A child woke up in the dark. She seemed to swim up into consciousness as if to a surface, which she then broke through, looking around with her eyes open. At first, the darkness was implacable. She might have arrived anywhere: all that was certain was her own self, lying on her side, her salty smell and her warmth, her knees pulled up to her skinny chest inside the cocoon of her brushed-nylon nightdress. But as she stared into the darkness familiar forms began to loom through it: the pale outline of a window, printed by the street lamp against the curtains; the horizontals on the opposite wall, which were the shelves where she and her brother kept their books and toys. Beside the window she could make out a rectangle of wool cloth tacked up; her mother had appliquéd onto it a sleigh and two horses and a driver cracking his whip, first gluing on the pieces and then outlining them with machine stitching—star shapes in blue thread for the falling snowflakes, lines of red stitching for the reins and the twisting whip. The child knew all these details by heart, though she couldn’t see them in the dark. She was where she always was when she woke up: in her own bedroom, in the top bunk, her younger brother asleep in the lower one.
Her mother and father were in bed and asleep, too. The basement flat was small enough that, if they were awake, she would have heard the sewing machine or the wireless, or her father practicing the trumpet or playing jazz records. She struggled to sit up out of the tightly wound nest of sheets and blankets; she was asthmatic and feared not being able to catch her breath. Cold night air struck her shoulders. It was strange to stare into the room with wide-open eyes and feel the darkness yielding only the smallest bit, as if it were pressing back against her efforts to penetrate it. Something had happened, she was sure, while she was asleep. She didn’t know what it was at first, but the strong dread it had left behind didn’t subside with the confusion of waking. Then she remembered that this thing had happened inside her sleep, in her dream. She had dreamed something horrible, and so plausible that it was vividly present as soon as she remembered it.
She had dreamed that she was reading her favorite book, the one she read over and over and actually had been reading earlier that night, until her mother came to turn off the light. In fact, she could feel the book’s hard corner pressing into her leg now through the blankets. In the dream, she had been turning its pages as usual when, beyond the story’s familiar last words, she discovered an extra section that she had never seen before, a short paragraph set on a page by itself, headed “Epilogue.” She was an advanced reader for nine and knew about prologues and epilogues—though it didn’t occur to her then that she was the author of her own dreams and must have invented this epilogue herself. It seemed so completely a found thing, alien and unanticipated, coming from outside herself, against her will.
In the real book she loved, “Swallows and Amazons,” six children spent their summers in perfect freedom, sailing dinghies on a lake, absorbed in adventures and rivalries that were half invented games and half truth, pushing across the threshold of safety into a thrilling unknown. All the details in the book had the solidity of life, though it wasn’t her own life—she didn’t have servants or boats or a lake or an absent father in the Navy. She had read all the other books in the series, too, and she acted out their stories with her friends at school, although they lived in a city and none of them had ever been sailing. The world of “Swallows and Amazons” existed in a dimension parallel to their own, touching it only in their games. They had a “Swallows and Amazons” club, and took turns bringing in “grub” to eat, “grog” and “pemmican”; they sewed badges, and wrote notes in secret code. All of them wanted to be Nancy Blackett, the strutting pirate girl, though they would settle for Titty Walker, sensitive and watchful.
Now the child seemed to see the impersonal print of the dream epilogue, written on the darkness in front of her eyes. John and Roger both went on to, it began, in a businesslike voice. Of course, the words weren’t actually in front of her eyes, and parts of what was written were elusive when she sought them; certain sentences, though, were scored into her awareness as sharply as if she’d heard them read aloud. Roger drowned at sea in his twenties. Roger was the youngest of them all, the ship’s boy, in whom she had only ever been mildly interested: this threw him into a terrible new prominence. John suffered with a bad heart. The Blackett sisters . . . long illnesses. Titty, killed in an unfortunate accident. The litany of deaths tore jaggedly into the tissue that the book had woven, making everything lopsided and hideous. The epilogue’s gloating bland language, complacently regretful, seemed to relish catching her out in her dismay. Oh, didn’t you know? Susan lived to a ripe old age. Susan was the dullest of the Swallows, tame and sensible, in charge of cooking and housekeeping. Still, the idea of her “ripe old age” was full of horror: wasn’t she just a girl, with everything ahead of her?
The child knew that the epilogue existed only in her dream, but she couldn’t dispel the taint of it, clinging to her thoughts. When she was younger, she had called to her mother if she woke in the night, but something stopped her from calling out now: she didn’t want to tell anyone about her dream. Once the words were said aloud, she would never be rid of them; it was better to keep them hidden. And she was afraid, anyway, that her mother wouldn’t understand the awfulness of the dream if she tried to explain it: she might laugh or think it was silly. For the first time, the child felt as if she were alone in her own home—its rooms spread out about her, invisible in the night, seemed unlike their usual selves. The book touching her leg through the blankets frightened her, and she thought she might never be able to open it again. Not wanting to lie down in the place where she’d had the dream, she swung over the side rail of the bed and reached with her bare feet for the steps of the ladder—the lower bunk was a cave so dark that she couldn’t make out the shape of her sleeping brother. Then she felt the carpet’s gritty wool under her toes.
