Just Dreaming Read online

  Oh, yes! Phase one! This afternoon’s events had driven it right out of my mind.

  The three-phase plan was Grayson’s own idea. He had explained it right after the humiliation of Mrs. Lawrence in the cafeteria—a plan to rid the world of Arthur. Unfortunately, in spite of its impressive name, the whole thing wasn’t really worked out yet. To be honest, it wasn’t even a proper plan, just a kind of statement of intent. Phase one was clear enough: take as many precautions as possible, check up on everything, and collect information, materials, facts, and ideas. But when you reached phase two, it was more vague. All the statement said was work out a concrete plan to keep Arthur from doing whatever he’s planning to do. Grayson hadn’t actually read phase three aloud to us (presumably because it would send us into fits of laughter), but we could make a guess at the gist of it: finish Arthur off according to plan.

  And so we would too. Always supposing he hadn’t finished us off first. And if we knew how.

  “Hey, have you been crying?” Grayson gave up offering me the sock, dropped on the chair at my desk, and looked at me reproachfully. “To be honest, I’d expected a little more gratitude. And appreciation,” he said, folding his arms. “Not everyone would go all the way to Surrey just for a sock.”

  He was right there. Getting hold of some personal possession of Senator Tod’s was definitely part of our plan, but we hadn’t really known how to go about it. However, Henry and I had found out what hospital he was in. That had been easy: a few clicks on the Internet and two phone calls, and we had the information we wanted. There weren’t very many nursing homes in and around Reigate that took in long-term coma patients, and luckily for us, they didn’t seem to take data protection all that seriously.

  “But wasn’t getting into the hospital difficult?” I asked.

  Grayson rolled his eyes. “No problem at all. I was going to say I was his nephew, but no one even asked me.” He looked almost disappointed; presumably he’d thought up another three-phase plan for breaking into hospitals with hostile action in mind. “Poor guy,” he said. “Just lying there asleep. Sleeping twenty-four hours a day, for over a month now. Did you know they can run feeding tubes directly through the abdominal wall instead of down the esophagus? It’s called percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy. They recommend it for long-term patients. Obviously they don’t hold out much hope that he’ll ever wake up again.” He rubbed his nose, clearly affected by his discoveries. “I don’t know the man at all, but even if he wasn’t a good character and Anabel had her reasons, I don’t think anyone deserves a fate like that, do you?”

  No, I didn’t. Not even Arthur. Even though Henry thought that Anabel’s method might be the only way of putting Arthur out of action if we weren’t actually going to murder him.

  “We have to help him.” Grayson looked at Senator Tod’s sock with a melancholy expression. “One of the nurses told me his mother comes in every day to get him dressed, just in case he wakes up. Poor woman—I bet she’ll wonder where the second sock of that pair is.”

  I bit my lower lip. Grayson was right; we must at least try to help Senator Tod. If only for his mother’s sake. I almost began crying again. “Weren’t there any other personal possessions lying around?” I asked quickly, blinking the tears away. “Maybe something not quite so revolting?”

  Grayson looked guilty. There had probably been all kinds of personal things there, but he couldn’t bring himself to steal one of them. “Don’t be so ungrateful, Liv. That sock is ideal. You can simply wear it every night, and then you’ll be ready if we find the door. Or if Anabel shows it to us of her own accord. Anyway, what can you tick off your to-do list today?”

  Hmm, well. I didn’t want to admit that I hadn’t drawn up a to-do list at all and had not, therefore, been able to contribute to the three-phase plan to save the world from Arthur. My day had been horrible enough as it was, and it occurred to me that Grayson didn’t know anything about that yet.

  “Forget the to-do lists,” I said, sighing deeply and moving to the edge of my bed. “Something bad has happened.” And I wanted my dear old teddy Mr. Twinkle back!

  “Has Granny finally made Dad agree to get a wedding planner in?” asked Grayson sympathetically. “Is that why you were crying?”

  Oh heavens, we had to think of the wedding planner too! Apparently the Boker had engaged the best in the business, and if she had her way, he would make Mom’s informal little party into a gigantic social event. But that wasn’t what our crisis meeting this afternoon had been about. I shook my head.

  “Lottie told us today that she’s going to leave us after the wedding,” I said, and I nearly did begin to cry again.

  “Really?” Grayson seemed genuinely concerned. “I thought there wasn’t any question of that anymore.”

  “So did I,” I said. But that wasn’t really true. Deep down inside, I’d known this day would come sometime. Mia and I were far too old to need an au pair, and had been for a long time, and now that Mom couldn’t be said to be bringing us up on her own and we had a real home, our Mary Poppins would have to take off for somewhere else. It wasn’t that we didn’t understand. We simply couldn’t imagine life without Lottie. She was the best thing that had ever happened to us. I wasn’t so sure whether that applied the other way around. After her au pair year almost thirteen years ago, she’d originally been going to train as a teacher in Munich, and she would be teaching in elementary schools if she hadn’t been traveling the world with us instead. She’d probably have married and had children of her own by now. As things were, she was thirty-two years old, and she didn’t even have training to do anything.

  “But what is she going to … er, I mean what will she…?” Grayson obviously didn’t know how to put his question tactfully, but I understood him all the same.

  “One of her cousins has offered her a job in his hotel in Oberstdorf,” I said. “Beginning on the first of July.”

  Grayson looked really shocked. “In Germany? But what about Uncle Charles? I thought he and Lottie were really serious about each other.”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “No, I’m afraid nothing is going to come of that. Your uncle is so … so undecided. And I think Lottie’s feelings have cooled off a bit too. She doesn’t stammer anymore when Charles is in the room.”

  “We’ll have to do something,” said Grayson firmly. “If Lottie and Charles are a couple, she’ll have to stay in London. That would be the best thing for Charles as well.”

  “Put it on your to-do list,” I said. I meant to sound sarcastic so that he wouldn’t notice how touched I was. And I could have hugged him for worrying about Lottie—and maybe also worrying a bit about Mia and me.

  “At least that’s one thing I can do.” Grayson grinned at me. “You wait and see, I’m not just brilliant at stealing socks—I’m good at pairing people off as well.”

  I grinned back and suddenly felt much more confident. Okay, so we had no plan, but we all had one another. Which was more than could be said for Arthur.

  The only question was, how long did we have left to arm ourselves to thwart whatever he was going to do? Which brought my thoughts back to personal possessions. Did things that the owner had thrown away count? And how long would an ordinary black sock, for instance, keep a personal note about it?

  Grayson couldn’t answer that question.

  “For a while at least, I guess,” I said, thinking out loud. “T-shirts that you’ve thrown out and I wear as pajama tops work fine, anyway.”

  Grayson took a deep breath. “First, I haven’t thrown those T-shirts out; you simply found them in the basket of clean laundry.…”

  “Yes, but only when you hadn’t worn them for weeks.”

  “And second, I want you to stop trying to get into my dreams.”

  “It’s only for test purposes.” I ignored his frown. “You know—phase one, security checks and so on. I’m only seeing whether the door would open if I wanted to get in. Which of course I don’t. Although I could.”

&nbs
p; “Leave that right out,” said Grayson categorically.

  “I’m afraid I can’t.” I realized that in spite of the Lottie disaster a big grin was spreading over my face, and there wasn’t a single thing I could do about it. “You’ll have to improve your security precautions, Grayson. I bet it would be easy as pie for Arthur to answer Frightful Freddy’s question. I mean, if I could do it…”

  Grayson laughed incredulously. “Oh, come on, you’re making this up, Liv. Since when have you been a whiz at mental arithmetic?”

  “It really wasn’t difficult.” Well, actually, it had taken me three nights even to notice the silly arithmetic puzzle and then get my calculator to work it out. “If you multiply the root of sixty-three thousand and one by a hundred and eighty-six, what is the result?” I said, trying to imitate Freddy’s squeaky voice. “And then if you subtract from that the product of one thousand three hundred and fifty plus six, take away from the result the root of sixty-three thousand and one, and look at it the other way around, what do you get?”

  “If you can recite it off by heart, you must really have heard it many times,” said Grayson sarcastically, still pretty sure of himself.

  “Thirty-eight thousand three hundred and seventeen,” I said.

  “Good arithmetic but wrong answer,” said Grayson, both relieved and gleeful. “Math isn’t everything, you know.”

  “Yes, I do know. But if you look at thirty-eight thousand three hundred and seventeen the other way around, you get—Liebe—which means love, in German.” I was the one who probably now looked like Buttercup when she wanted appreciation. But I was also proud of grasping all the laborious arithmetic quickly enough to see that looking at the result the other way around only meant reading the number on the display upside down, a trick that every schoolchild knew. That made the 7 a letter L, the 1 a letter I, the 3 a letter E, and so on. “I’d call that a very romantic password.”

  In fact, I hadn’t checked whether it really worked, because when I was standing outside Grayson’s dream door and Freddy was looking expectantly at me, it had suddenly seemed stupid to mention the password itself—too dangerous in this corridor, where you never knew if you were really alone. Even if I just whispered it into Freddy’s ear, someone could be eavesdropping, someone who might be invisible but still might not have thought of simply turning the calculator upside down. And Grayson had played fair with me by putting it in German—Liebe.

  “Oh, hell,” said Grayson quietly, from which I concluded that love really was the right answer. “Then I’ll have to think up something else for tonight.” At that, his frown went away, and he smiled. “Even though I bet Arthur isn’t as clever as you.”

  “Fair enough. But he makes up for it by having a nastier mind.” I thought of the showdown with Theo Ellis inside the school entrance, but just as I was about to tell Grayson about that, I thought of something and stood up to search my bag. “Here, this is for you, from Henry. He wants you to wear it tonight.”

  Grayson stared at what I was offering him, as baffled as I had been by the sock just now. “A pair of glasses with only one lens? Why? Who does it belong to?”

  “He didn’t say, but if I were going to make a guess…” I held up the lilac scarf that Henry had provided for my own use and smelled it. “I’d say to a woman born before 1950, who likes eating cabbage and douses herself in lavender perfume. I hope tying it around my leg will do. I’m not wearing it around my neck, anyway.”

  Grayson grumpily turned the glasses over in his fingers and stood up. “Oh, wonderful. No refreshing good night’s sleep again.” Yawning, he made for the door. “But I’ll tell you one thing: I’m not going to bed on an empty stomach. Do you think there’s anything left over from supper?”

  I nodded. “In the fridge. And Lottie hid your share of the meatballs on the terrace, to keep it safe from Mia. They’re in the green dish on the windowsill.”

  Grayson’s expression cleared at once. “I just love Lottie. How I’m ever going to live without her and her meatballs I can’t imagine.” He smiled at me once again before closing the door behind him. “See you soon, then. In that damn corridor.”

  5

  “HERE WE ARE.” Henry put his hand on a clunky bronze doorknob. “In you go.”

  Grayson looked skeptically at the door in question. “Can one of you please explain why we have to invade some stranger’s dream room, at a distance of what feels like miles away from our own doors, just to talk?” he asked, looking back along the corridor. “Aside from the fact that I’m sure I for one won’t find my way back on my own, Ar … er, an invisible person could have followed us here as well as anywhere else.”

  “Correct,” said Henry. “But anyone who doesn’t know whose door this is can’t steal one of its owner’s possessions and therefore won’t get through the doorway.” He gave the door a friendly pat. “We’re sure to be undisturbed here. And we’ll always have somewhere to take refuge if … if we happen to need it.”

  Grayson still didn’t look convinced, and I myself did not really think Henry’s argument entirely conclusive. “Hang on a moment. How about Amy’s door? I didn’t have any personal possession of hers,” I said. Amy was Henry’s four-year-old sister, and it was in one of her sugar-sweet sky-blue dreams of balloons and soap bubbles that Henry had first said he loved me. He couldn’t have chosen a more romantic setting. Well, maybe the rainbow-colored ponies had been rather over the top.

  “You could get into Amy’s dream room only because I opened the door for you and took you in with me,” Henry explained with a touch of impatience in his voice. “And because you had a personal possession of mine with you. Come on.”

  I still didn’t quite like it. “Ar … someone invisible could simply smuggle himself in with us. The way I followed you into B’s dream not so long ago as a breath of air. Don’t you remember?”

  Henry sighed. Maybe with impatience, maybe because he didn’t want to be reminded of that episode. “In this case, for one thing, someone would need a personal possession of mine, and, for another, would have to break through all the energy fields that I set up behind us on the way here.” He pointed to a wall of flickering air that he had brought into being just now with a casual wave of his hand, about sixty feet away from us. “They’ll last only as long as we can see them, but that’s enough to deter anyone following us.”

  “Energy fields keeping invisible people out,” muttered Grayson. “That sounds so silly that, if this was a movie, I’d walk out of the cinema.”

  You bet. “A movie about people who are so powerful in their dreams that they can even make themselves invisible but are supposed to be kept away by energy fields dreamed up by other people,” I added. “Doesn’t sound likely to win any Oscars.” Never mind the fact that it would be dead difficult to get invisible actors performing in such a movie.

  “Well, I’ve seen worse movies. Come along, you two.” Henry had opened the door, held it open, and pushed us through the doorway one after the other. “And no need to beware of the mastiff. It won’t hurt you.”

  When I heard that, I felt like going back, but Henry was quick to close the door behind us and lean back against it. I looked around. Luckily there was no sign of a mastiff. We were in a living room crammed with furniture and bric-a-brac. Stylistically, it was a perfect match for the scarf that Henry had given me (I had tied it around my waist like a belt before going to bed). The patterns of the flowered upholstery of the sofas and chairs, and the flowered shades of the floor lamps, competed with embroidered cushions, colorful Persian rugs, and traditional Victorian wallpaper. Framed prints of oil paintings showing ballerinas in blue and pink tutus hung on the walls, and pots full of magenta Alpine violets in flower stood on every spare space: the windowsills, the piano, and the dark, heavy cupboards and chests of drawers. There was a parrot in a huge gilded cage near the piano, scratching its chest feathers and looking at us with interest.

  “What a nightmare place to come,” said Grayson, astonished.

/>   “Nightmare yourself, scum!” screeched the parrot.

  “Corky, that’s no way for a well-brought-up bird to talk!” The speaker was an old lady sitting beside the fireplace in a flowered armchair, knitting something very brightly colored. Small and thin, with hair tinted pale lilac and a flowered dress, she merged so perfectly with the optical effect of the armchair that I hadn’t noticed her before. She pushed her glasses down to the end of her nose so as to look at us over the top of them. “But the blanket isn’t finished yet,” she said.

  “Never mind, Mrs. Honeycutt,” said Henry gently. “Don’t let us disturb you, just go on with your knitting.”

  “You aren’t disturbing me.” The old lady’s knitting needles clicked. “I don’t like people putting pressure on me, that’s all. It will take as long as it takes.”

  “Quite right too.” Henry slowly pushed Grayson and me past Mrs. Honeycutt’s chair and the parrot to a group of chairs standing around a little circular table. “We’ll just sit here for a little while, and you’ll forget we’re even in the room. Go on knitting, and you’ll feel relaxed and happy.” There was something in his voice that suggested hypnosis as shown in some ancient film, but it seemed to work.

  “I always feel relaxed and happy when I’m knitting,” said Mrs. Honeycutt, more to herself than to Henry. “That’s the wonderful thing about it. I always say, if everyone in the world knitted, it would be a better place.”

  “Sit down,” Henry told us. He turned one of the chairs around, sat astride it, and looked at us, satisfied.

  “Where’s the mastiff?” I whispered.

  “Mrs. Honeycutt doesn’t always dream of it. Usually she has perfectly harmless dreams of herself sitting in her living room, knitting.” The crinkles at the corners of Henry’s mouth deepened. “Which is exactly what she does in waking life.”

  “How awful,” whispered Grayson, and I wasn’t sure whether he meant our surroundings, or the fact that Mrs. Honeycutt’s dreams were a boring copy of what she did every day.