A Thousand and One English Nights (Book Three of The Powder Trail)

Chapter Twelve: Dead is Dead

Only at night did Ellini break her rule, although she hadn't meant to at first. A few days after her arrival, she had fallen asleep on the floor of the slop-house – dead tired, plain exhausted, expecting no dreams – and found a black doorway taking up all the space in front of her eyes.

She didn't mean to go through it. Even while unconscious, she dimly remembered that curiosity was part of her old life, and was not to be indulged in anymore. But the doorway sort of stretched, so that it was immediately in front of her no matter which way she turned. She felt as though she was on a small, round platform, surrounded by darkness, and the only way to move at all was to leap into it.

So she did. 

There was a long, dark corridor – so black that she had to navigate it with outstretched hands – and then a bedroom.

It was bare and unfurnished and falling apart, but she got the feeling that the destruction had been sudden and violent, rather than the gradual result of neglect. The floorboards had been torn up and wrenched apart, making the floor look like a ravaged landscape seen from above, with jagged peaks and bottomless canyons. There were also crumbling indentations in the plaster, as though someone had been repeatedly thumping the walls.

She looked down and saw that, not only had her wound re-opened, but she was back in the satin dress – dyed red with her blood – that she'd been wearing on her last night in Oxford. It was wet and scarlet and clingy. Her hair had come loose and strands of it were sticking to her bloody neck. She looked like a creature from a nightmare.

And then she saw the figure on the bed, and realized whose nightmare she was in.

He was asleep on top of the bed-clothes, curled up on his side, like a man with a terrible stomach-ache. There was a vertical furrow on his forehead – just at the top of his nose – and, even in his sleep, he had one hand curled around the bracelet at his wrist, as though it was a shackle he already resented.

He was sleeping angrily. She had seen him do this before, but never with a body so tense and taut and frowning. She didn't envy him the aches and pains he would have when he woke up.

Ellini repeated this sentence in her head and was instantly annoyed with herself. Aches and pains were the least he deserved! If she was going to be a tormentor in somebody else's nightmare, she would have to stop sympathizing with people.

Her footsteps must have been louder than she thought, because he began to stir. The frown-lines intensified and his eyelids fluttered open. It took him a long time to focus on her but, when he did, he didn't seem at all surprised to see her there. He just looked at her with mild, blurry eyes for a moment. And she looked back, without knowing how to snarl or sneer or spit in his face. Anger, she suddenly realized, was a completely new experience for her. As new as freedom, but not as nice.

Finally, Jack licked his lips and said, "Oh, please. Everything before was the dream, and this is the waking up."

Ellini raised an unsympathetic eyebrow. "Sorry, Jack."

She wandered over to the window, annoyed with herself for even saying that. Admittedly, she hadn't sounded very sorry, but it was still a stupid thing to say. It was too soon to torment him, perhaps. Or she was just bad at it. At least she hadn't tried to comfort him. That would have been worse than anything.

She picked her way across the ruined floor-boards and took up station by the window, hardly registering what she was seeing. After a few moments of gazing blindly across the street, she realized that the black shape in front of her was the ruin of the University Church, its spire like a crumbling stick of charcoal against the silver-black sky.