A Dream of Wessex Read Online Free

body had grown soft and flabby, in spite of the constant physiotherapy he received. His face was pale and waxen, as if embalmed, and his hair had grown long.
    Julia stared impassively, watching his facial muscles twitch occasionally, and his hands, folded across his chest, tremble as if about to grasp at something. Beneath his lids, his eyes flickered like those of a man dreaming.
    He was dreaming in a sense: a dream that had lasted nearly two years so far, a dream of a distant time and a strange society.
    Dr Trowbridge, who was Eliot’s chief assistant, came over to them from where he had been working at the far end of the hall.
    ‘Is there anything wrong, Dr Eliot?’
    ‘No ... Miss Stretton is familiarizing herself with Harkman’s appearance.’
    Trowbridge looked down at the face of the man in the drawer. ‘Would photographs not give a more accurate impression? Harkman has put on so much weight.’
    Julia said, still staring at the unconscious man: ‘I suppose he could have wilfully changed his appearance.’
    ‘Have any of the others?’ Eliot said.
    ‘Not as far as I know.’
    ‘It’s not consistent with his profile,’ Eliot said. ‘Everything we know about him underlines an inherent stability. There are no lapses. Harkman’s personality is ideal for projection.’
    ‘Perhaps too ideal,’ Julia said, remembering his forceful arguments. She looked intently at the pale face, trying to imprint it on her memory, at the same time remembering how he had talked and acted before the projection began. This body was too like a dummy to imagine it alive and thinking. She said: ‘I wonder if he was repressing some resentment against the others? Perhaps he felt we were somehow intruding, and on projecting he willed himself away from the rest of us.’
    ‘It still isn’t likely,’ Eliot said. ‘There’s nothing in his pre-projection notes to indicate that. It has to be a case of unconscious programming. We’ve had several minor cases of that.’
    ‘And one major one, perhaps,’ Julia said. She nodded to Trowbridge and the technician. ‘You can put him back. I think I’m ready.’
    They slid the drawer, and it closed with a sound of heavy, cushioned metal.
    Eliot said to Trowbridge: ‘I think we should cut back on his intravenous feeding. I’ll talk to you later.’
    He took Julia’s arm, and they went back through the side- tunnel to his surgery. As she followed him into the room, and he closed the door behind her, Julia thought momentarily of Paul. She remembered the row, and his letter, but she thought of them as unpleasant incidents in her experience, not as intrusions into her life. She felt a certain satisfaction that she had the strength at last to file him away into a cubby-hole of her conscious mind.
    She went to sit in the deep chair in front of Eliot’s littered desk, ready to accept his will.
    Later, as she listened to Eliot speak to her of the Wessex projection, she wanted to look away, to see him with her peripheral vision, but she was unable to. Sitting before her, Eliot spoke calmly, repetitively, quietly, and soon she fell into a trance.
     

three
     
    It was late afternoon in Dorchester, and the open-air cafes along Marine Boulevard were enjoying a busy trade as the tourists returned from the beaches. Inside the harbour, the whole extent of which could be seen by the people strolling along the Boulevard, the private yachts were marooned on the pebbles and mud of low tide, held upright by ropes and pontoons. A few men and women from the hired crews were on some of the boats, but most of the owners and their guests were ashore. When the tide was in, the private section of the harbour was a bustle of yachts coming and going, with visitors sitting on the decks enjoying the view and the sunshine, but for the moment those visitors still aboard their boats were concealed from public gaze beneath their gaily coloured canopies and festoons.
    Outside the harbour, a small fleet of fishing boats was