In the Prison of My Dreams
She is naked, and because she knows my mind and its subtle convolutions she dons glittering jewels, which become stars decking the firmament of her body and soul. She is, herself, as dark as the night sky, and she is beckoning, and laughing with a hint of mockery. She is one, and she is a thousand, and she is a million. She is not temptation (I am temptation) but promise, promise fulfilled a thousand times, and times without number.
While she dances, the stars that she wears circle and wheel and sparkle and shine, and sing the hollow lament of the rhythm of the spheres. The pallor of the stones in their setting, and their life and their vibration fill me with an amber liquid sensation which drags at my throat and warms me within my breast like a glowing coal. The chaos of the cold stone lights and their sensuous welcome make me mad with misunderstanding.
And when she lays her body on the ground and allows herself to flow and fuse, she smiles with transport, the blackness of her eyes is limitless, and the lissome curling of her body as gentle as slow water in a level stream. She taunts me with her eyes and bewilders me with her gemstones, and she moves herself into strange imaginary constellations as she rolls. She is free and honest and she does not pretend, but the music of her movements has only lies to tell me. Her arms and her legs, her thighs and her breasts shine with constant sweat like distant stardust, drawing my vision beyond the limits of resolution, where I can see nothing real except with the treacherous eye of my mind. Her breasts, when she is clothed, bear shells of ruby-red sarcophrase and stars of white sapphire. Even then, she disturbs my silence as deeply as my own fears, and the very scent of her body casts my thoughts into a wild abyss of hope and dream and foreboding from which I hurl myself with desperation and dread. Hidden menace dances perilously close to haloed triumph in the sonorous melancholy of the pavane, and I am forever looking over my shoulder lest some faceless presence be lurking there to threaten my exclusive reward.
I think I see before me the echoes of another existence, peopled with madmen and — worse still — mad gods. I look at her, and out of the corner of my eye I see a looking-glass Alice, a strange fragment of a long-destroyed incarnation. In the lamplight stars of her decorated skin, I can almost see diamonds on a pack of playing cards, and jacks and queens and bullet-riddled aces. And a hundred thousand children and young men who claim to be the faded hours of Harker Lee, consigned and consigning to the oblivion of dead memory and replowed engrammic earth.
Who sends these ghosts to haunt me?
And the candle whose light is reflected in the facets of the stones of enchantment flickers and dies, and there is no light to fire my fancies and my fantasies, and I lay myself to sleep in the cradle of her thighs.
But in sleep, there comes no rest, for I pass only from dream to dream to dream, and there is no possible remission in the fateful continuity of life. I feel that the constancy of the flow of images is breaking me apart; I cannot stand the everlasting flow of it all, and I can no longer split the current of images into separate scenes. I am caught in a long transition, dreaming that I am dreaming that I am dreaming, and I flee down endless corridors of sleep, rebound through an infinity of mirror images, with not the least prospect of escape. There is no court of appeal. And yet, why should I need one? You are dead, Harker Lee, whoever you were. You cannot haunt me — why am I forced to live with these — the residue of your futile life — why? Who pursues me? I am alone. In all the universe, there is only myself. I am all that there is: I, mock-Satan, hiding my face behind a million masks and discarding a million more. There is no one here but my victims.
No one.
Leave me alone. I will not be a prisoner in my own skull. I will not yield to my foolish fears. If the hound of hell himself is after me . . . why, then, I will wait for him and he will lick my hand.
Yet the ghost whispers in my ear that you have me prisoner, that you have me locked in the condemned cell. Who is this ghost? There is no man-in-a-death-mask. There never was.
Who dares to put me to the question? Who dares to pretend to be my judge? This is hell, nor am I out of it, and I am Lord in hell as in all the universe. There is no one. . . .
I did not see Attila born.
I did not see the sun rise on Agincourt.
I did not see the collapse of the Aztec Empire.
I was not present at the death of Tamburlaine.
This hound of hell is chasing me, through all the fading years he seeks me still to seize me in his savage teeth and stain the waters of the world with my heartfelt tears.
My jailers threw away the key a thousand years ago. They have left me here to rot away. But the bones they left in hiding are growing flesh again, and bloodbeat is returning to my veins. They think one day I’ll break in two, so they hate me all the more, and while they wait for me to break they’ll add it to the score.
Their fear is eating their hearts like acid, they really want to run. But they need someone to blame it on, and it’s going to be me.
It wasn’t me who stole your wives, it wasn’t me who killed your king, it wasn’t me that burned those effigies of Jesus, it wasn’t me who scorned your gifts of love.
It won’t be me who dies tonight, whatever you might do. There’s nothing I can do for you; it isn’t me you fear. Tonight the falling stars are faster in their fall, like pointing fingers in the sky. And the words they spell in starlight might tell you that I’ll die. But your words and signs can’t hurt me, if that’s the thing you want. If you want to see the streets run red, if you want to see me bleed, the hound of hell can’t catch me, you can’t hold me till he does, you’d better use a goat.
However much you hate me, I’m not going to die tonight. Not for you, not for anyone. This time, you can do your own dying. Not me. Not me.
I don’t care what your name is. I don’t know any Judas.
I never did.