The Dream Factory

Through the Looking Glass

Through the Looking Glass  

Dan reluctantly let go of Gia's soft warm hand, dragged himself from her dripping honeyed scent and gently slipped out from between the warm sheets. Warily he placed his bare feet on the cold wooden floor before rummaging uncertainly under the bed for his battered canvas shoes. Pulling his fleece over his head he lifted the curtain and looked outside. 

It was still dark. The scattered showers that had kept them awake into the early hours, thrumming sporadically against the bedroom window deep into the night still played across the lane outside leaving a sheen of glistening metallic brilliance in its wake.  

The trees bent low in the shifting wind. Above him it lifted the broken moss covered tiles on the roof, repeatedly dropping them with a loud clanking noise that ran like a spectre through the house banging its rusted chains along walls of the dank echoey corridors. 

Above him a low blanket of ominously dark clouds broke apart to reveal the luminescent moon hanging like gods pendulum, frozen in an instant in time against a velvet soft background of twinkling stars and swirling universes.  

For a fleeting moment the singular strangeness of the scene stuck Dan. Light on dark, dark on light. The strange pallidity of the moon, the cosmos of twisting stars reeling away beyond it into a vast cauldron of endless inkiness. The unearthliness of it momentarily taunted Dan's imagination with thoughts of the infinity of time and the possibilities of the changeless, nameless things that lurked in its infinite realms and beyond in the impenetrable deepness of space. 

The clouds swept over the moon, bringing a layer of enveloping shadow. Dan watched, waiting for the return of the heavens and the weirdly entrancing landscape. The clouds parted, a flash of moonlight caused the branches of the trees to twist and writhe like vampires caught in the sun. Momentarily Dan caught a shape shifting in the shadows. A tall impossibly thin figure with hat pulled down low over his head, raincoat flapping wildly in the wind, stood looking up at the house through the driving rain.  

A cat revealed by the moonlight and caught unawares by the spectre, cowered and hissed before racing off onto the safety of the high slate wall of the church opposite. For a moment it warily observed the unexpected apparition before darting off to skulk amongst the hewn stone rocks in the rundown churchyard. 

Slowly the figure stepped back into the shadows thrown down by the tangled wood of the yews trees to be swallowed up by the stygian darkness. 

Dan wiped the cold condensation off the inside of the window and pressed his face up against the glass, his warm breath clouding what he could see. Outside a broken street light flashed intermittently. The figure reappeared, caught in the eerie yellow sodium light. Standing well back under the trees in abject ignorance of the chilling rain it bent against the howling wind and looked directly at Dan. 

The street light stuttered and dimmed. A shapeless mass of blackness sprung from the greyness under the trees, tore across the road, into the front garden.  

Dans heart leapt. He scanned the trees. The figure had gone.  

'What are you doing?' A muffled voice from behind him made him jump. 

'Nothing. I thought I saw someone outside. They've gone.' Dan shivered and dropped the curtain. 'Go back to sleep.' 

Running his hand through his mass of deranged hair Dan slipped silently along the hallway into the bathroom. 

He shaved quickly. Hogarthian caricatures of drunken old men, red faced with large bulbous noses, leered out from the cracked Victorian tiles like grotesque gargoyles jeering at him while he ran the razor across his stubbled face. The cast iron boiler hissed in complaint at being disturbed at such an unearthly hour. Behind him the leaking cistern clanked gently to itself like an old man muttering over his neglect.