That dream again, the almost-face and the battering winds.
This time Gabriel tried to recapture it in pen and ink after he woke. An impossibly tall monolith. He wasn’t brilliant, but he was good. Every unsteady inked line caught and reflected another aspect of the serpentine twists and frenzied architecture of his dream tower, laying down a mass of sky-catching reflections amid the elongated walls of plated glass as they stretched higher, toward the circlet of marshmallow cloud hidden beyond the beckoning edge of the paper.
The drawing took most of the morning, and it was made more difficult by the pain in his hand whenever a careless movement stretched the healing wound. Bob Dylan told him he made love just like a woman, which put a smile on his face while he drew.
Still smiling, Gabriel added a crudely drawn stick man at the top of the tower, unconsciously changing pens to ink in a red outline.
Marooned amid the bleak whiteness of the paper, set safely on the tower of reflections, the stick man twisted its head as if to look up at its creator.
It’s still part of the dream; Gabriel told himself, the ache in his hand denying him even that small comfort. The part that should have died when the sunlight touched my eyes. That’s all it is, a part of the dream…
Gabriel dropped the pen. Dylan stopped singing. The featureless face pressed against the barrier of paper, a writhing jumble of red lines struggling to breach the containing weave. For a second, between songs, he was faced with the irrational fear that the paper would split open and the thing from his dream would reach through to seize him by the throat with greasy, scaled claws…
Through the pregnant swell of the paper-face Gabriel saw the repulsive mambo of squirming maggots, their bodies splashed with the semi-gloss sheen of red. Slick with blood. The face began to pulse in time with the thunderous heartbeat booming against his eardrums.
Even as he stared, the weave of the paper began to slowly unknit: thin, fibrous strands of woven pulp peeling back on themselves rather than going up against the press of the nightmarish paper-face. Radiated light, red, like the leprous paste of blood, squeezed through the tiny cracks as, heartbeat by heartbeat, the face began to unknit itself.
Great Spirit, First Father, help me, “Go! Go! Back to the dream,” he hissed, fingers pressing painfully into his temples as his eyes screwed up, refusing to see.
The eyes of the paper-face went wide, a fissure cracking its cheek like the track of a shed tear, re-knit, and the stick man’s coloured body started on a final, deadly plummet, arms windmilling wildly as it plunged out of the cartoon sky…
Without looking back, Gabriel turned away, leaving his drawing to die its unnatural death.