Art Pact 21

Let us be perfectly clear - Edge is not a dream, although you can reach Edge through a dream, or even while asleep but not dreaming. You can also get there from a particular place, or through a certain emotional state, or at specific times. I reached Edge through a dream myself, but it makes no difference how you get there, just that you do.

I was sleeping in the Black Archive, having spent twenty-two hours straight researching - well, let's not get into that at the moment. Suffice it to say my research had been fruitless up until that point, plenty of promising leads but all of them sending me on dusty paper paths that ended in cul-de-sacs of information. Ultimately the terrible lighting in the archive, the all-pervading smell of slowly rotting books, the lack of sleep, all conspired to send me into a deep sleep, my head cradled in the valley of an open tome on - let's skip over that.

I don't remember the dream that led me into Edge, not really. I don't usually remember my dreams, to be honest, which made it easy for me to know that I'd come to Edge. But even people with the most vivid dreams can tell the difference - there's something sharp, something definite about Edge that you don't experience in a dream. Edge crept up on me subtly, a sort of cutting sensation, a smell of acetone, and then I was walking through a field of grey corn that scratched at my hands every time they moved. I could feel no wind myself, but the grass shifted and rippled as though a lively breeze was snatching at it.

At the end of the cornfield was a clearing, surrounded by low colourless huts with child-sized doors. In the centre of the clearing a few dogs were lying - Labradors and Alsatians, and a grizzled Doberman who was sitting by the embers of a dying fire. The Doberman looked over at me, barked once. Out of the little doors issued a stream of other dogs, and I realised that the village was a dog village, the whole area bleached of colour because there was no need for it here. I sat in the clearing and held my hand out, palm up, and all of the villagers circled around me and one by one came in to sniff my palm. I thought that it would show that I had no ill intent there, and indeed the Doberman (who I guessed must be the hetman of the village) seemed pleased by the gesture and soon relaxed his (until then vigilant) stance.

They taught me a dance - a dog dance, which I could not perform well because I only have two legs, a thing that was like a staccato waltz in which the dogs progressed unpartnered around the centre of the village in a grand circle broken up into smaller spirals. Each time you traversed one of the smaller spirals the music continued but you held for a whole bar, which meant that you were only dancing for half of the time. To begin with we all started and stopped at the same time, but after the first tune half of the dogs danced two straight bars before stopping again and resuming the pattern, so that when we were stationary they were dancing and vice-versa. The musicians were also dogs - two Alsatians playing on low drums that provided the beat of the music, and a younger Doberman plucking at something that looked like a broad sitar, or perhaps a harp laid on its side. She picked out a strong and lively melody with her claws, the act of her playing looking something like a dance itself because of the way she had to balance on two or three feet depending on how complicated the tune was at any given moment. I saw her perform a particularly tricky double arpeggio with both front paws and one rear one, leaping over the instrument.

I danced as best I could, although the steps for me were nothing more than an approximation of the true ones. I realised when we had begun to dance in the alternating round that the dance was not entirely unpartnered, as I had thought, but that viewed from within the dance one was facing (and seeming to respond to) the dog on the exact opposite side of the circle. My partner in that sense was an elderly Labrador. After the dance (when I had been there for a few hours - long enough for me to begin to understand their language and they mine) I asked her whether other humans had been here.

"At one point or another," she told me, "all of them."

I did not understand at the time.

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