All it needed was a title. Something with a ring to it. Something that people would remember. Something - he scratched his chin with the pen - that said that the affairs of ordinary people were so much chaff in the great storms of history. Storms, that was it. Good imagery, a storm. You got thunder. Lightning. Rain. Wind.
Wind. That was it!
He crawled up to the top of the sheet and, with great care, wrote:
BLOWN AWAY.
Victor tossed and turned in his narrow bed, trying to get to sleep. Images marched through his half-dozing mind. There were chariot races and pirate ships and things he couldn't identify, and in the middle of it all this thing, climbing a tower. Something huge and terrible, grinning defiance at the world. And someone screaming . . .
He sat up, drenched in sweat.
After a few minutes he swung his legs out of bed and went to the window.
Above the lights of the town Holy Wood Hill brooded in the first dim light of dawn. It was going to be another fine day.
Holy Wood dreams surged through the streets, in great invisible golden waves.
And Something came with it.
Something that never, never dreamed at all. Something that never went to sleep.
Ginger got out of bed and also looked towards the hill, although it is doubtful if she saw it. Moving like a sightless person in a familiar room, she padded across to the door, down the steps, and out into the tail of the night.
A small dog, a cat and a mouse watched from the shadows as she moved silently down the alley and headed for the hill.
'Did you see her eyes?' said Gaspode.
'Glowing,' said the cat. 'Yukth!'
'She's going to the hill,' said Gaspode. 'I don't like that.'
'So what?' said Squeak. 'She's always around the hill somewhere. Goes up there every night and moons around looking dramatic.'
'What?'
'Every night. We thought it was all this romance stuff.'
'But you can see by the way she's movin' that somethin's not right,' said Gaspode desperately. 'That's not walkin', that's lurchin'. Like she's bein' pulled along by a inner voice, style of fing.'
'Don't look like that to me,' said Squeak. 'Walking on two legs is lurching, in my book.'
'You've only got to look at her face to see there's somethin' wrong!'
'Of course there's something wrong. She's a human,' said Squeak.
Gaspode considered the options. There weren't many. The obvious one was to find Victor and get him to come back here. He rejected it. It sounded too much like the silly, bouncy sort of thing that Laddie would do. It suggested that the best a dog could think of when confronted with a puzzle was to find a human to solve it.
He trotted forward and gripped the trailing hem of the sleepwalker's nightdress firmly in his jaws. She walked on, pulling him off his feet. The cat laughed, far too sarcastically for Gaspode's liking.
'Time to wake up, miss,' he growled, letting the nightdress go. Ginger strode onwards.
'See?' said the cat. 'Give them an opposed thumb and they think they're something shpecial.'
'I'm going to follow her,' said Gaspode. 'A girl could come to harm out by herself at night.'
'That's dogs for you,' said the cat to Squeak. 'Alwaysh fawning on people. It'll be diamante collars and a bowl with his name on it nexsht, I'm telling you.'
'If you're lookin' to lose a mouthful of fur you've come to the right place, kitty,' snarled Gaspode, barring his rotting teeth again.