Story: Oneiromancy, XXII

(Part O , XXI , XXIII)

For two people in uncertain peril, the exploration of the island was conducted in an unexpectedly lighthearted manner. Perhaps it was because they were still, after all, asleep and lucidly dreaming, and perhaps it was because they were together on an island that defied exploration. As with all dreams, the expected was not to be expected, and so little snowglobes grew on palm trees and great rubber trees bounced back and forth in the breeze. At one point, Stanley almost fell into a ha-ha, whose existence would have been funny if not for the cacti scattered around the base. On the far side of the ha-ha, a tall red stone wall loomed, dangerously smooth to their eyes.

"Which way?" Enquired the intrepid Helen of the ambiguously courageous Stanley, who in recent times had had to contend with decisions far more vexing than which books to use, and how to explain why the Iberian Peninsula was a peninsula at all. "To the right. If we don't find anything in ten minutes we could head back to the beach."

"What's time in this place? Haven't you noticed that we've been through night and day three times in the last hour?"

"Really?!" Stanley looked up and saw a broad moon high overhead, and that the light that had illuminated their way was in fact of the silvery variety that heralded romantic trips across moors in bad romantic novels, of which he would never admit to having been forced to read as part of a past wooing. Past wooings often have such dark secrets, and tragic endings.

"You've gone all pale? Is it some dark secret you can't possibly tell?"

"What?!?!" Stanley looked at her in shock.

Helen chuckled. "I was only joking. Does it strike you that this is all just a bit ridiculous? We could go walking for days in here and never find a thing." She pointed at a lemon tree, which was of course not at all what you might have expected, especially with the crazy straws. "It's just an arbitrary mess!"

"No, no it's not. Nothing in here is an arbitrary mess. One of us, or the Tweedy Woman, or the person who left that message, is creating all this and if it's either of those last two then it's far from arbitrary. We're being led, and it may be impossible for us to go wrong." Then, exactly one thought later, "If I keep this up, I might have to award myself a badge for original thought."

"Postpone the badge. Up there, when we were being herded toward that monstrous cage, the same rules applied but we did go 'wrong' and jumped off instead." Helen was, to put it mildly, not convinced.

"Yes... We could evade that path now and refuse to move, I suppose, but this ha-ha seems to be an excellent hint that we're being led. If we follow the ha-ha we'll find something."

"Or someone."

"Yes, or someone. I wonder who it might be."

"We'll just have to keep going until we wake up. Come on, teacher man. What do you teach again?" Helen asked impishly.

"Geography, the last refuge of those uncertain what to study."

"Then it's time to do something contrary. If you can't teach, then do."

The two dreamliners walked on for a while, following the ha-ha that was to their left and occasionally marvelling at the bizarre things growing at the bottom of the recess. Finally, they came to a bridge and a gate in the wall. The gate was fastened with a crude lock, which Helen broke off with a rock, and they walked through into the interior of what could only have been an arboretum. The path led deeper, amidst all the signs strewn about identifying each specimen.

Helen led the way, feeling both that she'd pushed Stanley to the front enough and an affinity to the woodland. The trees were exotic, incredible and surprising, but the two quelled their sleeping wonders and made their way to the centre. There was but one tree here, a simple oak, to which was tied a man by strong tarred cords. Initially he slumped, face down toward the ground, but when he sensed their presence he looked up in the most exhausted way. All he said was: "About blasted time!"

To be continued, and then concluded.