Dreamside Read Online Free

true; there was a kind of
sharpness, an extra definition about things today. Outside in the street she
had sensed a crackle in the morning air, and she had been confident that this
morning they would be untroubled by the nightmare procession of false
awakenings.
    Experience
told her not to waste hope on this respite. Yet it was in that morning's spirit
of optimism that they had drawn up their campaign to contact the others. They
had already agreed that it should be Ella who would go to Northern Ireland.

 
    Which was how she came to be standing out on deck on the ferry to Lame.   It was the last day of February, too cold to
spend more than a few minutes outside, too cold altogether for most people,
which left her with the deck to herself. Ella loved it, huddled in her flying
jacket, a bitter wind raking her hair, and the ferry dipping through the spume
of the waves.
    But when
the sky darkened to the colour of a bruise, and the sea turned black, her
doubts started to thicken. She knew that the voyage would reawaken the one
thing that she least wanted. The thought sickened her. Then the wind picked up
a foul stench off the water. It was a whiff of corruption; a secret known only
to the sea.
    The boat
rose and fell. Over the stern a ragged company of grey-backed gulls wheeled and
dived. But it was neither cruel beaks nor talons, nor the gulls' greedy eyes
that fascinated and terrified Ella as she stared out to sea. It was the
hovering nameless thing that went scavenging and sucking at the wake of her
journey, and in the wake of the bad dreams that would come to threaten them
all.
     
     
     
     

FOUR
    Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
    Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
    —Wordsworth
    This wasn't what he had wanted at
all, scuttling around trying to track someone
down without knowing if he was dead or alive, emigrated, gaoled, dropped out,
socially elevated or just erased from the face of the earth; trying to find a
character whose company he couldn't abide and who under normal circumstances he
would cross vast deserts to avoid.
    Brad Cousins. Where the hell are you now?
    The
trail was erratic. Ella had already exercised her powers by obtaining—against
university policy—an original home address and telephone number in Sale,
Manchester. It led to an odd phone call.
    "Mr,
Cousins? My name is Lee Peterson. I'm an old ... friend of your son, from
university days. I'm trying to get in touch with him." The line started
crackling. "Do you know where I could get hold of him?"
    "Nope."
    "No idea?"
    "I
don't ask; he don't tell." Lee could hear the
man's asthmatic breathing.
    "Would
Mrs. Cousins know?"
    “ She might; but she'll not tell; she's been dead six
year since."
    The line
was beginning to break up.
    "Where
was he last time you heard?"
    " Saudi . .. Germany. .. Yugoslavia. .." He pronounced
this last with a J.
    "Can't
you give me an idea?"
    At last,
and with an air of crushing disinterest, the man yielded the name PhileCo, a
Midlands pharmaceutical company his son had worked for some time ago. From
PhileCo the unpromising trail led through four drug companies, for which
Cousins had been a sales rep in less than as many years. It ran cold with a
West Country firm called Lytex, where a chatty personnel officer admitted that,
yes, the man had been an employee of the company representing their product to
GPs in the region, but that after a few months of mediocre returns he had
stopped weighing in for work. Lee emerged from the conversation with an address
in Cornwall.
    He made
careful preparations, packing a double change of clothes, a set of brushes, a
travel shaver and a gift manicure set. A manicure set? He wondered when he had
become so fastidious.
    He took the
train to Plymouth, and spent the journey sipping weak tea and gazing gloomily
at the landscape. In the carriage window he had three or more ears, multiple
eyebrows and chins to spare. He almost liked himself better that way.
    His
thoughts turned to Ella.