Cover

Title Page

Epigraph

If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke – Aye, what then?

– Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)

I’ve still got teeth-marks in my arm from a massive crocodile called Cuthbert that only ever existed in my head. Aye – what’s all that about, then?

– Malcolm Gordon Bell (aged 11)

Before it All Started

I’ve got to tell you about a bad dream. Only … it’s real as well.

That’s okay – it didn’t make sense to me either, at first.

When I was very little, I had this dream about a crocodile coming down the railway track where we lived, and chasing me round the back garden. (This was where we lived before Dad left. Seb was still a baby.)

I’d wake up and shout for Mam and she’d come into my room and say, ‘Shush, Malky, shush. You’ll wake Sebbie. It’s just a bad dream,’ and she’d sit on the side of the bed and stroke my hair and sing the song that went, ‘Let it be, let it be, let it be, let it be …’

But the crocodile kept coming back.

Then Mam had the idea of buying me a stuffed toy crocodile and giving it a funny name and we chose Cuthbert. Nothing called Cuthbert could be scary, she said.

So one night (I must have been about six) I dreamed that the crocodile was there, back in our old garden, chasing me like before. I stopped and pointed to it and said its name: ‘Cuthbert!’

In seconds, the beast in front of me turned into my toy. I watched – there in the garden in my Star Wars pyjamas – mesmerised, as the horny, scaly, knobbled skin became the soft green fur of a cuddly toy; the yellow razor teeth transformed to little white triangles of felt. Everything about him shrank till he was a furry toy.

All in my dream.

When I woke up the next morning, Mam says, my arm was slung round toy Cuthbert. The nightmares went away shortly after that.

This was my first experience of controlling a dream, and I kind of forgot all about it. Then the Dreaminator came along, and Cuthbert came back and, well …

The next time I saw Cuthbert – the real Cuthbert, not the toy one – was a few years later when I was with Seb, and the crocodile flopped out of the boot of a car belonging to one of the most evil men ever to have lived.

I should have quit then. But I didn’t.

I was somewhere bigger, more mysterious, and scarier than anywhere on earth you could possibly dream of. I guess you’d call it Dreamland – and that’s where I lost Seb.

Chapter 1