west to north-east, learned to read maps, learned how to find the croft and each other from anywhere on the peninsula even in thick fog.
"Thanks!"
The pale boy struggles against the wind, striding down the ridge and into the belly of the storm. Thick black cloud swallows him. The old crofter rests his hand on the remaining boy’s shoulder, turns him in, and closes the door.
Copyright 2000 Andrew Gates, all rights reserved