David slept for hours, and if he dreamed at all he didn’t remember a thing. When he finally woke up he was ravenously hungry and remembered that he’d eaten nothing all day. He got out of bed and saw that it was nearly ten P.M. He decided to take a shower, but on his way to the small bathroom he spotted that the wardrobe was slightly open. He slid back the door and found six identical black outfits, the so-called zero-retention suits, each with the number five stitched in gold thread and the strange logo on the back.
Was he really ready to wear such a thing? As the son of a dead soldier, he hated the very idea of uniforms. But after his shower he put on one of the suits after all. As he admired himself in the mirror, he had to admit that the outfit looked cool.
Dreamwalker number five.
David was about to leave the room when something else caught his eye. On a bookshelf that he’d thought was empty, something slim was propped up in the corner. He could have sworn it hadn’t been there before. He picked it up and felt his stomach contract when he saw what it was.
He was holding one of Eddie’s notebooks.
David turned the book around and around in his hands, staring at it in amazement. He’d often seen these plain little books in the hands of the boy in his dream, but now he was actually holding one. And it was real — not some dreamed-up image, but a solid book of creases, yellowing paper, and rusty staples.
“Blast it, Eddie, where are you?” The feel of the book in his hands made David’s long-lost grandfather seem suddenly very close, as if all he had to do was turn around to find Eddie standing there, squinting at him through his spectacles, ready with his pencil to scribble over yet another page. But Eddie wasn’t close at all. As David flicked through the pages, the furious jottings and crossings-out flashing before his eyes, he caught a whiff of age from the paper. He realized for the first time the enormous truth of just how far away Eddie really was, locked into his own time and lost in what might as well be another world.
David stopped flicking at a page where a single question stood out in bold letters, heavily circled: What is David?
Every line that had been drawn away from this question led to a tangle of crossing-out.
David looked at this for a long time before he closed the book. All those times he’d seen Eddie with his nose in one of these books, he’d never realized that the subject of all that writing had been himself.
Instead of putting the book back on the shelf, he rolled it up and stuffed it in his pocket, just as Eddie used to do. He and Eddie both had questions, it seemed. David swore to himself there and then that before all this was over they would both find their answers.
David picked his way back through the maze of corridors to the canteen. He ordered an enormous meal and sat at a table on his own. People looked at him and sometimes whispered, and he could tell that he was being watched. Roman came in briefly and poured himself a small cup of coffee. He gave David a long, hard stare before stalking out. This didn’t help David’s appetite, and he left his meal half finished after that. He went back to the Lodge, feeling highly self-conscious and more than a little out of place.
Back in the corridor he decided not to return to his bedroom but instead to visit the place called the Cave that Petra had mentioned earlier. He pressed his hand against the panel, and the double doors slid open.
His first impression was of a large crazy-shaped space with no ceiling at all, just a high shadowed vault where two rock faces arched together. Seeing this, David finally understood that the whole complex must have been built within a natural split in the mountain, beneath the château he’d been shown in the dreamwalk. The thought made him giddy as he walked to the center of the room.
There were armchairs and sofas scattered in groups near a low-lit bar on one side of the cavern, while the rest of the space was divided into different areas, one clearly for gaming, another for dancing and music, and yet another housing a multimedia library with a giant screen. One wall was taken up by an enormous slab of yellow rock, which clearly didn’t belong to the mountain. On the rock a spindly human form was painted in a strong line of vivid blue, surrounded by a halo of fuzzy dots. At the feet of the figure crept half-human, half-animal shapes in reds and browns.
Opposite this striking feature, an enormous window reached the whole height of the wall, sealing the cavern with a single sheet of glass. It was the first window David had seen since he’d arrived, and through it he could make out a black, jagged horizon beneath a twilit sky studded with stars.
He noticed Petra curled up in an armchair. She waved at him, and he walked over to find Dishita sitting there too, still looking frail. There was also a dark-haired boy who looked familiar. When David got closer he realized it was Théo, the boy he’d watched narrowly escaping the Haunting on the Metascape Map. None of them was wearing a black dreamwalker suit as David was now, and his heart sank as he realized he’d got it wrong again.
“Here’s number five!” called Petra. “All dressed up and one of us at last.”
“I don’t feel it,” said David, blushing. “I still can’t believe I’m really here.”
He sat down and was introduced to Théo as a waiter came over. It was as he ordered himself an icy drink that he remembered his mother.
“There’s no phone in my room,” he said to Petra. “I need to call home. My mum’ll be going mad.”
“Ah,” said Petra, “you can only call out from the front desk, actually. If they let you.”
“But she must be wondering where I am.”
“She probably already knows,” said Dishita. “Or rather, she thinks she does. They’re bound to have told her something she’ll accept. Unsleep House employs some very persuasive people. None more so than us dreamwalkers.”
“What does that mean?” said David.
“Remember the château you saw on your dreamwalk earlier?” said Dishita. “My family thinks it’s a top-flight science academy. And they were only too ready to believe it, especially with a dreamwalker telling it to them. A freed mind is so much stronger than a captive one, David, as you’ll know when you can finally be bothered to take the training course.”
“Other people think it’s a hospital or a Swiss finishing school,” said Petra, glaring at Dishita, “or whatever it needs to be. Your mother would have been told something entirely convincing, David; don’t worry about it.”
“It’s easier for dreamwalkers who don’t live at Unsleep House,” said Théo, “the part-timers who work from home. It’s only us misfits the Project keeps here, where we can look out for each other.”
Théo put his hand on Petra’s shoulder and gave a slight squeeze. For some reason she seemed grateful to him for what he’d just said.
David changed the subject.
“So this Unsleep House I keep hearing about, it’s just the name of the château, then?”
“Yes,” said Dishita, “though we rarely use the old place these days. It was a gift to your grandfather from the Swiss government.”
“They gave Eddie a stately home? That’s insane!”
“When the Dreamwalker Project took off, the United Nations wanted it based somewhere neutral.” Dishita shrugged, as if what she was saying was entirely normal. “The Swiss were only too happy to have us. Sir Edmund renamed it, and it’s been Unsleep House ever since.”
“Eddie really is a big deal for you people, isn’t he?” said David.
“Sir Edmund is everything to us,” Dishita replied.
David looked again at his sophisticated surroundings, and tried to imagine what the shy, geeky boy from his dream would say if David told him he would one day turn out to be the founder of all this. Not to mention the discoverer of something as extraordinary as dreamwalking. His eye was drawn back to the strange rock painting of the spindly blue man.
“I see you’re admiring the art,” said Dishita with a chuckle. “And so you should. That is the oldest image of a dreamwalker yet discovered. Or rather, I should say, of a haunter.”
“How old exactly?”
“Oh, only about thirty thousand years.”
“What?”
“It was found in a cave in southern France a few years ago. That particular shade of blue would have been very difficult for prehistoric man to create, so they must have really wanted to use it. The further back you try and dreamwalk the harder it is to do it accurately, but the Haunting are always pushing the limit. We managed to stop them that time, but the professor insisted on securing the evidence once the cave was discovered. They set it up here as a reminder of what we’re up against.”
“Talking of which,” David said, “are you okay? I’m still not sure I understand what happened to you earlier, but it looked like it must have hurt.”
Dishita seemed pleased David was asking, but it was clear she wasn’t going to be fussed.
“It was nothing. Just an unpleasant surprise.”
“That wasn’t a normal spear, right?”
“No, there wasn’t really a spear at all,” she said. “When we make a mind attack like that, we often dream up something that fits the environment we’re in to help us do it. But it’s just pure mental energy. The spear was simply a way to project that energy.”
“Yeah, but you vanished,” said David.
“Like I said, it was a surprise. Knocked right out of my dreamwalk like some newbie. I’ll get Adam for that.”
“So is that what Adam wants to do to Eddie? Kill him with a mind attack?”
Théo let out a laugh, then tried to cover it up. He stood, said good night, and left the Cave.
“No,” Dishita said, in a voice that suggested she’d just been asked something very stupid. “Even the strongest mind pulse has no effect on the physical world. It’s a dreamwalker weapon only.”
“So what’s Adam planning, then? How dangerous can he be to Eddie if he can’t even touch him?”
“Didn’t you visit the museum earlier?” said Dishita. “He’ll do what the Haunting always do — find someone in 1940 to terrify into helping him. And whomever he chooses, it won’t be anyone Eddie will want to meet in a dark alley, that’s for certain.”
“You’ve stopped the Haunting before, though. So …”
“But with Adam it’s different, David. He used to be one of us. He knows how we operate. He knows to keep moving so that we can’t pinpoint him on the Metascape Map. He’s got every advantage now, except one: He clearly doesn’t know where Eddie’s gone either. That’s where you come in.”
“I keep telling you people,” David said, “I don’t know where Eddie is.”
“Are you sure?” Dishita narrowed her eyes at him. “Because if you did know, we could get Eddie to safety tonight, move him to some random place in 1940 Adam could never guess at. You could end all this very quickly.”
David folded his arms, wishing more than ever that he did know something, if only to shut everyone up about it.
“I looked Adam up on the Showing Glass thing,” said David, “but I couldn’t get much sense of him as a person. Except for all this business about him being the best dreamwalker you’ve ever had.”
“Ha!” Dishita looked unimpressed. “He’d love to hear you say that. He’s good, yes, and his mind’s very strong, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us are losers. Adam’s too arrogant and selfish to really be the best.”
“David, can I ask you something?” said Petra.
David nodded, grateful to have questions going the other way for a change.
“What’s Eddie actually like? As a teenager, I mean? We know he was good-looking and painfully shy, but what was he like to be with?”
David blinked. Didn’t they know? And good-looking? Eddie? David realized both girls were watching him eagerly, and a flash of jealousy interfered with his fears for Eddie’s safety once again. He tried to ignore it. Anyway, if you liked tall and thin with sad eyes and decades-old clothes, then okay, perhaps Eddie was good-looking. To David, though, he’d always seemed sickly — far too pale to be healthy. No doubt that was because of all the books and writing …
Dishita let out a gasp.
David followed her gaze and found that he’d absentmindedly taken Eddie’s notebook from his pocket.
“That’s one of Sir Edmund’s notebooks! They’re priceless! Where did you get it?”
“I found it in my room. And if you really want to know what Eddie was like, just look inside.”
Dishita took the book as if it were a sacred text, allowing the pages to fall open, one after another.
“It’s one of his early ones. So few of them survive …” Dishita trailed off. David guessed she was noticing that almost everything that had been written in the book had then been crossed out. She glanced up at David.
“That’s what he was like,” said David, pointing at the scribbles. “Lost. But desperate not to be.”
Dishita sniffed and handed the book back.
“He was still very young. He hadn’t made any of his breakthroughs yet. But believe me, Sir Edmund had a brilliant mind.”
“Yes, but we’re not looking for Sir Edmund,” said Petra. “We’re looking for the confused boy who will grow into him. Is that what you’re trying to tell us, David?”
David wasn’t sure he’d been trying to tell them anything, but he nodded anyway and tried to look smarter than he felt.
“You know, now that I think about it, Eddie was exactly the kind of person who would make friends with a ghost.” David chuckled. “But I’ve been wondering about something. You say Eddie discovered dreamwalking as an adult, but when he was a boy was he a dreamwalker himself?”
“Yes,” said Dishita, “we think so. Dreamwalking can be hereditary, you know. Sir Edmund remembered especially vivid dreams from his childhood that he later came to realize were probably dreamwalks. Don’t forget, you yourself didn’t realize you could dreamwalk until we told you, but there was no one to tell Eddie. By the time he’d worked it out by himself, his own abilities were long gone.”
“And you were his inspiration, David,” said Petra. “Eddie’s ghost.”
David grew thoughtful again. If dreamwalking was hereditary, and David had the gift, and his grandfather had had it too, then …
“Do you really have no idea where Eddie might have run to after the fire?” said Dishita, interrupting his thoughts. “Because they’re going to ask you again. Roman is planning to interview you extensively, starting first thing in the morning. They’re expecting some new information. It might get a bit heavy.”
“Oh, great!” said David.
He wondered just how heavy Roman would get before he accepted that David had nothing at all to tell them.
“I wish I could have a rummage in Adam’s room.”
The two girls looked at him in surprise.
“What for?” said Dishita. “Security’s been all over it since Adam disappeared. Roman searched it personally.”
“I don’t know,” said David. “I just can’t quite believe in Adam Lang. Everyone keeps telling me he was so powerful and amazing, but no one’s that good. Maybe if I could get a better sense of him, I could think of some way to stop him. Everyone has a weak spot.”
“Maybe,” said Petra, “but there is no way to get into Adam’s room without either his handprint or security clearance. And the door’s taped up. I’d love to break in, but they would notice.”
“Oh, the tape can be stuck back on,” said Dishita quietly.
The conversation moved on after that, and Dishita became withdrawn and eventually stopped speaking entirely. It was long past midnight when they rose to go to bed. As they walked out into the corridor and said good night, Dishita broke in with an unexpected question.
“Do you really think it would be worthwhile looking in Adam’s room?” she asked.
David shrugged. “I’d certainly like to know more about him. Especially since he seems determined to wipe out my whole family.”
Dishita seemed to be caught in indecision, but after a moment she spoke.
“In that case, meet me in the corridor in two hours’ time. I know how to get into Adam’s room.”