The Room in the Tower

The CampfireThe openingFree

Most people have dreams that come back. A falling dream. A dream of being late for an exam. I had one dream that came back, over and over, for fifteen years.

It started when I was sixteen.

In the dream, I'm going to visit a school friend of mine named Jack Stone, at his family's house. I'd never been to his house in real life. In the dream, it's a big red brick house with a tower at one corner. It's summer. And the family is having tea on the lawn.

I walk across the lawn to them. Jack, and his parents, and his sisters. And they all look at me. And none of them say a word.

They just stare.

Then Mrs. Stone, Jack's mother, says to me, in a flat, strange voice:

"Jack will show you your room. I have given you the room in the tower."

And I wake up, sick with fear.

That was all. Every time. For years.

Nothing else ever happened in the dream. But I was more afraid of that dream than anything in my life. Something about that house. Something about the way they looked at me. Something about the room in the tower, which I never actually saw.

Over the years, the dream changed a little. The family got older. Jack grew up. One of his sisters disappeared from the tea table, and someone told me in the dream that she had married. Then Mrs. Stone disappeared, and I knew, the way you know things in dreams, that she had died.

But the dream kept coming. Only now, without her, somebody else would say the words. And the words were always the same.

"Jack will show you your room. I have given you the room in the tower."

And I always knew it was Mrs. Stone's words they were saying. As if she were saying them through them.