Nemonymous Night by D. F. Lewis Read Free Book Online

understood its meaning without actually understanding it at all—and why it kept returning to his mind unbidden or untranslated. He wasn’t even sure it was a real word: côté . Looked French, but was it? This was the sort of effect of dreaming a word during a night’s sleep rather than the flickering tail of a day-dream at dawn, whilst the party rested from what—he now remembered—was a desperate search for two children. He looked at Susan who also stared dreamily towards the towering Dry Dock—and her eyes later told him that they had forsaken their duty by not earlier informing the Authorities about the children’s disappearance. Many others in the search party had by now wandered off in twos and threes. Greg was the last to leave, as he would soon be due at work in his office. He shuffled papers as he walked away quite quickly for fear of being late. The excuse for his night’s wanderings was now lost on him. If it were children that were missing, surely the police would have been informed. On that evidence (or lack of it), he knew that no children were missing at all. A logic that seemed quite straightforward, as Greg entered the lift to take him to the top floor. Business-life always avoided any thought of crazy dreams and, for the next eight hours, he would not have the luxury of using his imagination.
    Much of the building—including the lift that slowly lifted him between the walls of its inner space—represented a reality that could bear no imagination to be applied to it... although many of its constituents such as the walls that were towards its top, certain parts of the basement boiler room and rooftop garden, some of its I.T. (for example) yearned to be less real so that they could be imagined into existence for some satisfying or evocative fiction work. But the building was there, tangible, safe as houses in a scheme of actuality, and, therefore, it failed in its ambition to cease existing so as to become a shimmering fantasy fit for the wildest imaginings. Greg had the same feeling about himself. He was convinced he was less real than Mike and Susan (for whose lost children they had all been supposedly searching)—and these two were dozing at the moment near the open-air market and they did not know Greg had left them to go to work. The others in the search party were also more real than Greg himself, but that left him with the mystery of why he had forgotten their names. This begged the question—were things (living or dead) more real with names than without? If so, Greg knew his own name was Greg, which fact gave him a sense of well-being, although tinged with a subconscious regret at the loss of unreality that this entailed.
    The power to imagine was perhaps the very Act of Creation in the first place.
    *
    Amy and Arthur slipped from beneath the carpet as the sun slowly lifted its upper edge above the market. Streams of office-workers emerged from the various wide entrances of the underground system—entrances so wide they almost blended into each other. They shaded their eyes as a shard of sunlight sharply sloped into a tall office block like a seaside aero-act. All grabbed their briefcases to their chests and hustled onward to their desks, fearful that, one day, they themselves would commit their own seaside act in some token of devastation... which was odd because, unless they dreamed it, they feared the devastation itself less than causing the devastation themselves.
    Arthur helped Amy stand up—and they both shuffled upon the carpet, now using it as a lower surface rather than the upper one it had been when serving as a blanket against the night chill.
    Instead of flying off on this carpet—as they would have done in a proper dream or an Arabian fantasy—they returned, as if by magic, to the room whence the carpet first emerged and where it had been downtrodden since time immemorial. Amy stretched and yawned, wondering how a carpet could ever have escaped from beneath the heavy legs of