Page 51 of A Theory of Dreaming (A Study in Drowning #2)
There is only so much any mind can endure before it must reject reality.
Before it must reject wisdom and reason.
I have always found my fragments of freedom in fantasy.
It has served me better than any shield or sword, and certainly better than any of the laws of men.
I have lived and died by quill and ink. And how could I ever begrudge myself this?
Even moths and cormorants are thought by the naturalists to dream.
“You don’t have to tell me everything,” Angharad said. “If it helps, we don’t even have to speak.”
She had pulled over a second chair to the other side of Effy’s bed and was leaning forward, hands resting just on the edge of the mattress.
Still nearer to Effy than Preston dared.
She had taken off her wool coat and draped it over the back of the chair, and her white silk blouse shimmered under the relentlessly bright lights.
At first Preston let the silence go on, not because it helped but because he could think of nothing that was not too painful to say. Several moments passed before he lifted his head and said hoarsely, “It was my fault. I left—I shouldn’t have left her alone.”
“Don’t say that,” Angharad replied in a sharp voice. “Don’t think that. I’m sure you did all that you could.”
But wasn’t that worse, Preston thought to himself, to have done everything and have it still not be enough? He recalled her mother’s words with a sickly feeling in his stomach.
Just because you love her doesn’t mean you can help her. It doesn’t mean you can save her.
He looked over the bed at Angharad, letting his gaze run over her scrutinously. Even in her trendy blouse, tucked into pleated slacks, even with her cropped hair, ending in a glossy bob just below her chin, there was something irrepressibly ethereal about her.
It was not her beauty alone—those wide-set green eyes that shone out of her almost agelessly pale face, her pearl-like complexion, which was hardly wrinkled at even more than sixty—but something intangible, something Preston could not name or describe.
It was as if she had not traveled here by train or by car but rather had stepped out straight from the realm of the Fair Folk, materializing within a mushroom circle or a dew-brightened field.
As if she did not belong in the real world nearly as much as she belonged in that proverbial castle in the air.
I had not known that the seam of the world was not between the living and the dead, but rather between the real and the unknown.
He could ask her, he realized. About that entry in her diary.
About the bells. About the dreams. She was probably better equipped than anyone else to answer his burning questions.
But Preston could not make himself speak.
Not when Effy lay between them, trapped precisely in that murky seam between the living and the dead.
“You must be exhausted,” Angharad said at last, when it was clear Preston was not going to answer. Her tone was low and gentle now. “I’ll stay with her, if you’d like to get some sleep.”
Exhaustion lay upon him like a heavy cloak.
His eyelids felt as if they were weighted with lead.
He was tired, but he was afraid of sleeping.
Afraid of losing his already tenuous grip on the real world completely.
He looked back at Effy again, her skin washed as pale as ice under the blinding hospital lights.
He waited, as if he could wake her just by staring. Just by wanting.
Each moment that passed in which she did not wake was more agonizing than the last. He couldn’t bear it. In halting, painful motions, Preston rose from his seat.
“You’ll call me, won’t you?” he asked, voice breaking between syllables. “If she wakes up?”
“Of course.” Angharad reached out and laid a hand over Effy’s. “You won’t miss a thing.”
When Preston walked through the corridor and back into the waiting room, he was shocked to see three familiar faces turn toward him. Maisie, Rhia, and Lotto all snapped their heads up as he entered, each wearing an expression of concern and haunted grief.
“What happened?” Lotto asked, rising from his seat, at the same time that Rhia asked, “Is she all right?”
“She’s asleep,” Preston replied. “They don’t know if—when—she’ll wake up.”
The words seemed to drift emptily to the floor. For a long moment, no one moved or spoke. Then:
“I’m sorry,” Rhia choked out. “I shouldn’t have let her go off alone. I should have watched her.”
“She went to the bathroom ,” Maisie said, though her voice was gentle. She rubbed a hand on the small of Rhia’s back. “It’s not like you could’ve known.”
“She’s right.” Preston rubbed his eyes wearily. They stung, not from tears, but from the lack of them—as much as he blinked, he couldn’t bring any moisture to the surface to relieve the dry, prickling pain. He realized then that he couldn’t remember the last time he had cried.
“Well, come on, then,” Lotto urged softly. “It’s six in the morning. You should get some rest.”
The blinds in the waiting room were drawn, but in the gaps between them, the very faintest rays of morning sun were showing themselves, a pale buttercup yellow.
It would be a rare cloudless day, sharp and bright and unforgivingly cold.
No flurries or mist to disguise the warplanes, no thunder to muffle their rumbling.
Preston let Lotto lead him out of the hospital and into the cruelly real world.
The earliest commuters were already milling about on the streets, bakers on the way to warm their bread, shop owners to draw up the grates of their storefronts.
Yet there was still the eerie, halting near-silence of a city at war.
Everyone kept their eyes trained on the ground.
Even the people walking in groups did not speak to one another.
As they passed the newsstand, the headline of today’s paper leaped out at Preston.
LLYR LAUNCHES MAJOR NEW GROUND OFFENSIVE AGAINST ARGANT, WHICH MAY IMPINGE ON CITIZEN AREAS.
Below there was a grainy photograph of Ellsworth Grindal, Llyr’s defense minister, in full military regalia, his aged, pouchy cheeks held taut as he gave a grim salute.
Preston’s gaze also skimmed over the date, and something flickered in his mind—a sense of awareness, of familiarity—but it quickly vanished, like a spark being snuffed. He was so tired.
They arrived back at their dorm just as the sun finally crowned the horizon.
Mechanically, Preston went through the motions of showering and changing his clothes, yet when he thought of crawling into bed, a feeling of dread pooled in his belly.
When he thought of sleeping alone. The sheets would be cold without Effy.
And he would not be able to stop thinking about her blanched, silent face, her arms, wrapped in wires, like tree branches strangled by thorns.
Alone. Adrift in waters that he could not reach.
So instead Preston sat down at his desk and began aimlessly turning through the pages of books he had left strewn there.
But all was not lost, when the city of Ys sank beneath the waves.
Under the sea, mermaids pray in the cathedral.
Under the sea, fire burns green. Under the sea, its great bells still toll.
And, it is said, that the city may one day rise again, lifting from its ocean tomb, and whoever first hears the music of the bells will be its new king.
Drivel, nonsense, the stuff of fairy tales, the refuge of the weak-minded, or so Preston would once have thought. Now he knew there was something essential here, something that could not be perceived with the eye. That could only be seen in the deepest depths of his dreams.
And yet—what was the use? He still did not know how to save her.
Preston’s head began to loll forward, almost unconsciously, as exhaustion overtook him. No matter how much his mind protested it, his body could not be prevailed upon to stay awake. And so Preston rose, unsteady on his trembling legs, and stumbled toward his bed.
Before he could reach it, there was a very sudden and disruptive racket in the hall.
It came in the form of a crashing door and a hurried rush of voices—one familiar, and one not so much. Preston could not make out the individual words, but he did hear the desperate, pleading tone of Lotto’s voice. And then the gravelly, furious whispers of the Earl of Clare.
In any other circumstance—or if he were not so tired—he would’ve found a bitter humor in the horrendous timing of it all.
Preston leaned closer to the door and listened.
He caught a few snatches of their conversation, term and grade and Damlet and, over and over again, failure , and as the Earl of Clare went on, raising his pitch, Lotto’s voice grew tremulous before he fell to utter silence.
That was when Preston, against all better judgment, opened the door and stepped out into the hall.
The Earl of Clare had not even taken off his overcoat before beginning to berate his son.
He was still clad in his sleek brown fox-fur stole as well, his chin held aloft, the nostrils of his aquiline nose flared.
He was the very picture of remote, patrician disdain; the only way he could have appeared even more an aristocrat was if he were wearing a powdered wig.
Preston froze half in and half out of the threshold, cowed beneath his dark, glittering stare.
“Mr. Héloury,” the earl said, “how nice to see you again.”
The frostiness of his tone did not imply that there was anything nice about it. Preston cleared his throat and replied, “It’s, ah, nice to see you, too, sir.”