Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe (38 page)

“No,” he said. “Why do you ask?”

“Curiosity,” I replied. “You know how I am. Well, good night.”

Then I closed the door behind the most willing subject in the world, hoping it would be some time before he returned. “If ever,” I said aloud, and the words echoed in the hollows of my home.

2
.

But it was not long afterward that Plomb and I had our next confrontation, though the circumstances were accidental. Late one afternoon, as it happens, I was browsing through a shop that dealt in second-hand merchandise of the most pathetic sort. The place was positively littered with tossed-off oddments and pure trash: rusty scales that once would have given your weight for a penny, cockeyed bookcases, broken toys, old furniture, standing ashtrays late of some hotel lobby, and a hodge-podge of items that seemed entirely inscrutable in their origin and purpose. For me, however, such desolate bazaars offered more diversion and consolation than the most exotic marketplaces, which so often made good on their strange promises that mystery itself ceased to have meaning. But my second-hand seller made no promises and inspired no dreams, leaving all that to those more ambitious hucksters who trafficked in such stock in trade. And I had left that search behind me, as previously explained. What the mystical rarities of this earth were for Plomb, the most used-up and dismal commodities had become for me. Now I could ask no more of a given gray afternoon than to find myself in an establishment that had nothing to sell but the charm of disenchantment.

By coincidence, that particular afternoon in the second-hand shop brought me, if only in an indirect manner, together with Plomb. The visual transaction took place in a tilting mirror that stood near the shop's back wall, one of the many mirrors that seemed to constitute a specialty of the place. I had squatted down before this relic and wiped my bare hand across its dusty surface. And there, hidden beneath the dust, was the face of Plomb, who must have just entered the shop and was standing a room's length away. While he seemed to recognize immediately the reverse side of me, his expression betrayed the hope that I had not seen him. There was shock as well as shame upon that face, and something else besides. And if Plomb had approached me, what could I have said to him? Perhaps I would have mentioned that he did not look very well or that it appeared he had been the victim of an accident. But how could he explain what had happened to him except to reveal the truth that we both knew and neither would speak? Fortunately, this scene was to remain in its hypothetical state, because a moment later he was out the door.

I cautiously approached the front window of the shop in time to see Plomb hurrying off into the dull, unreflecting day, his right hand held up to his face. “It was only my intention to cure him,” I mumbled to myself. I had not considered that he was incurable, nor that things would have developed in the way they did.

3
.

After that day I wondered, eventually to the point of obsession, what kind of hell had claimed poor Plomb for its own. I knew only that I had provided him with a type of toy: the subliminal ability to feast his eyes on an imaginary universe in a droplet of his own blood. The possibility that he would desire to magnify this experience, or indeed that he would be capable of such a feat, had not seriously occurred to me. Obviously, however, this had become the case. I now had to ask myself how much farther Plomb's situation could be extended. The answer, though I could not guess it at the time, was presented to me in a dream.

And it seemed fitting that the dream had its setting in that old attic storeroom of my house, which Plomb once prized above all other rooms in the world. I was sitting in a chair, a huge and enveloping chair which in reality does not exist but in the dream directly faces the sofa. No thoughts or feelings troubled me, and I had only the faintest sense that someone else was in the room. But I could not see who it was, because everything appeared so dim in outline, blurry and grayish. There seemed to be some movement in the region of the sofa, as if the enormous cushions themselves had become lethargically restless. Unable to fathom the source of this movement, I touched my hand to my temple in thought. This was how I discovered that I was wearing a pair of spectacles with circular lenses connected to wiry stems. I thought to myself: “If I remove these spectacles I will be able to see more clearly.” But a voice told me not to remove them, and I recognized that voice. Then something moved, a man-shaped shadow upon the sofa. A climate of dull horror began to invade my surroundings. “Go away, Plomb. You have nothing to show me,” I said. But the voice disagreed with me in sinister whispers that made no sense yet seemed filled with meaning. I would indeed be shown things, these whispers seemed to be saying. Already I was being shown things, astonishing things—mysteries and marvels beyond anything I had ever suspected. And suddenly all my feelings, as I gazed through the spectacles, were proof of that garbled pronouncement. They were feelings of a peculiar nature which, to my knowledge, one experiences only in dreams: sensations of infinite expansiveness and ineffable meaning that have no place elsewhere in our lives. But although these astronomical emotions suggested wonders of incredible magnitude and character, I saw nothing through those magic lenses except this: the obscure shape in the shadows before me as its outline grew clearer and clearer to my eyes. Gradually I came to view what appeared to be a mutilated carcass, something of a terrible rawness, a torn and flayed thing whose every laceration could be seen with microscopic precision. The only thing of color in my grayish surroundings, it twitched and quivered like a gory heart exposed beneath the body of the dream. And it made a sound like hellish giggling. Then it said, “I am back from my trip,” as if mocking me.

It was this simple statement that inspired my efforts to tear the spectacles from my face, even though they now seemed to be part of my flesh. I gripped them with both hands and flung them against the wall, where they shattered. Somehow this served to exorcise my tormented companion, who faded back into the grayness. Then I looked at the wall and saw that it was running red where the spectacles had struck. And the broken lenses that lay upon the floor were bleeding.

To experience such a dream as this on a single occasion might very well be the stuff of a haunting, lifelong memory, something that perhaps might even be cherished for its unfathomable depths of feeling. But to suffer over and over this same nightmare, as I soon found was my fate, leads one to seek nothing so much as a way to kill the dream, to expose all its secrets and reduce it to fragments that can be forgotten.

In my search for this deliverance, I first looked to the sheltering shadows of my home, the sobering shadows which at other times had granted me a cold and stagnant peace. I tried to argue myself free of my nightly excursions, to discourse these visions away, lecturing the walls
contra
the prodigies of a mysterious world. “Since any form of existence,” I muttered, “since any form of existence is by definition a conflict of forces, or it is nothing at all, what can it possibly matter if these skirmishes take place in a world of marvels or one of mud? The difference between the two is not worth mentioning, or none. Such distinctions are the work of only the crudest and most limited perspectives, the sense of mystery and wonder foremost among them. Even the most esoteric ecstasy, when it comes down to it, requires the prop of vulgar pain in order to stand up as an experience. Having acknowledged the truth, however provisional, and the reality, if subject to mutation, of all that is most strange in the universe—whether known, unknown, or merely suspected—one must conclude that such marvels change nothing in our existence. The gallery of human sensations that existed in prehistory is identical to the one that faces each life today, that will continue to face each new life as it enters this world . . . and then looks beyond it.”

Thus I attempted to reason my way back to self-possession. But no measure of my former serenity was forthcoming. On the contrary, my days as well as my nights were now poisoned by an obsession with Plomb. Why had I given him those spectacles! More to the point, why did I allow him to retain them? It was time to take back my gift, to confiscate those little bits of glass and twisted metal that were now harrowing the wrong mind. And since I had succeeded too well in keeping him away from my door, I would have to be the one to approach his.

4
.

But it was not Plomb who answered the rotting door of that house which stood at the street's end and beside a broad expanse of empty field. It was not Plomb who asked if I was a newspaper journalist or a policeman before closing that gouged and filthy door in my face when I replied that I was neither of those. Pounding on the door, which seemed about to crumble under my fist, I summoned the sunken-eyed man a second time to ask if this in fact was Mr. Plomb's address. I had never visited him at his home, that hopeless little box in which he lived and slept and dreamed.

“Was he a relative?”

“No,” I answered.

“Then what? You're not here to collect a bill, because if that's the case . . .”

For the sake of simplicity I interjected that I was a friend of Mr. Plomb.

“Then how is it you don't know?”

For the sake of my curiosity I said that I had been away on a trip, as I often was, and had my own reasons for notifying Mr. Plomb of my return.

“Then you don't know anything,” he stated flatly.

“Exactly,” I replied.

“It was even in the newspaper. And they asked me about him.”

“Plomb,” I confirmed.

“That's right,” he said, as if he had suddenly become the custodian of a secret knowledge.

Then he waved me into the house and led me through its ugly, airless interior to a small storage room at the back. He reached along the wall inside the room, as if he wanted to avoid entering it, and switched on the light.

Immediately I understood why the hollow-faced man preferred not to go into that room, for Plomb had renovated this space in a very strange way. Each wall, as well as the ceiling and floor, was a mosaic of mirrors, a shocking galaxy of redundant reflections. And each mirror was splattered across its surface, as if someone had swung brushfuls of paint from various points throughout the room, spreading dark stars across a silvery firmament. In his attempt to exhaust or exaggerate the visions to which he had apparently become enslaved, Plomb had done nothing less than multiplied these visions into infinity, creating oceans of his own blood and enabling himself to see with countless eyes. Entranced by such aspiration, I gazed at the mirrors in speechless wonder. Among them was that tilting mirror I remembered looking into not so long ago.

The landlord, who did not follow me into the room, said something about suicide and a body ripped raw. This news was of course unnecessary as I stood overwhelmed at Plomb's ingenuity. It was some time before I could look away from that gallery of glass and gore. Only afterward did I fully realize that I would never be rid of the horrible Plomb. He had broken through all the mirrors, projected himself into the eternity beyond them.

And even when I abandoned my home, with its hideous attic storeroom, Plomb still followed me in my dreams. He now travels with me to the ends of the earth, initiating me night after night into his unspeakable wonders. I can only hope that we will not meet in another place, one where the mysteries are always new and dreams never end. Oh, Plomb, will you not stay in that box where they have put your self-riven body?

I must whisper my words in the wind, knowing somehow that they will reach you who sent me here. Let this misadventure, like the first rank scent of autumn, be carried back to you, my good people. For it was you who decided where I would go, you who wished I come here and to him. And I agreed, because the fear that filled your voices and lined your faces was so much greater than your words could explain. I feared your fear of him: the one whose name we did not know, the one who lived far from town in that ruined house which long ago had seen the passing of the family Van Livenn. “What a tragedy,” we all agreed. “And they kept that beautiful garden for so long. But he . . . he doesn't seem much interested in such things.”

I was chosen to unravel his secrets and find what malice or indifference the new owner harbored toward our town. I should be the one, you said. Was I not the teacher of the town's child-citizens, the one who had knowledge that you had not and who might therefore see deeper into the mystery of our man? That was what you said, in the shadows of our church where we met that night; but what you thought, I could not help but sense, was that
he
has no children of his own, no one, and so many of his hours are spent walking through those same woods in which lives the stranger. It would seem quite natural if I happened to pass the old Van Livenn house, if I happened to stop and perhaps beg a glass of water for a thirsty walker of the woods. But these simple actions, even then, seemed an extraordinary adventure, though none of us confessed to this feeling. Nothing to fear, you said. And so I was chosen to go alone to that house which had fallen into such disrepair.

You have seen the house and how, approaching it from the road that leads out of town, it sprouts suddenly into view—a pale flower amid the dark summer trees, now a ghostly flower at autumn. At first this is how it appeared to my eyes. (Yes, my eyes, think about them, good people: dream about them.) But as I neared the house, its grayish planks, bowed and buckled and oddly spotted, turned the pallid lily to a pulpy toadstool. Surely the house has played this trick on some of you, and all of you have seen it at one time or another: its roof of rippling shingles shaped like scales from some great fish, sea-green and sparkling in the autumn sun; its two attic gables with paned windows that come to a point like the tip of a tear; its sepulcher-shaped doorway at the top of rotted wooden stairs. And as I stood among the shadows outside that door, I heard hundreds of raindrops running up the steps behind me, as the air went cold and the skies gained shadows of their own. The light rain spotted the empty, ashen plot nearby the house, watering the barren ground where that remarkable garden had blossomed in the time of the Van Livenns. What better excuse for my imposing upon the present owner of this house? Shelter me, stranger, from the icy autumn storm, and from a fragrance damp and decayed.

He responded promptly to my rapping, without suspicious movements of the ragged curtains, and I entered his dark home. There was no need for explanation; he had already seen me walking ahead of the clouds, though I had not seen him: his lanky limbs like vaguely twisted branches; his lazy expressionless face; the colorless rags which are easier to see as tattered wrappings than as parts of even the poorest wardrobe. But his voice, that is something none of you has ever heard. Although shaken at how gentle and musical it sounded, I was even less prepared for the sense of great distances created by the echo of his hollow words.

“It was just such a day as this when I saw you for the first time walking in the woods,” he said, looking out at the rain. “But you did not come near to the house. I wondered if you ever would.”

His words put me at ease, for our introduction to each other appeared to have already been made. I removed my coat, which he took and placed on a very small wooden chair beside the front door. Extending a long crooked arm and wide hand toward the interior, he formally welcomed me into his home.

But somehow he himself did not seem at home there. It was as if the Van Livenn family had left all their worldly goods behind them for the use of the next occupant of their house, which would not be peculiar, tragedy considered. Nothing seemed to belong to him, though there was little enough in that house to be possessed by anyone. Apart from the two old chairs in which we sat down and the tiny misshapen table between them, the few other objects I could see appeared to have been brought together only by accident or default, a sign of the last days of the Van Livenns. A huge trunk lying in the corner, its great tarnished lock sprung open and its heavy straps falling loosely to the floor, would have looked much less sullen buried away in an attic or a cellar. And that miniature chair by the door, with an identical twin fallen on its back near the opposite wall, belonged in a child's room. Standing by the shuttered window, a tall bookcase seemed proper enough, if only those cracked pots, bent boots, and other paraphernalia foreign to bookcases had not been stuffed among its battered volumes. A large bedroom bureau stood against one wall, but that would have seemed misplaced in any room: the hollows of its absent drawers were deeply webbed with disuse. All of these things seemed to me wracked with the history of degeneration and death chronicled in our memory of the Van Livenns. But let that rest for now, lest I forget to tell of the thick, dreamy smell that permeated that room, inspiring the sense that malodorous gardens of misshapen growths were budding in the dust and dirty corners everywhere around me.

The only light in the house was provided by two lamps that burned on either side of a mantle over the fireplace. Behind each of these lamps was an oval mirror in an ornate frame, and the reflected light of their quivering wicks threw our shadows onto the wide bare wall at our backs. And while the two of us were sitting still and silent, I saw those other two fidgeting upon the wall, as if wind-blown or perhaps undergoing some subtle torture.

“I have something for you to drink,” he said. “I know how far it is to walk from the town.”

And I did not have to feign my thirst, good people, for it was such that I wanted to swallow the storm, which I could hear beyond the door and the walls but could only see as a brilliance occasionally flashing behind the curtains or shining needle-bright between the dull slats of the shutters.

In the absence of my host, I directed my eyes to the treasures of his house and made them my own. But there was something I had not yet seen, somehow I felt this. Then again, I was sent to spy and so everything around me appeared suspicious. Can you see now what I failed to see then? Can you see it coming into focus through my eyes? Can you peek into those cobwebbed corners or scan the titles of those tilting books? Yes; but can you now, in the maddest dream of your lives, peer into places that have no corners and bear no names? This is what I tried to do: to see beyond the ghoulish remnants of the Van Livenns; to see beyond the haunted stage upon which I had made my entrance. And so I had to turn corners inside-out with my eyes and to read the third side of a book's page, seeking in futility to gaze at what I could then touch with none of my senses. It remained something shapeless and nameless, dampish and submerged, something swampy and abysmal which opposed the pure cold of the autumn storm outside.

When my host returned, he carried with him a dusty green bottle and a sparkling glass, both of which he set upon that little table between our chairs. I took up the bottle and it felt warm in my hand. Expecting some thickish dark liquid to gush from the bottle's neck, I was surprised to see only the purest liquid flowing into the glass. I drank and for a few moments was removed to a world of frozen light that lived within the cool and limpid water.

In the meantime, the blank-faced man had placed something else upon the table. It was a small music box made of some dark wood which looked as if it had the hardness of a jewel and was florid with strange designs that were at once distinct and impossible to focalize. “I found this while rummaging about this place,” the stranger said. Then slowly he drew back the cover of the box and sat back in his chair. I held both hands around that cold glass and listened to the still colder music. The crisp little notes that arose from the box were like stars of sound coming out in the twilight shadows and silence of the house. The storm had ended, leaving the world outside muffled by wetness. Within those closed rooms, which might now have been transported to the brink of a chasm or deep inside the earth, the music glimmered like infinitesimal flakes of light in that barren décor of dead days. Neither of us appeared to be breathing, and even the shadows behind our chairs were charmed with enchanted immobility. Everything held for a moment to allow the wandering music from the box to pass on toward some sublimely terrible destination. I tried to follow it—through the yellowish haze of the room and deep into the darkness that pressed against the walls, and then deeper into the darkness between the walls, then through the walls and into the unbordered spaces where those silvery tones ascended and quivered like a swarm of insects. There was still beauty in this vision, however tinged it was with the sinister. Even at that point I felt I could lose myself in the vastness spreading about me, a tenebrous expanse rich with unknown exploits. But then something began stirring, irrupting like a disease, poking its horribly colored head through the cool blackness . . . and chasing me back to my body.

“So what did you think? It was getting bad toward the end, wasn't it? I closed the box before it got worse. Would you say I was correct in my action?”

“Yes,” I said, my voice trembling.

“I could see it on your face. My purpose wasn't to harm you. I just wanted to show you something—to give you a glimpse.”

I drank the rest of the water, then set the glass I was still holding on the table. Settling down a bit, I said, “And what was it that you showed me?”

“The madness of things,” he said. And he pronounced these words calmly, precisely, while staring into my eyes to see how I would react.

Of course, I had to hear more. After all, that was why I was there, was it not? Can you hear me in your dreams, my friends?

“The madness of things,” I reiterated, trying to draw more from him. “I'm afraid I don't understand.”

“Nor do I. But that is all I can say about it. Those are the only words I can use. The only ones that apply. Once I delighted in them. As a young student in philosophy I used to say to myself, ‘I am going to learn the madness of things.' This was something I felt I needed to know—that I needed to
confront
. If I could face the madness of things, I thought, then I would have nothing more to fear. I could live in the universe without feeling I was coming apart, without feeling I would explode with the madness of things that to my mind formed the very foundation of existence. I wanted to tear off the veil and see things as they are, not to blind myself to them.”

“And did you succeed?” I asked, not caring in the least if I were listening to a lunatic, so fascinated was I by what he had to say. Though I could hardly grasp his words, I knew there was something in them that was not alien to me, and for some moments I was distracted by their implications. For who among us has not experienced something that could be called
the madness of things?
Even if we do not use those exact words, we must at sometime in our lives have had a sense of their meaning. We must have touched, or been touched, by that derangement which the stranger thought to be the foundation of existence. If nothing else, my good people, we have all known the fate of the Van Livenns. It would not be unusual if we pondered in the solitude of our minds what we call their “tragedy” and wondered at this world of ours.

“Succeeded?” said the stranger, bringing me back to myself. “Oh, yes. Only too well I would say. I succeeded in tearing myself loose from all my fears, and even from the world itself. Now I am a vagabond of the universe, a drifter among spaces where the madness of things has no limits. One day, after years of study and practice, I gave myself over to whatever awaited me. But I cannot say where I go or why I go there. Everything is so much chaos in my existence. Somehow, though, I always come back to this world, as if I were some creature that returns on occasion to its home ground. These places at which I arrive seem to draw me to them, as if they have been prepared, even invaded before me. For there are always things, little items, that are just what I would expect. That music box, for instance. I looked around until I found something of that sort. By its designs I could see it had been
touched
by the madness of things, and so could you, I noticed. What havoc it must have caused for those unready for such phenomena. What happened in this house? I can only wonder.”

And so the tragedy of the Van Livenns was illuminated. Which of them had come across the music box where it must have lain hidden for who knows how long? Over time, they must have all become its victims. The condition of the house and its grounds—that was the first sign. And then the shouting we began to hear from inside that made us stay away. What did it all mean? It was almost a year before there were no longer any sounds or any movement behind the shutters of the house. Soon after, the five bodies were found, some of them dead longer than others. None of them whole. All of them savaged beyond what was human. We wanted to think it was a stranger, but could not do so for long. Not after an inspection was conducted, and the conclusion drawn that they had gone after one another over at least a month's time. They said that old man Van Livenn must have been the last of them. His body was a mess of hacked pieces, but he must have done it himself, judging by the axe that was still gripped in his dead hand.

“Excuse me,” said the stranger, once again arousing me from a state of distraction. He was now standing by the shuttered window, peering through a row of slats he had pulled open. With a slow movement of his hand, he beckoned me to join him, surreptitiously it seemed. “Look. Can you see them?”