He remembered being told once that if you dreamed of falling and actually hit bottom in the dream, then you would die in your sleep. Nina had sometimes had an odd bedtime way with her.
It wasn’t yet full light, but he could see a faint glow through the eastern windows of the bedroom. He was on his back, and Ben was flung across him, arm across his chest, one leg bent up and heavy upon his thighs. He was hot and the soft breath against his neck was rhythmic and calming.
He brought his hand up and began to lightly stroke Ben’s naked back, the smooth skin under his fingertips felt like caressing silk. His brain started to float free, tiny firings of random thoughts, which began to form a pattern. As with his beautiful oriental rug, the complex geometry only became visible when you stood back a little and let it form at its own pace.
A writer.
He did not know why, but twice now when he had spoken to people, they had asked him if he was writing a book. Apparently there was a man claiming to be a writer going around interrogating people about Scilly. This interested him, for it seemed to him that if you wanted to ask questions, claiming to be an author doing research would be a good cover story—better than being off a foreign trawler, anyway. But that he was being mistaken for this other man, which apparently he was, implied that this writer, genuine or not, might also be Russian. After all, it was his most distinctive characteristic and hard to miss the moment he opened his mouth.
Ben’s breath was getting lighter; he was slowly waking. Aleksey stopped the stroking and just let his hand rest lightly on the prominent shoulder blade.
Toys. They also seemed to be something of a theme in his life recently—ones familiar to him, yet possibly not so to Ben. The older they both got, the less the age difference between them seemed to matter, but it had more significance for their births. He had been a child of the early 70s; Ben not born until the middle eighties. He and Nikolas had barely had batteries for their toys, let alone electronics. So what child found interest in a glove-puppet these days? He didn’t know. Perhaps they did. Maybe dragged from their screens, they did indeed find a grown-up’s hand wriggling in a bit of coloured cloth fascinating.
A clapping monkey? Putting aside the belief that no child should ever be forced to own such a thing, surely you could not buy a toy like that nowadays? It was possibly illegal, probably against health and safety at the very least. A key? What child would not immediately pull it out and swallow it? He smiled to himself, thinking of the blacksmith’s tools he had acquired for his armour-making endeavours. His favourite toys had been a sword and a catapult, as Nikolas had known only too well. Maybe that was why his twin retaliated with night-time clapping-monkey antics.
A writer. Old toys.
Benhar—that too was something of a theme which kept repeating itself in his life. He had asked about Billy in the museum and Arthur had suggested he might have lived in the asylum on Benhar. Philippa had also been to Benhar before she’d come to visit them. Coincidence, possibly—except for the bear. The teddy bear linked Phillipa, Light Island lighthouse, and the asylum.
What did all these things have in common?
Why did it matter?
Why was he bothering with any of it?
Did he really need another terrible situation to arise because of his insatiable need to slot the world together until it made sense? Childhood habits of constructing and building perfect worlds should be left behind when you grew up and realised the world was as it was and could not be altered. And yet…had not the two experiences he’d had since he’d bought Light Island shown just the opposite was true? Two arrogant men had told him that the future was theirs to control—no, thathisfuture was theirs to control—and he had proved otherwise. He had always claimed that his destiny was his own to create, now he broadened that assertion—he created his own world, this bubble of perfection that contained his valley, his island, his family.
All he wanted to do was find Billy, thank him for his help and possibly make some kind of reparation for locking him out of the lighthouse.
Now, however, he felt the disturbing episode in the asylum the day before had been a warning, a representation that his world was beginning to unravel—its perfect geometry not as secure as he wanted it to be. His brain, like an animal sensing a tsunami, had figuratively turned to the hills, and had then presented to him a topsy-turvy representation of reality—a horrific predestination of what could happen if he wasn’t ready for what was coming.
Maybe that would be his hell one day: being trapped in an abandoned insane asylum, forever seeking Ben whom he could hear but not find.
Ack. He’d break the bars.
Writer not writer. Toys. Benhar.Phillipa. And, again, Light Island.
It was fairly clear what he needed to do—he needed to stay in bed with Ben Rider-Mikkelsen and forget it all.
If he was entirely honest with himself, he knew he wasn’t staring into the abyss this time; it was happily asleep and he was poking it with a stick just for something to do.
But then when had honesty ever been his thing?
Eventually deciding that if he was going into battle once more, he’d better be on top form, Aleksey slipped out of the warm dent in the bed he and Ben had created, pulled on some jeans and a sweater, and jogged down the stairs to summon his swimming companions.
He had a feeling Radulf wouldn’t be quite so keen for this early-morning pond experiment now, given the noticeable chill in the air. It didn’t help that the dogs had discovered the sofas during the night and now occupied one each. They’d dug nice nests out of the throw cushions and were both on their backs, hairy legs splayed, and snoring gently.
Aleksey clapped his hands for attention.
Nothing. Not even a twitch.
He really needed to up his game.
Eventually getting them both outside, he strode with them down to the little lake, stripped, and plunged in.
He re-emerged and dragged a retreating Radulf in by his collar.
They swam side by side to the island, and he let the old dog scramble out, then levered himself up onto the rocks. They had spent some time now exploring this tiny fiefdom within his larger domain, and unofficially he’d named it Old Mutt Island, because the dog had discovered its most interesting feature. Right in the middle, beneath a spindly tree, there’d been a stone. When revealed, it had been unnaturally smooth and flat.
