Page 3 of A Theory of Dreaming (A Study in Drowning #2)

The storyteller is a liar, but the story he tells is true.

“You didn’t tell me you spoke to the paper.”

Like vapor from a cauldron, a plume of smoke nearly engulfed Master Gosse’s head. He exhaled so forcibly on his cigarette that the smoke obscured most of his face, and then wafted malevolently toward Preston, who recoiled and stifled a cough.

“What was that, Héloury?” Gosse asked, voice muffled.

Feeling turned off from the whole enterprise, Preston stubbed out his own cigarette. “The front page of the Llyrian Times . They interviewed you for their piece on Myrddin.”

The smoke dissipated, and Gosse’s face was revealed behind it.

His cheeks were taut and always pink, as though he had just come in from the cold.

This impression was heightened by his tousled black hair, which looked perennially windblown, and his exuberantly curling mustache, which appeared never to be greased or combed.

His eyes were blue, but they had a dim and murky quality that made them appear quite dark at times, like chips of smoked glass.

“I wouldn’t say so,” Gosse replied at last. He took another long drag from his cigarette.

“Wouldn’t say what?”

“You called it a piece on Myrddin,” he said. “I think it was more so a piece on you.”

Preston stiffened in his seat. Leaning forward, he asked, “Did you know, then? That Dean Fogg was going to give the paper our names?”

Master Gosse tapped his cigarette against the edge of the ashtray. He then smiled in an indulgent sort of way.

“Making the front page of the Llyrian Times for your scholarship is quite a feat,” he said. “How old are you, Héloury? Nineteen?”

“Twenty.” Preston forced his jaw to unclench. “And it was hardly an article about my scholarship.”

“Well, I hope you won’t forget your dear old adviser when you’re shaking hands with politicians and posing for magazine covers.” Gosse’s eyes gleamed. “Your compatriot has quite a face for photo spreads, don’t you think? It might warm the masses of Llyr to your cause.”

The very thought of appearing in a tabloid magazine was enough to make Preston feel vaguely nauseated. “Effy and I just want this matter to be handled with the decorum it deserves. This is about truth, objective truth, not gossip and celebrity—”

Gosse chortled. “You should have thought of that before you accused the most famous author in Llyrian history of fraud.” Preston opened his mouth to protest, but Gosse pressed on.

“And yes, I know I put you up to it, but every scholar needs a bit of controversy in his career. It’s energizing, like an ice bath. ”

“Thank you for the encouragement,” Preston said dully. “Is this why you wanted to see me?”

“No,” Gosse replied. Almost immediately, the glee and humor left his eyes. His face became a mask of solemnity, and his voice took on a grave tone. “Not at all.”

He rose from his seat behind the desk and strode over to the window.

Winter rain was stippling the glass, turning it marbled and translucent.

Preston hoped that Effy had made it to class before the storm began in earnest, and he hoped, too, that she would be careful when she returned to her dormitory.

Slush limned the street corners and the pavement was icy and treacherous.

Thinking of her was always like this: a rush of fondness, and then a bolt of fear.

Love poems never seemed to include this thread of terror.

Was he uniquely ill-disposed to this sentiment, too uneasy, too anxious for the act of loving without reserve?

Or was the object of his affection uniquely vulnerable?

As he had watched her walk away from him that morning, through the courtyard, vanishing into the sleet and the gray mist, Preston had been at war with himself.

The urge to protect her fought brutally with the desire for her to be free.

If he kept her contained because of his own fear, he would be no better than Ianto. No better than Myrddin.

Gosse stared out the window for a long time, though surely he could not see much except the gathering ice on the panes, or the faint yellow glow of the streetlamps, turned on prematurely to light a path through the fog and the sleet.

It was an eerie silence, punctuated by the pattering of rain upon the glass and the serpentlike exhalation of the radiator.

Discomfort settled over Preston in a cloak of cold, and he reached over for another cigarette.

At that moment, Gosse turned. “Do you believe in ghosts, Héloury?”

Preston was glad the cigarette hadn’t yet made its way to his mouth, for he would have choked on it. Gosse was a great one for jesting, but Preston perceived no glimmer of humor in the professor’s eyes. Instead, his stare was intense, as focused as a raptor upon its prey.

“No,” he replied when he recovered from his shock. “Not in the literal sense. No.”

“Hm. And what about fairies?”

Preston felt his whole body grow taut. “No.”

“Interesting.” Gosse began to pace back toward him.

“No wandering eye for the world’s beguiling obscurities.

What do you make of our Sleepers, then? Are their bodies preserved by chemicals, like hothouse flowers—such as the Ministry of Culture claims—or is it magic that keeps them intact, such as the Southern superstitions believe? ”

The emphasis with which Gosse said our made Preston feel as if he were not included within the scope of the pronoun.

His skin prickled with chill and unease, as if the cold winter air had seeped through the window.

But perhaps he was making something out of nothing.

Perhaps he was just too keenly aware, in that moment, of being an Argantian national .

“I don’t think there’s anything beyond the capacity of science to explain,” he answered. And yet his voice trembled faintly as he spoke, because Effy was right—he was a terrible liar.

When we were at Hiraeth, and I was sleeping in Myrddin’s study, some mornings I would wake up to the sound of bells outside the window. Did you ever hear them, too?

Even now, the memory of the sound echoed on his mind, resonant and clear. The deep, ancient gonging of a lost city beneath the waves.

No , Effy had replied, and there was such a look of grief on her face that Preston regretted asking. I never heard them.

And so Preston was alone in the knowledge, which felt sometimes like being alone in the world—because he had, unwillingly and with great trial, stepped into a realm that was not governed by reason, where truth and wisdom cracked apart and gave way only to darkness.

“Then you must have found Angharad Myrddin’s diary to be the deranged scrawling of a madwoman,” Gosse said. His tone was light, almost jovial.

Preston curled his fingers into the leather of the armchair.

He had known, of course, that this moment would come.

He had considered, more than once, whether it would have been wise to redact some parts of the diary.

Whether the magic that Angharad wrote of as though it were real would erode the credibility of the rest of her story.

The truth was such a fragile thing, slender protection against malicious scrutiny.

But he had never spoken these concerns aloud.

He knew that Effy would never allow it, and that it would be a betrayal of Angharad’s faith.

Preston wondered if it was cowardly of him, to cling to this notion of truth like a buoy in the thrashing tide, rather than let the waves take him and see if he could survive.

Effy had done it all her life, adrift alone in that ruthless water. He could at least try.

Did you ever hear them, too?

Yet for all the rumination he had done on the subject over these past weeks, Preston still found himself floundering.

“She’s a writer,” he said. There was a numb quality to his voice that made his words utterly unconvincing. “A very talented one. She created a metaphorical world where she could express her hopes and her fears.”

“And yet,” Gosse said, “if one were to take her stories at their face—stripped of the safety of allegory—one would find oneself believing in magic.”

Preston leveled his gaze at Gosse. Words came to him, a veritable flood of them, but none that he could arrange into speech. For what felt like an agonizingly long time, the room was blanketed in silence.

“You really are desperately loyal to this notion of truth,” Gosse said at last, in a tone that suggested both fondness and contempt. “Be careful with that, Héloury. You may find yourself worshipping blindly at the altar of reason, just as the pious worship at the altar of their saints.”

“I wouldn’t say those two are equivalent,” Preston replied tersely.

And then he said no more. At that particular moment he was wishing that some titanic wave would break through the floor and swallow them both whole.

Anything to free him from the tyranny of this conversation, which was feeling more and more like an interrogation.

Rather than reply, Gosse bent over. He removed a small golden key from his pocket, which he fitted into the lock of his bottom desk drawer.

He riffled through a number of files there before selecting a thick packet of papers, tied up with twine.

He closed the door and stood again, hair slightly mussed with exertion, and placed the bundle on his desk. The key returned to his pocket.

Preston leaned forward in his seat to peer at the papers. The handwriting was instantly familiar, and a jolt of uneasy shock went through him. They were photostated copies of Angharad’s diary.

“Let us take, for example, this Fairy King,” Gosse said. “She writes about him at least as often as she writes about the other individuals in her life, her husband and son. As if he were as real as they are.”