“We know what we are, but not what we may be.”
William Shakespeare
Previously on The Space Between:
In their shared dreams, Joe and Annabelle finally speak, drawn together by something neither of them can explain. She tries to warn him off, hinting at some unnamed danger, but he can’t let it go.
Back in the waking world, he tells Danny about the girl he keeps dreaming of, and Danny has a suggestion: a visit to Mrs. Constance Galbraith, a woman with an unusual expertise in the science of dreams…
Chapter Six
Mrs. Galbraith lived in a strange house, garish and old-fashioned, which set it apart from everything around it. The garden was fenced and badly kept. I’d expected flowers and neat beds, full of those modestly pretty blossoms English ladies put in their gardens. Instead there were moss-covered stones, and many of the objects left here and there seemed coated in a kind of fungal dust, like the lichen I’d seen as a boy on the hulls of ships. The hedge was unclipped and weeds reached the ankle. And yet that disorder had a logic to it, one that escaped me entirely. It was a romantic place, but restless.
“Come,” said Danny.
We moved toward the entrance. Someone shouted in the street. Someone else burst out laughing.
The house had a pointed roof, two floors, and an attic with no dormers. The entrance was Georgian and the whole facade was clad in colored panels.
“Far as I can tell,” I said, “it might be made of marzipan.”
“Mrs. Galbraith is not a witch.” He looked at me. “Not exactly,” he added.
Then he walked on, pulling my gaze behind him, and knocked.
The woman who opened the door was young. And pale. Remarkably pale. Her face was framed by hair of an unusually deep black, rare in London. In exotic places, far from here, women colored their hair with powders and strange compounds. I’d seen it often enough, traveling by sea.
I lowered my eyes, but not before catching a faint smile on her lips.
She extended her hand.
“Danny.”
He removed his hat, took it, and bent slightly over it.
“My dear.”
“I knew I’d see you again,” she said, holding his hand in hers.
“I’ve brought Jonathan with me.”
Her dark eyes moved to me. Her cheekbones had a fine structure and her eyebrows were like thin strokes of black pencil. There was a kind of restrained anticipation about her.
I stepped forward and bowed.
“Do you never wear a hat?” she asked, looking at my hair.
“Not if I can help it.”
I straightened my hair.
“You don’t seem comfortable here.”
“Let’s just say yours is a peculiar place.”
“I wasn’t speaking of my house.”
I looked at Danny and Danny looked at me. He was as impassive as a wall.
“You may be frank with me,” she said. “If you wish.”
“I haven’t much to say.”
She studied me, then stepped aside.
“Come in.”
***
The room was large. Books, glass ornaments, porcelain, candles. A significant number of candles, every shape and color. There was furniture too, but I kept my eyes off it. She led us to two armchairs facing each other across a low table, a third pulled slightly to one side.
She offered nothing. When I settled in I noticed the room smelled of the sea. Which was absurd, and I found myself questioning many of the things around me.
“You’ve been dreaming,” she said, looking at me.
“Most people do.”
“You’ve traveled a great deal, Jonathan.”
“I have.”
“By choice?”
“It was my life.”
“By choice?”
I looked at her.
“A boy can’t choose.”
She turned. “I’m sorry, Danny. I finished your favorite biscuits.”
“Don’t worry about it. I can do without, just this once.”
“Why am I here?” I asked.
“You dream.”
“Everyone dreams.”
“And you’ve traveled. And you still do.”
“I can confirm that,” said Danny.
“Dreams, travels… what is the point of it all?” I said.
“Most people dream of things they know,” she went on. “Places they’ve been. Faces they’ve seen.” She folded her hands in her lap. “Tell me about your dreams.”
I noticed the clock on the mantel was not ticking. I turned. She was still watching me, waiting.
“There isn’t much to tell.”
“Something inexplicable visits your dreams. I know that.”
“Danny talks too much.”
“Danny said nothing. I understood it from you. From the way you’ve been avoiding the subject.”
I felt myself at the center of an interrogation. “Perhaps.”
“What do you know about hypnagogic states, Jonathan?”
“Enough to know the word.”
“The boundary between waking and sleep is not a wall,” she said. “The scientists at the Society would call it a threshold. A physiological event, measurable, catalogued. They’re not wrong. But a threshold is also a door.”
“A door?”
“Most of us cross it every night without noticing. Some people, under certain conditions, stop in the doorway.”
“What conditions?”
“Loss, usually. Or longing. Sometimes both.” Her dark eyes held steady on mine. “The mind that has closed itself off from the waking world finds other ways through.”
Just then a light flooded the room. Her glass ornaments glittered. Everything did.
“You mean something supernatural?”
“I’m describing a phenomenon. The adjective is yours.”
“I should have taken you seriously when you mentioned frankness. Back at the door.”
“The woman in your dream,” Mrs. Galbraith continued, and I had not told her it was a woman, I was certain of that, “is not a construction of your sleeping mind. She is not assembled from fragments of memory. You already know this.”
And I did. God help me, I did. Her face came to me then. Precise. Annabelle. I didn’t even know if that was truly her name. I pushed it back.
“Do I?”
“You wouldn’t be sitting in that chair.” I leaned back. Slowly. She went on: “There are documented cases going back centuries. Shared dream-states. Minds that find each other across distance in sleep, like radio signals.”
“Good God...”
“Have you read the work of Hertz?”
“Who?”
“Jonathan.” She leaned toward me. “There are souls that find their receivers without knowing where they’re aimed. The Society has a name for it.”
“And?”
“Two minds. Meeting at the threshold.”
“I don’t follow you. And none of what you’re saying is documented. It’s theorized.”
“Most things are.”
My dreams can hurt. This isn’t a safe place for you.
The clock was still not ticking. I looked at it. It was running, the second hand moved, but I couldn’t hear it. The room absorbed sound the way cloth absorbs water.
“What do you want from me?”
“You came to me.”
“Danny brought me.”
“Did you drag this young man here against his will, Danny?”
“I merely suggested.”
“I...”
“I don’t think Danny has that kind of hold over a young man who goes around without a hat, buttons undone, hair uncombed.” She tilted her head slightly. “I’m not asking you to believe anything. I’m asking you to consider that the woman you’ve been dreaming of is dreaming of you. That she is as real as this room. And that something, some force of circumstance or of nature that we don’t yet have words for, has placed you both on the same threshold, at the same hour, for reasons that aren’t clear yet.”
I might have let it go. The trouble was, in that moment I felt Annabelle’s presence. And that presence was extraordinarily clear, the way reality had always been when I held it in my hands.
How can you be here? I mean... is this even real? Are you real? No, it can’t be...
I’ve been asking myself that for years...
I stood.
“Danny, let’s go.”
“Why? The tea will be here shortly.”
“I want to leave.”
“You’re shaken.”
“No, I’m not.”
I moved to go.
“Joe, wait…” he tried.
Then an intense cold burned through the cloth at my wrist before I even realized that woman’s hand was there.
“You’re torn by doubt,” she said, and her eyes didn’t leave mine.
“As everyone else in this world.”
“Stop hiding. You came here because you want to understand. That takes courage.”
She didn’t step back
“Go beyond that threshold, Jonathan. Try to accept what you can’t yet conceive, and find new ways of knowing.”
I freed my wrist from her grip.
“Sorry, I have to go.”
“Why are you so scared?”
“I’m not.”
“Wait.” Danny said.
“I need to leave this place.”
“Why are you so scared?” she asked again.
“I don’t know,” I yelled, out of breath.
They both looked at me. I was sweating. She took my face in her hands. They were ice cold.
“You’re trying to measure something immeasurable.”
For the first time since I’d walked in, I noticed it was she who smelled of the sea. I put my hands over hers and lifted them from my face.
“I have never believed in such things.”
She smiled. A sweet kind of smile.
“That changes nothing. They exist whether you believe or not.”
***
The red door closed behind us and the noise of the street came back all at once, carriages and voices and a boy selling papers three streets away. I stopped on the pavement.
“Well?” said Danny, lighting a new cigar.
“She knew things she shouldn’t have.”
“People often know more about us than we’d think.”
“There’s a logical explanation.”
“It’s rarely the one I prefer.”
He blew smoke upward. I looked down the street. A grey afternoon.
“She said the girl in my dreams is dreaming of me.”
“Yes. That’s what she said.”
“That’s impossible.”
“You said it yourself, Joe.”
“What?”
“That you interact. That she talks to you.”
“They’re only dreams. She does what I imagine her doing.”
“You don’t believe a word of that. And you know it.”
The sky was darkening.
Oh Jonathan, you can not. Please, promise me you will never try and find me.
It is far too dangerous for you.
“Joe? Are you here?”
I realized I was clenching my jaw.
“She’s in London, Danny.”
I felt like an idiot saying that, but he didn’t make me weigh it.
“So? What’s on your mind?”
“I need to find her.”
Danny drew on his cigar.
“Sounds like we need a plan.”
To be continued…
← Previous
Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Three, Chapter Four, Chapter Five
Danny once again proving himself a real one.
Yes, Jonathan, find her!