She didn’t cry. She looked at Roland and knew he thought she was the coldest person he had ever met. She didn’t cry, and she didn’t care.
Her right hand shot into her pocket, groping for something that wasn’t there. Keys? She kept her keys in her purse. Freddy blinked furiously against the tears and tried to force her brain to work properly. She couldn’t let herself cry. Why couldn’t she?
She signed, What happened back then? I can’t remember.
The story didn’t end, signed Roland. It’s still going. It’s been going ever since. Josiah still hasn’t opened his eyes.
She saw a boat on an impossible sea and a forest of tentacles boiling into the air. She saw herself firing a gun. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “We went on from there.”
He shook his head. “The story went wrong. Didn’t it?”
“The time is out of joint,” said Mel from behind Freddy. She turned. Mel was twelve years old, dressed in bunny-rabbit pyjamas.
Freddy said, “Oh cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right.”
“Shakespeare,” said Mel. “You’ve never read Hamlet, and yet here you are quoting it. You two need to regress, and fast. Remember where we really are.”
“You can’t be real,” said Freddy. “I’m dreaming. We’ve just been at a funeral.”
“Josiah still hasn’t opened his eyes,” said Roland. “It means some thing. I wish I knew what. No, I don’t. I don’t know. Where did you leave the car?”
“It means we’re still trapped in an imaginary world inside the house on Grosvenor Street.” Mel crossed her arms and came as close to glaring as she ever had. “This is all just the house on Grosvenor Street. Something’s tricked you into thinking you’ve grown up. None of this is happening.”
The boat and the sea and the sparkling pleasure-dome. “It was all out of a poem,” said Freddy. She groped for the key again. It should have been there. She thought back to her mother’s funeral and saw Mel in bunny-rabbit pyjamas, bouncing along beside the coffin. Again, there was a prickling behind her eyes.
Roland massaged his temple with his fingers. “It was ‘Kubla Khan.’ Why do I think that matters?”
“Stop being so stupid.” Mel actually stamped. “I can’t believe you’re both being so stupid! We have to make Josiah open his eyes! Getting him to close them was only the first part! Do you want all this to turn out to be real?”
“Isn’t it?” said Roland.
Now Freddy could remember the funeral going wrong. At the burial, skeletons had danced up out of the graves. Freddy’s mother had clambered from the coffin to join them. The minister had been made of glass. Everything was changing inside her head. “Roland’s telling the story. Is he? He needs to end it!”
“Look.” Mel flung her hands out towards the landscape surrounding them. “Look at where we are.”
She had thought it was snow. It was just … white. They had been walking down a road through nothing, not a road through winter. Freddy felt her carefully constructed past collapse inside her head. She was forty years old, and she didn’t know why.
“I take back everything I’ve been saying,” said Roland. “I won’t look.”
“You never wanted to,” said Mel. “You need to want to. For better or for worse, you’re at the centre of all this. Snap out of it. He needs to open his eyes.”
“It started with the poem,” said Freddy, struggling. “It should end with the poem. How does the poem end?”
“It doesn’t. You interrupted it. You remember interrupting it,” Mel told her. “But this is where it stops:
“Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ’twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!”
“No,” gasped Roland, “stop. Stop! I can’t do it. I don’t know how. We were at a funeral. It’s too late. I’m afraid…”
But Mel continued, inexorably:
“And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.”
“We’re still under the dome,” said Freddy, feeling as if she were forcing the words out through deep water. “We’re still in the house on Grosvenor Street.”
Tentacles snaked out of the whiteness. “No, Roland, stop it,” said Mel. “Cuerva Lachance changed that. But now you need to bring Josiah back. He’s stuck at the end of the poem.”
“Anything can happen.” Freddy heard her voice growing younger, softer. “And one of the anythings is that he doesn’t know when to open his eyes.”
“I don’t want to go back,” said Roland in anguish. “I don’t want it not to be too late. I don’t know what’s going to happen next.”
In Freddy’s head, the funeral dissolved into a carnival on the third floor of the house on Grosvenor Street. The carnival was getting scary. Cuerva Lachance was moving through her mind, changing everything. She saw her mother’s coffin floating in the middle of the carnival. The tears were back again, stinging, for a different reason.
It was Roland holding them here. She couldn’t imagine how afraid he must be.
“Nobody ever knows what’s going to happen next,” said Freddy. “But we need to find out.”
He was breathing very quickly. She held his gaze as long as she could. It was hard; tears were blinding him. She felt the tears she had been struggling to hold back herself well up again. For the first time in years, one slid free, trickling down her cheek.
Roland nodded slowly and took a deep, shaky breath. “Weave a circle round him thrice…”
He was growing younger now, too. The pleasure-dome was building itself again over their heads. The tentacles were melting away, but Cuerva Lachance was everywhere, dangerous and unchecked. Everything could change again. The world wasn’t stable.
“I made her a PC,” said Roland. “I won’t go back on that; it wouldn’t be fair. But where’s Josiah?”
“In the poem,” said Mel, “since that’s how you started it. ‘Close your eyes with holy dread,’ right?”
They looked.
A lake of fire had bubbled up out of nothing. Josiah knelt on an island at the centre, huddling against the flames. The only way across was … Freddy blinked, trying to clear her vision. For a moment, the dancing rainbows from the prism of the pleasure-dome seemed to have become intertwined with the fire of the lake, twisting their way into a seething, ever-changing bridge made of colour and light. She blinked again, and it was only a rope bridge after all, just on the verge of catching fire. “I think time’s stopped for him,” said Mel. “I think strange things happen when he closes his eyes.”
“Cuerva Lachance must have done the lake,” said Freddy.