USER: Please analyze each part of the following text: WEIRD DREAMS Chapter One Day broke over Plymouth, bringing a slow grey sky, damp morose streets and damp morose milkmen, finished off by a minor surge in the electricity supply as quarter of a million clock radios turned on to the early morning show. Waking up is hard to do, thought Steve. Radio playing, birds singing, Monday morning. He sighed, turned over, and without opening his eyes hit the radio right on the snooze button. That'd teach it. Another five minutes wouldn't hurt... But radios are made of sterner stuff. Five minutes later, unbowed by such early morning violence, it resumed its unspeakable pop. Which turned, in time, unto unpalatable news. Yawn... He really should get up now, or he'd have to run for the bus again. Strange - his usual warm sleepiness was mixed with something else... Two records after the news. He really had to get up now. Least disgusting pair of boxer shorts, that shirt would do for today, and into the bathroom to shave his teeth... breakfast, paper and irresponsible TV weathermen later, Steve had diagnosed his problem. He was feeling a bit peaky, as his mum would've said had she not been living in North Dakota. Nothing worse than that. Still, Steve mused, perhaps he was coming down with the flu. Perhaps he ought to get something for it. To really get Monday going, among the junk mail was a note from his dentist reminding him of his six-monthly checkup. Which was, he noticed, tomorrow. Super. He r...

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USER: Please examine the following text, then analyze each part of the following text:Chapter 3: WEIRD DREAMS Chapter One Day broke over Plymouth, bringing a slow grey sky, damp morose streets and damp morose milkmen, finished off by a minor surge in the electricity supply as quarter of a million clock radios turned on to the early morning show. Waking up is hard to do, thought Steve. Radio playing, birds singing, Monday morning. He sighed, turned over, and without opening his eyes hit the radio right on the snooze button. That'd teach it. Another five minutes wouldn't hurt... But radios are made of sterner stuff. Five minutes later, unbowed by such early morning violence, it resumed its unspeakable pop. Which turned, in time, unto unpalatable news. Yawn... He really should get up now, or he'd have to run for the bus again. Strange - his usual warm sleepiness was mixed with something else... Two records after the news. He really had to get up now. Least disgusting pair of boxer shorts, that shirt would do for today, and into the bathroom to shave his teeth... breakfast, paper and irresponsible TV weathermen later, Steve had diagnosed his problem. He was feeling a bit peaky, as his mum would've said had she not been living in North Dakota. Nothing worse than that. Still, Steve mused, perhaps he was coming down with the flu. Perhaps he ought to get something for it. To really get Monday going, among the junk mail was a note from his dentist reminding him of his six-monthly checkup. Which was, he noticed, tomorrow. Super. He ran for the bus, went upstairs and he read the paper, then trudged the ten minute walk from stop to work. Wet pavements and grey skies - it wasn't actually raining, but that was only a matter of time - did nothing to remove his malaise. In the office, he mentioned his lack of well-being to Emily, a bright girl in the postroom he'd got his eye on. He had often wondered whether he should ask her out but, just as often, decided not to. Never know, keep the friendship going and who knows what might happen? He'd never noticed, which was a bit insensitive on his part, that Emily was bored with life. More importantly, and this really wasn't his fault, he'd never noticed that she was a bored daemon. One of those mythical creatures who spend their eternal lives pushing misery, evil and discord. Emily hadn't started out as a daemon, few people do; her body had been possessed by the spirit Zelloripus as she waited out her punishment. Three thousand years ago, Zelloripus had been banished from the Central Circle of the court of Asklarioum in Chael for a crime against fellow daemons. A crime so despicable that, had it worked, she would have challenged the Great One herself. Given human form and stripped of many of her daemonic powers, she was sent to live the life of a mortal being on one of the less pleasant planets, Earth. As each host body died, she hopped into a new one, taking over the mind and feeding on the soul. Three thousand years into her sentence, with three thousand more to go, she was not happy. Sixty centuries in Plymouth is enough to embitter anyone. Even one whose residual evilness could, if focussed, melt a toddler's ice cream from a distance of ten miles. Today there were many puddles of Guiseppi's Famous Italian Ice Cream on the pavements of Plymouth. For today was special. Exactly half-way through Zelloripus' exile, she was feeling mean and ornery and disposed to high mischief. She despised the humans whose form she took; they by and large achieved oblivion in just seventy short years. She especially despised Steve, whose somnolent form sonorously snoring through lunchbreaks was a continual reminder of a contented peace of mind denied her. Daemons don't sleep; chances are that Another lurks nearby with designs on their soulstuff. A diabolic doze is the best they can normally manage; even this is denied those cast out of Hades because of the forces of Good that are on constant watch. Even, it had to be said, in Plymouth, where three thousand years of sleepless nights and boring days were driving Zelloripus close to breaking point. So far, she'd stuck to the rules, because using what remained of her powers to tamper with mortal affairs could double or treble her stay on Earth. But only if she was detected; the temptation to lash out at something or someone was growing. Her current job, with Plymouth's third most succesfful producer of soap, was not helping things. So mere bad timing could explain Steve's unhappy encounter with Zelloripus, or Emily as she should be called, on this day in particular. Maybe it was just bad luck that accounted for the copious yawns, heavy eyelids and sleep-slurred voice with which he laced the conversation over her franking machine. But the following conversation was almost too bad to be true... "Hiya Emily," said Steve. "You're looking wide eyed for a Monday morning. Wish I could be so awake, but I've been in bed most of the weekend." "Poor soul." said Emily, "What's the matter?" "Oh, I dunno. Think it's a touch of the flu; all I can do is sleep. It was a real effort to get up today. You don't know of anything that could perk me up a bit, do you?" Emily, bitter from boredom, was close to the edge. "No," she said "I don't usually get that sort of problem. With sleeping, I mean." It was probably his attempt at humour, or maybe it was a particularly clumsy chat-up line, that did it. "Perhaps you should sleep with me - it would maybe rub off a little. There's nothing like a good night's kip to make your fellow man seem a bit nicer..." "I'm sure" said Emily with a smile so sharp it was opening the letters, "that you're right there. Tell me, Steve, do you dream?" "Dream? No, can't say that I do. Not that I remember, that is. But if I did, it would be of you." "How sweet. Perhaps I can help you, at least" and here the smile was diamond-tipped "with the flu. I think I might just have something in my handbag. Hold on, let me go and get it." Steve was pleased. It might be worth asking her out after all, let's see, there's the funfair out of town... no, she's too bright for that... Outside, the weak sunlight darkened for a moment, as if a cloud had passed. She came back. "Here we are, something I got from a drug store last time I had the flu." It was a small brown bottle, with an indistinct label and, just visible in the powdery interior, three white pills. "You're supposed to have them before a meal, just take the lot tonight with a bottle of red wine and some cheese and you'll be a new man." "Thanks very much, Emily" said Steve, taking the bottle from her hand. "I'll do that. Look, what are you doing this weekend? Do you fancy a trip to see the new Stallone film or something?" "I'm not sure" lied the being with three thousand years' worth of identical Plymothian weekends stretched out in front of her. "Let's see how you're feeling in a couple of days. Wouldn't want to over-exert you during your convalescence". "Oh, I'm sure I'll be fine. I don't think I'll change my mind!" "We'll see" said Emily, allowing just a hint of cold, evil-tinged boredom to slip out. That evening, Steve wondered about Emily's last words. There was something not quite right, he decided, and came to a similar conclusion about the thrice-microwaved chilli con carne sitting in a bowl in the fridge. Then he remembered that wine and cheese had been recommended, and, although he was feeling fine by now, he thought that taking the lady's medicine followed by a triumphal Tuesday morning could do no harm. He had the cheese, and trotted out to the nearest 7-11 to get a bottle of red wine. Back at home, he emptied the three pills out of the bottle into his hand. Nothing special, thought he, and with a flourish popped them into his mouth and washed them down with a long draft of Burgundy. The cheese sandwich followed. A quick scan of the TV pages - why is there never anything on a Monday night? - convinced him of the desirability of bed. It's not generally appreciated that much magic is real, test-tubed and white-coated, science. Merlin's laboratory technique would have brought murmurs of approval from Pasteur, and watching Shiva smite (from a safe distance) might well have enlightened Einstein still further. It's just that while the great unwashed mass of men were more interested in squabbling, sex and smallpox it contented the Immortals to hide their rational prowess behind a web of mystic mishmash. Sure, there is magic to be had, but using it brings many repercussions which might not be completely controllable. Many magicians had lost their souls in the long research programme which, although almost half as old as the Universe, was still not producing results. But boy, was it over budget. Some of its more spectacular failures were still puzzling astronomers from a thousand worlds; more than few of whom were unexpected by-products from an experiment or two themselves. Emily was especially wary of employing the Dark Art. Not only had it landed her in this mess in the first place, but its use could signal loud and clear her position to any number of undesirable companions from the busybodies at Asklarioum, or something far more sinister. As it was, materialising the pills had been risky enough. Her excellent knowledge of human biochemistry helped her from there. As Steve dropped off to sleep, the pills were lying inert in his stomach. Slowly the gastric acid ate away the outer case, and the compounds within began to diffuse out. And what compounds, the like of which had not been seen on Earth before or (it is safe to assume) since. Any chemist worth his NaCl would have given his spatula to have been in on the action. First, the long chain molecules from the cheese were broken down to several interesting substances. The alcohol from the wine helped carry these and others from the pills themselves to the stomach wall, through which they slipped like Mexicans into Texas. On the other side of the wall, the usual gang of enzymes were waiting to digest the evening meal; but they weren't ready for what came at them. The scene of chemical carnage was brutal but short. Past the first stage of digestion, the intruding substances reached the blood stream. Dissolved in the plasma, they drifted up until they got to Steve's brain. The blood brain barrier - that wonderful filter that keeps hunks of pizza molecule out while letting oxygen in - was as effective as a traffic cop against a battalion of Soviet tanks. Emily's dark designs began their invidious work. Steve's brain was defenceless against the chemical onslaught. The vast, and mostly unused, network of neurones lay in front of them. Even as the last molecules were arriving, the compounds got to work. They diddled the dopamine receptors, they speeded up the cortical synapses, they nobbled the noradrenaline. A thin web of complex bonds spread deep into Steve's cerebellum, like frost over a tree. Further and further they went, until every part of his brain was invaded and controlled. For the moment they did nothing, but somewhere else in the Plymothian night a small chuckle of anticipation bounced off the flock wallpaper. In his sleep, Steve stirred and shivered. Chapter 2 The next day, Steve woke up, as usual, to the clock radio. Unusually, he found himself listening to it, and, even more strangely, it annoyed him. He turned over in bed and thumped the switch, leaving the bedroom to the birds, noisy Fords and myriad other sounds of morning. He stared at the ceiling. Hangover? No, he'd only had a couple of glasses of wine last night. Anyway, his head didn't hurt and he felt all right, sort of, except... He was wide awake. That was odd, too, as most days he only started to really wake up on the bus into work. He glanced at the clock radio; he still had a good half-hour until he had to leave, so he tried to doze. As he closed his eyes, the world spun. About fifteen years ago, he'd gone to Scotland with his parents, and once he'd crawled up to the edge of a granite cliff and peered over at the rocks and sea hundreds of feet beneath. He remembered amazement, awe and no little fear, but most of all he remembered the spiralling vertigo. That was what he was feeling now - he gripped the sides of the bed and opened his eyes rapidly, sweating. The flu? Those pills he took last night? Could be, but he'd never been ill like that before, nor taken anything from a chemist that shook him up so badly. For a moment he was worried, but then the morning took over again, and the sound of a bus pulling up the hill reminded and reassured him that another normal day was waiting. He got out of bed and, standing up, felt fine once more. The coffee and eggs of breakfast tasted really good, but he didn't feel like reading his paper on the bus. For some reason, he wasn't interested in "Rock Star Eats Own Hand, Sells Guitar", which seemed to be the most earthshaking intelligence on offer. Back in the office, he homed in on Emily. "Hey, Emily" he said "Those pills seemed to have done the trick. No flu, not a sniffle. I'm feeling really awake. They're good stuff - what're they called? I'd like to get some, just for next time, you know?" She giggled, a short, high-pitched stutter like a pony neighing. "Glad they seem to have worked, Steve. I can't remember their name, though, I've had them for a while. Still, if it comes back to me I'll let you know." "You've usually got such a good memory, Emily" said Steve ingratiatingly. "Me, mine's like a sieve. Can't even remember things like buying milk or doctor's appointments. Oh no!" "What's up?" asked Emily, wondering for a moment whether she'd miscalculated something and wondering, just for a moment, what exactly she'd done. Just for a moment, and then she realised. "Forgotten an appointment?" "Dentist. What's the time? Look, I've got to rush. See you at lunch - if I've got any teeth left" And he dashed into the boss' office to explain his impending absence. He rushed out of the building. His dentist was about a half a mile away, and by walking fast he could make it. Past the bombed church in the roundabout, past the police station, up the hill, past the library, past the reservoir and into Dr V. Sells, known since childhood as Dr Weasel. The receptionist looked through her window - hello <PRESIDIO_ANONYMIZED_PERSON>, hello Mr Trevathen take a seat he's running a little late - and he dived into the piles of House and Garden from 1972. Back in the office, the morning post had been sorted and distributed, and there was, as usual, half-an-hour's hiatus before the pre-lunch mailbags came in. Jill went out to round up all the outgoing mail from the seven floors, leaving Emily to herself. She checked her watch, and felt the sea of infinite boredom recede a little. Any minute now, and the first part of her plan would start to work. Deep within Steve's brain, profound changes were taking place. The tendrils of diabolic chemistry insinuated into his hippocampus, a small lump of grey matter normally concerned with sorting Steve's experience (such as they were) into long-term recall, and started to subtly rewire his memory mechanisms. Large portions of his mind were converted into the biological equivalent of RAM; ready to record experiences and, having recorded them, control his mind as a program controls a computer's processor. Elsewhere similar changes were taking place, but for now things were ready just to record. Just for now. The triggers to load the program were complex. If Steve was interested, then whatever it was that held his interest would be sorted, stored, activated. If he was frightened, amused, intrigued, it would all be recorded. But for this to work, he had to be capable of taking an interest in the first place. So part of Emily's chemical mishmash sharpened his wits, heightened his awareness, upped his IQ to just short of genius. This, she thought, was a nice move. Not only did it ensure that the data recorded would be powerful and particularly apt, but when the second stage began he would be only too capable of, mmmm, appreciating what was happening to him. He might even fight back, which would round off the whole thing nicely. And, she though with a daemonic delight, it would serve him right to be given a glimpse of what it's like to have an intelligence confronted with infinite boredom. Steve was, as the plan demanded, unaware of the mental mayhem crystallising beneath his cranium. But he was getting painfully aware of a lot of other things as he sat in the formica and chipboard waiting room. The posters of rabbits noshing carrots and jaunty poems about plaque ("Clean Clean Clean your teeth! Or else the germs get underneath!") were fading and a couple flapped loose at the corners. They'd been there since he'd started seeing Dr Weasel, and, he mused, the place probably hadn't seen a touch of paint for ten years before that. The bright orange and grey polypropelene bucket chairs finished of a fine example of early 'sixties public health design. Now why did he think that? He'd been here every six months for years, and usually only worried about whether he'd get a filling or not. Those old magazines - did people really think that the ideal home looked like that? The clothes they wore in the photos looked laughable too, but he could remember when he'd thought they looked good. How strange... perhaps the jacket and jeans he was wearing now would be equally ridiculous in ten years time. The buzzer chainsawed its way into his daydreams, and the receptionist looked up. "Mr Trevathen?". He stood up, and went into the surgery. Dr Sells was shuffling through some papers at a desk, and the Chair sat in the middle of the room beneath the usual battery of technology. "Hello Steve", said the dentist. "Sit down please. Now then, any problems since last time? It's good to see you keeping these checkups. Some people just don't bother after they leave home, and when something goes wrong there are all sorts of things to put right. How's your mother, by the way? It was America she moved to, wasn't it?" As usual, Steve had to wait for three or four questions to go past before he could get a word in. "Yes, she's settled down in North Dakota and she's doing fine. I might go over to see her at Christmas. My teeth are OK, too, but I wouldn't want to miss anything that needs looking at." "A fine attitude. Now then, lie down and open up." Steve looked up at the light. "That's new, isn't it? The old one was a different colour." "That's right, very observant! This one's a new low-voltage design, much more reliable and brighter too. I don't think anyone else has noticed. Open wide." The nurse hooked in some suction, and went to get Steve's notes. "Three's OK, two's OK, one's OK, one's OK, two's OK, three's OK, filling on four's a little bitty; we'll sort that out..." Dr Sells continued chanting his litany as Steve noticed, for the first time it seemed, the antiseptic smell, the faint noise of the machinery behind the dentist, the charts on the wall and the rows of dentures on the shelves. He felt the faint scratching inside his head as the dentist probed away. As Steve had forgotten about the appointment, he hadn't given his teeth the customary vigourous pre-checkup brushing and this was apparently noticeable. "Hello, we haven't been very thorough with your brushing, have we?" Typical quack, though Steve, lapsing into patronising parental tones. Doctor knows best. "Well, there's a cavity just starting on one of your premolars, and a slightly messy filling to tidy up. We'll have a poke around and fix them." Steve had collected a lot of fillings from a chocolate childhood, and had the memories to match. As various instruments of torture were produced and whined, sucked and scrunched their way around his mouth, he remembered the old fears with a vividness that surprised him. He winced as the drill scoured the cavity, and was very relieved at the instruction to rinse and spit. Strange taste, this pink liquid. "While I was fixing those teeth, Steve, I spotted something that might be serious. I'd better have a look at it." This was new. He opened his mouth obediently, and became more apprehensive as Dr Sell's usual banter failed to intersperse his dental deliberations. Finally the dentist stood up, and Steve closed his mouth. "One of your molars is misplaced - I don't know why I didn't catch it before, but there you go. Normally I'd leave it, as it's been there for years without causing any problems, but there are signs that you've got some more teeth coming through underneath." "Eh? You mean I'm teething?" "No, not quite. It's not uncommon for some people to have a third set of teeth at some time during their lives, and you might be one of them. In any case, I should really get that molar out otherwise it could be very bad for your jaw. It's not really fair that you should have to have a tooth pulled, since you're one of my better patients, but it's a good thing I caught it. Gas or needle?" He means it, Steve thought. He hadn't had a tooth out before, and the prospect frightened him. Adrenalin started to seep into his blood stream. His heart speeded up, but in his brain the new mechanisms fired up and channelled the stream of his senses into the almost infinite capacity of the revamped memory. "Oh, gas I think. Is it dangerous?" "No, not very." Oh, how reassuring, what soothing Weasel words. "Is the needle safer?" "There's nothing to worry about with either method. But the gas hurts less." "Fine. Will it take long?" "About half an hour, and you should be OK within the hour. Not driving, are you?" "I walked here." "No problems then. You might find things a bit fuzzy for a while, but it wears off." Steve remembered something Emily had said, and for the first time felt sadness for a thing which had never happened. "Will I dream?" "Hard to day. Some people do, but most don't." The nurse had been tinkering with a mess of tubes and cylinders, and brought it to the side of the Chair. While she prepared a tray of gleaming steel instruments, some of which Steve thought would look more in keeping in his local garage, Dr Sells continued his spiel. "Now then, I'll want you to breath deeply from the mask while counting to ten. You won't get past about seven, but you won't notice that. Ready, Sandra?" The nurse passed over a facemask, which the dentist placed over Steve's mouth. "Righty-ho - start breathing and counting. Sweet dreams!" Here we go, then. One... suck... two... blow... three... suck... four... blow... hmmm, this is quite pleasant... where was I... teeth... In the surgery, the dentist checked Steve's pulse, eyes and respiration. Satisifed that his patient was well under, he gave him a few seconds more and started to prepare for oral excavation. Back at the office, Jill wanted to know what Emily was finding so funny. Emily merely giggled, and carried on sorting the post. All that day, she'd be in high spirits, surprising those who were used to her normal sarcastic mood. To those who asked why, she'd reply only that 'Life's a gas, isn't it?' Chapter 3 Teeth... five... jive.. on the third stroke... hey, why aren't I under yet? Better warn the Weasel not to start pulling just yet. Steve opened his eyes. If this is dreaming, thought Steve, I haven't missed much. The view reminded him of Dartmoor, where he used to spend the school holidays camping and walking. Only this place was flat for miles, with no inviting tors to clamber up or run down. Behind him the plain stretched out as far as he could see, so for want of anything better to do he started to walk towards the mountains. After a few minutes, he looked as his watch. Or he tried to, but on raising his arm all he saw was a bare wrist. He was greatly troubled. It wasn't so much the lack of a watch that bothered him, nor the fact that the rest of his body was, on inspection, entirely bare, but the troublesome actuality that the body in question wasn't the same one he'd grown up in. In fact, it was borderline as to whether it was Homo Sapiens or not, what with the long hair on the legs and the excessive number of flattened toes. The blue colour didn't help either. For some reason, he calmed down. Out of curiosity, he tried to yell out "Anyone there?" and was intrigued by the guttural explosion that forced its way out of his mouth, past his fangs and into the leaden air. Fangs. Hmmm. That would startle the good Doctor. He realised with some surprise that he must still be in the Chair, with Dr Sells tapping away like a sculptor producing a miniature statue out of a chip of marble. He was vaguely uncomfortable about the fact that he'd forgotten so easily who he really was, and tried to shut his eyes to block out the flat dullness of wherever he was. And was gripped by the vertigo as he had been back in his bedroom. This time he got the impression of falling down a well by starlight; a fast fading sprinkling of light and the infinite void waiting... The landscape looked much more inviting after that. If this was a gas-induced dream he'd sit it out. Half an hour wasn't so long. But it felt like much more than that by the time he decided to get up and explore some more. Maybe his sense of time had gone the way of his skin colour. And, for that matter, the rest of his body, which had acquired several disquietening features which would surprise any osteopath, ear, nose and throat specialist or proctologist. Not that there seemed to be anybody (indeed, any body) else in the place, although once he caught what seemed to be a flash of motion in the sky. He squinted up into the grey light - the shapes that had sped by looked more like fish than birds; he must have been dreaming. That thought made him laugh. He wandered over to one of the boulders, with the vague intention of climbing up it and looking for something - anything - on the horizon. The surface caught his eyes; like granite it was composed of a myriad tiny facets of crystal, white, orange, black, grey. Unlike granite some of these were quite large, and faintly grooved. These bigger lumps were uniformly white, and they puzzled him. It wasn't until he came across one that was protruding from the rest of the rock, pure white with a blunt point, that he twigged. Teeth. The rocks were granite, he was sure of that from the mica, feldspar and quartz he recognised - any Dartmoor bog trotter knew granite as the city dwellers recognised concrete - but with an uneven sprinkling of teeth stirred in, like peanuts in a chocolate bar. Again, he thought of the Weasel's constant invectives against refined sugar when he was young; again reminded himself that somewhere his real body was supine and slightly more gummy. But granite couldn't have teeth in it. Long-distant school geography lessons sprang to mind. Born of elementary fire, hot lava from the earth's core slowly cooling under tremendous pressure with crystals of hard rock forming over centuries, any organic matter would be fried, powdered and assimilated in minutes. It was, he reminded himself, a dream. One which would offend doctors, geologists and dentists in equal measure, but still a dream. It had to have something to do with being in just such a dream, he thought, but he felt curiously elated. He felt plain curious too - he was looking forward to the next discovery, the next fact to fall out of this strange place. Again, he felt a little disquiet about the ease with which he'd forgotten about his real status as an office worker in Plymouth, but then that place had its fair share of grey skies and boredom too. He hunted around in the grass until he found a small lump of rock. Odd - he looked around, the scattering of the stuff was fairly even as far as he could see - what on earth (or wherever, he reminded himself) could have caused this place to be like this. He imagined great glaciers slowly melting, dropping rocks as they retreated down the vast gouge they in earlier youth had carved, but that wouldn't explain the flatness of the place. Glaciated valleys - once more, those geography lessons with Rolly Jones surfaced after a decade submerged - were U-shaped. This was plain plane. This blue and hairy body must belong to a blue and hairy geologist, he thought. He raised the rock above his head, and brought it down hard on the large boulder he'd been examining. The shock jarred his hand, but cracked off a small amount of the boulder's surface. He looked at the spray of chips that littered the grass. They were sharp, like flakes from the surface of a choc ice. The image of an ice cream, he couldn't remember the name, with small fragments of nut in the hard chocolate layer around the soft cream inside, came to mind, and on a whim he nibbled at one of the chips with his recently-enlarged canines. It tasted like a rock. He looked at the place on the boulder where the chips came from, expecting to see more of the same, perhaps a little more colourful and sharp. Instead he saw a smooth skin, black as the night, underneath what must have just been a shell of toothed rock. He prodded it with one ridiculously long finger (without a fingernail; for a moment he couldn't decide whether it was sillier to have a finger without a fingernail or one with - why did humans have fingernails anyway? He resolved to find out when he was back in the real- he nearly thought other - world) and it gave way a little, like the skin on a dead pig. Down at his feet, he found a particularly long shard of rock skin. With a roar he jabbed it into the gap on the boulder as hard as he could. This was, he discovered, very hard, and the skin broke. A gush of cold brown liquid shot out and over his - his? - body. He stood there for a moment, surprised, as the sticky coolness trickled down, matting the fine hair which covered him. He poked the same finger into the new gash, expecting to find a void. Instead he encountered a soft, sludgy gunk. It was very cold. He pulled his finger out (for some reason, an image of his boss came to mind) startled by the unexpected feelings. Again on an impulse, he licked the finger. Chocolate ice cream. He pulled at the rock shell around the gap, removing scabs of the stuff and widening the hole until he could get a fist in. One part of his mind stood back, aghast, as a feeding frenzy took over and he pulled, tugged, hit at the shell, reducing it to fragments and revealing an interior entirely composed of ice cream. With a whoop, he started to scoop the stuff into his mouth, not minding whether it ran down his chin, onto his chest, caking him with stickyness. "No. Chocolate. No chocolate. Bad for the teeth" Eh? Where did the voice come from? He looked up, and realised that he was cold, shivering, and standing in a spreading puddle of molten ice cream. He was very, very messy. "It'll ruin your teeth. Not good at all". Was that - that was the Weasel. "Steve, you mustn't eat so much chocolate. Steve, you have to wake up to the fact that your teeth must last you the rest of your life. Steve, wake up. Steve!" He shook his head, and suddenly felt very cold indeed. The grey of the sky lightened to orange, to white and he shivered. "Steve, wake up!" He blinked, and felt the ground somersault like a funfair ride. He tumbled, was lying down. He was on the couch, looking up at Dr Sells. "Steve, can you hear me?" "Uh" why was his mouth so horrible? "yeah. Yes, I can hear you. I've been dreaming, I think" "Don't talk. Take deep breaths. Do you feel OK?" Stupid dentist. How can I tell you if I can't talk? "Uhuh". "Good. I hit an artery, though what it was doing there I don't know, and we had a bit of an emergnecy. You're OK, though, not too much blood lost, and I've called an ambulance just in case. Ruined your clothes though - I'm sorry." His head spun. He tried to sit up, and in the couple of seconds before he collapsed back to the Chair he saw a blood-soaked body. At least it had pink hands.

USER: Please examine the following text, then analyze Chapter 3:4: WEIRD DREAMS Chapter One Day broke over Plymouth, bringing a slow grey sky, damp morose streets and damp morose milkmen, finished off by a minor surge in the electricity supply as quarter of a million clock radios turned on to the early morning show. Waking up is hard to do, thought Steve. Radio playing, birds singing, Monday morning. He sighed, turned over, and without opening his eyes hit the radio right on the snooze button. That'd teach it. Another five minutes wouldn't hurt... But radios are made of sterner stuff. Five minutes later, unbowed by such early morning violence, it resumed its unspeakable pop. Which turned, in time, unto unpalatable news. Yawn... He really should get up now, or he'd have to run for the bus again. Strange - his usual warm sleepiness was mixed with something else... Two records after the news. He really had to get up now. Least disgusting pair of boxer shorts, that shirt would do for today, and into the bathroom to shave his teeth... breakfast, paper and irresponsible TV weathermen later, Steve had diagnosed his problem. He was feeling a bit peaky, as his mum would've said had she not been living in North Dakota. Nothing worse than that. Still, Steve mused, perhaps he was coming down with the flu. Perhaps he ought to get something for it. To really get Monday going, among the junk mail was a note from his dentist reminding him of his six-monthly checkup. Which was, he noticed, tomorrow. Super. He ran for the bus, went upstairs and he read the paper, then trudged the ten minute walk from stop to work. Wet pavements and grey skies - it wasn't actually raining, but that was only a matter of time - did nothing to remove his malaise. In the office, he mentioned his lack of well-being to Emily, a bright girl in the postroom he'd got his eye on. He had often wondered whether he should ask her out but, just as often, decided not to. Never know, keep the friendship going and who knows what might happen? He'd never noticed, which was a bit insensitive on his part, that Emily was bored with life. More importantly, and this really wasn't his fault, he'd never noticed that she was a bored daemon. One of those mythical creatures who spend their eternal lives pushing misery, evil and discord. Emily hadn't started out as a daemon, few people do; her body had been possessed by the spirit Zelloripus as she waited out her punishment. Three thousand years ago, Zelloripus had been banished from the Central Circle of the court of Asklarioum in Chael for a crime against fellow daemons. A crime so despicable that, had it worked, she would have challenged the Great One herself. Given human form and stripped of many of her daemonic powers, she was sent to live the life of a mortal being on one of the less pleasant planets, Earth. As each host body died, she hopped into a new one, taking over the mind and feeding on the soul. Three thousand years into her sentence, with three thousand more to go, she was not happy. Sixty centuries in Plymouth is enough to embitter anyone. Even one whose residual evilness could, if focussed, melt a toddler's ice cream from a distance of ten miles. Today there were many puddles of Guiseppi's Famous Italian Ice Cream on the pavements of Plymouth. For today was special. Exactly half-way through Zelloripus' exile, she was feeling mean and ornery and disposed to high mischief. She despised the humans whose form she took; they by and large achieved oblivion in just seventy short years. She especially despised Steve, whose somnolent form sonorously snoring through lunchbreaks was a continual reminder of a contented peace of mind denied her. Daemons don't sleep; chances are that Another lurks nearby with designs on their soulstuff. A diabolic doze is the best they can normally manage; even this is denied those cast out of Hades because of the forces of Good that are on constant watch. Even, it had to be said, in Plymouth, where three thousand years of sleepless nights and boring days were driving Zelloripus close to breaking point. So far, she'd stuck to the rules, because using what remained of her powers to tamper with mortal affairs could double or treble her stay on Earth. But only if she was detected; the temptation to lash out at something or someone was growing. Her current job, with Plymouth's third most succesfful producer of soap, was not helping things. So mere bad timing could explain Steve's unhappy encounter with Zelloripus, or Emily as she should be called, on this day in particular. Maybe it was just bad luck that accounted for the copious yawns, heavy eyelids and sleep-slurred voice with which he laced the conversation over her franking machine. But the following conversation was almost too bad to be true... "Hiya Emily," said Steve. "You're looking wide eyed for a Monday morning. Wish I could be so awake, but I've been in bed most of the weekend." "Poor soul." said Emily, "What's the matter?" "Oh, I dunno. Think it's a touch of the flu; all I can do is sleep. It was a real effort to get up today. You don't know of anything that could perk me up a bit, do you?" Emily, bitter from boredom, was close to the edge. "No," she said "I don't usually get that sort of problem. With sleeping, I mean." It was probably his attempt at humour, or maybe it was a particularly clumsy chat-up line, that did it. "Perhaps you should sleep with me - it would maybe rub off a little. There's nothing like a good night's kip to make your fellow man seem a bit nicer..." "I'm sure" said Emily with a smile so sharp it was opening the letters, "that you're right there. Tell me, Steve, do you dream?" "Dream? No, can't say that I do. Not that I remember, that is. But if I did, it would be of you." "How sweet. Perhaps I can help you, at least" and here the smile was diamond-tipped "with the flu. I think I might just have something in my handbag. Hold on, let me go and get it." Steve was pleased. It might be worth asking her out after all, let's see, there's the funfair out of town... no, she's too bright for that... Outside, the weak sunlight darkened for a moment, as if a cloud had passed. She came back. "Here we are, something I got from a drug store last time I had the flu." It was a small brown bottle, with an indistinct label and, just visible in the powdery interior, three white pills. "You're supposed to have them before a meal, just take the lot tonight with a bottle of red wine and some cheese and you'll be a new man." "Thanks very much, Emily" said Steve, taking the bottle from her hand. "I'll do that. Look, what are you doing this weekend? Do you fancy a trip to see the new Stallone film or something?" "I'm not sure" lied the being with three thousand years' worth of identical Plymothian weekends stretched out in front of her. "Let's see how you're feeling in a couple of days. Wouldn't want to over-exert you during your convalescence". "Oh, I'm sure I'll be fine. I don't think I'll change my mind!" "We'll see" said Emily, allowing just a hint of cold, evil-tinged boredom to slip out. That evening, Steve wondered about Emily's last words. There was something not quite right, he decided, and came to a similar conclusion about the thrice-microwaved chilli con carne sitting in a bowl in the fridge. Then he remembered that wine and cheese had been recommended, and, although he was feeling fine by now, he thought that taking the lady's medicine followed by a triumphal Tuesday morning could do no harm. He had the cheese, and trotted out to the nearest 7-11 to get a bottle of red wine. Back at home, he emptied the three pills out of the bottle into his hand. Nothing special, thought he, and with a flourish popped them into his mouth and washed them down with a long draft of Burgundy. The cheese sandwich followed. A quick scan of the TV pages - why is there never anything on a Monday night? - convinced him of the desirability of bed. It's not generally appreciated that much magic is real, test-tubed and white-coated, science. Merlin's laboratory technique would have brought murmurs of approval from Pasteur, and watching Shiva smite (from a safe distance) might well have enlightened Einstein still further. It's just that while the great unwashed mass of men were more interested in squabbling, sex and smallpox it contented the Immortals to hide their rational prowess behind a web of mystic mishmash. Sure, there is magic to be had, but using it brings many repercussions which might not be completely controllable. Many magicians had lost their souls in the long research programme which, although almost half as old as the Universe, was still not producing results. But boy, was it over budget. Some of its more spectacular failures were still puzzling astronomers from a thousand worlds; more than few of whom were unexpected by-products from an experiment or two themselves. Emily was especially wary of employing the Dark Art. Not only had it landed her in this mess in the first place, but its use could signal loud and clear her position to any number of undesirable companions from the busybodies at Asklarioum, or something far more sinister. As it was, materialising the pills had been risky enough. Her excellent knowledge of human biochemistry helped her from there. As Steve dropped off to sleep, the pills were lying inert in his stomach. Slowly the gastric acid ate away the outer case, and the compounds within began to diffuse out. And what compounds, the like of which had not been seen on Earth before or (it is safe to assume) since. Any chemist worth his NaCl would have given his spatula to have been in on the action. First, the long chain molecules from the cheese were broken down to several interesting substances. The alcohol from the wine helped carry these and others from the pills themselves to the stomach wall, through which they slipped like Mexicans into Texas. On the other side of the wall, the usual gang of enzymes were waiting to digest the evening meal; but they weren't ready for what came at them. The scene of chemical carnage was brutal but short. Past the first stage of digestion, the intruding substances reached the blood stream. Dissolved in the plasma, they drifted up until they got to Steve's brain. The blood brain barrier - that wonderful filter that keeps hunks of pizza molecule out while letting oxygen in - was as effective as a traffic cop against a battalion of Soviet tanks. Emily's dark designs began their invidious work. Steve's brain was defenceless against the chemical onslaught. The vast, and mostly unused, network of neurones lay in front of them. Even as the last molecules were arriving, the compounds got to work. They diddled the dopamine receptors, they speeded up the cortical synapses, they nobbled the noradrenaline. A thin web of complex bonds spread deep into Steve's cerebellum, like frost over a tree. Further and further they went, until every part of his brain was invaded and controlled. For the moment they did nothing, but somewhere else in the Plymothian night a small chuckle of anticipation bounced off the flock wallpaper. In his sleep, Steve stirred and shivered. Chapter 2 The next day, Steve woke up, as usual, to the clock radio. Unusually, he found himself listening to it, and, even more strangely, it annoyed him. He turned over in bed and thumped the switch, leaving the bedroom to the birds, noisy Fords and myriad other sounds of morning. He stared at the ceiling. Hangover? No, he'd only had a couple of glasses of wine last night. Anyway, his head didn't hurt and he felt all right, sort of, except... He was wide awake. That was odd, too, as most days he only started to really wake up on the bus into work. He glanced at the clock radio; he still had a good half-hour until he had to leave, so he tried to doze. As he closed his eyes, the world spun. About fifteen years ago, he'd gone to Scotland with his parents, and once he'd crawled up to the edge of a granite cliff and peered over at the rocks and sea hundreds of feet beneath. He remembered amazement, awe and no little fear, but most of all he remembered the spiralling vertigo. That was what he was feeling now - he gripped the sides of the bed and opened his eyes rapidly, sweating. The flu? Those pills he took last night? Could be, but he'd never been ill like that before, nor taken anything from a chemist that shook him up so badly. For a moment he was worried, but then the morning took over again, and the sound of a bus pulling up the hill reminded and reassured him that another normal day was waiting. He got out of bed and, standing up, felt fine once more. The coffee and eggs of breakfast tasted really good, but he didn't feel like reading his paper on the bus. For some reason, he wasn't interested in "Rock Star Eats Own Hand, Sells Guitar", which seemed to be the most earthshaking intelligence on offer. Back in the office, he homed in on Emily. "Hey, Emily" he said "Those pills seemed to have done the trick. No flu, not a sniffle. I'm feeling really awake. They're good stuff - what're they called? I'd like to get some, just for next time, you know?" She giggled, a short, high-pitched stutter like a pony neighing. "Glad they seem to have worked, Steve. I can't remember their name, though, I've had them for a while. Still, if it comes back to me I'll let you know." "You've usually got such a good memory, Emily" said Steve ingratiatingly. "Me, mine's like a sieve. Can't even remember things like buying milk or doctor's appointments. Oh no!" "What's up?" asked Emily, wondering for a moment whether she'd miscalculated something and wondering, just for a moment, what exactly she'd done. Just for a moment, and then she realised. "Forgotten an appointment?" "Dentist. What's the time? Look, I've got to rush. See you at lunch - if I've got any teeth left" And he dashed into the boss' office to explain his impending absence. He rushed out of the building. His dentist was about a half a mile away, and by walking fast he could make it. Past the bombed church in the roundabout, past the police station, up the hill, past the library, past the reservoir and into Dr V. Sells, known since childhood as Dr Weasel. The receptionist looked through her window - hello <PRESIDIO_ANONYMIZED_PERSON>, hello Mr Trevathen take a seat he's running a little late - and he dived into the piles of House and Garden from 1972. Back in the office, the morning post had been sorted and distributed, and there was, as usual, half-an-hour's hiatus before the pre-lunch mailbags came in. Jill went out to round up all the outgoing mail from the seven floors, leaving Emily to herself. She checked her watch, and felt the sea of infinite boredom recede a little. Any minute now, and the first part of her plan would start to work. Deep within Steve's brain, profound changes were taking place. The tendrils of diabolic chemistry insinuated into his hippocampus, a small lump of grey matter normally concerned with sorting Steve's experience (such as they were) into long-term recall, and started to subtly rewire his memory mechanisms. Large portions of his mind were converted into the biological equivalent of RAM; ready to record experiences and, having recorded them, control his mind as a program controls a computer's processor. Elsewhere similar changes were taking place, but for now things were ready just to record. Just for now. The triggers to load the program were complex. If Steve was interested, then whatever it was that held his interest would be sorted, stored, activated. If he was frightened, amused, intrigued, it would all be recorded. But for this to work, he had to be capable of taking an interest in the first place. So part of Emily's chemical mishmash sharpened his wits, heightened his awareness, upped his IQ to just short of genius. This, she thought, was a nice move. Not only did it ensure that the data recorded would be powerful and particularly apt, but when the second stage began he would be only too capable of, mmmm, appreciating what was happening to him. He might even fight back, which would round off the whole thing nicely. And, she though with a daemonic delight, it would serve him right to be given a glimpse of what it's like to have an intelligence confronted with infinite boredom. Steve was, as the plan demanded, unaware of the mental mayhem crystallising beneath his cranium. But he was getting painfully aware of a lot of other things as he sat in the formica and chipboard waiting room. The posters of rabbits noshing carrots and jaunty poems about plaque ("Clean Clean Clean your teeth! Or else the germs get underneath!") were fading and a couple flapped loose at the corners. They'd been there since he'd started seeing Dr Weasel, and, he mused, the place probably hadn't seen a touch of paint for ten years before that. The bright orange and grey polypropelene bucket chairs finished of a fine example of early 'sixties public health design. Now why did he think that? He'd been here every six months for years, and usually only worried about whether he'd get a filling or not. Those old magazines - did people really think that the ideal home looked like that? The clothes they wore in the photos looked laughable too, but he could remember when he'd thought they looked good. How strange... perhaps the jacket and jeans he was wearing now would be equally ridiculous in ten years time. The buzzer chainsawed its way into his daydreams, and the receptionist looked up. "Mr Trevathen?". He stood up, and went into the surgery. Dr Sells was shuffling through some papers at a desk, and the Chair sat in the middle of the room beneath the usual battery of technology. "Hello Steve", said the dentist. "Sit down please. Now then, any problems since last time? It's good to see you keeping these checkups. Some people just don't bother after they leave home, and when something goes wrong there are all sorts of things to put right. How's your mother, by the way? It was America she moved to, wasn't it?" As usual, Steve had to wait for three or four questions to go past before he could get a word in. "Yes, she's settled down in North Dakota and she's doing fine. I might go over to see her at Christmas. My teeth are OK, too, but I wouldn't want to miss anything that needs looking at." "A fine attitude. Now then, lie down and open up." Steve looked up at the light. "That's new, isn't it? The old one was a different colour." "That's right, very observant! This one's a new low-voltage design, much more reliable and brighter too. I don't think anyone else has noticed. Open wide." The nurse hooked in some suction, and went to get Steve's notes. "Three's OK, two's OK, one's OK, one's OK, two's OK, three's OK, filling on four's a little bitty; we'll sort that out..." Dr Sells continued chanting his litany as Steve noticed, for the first time it seemed, the antiseptic smell, the faint noise of the machinery behind the dentist, the charts on the wall and the rows of dentures on the shelves. He felt the faint scratching inside his head as the dentist probed away. As Steve had forgotten about the appointment, he hadn't given his teeth the customary vigourous pre-checkup brushing and this was apparently noticeable. "Hello, we haven't been very thorough with your brushing, have we?" Typical quack, though Steve, lapsing into patronising parental tones. Doctor knows best. "Well, there's a cavity just starting on one of your premolars, and a slightly messy filling to tidy up. We'll have a poke around and fix them." Steve had collected a lot of fillings from a chocolate childhood, and had the memories to match. As various instruments of torture were produced and whined, sucked and scrunched their way around his mouth, he remembered the old fears with a vividness that surprised him. He winced as the drill scoured the cavity, and was very relieved at the instruction to rinse and spit. Strange taste, this pink liquid. "While I was fixing those teeth, Steve, I spotted something that might be serious. I'd better have a look at it." This was new. He opened his mouth obediently, and became more apprehensive as Dr Sell's usual banter failed to intersperse his dental deliberations. Finally the dentist stood up, and Steve closed his mouth. "One of your molars is misplaced - I don't know why I didn't catch it before, but there you go. Normally I'd leave it, as it's been there for years without causing any problems, but there are signs that you've got some more teeth coming through underneath." "Eh? You mean I'm teething?" "No, not quite. It's not uncommon for some people to have a third set of teeth at some time during their lives, and you might be one of them. In any case, I should really get that molar out otherwise it could be very bad for your jaw. It's not really fair that you should have to have a tooth pulled, since you're one of my better patients, but it's a good thing I caught it. Gas or needle?" He means it, Steve thought. He hadn't had a tooth out before, and the prospect frightened him. Adrenalin started to seep into his blood stream. His heart speeded up, but in his brain the new mechanisms fired up and channelled the stream of his senses into the almost infinite capacity of the revamped memory. "Oh, gas I think. Is it dangerous?" "No, not very." Oh, how reassuring, what soothing Weasel words. "Is the needle safer?" "There's nothing to worry about with either method. But the gas hurts less." "Fine. Will it take long?" "About half an hour, and you should be OK within the hour. Not driving, are you?" "I walked here." "No problems then. You might find things a bit fuzzy for a while, but it wears off." Steve remembered something Emily had said, and for the first time felt sadness for a thing which had never happened. "Will I dream?" "Hard to day. Some people do, but most don't." The nurse had been tinkering with a mess of tubes and cylinders, and brought it to the side of the Chair. While she prepared a tray of gleaming steel instruments, some of which Steve thought would look more in keeping in his local garage, Dr Sells continued his spiel. "Now then, I'll want you to breath deeply from the mask while counting to ten. You won't get past about seven, but you won't notice that. Ready, Sandra?" The nurse passed over a facemask, which the dentist placed over Steve's mouth. "Righty-ho - start breathing and counting. Sweet dreams!" Here we go, then. One... suck... two... blow... three... suck... four... blow... hmmm, this is quite pleasant... where was I... teeth... In the surgery, the dentist checked Steve's pulse, eyes and respiration. Satisifed that his patient was well under, he gave him a few seconds more and started to prepare for oral excavation. Back at the office, Jill wanted to know what Emily was finding so funny. Emily merely giggled, and carried on sorting the post. All that day, she'd be in high spirits, surprising those who were used to her normal sarcastic mood. To those who asked why, she'd reply only that 'Life's a gas, isn't it?' Chapter 3 Teeth... five... jive.. on the third stroke... hey, why aren't I under yet? Better warn the Weasel not to start pulling just yet. Steve opened his eyes. If this is dreaming, thought Steve, I haven't missed much. The view reminded him of Dartmoor, where he used to spend the school holidays camping and walking. Only this place was flat for miles, with no inviting tors to clamber up or run down. Behind him the plain stretched out as far as he could see, so for want of anything better to do he started to walk towards the mountains. After a few minutes, he looked as his watch. Or he tried to, but on raising his arm all he saw was a bare wrist. He was greatly troubled. It wasn't so much the lack of a watch that bothered him, nor the fact that the rest of his body was, on inspection, entirely bare, but the troublesome actuality that the body in question wasn't the same one he'd grown up in. In fact, it was borderline as to whether it was Homo Sapiens or not, what with the long hair on the legs and the excessive number of flattened toes. The blue colour didn't help either. For some reason, he calmed down. Out of curiosity, he tried to yell out "Anyone there?" and was intrigued by the guttural explosion that forced its way out of his mouth, past his fangs and into the leaden air. Fangs. Hmmm. That would startle the good Doctor. He realised with some surprise that he must still be in the Chair, with Dr Sells tapping away like a sculptor producing a miniature statue out of a chip of marble. He was vaguely uncomfortable about the fact that he'd forgotten so easily who he really was, and tried to shut his eyes to block out the flat dullness of wherever he was. And was gripped by the vertigo as he had been back in his bedroom. This time he got the impression of falling down a well by starlight; a fast fading sprinkling of light and the infinite void waiting... The landscape looked much more inviting after that. If this was a gas-induced dream he'd sit it out. Half an hour wasn't so long. But it felt like much more than that by the time he decided to get up and explore some more. Maybe his sense of time had gone the way of his skin colour. And, for that matter, the rest of his body, which had acquired several disquietening features which would surprise any osteopath, ear, nose and throat specialist or proctologist. Not that there seemed to be anybody (indeed, any body) else in the place, although once he caught what seemed to be a flash of motion in the sky. He squinted up into the grey light - the shapes that had sped by looked more like fish than birds; he must have been dreaming. That thought made him laugh. He wandered over to one of the boulders, with the vague intention of climbing up it and looking for something - anything - on the horizon. The surface caught his eyes; like granite it was composed of a myriad tiny facets of crystal, white, orange, black, grey. Unlike granite some of these were quite large, and faintly grooved. These bigger lumps were uniformly white, and they puzzled him. It wasn't until he came across one that was protruding from the rest of the rock, pure white with a blunt point, that he twigged. Teeth. The rocks were granite, he was sure of that from the mica, feldspar and quartz he recognised - any Dartmoor bog trotter knew granite as the city dwellers recognised concrete - but with an uneven sprinkling of teeth stirred in, like peanuts in a chocolate bar. Again, he thought of the Weasel's constant invectives against refined sugar when he was young; again reminded himself that somewhere his real body was supine and slightly more gummy. But granite couldn't have teeth in it. Long-distant school geography lessons sprang to mind. Born of elementary fire, hot lava from the earth's core slowly cooling under tremendous pressure with crystals of hard rock forming over centuries, any organic matter would be fried, powdered and assimilated in minutes. It was, he reminded himself, a dream. One which would offend doctors, geologists and dentists in equal measure, but still a dream. It had to have something to do with being in just such a dream, he thought, but he felt curiously elated. He felt plain curious too - he was looking forward to the next discovery, the next fact to fall out of this strange place. Again, he felt a little disquiet about the ease with which he'd forgotten about his real status as an office worker in Plymouth, but then that place had its fair share of grey skies and boredom too. He hunted around in the grass until he found a small lump of rock. Odd - he looked around, the scattering of the stuff was fairly even as far as he could see - what on earth (or wherever, he reminded himself) could have caused this place to be like this. He imagined great glaciers slowly melting, dropping rocks as they retreated down the vast gouge they in earlier youth had carved, but that wouldn't explain the flatness of the place. Glaciated valleys - once more, those geography lessons with Rolly Jones surfaced after a decade submerged - were U-shaped. This was plain plane. This blue and hairy body must belong to a blue and hairy geologist, he thought. He raised the rock above his head, and brought it down hard on the large boulder he'd been examining. The shock jarred his hand, but cracked off a small amount of the boulder's surface. He looked at the spray of chips that littered the grass. They were sharp, like flakes from the surface of a choc ice. The image of an ice cream, he couldn't remember the name, with small fragments of nut in the hard chocolate layer around the soft cream inside, came to mind, and on a whim he nibbled at one of the chips with his recently-enlarged canines. It tasted like a rock. He looked at the place on the boulder where the chips came from, expecting to see more of the same, perhaps a little more colourful and sharp. Instead he saw a smooth skin, black as the night, underneath what must have just been a shell of toothed rock. He prodded it with one ridiculously long finger (without a fingernail; for a moment he couldn't decide whether it was sillier to have a finger without a fingernail or one with - why did humans have fingernails anyway? He resolved to find out when he was back in the real- he nearly thought other - world) and it gave way a little, like the skin on a dead pig. Down at his feet, he found a particularly long shard of rock skin. With a roar he jabbed it into the gap on the boulder as hard as he could. This was, he discovered, very hard, and the skin broke. A gush of cold brown liquid shot out and over his - his? - body. He stood there for a moment, surprised, as the sticky coolness trickled down, matting the fine hair which covered him. He poked the same finger into the new gash, expecting to find a void. Instead he encountered a soft, sludgy gunk. It was very cold. He pulled his finger out (for some reason, an image of his boss came to mind) startled by the unexpected feelings. Again on an impulse, he licked the finger. Chocolate ice cream. He pulled at the rock shell around the gap, removing scabs of the stuff and widening the hole until he could get a fist in. One part of his mind stood back, aghast, as a feeding frenzy took over and he pulled, tugged, hit at the shell, reducing it to fragments and revealing an interior entirely composed of ice cream. With a whoop, he started to scoop the stuff into his mouth, not minding whether it ran down his chin, onto his chest, caking him with stickyness. "No. Chocolate. No chocolate. Bad for the teeth" Eh? Where did the voice come from? He looked up, and realised that he was cold, shivering, and standing in a spreading puddle of molten ice cream. He was very, very messy. "It'll ruin your teeth. Not good at all". Was that - that was the Weasel. "Steve, you mustn't eat so much chocolate. Steve, you have to wake up to the fact that your teeth must last you the rest of your life. Steve, wake up. Steve!" He shook his head, and suddenly felt very cold indeed. The grey of the sky lightened to orange, to white and he shivered. "Steve, wake up!" He blinked, and felt the ground somersault like a funfair ride. He tumbled, was lying down. He was on the couch, looking up at Dr Sells. "Steve, can you hear me?" "Uh" why was his mouth so horrible? "yeah. Yes, I can hear you. I've been dreaming, I think" "Don't talk. Take deep breaths. Do you feel OK?" Stupid dentist. How can I tell you if I can't talk? "Uhuh". "Good. I hit an artery, though what it was doing there I don't know, and we had a bit of an emergnecy. You're OK, though, not too much blood lost, and I've called an ambulance just in case. Ruined your clothes though - I'm sorry." His head spun. He tried to sit up, and in the couple of seconds before he collapsed back to the Chair he saw a blood-soaked body. At least it had pink hands. Chapter 4 The doctors at Freedom Fields Hospital weren't concerned with his dream. "Happens all the time, old man" one particularly young one said "You're dreaming about walking through a town when a fire engine goes past, bell ringing like billy-oh. You wake up, and the alarm clock's going nineteen to the dozen. Brain's made the connection, you see." Apart from the fact that he'd never owned an alarm clock with a bell, and suspected that the doctor had been watching too many Sunday afternoon wartime films, Steve saw. It had been a particularly vivid dream, but perhaps everyone dreamed like that under gas. He'd been given two pints of blood, which gave the lie to Dr Sells' soothing words, and was under observation for the rest of the day. According to the ward sister, he'd be out by seven since they needed the bed and he was young enough to survive "seeing what you young people do to yourselves nothing like this should worry you" by himself. The tooth had been removed, and in its place was a lump of surgical padding. Steve explored it with his tongue, it seemed much large and ten times rougher than the tooth it replaced but he expected that was just the unfamiliarity and weirdness of the pad. Again he felt strange, he wasn't used to such ideas and didn't know where they came from. That they might come from himself seemed impossible. The young doctor came back. "How are we doing?" "I'm feeling OK." He took Steve's blood pressure and pulse rate. "I think you'll be OK for this evening, but take it easy for the next week or so". "Er, Doctor?" "Yes?" "I'm still worried by the dream I had." The doctor sat down on the bed, and carefully placed his clipboard on the sheets before looking, seriously and with obvious intent, at Steve. "We all have dreams, old man." "No, I don't get dreams, apart from this time. It was so real, like being there, only I've never been anywhere like that before. Do you think it could have been the gas?" "That's possible. It's really nothing to worry about, though. It's been quite a traumatic experience for you. Look, if the dreams come back or you're still worried about things a week from now I can recommend a friend of mine who should sort you out." "He's a doctor too?" "Yes, but not a blood and guts man like me. He's a psychoanalyst." "Um... thanks. I think." The doctor laughed "Nobody's saying you're anything but sane. It's just if you're troubled by this thing I don't know anyone better. He's especially good on dreams. Wrote a book about them a while back, I think he's quite famous." "Among shrinks." "Yes, I suppose. Look, hold on a minute." The doctor scribbled out a name and phone number on his pad, and tore off the sheet. "Here you go. If you do give him a call, tell him Dr Chapman sent you, OK?" "Thanks, mate. I hope I don't, if you see what I mean." "Right. Anything else?" And as there was nothing else, the doctor left. He caught the bus home. Experimentally probing the top of the wadding, he decided that soup and stuff would be on the menu for the next week. That night he slept soundly, for the last time, as the day's happenings were sorted and stored. For later.

USER: Please examine the following text, then analyzecritically review Chapter 4: WEIRD DREAMS Chapter One Day broke over Plymouth, bringing a slow grey sky, damp morose streets and damp morose milkmen, finished off by a minor surge in the electricity supply as quarter of a million clock radios turned on to the early morning show. Waking up is hard to do, thought Steve. Radio playing, birds singing, Monday morning. He sighed, turned over, and without opening his eyes hit the radio right on the snooze button. That'd teach it. Another five minutes wouldn't hurt... But radios are made of sterner stuff. Five minutes later, unbowed by such early morning violence, it resumed its unspeakable pop. Which turned, in time, unto unpalatable news. Yawn... He really should get up now, or he'd have to run for the bus again. Strange - his usual warm sleepiness was mixed with something else... Two records after the news. He really had to get up now. Least disgusting pair of boxer shorts, that shirt would do for today, and into the bathroom to shave his teeth... breakfast, paper and irresponsible TV weathermen later, Steve had diagnosed his problem. He was feeling a bit peaky, as his mum would've said had she not been living in North Dakota. Nothing worse than that. Still, Steve mused, perhaps he was coming down with the flu. Perhaps he ought to get something for it. To really get Monday going, among the junk mail was a note from his dentist reminding him of his six-monthly checkup. Which was, he noticed, tomorrow. Super. He ran for the bus, went upstairs and he read the paper, then trudged the ten minute walk from stop to work. Wet pavements and grey skies - it wasn't actually raining, but that was only a matter of time - did nothing to remove his malaise. In the office, he mentioned his lack of well-being to Emily, a bright girl in the postroom he'd got his eye on. He had often wondered whether he should ask her out but, just as often, decided not to. Never know, keep the friendship going and who knows what might happen? He'd never noticed, which was a bit insensitive on his part, that Emily was bored with life. More importantly, and this really wasn't his fault, he'd never noticed that she was a bored daemon. One of those mythical creatures who spend their eternal lives pushing misery, evil and discord. Emily hadn't started out as a daemon, few people do; her body had been possessed by the spirit Zelloripus as she waited out her punishment. Three thousand years ago, Zelloripus had been banished from the Central Circle of the court of Asklarioum in Chael for a crime against fellow daemons. A crime so despicable that, had it worked, she would have challenged the Great One herself. Given human form and stripped of many of her daemonic powers, she was sent to live the life of a mortal being on one of the less pleasant planets, Earth. As each host body died, she hopped into a new one, taking over the mind and feeding on the soul. Three thousand years into her sentence, with three thousand more to go, she was not happy. Sixty centuries in Plymouth is enough to embitter anyone. Even one whose residual evilness could, if focussed, melt a toddler's ice cream from a distance of ten miles. Today there were many puddles of Guiseppi's Famous Italian Ice Cream on the pavements of Plymouth. For today was special. Exactly half-way through Zelloripus' exile, she was feeling mean and ornery and disposed to high mischief. She despised the humans whose form she took; they by and large achieved oblivion in just seventy short years. She especially despised Steve, whose somnolent form sonorously snoring through lunchbreaks was a continual reminder of a contented peace of mind denied her. Daemons don't sleep; chances are that Another lurks nearby with designs on their soulstuff. A diabolic doze is the best they can normally manage; even this is denied those cast out of Hades because of the forces of Good that are on constant watch. Even, it had to be said, in Plymouth, where three thousand years of sleepless nights and boring days were driving Zelloripus close to breaking point. So far, she'd stuck to the rules, because using what remained of her powers to tamper with mortal affairs could double or treble her stay on Earth. But only if she was detected; the temptation to lash out at something or someone was growing. Her current job, with Plymouth's third most succesfful producer of soap, was not helping things. So mere bad timing could explain Steve's unhappy encounter with Zelloripus, or Emily as she should be called, on this day in particular. Maybe it was just bad luck that accounted for the copious yawns, heavy eyelids and sleep-slurred voice with which he laced the conversation over her franking machine. But the following conversation was almost too bad to be true... "Hiya Emily," said Steve. "You're looking wide eyed for a Monday morning. Wish I could be so awake, but I've been in bed most of the weekend." "Poor soul." said Emily, "What's the matter?" "Oh, I dunno. Think it's a touch of the flu; all I can do is sleep. It was a real effort to get up today. You don't know of anything that could perk me up a bit, do you?" Emily, bitter from boredom, was close to the edge. "No," she said "I don't usually get that sort of problem. With sleeping, I mean." It was probably his attempt at humour, or maybe it was a particularly clumsy chat-up line, that did it. "Perhaps you should sleep with me - it would maybe rub off a little. There's nothing like a good night's kip to make your fellow man seem a bit nicer..." "I'm sure" said Emily with a smile so sharp it was opening the letters, "that you're right there. Tell me, Steve, do you dream?" "Dream? No, can't say that I do. Not that I remember, that is. But if I did, it would be of you." "How sweet. Perhaps I can help you, at least" and here the smile was diamond-tipped "with the flu. I think I might just have something in my handbag. Hold on, let me go and get it." Steve was pleased. It might be worth asking her out after all, let's see, there's the funfair out of town... no, she's too bright for that... Outside, the weak sunlight darkened for a moment, as if a cloud had passed. She came back. "Here we are, something I got from a drug store last time I had the flu." It was a small brown bottle, with an indistinct label and, just visible in the powdery interior, three white pills. "You're supposed to have them before a meal, just take the lot tonight with a bottle of red wine and some cheese and you'll be a new man." "Thanks very much, Emily" said Steve, taking the bottle from her hand. "I'll do that. Look, what are you doing this weekend? Do you fancy a trip to see the new Stallone film or something?" "I'm not sure" lied the being with three thousand years' worth of identical Plymothian weekends stretched out in front of her. "Let's see how you're feeling in a couple of days. Wouldn't want to over-exert you during your convalescence". "Oh, I'm sure I'll be fine. I don't think I'll change my mind!" "We'll see" said Emily, allowing just a hint of cold, evil-tinged boredom to slip out. That evening, Steve wondered about Emily's last words. There was something not quite right, he decided, and came to a similar conclusion about the thrice-microwaved chilli con carne sitting in a bowl in the fridge. Then he remembered that wine and cheese had been recommended, and, although he was feeling fine by now, he thought that taking the lady's medicine followed by a triumphal Tuesday morning could do no harm. He had the cheese, and trotted out to the nearest 7-11 to get a bottle of red wine. Back at home, he emptied the three pills out of the bottle into his hand. Nothing special, thought he, and with a flourish popped them into his mouth and washed them down with a long draft of Burgundy. The cheese sandwich followed. A quick scan of the TV pages - why is there never anything on a Monday night? - convinced him of the desirability of bed. It's not generally appreciated that much magic is real, test-tubed and white-coated, science. Merlin's laboratory technique would have brought murmurs of approval from Pasteur, and watching Shiva smite (from a safe distance) might well have enlightened Einstein still further. It's just that while the great unwashed mass of men were more interested in squabbling, sex and smallpox it contented the Immortals to hide their rational prowess behind a web of mystic mishmash. Sure, there is magic to be had, but using it brings many repercussions which might not be completely controllable. Many magicians had lost their souls in the long research programme which, although almost half as old as the Universe, was still not producing results. But boy, was it over budget. Some of its more spectacular failures were still puzzling astronomers from a thousand worlds; more than few of whom were unexpected by-products from an experiment or two themselves. Emily was especially wary of employing the Dark Art. Not only had it landed her in this mess in the first place, but its use could signal loud and clear her position to any number of undesirable companions from the busybodies at Asklarioum, or something far more sinister. As it was, materialising the pills had been risky enough. Her excellent knowledge of human biochemistry helped her from there. As Steve dropped off to sleep, the pills were lying inert in his stomach. Slowly the gastric acid ate away the outer case, and the compounds within began to diffuse out. And what compounds, the like of which had not been seen on Earth before or (it is safe to assume) since. Any chemist worth his NaCl would have given his spatula to have been in on the action. First, the long chain molecules from the cheese were broken down to several interesting substances. The alcohol from the wine helped carry these and others from the pills themselves to the stomach wall, through which they slipped like Mexicans into Texas. On the other side of the wall, the usual gang of enzymes were waiting to digest the evening meal; but they weren't ready for what came at them. The scene of chemical carnage was brutal but short. Past the first stage of digestion, the intruding substances reached the blood stream. Dissolved in the plasma, they drifted up until they got to Steve's brain. The blood brain barrier - that wonderful filter that keeps hunks of pizza molecule out while letting oxygen in - was as effective as a traffic cop against a battalion of Soviet tanks. Emily's dark designs began their invidious work. Steve's brain was defenceless against the chemical onslaught. The vast, and mostly unused, network of neurones lay in front of them. Even as the last molecules were arriving, the compounds got to work. They diddled the dopamine receptors, they speeded up the cortical synapses, they nobbled the noradrenaline. A thin web of complex bonds spread deep into Steve's cerebellum, like frost over a tree. Further and further they went, until every part of his brain was invaded and controlled. For the moment they did nothing, but somewhere else in the Plymothian night a small chuckle of anticipation bounced off the flock wallpaper. In his sleep, Steve stirred and shivered. Chapter 2 The next day, Steve woke up, as usual, to the clock radio. Unusually, he found himself listening to it, and, even more strangely, it annoyed him. He turned over in bed and thumped the switch, leaving the bedroom to the birds, noisy Fords and myriad other sounds of morning. He stared at the ceiling. Hangover? No, he'd only had a couple of glasses of wine last night. Anyway, his head didn't hurt and he felt all right, sort of, except... He was wide awake. That was odd, too, as most days he only started to really wake up on the bus into work. He glanced at the clock radio; he still had a good half-hour until he had to leave, so he tried to doze. As he closed his eyes, the world spun. About fifteen years ago, he'd gone to Scotland with his parents, and once he'd crawled up to the edge of a granite cliff and peered over at the rocks and sea hundreds of feet beneath. He remembered amazement, awe and no little fear, but most of all he remembered the spiralling vertigo. That was what he was feeling now - he gripped the sides of the bed and opened his eyes rapidly, sweating. The flu? Those pills he took last night? Could be, but he'd never been ill like that before, nor taken anything from a chemist that shook him up so badly. For a moment he was worried, but then the morning took over again, and the sound of a bus pulling up the hill reminded and reassured him that another normal day was waiting. He got out of bed and, standing up, felt fine once more. The coffee and eggs of breakfast tasted really good, but he didn't feel like reading his paper on the bus. For some reason, he wasn't interested in "Rock Star Eats Own Hand, Sells Guitar", which seemed to be the most earthshaking intelligence on offer. Back in the office, he homed in on Emily. "Hey, Emily" he said "Those pills seemed to have done the trick. No flu, not a sniffle. I'm feeling really awake. They're good stuff - what're they called? I'd like to get some, just for next time, you know?" She giggled, a short, high-pitched stutter like a pony neighing. "Glad they seem to have worked, Steve. I can't remember their name, though, I've had them for a while. Still, if it comes back to me I'll let you know." "You've usually got such a good memory, Emily" said Steve ingratiatingly. "Me, mine's like a sieve. Can't even remember things like buying milk or doctor's appointments. Oh no!" "What's up?" asked Emily, wondering for a moment whether she'd miscalculated something and wondering, just for a moment, what exactly she'd done. Just for a moment, and then she realised. "Forgotten an appointment?" "Dentist. What's the time? Look, I've got to rush. See you at lunch - if I've got any teeth left" And he dashed into the boss' office to explain his impending absence. He rushed out of the building. His dentist was about a half a mile away, and by walking fast he could make it. Past the bombed church in the roundabout, past the police station, up the hill, past the library, past the reservoir and into Dr V. Sells, known since childhood as Dr Weasel. The receptionist looked through her window - hello <PRESIDIO_ANONYMIZED_PERSON>, hello Mr Trevathen take a seat he's running a little late - and he dived into the piles of House and Garden from 1972. Back in the office, the morning post had been sorted and distributed, and there was, as usual, half-an-hour's hiatus before the pre-lunch mailbags came in. Jill went out to round up all the outgoing mail from the seven floors, leaving Emily to herself. She checked her watch, and felt the sea of infinite boredom recede a little. Any minute now, and the first part of her plan would start to work. Deep within Steve's brain, profound changes were taking place. The tendrils of diabolic chemistry insinuated into his hippocampus, a small lump of grey matter normally concerned with sorting Steve's experience (such as they were) into long-term recall, and started to subtly rewire his memory mechanisms. Large portions of his mind were converted into the biological equivalent of RAM; ready to record experiences and, having recorded them, control his mind as a program controls a computer's processor. Elsewhere similar changes were taking place, but for now things were ready just to record. Just for now. The triggers to load the program were complex. If Steve was interested, then whatever it was that held his interest would be sorted, stored, activated. If he was frightened, amused, intrigued, it would all be recorded. But for this to work, he had to be capable of taking an interest in the first place. So part of Emily's chemical mishmash sharpened his wits, heightened his awareness, upped his IQ to just short of genius. This, she thought, was a nice move. Not only did it ensure that the data recorded would be powerful and particularly apt, but when the second stage began he would be only too capable of, mmmm, appreciating what was happening to him. He might even fight back, which would round off the whole thing nicely. And, she though with a daemonic delight, it would serve him right to be given a glimpse of what it's like to have an intelligence confronted with infinite boredom. Steve was, as the plan demanded, unaware of the mental mayhem crystallising beneath his cranium. But he was getting painfully aware of a lot of other things as he sat in the formica and chipboard waiting room. The posters of rabbits noshing carrots and jaunty poems about plaque ("Clean Clean Clean your teeth! Or else the germs get underneath!") were fading and a couple flapped loose at the corners. They'd been there since he'd started seeing Dr Weasel, and, he mused, the place probably hadn't seen a touch of paint for ten years before that. The bright orange and grey polypropelene bucket chairs finished of a fine example of early 'sixties public health design. Now why did he think that? He'd been here every six months for years, and usually only worried about whether he'd get a filling or not. Those old magazines - did people really think that the ideal home looked like that? The clothes they wore in the photos looked laughable too, but he could remember when he'd thought they looked good. How strange... perhaps the jacket and jeans he was wearing now would be equally ridiculous in ten years time. The buzzer chainsawed its way into his daydreams, and the receptionist looked up. "Mr Trevathen?". He stood up, and went into the surgery. Dr Sells was shuffling through some papers at a desk, and the Chair sat in the middle of the room beneath the usual battery of technology. "Hello Steve", said the dentist. "Sit down please. Now then, any problems since last time? It's good to see you keeping these checkups. Some people just don't bother after they leave home, and when something goes wrong there are all sorts of things to put right. How's your mother, by the way? It was America she moved to, wasn't it?" As usual, Steve had to wait for three or four questions to go past before he could get a word in. "Yes, she's settled down in North Dakota and she's doing fine. I might go over to see her at Christmas. My teeth are OK, too, but I wouldn't want to miss anything that needs looking at." "A fine attitude. Now then, lie down and open up." Steve looked up at the light. "That's new, isn't it? The old one was a different colour." "That's right, very observant! This one's a new low-voltage design, much more reliable and brighter too. I don't think anyone else has noticed. Open wide." The nurse hooked in some suction, and went to get Steve's notes. "Three's OK, two's OK, one's OK, one's OK, two's OK, three's OK, filling on four's a little bitty; we'll sort that out..." Dr Sells continued chanting his litany as Steve noticed, for the first time it seemed, the antiseptic smell, the faint noise of the machinery behind the dentist, the charts on the wall and the rows of dentures on the shelves. He felt the faint scratching inside his head as the dentist probed away. As Steve had forgotten about the appointment, he hadn't given his teeth the customary vigourous pre-checkup brushing and this was apparently noticeable. "Hello, we haven't been very thorough with your brushing, have we?" Typical quack, though Steve, lapsing into patronising parental tones. Doctor knows best. "Well, there's a cavity just starting on one of your premolars, and a slightly messy filling to tidy up. We'll have a poke around and fix them." Steve had collected a lot of fillings from a chocolate childhood, and had the memories to match. As various instruments of torture were produced and whined, sucked and scrunched their way around his mouth, he remembered the old fears with a vividness that surprised him. He winced as the drill scoured the cavity, and was very relieved at the instruction to rinse and spit. Strange taste, this pink liquid. "While I was fixing those teeth, Steve, I spotted something that might be serious. I'd better have a look at it." This was new. He opened his mouth obediently, and became more apprehensive as Dr Sell's usual banter failed to intersperse his dental deliberations. Finally the dentist stood up, and Steve closed his mouth. "One of your molars is misplaced - I don't know why I didn't catch it before, but there you go. Normally I'd leave it, as it's been there for years without causing any problems, but there are signs that you've got some more teeth coming through underneath." "Eh? You mean I'm teething?" "No, not quite. It's not uncommon for some people to have a third set of teeth at some time during their lives, and you might be one of them. In any case, I should really get that molar out otherwise it could be very bad for your jaw. It's not really fair that you should have to have a tooth pulled, since you're one of my better patients, but it's a good thing I caught it. Gas or needle?" He means it, Steve thought. He hadn't had a tooth out before, and the prospect frightened him. Adrenalin started to seep into his blood stream. His heart speeded up, but in his brain the new mechanisms fired up and channelled the stream of his senses into the almost infinite capacity of the revamped memory. "Oh, gas I think. Is it dangerous?" "No, not very." Oh, how reassuring, what soothing Weasel words. "Is the needle safer?" "There's nothing to worry about with either method. But the gas hurts less." "Fine. Will it take long?" "About half an hour, and you should be OK within the hour. Not driving, are you?" "I walked here." "No problems then. You might find things a bit fuzzy for a while, but it wears off." Steve remembered something Emily had said, and for the first time felt sadness for a thing which had never happened. "Will I dream?" "Hard to day. Some people do, but most don't." The nurse had been tinkering with a mess of tubes and cylinders, and brought it to the side of the Chair. While she prepared a tray of gleaming steel instruments, some of which Steve thought would look more in keeping in his local garage, Dr Sells continued his spiel. "Now then, I'll want you to breath deeply from the mask while counting to ten. You won't get past about seven, but you won't notice that. Ready, Sandra?" The nurse passed over a facemask, which the dentist placed over Steve's mouth. "Righty-ho - start breathing and counting. Sweet dreams!" Here we go, then. One... suck... two... blow... three... suck... four... blow... hmmm, this is quite pleasant... where was I... teeth... In the surgery, the dentist checked Steve's pulse, eyes and respiration. Satisifed that his patient was well under, he gave him a few seconds more and started to prepare for oral excavation. Back at the office, Jill wanted to know what Emily was finding so funny. Emily merely giggled, and carried on sorting the post. All that day, she'd be in high spirits, surprising those who were used to her normal sarcastic mood. To those who asked why, she'd reply only that 'Life's a gas, isn't it?' Chapter 3 Teeth... five... jive.. on the third stroke... hey, why aren't I under yet? Better warn the Weasel not to start pulling just yet. Steve opened his eyes. If this is dreaming, thought Steve, I haven't missed much. The view reminded him of Dartmoor, where he used to spend the school holidays camping and walking. Only this place was flat for miles, with no inviting tors to clamber up or run down. Behind him the plain stretched out as far as he could see, so for want of anything better to do he started to walk towards the mountains. After a few minutes, he looked as his watch. Or he tried to, but on raising his arm all he saw was a bare wrist. He was greatly troubled. It wasn't so much the lack of a watch that bothered him, nor the fact that the rest of his body was, on inspection, entirely bare, but the troublesome actuality that the body in question wasn't the same one he'd grown up in. In fact, it was borderline as to whether it was Homo Sapiens or not, what with the long hair on the legs and the excessive number of flattened toes. The blue colour didn't help either. For some reason, he calmed down. Out of curiosity, he tried to yell out "Anyone there?" and was intrigued by the guttural explosion that forced its way out of his mouth, past his fangs and into the leaden air. Fangs. Hmmm. That would startle the good Doctor. He realised with some surprise that he must still be in the Chair, with Dr Sells tapping away like a sculptor producing a miniature statue out of a chip of marble. He was vaguely uncomfortable about the fact that he'd forgotten so easily who he really was, and tried to shut his eyes to block out the flat dullness of wherever he was. And was gripped by the vertigo as he had been back in his bedroom. This time he got the impression of falling down a well by starlight; a fast fading sprinkling of light and the infinite void waiting... The landscape looked much more inviting after that. If this was a gas-induced dream he'd sit it out. Half an hour wasn't so long. But it felt like much more than that by the time he decided to get up and explore some more. Maybe his sense of time had gone the way of his skin colour. And, for that matter, the rest of his body, which had acquired several disquietening features which would surprise any osteopath, ear, nose and throat specialist or proctologist. Not that there seemed to be anybody (indeed, any body) else in the place, although once he caught what seemed to be a flash of motion in the sky. He squinted up into the grey light - the shapes that had sped by looked more like fish than birds; he must have been dreaming. That thought made him laugh. He wandered over to one of the boulders, with the vague intention of climbing up it and looking for something - anything - on the horizon. The surface caught his eyes; like granite it was composed of a myriad tiny facets of crystal, white, orange, black, grey. Unlike granite some of these were quite large, and faintly grooved. These bigger lumps were uniformly white, and they puzzled him. It wasn't until he came across one that was protruding from the rest of the rock, pure white with a blunt point, that he twigged. Teeth. The rocks were granite, he was sure of that from the mica, feldspar and quartz he recognised - any Dartmoor bog trotter knew granite as the city dwellers recognised concrete - but with an uneven sprinkling of teeth stirred in, like peanuts in a chocolate bar. Again, he thought of the Weasel's constant invectives against refined sugar when he was young; again reminded himself that somewhere his real body was supine and slightly more gummy. But granite couldn't have teeth in it. Long-distant school geography lessons sprang to mind. Born of elementary fire, hot lava from the earth's core slowly cooling under tremendous pressure with crystals of hard rock forming over centuries, any organic matter would be fried, powdered and assimilated in minutes. It was, he reminded himself, a dream. One which would offend doctors, geologists and dentists in equal measure, but still a dream. It had to have something to do with being in just such a dream, he thought, but he felt curiously elated. He felt plain curious too - he was looking forward to the next discovery, the next fact to fall out of this strange place. Again, he felt a little disquiet about the ease with which he'd forgotten about his real status as an office worker in Plymouth, but then that place had its fair share of grey skies and boredom too. He hunted around in the grass until he found a small lump of rock. Odd - he looked around, the scattering of the stuff was fairly even as far as he could see - what on earth (or wherever, he reminded himself) could have caused this place to be like this. He imagined great glaciers slowly melting, dropping rocks as they retreated down the vast gouge they in earlier youth had carved, but that wouldn't explain the flatness of the place. Glaciated valleys - once more, those geography lessons with Rolly Jones surfaced after a decade submerged - were U-shaped. This was plain plane. This blue and hairy body must belong to a blue and hairy geologist, he thought. He raised the rock above his head, and brought it down hard on the large boulder he'd been examining. The shock jarred his hand, but cracked off a small amount of the boulder's surface. He looked at the spray of chips that littered the grass. They were sharp, like flakes from the surface of a choc ice. The image of an ice cream, he couldn't remember the name, with small fragments of nut in the hard chocolate layer around the soft cream inside, came to mind, and on a whim he nibbled at one of the chips with his recently-enlarged canines. It tasted like a rock. He looked at the place on the boulder where the chips came from, expecting to see more of the same, perhaps a little more colourful and sharp. Instead he saw a smooth skin, black as the night, underneath what must have just been a shell of toothed rock. He prodded it with one ridiculously long finger (without a fingernail; for a moment he couldn't decide whether it was sillier to have a finger without a fingernail or one with - why did humans have fingernails anyway? He resolved to find out when he was back in the real- he nearly thought other - world) and it gave way a little, like the skin on a dead pig. Down at his feet, he found a particularly long shard of rock skin. With a roar he jabbed it into the gap on the boulder as hard as he could. This was, he discovered, very hard, and the skin broke. A gush of cold brown liquid shot out and over his - his? - body. He stood there for a moment, surprised, as the sticky coolness trickled down, matting the fine hair which covered him. He poked the same finger into the new gash, expecting to find a void. Instead he encountered a soft, sludgy gunk. It was very cold. He pulled his finger out (for some reason, an image of his boss came to mind) startled by the unexpected feelings. Again on an impulse, he licked the finger. Chocolate ice cream. He pulled at the rock shell around the gap, removing scabs of the stuff and widening the hole until he could get a fist in. One part of his mind stood back, aghast, as a feeding frenzy took over and he pulled, tugged, hit at the shell, reducing it to fragments and revealing an interior entirely composed of ice cream. With a whoop, he started to scoop the stuff into his mouth, not minding whether it ran down his chin, onto his chest, caking him with stickyness. "No. Chocolate. No chocolate. Bad for the teeth" Eh? Where did the voice come from? He looked up, and realised that he was cold, shivering, and standing in a spreading puddle of molten ice cream. He was very, very messy. "It'll ruin your teeth. Not good at all". Was that - that was the Weasel. "Steve, you mustn't eat so much chocolate. Steve, you have to wake up to the fact that your teeth must last you the rest of your life. Steve, wake up. Steve!" He shook his head, and suddenly felt very cold indeed. The grey of the sky lightened to orange, to white and he shivered. "Steve, wake up!" He blinked, and felt the ground somersault like a funfair ride. He tumbled, was lying down. He was on the couch, looking up at Dr Sells. "Steve, can you hear me?" "Uh" why was his mouth so horrible? "yeah. Yes, I can hear you. I've been dreaming, I think" "Don't talk. Take deep breaths. Do you feel OK?" Stupid dentist. How can I tell you if I can't talk? "Uhuh". "Good. I hit an artery, though what it was doing there I don't know, and we had a bit of an emergnecy. You're OK, though, not too much blood lost, and I've called an ambulance just in case. Ruined your clothes though - I'm sorry." His head spun. He tried to sit up, and in the couple of seconds before he collapsed back to the Chair he saw a blood-soaked body. At least it had pink hands. Chapter 4 The doctors at Freedom Fields Hospital weren't concerned with his dream. "Happens all the time, old man" one particularly young one said "You're dreaming about walking through a town when a fire engine goes past, bell ringing like billy-oh. You wake up, and the alarm clock's going nineteen to the dozen. Brain's made the connection, you see." Apart from the fact that he'd never owned an alarm clock with a bell, and suspected that the doctor had been watching too many Sunday afternoon wartime films, Steve saw. It had been a particularly vivid dream, but perhaps everyone dreamed like that under gas. He'd been given two pints of blood, which gave the lie to Dr Sells' soothing words, and was under observation for the rest of the day. According to the ward sister, he'd be out by seven since they needed the bed and he was young enough to survive "seeing what you young people do to yourselves nothing like this should worry you" by himself. The tooth had been removed, and in its place was a lump of surgical padding. Steve explored it with his tongue, it seemed much large and ten times rougher than the tooth it replaced but he expected that was just the unfamiliarity and weirdness of the pad. Again he felt strange, he wasn't used to such ideas and didn't know where they came from. That they might come from himself seemed impossible. The young doctor came back. "How are we doing?" "I'm feeling OK." He took Steve's blood pressure and pulse rate. "I think you'll be OK for this evening, but take it easy for the next week or so". "Er, Doctor?" "Yes?" "I'm still worried by the dream I had." The doctor sat down on the bed, and carefully placed his clipboard on the sheets before looking, seriously and with obvious intent, at Steve. "We all have dreams, old man." "No, I don't get dreams, apart from this time. It was so real, like being there, only I've never been anywhere like that before. Do you think it could have been the gas?" "That's possible. It's really nothing to worry about, though. It's been quite a traumatic experience for you. Look, if the dreams come back or you're still worried about things a week from now I can recommend a friend of mine who should sort you out." "He's a doctor too?" "Yes, but not a blood and guts man like me. He's a psychoanalyst." "Um... thanks. I think." The doctor laughed "Nobody's saying you're anything but sane. It's just if you're troubled by this thing I don't know anyone better. He's especially good on dreams. Wrote a book about them a while back, I think he's quite famous." "Among shrinks." "Yes, I suppose. Look, hold on a minute." The doctor scribbled out a name and phone number on his pad, and tore off the sheet. "Here you go. If you do give him a call, tell him Dr Chapman sent you, OK?" "Thanks, mate. I hope I don't, if you see what I mean." "Right. Anything else?" And as there was nothing else, the doctor left. He caught the bus home. Experimentally probing the top of the wadding, he decided that soup and stuff would be on the menu for the next week. That night he slept soundly, for the last time, as the day's happenings were sorted and stored. For later.

USER: Please examine the following text, then critically review Chapter 4:4 of the following text: WEIRD DREAMS Chapter One Day broke over Plymouth, bringing a slow grey sky, damp morose streets and damp morose milkmen, finished off by a minor surge in the electricity supply as quarter of a million clock radios turned on to the early morning show. Waking up is hard to do, thought Steve. Radio playing, birds singing, Monday morning. He sighed, turned over, and without opening his eyes hit the radio right on the snooze button. That'd teach it. Another five minutes wouldn't hurt... But radios are made of sterner stuff. Five minutes later, unbowed by such early morning violence, it resumed its unspeakable pop. Which turned, in time, unto unpalatable news. Yawn... He really should get up now, or he'd have to run for the bus again. Strange - his usual warm sleepiness was mixed with something else... Two records after the news. He really had to get up now. Least disgusting pair of boxer shorts, that shirt would do for today, and into the bathroom to shave his teeth... breakfast, paper and irresponsible TV weathermen later, Steve had diagnosed his problem. He was feeling a bit peaky, as his mum would've said had she not been living in North Dakota. Nothing worse than that. Still, Steve mused, perhaps he was coming down with the flu. Perhaps he ought to get something for it. To really get Monday going, among the junk mail was a note from his dentist reminding him of his six-monthly checkup. Which was, he noticed, tomorrow. Super. He ran for the bus, went upstairs and he read the paper, then trudged the ten minute walk from stop to work. Wet pavements and grey skies - it wasn't actually raining, but that was only a matter of time - did nothing to remove his malaise. In the office, he mentioned his lack of well-being to Emily, a bright girl in the postroom he'd got his eye on. He had often wondered whether he should ask her out but, just as often, decided not to. Never know, keep the friendship going and who knows what might happen? He'd never noticed, which was a bit insensitive on his part, that Emily was bored with life. More importantly, and this really wasn't his fault, he'd never noticed that she was a bored daemon. One of those mythical creatures who spend their eternal lives pushing misery, evil and discord. Emily hadn't started out as a daemon, few people do; her body had been possessed by the spirit Zelloripus as she waited out her punishment. Three thousand years ago, Zelloripus had been banished from the Central Circle of the court of Asklarioum in Chael for a crime against fellow daemons. A crime so despicable that, had it worked, she would have challenged the Great One herself. Given human form and stripped of many of her daemonic powers, she was sent to live the life of a mortal being on one of the less pleasant planets, Earth. As each host body died, she hopped into a new one, taking over the mind and feeding on the soul. Three thousand years into her sentence, with three thousand more to go, she was not happy. Sixty centuries in Plymouth is enough to embitter anyone. Even one whose residual evilness could, if focussed, melt a toddler's ice cream from a distance of ten miles. Today there were many puddles of Guiseppi's Famous Italian Ice Cream on the pavements of Plymouth. For today was special. Exactly half-way through Zelloripus' exile, she was feeling mean and ornery and disposed to high mischief. She despised the humans whose form she took; they by and large achieved oblivion in just seventy short years. She especially despised Steve, whose somnolent form sonorously snoring through lunchbreaks was a continual reminder of a contented peace of mind denied her. Daemons don't sleep; chances are that Another lurks nearby with designs on their soulstuff. A diabolic doze is the best they can normally manage; even this is denied those cast out of Hades because of the forces of Good that are on constant watch. Even, it had to be said, in Plymouth, where three thousand years of sleepless nights and boring days were driving Zelloripus close to breaking point. So far, she'd stuck to the rules, because using what remained of her powers to tamper with mortal affairs could double or treble her stay on Earth. But only if she was detected; the temptation to lash out at something or someone was growing. Her current job, with Plymouth's third most succesfful producer of soap, was not helping things. So mere bad timing could explain Steve's unhappy encounter with Zelloripus, or Emily as she should be called, on this day in particular. Maybe it was just bad luck that accounted for the copious yawns, heavy eyelids and sleep-slurred voice with which he laced the conversation over her franking machine. But the following conversation was almost too bad to be true... "Hiya Emily," said Steve. "You're looking wide eyed for a Monday morning. Wish I could be so awake, but I've been in bed most of the weekend." "Poor soul." said Emily, "What's the matter?" "Oh, I dunno. Think it's a touch of the flu; all I can do is sleep. It was a real effort to get up today. You don't know of anything that could perk me up a bit, do you?" Emily, bitter from boredom, was close to the edge. "No," she said "I don't usually get that sort of problem. With sleeping, I mean." It was probably his attempt at humour, or maybe it was a particularly clumsy chat-up line, that did it. "Perhaps you should sleep with me - it would maybe rub off a little. There's nothing like a good night's kip to make your fellow man seem a bit nicer..." "I'm sure" said Emily with a smile so sharp it was opening the letters, "that you're right there. Tell me, Steve, do you dream?" "Dream? No, can't say that I do. Not that I remember, that is. But if I did, it would be of you." "How sweet. Perhaps I can help you, at least" and here the smile was diamond-tipped "with the flu. I think I might just have something in my handbag. Hold on, let me go and get it." Steve was pleased. It might be worth asking her out after all, let's see, there's the funfair out of town... no, she's too bright for that... Outside, the weak sunlight darkened for a moment, as if a cloud had passed. She came back. "Here we are, something I got from a drug store last time I had the flu." It was a small brown bottle, with an indistinct label and, just visible in the powdery interior, three white pills. "You're supposed to have them before a meal, just take the lot tonight with a bottle of red wine and some cheese and you'll be a new man." "Thanks very much, Emily" said Steve, taking the bottle from her hand. "I'll do that. Look, what are you doing this weekend? Do you fancy a trip to see the new Stallone film or something?" "I'm not sure" lied the being with three thousand years' worth of identical Plymothian weekends stretched out in front of her. "Let's see how you're feeling in a couple of days. Wouldn't want to over-exert you during your convalescence". "Oh, I'm sure I'll be fine. I don't think I'll change my mind!" "We'll see" said Emily, allowing just a hint of cold, evil-tinged boredom to slip out. That evening, Steve wondered about Emily's last words. There was something not quite right, he decided, and came to a similar conclusion about the thrice-microwaved chilli con carne sitting in a bowl in the fridge. Then he remembered that wine and cheese had been recommended, and, although he was feeling fine by now, he thought that taking the lady's medicine followed by a triumphal Tuesday morning could do no harm. He had the cheese, and trotted out to the nearest 7-11 to get a bottle of red wine. Back at home, he emptied the three pills out of the bottle into his hand. Nothing special, thought he, and with a flourish popped them into his mouth and washed them down with a long draft of Burgundy. The cheese sandwich followed. A quick scan of the TV pages - why is there never anything on a Monday night? - convinced him of the desirability of bed. It's not generally appreciated that much magic is real, test-tubed and white-coated, science. Merlin's laboratory technique would have brought murmurs of approval from Pasteur, and watching Shiva smite (from a safe distance) might well have enlightened Einstein still further. It's just that while the great unwashed mass of men were more interested in squabbling, sex and smallpox it contented the Immortals to hide their rational prowess behind a web of mystic mishmash. Sure, there is magic to be had, but using it brings many repercussions which might not be completely controllable. Many magicians had lost their souls in the long research programme which, although almost half as old as the Universe, was still not producing results. But boy, was it over budget. Some of its more spectacular failures were still puzzling astronomers from a thousand worlds; more than few of whom were unexpected by-products from an experiment or two themselves. Emily was especially wary of employing the Dark Art. Not only had it landed her in this mess in the first place, but its use could signal loud and clear her position to any number of undesirable companions from the busybodies at Asklarioum, or something far more sinister. As it was, materialising the pills had been risky enough. Her excellent knowledge of human biochemistry helped her from there. As Steve dropped off to sleep, the pills were lying inert in his stomach. Slowly the gastric acid ate away the outer case, and the compounds within began to diffuse out. And what compounds, the like of which had not been seen on Earth before or (it is safe to assume) since. Any chemist worth his NaCl would have given his spatula to have been in on the action. First, the long chain molecules from the cheese were broken down to several interesting substances. The alcohol from the wine helped carry these and others from the pills themselves to the stomach wall, through which they slipped like Mexicans into Texas. On the other side of the wall, the usual gang of enzymes were waiting to digest the evening meal; but they weren't ready for what came at them. The scene of chemical carnage was brutal but short. Past the first stage of digestion, the intruding substances reached the blood stream. Dissolved in the plasma, they drifted up until they got to Steve's brain. The blood brain barrier - that wonderful filter that keeps hunks of pizza molecule out while letting oxygen in - was as effective as a traffic cop against a battalion of Soviet tanks. Emily's dark designs began their invidious work. Steve's brain was defenceless against the chemical onslaught. The vast, and mostly unused, network of neurones lay in front of them. Even as the last molecules were arriving, the compounds got to work. They diddled the dopamine receptors, they speeded up the cortical synapses, they nobbled the noradrenaline. A thin web of complex bonds spread deep into Steve's cerebellum, like frost over a tree. Further and further they went, until every part of his brain was invaded and controlled. For the moment they did nothing, but somewhere else in the Plymothian night a small chuckle of anticipation bounced off the flock wallpaper. In his sleep, Steve stirred and shivered. Chapter 2 The next day, Steve woke up, as usual, to the clock radio. Unusually, he found himself listening to it, and, even more strangely, it annoyed him. He turned over in bed and thumped the switch, leaving the bedroom to the birds, noisy Fords and myriad other sounds of morning. He stared at the ceiling. Hangover? No, he'd only had a couple of glasses of wine last night. Anyway, his head didn't hurt and he felt all right, sort of, except... He was wide awake. That was odd, too, as most days he only started to really wake up on the bus into work. He glanced at the clock radio; he still had a good half-hour until he had to leave, so he tried to doze. As he closed his eyes, the world spun. About fifteen years ago, he'd gone to Scotland with his parents, and once he'd crawled up to the edge of a granite cliff and peered over at the rocks and sea hundreds of feet beneath. He remembered amazement, awe and no little fear, but most of all he remembered the spiralling vertigo. That was what he was feeling now - he gripped the sides of the bed and opened his eyes rapidly, sweating. The flu? Those pills he took last night? Could be, but he'd never been ill like that before, nor taken anything from a chemist that shook him up so badly. For a moment he was worried, but then the morning took over again, and the sound of a bus pulling up the hill reminded and reassured him that another normal day was waiting. He got out of bed and, standing up, felt fine once more. The coffee and eggs of breakfast tasted really good, but he didn't feel like reading his paper on the bus. For some reason, he wasn't interested in "Rock Star Eats Own Hand, Sells Guitar", which seemed to be the most earthshaking intelligence on offer. Back in the office, he homed in on Emily. "Hey, Emily" he said "Those pills seemed to have done the trick. No flu, not a sniffle. I'm feeling really awake. They're good stuff - what're they called? I'd like to get some, just for next time, you know?" She giggled, a short, high-pitched stutter like a pony neighing. "Glad they seem to have worked, Steve. I can't remember their name, though, I've had them for a while. Still, if it comes back to me I'll let you know." "You've usually got such a good memory, Emily" said Steve ingratiatingly. "Me, mine's like a sieve. Can't even remember things like buying milk or doctor's appointments. Oh no!" "What's up?" asked Emily, wondering for a moment whether she'd miscalculated something and wondering, just for a moment, what exactly she'd done. Just for a moment, and then she realised. "Forgotten an appointment?" "Dentist. What's the time? Look, I've got to rush. See you at lunch - if I've got any teeth left" And he dashed into the boss' office to explain his impending absence. He rushed out of the building. His dentist was about a half a mile away, and by walking fast he could make it. Past the bombed church in the roundabout, past the police station, up the hill, past the library, past the reservoir and into Dr V. Sells, known since childhood as Dr Weasel. The receptionist looked through her window - hello <PRESIDIO_ANONYMIZED_PERSON>, hello Mr Trevathen take a seat he's running a little late - and he dived into the piles of House and Garden from 1972. Back in the office, the morning post had been sorted and distributed, and there was, as usual, half-an-hour's hiatus before the pre-lunch mailbags came in. Jill went out to round up all the outgoing mail from the seven floors, leaving Emily to herself. She checked her watch, and felt the sea of infinite boredom recede a little. Any minute now, and the first part of her plan would start to work. Deep within Steve's brain, profound changes were taking place. The tendrils of diabolic chemistry insinuated into his hippocampus, a small lump of grey matter normally concerned with sorting Steve's experience (such as they were) into long-term recall, and started to subtly rewire his memory mechanisms. Large portions of his mind were converted into the biological equivalent of RAM; ready to record experiences and, having recorded them, control his mind as a program controls a computer's processor. Elsewhere similar changes were taking place, but for now things were ready just to record. Just for now. The triggers to load the program were complex. If Steve was interested, then whatever it was that held his interest would be sorted, stored, activated. If he was frightened, amused, intrigued, it would all be recorded. But for this to work, he had to be capable of taking an interest in the first place. So part of Emily's chemical mishmash sharpened his wits, heightened his awareness, upped his IQ to just short of genius. This, she thought, was a nice move. Not only did it ensure that the data recorded would be powerful and particularly apt, but when the second stage began he would be only too capable of, mmmm, appreciating what was happening to him. He might even fight back, which would round off the whole thing nicely. And, she though with a daemonic delight, it would serve him right to be given a glimpse of what it's like to have an intelligence confronted with infinite boredom. Steve was, as the plan demanded, unaware of the mental mayhem crystallising beneath his cranium. But he was getting painfully aware of a lot of other things as he sat in the formica and chipboard waiting room. The posters of rabbits noshing carrots and jaunty poems about plaque ("Clean Clean Clean your teeth! Or else the germs get underneath!") were fading and a couple flapped loose at the corners. They'd been there since he'd started seeing Dr Weasel, and, he mused, the place probably hadn't seen a touch of paint for ten years before that. The bright orange and grey polypropelene bucket chairs finished of a fine example of early 'sixties public health design. Now why did he think that? He'd been here every six months for years, and usually only worried about whether he'd get a filling or not. Those old magazines - did people really think that the ideal home looked like that? The clothes they wore in the photos looked laughable too, but he could remember when he'd thought they looked good. How strange... perhaps the jacket and jeans he was wearing now would be equally ridiculous in ten years time. The buzzer chainsawed its way into his daydreams, and the receptionist looked up. "Mr Trevathen?". He stood up, and went into the surgery. Dr Sells was shuffling through some papers at a desk, and the Chair sat in the middle of the room beneath the usual battery of technology. "Hello Steve", said the dentist. "Sit down please. Now then, any problems since last time? It's good to see you keeping these checkups. Some people just don't bother after they leave home, and when something goes wrong there are all sorts of things to put right. How's your mother, by the way? It was America she moved to, wasn't it?" As usual, Steve had to wait for three or four questions to go past before he could get a word in. "Yes, she's settled down in North Dakota and she's doing fine. I might go over to see her at Christmas. My teeth are OK, too, but I wouldn't want to miss anything that needs looking at." "A fine attitude. Now then, lie down and open up." Steve looked up at the light. "That's new, isn't it? The old one was a different colour." "That's right, very observant! This one's a new low-voltage design, much more reliable and brighter too. I don't think anyone else has noticed. Open wide." The nurse hooked in some suction, and went to get Steve's notes. "Three's OK, two's OK, one's OK, one's OK, two's OK, three's OK, filling on four's a little bitty; we'll sort that out..." Dr Sells continued chanting his litany as Steve noticed, for the first time it seemed, the antiseptic smell, the faint noise of the machinery behind the dentist, the charts on the wall and the rows of dentures on the shelves. He felt the faint scratching inside his head as the dentist probed away. As Steve had forgotten about the appointment, he hadn't given his teeth the customary vigourous pre-checkup brushing and this was apparently noticeable. "Hello, we haven't been very thorough with your brushing, have we?" Typical quack, though Steve, lapsing into patronising parental tones. Doctor knows best. "Well, there's a cavity just starting on one of your premolars, and a slightly messy filling to tidy up. We'll have a poke around and fix them." Steve had collected a lot of fillings from a chocolate childhood, and had the memories to match. As various instruments of torture were produced and whined, sucked and scrunched their way around his mouth, he remembered the old fears with a vividness that surprised him. He winced as the drill scoured the cavity, and was very relieved at the instruction to rinse and spit. Strange taste, this pink liquid. "While I was fixing those teeth, Steve, I spotted something that might be serious. I'd better have a look at it." This was new. He opened his mouth obediently, and became more apprehensive as Dr Sell's usual banter failed to intersperse his dental deliberations. Finally the dentist stood up, and Steve closed his mouth. "One of your molars is misplaced - I don't know why I didn't catch it before, but there you go. Normally I'd leave it, as it's been there for years without causing any problems, but there are signs that you've got some more teeth coming through underneath." "Eh? You mean I'm teething?" "No, not quite. It's not uncommon for some people to have a third set of teeth at some time during their lives, and you might be one of them. In any case, I should really get that molar out otherwise it could be very bad for your jaw. It's not really fair that you should have to have a tooth pulled, since you're one of my better patients, but it's a good thing I caught it. Gas or needle?" He means it, Steve thought. He hadn't had a tooth out before, and the prospect frightened him. Adrenalin started to seep into his blood stream. His heart speeded up, but in his brain the new mechanisms fired up and channelled the stream of his senses into the almost infinite capacity of the revamped memory. "Oh, gas I think. Is it dangerous?" "No, not very." Oh, how reassuring, what soothing Weasel words. "Is the needle safer?" "There's nothing to worry about with either method. But the gas hurts less." "Fine. Will it take long?" "About half an hour, and you should be OK within the hour. Not driving, are you?" "I walked here." "No problems then. You might find things a bit fuzzy for a while, but it wears off." Steve remembered something Emily had said, and for the first time felt sadness for a thing which had never happened. "Will I dream?" "Hard to day. Some people do, but most don't." The nurse had been tinkering with a mess of tubes and cylinders, and brought it to the side of the Chair. While she prepared a tray of gleaming steel instruments, some of which Steve thought would look more in keeping in his local garage, Dr Sells continued his spiel. "Now then, I'll want you to breath deeply from the mask while counting to ten. You won't get past about seven, but you won't notice that. Ready, Sandra?" The nurse passed over a facemask, which the dentist placed over Steve's mouth. "Righty-ho - start breathing and counting. Sweet dreams!" Here we go, then. One... suck... two... blow... three... suck... four... blow... hmmm, this is quite pleasant... where was I... teeth... In the surgery, the dentist checked Steve's pulse, eyes and respiration. Satisifed that his patient was well under, he gave him a few seconds more and started to prepare for oral excavation. Back at the office, Jill wanted to know what Emily was finding so funny. Emily merely giggled, and carried on sorting the post. All that day, she'd be in high spirits, surprising those who were used to her normal sarcastic mood. To those who asked why, she'd reply only that 'Life's a gas, isn't it?' Chapter 3 Teeth... five... jive.. on the third stroke... hey, why aren't I under yet? Better warn the Weasel not to start pulling just yet. Steve opened his eyes. If this is dreaming, thought Steve, I haven't missed much. The view reminded him of Dartmoor, where he used to spend the school holidays camping and walking. Only this place was flat for miles, with no inviting tors to clamber up or run down. Behind him the plain stretched out as far as he could see, so for want of anything better to do he started to walk towards the mountains. After a few minutes, he looked as his watch. Or he tried to, but on raising his arm all he saw was a bare wrist. He was greatly troubled. It wasn't so much the lack of a watch that bothered him, nor the fact that the rest of his body was, on inspection, entirely bare, but the troublesome actuality that the body in question wasn't the same one he'd grown up in. In fact, it was borderline as to whether it was Homo Sapiens or not, what with the long hair on the legs and the excessive number of flattened toes. The blue colour didn't help either. For some reason, he calmed down. Out of curiosity, he tried to yell out "Anyone there?" and was intrigued by the guttural explosion that forced its way out of his mouth, past his fangs and into the leaden air. Fangs. Hmmm. That would startle the good Doctor. He realised with some surprise that he must still be in the Chair, with Dr Sells tapping away like a sculptor producing a miniature statue out of a chip of marble. He was vaguely uncomfortable about the fact that he'd forgotten so easily who he really was, and tried to shut his eyes to block out the flat dullness of wherever he was. And was gripped by the vertigo as he had been back in his bedroom. This time he got the impression of falling down a well by starlight; a fast fading sprinkling of light and the infinite void waiting... The landscape looked much more inviting after that. If this was a gas-induced dream he'd sit it out. Half an hour wasn't so long. But it felt like much more than that by the time he decided to get up and explore some more. Maybe his sense of time had gone the way of his skin colour. And, for that matter, the rest of his body, which had acquired several disquietening features which would surprise any osteopath, ear, nose and throat specialist or proctologist. Not that there seemed to be anybody (indeed, any body) else in the place, although once he caught what seemed to be a flash of motion in the sky. He squinted up into the grey light - the shapes that had sped by looked more like fish than birds; he must have been dreaming. That thought made him laugh. He wandered over to one of the boulders, with the vague intention of climbing up it and looking for something - anything - on the horizon. The surface caught his eyes; like granite it was composed of a myriad tiny facets of crystal, white, orange, black, grey. Unlike granite some of these were quite large, and faintly grooved. These bigger lumps were uniformly white, and they puzzled him. It wasn't until he came across one that was protruding from the rest of the rock, pure white with a blunt point, that he twigged. Teeth. The rocks were granite, he was sure of that from the mica, feldspar and quartz he recognised - any Dartmoor bog trotter knew granite as the city dwellers recognised concrete - but with an uneven sprinkling of teeth stirred in, like peanuts in a chocolate bar. Again, he thought of the Weasel's constant invectives against refined sugar when he was young; again reminded himself that somewhere his real body was supine and slightly more gummy. But granite couldn't have teeth in it. Long-distant school geography lessons sprang to mind. Born of elementary fire, hot lava from the earth's core slowly cooling under tremendous pressure with crystals of hard rock forming over centuries, any organic matter would be fried, powdered and assimilated in minutes. It was, he reminded himself, a dream. One which would offend doctors, geologists and dentists in equal measure, but still a dream. It had to have something to do with being in just such a dream, he thought, but he felt curiously elated. He felt plain curious too - he was looking forward to the next discovery, the next fact to fall out of this strange place. Again, he felt a little disquiet about the ease with which he'd forgotten about his real status as an office worker in Plymouth, but then that place had its fair share of grey skies and boredom too. He hunted around in the grass until he found a small lump of rock. Odd - he looked around, the scattering of the stuff was fairly even as far as he could see - what on earth (or wherever, he reminded himself) could have caused this place to be like this. He imagined great glaciers slowly melting, dropping rocks as they retreated down the vast gouge they in earlier youth had carved, but that wouldn't explain the flatness of the place. Glaciated valleys - once more, those geography lessons with Rolly Jones surfaced after a decade submerged - were U-shaped. This was plain plane. This blue and hairy body must belong to a blue and hairy geologist, he thought. He raised the rock above his head, and brought it down hard on the large boulder he'd been examining. The shock jarred his hand, but cracked off a small amount of the boulder's surface. He looked at the spray of chips that littered the grass. They were sharp, like flakes from the surface of a choc ice. The image of an ice cream, he couldn't remember the name, with small fragments of nut in the hard chocolate layer around the soft cream inside, came to mind, and on a whim he nibbled at one of the chips with his recently-enlarged canines. It tasted like a rock. He looked at the place on the boulder where the chips came from, expecting to see more of the same, perhaps a little more colourful and sharp. Instead he saw a smooth skin, black as the night, underneath what must have just been a shell of toothed rock. He prodded it with one ridiculously long finger (without a fingernail; for a moment he couldn't decide whether it was sillier to have a finger without a fingernail or one with - why did humans have fingernails anyway? He resolved to find out when he was back in the real- he nearly thought other - world) and it gave way a little, like the skin on a dead pig. Down at his feet, he found a particularly long shard of rock skin. With a roar he jabbed it into the gap on the boulder as hard as he could. This was, he discovered, very hard, and the skin broke. A gush of cold brown liquid shot out and over his - his? - body. He stood there for a moment, surprised, as the sticky coolness trickled down, matting the fine hair which covered him. He poked the same finger into the new gash, expecting to find a void. Instead he encountered a soft, sludgy gunk. It was very cold. He pulled his finger out (for some reason, an image of his boss came to mind) startled by the unexpected feelings. Again on an impulse, he licked the finger. Chocolate ice cream. He pulled at the rock shell around the gap, removing scabs of the stuff and widening the hole until he could get a fist in. One part of his mind stood back, aghast, as a feeding frenzy took over and he pulled, tugged, hit at the shell, reducing it to fragments and revealing an interior entirely composed of ice cream. With a whoop, he started to scoop the stuff into his mouth, not minding whether it ran down his chin, onto his chest, caking him with stickyness. "No. Chocolate. No chocolate. Bad for the teeth" Eh? Where did the voice come from? He looked up, and realised that he was cold, shivering, and standing in a spreading puddle of molten ice cream. He was very, very messy. "It'll ruin your teeth. Not good at all". Was that - that was the Weasel. "Steve, you mustn't eat so much chocolate. Steve, you have to wake up to the fact that your teeth must last you the rest of your life. Steve, wake up. Steve!" He shook his head, and suddenly felt very cold indeed. The grey of the sky lightened to orange, to white and he shivered. "Steve, wake up!" He blinked, and felt the ground somersault like a funfair ride. He tumbled, was lying down. He was on the couch, looking up at Dr Sells. "Steve, can you hear me?" "Uh" why was his mouth so horrible? "yeah. Yes, I can hear you. I've been dreaming, I think" "Don't talk. Take deep breaths. Do you feel OK?" Stupid dentist. How can I tell you if I can't talk? "Uhuh". "Good. I hit an artery, though what it was doing there I don't know, and we had a bit of an emergnecy. You're OK, though, not too much blood lost, and I've called an ambulance just in case. Ruined your clothes though - I'm sorry." His head spun. He tried to sit up, and in the couple of seconds before he collapsed back to the Chair he saw a blood-soaked body. At least it had pink hands. Chapter 4 The doctors at Freedom Fields Hospital weren't concerned with his dream. "Happens all the time, old man" one particularly young one said "You're dreaming about walking through a town when a fire engine goes past, bell ringing like billy-oh. You wake up, and the alarm clock's going nineteen to the dozen. Brain's made the connection, you see." Apart from the fact that he'd never owned an alarm clock with a bell, and suspected that the doctor had been watching too many Sunday afternoon wartime films, Steve saw. It had been a particularly vivid dream, but perhaps everyone dreamed like that under gas. He'd been given two pints of blood, which gave the lie to Dr Sells' soothing words, and was under observation for the rest of the day. According to the ward sister, he'd be out by seven since they needed the bed and he was young enough to survive "seeing what you young people do to yourselves nothing like this should worry you" by himself. The tooth had been removed, and in its place was a lump of surgical padding. Steve explored it with his tongue, it seemed much large and ten times rougher than the tooth it replaced but he expected that was just the unfamiliarity and weirdness of the pad. Again he felt strange, he wasn't used to such ideas and didn't know where they came from. That they might come from himself seemed impossible. The young doctor came back. "How are we doing?" "I'm feeling OK." He took Steve's blood pressure and pulse rate. "I think you'll be OK for this evening, but take it easy for the next week or so". "Er, Doctor?" "Yes?" "I'm still worried by the dream I had." The doctor sat down on the bed, and carefully placed his clipboard on the sheets before looking, seriously and with obvious intent, at Steve. "We all have dreams, old man." "No, I don't get dreams, apart from this time. It was so real, like being there, only I've never been anywhere like that before. Do you think it could have been the gas?" "That's possible. It's really nothing to worry about, though. It's been quite a traumatic experience for you. Look, if the dreams come back or you're still worried about things a week from now I can recommend a friend of mine who should sort you out." "He's a doctor too?" "Yes, but not a blood and guts man like me. He's a psychoanalyst." "Um... thanks. I think." The doctor laughed "Nobody's saying you're anything but sane. It's just if you're troubled by this thing I don't know anyone better. He's especially good on dreams. Wrote a book about them a while back, I think he's quite famous." "Among shrinks." "Yes, I suppose. Look, hold on a minute." The doctor scribbled out a name and phone number on his pad, and tore off the sheet. "Here you go. If you do give him a call, tell him Dr Chapman sent you, OK?" "Thanks, mate. I hope I don't, if you see what I mean." "Right. Anything else?" And as there was nothing else, the doctor left. He caught the bus home. Experimentally probing the top of the wadding, he decided that soup and stuff would be on the menu for the next week. That night he slept soundly, for the last time, as the day's happenings were sorted and stored. For later.

USER: Please critically review Chapter 4 of the following text: WEIRD DREAMS Chapter One Day broke over Plymouth, bringing a slow grey sky, damp morose streets and damp morose milkmen, finished off by a minor surge in the electricity supply as quarter of a million clock radios turned on to the early morning show. Waking up is hard to do, thought Steve. Radio playing, birds singing, Monday morning. He sighed, turned over, and without opening his eyes hit the radio right on the snooze button. That'd teach it. Another five minutes wouldn't hurt... But radios are made of sterner stuff. Five minutes later, unbowed by such early morning violence, it resumed its unspeakable pop. Which turned, in time, unto unpalatable news. Yawn... He really should get up now, or he'd have to run for the bus again. Strange - his usual warm sleepiness was mixed with something else... Two records after the news. He really had to get up now. Least disgusting pair of boxer shorts, that shirt would do for today, and into the bathroom to shave his teeth... breakfast, paper and irresponsible TV weathermen later, Steve had diagnosed his problem. He was feeling a bit peaky, as his mum would've said had she not been living in North Dakota. Nothing worse than that. Still, Steve mused, perhaps he was coming down with the flu. Perhaps he ought to get something for it. To really get Monday going, among the junk mail was a note from his dentist reminding him of his six-monthly checkup. Which was, he noticed, tomorrow. S...

USER: Please critically review the following text: Chapter 1 The High Priest swept into the outer chambers of the Pharoah's palace with a distinct air of annoyance. The guards to the inner chamber had already been informed of the impending visit and, remembering the last time that they had tried to stop him, stood aside. He brushed past, barely bothering to acknowledge their existence. As he entered the inner chamber, the Pharoah finished reading the scroll he had in his hands and looked up. 'Most disappointing, most disappointing...' the Pharoah muttered quietly to himself. 'Your forecasts do nothing to inspire confidence. Perhaps a change of court astrologer might be in order? Anyway, enough of that. What was it you wanted to see me about?' 'Your Brightness,' began the High Priest. The Pharoah cringed at the use of his title. Any attempt at flattery on the astrologer's part was usually a precursor to bad news. 'I have completed the study of all your lands and dominions, as you instructed. My conclusions are disturbing. I have also consulted the heavens and the results I have obtained only go to prove my suspicions. The Empire is failing.' 'Failing?' the Pharoah had a look of astonishment. 'How can it be? Look around. Am I not the wealthiest Pharoah of all time?' The High Priest took in his surroundings, not failing to notice the vast collection of golden ornaments and priceless treasures that the Pharoah had gathered about him. His next sentence was chosen with great deliberation. 'What you say is true, Mighty One, but it seems that your leadership is the last thing holding our great and enlightened civilization together. It is predicted that, in the very year of your death, our civilization will perish, to be overrun by the hordes of barbarians who mock our learning and sophistication. It will be the world's darkest hour.' 'However, there is a ray of hope. After many lifetimes have passed, and even your memory has faded into obscurity, a new and great civilization will arise from the West, perhaps to become as powerful as our own. Although I cannot foresee the date of your death, I can see how long this uprising will take.' 'Will they worship my Divine Father, Ra, God of the Sun?' asked the Pharoah. He did not think to question the priest's predictions. The priesthood was respected by all men of learning and even the Pharoah took note of their teachings. 'Unfortunately, that information is hidden from me.' The Pharaoh sat a while in silence, contemplating what he had just been told. The High Priest took great pains to conceal his growing impatience. At length, the Pharoah spoke. 'If they are not Brothers of the Sun, like ourselves, then they are not fit to inherit our world, our empires. We must set them a test. To succeed in this they must act and think like Brothers of the Sun. If they do this then they are worthy inheritors of all the riches I have collected. However,' the Pharoah leant closer to the High Priest and spoke in an altogether more threatening voice, 'if they fail, they must be punished in order to make way for the true Brothers of the Sun who will surely return.' 'An excellent idea, Your Eminence. In fact, I already have an inkling of just how it may be done. Permit me to tell you about it...' Chapter 2 The High Priest died before work on the Great Sun Pyramid was completed, but the ageing Pharoah leant on his gnarled walking stick and admired his creation from the hill. In the valley, thousands of slaves laboured to place the final capstone on the pyramid, scurrying up and down the scaffolding that completely covered one face of the monolithic structure. All were unaware of being watched by their Pharoah who, looking down from the hillside, regarded them with the same fascination that one might watch a swarm of ants building a nest. It was early evening by the time the capstone reached the summit of the pyramid; the largest single stone in the entire structure. The Pharoah, looking out across the rapidly darkening valley, made a mental note of the cost of this project. One tenth of the entire Royal reserves had gone towards it along with the lives of seven men, not to mention countless slaves. A thunderclap echoed across the valley. Everywhere, people stopped and turned. The capstone had dropped neatly into its carved bed at the apex of the pyramid. The work was done. The Pharoah smiled contentedly, knowing that his shrine was complete. He got up, rubbing his chest whilst thinking to himself that the banquet he had enjoyed earlier in the day could have been a little less rich. Two paces forward, he stumbled and fell. The blood clot that had passed unnoticed through his heart had reached his brain. The tranquil red sunset started to darken as the sun disappeared behind the western ranges. The first Dark Age had begun... Chapter 3 The dank old library looked as though it hadn't seen a duster for a month or two. Anyone with hay fever or of a house-proud nature would not have lasted five minutes in there. Albert 'Tiny' Dorliss, however, was made of sterner stuff. Looking at him, though, you probably would not have believed it. His nickname, far from being sarcastic, was apt almost to the point of being embarrassing. His horn-rimmed spectacles only added to his academic looks. This impression was very difficult to shake, unless you happened to wander down to the local gym when, on a Wednesday night, 'Tiny' Dorliss would be seen knocking seven bells out of someone twice his size in a boxing ring. Somehow, the image of one of England's leading theoretical Egyptologists also being one of its finest amateur flyweights seems somehow slightly incongruous. This morning, as most mornings, he was sat at his small, leather-topped desk in the Egyptian section, the dustiest part of the library. Egypt had not really been fashionable for serious research since the late 1880's. Fifty years of neglect meant quite a lot of dust. 'Morning, Tiny. Found anything interesting lately?' I enquired. 'Hello.' He pushed his glasses up his nose with one finger and studied me. 'Where on earth have you been? I've been trying to contact you for weeks.' 'Well, you know how it is.' I shrugged. 'One minute I'm sitting at home; the next, I'm being asked by the British Museum to go to South America and, I might add, get paid for the priviledge.' 'You're incorrigible. Will you never learn? Money this, money that all the time. You never apply yourself to your full potential. Anyway, yes I have.' 'Have what?' 'Oh, come on. Pay attention. Yes, I have found something interesting. That's the reason behind me trying to contact you for the past week.' 'If this is going to be another of your damn fool trips to strange temples with supernatural powers and all that sort of thing, then you can count me out right now.' 'I don't believe in supernatural mumbo-jumbo about ancient curses. It only applies to superstitious primitives who...' 'All right, I get your point. But if you had been there the last time, I am willing to bet that even your unflappable certainty would have taken a nasty knock.' I shook my finger at him to emphasize my last point, but it did no good. 'I've translated a previously unknown fragment of papyrus from the last years of the Pharoah period of Egyptian history, discovered in the palace of the last Pharaoh before the empire was overrun. It was written in a dialectic variation of the private language used by the court astrologers...' My attention began to wander. I could never keep up with Tiny once he started on language variations. I wouldn't know a dialect from a pidgin if it bit me on the nose. My mind started to drift. '..and what it actually said was quite interesting. Apparently, the court astrologers had predicted the overthrow of their civilization and the rise of ours. They made some quite accurate guesses about us, you know.' Guesses! There really is no convincing some people. 'They say that if we are not true worshippers of Ra, the Sun God, then they have set a trap for us which will wipe us all out. Something to do with the moon and the sun... I couldn't make out the rest of that part as there was a tear in the papyrus. It seems that the trap is a graded test, and that it swings both ways. If you succeed in..' 'Hold it one moment! What is this 'you' nonsense? Do you expect me to go back to Egypt at the drop of a hat after what happened the last time I was there? Surely you're not serious?' 'Think of the money if you succeed', he replied. I thought of the money. I also thought of the curse. I returned my thoughts to the money. 'Okay, I'll go. What do I have to do?' 'There is a temple built into the top of a large pyramid. Although the river that it stood beside has now dried up, I have managed to find out where it was built.' 'So how do we stop the curse?' 'It's fairly simple really', he said. Liar, I thought. Nothing about this affair so far sounded simple. 'You just have to get to the temple, which is at the apex of the pyramid and destroy the trigger mechanism. It's a statue of some sort. It shouldn't be too difficult to spot. The records say that the room was built with the sole purpose of housing the statue only.' I extracted myself from the buttoned leather armchair that had obviously seen better days and made to leave. 'Where are you going?' Tiny asked. 'You only just got here.' 'To pack. There's a total eclipse in Egypt in four days and it'll take at least three to get there so I'm going immediately. If what you say is true, we don't have much time before the curse takes effect. By the way, just what is the name of this place that I'm supposed to go to?' Tiny told me the name of the nearest village. I paused at the door. 'And don't think that I'm only doing this for the money!' He looked over the top of his glasses and raised a solitary eyebrow. 'The idea hadn't even entered my mind. Good luck.' I grabbed my hat and coat from the doorman and ran out into the street, my mind overflowing with information and plans for the journey ahead. I hailed a taxi. 'Where to, Guv?' 'St. John's Road, please and as quickly as possible.' As I sat back in my seat I was filled with excitement and dread in roughly equal amounts. After my last fiasco in Egypt, I had no doubt that the powers the Ancient Egyptian priesthood had at their disposal could quite easily bring about the sort of thing described in that papyrus. The taxi made a hasty U-turn in the street and lurched off to my destination. Chapter 4 of the following text: WEIRD DREAMS ChapterShadows contrasted sharply with the almost white glare thrown up by the sand. I had long ago ceased to take any notice of the salty tang in my mouth as, unaccustomed as yet even to the so-called mild October heat, sweat enveloped my entire body. Clothes once crisply starched had long since wilted into a crumpled mass of cotton glued to my aching body. By the sight of it, my saddle had obviously seen better days and, judging by the bumps and jolts that jarred my spine, I had been correct in my initial misgivings. I found myself becoming more and more uncomfortable as the journey wore on. Camels have never been my favourite mode of transport and nothing had happened in the past couple of hours that had brought about a change of mind. Still, I thought to myself, anything's better than walking. Then again, almost anything's better than riding a camel. I muttered oaths under my breath and forced a smile on the odd occasion that my camel driver bothered to look at his passenger. I began to regret ever having accepted this task. I tried to shut out my present surroundings by concentrating on the endless wealth with which I would be endowed if I were to succeed. The trouble was, the more I thought about it, the larger the 'if' seemed to become. After what seemed an interminable ride, we finally arrived at Ankh-Arah village. A fairly typical Egyptian village, it consisted in the main of dry, dirt streets, square, whitewashed houses and a stone well in the main square. I jumped clumsily from my mount and paid the camel driver his fare. Doing a quick calculation in my head, I came up with the same answer as when I started the journey. Twenty one shillings for a nineteen mile camel ride. Captive markets such as helpless English Archeologists obviously lend themselves to exploitation by the locals. At least I saved some face by getting off the camel without landing on my face, and that in itself probably lowered the price by sixpence or so. The driver unstrapped my two cases and watched as they fell to the ground. Without any further ado, he wheeled about, spurred his camel and was gone, leaving me looking rather forlorn in a slowly settling cloud of dust. I retrieved my cases and went off in search of some accommodation. It took me about twenty minutes to find the only inn in the village: a small sandstone building like all the others, with two bedrooms, a hole in the floor for a latrine and enough insect life to supply a museum. One Day brokeof these was the owner, who charged in a similar vein to the camel driver, and only grudgingly showed me my room. Although the straw-stuffed bed was lumpy and scratchy, I fell asleep almost immediately, the bed seeming like pure luxury compared to a camel's backside. I intended to make an early start the next morning in order to start my exploration of the pyramid which lay in the dried up river valley a few miles to the south of the village. That should at least give me a couple of hours before the eclipse. As I drifted off to sleep, I dreamily wished that I had remembered to bring an alarm clock. I need not have worried. The innkeeper's cockerel woke me far too early in the morning for my liking. Any thoughts as to why the cockerel was still alive and crowing in a small village such as this were soon put to rest on looking out of the window. There wasn't enough meat on that bird for more than one or two scrawny sandwiches, let alone a proper meal, so I suppose the villagers put up with it out of pity. Silently cursing the multi-legged population of my bed, I dressed and packed my equipment for the day. In a sudden fit of self-reflection, I noted just how calmly I seemed to taking this matter. After all, the End of the World is not your usual run-of-the-mill problem. Panicking would have helped little in a situation such as this, so I resisted the urge to do so. The sun was just creeping sleepily over Plymouth, bringing a slow grey sky, damp morose streets and damp morose milkmen, finished off by a minor surge in the electricity supplythe horizon as quarter of a million clock radiosI left my room and turned on to the early morning show. Waking up is hard to do, thought Steve. Radio playing, birds singing, Monday morning. He sighed, turned over, and without opening his eyes hit the radio right on the snooze button. That'd teach it. Another five minutes wouldn't hurt... But radios are made of sterner stuff. Five minutes later, unbowed by such early morning violence, it resumed its unspeakable pop. Which turned, in time, unto unpalatable news. Yawn... He really should get up now, or he'd have to run for the bus again. Strange - his usual warm sleepiness was mixed with something else... Two records after the news. He reallysouth along the little-used track that ran towards the only airfield within twenty miles. The mechanic, who seemed to be the sole inhabitant of the entire place, showed me to the only aeroplane. Tiny had to get up now. Least disgusting pair of boxer shorts, that shirt wouldcalled ahead and arranged everything, so all I had to do for today, and into the bathroom to shave his teeth... breakfast, paper and irresponsible TV weathermen later, Steve had diagnosed his problem. He was feeling a bit peaky, as his mum would've said had she not been living in North Dakota. Nothing worse than that. Still, Steve mused, perhaps he was coming down with the flu. Perhaps he ought to get somethingwas pay for it. To really get Monday going, among the junk mail was a noteAgain. It was a clapped-out Sopwith Camel. I didn't look too closely on my pre-flight inspection; to do so would have brought to my attention loose rigging wires, numerous oil leaks from his dentist reminding him of his six-monthly checkup. Which was,within the engine bay, and more holes in the fabric than a tramp's jacket. As I climbed into the cockpit, I reflected that, in Egypt, you tended to find yourself traveling by Camel most of the time. The mechanic heaved on the propellor a couple of times before the engine slowly coughed itself to life, and he noticed, tomorrow. Super. He ran for the bus, went upstairs andonly just managed to jump clear of the blades as I rolled forward. I had never been what you would call an experienced aviator and that, coupled with the early hour, meant that things such as lack of wheel chocks were a minor inconvenience. Still, he read the paper, then trudged the ten minute walk from stop to work. Wet pavements and grey skies -seemed unharmed and he gave me a friendly wave as I passed overhead. At least, I think it wasn't actually raining, but that was only a matter of time - did nothing to remove his malaise. In the office, he mentioned his lack of well-being to Emily, a bright girl in the postroom he'd got his eye on. Hewas friendly... It was still early in the morning as I reached the pyramid. I was awed by the size of the task ahead of me; the pyramid was one of the largest that I had often wondered whether he should ask her out but, just as often, decided not to. Never know, keep the friendship going and who knows what might happen? He'd never noticed, which was a bit insensitive on his part, that Emily was bored with life. More importantly, and this really wasn't his fault, he'd never noticed that she was a bored daemon. One of those mythical creatures who spend their eternal lives pushing misery, evil and discord. Emily hadn't started out as a daemon, few people do; her bodyever come across. All the other digs that I had been possessed by the spirit Zelloripuson previously were much smaller than this, and they had taken months of painstaking effort. I circled once or twice to find the best landing spot and, having decided that a strip of smooth-looking sand down one side of the pyramid looked suitable for putting the Camel down, I prepared to land. Turning carefully onto the downwind leg I began the final checks. Dropping down to around three hundred feet, I throttled back and turned the mixture to fully rich. Flying parallel to the makeshift runway, I continued until I was level with the beginning of the strip. Gently banking the aircraft into a descending left turn, I put in a little bit of left rudder to balance out the Camel and throttled back slightly more. Thankful that there were no air pockets waiting to plummet the aircraft like a stone, I finally started to line up on my chosen landing spot. The ground slowly came up to meet me and I throttled back completely and concentrated on keeping the aircraft level at about one or two feet off the ground. Gently trimming the aircraft to keep a slight nose up attitude as she waitedthe speed scrubbed off, the Camel simply lost flying speed and lowered itself onto the sand. A quick flick of the rudder to compensate for a patch of rough sand that was attempting to upset the aircraft and I was down safely. I trundled to a halt and, on switching off the engine, I really began to feel the effect of three days continuous travelling. Slumped in my seat, it took all my energy to unbuckle the straps and extract myself from the cockpit. Pulling out her punishment. Threemy limited equipment that was wedged down deep within the cockpit, I jumped off the wing and felt the heat of the sand work its way through my boots. I kept thinking that the task ahead was just too large to complete within the time available. However, no matter how corny it may sound, the fate of civilization really did rest fairly and squarely on my shoulders. I skirted around the base of the pyramid, searching for the door to the antechamber. The first test had begun... Chapter 5 They stopped their camels on top of the rise where, over three thousand years ago, Zelloripusthe last of the Pharoahs had been banished from the Central Circle of the court of Asklarioum in Chael for a crime against fellow daemons. A crime so despicable that, had it worked, she would have challenged the Great One herself. Given human form and stripped of many of her daemonic powers, she was sent to live the life of a mortal being onspent his final hour. Behind them, a tiny sliver of crescent moon moved immeasurably closer towards the golden disc of the sun. The taller one of the less pleasant planets, Earth. As each host body died, she hopped into a new one, taking over the mind and feeding on the soul. Three thousand years into her sentence,spoke. 'Look.' Together they watched with three thousandcuriosity as a small figure worked its way, ant-like, around the base of the pyramid below them, stopping now and then to look more to go, she was not happy. Sixty centuries in Plymouth is enough to embitter anyone. Even one whose residual evilness could, if focussed, melt a toddler's ice cream from a distance of ten miles. Today there were many puddles of Guiseppi's Famous Italian Ice Cream on the pavements of Plymouth. For today was special. Exactly half-way through Zelloripus' exile, she was feeling mean and ornery and disposed to high mischief. She despised the humans whose form she took; they by and large achieved oblivion in just seventy short years. She especially despised Steve, whose somnolent form sonorously snoring through lunchbreaks was a continual reminder of a contented peace of mind denied her. Daemons don't sleep; chances are that Another lurks nearby with designs onclosely at the worn carvings. It disappeared out of sight around the corner. After a while, the two men tired of watching the blank face of the pyramid and, turning their soulstuff. A diabolic doze is the best they can normally manage; even this is denied those cast out of Hades because of the forces of Good that are on constant watch. Even, it had to be said, in Plymouth, where three thousand years of sleepless nights and boring days were driving Zelloripus close to breaking point. So far, she'd stuck to the rules, because using what remained of her powers to tamper with mortal affairs could double or treble her stay on Earth. But only if she was detected; the temptation to lash out at something or someone was growing. Her current job, with Plymouth's third most succesfful producer of soap, was not helping things. So mere bad timing could explain Steve's unhappy encounter with Zelloripus, or Emily as she should be called, on this day in particular. Maybe it was just bad luck that accounted for the copious yawns, heavy eyelids and sleep-slurred voice with which he laced the conversation over her franking machine. But the following conversation was almost too bad to be true... "Hiya Emily," said Steve. "You're looking wide eyed for a Monday morning. Wish I could be so awake, but I've been in bed most of the weekend." "Poor soul." said Emily, "What's the matter?" "Oh, I dunno. Think it's a touch of the flu; all I can do is sleep. It was a real effort to get up today. You don't know of anything that could perk me up a bit, do you?" Emily, bitter from boredom, was close to the edge. "No," she said "I don't usually get that sort of problem. With sleeping, I mean." It was probably his attempt at humour, or maybe it was a particularly clumsy chat-up line, that did it. "Perhaps you should sleep with me - it would maybe rub off a little. There's nothing like a good night's kip to make your fellow man seem a bit nicer..." "I'm sure" said Emily with a smile so sharp it was opening the letters, "that you're right there. Tell me, Steve, do you dream?" "Dream? No, can't say that I do. Not that I remember, that is. But if I did, it would be of you." "How sweet. Perhaps I can help you, at least" and here the smile was diamond-tipped "with the flu. I think I might just have something in my handbag. Hold on, let me go and get it." Steve was pleased. It might be worth asking her out after all, let's see, there's the funfair out of town... no, she's too bright for that... Outside, the weak sunlight darkened for a moment, as if a cloud had passed. She came back. "Here we are, something I got from a drug store last time I had the flu." It was a small brown bottle, with an indistinct label and, just visible in the powdery interior, three white pills. "You're supposed to have them before a meal, just take the lot tonight with a bottle of red wine and some cheese and you'll be a new man." "Thanks very much, Emily" said Steve, taking the bottle from her hand. "I'll do that. Look, what are you doing this weekend? Do you fancy a trip to see the new Stallone film or something?" "I'm not sure" lied the being with three thousand years' worth of identical Plymothian weekends stretched out in front of her. "Let's see how you're feeling in a couple of days. Wouldn't want to over-exert you during your convalescence". "Oh, I'm sure I'll be fine. I don't think I'll change my mind!" "We'll see" said Emily, allowing just a hint of cold, evil-tinged boredom to slip out. That evening, Steve wondered about Emily's last words. There was something not quite right, he decided, and came to a similar conclusion about the thrice-microwaved chilli con carne sitting in a bowl in the fridge. Then he remembered that wine and cheese had been recommended, and, although he was feeling fine by now, he thought that taking the lady's medicine followed by a triumphal Tuesday morning could do no harm. He had the cheese, and trotted out to the nearest 7-11 to get a bottle of red wine. Back at home, he emptied the three pills out of the bottle into his hand. Nothing special, thought he, and with a flourish popped them into his mouth and washed them down with a long draft of Burgundy. The cheese sandwich followed. A quick scan of the TV pages - why is there never anything on a Monday night? - convinced him of the desirability of bed. It's not generally appreciated that much magic is real, test-tubed and white-coated, science. Merlin's laboratory technique would have brought murmurs of approval from Pasteur, and watching Shiva smite (from a safe distance) might well have enlightened Einstein still further. It's just that while the great unwashed mass of men were more interested in squabbling, sex and smallpox it contented the Immortals to hide their rational prowess behind a web of mystic mishmash. Sure, there is magic to be had, but using it brings many repercussions which might not be completely controllable. Many magicians had lost their souls in the long research programme which, although almost half as old as the Universe, was still not producing results. But boy, was it over budget. Some of its more spectacular failures were still puzzling astronomers from a thousand worlds; more than few of whom were unexpected by-products from an experiment or two themselves. Emily was especially wary of employing the Dark Art. Not only had it landed her in this mess in the first place, but its use could signal loud and clear her position to any number of undesirable companions from the busybodies at Asklarioum, or something far more sinister. As it was, materialising the pills had been risky enough. Her excellent knowledge of human biochemistry helped her from there. As Steve dropped off to sleep, the pills were lying inert in his stomach. Slowly the gastric acid ate away the outer case, and the compounds within began to diffuse out. And what compounds, the like of which had not been seen on Earth before or (it is safe to assume) since. Any chemist worth his NaCl would have given his spatula to have been in on the action. First, the long chain molecules from the cheese were broken down to several interesting substances. The alcohol from the wine helped carry these and others from the pills themselves to the stomach wall, through which they slipped like Mexicans into Texas. On the other side of the wall, the usual gang of enzymes were waiting to digest the evening meal; but they weren't ready for what came at them. The scene of chemical carnage was brutal but short. Past the first stage of digestion, the intruding substances reached the blood stream. Dissolved in the plasma, they drifted up until they got to Steve's brain. The blood brain barrier - that wonderful filter that keeps hunks of pizza molecule out while letting oxygen in - was as effective as a traffic cop against a battalion of Soviet tanks. Emily's dark designs began their invidious work. Steve's brain was defenceless against the chemical onslaught. The vast, and mostly unused, network of neurones lay in front of them. Even as the last molecules were arriving, the compounds got to work. They diddled the dopamine receptors, they speeded up the cortical synapses, they nobbled the noradrenaline. A thin web of complex bonds spread deep into Steve's cerebellum, like frost over a tree. Further and further they went, until every part of his brain was invaded and controlled. For the moment they did nothing, but somewhere else in the Plymothian night a small chuckle of anticipation bounced off the flock wallpaper. In his sleep, Steve stirred and shivered. Chapter 2 The next day, Steve woke up, as usual, to the clock radio. Unusually, he found himself listening to it, and, even more strangely, it annoyed him. He turned over in bed and thumped the switch, leaving the bedroom to the birds, noisy Fords and myriad other sounds of morning. He stared at the ceiling. Hangover? No, he'd only had a couple of glasses of wine last night. Anyway, his head didn't hurt and he felt all right, sort of, except... He was wide awake. That was odd, too, as most days he only started to really wake up on the bus into work. He glanced at the clock radio; he still had a good half-hour until he had to leave, so he tried to doze. As he closed his eyes, the world spun. About fifteen years ago, he'd gone to Scotland with his parents, and once he'd crawled up to the edge of a granite cliff and peered over at the rocks and sea hundreds of feet beneath. He remembered amazement, awe and no little fear, but most of all he remembered the spiralling vertigo. That was what he was feeling now - he gripped the sides of the bed and opened his eyes rapidly, sweating. The flu? Those pills he took last night? Could be, but he'd never been ill like that before, nor taken anything from a chemist that shook him up so badly. For a moment he was worried, but then the morning took over again, and the sound of a bus pulling up the hill reminded and reassured him that another normal day was waiting. He got out of bed and, standing up, felt fine once more. The coffee and eggs of breakfast tasted really good, but he didn't feel like reading his paper on the bus. For some reason, he wasn't interested in "Rock Star Eats Own Hand, Sells Guitar", which seemed to be the most earthshaking intelligence on offer. Back in the office, he homed in on Emily. "Hey, Emily" he said "Those pills seemed to have done the trick. No flu, not a sniffle. I'm feeling really awake. They're good stuff - what're they called? I'd like to get some, just for next time, you know?" She giggled, a short, high-pitched stutter like a pony neighing. "Glad they seem to have worked, Steve. I can't remember their name, though, I've had them for a while. Still, if it comes back to me I'll let you know." "You've usually got such a good memory, Emily" said Steve ingratiatingly. "Me, mine's like a sieve. Can't even remember things like buying milk or doctor's appointments. Oh no!" "What's up?" asked Emily, wondering for a moment whether she'd miscalculated something and wondering, just for a moment, what exactly she'd done. Just for a moment, and then she realised. "Forgotten an appointment?" "Dentist. What's the time? Look, I've got to rush. See you at lunch - if I've got any teeth left" And he dashed into the boss' office to explain his impending absence. He rushed out of the building. His dentist was about a half a mile away, and by walking fast he could make it. Past the bombed church in the roundabout, past the police station, up the hill, past the library, past the reservoir and into Dr V. Sells, known since childhood as Dr Weasel. The receptionist looked through her window - hello <PRESIDIO_ANONYMIZED_PERSON>, hello Mr Trevathen take a seat he's running a little late - and he dived into the piles of House and Garden from 1972. Back in the office, the morning post had been sorted and distributed, and there was, as usual, half-an-hour's hiatus before the pre-lunch mailbags came in. Jill went out to round up all the outgoing mail from the seven floors, leaving Emily to herself. She checked her watch, and felt the sea of infinite boredom recede a little. Any minute now, and the first part of her plan would start to work. Deep within Steve's brain, profound changes were taking place. The tendrils of diabolic chemistry insinuated into his hippocampus, a small lump of grey matter normally concerned with sorting Steve's experience (such as they were) into long-term recall, and started to subtly rewire his memory mechanisms. Large portions of his mind were converted into the biological equivalent of RAM; ready to record experiences and, having recorded them, control his mind as a program controls a computer's processor. Elsewhere similar changes were taking place, but for now things were ready just to record. Just for now. The triggers to load the program were complex. If Steve was interested, then whatever it was that held his interest would be sorted, stored, activated. If he was frightened, amused, intrigued, it would all be recorded. But for this to work, he had to be capable of taking an interest in the first place. So part of Emily's chemical mishmash sharpened his wits, heightened his awareness, upped his IQ to just short of genius. This, she thought, was a nice move. Not only did it ensure that the data recorded would be powerful and particularly apt, but when the second stage began he would be only too capable of, mmmm, appreciating what was happening to him. He might even fight back, which would round off the whole thing nicely. And, she though with a daemonic delight, it would serve him right to be given a glimpse of what it's like to have an intelligence confronted with infinite boredom. Steve was, as the plan demanded, unaware of the mental mayhem crystallising beneath his cranium. But he was getting painfully aware of a lot of other things as he sat in the formica and chipboard waiting room. The posters of rabbits noshing carrots and jaunty poems about plaque ("Clean Clean Clean your teeth! Or else the germs get underneath!") were fading and a couple flapped loose at the corners. They'd been there since he'd started seeing Dr Weasel, and, he mused, the place probably hadn't seen a touch of paint for ten years before that. The bright orange and grey polypropelene bucket chairs finished of a fine example of early 'sixties public health design. Now why did he think that? He'd been here every six months for years, and usually only worried about whether he'd get a filling or not. Those old magazines - did people really think that the ideal home looked like that? The clothes they wore in the photos looked laughable too, but he could remember when he'd thought they looked good. How strange... perhaps the jacket and jeans he was wearing now would be equally ridiculous in ten years time. The buzzer chainsawed its way into his daydreams, and the receptionist looked up. "Mr Trevathen?". He stood up, and went into the surgery. Dr Sells was shuffling through some papers at a desk, and the Chair sat in the middle of the room beneath the usual battery of technology. "Hello Steve", said the dentist. "Sit down please. Now then, any problems since last time? It's good to see you keeping these checkups. Some people just don't bother after they leave home, and when something goes wrong there are all sorts of things to put right. How's your mother, by the way? It was America she moved to, wasn't it?" As usual, Steve had to wait for three or four questions to go past before he could get a word in. "Yes, she's settled down in North Dakota and she's doing fine. I might go over to see her at Christmas. My teeth are OK, too, but I wouldn't want to miss anything that needs looking at." "A fine attitude. Now then, lie down and open up." Steve looked up at the light. "That's new, isn't it? The old one was a different colour." "That's right, very observant! This one's a new low-voltage design, much more reliable and brighter too. I don't think anyone else has noticed. Open wide." The nurse hooked in some suction, and went to get Steve's notes. "Three's OK, two's OK, one's OK, one's OK, two's OK, three's OK, filling on four's a little bitty; we'll sort that out..." Dr Sells continued chanting his litany as Steve noticed, for the first time it seemed, the antiseptic smell, the faint noise of the machinery behind the dentist, the charts on the wall and the rows of dentures on the shelves. He felt the faint scratching inside his head as the dentist probed away. As Steve had forgotten about the appointment, he hadn't given his teeth the customary vigourous pre-checkup brushing and this was apparently noticeable. "Hello, we haven't been very thorough with your brushing, have we?" Typical quack, though Steve, lapsing into patronising parental tones. Doctor knows best. "Well, there's a cavity just starting on one of your premolars, and a slightly messy filling to tidy up. We'll have a poke around and fix them." Steve had collected a lot of fillings from a chocolate childhood, and had the memories to match. As various instruments of torture were produced and whined, sucked and scrunchedcamels, made their way around his mouth, he remembered the old fears with a vividness that surprised him. He winced as the drill scoured the cavity, and was very relieved at the instruction to rinse and spit. Strange taste, this pink liquid. "While I was fixing those teeth, Steve, I spotted something that might be serious. I'd better have a look at it." This was new. He opened his mouth obediently, and became more apprehensive as Dr Sell's usual banter failed to intersperse his dental deliberations. Finally the dentist stood up, and Steve closed his mouth. "One of your molars is misplaced - I don't know why I didn't catch it before, but there you go. Normally I'd leave it, as it's been there for years without causing any problems, but there are signs that you've got some more teeth coming through underneath." "Eh? You mean I'm teething?" "No, not quite. It's not uncommon for some people to have a third set of teeth at some time during their lives, and you might be one of them. In any case, I should really get that molar out otherwise it could be very bad for your jaw. It's not really fair that you should have to have a tooth pulled, since you're one of my better patients, but it's a good thing I caught it. Gas or needle?" He means it, Steve thought. He hadn't had a tooth out before, and the prospect frightened him. Adrenalin started to seep into his blood stream. His heart speeded up, but in his brain the new mechanisms fired up and channelled the stream of his senses into the almost infinite capacity of the revamped memory. "Oh, gas I think. Is it dangerous?" "No, not very." Oh, how reassuring, what soothing Weasel words. "Is the needle safer?" "There's nothing to worry about with either method. But the gas hurts less." "Fine. Will it take long?" "About half an hour, and you should be OK within the hour. Not driving, are you?" "I walked here." "No problems then. You might find things a bit fuzzy for a while, but it wears off." Steve remembered something Emily had said, and for the first time felt sadness for a thing which had never happened. "Will I dream?" "Hard to day. Some people do, but most don't."back along the dusty track. The nurse had been tinkering with a mess of tubes and cylinders, and brought it to the side of the Chair. While she prepared a tray of gleaming steel instruments, some of which Steve thought would look more in keeping in his local garage, Dr Sells continued his spiel. "Now then, I'll want you to breath deeplymoon took its first, tentative bite from the mask while counting to ten. You won't get past about seven, but you won't notice that. Ready, Sandra?" The nurse passed over a facemask, which the dentist placed over Steve's mouth. "Righty-ho - start breathing and counting. Sweet dreams!" Here we go, then. One... suck... two... blow... three... suck... four... blow... hmmm, this is quite pleasant... where was I... teeth... In the surgery, the dentist checked Steve's pulse, eyes and respiration. Satisifed that his patient was well under, he gave him a few seconds more and started to prepare for oral excavation. Back at the office, Jill wanted to know what Emily was finding so funny. Emily merely giggled, and carried on sorting the post. All that day, she'd be in high spirits, surprising those who were used to her normal sarcastic mood. To those who asked why, she'd reply only that 'Life's a gas, isn't it?' Chapter 3 Teeth... five... jive.. on the third stroke... hey, why aren't I under yet? Better warn the Weasel not to start pulling just yet. Steve opened his eyes. If this is dreaming, thought Steve, I haven't missed much. The view reminded him of Dartmoor, where he used to spend the school holidays camping and walking. Only this place was flat for miles, with no inviting tors to clamber up or run down. Behind him the plain stretched out as far as he could see, so for want of anything better to do he started to walk towards the mountains. After a few minutes, he looked as his watch. Or he tried to, but on raising his arm all he saw was a bare wrist. He was greatly troubled. It wasn't so much the lack of a watch that bothered him, nor the fact that the rest of his body was, on inspection, entirely bare, but the troublesome actuality that the body in question wasn't the same one he'd grown up in. In fact, it was borderline as to whether it was Homo Sapiens or not, what with the long hair on the legs and the excessive number of flattened toes. The blue colour didn't help either. For some reason, he calmed down. Out of curiosity, he tried to yell out "Anyone there?" and was intrigued by the guttural explosion that forced its way out of his mouth, past his fangs and into the leaden air. Fangs. Hmmm. That would startle the good Doctor. He realised with some surprise that he must still be in the Chair, with Dr Sells tapping away like a sculptor producing a miniature statue out of a chip of marble. He was vaguely uncomfortable about the fact that he'd forgotten so easily who he really was, and tried to shut his eyes to block out the flat dullness of wherever he was. And was gripped by the vertigo as he had been back in his bedroom. This time he got the impression of falling down a well by starlight; a fast fading sprinkling of light and the infinite void waiting... The landscape looked much more inviting after that. If this was a gas-induced dream he'd sit it out. Half an hour wasn't so long. But it felt like much more than that by the time he decided to get up and explore some more. Maybe his sense of time had gone the way of his skin colour. And, for that matter, the rest of his body, which had acquired several disquietening features which would surprise any osteopath, ear, nose and throat specialist or proctologist. Not that there seemed to be anybody (indeed, any body) else in the place, although once he caught what seemed to be a flash of motion in the sky. He squinted up into the grey light - the shapes that had sped by looked more like fish than birds; he must have been dreaming. That thought made him laugh. He wandered over to one of the boulders, with the vague intention of climbing up it and looking for something - anything - on the horizon. The surface caught his eyes; like granite it was composed of a myriad tiny facets of crystal, white, orange, black, grey. Unlike granite some of these were quite large, and faintly grooved. These bigger lumps were uniformly white, and they puzzled him. It wasn't until he came across one that was protruding from the rest of the rock, pure white with a blunt point, that he twigged. Teeth. The rocks were granite, he was sure of that from the mica, feldspar and quartz he recognised - any Dartmoor bog trotter knew granite as the city dwellers recognised concrete - but with an uneven sprinkling of teeth stirred in, like peanuts in a chocolate bar. Again, he thought of the Weasel's constant invectives against refined sugar when he was young; again reminded himself that somewhere his real body was supine and slightly more gummy. But granite couldn't have teeth in it. Long-distant school geography lessons sprang to mind. Born of elementary fire, hot lava from the earth's core slowly cooling under tremendous pressure with crystals of hard rock forming over centuries, any organic matter would be fried, powdered and assimilated in minutes. It was, he reminded himself, a dream. One which would offend doctors, geologists and dentists in equal measure, but still a dream. It had to have something to do with being in just such a dream, he thought, but he felt curiously elated. He felt plain curious too - he was looking forward to the next discovery, the next fact to fall out of this strange place. Again, he felt a little disquiet about the ease with which he'd forgotten about his real status as an office worker in Plymouth, but then that place had its fair share of grey skies and boredom too. He hunted around in the grass until he found a small lump of rock. Odd - he looked around, the scattering of the stuff was fairly even as far as he could see - what on earth (or wherever, he reminded himself) could have caused this place to be like this. He imagined great glaciers slowly melting, dropping rocks as they retreated down the vast gouge they in earlier youth had carved, but that wouldn't explain the flatness of the place. Glaciated valleys - once more, those geography lessons with Rolly Jones surfaced after a decade submerged - were U-shaped. This was plain plane. This blue and hairy body must belong to a blue and hairy geologist, he thought. He raised the rock above his head, and brought it down hard on the large boulder he'd been examining. The shock jarred his hand, but cracked off a small amount of the boulder's surface. He looked at the spray of chips that littered the grass. They were sharp, like flakes from the surface of a choc ice. The image of an ice cream, he couldn't remember the name, with small fragments of nut in the hard chocolate layer around the soft cream inside, came to mind, and on a whim he nibbled at one of the chips with his recently-enlarged canines. It tasted like a rock. He looked at the place on the boulder where the chips came from, expecting to see more of the same, perhaps a little more colourful and sharp. Instead he saw a smooth skin, black as the night, underneath what must have just been a shell of toothed rock. He prodded it with one ridiculously long finger (without a fingernail; for a moment he couldn't decide whether it was sillier to have a finger without a fingernail or one with - why did humans have fingernails anyway? He resolved to find out when he was back in the real- he nearly thought other - world) and it gave way a little, like the skin on a dead pig. Down at his feet, he found a particularly long shard of rock skin. With a roar he jabbed it into the gap on the boulder as hard as he could. This was, he discovered, very hard, and the skin broke. A gush of cold brown liquid shot out and over his - his? - body. He stood there for a moment, surprised, as the sticky coolness trickled down, matting the fine hair which covered him. He poked the same finger into the new gash, expecting to find a void. Instead he encountered a soft, sludgy gunk. It was very cold. He pulled his finger out (for some reason, an image of his boss came to mind) startled by the unexpected feelings. Again on an impulse, he licked the finger. Chocolate ice cream. He pulled at the rock shell around the gap, removing scabs of the stuff and widening the hole until he could get a fist in. One part of his mind stood back, aghast, as a feeding frenzy took over and he pulled, tugged, hit at the shell, reducing it to fragments and revealing an interior entirely composed of ice cream. With a whoop, he started to scoop the stuff into his mouth, not minding whether it ran down his chin, onto his chest, caking him with stickyness. "No. Chocolate. No chocolate. Bad for the teeth" Eh? Where did the voice come from? He looked up, and realised that he was cold, shivering, and standing in a spreading puddle of molten ice cream. He was very, very messy. "It'll ruin your teeth. Not good at all". Was that - that was the Weasel. "Steve, you mustn't eat so much chocolate. Steve, you have to wake up to the fact that your teeth must last you the rest of your life. Steve, wake up. Steve!" He shook his head, and suddenly felt very cold indeed. The grey of the sky lightened to orange, to white and he shivered. "Steve, wake up!" He blinked, and felt the ground somersault like a funfair ride. He tumbled, was lying down. He was on the couch, looking up at Dr Sells. "Steve, can you hear me?" "Uh" why was his mouth so horrible? "yeah. Yes, I can hear you. I've been dreaming, I think" "Don't talk. Take deep breaths. Do you feel OK?" Stupid dentist. How can I tell you if I can't talk? "Uhuh". "Good. I hit an artery, though what it was doing there I don't know, and we had a bit of an emergnecy. You're OK, though, not too much blood lost, and I've called an ambulance just in case. Ruined your clothes though - I'm sorry." His head spun. He tried to sit up, and in the couple of seconds before he collapsed back to the Chair he saw a blood-soaked body. At least it had pink hands. Chapter 4 The doctors at Freedom Fields Hospital weren't concerned with his dream. "Happens all the time, old man" one particularly young one said "You're dreaming about walking through a town when a fire engine goes past, bell ringing like billy-oh. You wake up, and the alarm clock's going nineteen to the dozen. Brain's made the connection, you see." Apart from the fact that he'd never owned an alarm clock with a bell, and suspected that the doctor had been watching too many Sunday afternoon wartime films, Steve saw. It had been a particularly vivid dream, but perhaps everyone dreamed like that under gas. He'd been given two pints of blood, which gave the lie to Dr Sells' soothing words, and was under observation for the rest of the day. According to the ward sister, he'd be out by seven since they needed the bed and he was young enough to survive "seeing what you young people do to yourselves nothing like this should worry you" by himself. The tooth had been removed, and in its place was a lump of surgical padding. Steve explored it with his tongue, it seemed much large and ten times rougher than the tooth it replaced but he expected that was just the unfamiliarity and weirdness of the pad. Again he felt strange, he wasn't used to such ideas and didn't know where they came from. That they might come from himself seemed impossible. The young doctor came back. "How are we doing?" "I'm feeling OK." He took Steve's blood pressure and pulse rate. "I think you'll be OK for this evening, but take it easy for the next week or so". "Er, Doctor?" "Yes?" "I'm still worried by the dream I had." The doctor sat down on the bed, and carefully placed his clipboard on the sheets before looking, seriously and with obvious intent, at Steve. "We all have dreams, old man." "No, I don't get dreams, apart from this time. It was so real, like being there, only I've never been anywhere like that before. Do you think it could have been the gas?" "That's possible. It's really nothing to worry about, though. It's been quite a traumatic experience for you. Look, if the dreams come back or you're still worried about things a week from now I can recommend a friend of mine who should sort you out." "He's a doctor too?" "Yes, but not a blood and guts man like me. He's a psychoanalyst." "Um... thanks. I think." The doctor laughed "Nobody's saying you're anything but sane. It's just if you're troubled by this thing I don't know anyone better. He's especially good on dreams. Wrote a book about them a while back, I think he's quite famous." "Among shrinks." "Yes, I suppose. Look, hold on a minute." The doctor scribbled out a name and phone number on his pad, and tore off the sheet. "Here you go. If you do give him a call, tell him Dr Chapman sent you, OK?" "Thanks, mate. I hope I don't, if you see what I mean." "Right. Anything else?" And as there was nothing else, the doctor left. He caught the bus home. Experimentally probing the top of the wadding, he decided that soup and stuff would be on the menu for the next week. That night he slept soundly, for the last time, as the day's happenings were sorted and stored. For later.edge of the sun.