He called her Tho, as a gratuitously eccentric shortening for Thora. He was Hataz. Always had been. In full.

Hataz was more oriental than he looked. He and Tho were not necessarily a match made in Heaven, yet fair enough for two lonely strangers who both admitted they needed somebody. Their single attempt at love-making proper had been a clumsy exercise, neither of the participants earning flying colours for their efforts. They didn't really get near enough to each other. They were probably scared of the final penetration: a fact left unsaid.

After that, by tacit mutual consent, they never indulged a blatantly physical approach again. Going to the cinema, making big talk and small kisses, the ritual holding of hands, walking in parks ... these activities were surely sufficient for people like them, because (as Tho thought) "spirit rode the flesh like aura".

They also played childish games unchildishly in Hataz's place, such as Ludo and Draughts - and, even, despite the size of the flat, hide-and-seek.

Inevitably, affairs of innocent convenience wind down and, today, Tho was bluntly determined to cut Hataz from her life before she became too enmeshed - not because the relationship was particularly claustrophobic, but simply because she was scared of a dream.

"A dream you've dreamed?" asked Hataz, genuinely puzzled at the sudden mention by Tho of dreaming. They had just returned from a concert where a little known jazz combo called Erich Zann had given a desultory performance on vibes, flute and zither. Now, she had chosen this moment in Hataz's flat to make a prepared statement, one she had seemingly rehearsed in front of her wardrobe mirror.

"It's not a dream I've really dreamed, as such - it's strange, I can't explain it."

Hataz had started the evening hating the music. Now he was more confused than irritated - an uncommon feeling with him. Usually confident about life in general (if not with girls in the shape of Tho), tonight's disorientation was difficult to fathom. He had already felt vague indications of being unbalanced on previous dates, but nothing quite like now. Surely she was not going a roundabout way to ditching him. His pride, as far as the opposite sex was concerned, seemed fragile enough, already. For one peculiar moment, he felt these thoughts were not his, but Tho's. Osmosis? A twinning of auras?

"It was the edge of a dream, Hataz. I could see the dream in my bedroom, as if it had a transparent cover. Not really a bubble nor a balloon. Just a shapeless watery skin. Inside were all the nightmares I knew should have been in my sleep. I was awake, watching an independent dream that nobody was dreaming. There were glowing things that walked about. One of them I later saw was you, Hataz. Or someone who looked like you."

Tho coughed. She had tried to make it all sound natural, but Hataz was fully aware that she was reciting something she had learned parrot fashion. It almost felt as if he were dreaming. And the recital was silent.

"One looked like me? What are you trying to say?"

He had the uncanny sense that he was also reciting something, learned without having remembered learning it.

"It was you, Hataz. You were inside the body of somebody else, trying, I think, to yank yourself out, using the shoulders as a lever."

There was a silence, broken by more silence, only this time it was a silence deeper and more frightening. Hataz's flat was always a quiet place at the top of a tall building. Tonight, there were no lonely aeroplanes droning over the sky from Heathrow.

In many ways, she didn't need to say the words. Hataz's new-found faith in the phenomenon of osmosis was nurtured by the silence, as she sprayed further implications and he allowed his inferences to burgeon. But, then, of course, her words would spill out autonomously, more visible than audible.

"I could see the host body's neck tightening," she continued, "bursting at the seams, as you tried to clamber out, except the seams were knotted veins rather than rows of stitches. Other creatures gathered at your feet - things I couldn't recognise, let alone describe. Some just a mass of wriggling tentacles. Others with more head than body. Tails and teeth. All chanting bits from an invented religion. To describe things in a dream makes remembering them more easy. The words and the names of the things seemed the most natural parts although, afterwards, they were the strangest. God knows how they were spelt. A good job, perhaps, that one can't remember every dream. But this dream was different, being one I was viewing from the bed, whilst still awake. It was growing in size, too. The dream's wobbly skin getting nearer and nearer, as it filled with more and more nightmares. Can't you see, Hataz, how I've been worried? I didn't know how to tell you. Nor if I should tell you at all."

"Do you want a drink?" Hataz asked, thinking that a psychologist would probably call this a nervous breakdown. She needed humouring, not scolding. He still couldn't shake off, however, the suspicion of a sting in the tail. Tho wanted to chuck him. That was bloody obvious, if nothing else was. In the meantime, though, she needed help.

"A drink? Yes, why not? A coffee, perhaps. Make it with milk if you've got plenty."

She heard him pottering about in the kitchen, as men did. Hataz imagined her hearing him - the chink of cups easing the silence more efficiently than the earlier exchange of words had done. Words were not really sounds, when they meant so much. Meanings were there whether one said them out loud or not. She shook her head. Or so Hataz inferred. How could she be thinking such thoughts? Thoughts were words injected straight into the vein. Surely she had intended to tell him of his host body in the dream with its skull splitting, tilting sideways from his own one which was inside it. Bone within bone. The brain slid down his face like porridge, hair brylcreemed with blood. It was strange she could describe things better aloud, than describing them silently to herself. Osmosis was telling him too much of what she thought.

He returned with the cups of coffee and placed then upon the small table between them.

"Are you feeling any better?"

He bit his tongue, without knowing why.

"All depends from what standard you are judging 'better'. I've never felt better, Hataz. It's as if I've never really been myself before. I was once a girl living in a dream. Now, I'm awake and I can see myself for what I am. No illusions. Just a dead-end girl who'll never be 'better' than average. You see, I was in that dream, too - eventually. Not one of the creatures slithering on their backsides. I was a finned figure that emerged from the shadows, soon after the body you once inhabited had disappeared. We didn't recognise each other, since we were both somewhat different than in real life. Then, I saw myself in bed, peering through the skin of the dream, from the outside of the dream, yes, peering at me in the dream."

"Tho, it was just a nightmare. You shouldn't take it so seriously. Everybody has at least one godawful dream in their lives - one that sticks with them."

He smiled. Was he on the point of ditching her?

"No, I told you, Hataz, I was not dreaming. I was awake. I was that girl in the bed. Fully conscious. Knowing exactly what I was seeing. And then you put one of your hands through the skin."

She screamed. A short sharp laugh that she had intended to come out as a full-blooded scream.

"Then your whole arm poked through," she continued, "reaching out for me with fingers that were webbed with some backward evolution. I screamed in real life, then - dreading that a dream without a dreamer could actually hurt more than just mentally."

Hataz sipped his coffee, sorry that he could not hear one of those droning aeroplanes. It must have been the fog that had cut them off from the sound of the Earl's Court traffic down below. He decided to let her have her head. No further point in interrupting or even commenting at natural breaks.

"Hataz, believe me, when I tell you, I was scared. So rotten scared, I closed my eyes, to blot out the dream."

"I bet you still saw the dream, though."

This time Hataz bit his tongue with the full foreknowledge of so doing. He had contravened his own rules of engagement.

"No, it was black inside my head. Not even a glimmer showing through the eyelids. The dream was not throwing out any light of its own. My bedroom was indeed as dark as it should have been, with the lamp off. That seemed to prove beyond all shadow of doubt it was a dream I'd been watching, not a dream I'd been dreaming. This must all sound so incredibly crazy to you - but when I felt the kiss upon my cheek and the strange words in my ear..."

"You became a Sleeping Beauty reversed, never to wake again!"

Hataz laughed at his own non sequitur. Humouring Tho had got him nowhere, so mockery had to be his next ploy. She reddened and simply stared through him into space. Having finished his coffee, he got up to look outside through the window. Not a glint. Not even a hint of anything beyond his gaze. Silence met silence through the glass. Eventually, with his neck aching, he turned back to face out Tho. It was about time she came to the point. And if she didn't, he would. At least one of them would have to cut the other from his or her life. But the vibes were all wrong. What he saw was the most horrific creature in the whole of the cosmos.

Nobody.

The Nobody who was ever the essence of loneliness.

The milky coffee he'd prepared for Tho was untouched, left stirlessly to a look of barely lukewarm and growing a meniscus skin.

Near to bursting with a passion he had never previously experienced, Hataz headed for the kitchen. He sought the bread knife or, preferably, something slightly more surgical than culinary - simply to lance the boil that his whole body had become. Playing hide-and-seek didn't allow the hidden one to squat, thumb-plugged, inside the searcher, did it?

Hataz returned with emptiness in his grasp, planted his face in the grail of his own webbed fingers. He later sipped the piping hot coffee to the sound of droning skycraft. Eventually, he heard a needle enter the deepest groove of all - and to the silence of Zann's zany zithers playing 'Nethermost Blight', he felt abysmally sad for someone he'd never find because it was himself. Azathoth's eyes poured out their sorrow. A rich redness bubbling from the centre of Infinity.


(Published 'Black Moon' 1996)