Barry Patterson, 16-10-04.
This dream is an omen of the strange fortunes that await Derry in a tale which I write on & off, for fun. What is going to happen to the poor guy I leave to your imagination for the time being. If you like it, please respond to it! If no-one responds to it you may never hear of him again, I'll just put something else up instead. I suppose that's my way of asking for feedback or support in my only long term prose writing project.
When I was a kid I often had this nightmare about this big old house or other building. First I'd see it from the outside, all dark & crumbling. It would look really spooky, but I'd know that I had to go in. When I went in it was crammed full of piled up dusty furniture or something so that it was hard to move around. Everywhere was very narrow & cramped. I might have to go upstairs or get from one part of the building to another in the dark & I could always sense some kind of malign presence watching me & waiting... In really heavy dreams the narrow squeezes would be through huge spaces crammed with rusting piles of machinery & cabinets or layers & layers of what you might describe as switch gears or valves. I might have to get down on my hands & knees & crawl but usually it was on my feet, shuddering & sick with fear. There was always this smell, too. I can call it to mind but couldn't name it. Dead flies, perhaps. Sometimes I'd make it through, my spine crawling with the thought of what was behind me, nauseated by the thought of what I had passed through or what might have been following me, or waiting for me.
Just as things were getting to a head with Barbara - or rather not, I had the dream again. It must have been years since I had been in that space but it was instantly familiar, as if I'd never been away. It was, of course the museum, but it was abandoned, webby & seriously haunted. To start with it wasn't unlike my journeys to Barbara's lab which were weird enough anyway, but the rooms & corridors became less & less easy to navigate as they filled up with rubbish. Old specimens in Victorian display cases. Animals I'd never suspected could exist. Bears with tiger stripes, spotted lions, chocolate coloured creatures like giant ferrets with long thin bird bills. Pale, big eyed things in huge jars as tall as I was, their tentacles or fins pushed up against the glass. Staring at me like "big mistakes"; my favourite Laurie Anderson lyric.
Then, as it would have been in the dreams of my youth, I saw a map showing me my position & my destination - miles apart. I remember thinking: "I'm in the Entomology Department, heading towards the place where the stairs lead to the snail woman's lab." I was in a narrow corridor & huge insects had been pinned to the wall on my right. Enormous they were, many over a foot long. There were moths & mantids, beetles, flies & bugs. Old & faded, dusty. Losing limbs, wings & cuticle plates to their smaller cannibalistic cousins. My passage too, was causing damage. I naturally shrank away from making contact with them but it was unavoidable. A clawed tarsus here, an antenna there, or a fractured wing membrane sending up a cloud of ancient scales. I tried to apologise as I passed, but that made things worse. Of course I had once considered a career in Entomology - A beautiful saw fly caught near the river & buzzing about frantically in the killing jar came to mind. I stopped. That was a mistake! The sense of a Presence began to escalate. Their gleaming globular eyes all seemed to be staring me out. They seemed to be saying, "Soon enough, soon enough, you will be joining us!"
Eventually I emerged into the infamous Zoo Store 1. There was the giant saw fish hanging from the ceiling. The Irish Elk. The pile of crocodile skulls, with their inky ID numbers on their snouts like Nazi tattoos. Suddenly, unlike any other variant of this dream from the past I knew that I was to meet my pursuer. It was as if the sense of threat, the shadow, had condensed into a far corner awaiting my inevitable passage. Eyes gleamed. A long overcoat scraped against a faded wooden board with an old sign painted on it. "Ancestral Fishes," it said.
He didn't seem like a gothy hero figure; my tormentor, my nemesis had come to claim me. To pin me & arrange my limbs in a manner that the ghosts & alien tourists would find aesthetically pleasing. There was no escape. My doomed legs shakily but inexorably carried me into the sphere of his aura. He didn't speak. I coughed. Stopped walking. Looked up, he must have been all of eight feet tall, into his face. The features remained hidden, but it seemed that he had high cheek bones & lots of dreadlocks. I said: "What are you doing to me? Why? Why is this happening? I feel sick. Is there no escape? What do you want?
He never spoke but I understood what he intended me to hear, that is the best way of putting it.
"You are dreaming, he said. Just dreaming."
"Just? Just? Wha-at?"
"Listen. You are a good dreamer! & I admire your courage! Most would have awoken themselves long before they got this far into the labyrinth. Would you care to continue or return to the arms of your would be lover?"
I stood in silence & lowered my head, feeling for some reason, a deep shame. I recognised that I was dreaming then, but I wasn't lucid enough to will myself away from here. I was completely under his power & he was, in some way, judging me. Eventually I raised my chin in an affirmative gesture. I had to go on. Sometimes fear is like that. Escape may be worse than facing what awaits.
"Good! There is work to do. A job for you. A destiny to fulfill." It sounded like something out of a book. He gestured at a dinosaur skeleton which I hadn't noticed earlier. I smelt the salt marsh into which it had fallen. I watched the layers of sandstone build up around it, sleep beneath the earth & then slowly peel away to reveal a dark, stormy sky. Grey trees waved in a sultry late summer wind. A man in a top hat & cape stood nearby. His heart was filled with wonder as the huge bones were winched from the pit at his feet.
Then I was back in Zoo Store 1. The shadow gestured with his hand. A narrow flight of stairs appeared from the gloom. I bowed to him, Zen style, & ascended.
In a sense I knew that I was dreaming - or rather that this wasn't what it seemed - but the lucidity faded. I climbed a little staircase, narrow walls on each side, not unlike the way up to the snail woman's lab again - & came to a door. It was one of those doors that the public never gain admittance to, but which connect the secret underworld of the museum with it's public places. I emerged on a first floor balcony. The smell & the sense of claustrophobia, disgust & terror had subsided but I felt nervous, as if something was expected of me. Outside the windows of the great hall yellow light flashed & flickered as if a silent thunder storm were taking place. It was dark, but the light coming in allowed me to see my surroundings. I descended to a square landing, a grand flight of steps leading down to the hall & the sauropod waving its tail in the air. It was remarkably uncluttered. The signs pointing here & there were missing. The alcoves were dark & seemed empty. The ticket desk wasn't there. I recalled the comparisons which had been made between the building & a cathedral. Trilobites & lepidodendron pores were carved on the pillars. Plants were painted on the ceiling - flowers, stems, tendrils, leaves & artistically arranged roots, like book illustrations. The tiled floor of the landing caught my eye. A square of blue limestone tiles enclosed a quartered circle - each quarter tiled with a stone of different hue. Like a magic circle. A mandala. Like a stage, too - the landing was large enough for a band to have played on it, with the audience below in the hall, dancing among the bones.
The map came back. I saw the whole structure of this incredible building spread out all around me as if I were at it's natural centre. All the different galleries, rooms, corridors, offices & labs. It was as if the map were superimposed upon the view from my point of vantage, or rather that I understood the whole structure in some new way so that this knowledge was on display. I could see into all the dark & dusty corners of the place where spiders wove & mice & silverfish scurried about. The cluttered underbelly & all its narrow little tunnels of horror through which I had edged my uncomfortable way. From this point of view it was as if I had almost been trying to avoid this place. But the centre of a maze always feels that way perhaps.
Then the noises began. First of all it was that tape of rainforest sounds that always greeted you as soon as you walked into the place. With the long melodic wolf whistle of an unseen amazonian bird looking for a mate. Then a humming & a buzzing from all around, from above & below me, followed by the cries. First they were quiet., then the volume gradually rose. Howls & squeals, yowls & shrieks. Bubbling voices, twittering calls - the musical, the challenging, the pained. The lonely. The forgotten. The imprisoned. The ignored. I stood stock still amidst the roar which came in wave after wave, sometimes almost falling quiet then suddenly revived by the barking of a dog or the voice of some unseen bird or primate.
The voices were calling to me & they had a purpose. They were crying out to me as if by some gesture or some action I could fulfill their need. But I didn't know what to do. I stood there dumbfounded. My own memories of the university laboratory, the microscope, the dissection board, arose in my mind but for some reason I didn't feel guilty. Neither did I feel judged, as I had in the presence of the dark Lord of this place. Again there was the sense that they were crying out to me, but still I was frozen. Then I added my voice to theirs. First I howled with the howlers & whistled with the whistlers then I danced & sang as if I were a tenor in an opera, wordlessly la la laing until I found myself singing in what sounded like gaelic, the language of my ancestors of which I don't know a bloody word. But it flowed. Some kind of power began to build. I could feel it like a warmth & excitement in my body, like the anticipation of sex with a new lover or the discovery of something awesome that fills you with delight & wonder. Then I took a deep breath & just sighed.
Everything fell slient. I was trembling. I turned & I bowed to the white marble at my feet. I bowed to the yellow limestone. I bowed to the pink gneiss, full of waves. I bowed to the green slate. I raised my hands above my head & shouted something in cod latin, which sounded like, "Eloi facititatus!" Then it began.
I became aware of movement in the shadows & flickering light. Some came from below. Some came from above. They came from all the galleries & cases & cupboards, from all the boxes in the drawers. There was the mammoth, the smilodon, the dire wolf. There were the kudu & the wildebeast, the rhino & the dodo. The prize winning greyhound. There were a million things on wings & countless streams of the tiny across the floor & up the walls. & they were silent save for the clattering of bones & the padding of paws &the tickle of claws, the rustle of wings. Then the great whales swam in, on the air, from the Mammals Section, flukes pumping, & the coelocanth & the plesiosaur & the giant squid with its enormous unblinking eye. It was overwelming. Tears sprang into my eyes & I fell to my knees. Then they sang. But unlike the previous cacophony, like a bad zoo in the morning, they sang the sweetest & most beautiful rhapsody. I jumped to my feet to cry out in recognition & thanks but then I awoke, with that music still sweet in my mind, in a sweaty tangled bed wherein two domesticated primates contrived to torture one another. Where two angels entangled one another in their chains.
My wish is that this be copyright.