It began, as these things do, there, first thing in the morning. It is strange how we know when we are dreaming and when we are not dreaming. I woke up, there not in my bed, not in my bedroom and the woman sleeping next to me was not my wife. It should have been a dream, something I woke from back in my normal life, but I didn’t and it wasn’t.
I knew I ought to be dreaming. The room I awoke in looked so much like the 17th Century coaching Inn we were holidaying in. In so much and as far as I could tell, it was the same room. But everything else about it was different. Even then, I knew this was not something I was going to wake up from.
The bed itself, which my wife and I had laughed about, was a four-poster still, but newer, not antique. The room was roughly the room we’d gone to sleep in. But the bedlinen, the room and the décor were all different. The woman still sleeping next to me was not my forty-seven year old (dyed) brown-haired wife, but some raven-haired young woman, naked and spread out across the other side of the bed, sleeping the sleep of the exhausted.
Over across the other side of the room, where the TV had been when I’d gone to sleep, was a chair. Draped across it were clothes I’d never seen, or worn, before. Including what looked like a scabbard, containing a rapier, on a worn leather belt. Next to the chair were what looked like a pair of high leather books, with a leather coat that looked even more worn than a Hell’s Angel’s biker jacket.
What is more… the en-suite bathroom was no longer there and I needed a piss. Instead, I just lay there too scared to move in case this turned out not to be – even though I already knew it wasn’t – a dream.
[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US).]
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