Chapter 204: Day 203

Day 203,

Morning thought: I’d half expected Lin to show up yesterday at Siren Overlook given how the aftermath of the previous funeral went.  Then again, I suppose she is on standby waiting for a baby to be born now.  Maybe this funeral didn’t get to her as badly as the last one either.  More time between the death and funeral to process and the service itself seemed less melancholy.  It’s a nice thought anyway.  

 

It occurred to me earlier that one of the agreed upon telling dates was “the next market day after the funeral,” which would be today.  I wound up spending all day preparing for and fretting over that and will be heading out shortly.  Made for a convenient excuse to put off talking to Pat.

It’s not that I don’t like talking to him, it’s the particular subject matter I’m avoiding.

 

Back at the archive.  Spending the night here again.  I hope Maiko’s not wondering where I’ve been the past couple nights.  Got too deep into the restoration work to distract myself yesterday and wound up losing track of time until late in the evening.

It’s late again and I’m tired so I’ll keep the recounting of this evening’s work brief.

The request was another case of friends from the outskirts meeting up in town on market day and wanting entertainment for the evening.  Something exciting, but fine if they’ve heard it before.  I took the latter as permission to pull something from the archive instead of memory.  

I settled on one that I found to stir echoes of familiarity for me as well.  The tale of a man who met Death while out hunting.  Death asked the man to impersonate him and venture into the land of the dead to do battle in his stead with another land’s crueler, more vicious Death who was intent on deposing the just Death the man knew.

All in all, I think the night went relatively well.  The common room of the inn was our venue, which meant a slightly larger audience than expected, but I held up alright despite that.  Cass accompanied me.  For now at least, she is still the Archivist’s apprentice and if that may change soon I’d like to see that she still gets what experience she can before it does.  And the format of having a second speaker is still a novelty for the people here.  Changes it from the traditional storytelling to something a step closer to play, which they don’t seem to have here.  That hadn’t really occurred to me before now, but now that it has it doesn’t stop feeling strange.

As well received as we were, I must confess, to this journal if nowhere else, that the two of us were essentially improvising by the end of the telling.  Not that I hadn’t done that before or that there isn’t always an element of that to this format of storytelling to begin with, but this was more a matter of us realizing halfway through that we hadn’t memorized the story as well as we’d thought and making some parts up wholecloth.  We had a good laugh about it while I walked her back to Norman and Marva’s at the end of the night, but it’s a reminder that I really need to stop forgetting about these engagements until the day of.

 

After enough laying in bed unable to sleep, I finally got up to write more.

So, the nightmare of the Catacomb Depths from the night before last.

The key thing to remember about the Catacombs nightmares, and one that’s easy to forget or hard to grasp if you haven’t had one, or at least haven’t had one in a long time, is their horrid vividness.  They say all dreams feel real while you are in them, but there’s still always a certain vagueness to our perceptions during them and we can usually clearly distinguish upon waking.  With these, the experience is virtually indistinguishable from waking perception and the memory remains as clear and sharp upon waking as if it had actually happened.  Less like sleeping and waking and more like being transported while remaining awake the whole time.  Or perhaps briefly falling asleep in one place and waking in another.

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The last one I’d had before this - the last one I actually slept for at any rate -  I’d fallen a very, very long way and, owing to dream logic and/or the properties of that chthonic realm of the dead, somehow survived despite the impact doing what one would otherwise expect, leaving me to crawl on broken limbs and shattered ribs.  As I’d glimpsed in my episodes from staying awake through the next mist night, my body in that place had since healed, but not entirely well.  I’d gotten an impression of twisted, crooked limbs and stiff joints, but this time I lived it.  Bones not set properly will heal back crooked.  Bad enough when just an arm or a finger, but now imagine that applied all over.  One elbow refusing to bend more than a few degrees.  The other arm unnaturally curved.  Fingers getting in one another’s way when trying to grasp.  A hunched back.  A limp from uneven legs.  Pain when breathing too deeply.

This was the body I inhabited throughout the night and into the morning.

Now, imagine an endless series of tunnels, rarely wide enough to fit two people side by side without squeezing and sometimes not even that wide.  Sometimes they’ll be roughly carved into dirt or raw stone, the footing uneven, with the occasional wooden beam to provide both structural stability and a tripping hazard.  Other times it will be worked masonry, maybe barren and geometric, maybe intricately and gothically carved, the tile flooring flat and smooth, slick even, up until you stop paying attention and stub your toe on a loose tile sticking up.  Whatever the case, the walls are indented floor to ceiling with alcoves for coffins, caskets, sarcophagi, urns.  Any container to hold the dead one might imagine, in numbers that would contain the entire Village in less than an hour of walking.  Sometimes they’re further back in, sometimes they’ll be sticking out enough to bump into.  Occasionally, you’ll emerge onto a bridge, usually sturdy and well intact, but it may or may not have any semblance of guard rails.

And normally this would all be illuminated by a dim, sourceless light, enough to see where you’re going, but not quite so much that turns and stairs and ramps don’t regularly catch you by surprise.  On funerary nights, this visibility decreases to inches, sometimes feet if you’re lucky.

This is the place I find myself every mist night.

Hanging over all of this is the compulsion to keep moving.  For all that the rest of your mind and senses stay intact and aware, even aware enough to consciously recognize the nightmare for what it is, this urge to locomotion cannot be resisted.  On most nights you’ll rationalize it.  Searching for a way out, most commonly, especially if you’re new to the dreams.  Perhaps you’ll tell yourself you wish to explore, see if there’s anything other than tunnels here; other people, rooms, structures, something.  Maybe you’ll actively try to go deeper, thinking to find answers at the nadir of the underworld.  Eventually you may come to not even attach a reason to it, simply noticing that you’ve started walking without realizing it.  Whatever the case, you are always alone, unless perhaps you’re lucky enough to have a certain artifact watching over you.

Except on funerary nights.  The night of Bartolome’s funeral I had the intense sense that there was something else down there with me.  I couldn’t tell if I was trying to find it in time or flee from it, but it added a fearful layer of urgency and danger to my wanderings that I’ve not felt before or since.  Until the night before last.  Perhaps it was because I was much deeper now but this time there was no doubt that the other was something to stay well away from and that while it was far for now, it was coming closer.

This is the state my mind was in.

When I first came to in that place this most recent time, the first thing I noticed was that I was sore all over.  Not the broken agony of the night of the fall, but markedly uncomfortable.  A dull ache of every joint and malunioned fracture.  The next thing I noticed was how much darker it was than normal.  I acquainted myself with my deformity more by touch than sight.  No sooner had I done that then I felt the distant approach of the other.  I still had the loving watchfulness of the blanket (or whatever impression of consciousness or spirit it may carry) to balance the feeling out, so at first I did not fear.  Merely knew that it was time to start moving, and maybe even a general direction for once.  Away.

Of course, once I got moving all those aches began to throb in protest, and my speed was hampered by the dark.  Even feeling my way along I was bumping into things and losing my footing, with each impact causing those existing wounds, those scars on my flesh and bones, to flare up.  

And yet, that thing was getting closer.  I had to push myself.  Had to go faster.  Tried to run.  Didn’t last long.  Lungs burned, back and legs shot through with pain.  Hit a wall.  Fell.  A flash of memory of the other fall.  Force myself up.  Try again.  Same result.  How fast can I limp?  Pull myself along the wall, don’t just feel my way.  Cry.  More from the frustration than the pain.  Want to, need to, go faster, move better.  But I can’t.  It keeps going.  How long?  Who knows.  Loving watcher is gone.  When did that happen?  All those dull aches keep growing.  Not so dull anymore.  Measure the time by the change in the sharpness of the pain.  Wall’s gone.  A sharp turn?  No.  Worse.  A bridge.  Remember last time.  Remember last time.  Remember last time.  Remember last time.  Down to hands and knees.  They hate it.  Protest with knives.  Threaten to break themselves again.  Find the center.  Keep crawling.  Don’t fall again.  Don’t fall again.  Don’t fall again.  Don’t fall again.  Don’t fall again.  Don’t fall again.  Don’t fall again.  Don’t fall again.  Don’t fall again.  Don’t fall again.  Floor feels different.  On the other side.  Stand up again.  Can’t.  Find the wall.  Drag my way upright.  It’s closer.  Gaining.  Try running again.  Fall again.  How fast can I drag myself.  Can’t track the time anymore.  Pain’s plateaued.  That isn’t a good thing.  Closer.  Run.  Fall.  Repeat.  It’s slow, but I’m slower.  Run fall repeat.  Runfallrepeat.  Hurting myself more.  Don’t care.  Need to get away.  Need to keep moving.  Whatever I do to myself can’t be as bad as after the fall.  Can’t be as bad as staying put.

And so on until I awoke.

If there’s a silver lining, it’s that I haven’t had an episode these past two days.

 

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