“What did you do the first time?”
“I looked at the rocks. I spent the night. I don’t know, I was hoping Dad’s ghost would show up.”
Max walked faster. Nathan tried to find his cool voice, the neutral tone he used as TA. “So what do you think happened to your father?”
“You know. He slept. That which is not dead . . . he dreamed.”
“‘What dreams may come,’ eh?” asked Nathan. He didn’t know what to say; he had never spent any time with a
bona fide
crazy person.
“Just like Dr. Perualt said. Dreams in which time is accelerated. The sleeper spends a few years in sleep in regard to the outside world, but lives tens, hundreds of years.”
Nathan stared at the trees, the black ridges of stone. He had no place to run to. Max unbuttoned his jacket as he walked. The trees were larger, thicker, older.
Then a loud scraping/striking sound echoed through the silence. “What the fuck?” asked Nathan.
Max said calmly, “They’ve started the game.” He nonchalantly took the pistol from his shoulder holster. “You’ve figured it out by now. You’re the deer.”
“You’re going to kill me?”
“Only if you were so stupid as to run. Of course I wanted to run; I didn’t know I was being dragged to Heaven. You sure won’t think it’s Heaven for the first few hundred years, though.’ Max laughed, then continued, “I am paying my way into another dream-round. You will dream for them. Once you have you’ll do what I’m doing, unless the world ends while you sleep.”
Max started to say something about waking up, but the scraping sound boomed again. The gray clouds seemed to darken.
“This is for real,” said Nathan.
“This is for real,” agreed Max.
“How old are you, really?”
“I’m sixty-five. You don’t age much while you sleep. I look as bad as I do because of how they treated me at the Capital District Psychiatric Center in Albany. They get an aphasic like me every ten years or so—always found on the same stretch of highway in the Catskills. They shock us until we start talking, then flood us with anti-psychotics. Then when we’re all human and shit let us go.”
“Is this some cult thing?”
“It’s me escaping to Witch Mountain. I am buying back in. My body will die under the Sleep this time. I’m lucky, most of them stay locked up. My dad still ran his diner, I convinced him I was a long-lost nephew.”
“I suppose if I gave you the ‘You don’t have to do this’ speech, it wouldn’t work?”
Max just gestured with the pistol. Nathan had a flash that he was not the first deer, just the one that might be curious enough and chickenshit enough
not
to run.
Max said, “I’ll need you to step in front of me now. The last couple of hundred yards is steep. Watch your footing, we’ll be going down into the pit. There’s loose gravel, mixed with snow. I fell a lot the first time.”
Max’s words proved true. They were descending shortly into a vast amphitheater of basalt maybe a hundred yards in diameter. It seemed to hold night in its center, as though darkness were a liquid. Nathan could see a score of pale gray figures dancing among tall stones. He couldn’t study the scene except by short glances; mainly he watched his footing. Max prodded his back with a drawn gun from time to time.
Max asked, “Can you imagine my life? The day Perault led me down here, the biggest thing in my life was the fucking Beatles. I dreamed down here for thirty years. Poor young Max missed Woodstock—just a few months later and twenty-five miles away. When I awoke it was 1999. I couldn’t talk for months. I stumbled out of here when I figured out what I had to do. A truck picked me up on the highway. I had seen such things, couldn’t relate to my fellow humans for two fucking years. When I tried to tell them, they gave me electroshock. So I forgot enough that I just became human again—and I learned to shut up. Remember that you’ll need to. You will have seen such things that you won’t be able to talk.”
“What did you dream of?”
“I lived. It wasn’t a fucking dream; they sent my psyche elsewhere. They throw us into worlds and things like worlds—and they eat something we make—or maybe the stones do. I’ve seen polychromatic waterfalls of flame on worlds far from any sun. I’ve heard debates between philosophers with three mouths and no eyes about the worms that eat time. I’ve eaten thick music in a decade-long orgy under the sub-crypt of a temple built on a comet. Hundreds of scenes there are no words for. I’m not a poet; I don’t have the words. Fear? Ecstasy? Shit, man, what you will have will make those words sound lukewarm and mildly chilly.”
Then two of the stones struck each other, throwing sparks at least twelve feet on either side. It was so loud that Nathan was deafened. For minutes all he could hear was an aching whistle in his ears. Nathan didn’t realize that Max was still talking until Max poked with him with the gun barrel again. Nathan looked back at him. Max was probably shouting, overcome by the need to share his experience with another human. Nathan stumbled—sliding ten, maybe fifteen feet before falling onto the loose gravel. He half crawled, half fell on into the valley. The rocks cut his hands. He was very aware of the smell of his blood as well as the smell of sparks. His coat was wet and dirty. As he managed to stand and look up at Max, he could make out some of the words of the shouter in the darkness.
“ . . . more dreamers . . . in those days only one or two humans at a time . . . humans better . . . semi-rotten nourishment . . . speeds up human history for the One . . . nightmare wine . . . blood dance in the court of the Thousand Moons . . . I saw Him who . . . the Mao games . . . the labyrinth of laughter . . . the things in the rings of the twelfth planet . . .”
Nathan looked at the stones. Tall, thin, and sickly yellow—they looked like coral. Maybe they were life forms. They would suddenly move to smash one of the tiny dancers between them, illuminating the amphitheater with sparks. The dancers stood less than three feet tall; vaguely insectlike, they danced on their hind legs. Some held jugs in their middle legs. Where their heads should be were masses of white feelers that could have been mistaken for long white beards. Some of them bore triple rows of nipples from which dribbled a wine-colored sap that was gathered into jugs. Some naked humans, male and female, danced among them. Max struck his face with the gun, then kicked him on the back of his legs, forcing him to kneel. The dancers swarmed over to him very quickly. Their insect motion and blinding speed made him feel nauseous, and their
smell . . .
The swarmed up him. Their tiny pincers grabbed his hair; others grabbed and pinched his lips and pulled them downward.
They forced his mouth open. The drink was thick, sweet, and metallic. They poured maybe two ounces in him. Nathan tried to throw up, to no avail. Their pincers cut into his neck; he could feel his hot blood running down his spine, though it felt good compared to the cold New York air. He thought of his mother and father and Texas sunsets.
Two rock columns smashed together a few feet from him, and regrettably he saw the faces of the dancers underneath their feelers. Before he could scream the drug knocked him out.
And for what he saw then, there are no words. He was not a poet.
(
For Simon Strantzas
)
Powers of Air and Darkness
Being a waiter on R 418
Balmoral
was Ernest MacVeigh’s dream job. As a young boy in Kansas he was captivated by the Phantom Airship stories. For two years humans all over the globe reported encounters with mysterious airships. Like many young men and women, he dreamed that he too would be taken on a ride with the strange airmen. The stories had inspired dime novels, stage plays, and finally the invention of real airships. The skies were filled with Mr. Wells’s invention—great silvery cylinders that challenged the blue skies or cast wonderful shadows against the full moon. Ernest’s older brother was a captain of the R 118
Empress Victoria
that had gone down in Benares. It had been the last of the hydrogen ships. There was great irony in its holocaust—its flaming debris raining down on the vast open-air crematoria that fill the holy city of Benares. Brother John’s ashes mixed with the stink of the city and the sacred water of the Ganges.
John had been the smart one. Top in his class at the University of Kansas. He had excelled in mathematics and astronomy. He believed the airships were mankind’s first step toward leaving the Earth. Ernest was the dreamer. Instead of doing well at school, he had pored over the romance of Mr. Poe, the “scientific” tales of Mr. Twain, and Charles Dickens’s
Eben Mizer on the Moon.
When his brother wrote one of the first serious studies of Roentgen’s X-rays, Ernest was reading the uncritical accounts of how X-rays could do anything from curing blindness to reanimating the dead. The day brother John submitted his patent for an improved sextant, Ernest had joined the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor—a mail-order occult group. John was tall, blond, and well built. Ernest had dark brown hair and brown eyes set too far apart. John attracted ladies, Ernest attracted fellow fanatics and enthusiasts. John had been drawn to commercial air travel because he wanted to be part of the modernizing of the world. Ernest wanted to be nearer to air elementals. John believed the world was ruled by reason; Ernest believed the world was ruled a vast conspiracy run either by Jews, communists, or demons (assuming these
were
different groups).
The
Balmoral
flew around the world every two weeks. Paris, Chicago, Victoria, Tokyo, Peking, Moscow, Paris. A heady mix for a young man from Overland Park. Ernest had spent time in each of these cities. He had hoped for love and for adventure. Only at the very end did he receive the latter.
The letters from John had reached him in Victoria, British Columbia. With some irony they had been chasing him around the globe for nearly two years, and the five envelopes were almost black with grime. The first three letters were commonplace. John described Rome, Tehran, Benares, Barcelona, Mexico City, Honolulu. He told of romance and fine dining. The last two letters were of a different sort. Ernest wondered if they had been meant as a joke, but John was not really the joking sort. He genuinely cared for younger brother, as much as he sometimes taunted him for uncritical thinking.
John MacVeigh
Royal Victiora
British Air Mail Service
September 18, 1894
Dear Ernest,
My brother, I had never supposed that I would write you about such matters. Do you remember as a child when we first heard of airships? You were a true believer. You thought the story of the Dallas airship that kidnapped a steer from a rancher’s field was gospel truth. Remember how you couldn’t sleep for weeks? I have come to wonder if there might be something to those stories. Months ago in Cairo, I spent an evening with a renowned Egyptologist, Wallis Budge, who told me that during certain dynasties Egyptians believed that they were dealing with beings that lived in the clouds. These creatures were not gods or demons
per se,
although they were in league with the darker gods of their pantheon, Set and Nyarlathotep. “Hotep” is an EgyptiAn word meaning “satisfied” and “Nyarla” means “dark churning.” The name itself means “He Who Is Pleased by Stirring Up the Dark”—or perhaps “the Silence.” It was an interesting discussion, and I wished you had been there as mythology is more your hobby-horse than my own. But at the end of the evening Mr. Budge mentioned that the cloud beings were invisible unless viewed with certain special lenses. Now Mr. Budge had no way of knowing this (and I am
risking my job
telling you), but all the British Dirigible Company’s dirigibles carry a special optical device that can only be taken from its special case by very high-ranking company officials, even I lack the clearance to use these glasses. The rumor has been that the German or Russian dirigibles have been treated with a special paint that renders them invisible—and that this news is being kept from the general public to avoid mass hysteria. The special glasses unpolarize the light and reveal the ships.
I did not rush to correlate these facts, but I found that I could not stop thinking about the glasses. They rest in a small chest in the captain’s office, I’m sure the
Balmoral
has a pair. I am writing to you so that you may have a record of my discoveries and (in the event something should happen to me) let the world know. Making a long story short, I arranged to buy some lock-picking tools from a criminal in Barcelona. He was a jewel thief who plied his trade on the
Victoria.
The ship’s detective was never able to catch him, and I had invited him to the captain’s table several times because I admired his incorrigible nature. He explained the use of the tools. Since I had the opportunity to spend several hours alone with the case, opening it proved no problem. The glasses were simple goggle-looking affairs in no way remarkable. I took to wearing them anytime I could be unobserved. I saw nothing of interest for nearly nine weeks. Then while passing over the Himalayas I spotted several
flying
creatures one night entering a saucer-shaped platform. I will not describe the nightmare city, save to say that I have come to believe that there are certain
shapes
and
colors
that humans cannot look upon without damaging their neural tissues. I nearly screamed in fear and pain. I removed the special glasses. The creatures, which resembled a sort of flying crayfish, were not invisible, but their platform could only be seen with the glasses. I realize that the Royal Air Force is not hiding the truth about Germany or Russia, but about the state of the world. I replaced the glasses in their case. I wrote a letter to Mr. Budge asking about the sources of the cloud-people legend—wondering if that was the remotest of coincidences or if perhaps this planet has been occupied for thousands of years. I remember your quoting of Fort that humans are property. I do not fear for my life; I doubt the powers that be would be able to keep this secret much longer—and how could they (whoever “they” would be) know that I happened upon this secret? I wonder if the Russians or Germans know. I wonder what these creatures are and what they want.