He did not attempt to play his organ that night. The music box was too close by. Instead he vigorously set about carving up the barnacles that were threatening to destroy the pipes of the organ. It was fantastically boring, backbreaking work, the sort he usually got new recruits to the crew to suffer. He promised himself to make a habit of it.
When he slumped to a gratified, helpless sleep (in a bed draped with sea-slime, rotting beneath his prone body), he was sure he'd hear no young, bland voice, and no beautiful purr of ancient poetry.
He thought it was the sudden quiet that woke him- a sailor grows used to the coaxing mumbles of the sea. He twitched as rapidly as a moth under flame, almost unable to think above the cavern of silence. By ticks and shudders, he threw himself upright, rather hindered by the fact the girl was sitting on his feet. He had not awoken- he had been pulled inexorably into the dream-cabin.
She was watching him with a slight smile on her face. Her skin had lost its film of freckles, and indeed looked as if it was slowly peeling away, making her resemble the hammerhead first mate Maccus more than ever. An image of her, rotting and swollen on the sea-bed, passed across his mind, and he stared hungrily at the translucent sheen of the bones through her skin. Perhaps, he thought, perhaps she'll stop reading once she's decomposed far enough.
"Won't happen," she interrupted. "After all, I'm your dream. Ask me my name."
Grateful she had not begun with more Pyrrha, Davy eagerly complied, leaning across his bed to demand quickly, "What is yer name?"
"Frances," she said, without hesitation.
"I always liked that name," Davy said. Had it been the waking world, he would have made a great show of being aghast but for some reason it just seemed to slot into place, like a slight change of focus that turns the knotholes on a bedroom door to a face, a host of faces, a waiting figure with a hundred limbs. "I would have named- it's a good name," he hastily amended.
"Isn't it," she said softly, her face sliding down the cool, tranquil expression again. "Let's leave the subject for now." Before he could stop her, she opened the book and her throat and started afresh with the third verse.
"He, the credible, who now relishes you, golden one, who believes you will always be available, always loveable."
"She said she would be!" Davy burst out, whilst the words were still fading away. Frances gave him a cold look that, because it could not pierce his heart, emptied its emotionless scorn in his chest and let it lie there, and finished the verse.
"He is unaware of the treacherous breeze. Unhappy are those for whom you sparkle, untried."
The lack of noise returned and swaddled them both.
In the minutes that followed, Davy struggled to build up to speech. Frances' gray eyes held no mercy and no malice, and somehow this made them harder to talk to. It was like- no, he realised, it was- looking in a mirror. When he could speak, he felt too raw to talk about what she had just read. So he said, "Yer name isn't Frances, aye?"
"No," she agreed. "But you always liked that name, and this is your mindscape. Sorry," she added, a scrap of sympathy appearing in the face.
"What is yer real name?" Davy asked her, curiously.
She smiled, very sadly. It was the realest emotion he had ever seen her face display. "How can I tell you that? You killed me before you knew. Therefore, you can never know. I'm just a dream."
This seemed abominably unfair to Davy, and he was filled with regret and remorse to such an extent he lost sight of her for a moment, because of a film of tears.
"You were a slim, credible boy."
"A man," he corrected. "But she made me child-like. And I- I thought because of that, she would have been as kind as a mother should be. I should have known better. Beautiful women," he spat, "don't need to be."
At this point things dissolved, and he panicked, because he knew the dream was ending and he wanted someone to talk to. "There's more!" he said hastily, but it came out mewling and the vowels seemed to sink to the floor before he could get them out of his lips. And he wanted to ask the girl, "If you're a dream, how come yer can read me a poem I've never heard of?"
She must have heard his intent. "Some things are more real than others." When he awoke into the soft, terrible bustle of wakefulness, he realised that was not a real answer.