CHAPTER SIX - Forgotten Fears

So, resolutely turning her back upon the house, she set out once more down the path, determined to keep straight on till she got to the hill. For a few minutes all went on well, and she was just saying 'I really shall do it this time--' when the path gave a sudden twist and shook itself (as she described it afterwards), and the next moment she found herself actually walking in at the door.

'Oh, it's too bad!' she cried. 'I never saw such a house for getting in the way! Never!'

-- Lewis Carroll, Through the
Looking -Glass, and What
Alice Found There, 1872

Joanna was always afterwards unable to pin down in her mind exactly what took place next: it was as if, every time she tried to place them under the glass of memory, the events moved away in the moment before she brought the glass into focus. But what it felt as if had happened was this:

# # #

The smoky unicorn snorted and reared up on his hindlegs, his forehooves clawing at the air. Joanna was astride his broad, ethereal back, with Mustardseed clinging on tight behind her and Mr Dogg draped inelegantly across the mist of Hrimfaxi's shoulderblades in front of her. She clutched the tresses of the unicorn's feathery mane in her hands.

Then, beneath her, Hrimfaxi faded into substantiality. Out of the corners of her eyes she could see the walls of Mustardseed's room, one of them now beginning to char and smoulder, fade into a thin fog.

And then the unicorn leapt; cold, empty air was whipping her hair back in a tangle behind her, pulling her lips back from her teeth, pressing against her eyes so that they filled instantly with tears . . .

They were in the midst of a starfield, one starfield among many, the brilliant points of light clustering here and there, or cast like tiny grains of diamond across the black velvet of eternity. The pulse of Hrimfaxi's mighty strides beat up through her, making her whole body ache. Colossal bulbous billows of gas, glowing in softly radiant colours, puffed towards them, then retreated as Hrimfaxi galloped at full tilt by them, his neck outstretched, his mane lashing, his horn like an arrow fleeing to the furthest corner of the universe. The clouds of bright stars shifted and turned from the speed of Hrimfaxi's flight among them: spirals unfolded and dissipated, unknotting themselves into nothingness; pools of light erupted silently into fountains of brilliance; scintillant shards of ice melted and flowed. Bright stars in reds and whites and golds and blues and oranges whipped past Joanna's face as she leant forward into the terrifying gale of Hrimfaxi's swiftness. She lost all notion that Mustardseed and Mr Dogg were with her: there were only herself and the unicorn and the infinite fields of stars and the waves of the sea that is everness . . .

And through the dreadful stillness she heard, faint at first, the notes of a song, a song that was beyond ears, the song that all the universe is, the song that she and Hrimfaxi were minute parts of, consonances that filled out the everlasting chorus of the starfields . . .

She was everywhere at once, and she was also a woman clad in a belted white robe and seated astride a vibrantly alive creature that plunged ever onwards through the lit blackness. She herself was the light of the stars: she saw herself with their remote, flaringly chill eyes. She was a part of the great, the infinite song, and yet she was its entirety, for it, too, was only a part of her. She was a rain of starlight on the bleak, still waters of an unseen lake. She was silence and the shout of a million throats. She was living and yet she was somewhere far beyond all life. She was the soul's night that never ends, and the luminosity of a newborn smile. She was tinier than a lepton and huger than the colour violet. She was nameless, and the One Who Has All Names. She was the gods -- she was none less than Qinmeartha, the Insane God -- and she was the humblest, most tenuous of all their creations. She felt herself spread out thinly so that there was a taint of her in everything that there ever was and ever would be, from the brightness of spun platinum to the sere voracity of a hole that swallowed space. She was too vast, too vastly isolated from the rest of herself, to sustain thought, yet her thoughts were the song that was all things . . .

And still a core of her remained. A core that was herself, Joanna, whom she could both see and be as she clung to Hrimfaxi's mane and was preternaturally aware of the softness of its frondy hairs against her fingers and palms.

She was the Farness.

The Farness was her.

She was in the Farness.

The Farness was in her.

Forever.

Never to leave . . .

# # #

They were in a place where white desert stretched out on every side of them. She knew they had been there a long time -- hours or years, she was uncertain of the precise duration, although she knew near enough -- perhaps ever since they had left the smoke-smelling prison of the court of the Great High King. The sky was entirely black above them -- not a star to be seen -- and she sensed they were on some world far beyond all stars. Yet the white sand of the ground glowed with a soft milkiness sufficiently bright that she could see her companions and her surroundings perfectly.

'The surface of the moon,' she breathed. Her bottom was a mass of aches from the ride: she shuddered to think how bruised it must look.

Mr Dogg, coming up behind where she sat cross-legged on the sand, gave a little growl of disgust. 'I love you dearly, Joanna, but sometimes your persistent failure of imagination appals me. Always so parochial! Hasn't it yet begun to get through to you who you are -- who you can become?'

'I seem to be the same person I always was,' said Joanna crossly, pinching her leg just above the knee to see if her flesh felt any different from usual. 'I live in the big house with you and Mrs Ruggeley and Mudgett and Knolly Mutton and . . .'

'But you're -- not -- there -- now!' snarled Mr Dogg. He trotted away across the sands, clearly too angry to talk with her any more.

She watched his retreating tail sadly. Why was he suddenly being so horrible to her? Mr Dogg, her only friend from home -- her lifeline.

Hrimfaxi was standing about twenty yards away, his head bowed as if he were grazing. His great flanks still heaved from the exertions of the wild gallop. Mustardseed stood at his neck.

The handservant felt Joanna's gaze on her and looked up. 'I didn't want to come with you, you know,' she said, 'and the anguish of being torn away was like the flesh being ripped off my bones, but I thank you, Joanna. Thank you for giving me my larger thoughts back.' Mustardseed gave a slightly pained smile. 'Thank you,' she repeated.

'Where are we?' said Joanna.

Mustardseed shrugged. 'Hrimfaxi has brought us out of Fairyland and into the further realms of the Farness. We are beyond anywhere that even the Great High King can reach us. Great High King!' she snorted. 'His dominion is one of the grains of sand in this desert, and who could tell which one?'

Joanna looked around her, felt the desert floor beneath her outspread palms. The desert ran away from her all the way to the black horizon in every direction, and she sensed that the horizon was almost infinitely distant. She could cup a million grains of the desert's white sand in her hands . . .

'Are these all realms like Fairyland?' she asked numbly.

'No,' said Mustardseed. 'Only one. The rest are merely chalky sand.'

The thought of Fairyland's vast loneliness made Joanna's spine cold, and she shifted uneasily, as if she could warm it.

The desert, she began to realize, was not featureless, despite the near-uniformity of the light. It rolled in low hills and shallow valleys, some only a few yards across and others many miles. She did not at the time wonder why she could see clear across great mountain ridges to the horizon beyond them. Her sight was caught by one particular structure, the only feature that disturbed the smooth line where the white sands met the blackness of the sky: a mountain that jutted steeply out of the desert, its pitted sides nearly cliffs, its top a jagged plateau like the crown of a carious tooth.

'What's that?' she said, pointing.

Mustardseed turned to look. 'I don't know.'

It's where we're going, said Hrimfaxi's quiet voice. Joanna could see Mustardseed hearing it as well as herself. It's the reason I brought you here. It is the route we must take if we are to go back to where we came from.

'To Fairyland?' said Joanna, aghast. 'But surely that's the last place we want to--'

Of course we must return there, said Hrimfaxi mildly. Otherwise there would have been no reason in our leaving.

'I thought we left so that we -- I -- could escape from being slain by the Comelatelies?' Joanna nodded guiltily towards Mustardseed. 'Present company excepted, of course.'

Robin Goodfellow's still there. Dolly Onskonsider's still there -- and Lumpenkulder. They caused themselves great pain to conjure their ghosts out of themselves, so they could lead me to you. They haven't escaped from Fairyland. There was a definite note of reproof in Hrimfaxi's thought. Your friends, he added.

Joanna's hand flew to her mouth. 'How selfish of me to have forgotten -- even for a moment! Yes, you're right -- of course we must go back! If there's any chance we can help them we must do so! What are we waiting for?' She threw herself to her feet in a cloud of white sand, which settled only slowly around her bare feet. 'Come on, Mr Dogg! Come on, Mustardseed! Let's get going!' She shook sand out of the creases of her robe. 'May we ride upon you once more, Hrimfaxi, or are you weary from your flight here?'

I cannot be weary when you and I are touching, Joanna. She imagined she felt Hrimfaxi smile. It's a matter of fact -- not just a compliment.

'Then let's be on our way,' she cried, running towards him. She put her arm around his great, strong neck, and felt the might of him throb against her skin.

'Do we get a vote on this?' said Mr Dogg.

Joanna looked around the nakedness of the white desert. 'You can stay here if you'd like,' she offered.

'No,' he muttered after a moment. 'I just wanted to make a point, that's all.'

Only Mustardseed seemed reluctant to set off for the distant crag. She stood as if she were alone, her narrow eyes drinking in the barren white and the impenetrable darkness. 'I have so many thoughts to explore,' she whispered. Her voice was no longer harsh and clangorous -- had not been since first she'd spoken to Joanna here. Her whisper was like soft dust moving over polished stone. 'To think, I never knew there were half so many there.'

'Come on, Mustardseed,' said Joanna from her seat on Hrimfaxi's back. 'We can't leave here without you. Remember, Mustardseed is Joanna's friend so long as Joanna is Mustardseed's friend -- and I'm still your friend.'

The handservant shook her head once, twice, as if trying to jerk dreams out of it. 'Yes,' she said. 'Of course I'll come with you. I was just enjoying the sensation of being me, that's all.'

She moved quickly across the sand and leapt easily up behind Joanna.

The unicorn set off across the desert at an easy canter, his big muscles moving smoothly. She put the flat of her hand on the base of his neck and felt the flow of his power. She felt Mustardseed remove one hand from her waist; glancing back, she saw the handservant balancing easily as she surveyed their surroundings.

'See anything?'

'No,' said Mustardseed. 'Just desert. But oh what a freedom it is to be able to see just desert.'

Joanna pondered for a few moments. 'Why did you join Oberon's court, if you hated being there so much?'

'I didn't. Hate being there so much, I mean. I was perfectly content, until you appeared. Oberon allowed me just enough range of thought to perform all the functions he required of me -- nothing like enough to become unhappy with my lot.'

'But you must have known from before--'

'Known what I was letting myself in for, you mean? Listen, after the Oldcomers had been thinned from existence, leaving us to be merry peris and leaping leprechauns, most of us didn't have enough of a mind to remember our names, let alone what it had been like to serve the Great High King in the before-times.' Mustardseed smiled suddenly. 'Don't mistake me, when I was a little fairy with gossamer wings I was still in the service of Oberon, but he too was different. He was languid and youthful and very, very beautiful.' She sighed. 'We all loved our king in a way that was not entirely pure, except that he was devoted to his queen, Titania. So most of us fell in love with Robin Goodfellow instead: he might not be half so handsome, but he had a much better sense of humour. And Robin loved us all back, as much as his cynicism would allow . . . and I thought he probably loved me most of all. Likely all the other fairies thought the same. Then, when the little Finefolk were thinned in their turn, we all changed -- all except Robin Goodfellow and a few others -- and I found myself once more the handservant of a ruthless monarch.'

She smiled tightly.

Joanna remembered a question that had been troubling her earlier.

'What happened to Titania?' she said.

'Oh, she was beautiful -- almost as beautiful as you are when you let yourself be, Joanna.' Mustardseed chuckled. 'How odd. I've only just realized. Back in the court of the Great High King I thought you were hideously ugly. Now, here, although you haven't changed, this same pair of eyes sees you as beautiful. As you are. And growing more so.'

Joanna discovered that the same transformation of perception had occurred in her, too. She saw the exquisite sheen of Mustardseed's scales, the grace of her flattened nose-that-was-not-really-a-nose, the glow of her yellow gaze. She said as much, and the handservant smiled broadly. The teeth -- yes, well, everyone had imperfections. And often it was the imperfections that created their beauty. Mrs Ruggeley was, a mass of imperfections, beautiful.

'About Titania,' Joanna prompted.

'She was beautiful, as I've said. She had long hair that reached to her ankles and was the colour of weeping willows. Her face was a pale acorn. Her eyes -- ah, her brown eyes danced and shone to the tune of a pond's ripples. I think we all loved her as much as we did Oberon -- and, truth be said, with considerably more chance of requital, for she did not in full match his besotment. But towards the time of the thinning of the little ones, Titania's face became clouded with presentiment: she knew what was coming, and she had no wish to be part of it. She tried to tell Oberon of this, for she loved him enough for that, but he was living all his life in the middle of a midsummer day and would not let her put clouds in its sky. He waved her away, with her troublesome frets, and when next he looked for her he found she was gone.'

'Gone? Gone where?'

'If anyone of us had known,' Mustardseed said darkly, 'you can be sure Oberon would have known as well. But nobody did. And when the change in him came -- as it came in all of us -- he vowed vengeance on the one whom he decreed had betrayed him. Which, had he thought about it, was himself.'

'She just . . . vanished?' Joanna said.

'Gone from Fairyland. Seemingly gone from all the realms of the Farness where Finefolk minds could reach. She no longer wished to be Oberon's queen. Disappeared -- as if she had never existed outside our memories of her.'

Mustardseed held up both hands as if to show they were empty, and Joanna thought she might fall -- but the handservant's balance was perfect.

'And no one knows?'

'Oh,' said Mustardseed, 'assuredly there must be some who know. This steed of ours, for example.' She heeled Hrimfaxi's flank with insouciant roughness. 'Unicorns can see further into the Farness than any Finefolk can, although often they are not free to tell of what they see there. Ask him, if you like.'

Joanna reached out her thoughts towards Hrimfaxi, and felt his warm response. But almost at once his mind recoiled a little.

Don't ask me your question, Joanna. I cannot lie to you, and I could not refuse to answer you -- yet it would hurt me greatly if I answered you truthfully. So please, Joanna, please do not ask.

'You see?' said Mustardseed.

Joanna fondled the back of Hrimfaxi's head. 'Don't worry, friend,' she breathed. 'I'll not hurt you. It was only my curiosity wanted to know.'

All this time they had been approaching the great structure that rose into the black sky of this silent world. Such was its vastness that now, although it towered over them, they seemed to have come no closer to its sides.

'What is that place?' said Joanna.

Hrimfaxi seemed reluctant for a moment to answer this question as well. Then he said: It is the Lair of Forgotten Fears -- the first of two gateways through which you must pass if you are to reach Fairyland once more.

Joanna turned to look at Mustardseed, but the handservant merely shrugged, seemingly as baffled by this response as she was herself.

When you awake, Joanna, in the middle of the night with ice clutching your heart and a scream frozen on your lips, and you know that you have dreamt of horrors and worse but cannot remember anything of them -- those are the worst nightmares of all, the ones too dreadful to recall. Or the things that used to terrify you as a child -- the tap of a branch on a curtained windowpane, the pummel of thunder on the roof -- which now you can vaguely recollect seemed frightening, though the fear itself has been drained out of them by time.

Joanna thought she wouldn't mention that she still found thunderstorms . . . well, terrifying was probably too strong a word to put on it, but . . .

And then there are the terrors that used to make your ancestors quake -- the werewolves and the selkies, the kelpies and the frost giants -- but now are remembered only as folktales . . .

'The Oldcomers -- the Comelatelies -- they were among those,' said Joanna.

Yes, you're correct: and the Siddhe also. But the Siddhe were returned to Fairyland -- returned there by human mortals like yourself. Cast even further than Fairyland. And where did you think they'd been all those years?

'Repressed,' said Joanna. 'I thought they were the repressed selves of the Finefolk -- their dark aspects.' She glanced back once more at Mustardseed, who was looking horrified.

True enough: that is what happened in the realm of the Farness called Fairyland. But this is not Fairyland: you are no longer there, but here. In the reality of the Farness as a whole what happened was that the Siddhe, the fear of them forgotten, were brought here -- leaving their other selves to rule Fairyland until their time, too, would come.

'Then the little ones are here now, in their place?' Joanna grappled with the concept that two quite different explanations for one thing might both be true at once.

Who has ever feared the little Finefolk? said Hrimfaxi. No, you won't find them here -- they're in a realm far from here, waiting in their own lair until some change of fortune will return them to what they regard as their own kingdom. Only the creatures of nightmare come to this place: the forgotten fears, the ones that no one any longer has a use for -- at least for the time being.

Joanna wrinkled her face. 'Are other . . . people in the Farness tormented by nightmares as well? Not just we humans?'

Ask Mustardseed.

Once again Joanna swivelled in her seat. One look at Mustardseed's expression was enough. There was no need to ask her.

'This,' said Joanna carefully to the unicorn, 'must be a very terrifying place that you are taking us to.'

Yes -- that's why I did not tell you about it earlier, in case you would refuse to come. But we have to go through this portal if we are ever to rediscover Fairyland. So I allowed my silence to deceive you.

Joanna felt a rush of hot anger. 'I thought you were my true friend!' she said. 'Didn't you trust me to do what is right, no matter how terrifying it might be?'

Hrimfaxi's thoughts were silent.

'Some friend!' muttered Joanna.

'Er, Joanna,' said Mr Dogg from below, 'don't whatever you do alienate him, will you?'

# # #

Still they drew closer to the vast column, so that now it seemed to be extending colossal rust-streaked wings to enfold them. They must still be two or three miles from its almost sheer walls, but already it was evident that the edifice was -- even if based upon a natural formation -- artificial, with tall thin windows like knife-slashes arranged symmetrically along its frontage and a great double door, perhaps a hundred yards tall, piercing it at the base. Joanna craned her neck trying to see the structure's top, far above them, but its sides -- like railway lines -- seemed to narrow forever towards somewhere that was lost in distance. But its mere vastness was not its most intimidating quality: rather, it was the overwhelming sense of massiveness the pile projected. She felt that they were travelling towards it less because of Hrimfaxi's pounding hooves than because it was sucking them in by sheer gravity.

She could find no words to express the depths of her demoralization. The others, too -- even the unicorn -- were silent. If the outer face of the structure exerted this grip upon them, what hope had they against the horrors within?

The building grew until there was nothing else left of the world. Mustardseed's grip around Joanna's waist was like iron. Mr Dogg kept so close to Hrimfaxi's side that he was in constant danger of being trampled underfoot.

The desert beneath them was still white, but Joanna had the fancy that it was no longer composed of sand but instead of powdered bone. The stuff absorbed the sound of Hrimfaxi's gallop: all she could hear of their passage was a long, low shushing sound. No echoes: instead the face of the edifice seemed to emanate chill.

And suddenly Joanna giggled.

The sound jerked all of them out of the depression that had been swallowing them.

'Something funny?' said Mr Dogg. 'Or are you just lapsing into maidenly hysteria?'

'I just thought,' said Joanna, 'I just thought that if you put a lightning-storm in the sky behind this place and set loose a flock of bats to swoop around it, you'd have the perfect setting for a Dracula movie.'

'Dracula was a vampire,' observed Mr Dogg. 'That's not so hilarious. Vampires are forgotten fears, too, aren't they? And if this vampire's on the same scale as his castle . . .'

'Yes, only--' She let it be. But she could feel Hrimfaxi sharing her amusement.

Now they were entering their final approach towards the colossal doors, and the unicorn began to slow his pace.

The doors will open for us, he said. This is a place which is never barred: all are welcome to enter.

'And to leave?' breathed Mustardseed, close behind Joanna's ear.

That is a different matter, replied Hrimfaxi with finality.

Just as the unicorn had predicted, the doors began to creak open, their screech coming almost as a relief after the deadened sound of the past few miles. Inside Joanna could see a red glow like the heart of a furnace. She braced herself for a waft of heat that didn't come.

Now Hrimfaxi's hoofbeats began to echo. Mr Dogg barked a challenge at the front of the construction, and seemed vaguely cheered when it seemed to bark back. Thank goodness for something so prosaic as an echo, at last! The doors opened further, their hinges giving a curiously deep squeal, like a bassoon inexpertly blown.

'We're going to be all right,' said Joanna over her shoulder to Mustardseed. 'I can feel it.'

There was no reply from the handservant, only a further tightening of her grip around Joanna's waist.

And then they were between the doors, and seemed to travel for far too long the distance through the structure's wall towards the fiery glow within. The deep, wrathful red was marbled with flickering streaks of living orange-yellow and puffs of a pale, alien blue. They seemed to be galloping voluntarily into the heart of a pyre, and yet still they felt no heat.

It must be illusion, Joanna told herself fiercely. All the worst horrors are merely illusion. Nightmares drift away, given time; they're less substantial than air . . . Oh. This is the place to which nightmares drift away, Hrimfaxi said. Maybe here they're a bit more subst-- I wish I hadn't started this train of thought.

Suddenly they were through the incandescent husk. The sensation was like puncturing the skin of a soap-bubble, and Hrimfaxi lost his footing entirely, tumbling forwards so that Joanna and Mustardseed fell from his back. Mr Dogg dancing clear of their limbs, the three of them rolled over and over on the dusty floor of what seemed to be a huge cathedral. Joanna's head cracked back against something that seemed like stone, and for some moments all she could see was the wet, soapy-tasting sound of someone busily scraping her face with a hard-bristled brush.

When she returned to the present it was to discover Mr Dogg's face close above hers, watching her anxiously.

'You all right?'

'A bit groggy, that's all.' She shoved herself up onto her elbows. 'And a bit wobbly as well. How are the others?'

'They're OK, though your Siddhe friend seems too terrified to move. It took us a lot of persuasion to get her to uncurl from a foetal ball.' He sniffed Joanna as if to check she really was in full working order. 'Do the Siddhe have foetuses, being immortal and all? Don't know. Still, that was the kind of ball she was--'

'Mr Dogg, she's not my Siddhe friend -- she's our Siddhe friend. Remember that. Besides, I'm not sure that, strictly speaking, she's a Siddhe any longer. As far as I can gather from what Hrimfaxi was saying, the Comelatelies are only Comelatelies when they're actually in Fairyland.' She rubbed the back of her head cautiously. 'When this starts hurting, it's going to hurt a lot.' Her fingers came away with a few small streaks of blood on them.

Mr Dogg moved round behind her for a look, his paws clicking on the stone. 'Very punk,' he commented.

'What is this place?' she said, looking around her. They seemed to be inside a truly colossal space, but the sound-dampening gloom was such that it was impossible to tell for sure. She had the impression that there was a roof vastly far above them. Of the doors and fiery skin through which they had penetrated there was not a sign, and Joanna had the uncanny sense that they, too, were now hugely far away. She had the image of the four companions as minute playing pieces on the board of a giant's game.

Hrimfaxi came hulking out of the dimness, the clopping of his hooves sounding reassuringly normal.

Let my soulstuff heal your hurt, he said without preamble.

'It hasn't started hur--'

But it will, unless . . .

He came close to her and lowered his head so that the spear of his horn was pointing directly towards her heart. She reached out and clasped the bony shaft, and at once felt warmth seeping through her. She held on until the warmth was covering the back of her scalp, and then Hrimfaxi retreated a pace.

The wound will take longer to heal, he said, but it will give you no pain.

Whatever his soulstuff had done, it had also filled her with a strange, bubbly sensation -- a feeling of eruptive vigour. She sprang to her feet, startling Mr Dogg, and tried to make out any details of their surroundings through the murk, which seemed to blow smokily around them. The place smelled smoky, too: perhaps the illusion of embers at the doors had not been entirely misleading.

'Have you ever been here before?' she said to Hrimfaxi.

He shook his mane. No.

'Where's Mustardseed?'

Over here.

She and Mr Dogg followed him as he led them a few tens of yards across the featureless floor to where the handservant lay curled against something that Joanna finally identified as the end of a wooden pew. She had thought in that first blinding moment of their entrance that the place was like a great cathedral, and it seemed she'd been right.

You've made it into a cathedral, Hrimfaxi corrected.

She stared at him. 'How do you mean?'

Many of the things we see in the Farness, Joanna, are too remote from anything we've ever experienced for us to be able to see them as they truly are -- if they can even be said to have a true form. So our minds reinterpret what we see and sense . . . but your mind -- these realms of the Farness have never been exposed to a raw mortal mind before, only to the refined, sophisticated consciousnesses of their higher denizens. Your primitiveness has given you great potential power, Joanna. You seem to have the power to mould the reality of the Farness. That is why I say you made the Lair into a cathedral. It was you, I conjecture, who also created the sere white desert outside here. Your ability may be of great use to us as we travel through this portal.

Joanna continued to stare at him incredulously. 'You mean, I'm a sort of god here? I don't believe you!'

No, because a god would be aware of what he or she was creating. You obviously aren't -- you have no control, and I would think you probably cannot have any control over this. Yet, as I say, your ability may nevertheless be of great assistance to us. But leave that aside: first you are needed to console our friend Mustardseed.

'Yes -- yes of course.' Joanna hoped none of the others had realized that for a few moments she had completely forgotten about the handservant's existence. 'Have you given her some of your -- of your "soulstuff"?'

She will not receive it.

Joanna went down to her knees beside Mustardseed and cradled the Comelately's head in her arms. 'Come on, dear,' she said, feeling inadequate. She'd never really had to comfort anyone before -- just Mr Dogg and Knolly Mutton, and she suspected they'd have got along just as well without her ministrations. 'Look on the bright side. Things aren't so bad.'

Mustardseed didn't respond. She seemed almost catatonic.

'Every cloud has a silver lining,' Joanna tried. 'It never rains but it-- No, hang on, try again. I'm sure it'll all turn out for the best. There's bound to be light at the end of the tunnel.'

Mustardseed stirred slightly, snuggling her head further into the crook of Joanna's shoulder.

'She's probably trying to block her ears,' snapped Mr Dogg. 'Really, you're hopeless. Look -- this is how it's done.'

He planted his forepaws firmly in the middle of Mustardseed's chest and started industriously to lick her face. After a few moments the handservant's features puckered, and she put out an arm to fend him off.

'See?' said Mr Dogg. 'Told you -- works a treat. Works even better, come to that, if you've just had a bowlful of dog biscuits, but--'

Joanna pushed him away herself, feeling miffed. 'Are you better?' she said to Mustardseed. 'Probably you just needed a good sleep.'

'Where--? How did we get here?' said the handservant, gasping the words. 'Where did the jaws go?'

'The jaws?' said Joanna. 'What are you talking about?'

She must have glimpsed this place just before you did, said Hrimfaxi. You must have blinked just as we came through the barrier, Joanna. Long enough for Mustardseed to see her own vision of what the Lair looks like before you remodelled it to match your own conceptions.

Joanna absorbed this. 'Jaws,' she repeated to Mustardseed. 'What exactly did you see?'

'I . . . I don't want to . . .'

'Of course not, dear Mustardseed. Of course you mustn't talk about it, or even think about it, if it distresses you so much. We'll just wait here until you're feeling a bit steadier, and then we must set off to . . .' She looked up at Hrimfaxi and Mr Dogg. 'Does anyone have any clear idea of where it is we're setting off for?'

Fairyland.

Joanna looked scathingly at the unicorn. 'That may be true,' she said, 'but it's not very helpful as a route-plan.'

'If you ask me.' Mr Dogg coughed. 'If you ask me, I think this place is going to decide itself where we're going next. I don't think we actually have much choice in the matter.'

He turned his head meaningfully and indicated a direction seemingly at random. 'Breathe deep,' he said. 'Perhaps you'll be able to smell it.'

Standing up, leaving Mustardseed sitting where she was with her back propped against the end of the pew, Joanna sucked air in through her nostrils. Aside from the individual animal smells of Mr Dogg and Hrimfaxi, there was just the fusty scent of disuse and antiquity. She was half-opening her mouth to say as much to Mr Dogg when she caught the faintest whiff of something else. The odour was intimately familiar, but for the moment she couldn't identify it. She screwed up her eyes, trying to locate the smell in her mental library.

'It's--' she began tentatively.

'Blood,' Mr Dogg concluded. 'Human blood.'

She felt the colour drain from her face.

'Blood?' But she knew she didn't need to ask for confirmation. That was the word on the spine of the book she'd just put her finger on.

'I smell it too,' said Mustardseed.

Joanna looked at Hrimfaxi's eyes and they were sad. I fear what we may discover, he confessed.

'It's only blood,' she said, trying to sound braver than she felt. 'I've smelt it often enough before. It doesn't necessarily mean that . . . well, that there's anyone being killed, or anything. In fact, it probably doesn't. There's probably a perfectly healthy explanation for this.' She put her hands together and made confident washing movements with them. 'Probably.'

'We'd better go and see,' said Mr Dogg doubtfully.

Mustardseed used the pew to pull herself to her feet. She swayed dizzily for a moment, clutching at Joanna's shoulder for support.

Hrimfaxi turned in the direction from which Mr Dogg had indicated the smell came, and began to trot slowly towards it. The others followed him, Mustardseed relinquishing her hold on Joanna after a few paces. The ends of pews appeared to either side of them as they walked: they must be moving up the aisle of the cathedral towards the altar. After a little while their surroundings began to brighten slowly, as if the murkiness were being drawn off into vents far overhead. Joanna found she could see further and further along the pews, which extended emptily on each side as far as her eyes could discern. She hoped they stayed empty: the prospect of discovering a silent worshipper sitting in one of them made her breath catch in her throat.

She glanced at Mustardseed to see how the handservant was bearing up. Well, by the look of her. The handservant flashed her a watery grin.

It didn't occur to Joanna to speak. There was too much of a weight of accumulated years of silence in here.

No -- not quite silence. Despite the steady clop of Hrimfaxi's hooves and the skitter of Mr Dogg's claws, she could hear from somewhere a steady, rhythmic ticking noise.

The gloomy air ahead of them lethargically began to take on an orange cast -- she was reminded of the flames she had seen through the wall of Oberon's tent, and of the inferno into which they'd seemed to plunge as they entered this place. But this wasn't the glow of fire: the colours -- for there were reds and yellows and blues in the mix as well -- hung steadily and still, almost like draped flags.

If this is a cathedral, Joanna thought, and we're approaching the altar, then that would be the stained-glass window behind it . . .

A couple of minutes later her supposition was proved justified. The altar the companions came to was a simple and singularly unimposing affair -- simply a block of some pink-grey marble, unpolished, with a white cloth spread across it -- but the window behind it was enormous, perhaps a hundred and fifty feet high and almost as wide before it curved inwards at the top in the form of a gothic arch. The scene depicted was of the crucifixion: a monstrous and almost monstrously beautiful naked Christ hung beneath a nailed parchment bearing the letters INRI. The crown of thorns had been rammed firmly onto the saviour's forehead, so that blood ran down either side of his face, and the gash in his side likewise poured blood. Around the nails driven through his wrists and ankles the blood had dried into black scabs. Gelatinous tears oozed from the saviour's eyes, though the eyes themselves were an image of tranquility and peace, as if he had come to some kind of accommodation with the pain.

But this was no mere tableau. Christ's chest rose and fell irregularly with his tormented breathing. A slight wind was blowing his sweat-soaked black hair back from his swarthy face. The scene stank of the blood that gushed from the fearful wound in his side.

All was silence save the dripping of this blood to the stone floor behind the altar, where it pooled.

And all of a sudden Joanna remembered where she had seen this image before. She had been very young -- perhaps three or four, certainly no older -- and Mrs Ruggeley had been reading her to sleep from a book of Bible stories. With the typical misjudgment of the childless, Mrs Ruggeley had made the last story before the lights were switched out that of the Passion, with Christ nailed to the cross until he cried out, in his anguish, 'My God, why hast though forsaken me?' The book had been illustrated in graphic colour, and Mrs Ruggeley had held it so that Joanna, incapable of comprehending the lines of print, had been able to look at the pictures. The scene of the crucifixion had been depicted in particularly loving detail, the bright, cheaply printed colours gleaming from the page.

That night Joanna had woken screaming into the chill loneliness. Mrs Ruggeley had rushed to comfort her, but the child had been unable to explain what it was that had so terrified her. 'Just a bad dream,' Mrs Ruggeley had said comfortingly as she led the little girl to her own fruity-smelling bed for the rest of the night.

But now Joanna was able to recall well enough what the nightmare had been. She had stood, full-grown, among the other women and the disciples at the base of the cross upon which the saviour's pain-contorted body dangled. Christ's side had not long been pierced by the one merciful man among the brutal Roman troops whose task it was to put the criminals to death. The blood was gushing from the wound, running down the saviour's leg, and then splashing to the ground.

Not to the ground. The women were huddled directly beneath the cross, and the blood had been falling on Joanna's head and shoulders. As the youngest person there she was not allowed to draw the attention of the others to this, nor to shove them aside so that she could escape from the sticky flood descending on her. She had been forced to stay there, tolerating the horror.

She could recall her loathing, her fear, yet . . .

That was all she was doing now: recalling them. She wasn't actually experiencing them. The child-Joanna who had sprung from sleep with her eyes bulging and her lips stretched across her teeth was a creature of the past.

'I know what's happening,' she whispered to the others. They were looking at her with a mixture of consternation and dread. 'I know.'

She felt herself being pulled, her feet sliding without resistance across the smooth, cold floor towards the moving glass. There was a slight tug on her midriff as she passed directly through the solid-seeming marble altar.

And then once more, just as in the nightmare, she was at the base of a cross that seemed to loom forever into the sky. She glanced up, but all she could see, grotesquely foreshortened, were the saviour's crossed feet and the crude iron nail punched through them and into the splintering wood, Christ's feet and the spate of blood descending towards her.

The blood poured into her upturned face, its splashing din filling her ears as it drenched the white robe over her shoulders and torso. She could taste its saltiness, its iron, its mellow wholeness, even though she kept her lips tight shut. Gobbets clung to the rat-tails of her hair, gumming them to her cheeks. More blood filled her nostrils and, frustrated by the rigid line of her mouth, washed down over her chin and neck, down, down beneath her robe to soak her belly and her legs.

She lowered her gaze and saw, through a curtain of red, her friends staring at her in misery.

'It's all right!' she called, her voice half-choked by the sticky flood. 'It's nothing, really. Just blood. It's yucky, but all it is is blood. I won't drown or anything.'

The flow abruptly stopped, and she staggered from the suddenness of her reprieve.

Her robe was dry, unstained, pristine, white. She extended her arms in front of her, and saw the pattern of fine golden hairs and tiny freckles on their backs. She turned them over and saw her palms, the creases pink, cleaner than they could possibly be after all that she had gone through since last she'd washed them. A few strands of hair dropped in front of her face and she absent-mindedly crammed them back behind her ears.

She turned and looked upwards. She was too close to the great window to see the scene properly, but she was able to tell that it no longer lived: it was merely a construction of stained glass and strips of lead.

The unicorn clipped around the altar to reach her.

What's happened? he said. What have you done?

'Grown up,' she said. 'Learned a little. The terrors of this place can't hurt us, because they're all old terrors.'

She stroked his forehead.

'Well,' she qualified, 'they can't hurt me, anyway. Or Mr Dogg. I'm not so sure about you and Mustardseed, who're immortal. Mortality's the big advantage Mr Dogg and I have, you see: we change and develop as we grow older, so that things that frightened us long ago don't do so any longer.'

Mustardseed, who had approached behind Hrimfaxi, touched her on the elbow. 'Why did you stand there under the window?' she said. 'You looked so . . . so glorious, Joanna. Glorifying.'

'I was washing in blood.'

'We saw you bathing in that shaft of red light that was falling through the glass, yes,' Mustardseed said impatiently, 'but that was no cause to worry us so much.'

Hrimfaxi shifted beneath Joanna's hand, and he gazed at her. She could feel him pulling the memories of the experiences of the past few minutes from her mind and passing them to Mustardseed and Mr Dogg.

'Blimey,' said Mr Dogg. 'So that was what was going on. You must have been--'

'But I wasn't frightened!' exclaimed Joanna. 'Don't you see? I was a bit revolted -- that's all. Disgusted, nauseated, call it what you will -- but I wasn't the least bit frightened.'

There was a shuddering creak from overhead, and all four jerked their faces towards it.

Another groan, as of a great weight straining against insufficient supports to be allowed to plummet groundwards.

'You've broken the window,' growled Mr Dogg, turning. 'Quick -- run!'

Joanna stood rooted to the spot as a network of cracks suddenly sprang into being across the stained-glass image. It was so beautiful, this suddenly modified depiction, as if the reticular lines were somehow dragging her perception of it into a further, hitherto unconceived dimension. The window portrayed the light of the world, but behind it, giving it light, there was a greater light, now poised to reveal itself in its full lambent glory . . .

'Come on!' screamed Mustardseed, yanking her arm.

Snapping out of her daydream, Joanna gave a little shriek and scrambled behind the handservant towards the front rows of the cathedral's pews. Behind them the crackings of the glass sounded like fusillades of shots. The floor was shaking to a series of profounder thuds.

Joanna and Mustardseed threw themselves over the back of the frontmost pew and into the sheltering darkness beyond it just as the enormous stained-glass construction, with a final convulsive scream of tortured matter, erupted in a cloud of singing coloured shards. The air above where they cowered filled with speeding, sharp-edged death. The noise was like a million cats declaring war.

It seemed to last for hours.

'What was that you were saying about the terrors of this place not being able to do us any damage?' said Mustardseed when at last peace came.

Joanna made no reply, but cautiously rose to her feet. The air was filled with suspended glass-dust, so that everything sparkled with an unnatural hyperreality. On the far side of the aisle she could see Mr Dogg's muzzle poking inquisitively out, testing the air. Hrimfaxi, with his greater speed, had run far further than the others but had been unable to find adequate protection for his great white form, and there were bright red streaks along his flanks as he staggered down the central passage towards her.

'You're hurt!' she cried.

Not badly. My wounds will soon heal.

And indeed, even as she watched, the angry weals were fading.

She heard a rapid intake of breath behind her.

Mustardseed, standing, was facing towards where the stained-glass window had been. Her reptilian mouth had fallen open; her eyes were as wide as Joanna had ever seen them.

Joanna looked, too -- looked at the light that had been behind the window.

They were beings, seemingly living creatures. Stretching from the floor to far overhead, they were like pillars formed purely of light, and they shuffled and moved among each other like any human crowd. Others were bulbous incandescences, slowly sinking towards the ground. As soon as she set eyes on them Joanna knew, without benefit of her senses, that they were staring at her. Not at her three companions: just at her. And their stare was not friendly.

Who are they? she thought to Hrimfaxi.

I don't know, he responded unhappily, coming level with her. Like everything else here, they're products of your mind, Joanna. I've never seen anything like them before.

But she had -- she must have, for wasn't this place composed of her own forgotten memories? She racked her brains trying to recall where she'd encountered them, but still there was not the slightest resonance of familiarity.

Think, Joanna! said Hrimfaxi, his thoughts beginning to sound anxious. You triumphed over the fear of Christ's blood because you were able to focus on when you had felt it before -- only that way were you able to withstand it and defeat it. You were right -- the things here cannot directly harm us because they're your discarded fears, and can be remembered into impotence. But if you cannot remember them . . .

'I'm trying,' she wailed.

'Try harder,' suggested Mr Dogg helpfully.

'Shut up! How can I think if you keep--?'

'Can't you hear them?' said Mustardseed, clearly unaware of the others' conversation. 'Can't you hear their power?'

Joanna seized on the clue. She could hear nothing at all, and then -- yes, there was something. A steady whining growl, almost beneath the limit of hearing.

Throw your mind back as far as you can, Joanna, said Hrimfaxi urgently.

Silence! she thought furiously at him. The growl -- the sound of a car on a wet road at night . . . Fifteen or more years since last she'd heard it . . .

Yes, yes, far back . . . Back when Mummy had still been there with them, her softness and the warmth of her embracing arms the core of a tiny Joanna's universe. And one night Joanna had woken to find herself not in her own puke-redolent cot but lying on her back amid blankets in a strange box, with the batter of a giant's roar coming up from beneath her. And she'd looked up to a shiny blackness, where pillars and globules of light moved backwards and forwards in a terrifyingly hostile -- because inexplicable -- formal dance. How she'd screamed and screamed, until the roar had abated and slowly died, until the strange figures of light had swept away from the blackness, which was no longer black but a dirty orange . . .

And her mother's voice, appearing out of nowhere. 'They do choose their moments, don't they, Aubrey? Bloody babies -- remind me never to have another one.'

Her father's laughter as her mother's arms had come from somewhere to lift her up. Joanna's nappy was a heavy warmth, dragging her down, but that didn't seem to matter as Mummy's face had appeared, smiling wearily, to kiss away the fears . . .

'They must have been headlights on the car's rear window,' gasped Joanna now, extrapolating from ignorance into possibly false comprehension, staring at the vastly huger columns and balls of light. 'We must have been on a big road, with lots of other cars behind us. And the rain on the window turned the beams into pillars! Bright raindrops, coursing down the glass. I -- I thought they were monsters, come to watch me and -- and prey on me because I was so small and I didn't know where I was and Mummy and Daddy were nowhere to be seen . . .'

'They're so fine,' said Mustardseed in a low voice. 'So cruel but . . . so fine.'

'They're not cruel,' said Joanna, jumping into motion. 'They're not anything except beautiful. They're just light -- no more than pretty arrays of distorted light.' She stepped out into the cathedral's aisle. 'Look, Mustardseed -- look, all of you -- they can't harm us. It's you who've given them their evil stare.'

She walked assuredly towards the altar once more, crunching broken glass beneath her feet. The lights began to cluster ahead of her, as if grouping for defence. She didn't break her stride until she reached the altar; she paused for a brief moment, decided she didn't have the confidence to believe she'd be able to go right through it a second time, then walked around it, her hands outstretched towards the lights.

'Don't be frightened of me,' she heard herself saying to them, as if they were nervous infants. 'It's only me. Joanna. I'm not a frightening person. I won't hurt you.'

And, in less than the space of a single instant, the lights were gone.

'Oh.' Her hands dropped to her sides. She felt disappointed, let down. Daddy hadn't come for Christmas, again.

Ahead of her, where the lights had stood, there was a grey tunnel, winding out of sight.

# # #

Claustrophobia hit her before they had gone more than a few hundred yards down the tunnel. She and Mustardseed were seated on Hrimfaxi's back, as before, with Mr Dogg once again loping along beside. The tunnel had seemed generously wide at first, but after the first bend it had started to narrow. Now she felt as if it weren't large enough to allow her to breathe.

'I can't-- I can't--'

Yes you can, came Hrimfaxi's firm thought. She wished she were so certain.

They rounded another corner and were immediately plunged into bedlam. A thousand thick, clammy tendrils sprang from the sides of the tunnel to grope at them. Each of the tendrils ended in a circular mouth, ringed with hungry teeth. The mouths were chattering to each other even as they bit at Joanna and her companions.

'Oh, I'd like a munchy of your smooth creamy flesh . . .'

'Come closer, come closer, come closer . . .'

'Such a pretty face, my dear. You look delicious -- really quite good enough to eat . . .'

'Tender to the tooth, tender to the palate, tender to the tummy-tum-tum . . .'

'Lampreys!' Joanna screamed. 'I saw some lampreys in a natural-history movie -- Disney, I think -- see Lenny Lamprey as he makes his new home -- that kind of thing -- only lampreys -- I was about ten -- I dreamt of . . .'

Hrimfaxi lowered his shoulders and charged on through the lampreys, raking his horn from side to side, ripping their pallid flesh.

All at once the lampreys were gone and the tunnel was clear again.

But only for a few seconds. Now there were pirates -- pirates big, pirates small, pirates handsome, pirates grotesque, pirates young, pirates old, and all of them eyepatched and parroted and with a hook in the place of at least one hand. In their other hands they clutched icily sharp sabres, which they brandished at Joanna's eyes. 'Boil her in oil!' they chanted.

'It's a bit much, if you ask me, thinking I'd still be afraid of pirates!' she blurted angrily. 'I'm not a complete child.'

The pirates looked vaguely guilty and disappeared.

So did the tunnel. So did everyone else. Joanna was alone, perched unsteadily on a loo. She knew, as a matter of complete, certain, strict, no-arguments-countenanced cast-iron fact that a witch lived somewhere within the inexplicable intricacies of the loo's workings. The witch was released when you pulled the handle and the waters churned, so what you had to do was wash your hands first (whatever Mrs Ruggeley might say to the contrary), then press the handle down and hold it there -- because the witch wasn't freed until the waters started thundering and that didn't happen until you let go of the handle -- so you stood there with your body tensed, like an athlete on the blocks, until just the very right moment appeared and you let go of the handle and you sped to the lavatory door and were through it and slamming it behind you before your feet properly had a chance to touch the ground and certainly before the wicked witch had time to get even the tip of her pointy black hat above the level of the seat . . .

'I gave up believing in this one before I even started having bad dreams about pirates,' said Joanna with heavy irony to the air in general.

She was back astride Hrimfaxi, with Mustardseed pinned to her.

'I've had such mediocre fears,' she confessed sadly to the unicorn.

They only seem that way to you because they're yours, said the unicorn faintly.

Now the tunnel -- which was certainly beginning to narrow quite rapidly, so that Mr Dogg was having to race ahead of Hrimfaxi rather than run alongside him -- was awash with toothless, gibbering creatures whose eyes were blue flames and who moaned with the wordless sound of the wind in an old chimney. Their bodies seemed to made of grubby tissue paper, disintegrating at their lower edges. They fumbled for Joanna with a sort of wayward purposefulness.

'The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come,' she said contemptuously. 'Always the most dreadful of the three. I must have been nine.'

The creatures melted into emptiness. As did the lurching Tyrannosaurus rex, in its turn. And the hag from the gingerbread house, and the lynch mob, and the parasitic worms that lived in one's tummy, and the marching army of carnivorous phalluses (Joanna was excruciatingly embarrassed about these, but her friends seemed not to recognize them as anything particularly special), and the cake that dripped with concentrated sulphuric acid (Mrs Ruggeley had one day made a joke about having your cake and being eaten by it, and the notion had resurfaced in the seven-year-old Joanna's dreams), and a long period of falling helplessly through a pitch blackness that stank of mildew, and the giant slugs that crawled up your legs while you slept and might go in there, and spiders that scuttled and toothed lizards that flew, and figures of Joanna herself with various different terrible (differently terrible and terribly different) mutilations and mutations, and . . .

All of them -- well, almost all of them -- she managed to face off with some measure of equanimity, although many of the apparitions manifestly terrified one or other of her companions. Mustardseed, in particular, began to look at her betweentimes with an expression of almost reverent awe, as if she had discovered herself in company with a heroine out of an old battling myth.

'It's a lack of imagination that makes her so strong,' Joanna heard Mr Dogg confide to the handservant.

Her temper flared, although she kept her exterior calm. Mr Dogg couldn't have got it more wrong. It wasn't a lack of imagination that was enabling her to dismiss each new assault but a power of imagination: she was imagining herself to be facing them off bravely, casting herself into a courageous rôle, and the reality was obediently trailing along behind.

By now the tunnel had narrowed so much that they were having to move in single file, with Joanna in the lead, then Mustardseed and Mr Dogg and finally Hrimfaxi, who was easing himself backwards in case the constriction grew so tight on him that he got stuck. Progress was slow. The tunnel walls were spongy and covered in rough hairs, like the fibres of a doormat teased out individually to make a shaggy fleece. Joanna was having to push herself forward almost as if she were swimming, and could only occasionally catch glimpses of her friends behind her. The tunnel seemed to be pressing in on each of them equally now, even though they were all different sizes. Her robe was tangling up and hindering her, so she shucked it off and let it lose itself behind her, even though the coarse fibres hurt her skin.

It was the hot pain of the abrasion that brought the forgotten nightmare suddenly back into focus.

It had been a recurring dream and, through its appearance every few months, had done much to shape her childhood. In the dream she had been staying in a house with half a dozen or more other children -- an experience she had known only vicariously through The Sound of Music and The Goonies and Oliver Twist and who knew what else. The other children had belonged to the house, or it had belonged to them; Joanna was a guest, a tolerated interloper. She was aware that adults were in supervision somewhere, and that she'd seen them reassuringly often; but in the dream they were always somewhere else just now. All the children had decided to play some sort of hide-and-seek game, and during it Joanna became aware that there was something not quite right about the house: nothing overtly menacing, probably nothing dangerous, but something unseen that was silently pursuing her. Her search for a hiding-place had taken her up into the house's attic, where there was no real lighting except for whatever sunlight penetrated the cracks in the roof. The place was a repository for old rugs and rolls of carpet, and it smelled of dust and ancient, gracefully decaying wool and sacking. Whatever the thing that was following her was, it was somewhere behind her, perhaps even on the flight of stairs leading up to the attic. It seemingly wasn't trying to catch her: it was just waiting. Yet there was no possibility of retreat: she could just about tolerate the something's existence, but she most certainly wasn't going to risk coming face-to-face with it . . . if it had a face.

She noticed for the first time that one wall of the attic was formed of two masses of coarse carpeting -- except that it wasn't for the first time, because it was at this point in the dream that she suddenly realized she'd been here before, countless times, and knew exactly what would happen next. The line between those two bulks of matting was a way of escape from the attic. She had no idea what lay on the other side, but that didn't matter: the important thing was that it was not-attic.

She moved quite calmly towards the slit and probed at it with her fingers. Then there was a rush of awareness that the something on the stairs had tired of merely waiting, and was slowly coming up towards her; with the awareness came the knowledge that again she had known this was going to happen, that she remembered it from last time -- whenever last time had been. She wasn't terrified, hardly even scared, but she knew she wanted to leave the attic as quickly as possible, so she forced her head and shoulders in between the two volumes of carpeting (the gap had moved from vertical to horizontal without her noticing), and began to drag the rest of herself in, straining with her arms against firm but not overwhelming resistance. Now she was right inside the carpets, and was being pressed lung-flatteningly between them, so that breathing was an impossibility. The swimming movements of her arms took on a real urgency as she struggled further into the warm, dark pressure and . . .

And that was when she always woke up, still for long seconds suffocated by the dream before she could drag a breath and lie shaking in the darkness, reaching out for Knolly Mutton and his comforting familiarity.

When she was twelve or thirteen Mrs Ruggeley had given her a book on reproduction and childbirth and told her to read it, and Joanna had concluded that her recurring dream must be some kind of deep memory of her own birth trauma. Explained, rightly or wrongly, in this mundane way the dream never returned, and she had forgotten all about it until . . .

'The dream!' she whispered with the last puff of breath in her lungs. 'There was birth on the other side of the carpets!'