SSCS 03: Installment 33 of 35
Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About
This is Installment 33 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…
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.
…Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About
Installment 33: 22.1105
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Much, much later, after this is all over, after we’ve stepped out of the Dreaming at last and have had a chance to start to fumble our way back toward the lives we are supposed to lead, I try to tell Jack what it was I saw in that Memorial Hall. I say:
It was like the photographs were leading me.
I say:
It was like their eyes looking out at me were shouting, were trying to tell me what had happened, and the more I looked, the more I could start to hear them.
They were all just photographs, of course, voiceless, flashes of static from the past, before their tragedy. And there was no context other than that, nowhere in that half-shattered Hall that stated why they were mourned – which of course, ultimately, was part of the problem. But the lions, or ghosts of lions. or…well. They had entered the old Palace with me, and something about the prowling flashes of their presence coaxed more than dead images from the photographs’ mouths.
I don’t tell Jack about the lions, though; they scare him…even though I don’t, somehow? But I tell him everything else. Because he deserves to know the why of what was started, by the New Palace, and he deserves to know the why of what happened to him after – why I almost didn’t save him. I say:
They were all members of the Palace Court, in the Old Palace. Each one of them showed, in at least one photograph somewhere, a gleam in their eye – a hint of a great and wonderful knowing – of great discovery almost at their fingertips. Eventually, after I reached the end of the Hall, I realized that that was the difference, that it was a Memorial not for their Loss, for their Mourning, but for their Noble Sacrifice. That’s why the new Bell I’d been tasked with was being commissioned – to try to appease them, to try to quiet them back down. Because they were angry – and they had every right to be.
And so I work to tell Jack why, what I’d learned (somehow) from all of those staring, shouting eyes. It’s easier now that we’ve come out of the Dreaming. When I was still in it, it was like being a fish – the small kind – and learning that there is this something called ‘water’. I knew I was learning something true, but my mind kept slipping sideways around the edges of it. But there were just enough ceremonial group-photos that I was able to stumble my way back to each of them in turn – crossing through the shadows and shattered sunlight of that Hall – and see the concrete shape of what they had been doing. And their shouting eyes opened enough windows in my own memory that my body began to feel the truth of what had been done.
And then there were the crumbled walls of the old Palace itself, and the River-filled pits where they’d excavated – the ones who’d survived that first attempt. Really, those are all the proof we need.
Jack is more patient than I am, and he doesn’t mind that I’m telling everything all out of order. Though his bones have been shaped into this story already and maybe my words are just waking up the memories like old photographs casting ghostly reflections of lions did for me. But sometime I will need to get it down in order, for whoever might read it and be warned. Maybe then I will say:
They were part of a great experiment, a great quest, and they knew: That they were the generation that would finally achieve it – they would become Immortal. They would be, or at least those at the very top would be – the King, the Princesses, their most esteemed advisors… And others. Depending on how great the spell, maybe truly all of them. This Palace and this Court would reign forever. All in the Court would make it so. And those working in the city’s oldest factory would make it so, working in that crumble-down place that was held together by banyan, and geranium, and hard-won pieces of magic. A great spell was being built, and when it was ready, it would be brought to the Palace on the River to be performed.
The cornerstone of the factory’s spells was the Dreaming. In those days, as again it is now, there were very few who could enter the Dreaming, but when they were found, and when they did, they could see the way to piece the spells together. In this way, the old factory had already wrought many miracles for the Palace before, had built them, and woven them, and infused them in potions. But this spell, this spell would harness the Dreaming itself. When it was cast, the whole city would Dream – just for a moment, just long enough to harvest the power needed to grant their noble rulers that perfect sip of Immortality.
And so, the whole Court gathered to cast the spell. And so, the Dreaming fell upon us all. Were you alive then? Can you remember the net of it? The way our minds all breathed in together, all Dreamed a new Dream together? Probably you cannot. Because who among us wants to remember that nightmare. The nightmare that stayed with us when we woke. Because that Dreaming was powerful, and the factory’s spells at that time had not yet discovered a tenth of how to control it.
We woke, and the great Fish had come to take their place in both the River and the sea – dream of monsters, and they had obligingly appeared. We woke, and too many of our loved ones were suddenly gone – perhaps dead, perhaps just gone – along with fully a third of the Palace Court, gathered to cast a great spell, and then taken away by it. And pieces of the Palace taken too. In place of the outer Palace walls, there were instead the bones of a great and monstrous and magical Fish, half-buried in the bricks and the River mud. Those bones were a price for a price – or so those remaining in the Court saw it – and so they were dug up and taken swiftly back to the Factory. To begin to build the counter-spell. No – to begin to build the spell anew, to try again.
Because it hadn’t worked the first time. Some of the Court had vanished, and some survived. But though the survivors were determined enough to at least test the edges of it, there was not yet any Immortality to be found. The Dreaming had got away from them. But next time would be better. And in the mean time, the third of the court that had been lost in the first attempt were memorialized for their Great Sacrifice.
Walking that Memorial Hall, I knew then that this is how the terrible Fish had come to us, because I could feel the horror and the hole of it in my memories: The way I could barely remember clutching my mother’s hand during a funeral I couldn’t remember anticipating, for a father I only know must once have been alive. The way Nina would look at herself in the mirror sometimes and remember again the feeling of becoming suddenly alone. And the way Jack had learned to live as though walking always beneath a great shadow, nothing he could see, but still a great and terrible misfortune he would be forced to walk into before he’d even realized it had arrived. Because those in the Palace had decided to use our nightmare Fish to further their own ends, rather than fight against them to get our city back.
We’d all been cast into the Dreaming. And even if we refuse to remember them, nightmares have a way of perpetuating themselves.
And, if you’re wondering (though Jack pointedly is not), the lions weren’t part of any of that. It’s just that, where there is tragedy and opportunity, the lions will come. They can see through the Dreaming, and will gather to lick heartily at the bones of whatever else is then on offer. For some reason, when it was my turn to join them, they had already decided that ten years of Dreaming had been enough. They’d feasted on possibilities and now were full. They had decided, now we should see about waking everyone up again.