SSCS 03: Installment 32 of 35
Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About
This is Installment 32 of this year’s SSCS. If you want to start at the beginning of ‘Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About’, go here! If you want to know what the heck an SSCS is, go here!
Previously…
The water was grey, opaque with silt, and the smog smudged the distance across it, so that I knew I stood on the edge of the world. But the bricks beneath my feet were white. And banyan trees climbed a crumbled wall only the distance of half-a-block away, a stretch of still, grey water between us. The old Palace. Half its walls were fallen down, but those still standing were white and blue like a distant memory of sky.
The city shifted, pushed me forward. I began to wade across.
…Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About
Installment 32: 22.0911
Halfway there, I slipped and fell, felt something pulling at my ankles, pulling me under. But then I was sputtering and on my feet again and sure it was just the nearness – the here-ness – of the River that was making me jumpy. If I had been paying attention, I would have noticed that the sky was no longer red or bronze, but the smudged and pale almost-blue of early morning. But all I knew was that I could see my destination more clearly now I was halfway across, the shadows edging each brick and vine crisp and clear.
Beneath my feet, beneath the water, the ground was soft and squishy with mud, and then the steps were, too, as I climbed them up out of the water, onto the dusty, white bricks of the old Palace. Thin roots snaked across the paving stones, twining over themselves and out and down to the water. So I stepped carefully as I crossed to the crumbling wall. At the jagged opening, it was hard to tell if the wall held up the banyan tree or the other way around. Either way, there was nothing stopping me from stepping over, and through.
I was expecting to find a courtyard of some kind. Here, on the edge of the River, with everything crumbled and open, a courtyard or garden of some sort would have fit with a natural state of abandonment. But this had been no courtyard. On the other side of the wall lay a sea of shattered, blue roof tiles. They were piled into odd drifts and heaps, that I eventually realized matched the pattern of where jutting spars and roofbeams would have been, though those had long been rotted away. A fine slick of silt and mud around the edges of the tiles attested to the many floods that must have washed through here since however long it had been since the old Palace had stood whole – had been just the Palace. Had it really been so long ago? I didn’t know. Like the Fish, the old Palace was something we tried to keep out of our thoughts.
Picking my way carefully over the shattered tiles, I crossed to the other side of what had once been a grand room – or ante-room. For, on the other side I looked through a doorway, still standing within a half-standing wall, and looked through to what had once been an even grander room on the other side.
The roof to this place was only half-lost, pools of dark-blue tiles gathered beneath great gaps overhead that let in the pale-blue light of the sky, lighting up the inside and the walls with odd streaks of sunlight and shadows. It made it hard for the eyes to pick out what I was seeing, and at first I thought the walls in here were just as crumbled and flooded as in the first room, rotten and tattered, jumbled.
But then at last I saw past the shadows, and picked out the shapes of the bells. They were lined up all along the walls, each the height of a man and spaced maybe two man-lengths apart, so that together the great room held many dozens. And behind the bells, the walls weren’t tattered and crumbled, but rather covered, nearly as thick as was possible, in a multitude of framed photographs, slightly dusty, perhaps, but otherwise whole. They were partitioned, one set per bell, by narrow drapes of tattered red brocade.
I approached, not the nearest set, but one a little further on, where I had to slip and stumble a bit over broken tiles, but at least the light shone in clear right here so I could see, and at least there was open sky over my head, not rickety roof tiles that may or may not stay aloft. There was enough space between the bell and the wall of photographs so that I could stand in front of any of them comfortably, and worry only about the obscuration of my own shadow.
Portraits were the first, most obvious theme. Most of them were in black-and-white, but not for any obvious reason, as they were all of the same woman who appeared to age very little across the span of the frames. A beautiful woman, expensively clothed, with jeweled pins sparkling from her hair. Her expressions ranged from shy to determined to serene, and for an odd moment of vertigo I felt sure I’d seen some of these portraits before – not lovingly framed in gilt and mahogany, perhaps – perhaps in a different jumble, magazines on a waiting-room table. But I couldn’t really remember. All I had were these. There were a few group portraits included also – or fragments of group portraits – reframed to focus on her. Ceremonial things. Testaments to a very formal life.
I looked over to the next section of photographs along the wall, the next bell, and could see the mix was similar, but this time was many portraits of a mostly older man. And beyond that another, a young man? Many dozens of bells. Many dozens of memorials. But why in a room so large and public and…uniform? If these were memorials, it was as though all of these people – royals and court attendants, perhaps? based on the uniform richness of their dress – had all died on the same day. And so this was a memorial to something more than just them.
Turning back to the first photograph I’d looked at, the young woman sitting attentive on a brocade couch, hair glittering, I saw a reflection or a shadow of something else pass across the glass. Something tawny, with eyes like distant moons. It had moved away to the left, and though it should have frightened me, all I felt upon seeing it was a sudden calm. The answers would be here, if I looked long enough.
So I followed after in its wake.