“I’m the clerk, I’m the scribe, at the hearings of what cause I know not.”
— Samuel Beckett, “Texts for Nothing”
She finds herself inside a lilting cottage. Gales test the twisted nails that hold the planks of this most humble abode consecutive, firm. The wooden walls creak, as does the bowing cot she rests upon.
The winds are cold and smell of yeast. They insinuate themselves between the slats, snuffing out the low-burning kerosene lamp. There is no moon.
Shifting in a strange bed, with its prodding springs and coarse blankets, the woman is suddenly alerted to…what, a premonition, a memory?
Knowledge; direct irrefutable knowledge that a great peril is encroaching; growing keener, vaster, nearer.
The certainty of this danger rouses in the woman an all-consuming terror, one that reaches a critical mass once she hears the bleating sound that rides the forceful wind. These noises come rhythmically. They penetrate the cottage as surely as a spear.
Flinging back the bedclothes, the woman charges for the door. She is thoughtless in her panic, but is intent only on fleeing, on racing down the first causeway she encounters.
She freezes mere paces outside her door.
There are no roads to tread, for this tiny cottage, she discovers, stands upon a tiny island. The mainland is clearly visible, its dunes baptized in a strange kind of manufactured light, but a raging channel stretches between it and the woman. She studies the choppy surface with its whitish peaks. It is like a horde of ghosts floating past her, endlessly.
Out here the bleating sound is that much louder, that much closer. Peering out across the roiling divide, she pinpoints the source of the noise. Standing on the far shore, planted in the sand like an incongruous tree, is a payphone. Fixed to a stout wooden pillar, the phone is of a style the woman has not seen in years. The metallic clang of its bell is painful, panicked, like the mechanized scream of a maimed creature…
*
Joyce Felton lifted her eyelids slowly, then immediately closed them again. Though the dream had dissolved, its significance lingered, spiting the daylight that had only just begun to brighten the blinds. Tears slipped from the corners of her eyes. Breathing had become a chore. Joyce knew she had to muster sufficient courage in order to face whatever changes might have been wrought during her sleep. She also knew that there were questions, difficult and delicate questions that needed to be asked.
She sat up quickly and forced herself to see.
The bedroom was as she had left it, complete with the half-drained water glass and an overfilled ashtray on the nightstand. Though these sights might have on any other morning reassured her, Joyce could not ignore the fact that she had endured a disturbing dream, a nightmare where every detail seemed to sweat menace, to shine with fell purpose.
She rose and began to walk, to scrutinize, to hunt for signs of transition.
In the hallway, pale carpet met smartly with moulding.
Walls ran upright. All the light fixtures were functioning.
The number of steps on the main stairway had neither swelled nor diminished. The mums in the vase on the foyer stand had not withered.
A cursory check of the kitchen proved that the milk remained white in its container and that the water still drained clockwise in the sink.
Joyce had almost managed to convince herself that her lot in life had survived this most recent experience in the nightmare-realm, but her confidence crumbled when she chanced a glimpse through the laundry-room window that looked out into the back yard.
The lawn was strewn with the bodies of birds—crows, thrushes, sparrows.
At first Joyce was struck by the awful scenario of the creatures having suffered some epidemic that had stolen their lives. But this theory was usurped by the worse reality once Joyce noticed that many of the birds were still stirring and twitching. Their feathers were fluffed, bills were tucked under wings, tiny eyes were closed.
The knowledge, such as she had undergone in her nightmare, was flushing through her now, in the heatless light of the waking state.
This was how the change always came: a Hand of Death caressing those it had cursed. In Joyce’s case, for reasons she could never ascertain, the change had always staked its claim through slumber. It rode in like a Horseman on a mare, spectral and marauding in its pursuit of her.
Sleep’s reach, Joyce had learned, was vast. Though this was the first time she had ever seen evidence of it pulling birds from the sky and stunning them into an almost unshakable rest, she was not shocked by this development. Her past experiences had left her utterly consumed by the mounting unreality of oneiric shifting. It grew around her like a rising tide, dragging in any sentient creature that happened to be anywhere near Joyce’s prostrate form. Anything lost in this undertow often floundered. If they did survive, they awoke to find themselves inside a wholly different life, a wholly different world.
Joyce hoped, prayed, that these winged creatures were too slight and frail to impact her to any degree.
But she then discovered that the birds were not the only creatures to have been sucked into this dream-mire: a man must have been passing by her yard at some point in the night. Had he been trying to break in, Joyce wondered? No matter, for his punishment was to become a mere pawn in an enterprise that was beyond the ken of anyone.
The man was floating face up in her swimming pool.
All strength drained from Joyce’s legs. She slipped down between the laundry tub and the dryer, which, she noticed, needlessly and inopportunely, had a thin scab of rust at its base. It was not fear that buckled her, but an exhaustion that is specific to this psychological torture. It was happening so soon after last time. Had it ever truly ceased? Even its respites seemed somehow to be punishments.
Pulling herself erect, Joyce childishly hoped that the man on the water had evaporated as dreams are supposed to do in daylight.
He was no longer in the pool. He was now at the window.
His features became distorted as he pressed his face to the pane. His movements left a greasy trail on the glass. Joyce looked at his face and was offended by its slackness, by the way the eyes jittered beneath their drooping lids. Through the glass she could hear the wet flutter of the man’s snore.
“Go away!” she pleaded, her voice waffling unpleasantly between a whisper and a shrill whine. She checked over her shoulder, fearing that Morgan had been woken, that she would see the shape of all that Joyce had struggled to protect her from ever seeing. “Go!” She enforced her plea by waving her hands in a shooing motion.
Drool spilt from the man’s hanging jaw, indicating just how deep in the nightmare he was.
Confident that the rear door was out of the somnambulist’s reach, Joyce unlocked it and stepped out onto the patio. “Get out of here—now!” she cried. The man’s clothes were ragged. He pawed at the air as one love-starved, one desperate for an embrace. He was, Joyce knew, looking to pull her back into last night’s ugly island cottage, with its telephone screeching to be answered.
The man shambled listlessly to his left, his right. His condition allowed Joyce to guide him on his way with relative ease. She steered him toward the open wooden gate. Pool water dripped from his clothing. Joyce hated the fact that she had to touch him.
Once he began shuffling down the driveway Joyce slammed and bolted the gate.
Her re-entry into the house had all the drama of a teen sneaking in after curfew. She broke from tiptoeing long enough to snap the deadbolt on the back door, then she moved to the living room and peered through the sheers of the large bay window.
The man was staggering like a drunkard down the centre of the street.
He’d managed to shuffle out of Joyce’s view before the terrible squeal of tires, followed immediately by a thud.
Joyce backed away from the window, chilled by the sound of the panicked voices and cries from down the way.
“What’s going on?”
The voice came from behind her. Joyce spun to see Morgan, who was rubbing her eyes with the heel of her left hand. Her tangled hair suggested a restless night.
“An accident,” were the only two words Joyce managed to pronounce before she began to cry.
Morgan moved to her, wrapped her arm around her shoulders, and asked repeatedly what was wrong. When Joyce was unable or unwilling to respond, all at once Morgan knew.
Her arm slipped off Joyce’s quaking frame. “No,” she said.
Joyce looked at her, her eyes desperately assessing what, if anything, Morgan might have pieced together.
The girl’s expression and demeanour were frustratingly blank. They prevented Joyce from any insights at all. Morgan made her way to the breakfast nook with melodramatic slowness. The padded bench huffed when she slumped down upon it. The girl sat like one mesmerized. She lazily traced the table-top’s grain pattern with one finger.
Resignedly, Joyce joined her, studying her from across the narrow nook.
“I want to ask you a question and I want you to answer me honestly. Morgan? Look at me please. I need to ask you something.”
Morgan kept her head against the crook of her elbow but did respond with “What?”
“Have you been doing something you’re not supposed to?”
Morgan lifted her head at last. “What do you mean?”
“I mean have you been…curious.”
Morgan’s eyes slowly closed. Her chin rumpled and began to quiver. “I’m sorry,” she squeaked.
“I told you never to go looking for her, didn’t I? How many times did I say that if you start looking for a castaway, all you end up doing is calling attention to yourself, making the nightmare notice you?”
A thick wedge of tension was driven between them.
Joyce ultimately rose to collect the rudiments of breakfast.
She peered out at the back yard. The birds must have awoken and flown.
Morgan was unable even to consider eating the bowl of cold cereal that had been placed before her. Joyce smoked cigarettes over her own, allowing the fallen ashes to darken the milk like polluted snow.
The telephone’s ring jolted the pair of them—Morgan from the unexpectedness, Joyce from its kinship to her most recent nightmare. They let the answering machine take the call:
“Hello, Joyce? This is Alex from the store. I’m just checking to see if you were aware that you were scheduled to be our opening cashier this morning. Your shift started forty minutes ago, so if you could give me a call back as soon as you get this that would be great.”
The sing-song tone of her supervisor’s voice both masked anger and betrayed an utter lack of concern for what might have prevented Joyce from fulfilling her retail duties.
Joyce rose and yanked the phone cord from its jack. She returned to the nook and lit a fresh cigarette.
“Can I have one of those?” Morgan asked. There was no longer a need for pretence.
Joyce flicked the pack across the table. Morgan felt as though she might be graded on her smoking skills. She cleared her throat and then confessed.
“I wanted to know…know who she was.”
“I told you, you can’t,” Joyce barked. “Do I have to engrave it on your forehead? You can’t and you won’t.”
“But you knew her.”
Joyce sighed. “Yes,” she said, “but I knew her before she fell into it.”
“Well I wasn’t around before.”
“I know you weren’t.”
Smoking was evidently new to Morgan. Joyce noted the way her face was beginning to blanch.
“Let me ask you,” Morgan began, “did you know your mother?”
Joyce cleared her throat. “Yes.”
“Have lots of good memories of her, do you?” Morgan’s voice was taking on a keen edge.
“Some.”
“Oh? You weren’t taken from her when you were still in diapers? How nice for you.”
Joyce folded her hands before her. In her mind she counted the seconds until an appropriate pause was reached.
“Did you know I once had two sons?”
Morgan did not know how to respond.
Joyce nodded. She was unaware of the fact that she’d begun to cry again until she felt a tear splash upon her still-folded hands.
“Isaac and Caleb. Well, to be accurate, Caleb hadn’t been born yet, but I was in my ninth month. My husband Barry was a firefighter. Or maybe he still is. How can I know? Anyway, we’d just purchased our first house—a little place, a lot smaller than this house. Barry was working a lot, trying to pick up extra hours to pay for all the things we needed. I was trying to get as much unpacking done as I could, but Isaac was only three at that time, so trying to keep up with him and set up house while I was as big as a house myself, well, it tired me out. Plus, about that time Isaac had been suffering from…bad dreams. That must be how it got me…”
Joyce’s voice dissipated like wind-scattered smoke. Several moments were spent on a vacant stare that made Morgan both heartsick and frightened.
“I remember,” Joyce resumed, “I’d just put Isaac down for his afternoon nap. I was going to finish unboxing our kitchenware, but I was just so exhausted. I curled up right beside Isaac.”
Morgan interjected with a rush of apologies. “You don’t have to relive this,” she told her.
But Joyce’s recollection was immune to protest. “We had an antique clock,” she continued, “an heirloom. It was inside one of the open boxes in our bedroom. It was a pretty thing, with Roman numerals on the face and little brass chimes that rang on the hour. Anyway, the house was so quiet that day that all I could hear was the refrigerator buzzing in the kitchen and the ticking of that pretty little clock. As a matter of fact, I pulled that ticking sound into my dream.
“I must have dozed off fairly quickly, and the nightmare came right away. In it, I was walking up a steep country road. The incline was so extreme that I could barely climb it. At one point my legs gave out. I fell down but I still couldn’t stop climbing. I began to crawl, to pull myself along the asphalt, looking up to the top of the road.
“The sun was very white. It hurt to look upward, but I could just make out that there was a silhouette at the top of the hill. It took what felt like forever before I was able to make out what it was—a stuffed chair, a wingback, antique…but battered. The chair was turned away from me. When I got a bit closer, I could see that something was sitting in that chair. There were spiky tufts of hair sticking up above the back. The upholstery was blue with a very ugly pattern of gold running through it, a zigzag thing that made me nauseous if I looked at it for too long.
“Standing next to the chair—and I’d forgotten all about it until just this very moment—was a little wooden table. There was a glass on the table, like a champagne flute. It was filled with this shining liquid. It was the colour of amethyst.
“I almost made it to the top when I suddenly froze. I can’t remember exactly what it was sitting there, waiting for me, but I was overcome with…awfulness. I tried to turn around, to get back to the bottom of the hill, but there was a magnetic pull that was forcing me closer to that chair.
“I tried to resist. I pressed my fingernails into the asphalt until they broke off. I even tried to bite down into the ground. Somehow it worked. I’d managed to stop moving forward.
“So, the thing in the chair came to me.
“The chair came grinding down the sloping road. The sound was hideous, the shrill scraping sound of wood being dragged along the ground. I remember seeing the chair legs splintering and breaking apart. The closer it got, the worse it became. The upholstery was not patterned but stained with all these foul blotches. And I bet if you try really hard you can guess what the upholstery was made from.
“And then the chair was right there.” Joyce held her hand before her face to emphasize her point.
“The thing in the chair stood up and lifted me off the ground by my eyelids. I started to scream, and then the nightmare ended.”
Morgan felt she should speak. She did not speak. “When I woke up,” Joyce added, “my babies were gone, and I was in a little townhouse with a different lot in life. The stranger who insisted he was my husband got tired of my hysteria pretty quickly. It took him less than a day before he had me hospitalized. I was stuck inside there for weeks. But I got out of that situation too, eventually. Anyway, something good came out of it. I kept the name Joyce. I used to love James Joyce’s story ‘The Dead.’ I really think I did…such a long time ago.”
“I sent an email,” Morgan finally confessed. “I found an online service that claimed they could track down lost relatives. It was that day we argued last week, remember? I was angry at you, and hurt, so I emailed them to ask for information. But I’ll write them back and cancel, okay? I’ll tell them to forget it.”
“Don’t bother.”
“No, really.” She reached for her phone, which sat charging in the kitchen wall socket. “I’ll do it right now.”
“It won’t change a thing.”
Morgan withdrew her hand.
“What happens now?”
Joyce said nothing for a time, then: “What happens is that everything shifts.”
“How can you be sure?” Morgan retorted. “Nothing’s happened to us yet.”
“Oh, it has. We just haven’t seen it yet. Everything’s always changing, in flux.” Joyce crossed her arms across her chest, a posture that made Morgan uncomfortable, so great was its kinship to the dead in their eternal rest. “I don’t know if there is a message in this whole thing, if there is any kind of lesson to be learned, but if there is, perhaps that’s it: that nothing is ever stable, that we’re never in control, no matter how much we believe ourselves to be.”
Morgan was visibly deflated. Thinly, she asked, “Do you know how all this started?”
“No idea. But I think this…nightmare, vision, whatever you want to call it, has been around forever. I don’t think we create the dream, we just experience it, get claimed by it. It takes from us, but weirdly enough, it gives to us too. I’ve had other children, other possessions. But I don’t choose them. I just kind of…observe them.”
“Like in a dream?” Morgan asked.
“Like in a dream. One thing I have figured out is that you had to have met someone in waking life before they can be pulled into this. Sort of like the way you dream about ordinary people, even the dead, when you dream. Your mother used to do my hair, as you know. That’s how she got dragged in.”
Joyce’s subsequent shudder was so violent that Morgan asked her what she was thinking. “That man, the one in the yard…I think I saw him panhandling in the alley behind the house last week. I even gave him a five…”
Despite her confusion, Morgan felt that further questions were futile.
The room donned silence like a garment, flaunted it for too long. The doorbell’s chiming broke the spell. Morgan flinched, gasped, and then rose to answer it. Joyce reached across the table and gripped Morgan’s arm. “Don’t. It will be the police looking for witnesses to the accident. We’re not getting involved.”
There was a knock, then a stillness that lasted well into the afternoon. By then Morgan had migrated to the living room, where she stared at the television with its volume deliberately high. Joyce remained in the kitchen, smoking until the package was depleted.
Out of frustration and defiance Morgan rose from the sofa with a huff. She gathered her rolled mat and her petite gym bag.
“Where are you going?” Joyce asked her.
“Yoga. It’s Wednesday.”
“You can’t.”
Morgan shrugged. “I say I can.”
The jangling of keys, the rattling of Joyce’s nerves; she bolted toward the front door. “Wait! Don’t go. It’s not safe, do you understand? Not safe!”
Morgan pretended that the woman’s blubbering, her clinging grip, didn’t faze her. “I’m not going to sit here and rot like some prisoner.”
“Well then, I’m coming with you.”
*
Joyce stationed herself upon a bench against the yoga studio’s far wall. She was like a stoic bird watching emotionlessly as the women reached and twisted their bodies in mimicry of beasts, and then, at a turn, in reverent imitation of the holy ones who prostrate themselves on sajadas facing Mecca.
The studio was warm and the score that leaked from hidden speakers was a lullaby of chimes and babbling water. Joyce felt buoyant, cleansed. Her guard seduced, she allowed her heavy eyelids to draw shut.
The nightmare did not grab her until after she was awoken. The yoga instructor who’d nudged her offered a warm smile and said something that Joyce didn’t hear. The studio was empty.
Joyce rose and began asking about Morgan. The instructor’s nonplussed expression spoke volumes. Numb, Joyce slipped out of the studio.
Dusk was thickening around her. The streets were a pale haze, the people mere moving props. Joyce found her way home by instinct. She fully expected her key to no longer fit the lock, but in the end, she did not have to test it, for upon her arrival she found the house’s front door slightly ajar. She pushed it open and stood in the vacant frame.
To the uninitiated the disruption to the house would have been viewed as a robbery, but Joyce was keenly aware of the incongruous details: the thick coating of dust that suggested years of neglect despite the fact that she had left the house only hours earlier; the indentations in the carpet where a furnishing had once sat; the ceiling fan that dangled from its wires, as if something immense had recently stormed through the confining room.
Joyce ducked under the destroyed fixture. Chunks of plaster crunched beneath her soles. She followed the tracks in the carpet, which led her to the stairway.
The chair that was missing from the living room had been dragged to the top of the stairs. It was facing the top of the landing, its back to the steps.
Joyce felt herself moving backward. She pressed her back against the foyer window.
The figure that was seated in the chair was, Joyce reasoned, designed to seem familiar, much the way recognizable forms pass through one’s dreams.
“Morgan…” Joyce whispered, knowing how desperate her guess was, how foolish.
The shape in the chair rose, swelled. The chair was cast aside and went tumbling down the steps until it finally became wedged between the wall and the banister. Its upholstery was shimmering wet. It reeked foully.
What had once been seated now stood. The thing was colossal, tangled, yet it moved with a grace that defied its size and its anatomy. Every time it lowered one of its lumps onto the next carpeted step there came a thunderous knocking, metallic and deep and echoing endlessly. The creature began to contort itself, to flaunt its non-humanness by halting for a second or two so that Joyce could absorb each repulsive asana.
Joyce shut her eyes.
Weeping, she sputtered, “Now I lay me down to sleep…”