Undine -

Chapter 9

SOPHIE woke soaked with perspiration, shivering despite the fact that her bedroom felt hot and stifling as a kiln. She'd been dreaming, a fragmented nightmare often experienced as a child, and held in abeyance by her adult capacity for reason and logic. Tonight, like some diabolical leviathan, it had breached the tranquil waters of her subconscious for the first time in twelve years, crashing into her mind with the savagery of a Tsunami.

There'd been water, a vast body of it, and she held in stasis within. The dream waves were huge, muscular, and they flexed and throbbed, pinioning her limbs but allowing her to float.

There'd been the eerie, discordant wailing of invisible gulls, the sly susurration of the heaving water, and she'd tried to thrash her limbs, tried to cry for help, gasping impotently as the undertow pulled her under. Beneath the water she could breathe, though her lungs felt sore and smothered. A greenish light glowed, and in her mind a voice spoke her name over and over; a siren song that was strangely soporific.

I'm dying, she marvelled, though her mind accepted the fact and felt comforted, and it's all so easy...

Something moved towards her through the water, a dark shape at once menacing and familiar. She tried to turn away, but felt compelled to look. A face coalesced.

Help me, she tried to cry. With you I'm safe... But her lungs were filled with water. Michael's dark hair waved in the slipstream. He extended a hand, and it was as though her existence had suddenly come into sharp focus; as though something she'd been waiting for all her life had finally arrived. She had reached out, inches from touching his fingers, when something slick and icy coiled itself about her legs and yanked her from his grasp.

The weed was an old adversary; tenacious and clinging as sin. It coiled and pulled her into an abyss of hopelessness and horror, tapping into the primal vein she dared not enter of her own accord. The years peeled away and the gulls wailed again, the sea roaring like a conch shell in her ears.

Sophie thrashed her legs, reaching out desperately, but Michael was receding and she plunged downwards until, with the strange, disjointed reality peculiar to dreams, she found herself kneeling before the fountain in Fern Deane's orangery. The musical tinkling of running water seemed incongruous in the aftermath of the recent horror, and Sophie knelt immobile, dressed in green voile that clung to her body, her golden hair filigreed with skeins of weed. Sunlight shone through the orangery roof, igniting glittering motes suspended in the air as she lifted her eyes and saw the water rear from the fountainhead, swaying like a cobra as it spoke to her.

'You'll never breach the void.'

She'd tried to speak, but her dream wouldn't let her. No one argued in dreams, or possessed swiftness enough to flee. The nightmare held her, helpless as a dragonfly in amber.

'If you persist,' the voice insisted, '...you'll wish you'd died that day in the sea!'

Sophie recognized who spoke at the same moment she awoke. The tones of that liquid tentacle had been unmistakable... the water had spoken with the voice of Michael St Clair.

Pulling a robe over her nakedness, Sophie sat on the edge of her bed trying to shake off the depression of her dream. It was two thirty in the morning. She padded to the window and threw back the curtains. A full moon grinned in the sky, huge and golden as a Chinese lantern, the distant lake polished obsidian.

To her annoyance, the crystal water pitcher by the bedside was empty. She'd have to go downstairs to the kitchen. 

The windows at the end of the corridor outside her room admitted broad shafts of moonlight, and she padded along, bare feet noiseless on the carpet; then down the two shallow steps onto the main landing leading to the staircase. At the stone sip well, she paused.