Chapter 40: Day 39

Day 39,

The Catacomb nightmares were… bad… last night.  It was even darker than normal; just enough eerily unsourced light to guess at suggestions of surfaces if I strained my eyes and concentrated to the point of pain.  I was constantly bumping into walls and low-hanging arches and outcropped grave markers; tripping and falling on uneven sections of floor or scattered pottery until I was forced to give up and crawl.  And through it all, on top of the sense of being lost and trapped from the last two such nightmares was the knowledge that someone or something else was here with me and that I had to keep moving because of it.  Whether I was terrified of losing it or terrified of it finding me I can’t say after waking, only that the terror was mixed with anger, frustration, and tears from the agonizingly slow pace I was forced into.

In the end, it was hunger and thirst that finally woke me.  And yet when I woke, despite being in a bed I was still in a near-lightless stone-walled space and for a moment I despaired that I was still in the Catacomb Depths after waking.  I began flailing, tangling myself in my sheets as I groped for the nearby diffuse glow and knocked the lantern crystal from my bedside table.  As the crystal lost its heavy cloth covering and tumbled to the floor I found myself in the windowless archive bedroom, made strange by the underlighting casting shadows at unusual angles.  Shaking, I disentangled myself from the bedsheets and stumbled over to uncover the room’s other lights.

I realized now that I was hyperventilating and made a partially successful attempt to slow and calm my breathing before opening the door to the rest of the archive.  I found myself pacing back and forth, compulsively touching things to reassure myself that I was awake now.  Even with the conscious knowledge that I was fine, unharmed, and safe I recognized that I was having a panic attack and just needed to calm down, but the knowledge that I was panicking simply fed itself into an irrational loop of panicking about panicking.  Fear of being so afraid that I might pass out and hurt myself for real.  I kept going back and forth between trying to dress myself, eating something, and getting myself to step outside for fresh air and sun, but as soon as I started to make progress towards one thing I’d be beset by the idea that one of the others was more urgent and I was making the wrong choice so I’d abandon it and switch, only to repeat the cycle and come back to the original course of action.  It didn’t help that my throat was so tight I felt that I would choke every time I tried to swallow something.  I tried to write in this journal as I often do to calm myself before bed but couldn’t find any coherent thoughts to put to words and only wound up thinking about my symbol comprehension issue.

I can’t say how long I spent trying to get myself together vs how long I simply slept in, but the sun was at its noontime height by the time I finally got myself out onto the cobblestone street in a semblance of functional lucidity.  As I made my way out of the Village people greeted me as I passed by as if it were any other day.  I kept asking myself why none of them were trying to help me.  Couldn’t they see that I was distressed?  Barely holding myself together?  But of course, I was holding myself together now.  Forcing that panic down to keep it from showing or controlling me even while it stayed on the edge of my mind.  And if I seemed a bit distracted to onlookers, well, that was normal for the strange, absent-minded Archivist, now wasn’t it?

Once I reached Siren Overlook I took a seat on one of the pillar stumps and let the song wash over me.  With the intent of avoiding a repeat of the last time I was here, it was my hope that sitting on hard stone I’d be less likely to fall asleep than lying on soft grass.  Whether magic, placebo, or just normal soothing music, the listening to the song really did help to relax the nervous tension that had been in my muscles since before waking and lull that pulling sensation at the edge of my consciousness.  It’s amazing how good it feels to be able to let your mind drift without constantly getting caught on obsessive thoughts, and so easy to take for granted.  Looking back, I can’t help but wonder about possibly dangers of dependency or even addition to self-medicating mental health with otherworldly music, but in the moment I could only be thankful for relief from the ravages of my own thoughts (or the thoughts inflicted upon me by the mists and Catacombs if we choose to believe that).

As I sat there in peaceful contemplation looking down over the Village, I almost didn’t hear Lin arrive.

As I turned to see who was approaching she was already starting to turn around to leave.  When she realized I’d seen her she started stammering an apology for bothering me, but I told her it was fine and patted the empty space on the pillar next to me.  She gave a one word “Thanks” as a reply and took a seat with her back to mine.

We sat in silence like that for a while until I heard a quiet sniffling behind me and realized that Lin was crying.  I turned around, thinking I should do something to comfort her, yet finding myself unable to initiate physical contact or form words that didn’t sound insincere or condescending to my own mind.  So instead I simply asked if she wanted to talk about it.

She said no.  Then she said yes.  Then she said she wasn’t sure how.

I said that was fine, and that I’d be here if she figures it out.

A few minutes later the sound of tears ceased and I felt a weight against my back as she was now leaning back on me.

I asked if she was feeling better.

She said she was, a little.

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I shifted my posture until we reached an equilibrium of back-to-back resting support.

That’s how we were when we heard a sneeze and looked up to see a somewhat abashed Vernon, out of uniform for once, apologizing for interrupting and saying he’d be on his way.  We chuckled and offered him a seat on our stone stump.  He accepted.

It was Vernon who broke the silence several minutes later, venting about how he feared that he’d handled the situation with the brothers poorly and that it was his fault their father died without his family nearby.  That if he’d been more decisive maybe things could have been resolved sooner.  And what if the brothers started resenting one another for how things played out?  His job was to help resolve conflicts, but what if he’d just transformed it into a worse one?

Lin spoke up at this, telling him not to blame himself.  That he couldn’t have predicted how things would turn out and he certainly isn’t responsible for other people’s feelings or behavior.  And besides, at the end, Bartolome wasn’t even aware of who was or wasn’t there, and hadn’t really been for weeks.  She would know, she was there.  She’d watched for months (alongside her father) as the old man grew less and less lucid and his sons became more and more distant.  She was the one who had more and more become the man’s primary caregiver, keeping him comfortable, administering food, water, and medicine, and changing his sheets as his sons grew unable to bear the sight of a father who didn’t recognize them and her own father shifted his attention to other patients with sniffles, and headaches, and cuts that could be made better.  She was the one who was acting upbeat every day for a sleepy old man who probably didn’t even notice.  She was the one who couldn’t even get angry at the brothers for not wanting to see their father like that after having had to do so daily herself.  She was the one who didn’t even have a day to process how she felt about it all because she’d had to ready the body for a funeral, and then attend the funeral, and then spend the mist night wondering what it’d be like when her own father got that old and if he would keep his mind to the end or not, and then got woken up at the crack of dawn to knocking on the door because the doctor and his assistant were needed to deliver a baby, and even though it’s normal for births to shortly follow funerals it’s not normally that soon after, and so she’d spent the morning dealing with all the pain and blood and everything that goes along with childbirth and how that to her always overshadowed how happy the parents might be holding their child afterward and how she was terrified of ever having to go through that herself but her parents wanted her to find a husband and have kids and she didn’t want to disappoint them and everyone else her age had already done so and were happy but she wasn’t even sure even wanted any of that and… and she finally ran out of breath and energy to keep speaking.

Neither Vernon nor myself knew what to say to all that.  I ended up with a simple, understated acknowledgement that that was rough.

Lin started apologizing for ranting and burdening us with her problems like that.  We started reassuring her that it was fine.  She thanked us.

Then she turned to me and half-jokingly said that now that she and Vernon had shared why they came up here today it was my turn.

I gave a forced laugh and said that it wasn’t anything nearly so personal; that I just get bad nightmares about being trapped in the Catacomb Depths every mist night, and that according to Pat that’s a fairly common thing for outsiders.  Lin mentioned that the old archivist never said anything about having to deal with that, but maybe it’s just a “most, not all outsiders” thing, or maybe he was just good at coping and covering it up.

I feel kind of bad for not mentioning the other part of what had been bothering me lately, but in the moment there, feeling better and having just listened to them share their personal troubles, the idea that all this – even them – might not be real just felt absurd and self-centered to the point I could barely imagine how it had ever bothered me.

Eventually, we shifted on to lighter topics and started making our way back to the Village where we went our separate ways again.  Feeling better but not up to going back to the library today, I went on back to the house where I’m writing all this now.

The nature sprite had been busy in my absence the past several days and rearranged all the furniture and swapped around the contents of all the drawers and cabinets.  I’m sure over the next few days I’ll find this annoying, but at the time I couldn’t help but laugh at the absurdity of it.  After the past couple of days, being literally haunted by a mischievous spirit is a surprisingly refreshing change of pace.  Then again, the bathtub was also full of crabs (thankfully smaller than the last one brought into the house), so that was less fun to deal with.

There were also some fruit and strips of dried/preserved meat on the kitchen table.  I figured it was 50/50 either a prank from the nature sprite to taste bad and/or make me ill or a thank you gift from Maiko for letting her use the house on the mist night.  In my current mood I was willing to take those odds, and I’m not sick yet, so I’m guessing I have Maiko to thank for tonight’s dinner.

But still, I’m tired, I’ve been writing for a while now, and I think I’m due for an early(ish) bedtime.

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