A DREAM OF SIGHT
For three days, Mehrigus did not sleep. The door to the shop remained barred and Ngja found himself having to venture several times a day up to the study above to plead with his master to feed him. Mehrigus was absorbed in the Book of Transformations. His own journals – the work of years – lay around him but so dismayed was he now with the blindness of his own earlier reasoning that he tore whole pages from them and fed them to the demanding lizard.
There was much that was indecipherable but Mehrigus could already see from the old man’s diligent work that he had missed a very obvious truth. Mehrigus himself had long lambasted (privately, for the most part) the short-sightedness of those who confined themselves to alchemy or physic or magic alone, but he realised now that his own methods had too long been lacking some vital part of each. Essence, substance, enchantment – transformation required each of these. Mehrigus’ own perfunctory blending of mystical arts had been too haphazard; it was so obvious to him now. He rolled the baetylus between his palms, one to the other, as he pondered it, mulling over the runes and their power and wondering how he might harness the same from the strange symbols on the pages of the Book of Transformations.
At last, in exhaustion, he abandoned his desk and his study for his bedchamber and collapsed into sleep and fevered dreams.
The eyes were flicking frantically from side to side, pupils wide in terror at their imprisonment – seeming, in fact, even more horrified for the unblinking, stone eyelids frozen open around them.
Mehrigus awoke, sitting up sharply in bed. No light fell from the gaps in the rickety old shutters – it was the middle of the night. Perhaps he had slept for a day or more. He sat panting, letting his thoughts gather for a few moments. It was a dream, but it was quickly turning into an irresistible question in his mind.
Mehrigus pushed the thin quilt aside and hurried barefoot across the bedchamber and headed for the cramped, winding stairs to the shop below. He snatched at the lantern that hung always at the head of the stairs and whispered to it, bringing to life its faithful orange glow. Down he went. As he entered from the back of the room, he dropped to his knees beside a large wooden box standing against the wall. He swept aside the clutter of empty jars, bottles and smaller boxes on top of it and pulled off the lid.
Inside was a mess of tools, some inherited, some found, some opportunistically collected, few with any particular reason for being there. Mehrigus rummaged excitedly through the jumble of them, looking for an implement. He knew what he needed it to do, but not yet what it would look like. He pulled out a small pick, used for chipping mineral deposits free from their rocky birthplaces. Too destructive, he thought, but set it down on the floor beside him all the same and continued to rummage. He pushed a small, square-ended hammer aside – too clumsy – then stopped, turning back to it, scrabbling for its handle through the mess of tools pushed on top of it and pulling it out. The hammer was too clumsy, true enough, but at the sight of it Mehrigus realised what he needed. Impatient, he hauled the box towards him, spilling its contents across the floor. Sharp edges cut his bare feet as the mass of tools slid across the stone but he didn’t care. He snatched up what he was looking for. A stonemason’s chisel. He grabbed the pick and the hammer too before hurrying through to the front of the shop.
The petrulus was where it had always been, its eyes as unmoving and as petrified as ever. Mehrigus stopped, panting – in fear, in anticipation, in mad, senseless curiosity – and stared at the floor beside the statue. The excitement he felt was like that of someone knowing they are about to do wrong, and he asked himself why he felt it, if that was what he really believed. He looked at the petrulus, wondering if something within it or beyond it still existed to judge him. But he could gain no such sense and, calming his thoughts, he could see no reason to judge himself either. He raised the chisel and put the blade to the petrulus’ lifeless eyes, carefully positioning just one corner in the little gully between the eye and its lower lid.
He lifted his right hand, his grip tight around the handle of the hammer. But then he relaxed his arm, and instead ran the corner of the chisel’s blade slowly and carefully along that little gully, without striking the chisel once. A trail of dust, like sand, fell from the corner of the petrulus’ eye, like tears. Beneath the stone was whiter and the dream of those eyes – brilliant whites, pupils wide – came back vividly.
Mehrigus lifted the hammer and struck. The trickle of sandy tears became a stream, flecks of white stone falling down the petrulus’ cheek, over his stiff, stone robes and onto the floor. But the chisel was now perhaps a blade’s thickness further in, and the white that shone from the gouge Mehrigus had made was still just stone. Cold, lifeless stone.
So, it was just a dream. Mehrigus could be sure of that, at least. This stony surface was not some eggshell waiting to be shattered to reveal a still-living eye beneath. Mehrigus breathed a great sigh – of relief that he had not made some horrendous mistake or discovered something truly terrible, but equally of disappointment that he had not yet uncovered any of the secrets he was sure the unfortunate thing held.
But the question of whether or not some living thing still dwelt beneath was not really the one that Mehrigus had come to answer. This was not the source of that nervous, guilty excitement that had brought him rushing from his bed. That same excitement returned now as – having answered his dreaming mind’s darkest doubts and being free to ask the question that gripped his waking mind – he set down the chisel and dropped the hammer to the floor beside him.
He lifted the pick.
And slammed its tip straight into the corner of the petrulus’ agog, still-staring eye.