bottoms dream 3

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“‘…and when I love thee not, Chaos is come again,’” Rose whispered into the darkness.

“That’s Shakespeare, English playwright. You like?” Her voice may have been low soft but her smile was loud, stretched wide to the right side of her face. She grinned at the darkness and its silence, and cupped her hands. “Flamma.” The crypts filled with a low white light.

Briefly she considered the fresh grave, but she had no interest in robbing a man she had respected, although he would make such an easy target. She drummed her fingers on the waiting tomb of the second prince. “Chaos has come…but what will chaos do?”

Raymond had seen the symbol on the wall above his parents’ bed. He had recognized it, but only in the distant recognition of dreams. As in, he knew what it meant, but he could not account for his knowing. An urge also plucked straight from his dreams pulled
him down to the crypts at a run. Royalty never rushes. It was a favourite aphorism of his brothers, but like most flowery things the crown prince said, Raymond doubted it and its sincerity.

Raymond too was royalty, but Raymond would rush through the crypts as though the deceased Castells were in mortal danger – and maybe they were.

His memories of Rose were vague and obscured, but they all pulled him his heart down in a deep melancholic dread. As his footsteps descended into stony tombs, the crypts fell dark and he caught the whisper of “nox” as it trailed up to meet him. The second prince of Castell may not have remembered Rose or the threat she posed, but he remembered one word, which and he threw this word into the darkness.

“Traitor.”

Rose, unresponsive, edged closer in a cascade of light footsteps. Raymond no longer rushed as dread dragged itself through his stomach. But he could not hold back his legs as they responded to her irresistible pull. The dread that she inspired closed his throat and choked him.

“Flamma,” Rose hissed. A shock ran through them as white light filled the crypts: surprise, recognition–, like high school friends cast in opposing roles–except it was nothing like that.

Their heads twitched and they swam up from the deep.

bottoms dream 2

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“’Concern with depth leads us in practice to pay special attention to whatever is below. This has been so since the beginning of psychoanalysis, and its notions of suppression, subconscious, and shadow.’ That was James Hillman. Do you understand?”

“Not really, Doctor, but please go on.”

“Very well. You’ve heard of sensory deprivation tanks I assume? These were thought to transport one into the subconscious mind. Though they are a primitive technology, simply salt water and a blindfold, they really do take subjects somewhere else.

“The problem with this method, however, is that it only offers only entry into the depth of the mind, admission, if you will, but we propose to offer a guided tour.”

“And you think your technology method can accomplish this?”

“Easily. We have located areas of the brain only active during REM, responsible for dreams and only dreams. Stimulating these areas with a mild electric current during sensory deprivation with a mild electric current brings the dreams from their depths. We
can finally access whatever is below.”

“Induced lucid dreaming?”

“In a gross simplification, yes.”

“And you think with this technology you can access the…subconscious?” The doctor picked up his dog-eared paperback again.

“‘Jung considered the fantasy images that run through our daydreams and night dreams, and which are present unconsciously in all our consciousness, to be the primary data of the
psyche.’”

“Hilman again?”

“You catch on fast, Johnson.”

bottoms dream 1

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Raymond knelt in dark torch-lit crypts.

His sword hung gilded and decorative at his side as his parents decorated the room with their own useless and empty words. The king pulled his eyebrows together to deliver his poetic eulogy, the queen pushed sobs through her mouth and tears through her eyes to mimic grief, Adrian, the crown prince, maintained his stoic composure, letting it crack so as to pretend it difficult, but only Raymond, the second prince gave into a deep melancholy like his heart was a stone sinking into his boots.

It would not appear that way, but the second prince was the only member of the royal family whose mourning for the late Prince Henry Castell was sincere. The late prince had been a bitter old man and a quick enemy of the insincere.

“A great man has died today, and we deeply mourn his loss,” Raymond’s father
continued. The king had only ever thought his uncle a royal annoyance, useless and unsavory. Amid the empty ring of false condolences, the stone relief was lowered over the remains of a the misanthropic royal. He would have given laughed bitterly at his own insincere funeral. It was not as he had wanted, but his protests had died with him.

The funeral party departed to feast in honor of a man they had despised in life, and Raymond Castell walked alone in these empty crypts. He ran his fingers over the feet of his own marble relief, waiting for his death and his own flowery eulogy. He imagined his brother
giving it and he imagined him meaning not a word.

His head twitched to one side, hitting him like an electric shock or the sudden absence of a current. He twitched again and swam up from the deep.

pentacle 2

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PART 1 – THREE OF SWORDS (cont.)

Stepping out into the street was like being hit with a bucket of ice water. It may have been April, but the seaside town of Columbia remained cold and damp well into June when the fair-weather tourists would begin to show their faces.

Adrian, with a detached sense of calm, realized that they were running on fumes. Eventually, they would crash and understand what had happened. Until then, they reasoned, they should continue to walk. It they stopped, they might forget how to do the locomotion-thing in the first place.

If the fog had any goddamn respect, it would have swirled, or done something majestic like that. But no. It hung cold and dead in the sky, daring Adrian to make it stop. The wind picked up and danced around Adrian, but the fog stubbornly stayed put.

Columbia was one street and if you blinked, or, if like Adrian, your eyes had stopped noticing anything in front of them, you could miss it. And miss it they did. They took a step forward into an unexpected substance.

“Oh,” Adrian said passively. Because they had just realized that they had stepped into the ocean. They might not have even removed their right foot from the ocean had they not heard a familiar call of “Yo Adrian!” followed by an obscene amount of laughter, from the lifeguard tower.

When Adrian reached the top of the ladder, Aiden was still laughing to himself.

“You know that kind of gets old,” Adrian said.

“Maybe to you,” Aiden shrugged. His demeanor turned a variation of serious. A half-smile still poked around his stoic expression. To Aiden, being fully serious meant you were loosing the battle against life’s slew of hardships. “So,” he started, “did you see him.” Adrian nodded.

“Yeah, he’s dead alright,” they repeated. It seemed to be the only thing they could say about their uncle.

“Was there any doubt?” Aiden asked. Adrian sat down and dangled their legs over the edge of the tower’s platform.

“I don’t know,” they replied. “He just never seemed like kind of guy who would -“

“Commit suicide?” Aiden finished.

“Die,” Adrian said. “It just didn’t seem like he could die.” Aiden nodded.

“You’re right. It did seem like he could live forever.” The two friends fell silent. The rhythmic sound of the waves washed over them. The seagulls screamed bloody murder and dove, in turns, to the ocean’s surface. Aiden joined Adrian on the edge of the platform. Tears threatened Adrian’s eyes, but they knew they would have to wait to fall. Aiden turned to talk to them again.

“What else do you have to do?” he asked.

“I have to talk to Joyce, er, his lawyer…will stuff. I think,” Adrian responded, uncertainly. Their stoic autopilot was beginning to falter. Aiden looked at his watch.

“Give me 15 minutes until my shift ends and I’ll go with you,” Aiden said.

“I’lll be fine on my own,” Adrian said. Aiden put his hand up to his ear.

“What’s that? What’s that?” He dropped his hand. “Yeah, I don’t care. I’m coming.”

there are monsters in small places 4

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They call it Deadman’s Boulder because every year, someone winds up dead there. Usually, it’s a tourist who thinks they can swim against the undertow and stay away from the sharp sea rock. Every year, through the usual town lottery, someone finds their body, skin opened or back twisted and neck snapped.

There are a lot of ways these people find themselves snagged on Deadman’s Boulder and none of them have to do with the undertow. They are thrown from the ocean by the scaly sixty-foot sea snake that no one had ever photographed. They are thrown the other way by people who think the same snake could use a sacrifice. They are sunk by sirens who draw them in with slippery songs.

But every year, one person from Brightview has to call the town police, directly because it takes 911 three transfers to find a place called Brightview, and say, “Chief, there’s another one.”

there are monsters in small places 3

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There is a boulder thick with moss along the beach that looks like one man leaning over another’s back. It’s an easy thing to climb if you are young and don’t mind scraping your knees the way Hazel doesn’t. She is already watching the ocean with the wind licking her neck – the way you can’t when you’re on the ground like Ray is – when Ezrah catches up to him.

“Want to go up, bud?” Ray shakes his head.

“No,” he says. But he watches Hazel with frustrated jealousy, scared to say that he’s scared of climbing up. Ros walks up slowly from behind.

“Really?” she asks, sounding surprised. “Because there are sirens up there. They’ll listen to you when you’re feeling sad.” Ray looks back up at Hazel on the top of the rock.
“Sirens? Really?”

Ros nods. The air of gravity she always keeps around her makes her easy for a kid to believe as Ray does now. He looks at Ros. She doesn’t make him ask her for help.

“Go on up. I’ll make sure you don’t fall.” Ray’s mouth parts in an uncertain smile, and he starts up the mossy foot of the first man. Ezrah tries to pierce Ros’s silence with his eyes.

“We used to think there were sirens up there,” he smiled.

“There are,” Ros answers. Her face remained sharp sea-broken rock.

there are monsters in small places 2

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Rosmond was a quiet out-of-towner when Ezrah met her first four years ago. She smiled well on command, but she wouldn’t invite herself to talk to you and she would stop eating if she knew you were watching.

Ezrah thought she didn’t eat at all when his parents told him to come to lunch with the nice new family in town with a daughter your age, Ezrah. He watched her hand hovering over her fork to see if he could catch the butterfly wing movement of her picking it up, but she did not. She kept her head bent. Halfway through Ezrah’s grilled cheese, she could finally talk to him.

“Can you stop watching?” she said in a voice that only reached as far as Evander in the seat next to Ezrah. There was not a daughter four years older like Evander but Evander had to come to this stupid lunch anyway.

“Why don’t you just eat?” Evander snapped. Rosmond could not answer. She also could not eat. She still could not answer until Ezrah’s parents took them to see the lovely little boardwalk just outside of town. Evander stepped over the still water tide pools and stilled the waving anemone with the point of a stick.

“Why not just leave it alone,” she whispered, and only Ezrah heard her.