Such Stuff Ch. 23

The scream of delight woke Lizzie. It was her mother hugging her for dear life, tears streaming down her cheeks, "Lizzie, Lizzie dearest where have you been? Daddy," she shouted, "our baby's home."

The joy of Lizzie's parents at finding their daughter can only be imagined. It was immediately clear to the awakened Lizzie that not only was she really home but she really had been away, really been missing for weeks. A missing person. The date in the newspapers was undeniable. The Police had to be called and Lizzie had to answer innumerable questions from her parents and the Police. But what could she say? What could she answer? How could she ex­plain? It was if she had been whisked off by the fairies.

Lizzie was not allowed out on her own for days and days. Her unsatisfacto­ry answers to questions had not been well received. "I'm all right Mummy, real­ly I am, just don't ask. Nothing has happened you need to worry about. Really, please don't ask."

The bookshop owner had not seen Conrad for quite a time and was an­noyed with his abrupt disappearance. It had inconvenienced him. "He should have given proper notice. Are you a friend of his, do you know where he is?"

Lizzie could hardly admit that, most certainly, she did know where Con­rad was—locked up in somewhere called the 'Tower Innominate' situated on a hill in a half finished book. It did not sound very likely at all: not to someone who had not been there. The most she could bring herself to say was she was 'sort of a friend.' But even that grated on her tongue. The bookshop owner did however tell her where Conrad lived and Lizzie went to look. It was a very ordi­nary Victorian house converted to bed-sits—not in the best part of town.

The owner of the bed-sits was equally unhappy with Conrad. He had dis­appeared and now owed rent. She was about to throw his stuff out and re-let the room. Was Lizzie interested? She might be. The landlady gave Lizzie the key whilst she got on with cleaning.

It was very strange for Lizzie to find herself standing in the doorway of the very room she had seen from Conrad's chamber in the Great House. It real­ly was the room; there was no doubt about it. She could surely not have got the detail so right in her head if she had been dreaming—could she? With a sense of trepidation Lizzie stepped into the room and closed the door, a feeling al­most of fear. It was several minutes before she could bring herself to do what she knew she had to do.

Lizzie turned to the bed and then slowly got down on her knees on the scratchy carpet to look under the bed. Would the yellow Parker pen be there where it had landed when she had so foolishly thrown it that morning in Con­rad's chamber? Lizzie bent a little lower and stopped. She swallowed. It was there. She reached out to pick up the pen that was lying in the dust under the bed, just as in her heart she had known it would be there. Her fingers paused half an inch from its yellow body. Did she really want to touch it again? Why not just leave the thing and go? She now knew for certain what she had dreamt had been true—but could she really leave the pen and risk someone else pick­ing it up and writing with it?

Her hand closed over the shiny yellow barrel and she pulled it towards her.

In her hand it seemed so ordinary. Just a rather lovely fountain pen in a rather garish yellow with black top and bottom and gold bands and clip. Lizzie looked at it in her hand as she eased herself upright again. She turned to look at the wall facing the bed. She was not surprised to see the doorway opening, opening through to Conrad's chamber. Lizzie could see right into it, could see the tall clerk's desk where she had sat writing in Conrad's book — indeed, though she could not see, the very book might well be on the desk. She stepped to the wall and stopped, just looking into the chamber. Should she? A frisson of excitement came through her and not just of wonder or at seeing a place she well remembered, Lizzie recognised it as the thrill of sexual excitement as if the strange nature of the place was radiating out to her through the doorway in the wall.

Almost without thinking her arm came up and found no resistance. She pulled her arm back—it came. Should she walk through?

One moment she was in the bed-sit: the next she was in Conrad's chamber looking back. She stepped back into the bed-sit—there was no resistance, no difficulty at all.

The chamber was how she had left it—the book was still there on the desk. She opened it. Nothing further had been written. Lizzie had no particular interest in the room but she wanted to know what was happening outside. She opened the wooden door and peaked out into the corridor. There was no one there. Did they know she was gone? Had she been gone the days she had been home? It was too much of a temptation not to go out into the corridor, look out of windows and see the Great House and its gardens again, the house of her strange dreams — the house of her sexual awakening. To see it not in a dream but just as real as if she had crossed the road to the Post Office.

From a window Lizzie gazed out across the Quadrangle to where the Guard marched resplendent in their ornamentals. Lizzie looked with desire at their manhood — properly encased in silver cages—what fun it would be to be with them and unlock the cages. To her left dear Chevalier Heuron walked across in deep conversation with his friend, the possessor of the ridiculous cod­piece. To her right Mallow was dancing with one of her friends both (almost) dressed in the thinnest gauze.

Lizzie wanted to go out, see her friends, talk with them and perhaps, no definitely, engage in...

Lizzie bit her lip. It was happening again, the insidious, seductive nature of the place was getting to her, exciting her, bringing her need for sex to the fore—changing her. Lizzie bit her lip and resisted by turning away and walk­ing, walking away from them along the stone flags of the corridor. From anoth­er window she could look out across the countryside to where the Tower In­nominate stood high on its hill. She scowled as she thought she could espy through a window in the tower a hint of yellow—the source of her change. Her resolution hardened.

Quietly, secretly, quite unobserved, Lizzie returned to the chamber. She could not stay here in the Great House—much as she liked both it and its peo­ple in so many, many ways—she could not risk treating it and them, as Con­rad had done, as a pleasure garden to visit and lord over. She could do that, oh yes, she was sure she could do that now she had the pen again. No, she must leave, never to return. But what of Conrad? Should he stay locked forever in the Tower Innominate? Horrid, horrid man. Even so, did he deserve—or more­over would it do him any good to stay locked away—forever? Would it make him any better, make him reflect and realise what he had done wrong? Oh yes, the punishment fitted the crime: but what about any idea of reforming Con­rad? Continual punishment would fuel resentment not remorse and a personal redefinition.

Slowly Lizzie unscrewed the cap of the Parker Duofold pen.

"The Chevalier, being kinder than most, decided that Conrad, despite his grievous errors, should be permitted to leave the Tower Innominate every third day and reside those days as a private denizen of the Great House until eleven of the clock at night."

For some time she sat looking at the words she had written, an idea she was putting into the Chevalier Heuron's head, and then stood and without looking back, walked through the doorway and into the bed-sit. Placing the pen in her pocket the doorway was already fading as she opened the door and left the bed-sit.

No, she did not wish to rent the room.

Despite what she thought, Lizzie had not actually been alone in Conrad's chamber. As the doorway shimmered and disappeared a small figure in a blue cap could be seen, if you knew where to look, shaking his head gently from side to side, saying to no one at all,

"Lizzie, Lizzie Sherrell, you are too sweet and kind by half. You really ought not have done that—let the Writer out. Ho, ho, no! But 'tis all amuse­ment to me—so should I care?"

Home again, Elizabeth Sherrell carefully placed the yellow pen in her dressing table drawer and turned the key. She had beaten Conrad, won against the seduction of his story and controlled her own lust. She sighed, thinking wistfully of what might have been, it was not that easy to suppress de­sire now it had been raised to such a pitch. She would miss Friday, miss the Guard, miss her friend, the Green Maiden—miss people who were her friends, indeed people she had been more than friendly with. Lizzie, though, had real things to do, a real university course to follow, substantial real world chal­lenges: not made up, make believe things to do that are only possible in dreams. How could she really have dreamt such things, even been dreaming dreams within a dream? That chapter of her life was over: the new chapter started now and that was not a dream at all. With resolution Lizzie picked up one of the new books she had bought and needed to read before her English course started. It was a poetry anthology down the years. The new book fell open and Lizzie read, with a growing disquiet, the poem (by Poe) on the page:

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow—
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand—
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep—while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

End