Dream a Little Dream (The Silver Trilogy) (F) (17 page)

“Has Emancipated Emily actually been to the hairdresser?” asked Jasper. “And is that
lipstick
she’s wearing?” He whistled softly through his teeth. “She’s fallen for you in a big way, Grayson.”

As if to prove his point, Emily smiled and waved to us, while Florence turned to a dark-haired boy with slumped shoulders whose facial-skin problem was obvious even from here, in spite of the dim light. Good heavens—that must be Pimply Sam, no doubt about it. His gaze was wandering around. Florence had probably just been offering him a hundred pounds to take me to the Autumn Ball, and now he wanted to see if the offer was large enough. I was fairly sure that Mom, too, would be ready to pay that and even more to see her daughter in a Victorian-style ball dress.

I got into cover behind Grayson.

“What with the gracious way Emily is smiling and waving, you might think she was standing on the balcony of Buckingham Palace,” said Henry. “I’d say she’s waiting for her prince to turn up.”

Grayson sighed deeply, and Jasper nudged him in the ribs. “Go on. We’ll look after Liz.”

“Liv!”

“That’s what I said.”

“Okay. I’ll be right back,” said Grayson to no one in particular. He turned and wandered over to Emily. Jasper, Henry, and I watched their meeting.

“Ordinary sort of noncommittal peck on both cheeks,” commented Henry.

“Just the kind of kiss I give my aunt Gertrude when we see each other,” I said. (And I held my breath too, because Aunt Gertrude always smelled of a not-very-nice mixture of wet dog and hairspray.)

However, Emily didn’t seem satisfied with an Aunt Gertrude kiss. She glanced briefly our way, then put both arms around Grayson’s neck and pulled his mouth down to hers. It was a tongue kiss worthy of Hollywood.

“Uh-huh,” went Jasper.

And Henry said, “Too bad about the lipstick, then.”

“I guess she just doesn’t want anyone to think she might smell of wet dog, like my aunt Gertrude,” I said.

“Between you and me, I think she always does smell of the stables a bit,” whispered Arthur, who had come up behind us again, unnoticed. “Of hay and leather and horse droppings … but don’t say so to Grayson. Especially since it looks like she’s getting to feel more passionate about him than her horse.”

“And her horse is called Conquest of Paradise,” added Henry. Without even looking, I knew what kind of face he was making. I tried not to giggle.

Emily and Grayson were still kissing, and it was getting kind of embarrassing to watch.

“Maybe they’d better look for a room somewhere,” murmured Jasper. Henry and Arthur exchanged a brief glance.

Then Arthur suddenly asked, “Er, Liv, would you like to see our home cinema and the film archive?”

All at once I was wide awake and concentrating intently. Was something about to happen? Was I going to find out just why Grayson had tried so hard to keep me away from this party? Jasper, Henry, and Arthur seemed equally interested. They were looking at me expectantly. You could almost have said they were lying in wait for me.

Do please simply say no
—I hadn’t forgotten Grayson’s words.

“Yes,” I said firmly. “I’d love to.”

18

ONLY IN THE CORRIDOR
going back to the main house did I realize exactly how loud the party music had been. There was a squeaking in my ears, but we left the thumping basses behind, and finally only our footsteps echoed at unnaturally loud volume on the polished granite flagstones.

I turned around. “Where’s Jasper?”

“He’s mixing us a couple of drinks, then he’ll follow. This way.” We had reached the end of the corridor and turned into the front hall, where the fountain was peacefully playing. There was no one in sight, but you could hear muted voices and piano music.

“The cinema and the film archive are down on the lower floor,” Arthur explained, opening a door.

Ahead of us, a flight of stairs led down. My feet stopped of their own accord.

“Maybe it’s not the best idea to go down into a gloomy cellar with two guys you hardly know, eh, Liv?” Henry appeared next to me, looking at me sideways, his eyebrows ironically raised as usual.

Oddly enough, I’d been thinking exactly the same thing (and so, obviously, had my feet). Hadn’t Mom said, only a few hours ago, that she was afraid I’d never do anything in my life without mulling it over first, just like my father? Who did she think she was kidding?

But as Mr. Wu always said, “He who thinks too long before taking the next step will spend his life standing on one leg.”

I started moving again. What was there to be scared of, I asked myself with my sweetest, most innocent smile. (I could do the eyebrow-raising trick myself, too, and pretty well, but I was going to keep that for later. You want to go easy on imitating tricks like that, or the effect soon wears off.)

“The lower floor isn’t a gloomy cellar, and we’re not strangers.” Arthur sounded slightly insulted, and sure enough the word
cellar
turned out to be unsuitable when we arrived in the home cinema. Thanks to a series of handsome ceiling and wall lights, it was bright as day, and the corridor—which, with all its doors, reminded me a little of the corridor in my dreams—was luxuriously carpeted.

“All the same, the walls here are really thick. No one would hear your screams.” Henry didn’t seem to know when to drop the subject.

I shrugged my shoulders casually, and this time I quoted out loud from Mr. Wu’s wide range of proverbs: “But if the dragon wants to rise in the air, it must fly against the wind.”
Also, I can do kung fu.

Henry laughed, and Arthur opened a heavy door at the end of the corridor.

“Come in!” he said with an inviting gesture and stood aside for me.

Impressed, I stared at the rows of cinema seats upholstered in red velour and rising like a ramp, at least ten seats per row, framed by steps to left and right. The fitted carpet on the steps was soft and black. Crazy. These people really did have a genuine cinema in their cellar! When Arthur turned a switch near the door, the auditorium was gently illuminated by countless tiny lights shining like stars on the ceiling, which was lined with black fabric.

A sharp scream rang out. I looked instinctively at the loudspeakers, because the scream could easily have come from
Scary Movie
, but two heads emerged in one of the back rows of seats. One was the head of a man, gray haired and distinguished looking, the other the head of a woman with an expensive Bond Street hairstyle, although at this moment she seemed to be beside herself.

“Oh, Mrs. Kelly. And Sir Braxton. Sorry to disturb you,” said Arthur politely, turning the switch farther until the starry sky consisted entirely of supernovas, and the cinema was bathed in bright, clear light. “My friends and I will be gone again in half an hour’s time, or thereabouts.”

“Bloody hell,” muttered the man, and he began frantically adjusting his clothes. It took him only a few seconds, and then he came storming down the steps, his shirt still unbuttoned. I didn’t get out of his way fast enough, and he promptly ran into my shoulder with the force of a suburban train coming into a station. If Henry hadn’t caught me, I’d have fallen over.

“Lout,” I said. Even though I understood why he was in such a hurry, he didn’t have to use me as a buffer.

“Do you mean me?” Henry laughed quietly and stroked the hair back from my forehead before he let me go. I tried to go on breathing normally. The last thing I wanted was for him to notice how confused he made me feel when I was near him.

It took the poor woman a little longer to get fully dressed again. When she finally came down the steps, red in the face, she kept her gaze fixed on the floor.

“How nice to see you again, Mrs. Kelly,” said Arthur, sketching a bow as she raced past us. In spite of her high heels, her speed was worthy of the Olympic Games. “And give your husband my regards if he happens to be at the party too.”

Mrs. Kelly hurried along the corridor as if she hadn’t heard him.

“That was mean of you,” said Henry.

“Sir Braxton could have waited for her,” I said sympathetically.

“Ah, well.” Arthur closed the door to the corridor and dimmed the light again. “Real gentlemen are nearly extinct these days, as my grandmother is always saying. Where were we? Oh, yes.” He smiled at me. “Well, what do you think of our cinema?”

I was wide awake again at once, and on the ball. “It’s great,” I said cautiously, stroking the soft velour of an upholstered armrest. And why exactly were we here?

“I could find us a 1950s horror film from the archive next door,” suggested Arthur. He was still standing beside the door, hands in his jeans pockets. “They’re not a bit scary, but if my father’s to be believed, they’re amazingly valuable from the cinema enthusiast’s point of view. What do you like best, Liv? Zombies, ghosts, vampires…?”

“Or maybe demons?” added Henry.

Was that the cue? Were secrets finally about to be aired?

I assumed my innocent-little-lamb smile again. “But we can’t watch a film right now—you have fifty guests up there.”

“More like seventy by this time, I guess,” said Arthur, shrugging his shoulders. “But they’ll do fine without me. This is more important.”

Something bumped into the door.

“Good, our drinks.” Arthur opened the door, and Jasper stumbled in, laden with glasses, several bottles, a bucket of ice cubes, and two oranges that he had wedged between his ear and his shoulder, with his head tilted to one side. His face was half hidden by a bunch of mint that he’d stuck in his mouth. It fell out when he started talking. Henry was just in time to catch it before it fell to the floor.

“I couldn’t find a tray, so I thought I’d just mix the drinks down here,” explained Jasper, trying to put everything else carefully down on one of the seats. “Well? Have you asked her yet?”

“Asked her what?” I retrieved the oranges as they were rolling away over the black fitted carpet.

“Well, whether you’ll … join in our game instead of Anabel,” replied Jasper. “Only, of course it won’t work unless you’re still a virgin. So first of all we ought to ask, right away:
Are
you a virgin?”

What in heaven’s name was that to do with him? What was the idea?

“Oh, keep your mouth shut, Jas,” said Henry as the innocent-little-lamb smile disappeared from my face.

“What do you mean?” Baffled, Jasper frowned. “What’s the point of spending hours explaining what it’s all about to her, and then maybe it turns out that she wouldn’t be right for the part anyway? I read only the other day that, on average, girls first do it aged fifteen, and she’s fifteen and hot stuff, or she would be if she didn’t wear those funny glasses, so it’s a perfectly reasonable question. Are you still a virgin, Liv, yes or no?”

I stared at them, thunderstruck. “You’re involved in a game which only
virgins
can play?”

“Oh, brilliant, Jasper. Now she thinks we’re out of our minds.”

“I didn’t mean to do that.” Jasper looked repentant. “I just didn’t want to waste time. How would you two have gone about it, then?”

Henry leaned against the wall and folded his arms. “Presumably we’d have begun by pointing out the advantages of the game before going on to the crazy part.”

“Slowly and carefully.” Arthur looked distinctly less amused than Henry.

“What kind of game, exactly, is it?” I quickly asked.

Arthur opened his mouth to tell me, but Jasper got in first. “Not a game you play with dice. And it’s not about winning, either. It’s more a kind of role-playing game—not that anyone is really playing a part. Basically it’s not a
game
at all. If you feel confused now, so do I. I call it confusing too. Very confusing. So confusing that right now I’m going to mix us a drink before I go on.” He had lined up the glasses on the armrest of the cinema seat and unscrewed the top of a bottle of gin.

Arthur was looking as if he’d like to grab Jasper and hold his mouth closed, but after a glance at Henry, he contented himself with flashing his eyes furiously at Jasper instead. In his own turn, Jasper took no notice whatsoever of his friend’s attempt to communicate wordlessly with him. “I’m ready to admit that I still don’t really understand it,” he chattered on. “Especially all that dream business—it’s really way out. But with a little practice it worked for me, too, and wow, all that about the wishes bowled me over, and yup, it’s cool, or anyway it was cool until … Oh, shit, I’ve gone and forgotten the chalice for saying the Mass.”

This just could not be true! Now he was carrying on about the stupid chalice for saying Mass! “It was cool until what?” I asked, more impatiently than I meant.

“Until we broke the rules. Well, it was really only Anabel, but that makes no difference to him.” Jasper had decided to stop complaining about the chalice. He poured lavish amounts of gin over the ice cubes. “It’s like this: at least one of the players must have virgin blood, because the last seal can be broken only with virgin blood, and at Halloween last year, when we began playing the game, well, I still thought that just about qualified most of us, up to and including Anabel—sorry, Arthur.…”

“That’s okay.” Arthur had dropped into one of the cinema seats, burying his head in his hands. He’d clearly given up trying to make Jasper keep quiet.

I rubbed my arms inconspicuously, or so I hoped. They had come up in goose bumps, because only then did it dawn on me that what Jasper said made reasonably good sense, in light of the story Anabel had told me in my dream last night. About a game they had begun playing last Halloween … a game that had gotten out of control, and Anabel said it was her fault.

I glanced quickly at Henry, who was still leaning back against the wall. Like Arthur, he had stopped making any attempt to stop Jasper. Maybe because so far I hadn’t run away screaming, or maybe simply because no one
could
have stopped Jasper at this point.

Jasper had put down the gin bottle and was now pouring vermouth into the glasses—plenty of it too. The mere smell was enough to make you tipsy.

“But then it turned out, surprisingly, that Grayson had a relationship with Maisie, and Henry is a stupid mysterymonger who never tells us anything, while Arthur had lost his virginity when he was fifteen to that really cute French trainee teacher, but unfortunately he’d forgotten to tell his best friend about it.” Here Jasper favored Arthur with a reproachful glance. “So, in fact—and who’d have thought it?—at the beginning of the game, Anabel really was the only one of us who hadn’t had sex yet. Basically, one of us would have been enough. But then Anabel went and, er, broke the rules of the game, exactly when and who with I don’t know, but anyway it’s a very complicated and dramatic story, and everything went wrong, and now we need a new Anabel, one who’s guaranteed to be a virgin and stay a virgin until the end of the game. So how about it, Liv? Are you a virgin, yes or no?” As he’d come out with the last few sentences all in a rush, he was now gasping for air.