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Robert dreams.
He is walking through a hotel, the corridor seeming to go on forever, footsteps muffled by the carpet. The lights flicker and the carpet is now stone beneath his feet.
He can hear someone calling his name, but it isn't a voice he recognizes. It's soothing. Crooning, almost, as if he's a lost child. As if they care for him. As if they miss him. He hasn't heard anyone use that tone for him since his mother died.
He calls out, wondering. Has she finally come back to him? But his mother never wore her hair that short, it was always long and silky, pulled back into an elegant twist. Not short and twisted into messy locks that coil like snakes.
She turns and raises the gun. And he wakes with tears on his face, no matter how many drinks he has before bed, no matter how many pills he takes. Maybe one night he won't have the dream. Maybe one night he'll never wake up.
Ariadne dreams.
She walks through a maze. She's vaguely irritated at her subconscious; with all of the world to play in, all the untapped creativity that she knows her mind can wield, it's disappointing to retreat to the myths of her childhood and her namesake. There's not even a sky, just a gray featureless void that radiates a pale light and washes everything into a dull gray.
She pushes at the stone walls with that strange other sense and they refuse to move. She pulls at the floor, the path beneath her paved with stones, and she cannot do anything at all.
Footsteps echo behind her and Ariadne moves. She walks, then breaks into a run. The footsteps never speed up but they sound closer and closer, and it's all terribly cliched but Ariadne starts to feel real terror in her gut. She can find her way out of any maze, but the paths all lead the same way and they never vary and they always lead her to a whisper in her ear and a knife in her gut.
Ariadne takes to drinking cup after cup of espresso to stay awake. If she's not asleep, she can't be back in that same pitiless maze. Until the day when she sees an elegantly dressed woman striding towards her and fumbles for her totem with nerveless fingers, dropping it and watching helplessly as it rolls right down into a sewer grate.
She sits on the curb and cries.
Phillipa dreams.
Her mother croons a lullaby, a song that circles around and around on itself and never ends. She dreams of the beach, the day they made sandcastles, the day her mother walked out so far into the waves that they caught up her skirt and made it balloon out like a jellyfish and her father ran out and snatched her up. Like something out of a movie. Except her mother beat at her father's chest and screamed and begged to be let go. Her father was gone for a long time and seemed so sad sometimes when he came back. He never talks much about her mother. He doesn't like to keep pictures of her around the house. It's like those early memories of her mother are no more than another one of Phillipa's dreams.
Phillipa dreams of breaking glass and kitchen knives. She dreams in French and wakes to half-scrawled notes in unfamiliar handwriting next to her bed. She bolts her bedroom door at night after the third time she wakes up standing in the street. She dreams of a rushing wind and wakes up to find herself sitting on the windowsill, bare legs dangling over the wall.
When Phillipa grows up, her hair turns dark and wavy. One day she cuts it all off and sees the curls spring up, almost hiding her face, one eye shining through.
Her mother smiles back at her from the mirror and laughs.