Neil Gaiman & Caitlin R. Kiernan & Laird Barron by The Book of Cthulhu Page B

things about these dreams—I mean, apart from all that. They always used to begin the same way, and always about the same time of the month.”
    “The night of the full moon?” Hilary said, slurping coffee.
    “Funnily enough, yes. Don’t worry, I didn’t sprout midnight shadow or anything. But some people are sensitive to the full moon, that’s well enough documented. And I always used to begin by dreaming I could see the full moon over the sea, way out in the middle of the ocean. I could see the reflection resting on the water, and after a while I’d always find myself thinking it wasn’t the moon at all but a great pale face peering up out of the ocean, and I’d panic. Then I wouldn’t be able to move and I’d know that the full moon was pulling at something deep in the ocean, waking it up. I’d feel my panic swelling up in me, and all of a sudden it would burst and I’d be in the next dream. That’s how it happened, every time.”
    “Didn’t your parents know? Didn’t they try to find out what was wrong?”
    “I don’t know what you mean by wrong. But yes, they knew eventually, when I told them. That was after I had the idea my father might be able to explain. I was eleven then and I’d had strange feelings sometimes, intuitions and premonitions and so forth, and sometimes I’d discovered they’d been my father’s feelings too.”
    “I know all about your father’s feelings,” Hilary said. “More than he knows about mine.”
    Soon after they’d met, Ingels had taken her to see his parents. She’d felt his father had been too stiffly polite to her, and when she’d cross-examined Ingels he’d eventually admitted that his father had felt she was wrong for him, unsympathetic to him. “You were going to let me tell you about my dreams,” he said. “I told my father about the sea dream and I could see there was something he wasn’t saying. My mother had to make him tell me. Her attitude to the whole thing was rather what yours would have been, but she told him to get it over with, he’d have to tell me sometime. So he told me he’d sometimes shared his father’s dreams without either of them ever knowing why. And he’d had several of my dreams when he’d been young, until one night in the mid-twenties—early 1925, I think he said. Then he’d dreamed a city had risen out of the sea. After that he’d never dreamed again. Well, maybe hearing that was some kind of release for me, because the next time I dreamed of the city too.”
    “You dreamed of a city,” Hilary said.
    “The same one. I told him about it next morning, details of it he hadn’t told me, that were the same in both our dreams. I was watching the sea, the same place as always. Don’t ask me how I knew it was always the same. I knew. One moment I was watching the moon on the water, then I saw it was trembling. The next moment an island rose out of the ocean with a roaring like a waterfall, louder than that, louder than anything I’ve ever heard while awake; I could actually feel my ears bursting. There was a city on the island, all huge greenish blocks with sea and seaweed pouring off them. And the mud was boiling with stranded creatures, panting and bursting. Right in front of me and above me and below me there was a door. Mud was trickling down from it, and I knew that the great pale face I was terrified of was behind the door, getting ready to come out, opening its eyes in the dark. I woke up then, and that was the end of the dreams. Say they were only dreams if you like. You might find it easiest to believe my father and I were sharing them by telepathy.”
    “You know perfectly well,” Hilary said, “that I’d find nothing of the sort.”
    “No? Then try this,” he said sharply. “At the exhibition I visited today there was a painting of our dream. And not by either of us.”
    “So what does that mean?” she cried. “What on earth is that supposed to mean?”
    ‘Well, a dream I can recall so vividly after