Phil Rickman - The Wine of Angels

‘Jane?’

The house was absolutely still. Why can’t you creak? Have you no personality?

‘Ja-ane?’

Which one was the bathroom? She opened a door; space and silence sucked at her and she shut it quickly.

A pace along the passage and she lost the moonlight. Now, there was only the faint, green spot of a smoke-alarm on a ceiling beam and the deeper darkness of doorways. She put a hand into a recess, found a cold doorknob and then drew back.

‘Jane!’

Shouting this time, but the passage swallowed it; she could almost see the short, bright name narrowing like a light down a tunnel, vanishing in no time. She was aware of a slow panic, like a dark train coming, and she grabbed the handle and turned it and the door didn’t open; perhaps this was the bathroom and the kid had locked it. ‘ Jane ... ’

A sudden yielding, and she stumbled, the oak door rolling away into the vastness of a long, long bedroom, empty as an open field, and Merrily grabbed at the handle and hauled the door closed, turning away and finding herself facing another door and she opened that, and there was the lavatory with its seat up and caught in a frail moonbeam, making an apologetic O.

As in NO. No Jane ...

No, no, no, no, no ... She fled along the passage, all the doors closed and blank. She felt she’d been out here for hours, trying door after door, and in that time Jane must have finished in the bathroom and gone back to bed, so which one was the bedroom?

Which one was the bloody bedroom?

All the doors were closed, and she’d surely left the bedroom door open, hadn’t she? But maybe Jane had closed it, shut her out. Jane had shut her out. ‘ Jane!!! ’ she screamed, and ran wildly from door to door, all the same, all black oak and all shut.

And spun round and round and found herself facing stairs. Where was she now? Had she gone downstairs? Had she gone down to the dreadful kitchen or the drawing room with its chimney blocked; she couldn’t have.

No. These were the other stairs. The next stairs. Oh, Jesus, there were more stairs.

The extra floor. A third and empty floor of doors and doors and doors.

She stood at the bottom of the stairs and couldn’t look up. She hugged herself, and felt sweat cold on her shoulders.

She knew, of course, that she would have to go up there.

In all her dreams of being in a house and suddenly discovering it had a third storey, she had accepted that, sooner or later, she was going to have to climb those final stairs. Because of the presence. Because there was someone up there waiting for her. In the best dreams, it was herself; if she climbed the stairs, she would find her true self, discover her hidden potential. This, said the analysts she had read over the years, was the true meaning of this dream. It was about reaching for the higher dimension. Or, in a spiritual sense, carrying the lantern of faith along the dark corridors to the foot of the last stairs, at the top of which was the greater light.

But in the worst dreams, the presence at the top of the stairs, along the final passage, behind the final doors, was neither her higher self nor the light of lights. For a while, after his death, it had been Sean, still greedily grinning through the torn metal, through his blood.

So, which one was this: the good dream or the bad dream?

No.

It wasn’t a dream. This was the promised reality, the culmination. She had obeyed her calling, given herself up to the Holy Spirit. And moved at last into the house with three floors. Oh God, the tugging on the hand ...

Jane?

No.

All right. So be it. Merrily relaxed the grip on her cold shoulders, let her arms fall to her side.

She looked up.

Couldn’t breathe.

‘Mum?’

Oh my God, my God, my God, my God, my God, I can’t breathe.

‘Mum!’

Her chest was rigid, as though there was a tourniquet around it, winding tighter and tighter, squashing her breasts. She rolled over, gasping.

‘Mummy!’ Her eyes blinked open and the breath gushed into her, and she sat up, coughing. Jane had hold of her shoulders. Big, frightened eyes, dark hair fluffed up and haloed by the pinky-orange light of dawn.

‘You’re back,’ Merrily croaked.

‘Mum, I haven’t been anywhere.’

‘You went to the bathroom.’

‘No ...’

Merrily turned to the door. It was closed.

‘You were having a dream,’ Jane said.

‘It couldn’t have been a dream. I followed you out.’

Jane shook her head wryly and skipped to the window. ‘Oh, look, you can see the hills. You can see right over the houses across the road. I bet it’s brilliant from upstairs, on the top floor. In my apartment.’

She turned back to Merrily and grinned.

‘I’ll go and make some tea.’

Merrily closed her eyes. When she opened them, Jane was gone, the door slamming behind her. Merrily’s hair felt cold and damp around the numbness of her face, and her chest felt like it had been sat on. She was exhausted.

OF COURSE, SHE’D had this kind of nightmare before. Everybody had. The point about dreams was that your reactions were often intensified because you were so helpless. Apprehension, mild fear, turned very quickly into terror; small, disquieting things were sometimes loaded with a bloated menace, which gradually deflated when you awoke.

Well. Usually.

Very occasionally, the essence of it remained draped over you like dusty, moth-eaten rags, for most of the day. Merrily knelt under the pink-washed window, hoping to rinse her spirits with prayer. But it was mechanical, she couldn’t find the level. It was as though the nightmare had blocked her spiritual pores.

And something else was blocked. What did I see? she kept asking herself. What did I see when I looked up those stairs? And something cold crept up her vertebrae and left behind it a formless, drifting dread.

She stood up and shook herself. Found a towel and some shampoo in the overnight bag, went for a bath but nearly chickened out: the sight of the cold, tiled bathroom made clammy skin and sweat-stiffened hair seem rather less offensive, and she had to dismiss sinful images of the warm, creamy comforts of the en-suite at the Black Swan, the urge to slip back there for one last, glorious soak.

Anyway, it was only about five-thirty. Too early even to get into the Swan. Oh, come on. Are we grown women, or what? She helped a big spider to freedom and turned on the flaking, chromium taps, noticing that the oak floorboards had been concealed, probably for the past thirty years, under well-worn, well-cracked black and white lino tiles.

During Alf Hayden’s lengthy tenure, the nouveau riche village of Ledwardine had managed to leave its vicarage a long way behind.

‘You,’ her daughter said, looking thoughtful, ‘are looking pretty rough.’

They’d bought a loaf last night from the Late store, and Jane was trying to make the Aga make toast.

‘Why don’t you just go back to bed?’

‘ What bloody bed?’ Merrily leaned over the stove with a cigarette in her mouth, wondering if there was somewhere to ignite it; evidently there wasn’t.

‘I’m quite sure,’ Jane said primly, ‘that your God wouldn’t want you to smoke like a chimney.’

‘Listen, flower, if you can find the bit in the Bible where it says that ... ’

‘All right, sorry. Just because I had a decent night’s sleep and you didn’t.’

‘That’s because you’re a child. An innocent. Look, I don’t suppose, if I were to mind your toast, you could run upstairs and fetch my Zippo from the bathroom?’

Jane raised her eyes cynically to the ceiling and trotted off. Merrily stood resting her forehead on folded arms on the plate rack over the stove.