Item #214: a Curiosity

a weird tale: the story of the month for April, 2022

photo by drainrat

Item #214: a Curiosity

by Thomas Pluck

From the L. Erasmus Scott estate, a hand-sewn diary dated 1880, unidentified leather binding. Sixty pages, heavy foxing. Twenty-three pages neatly inscribed in a left-leaning hand. Found inside Item #83, a taxidermy specimen believed to be a highly deformed okapi, to be auctioned separately.

My adventures in dreams have allowed me to lead countless lives. I would trade them all for the one I left behind. —Geff Scott, 7 Sep 1880

11 March 1880

Father tells me I am adopted, that he found me shivering and alone on one of his explorations, and that is why I do not resemble my sister. He seemed concerned that I would be jealous, but nothing could be further from the truth. Through Amalthea, I learned there was magic in the world, from her smile and laughter. She taught me to read, and I devoured Father’s library. We played games and explored our corner of the island, I her protector, she my muse, with her boundless imagination. For each morning, she would tell me of her dreams. I have read that some believe there is nothing more tedious than to listen to someone describe their dreams and attempt to untangle the Gordian logic and hidden meanings, but I have never felt that way.

For I never remember my own night-stories. I awake from blackness each day, as if reborn.

Amalthea on the other hand, weaves entire worlds as she sleeps. Gorgeous forests of flying umbrella-cats and whisper-snakes, spinning across the planets on the backs of turtles, swimming through the dark amongst a pod of crystal dolphins. That is just one.

I pleaded with her to teach the secrets of dreaming to me. She said she simply closed her eyes and went to sleep. Each dawn she woke breathless in bed with cut and muddied feet. While my sister is imaginative, I am the cleverer one. One does not go to bed freshly scrubbed and then wake with dirt between their toes.

She is a sleepwalker. There is nothing to do but follow her.

After the evening meal, I always find my eyes weary. The light pains them, and by nighttime I crawl beneath the covers in the comfort of the dark and wait for Mother to send sister to bed, while Father reads old books in his den. No matter how I try to stay awake to follow my sister—sneaking cold tea from the pot, reciting poems to myself—my eyes betray me, and I would awake the next morning to hear her stories of wondrous dreams while I tended to the cuts on her feet.

So, after she dozed, I took Father’s key and locked our door. Thinking she would wander in circles and be as dreamless as I! But in the morning, I found the door cracked open, and the key still beneath my bedding. Amalthea lay in bed, her feet caked with dust as if she had wandered through a tomb. She sprung awake, eager to tell me of the black jackal-men of the desert and how they conquered a golden kingdom from the backs of house-tall hippopotamuses.

I must be cleverer.

23 June 1880

I must say my first failure drove me a bit mad. Apparently, I fell victim to a brain fever common to those from my homeland, and was confined to the sickroom for some days, tied to my bed to quell my thrashing. Father assures me it is not contagious, and that I am well now, but had become so weak that I required bowls of hot blood fresh from the rooster’s neck to regain my strength. I shudder at the thought, and am thankful I have no memory of it. Not even a fever dream is gifted to me!

But I did wake with a fresh idea, thanks to the bonds I gnawed during my recovery.

Last night I took a ball of twine, and looped one end around sister’s ankle. The other end, I tied to my wrist. I will join you in dreams tonight, I told her, and tucked her to bed. How confident I was, and rightly so!

For last night, I dreamed. How could it have been anything but a dream?

Little Amalthea rose from her bed without awakening me, but the tugging on the twine roused me from my deathly slumber! She would not speak, so I followed her to Father’s trophy room. He had retired to bed, but the menagerie of dead creatures always frighten me. Their scent offends my nose. Some I have seen in books, others resemble the fanciful creatures men draw in the corners of unfinished maps, as a warning.

Amalthea tugged the hippopotamus’s tusk with both hands, and the floor beyond it sank into stairs. She gave me no time to gawp in wonder. The twine tugged at my slender arm and I followed her into the dank bowels beneath our homestead, where the labyrinthine walls shined with black mica, lighted by shags of glowing moss. We stopped in a large cavern lighted by cold fire licking from three passages, each flanked by golden statues. She twisted the left statue and walked through the flames.

I have burned myself once; the memory still stings my sensitive palps. I closed my eyes and followed my sister into a world with a crimson sky, peopled with wisps of eel that bore human faces. They flew through songs unending, dined on clouds of pollen from a flower-sea that swathed their world in endless color. By passing through the flame, we had become them. We lived as sky eels until their purple sun burnt cinder-dark and we woke in bed, our feet calloused and filthy from our travels below.

I made sure to clean them before we came to the breakfast table.

17 July 1880

I have dreamed so much, I forgot to write. But oh, I have ruined everything!

I tied a new line the next night, and the next. Ravenous for dreams, I was! I followed Amalthea to worlds of crags and sea foam. Dead planets of mind-shattering silence. Primordial jungles where the trees bore eyes, where we crawled as low-slung apes with toothy, gaping mouths. Oceans that swarmed with humpbacked serpents, squirming back to belly, in waves of roiling, scaly flesh.

This morning, no breakfast waited for us. Fraught Mother pointed us to the den, where Father waited by his trophy room door. He told us he was proud that we had found the house’s secret, but he could not allow us to explore any more on our own. He had delved the caves himself, but he was older, wiser, and most importantly, well-armed. The danger was too great, and he could not bear to lose either of us. I told him that I had never felt threatened. I excel at stealth and observation.

Then, Amalthea said she envied my exotic origins and felt that Father favored me. He told her that was not true. That when a man saves a life, he is bound to protect it. He hugged her tightly, then sent her off to school without breakfast, and locked the door to his trophy room. He knows that for me, scolding is punishment enough.

Father says I must not allow my curiosity to overcome my judgment. That for one of my kind, I have accomplished things undreamed of. That if I love him—which I most assuredly do, despite vague memories of my earliest childhood, before I became orphaned—I would not disobey. No longer must I remain in eyesight of the house—now I had our entire corner of the island to explore, from stone wall to stone wall! The cliffs are cragged with rookeries. Our shore is far too rough for landings, but are quite thrilling for me to swim, and only I can safely discover if there are caves hidden within. He would join me on scouting missions.

Chastened, I did not tell him of my dreamless nights and how I coveted my sister’s dreams. For I knew it was beyond explanation. When I had told Amalthea how my head was full of darkness, she regarded me with such sadness, such pity, that a chasm opened in my heart. Dream-walking with her does not fill it, but soothes the ache.

11 August 1880

I have kept my promise to Father, and hunt dream-fodder amongst the crags. We have found no grottos or caverns, and the bone-piles and carvings that face the angry sea are no match for the wonders of the caves beneath the house. The chasm grows deeper within my heart each night. Now that I have seen the wellspring of all dreams, it has become intolerable, like the scent of blood, after my fever-cure.

To Amalthea’s credit, her feet are pristine each morning. Her dreams remain, but only echoes of what once was. So many are about other children at her school, who are so deathly boring! I used to dread my home-lessons, but I do not regret them now. Her dream-tales do not compare to our breathtaking adventures. Sumptuous feasts, now traded for sucking the mud from river stones. How Father had found me as a babe.

And so I creep downstairs each night in search of the key.

Nosing through Father’s library, I feel a twinge of fear at being discovered. Woozy from the heady scents of liquor and leather, India ink drying on parchment left by his manuscripts, now locked away from us in a steamer trunk of pachyderm hide. The lingering scent of fear and death coming from the leering trophy head above his chair, keeps me alert as I pore through his library, the memoirs of sailors and naturalists, diaries of unschooled astronomers, scraps of rants of imprisoned philosophers, hand-printed chapbooks of nameless, half-mad poets.

I have learned much, but found no key.

? 1880

Last night, I waited for Amalthea’s breathing to soften before I slunk from my bed and crept down the hallway and hid beneath my parents’ bed. Darkness quickly consumed me, but as I had hoped, I woke from dreamless sleep to Father’s loud snoring. I wiggled my hand into his robe pocket and found not the master key, but better; the tiny brass key with the curlicue handle, which guarded his papers! Suppressing a squeal, I padded to the den and unlocked the trunk.

Weighting down his papers was the master key. As I snatched it, the top page curled like a beckoning finger. I was dream-hungry, but what rooted my feet to the floor was a sketch of my face, much younger, in Father’s hand.

I felt a pang of pain in my heart. It took all my strength to peel the page aside. I did not wish to know the depths of squalor from which I came. They are my family now. But I caught a thread of how to control where the statues sent you, and that was my undoing.

Reader, I should have stayed and read more. I should have returned Father’s key to his robe pocket and used my clever trick to learn, but how ravenous I was to dream again! I brought my diary, so I could record my adventures, in case my mind was blank without Amalthea to join me on my journey. How clever I was!

I crept into the trophy room, filled as it was with the stink of creatures who died in terror. The hippo’s tusk clicked, and I headed downstairs alone. Three passages blue with flame, as before. I turned the leftmost statue, but it would not budge.

I nearly voided myself in fear. So close! I put my fingertips to the flames and felt no burn. I closed my eyes and walked ahead. Oh, the dreams I could share when I emerged from the tunnel into the unknown! How jealous Amalthea would be.

But my curiosity had burned me, unlike the statue-flames. For I used Father’s methods of dream-guidance to send me to where Father found me.

How ungrateful of me!

When I opened my eyes, I saw only darkness. I writhed into a ball of panic. Perhaps I had walked into my own mind, bereft of dreams? Slowly, my eyes adjusted to the gloomy world I had stumbled into. Ash drifted from an iron sky like snow.

I wiped my eyes and explored a warren of holes in a mountainside, peopled with mirrors of myself. My selves were friendly, if less civilized and speaking a language I could no longer comprehend. They squeezed my hands and welcomed me home. Plied me with bowls of fresh-slaked blood and cracked marrow-bones.

The eldest rose from the squatting masses and led me to a distant burrow. Old bones crunched beneath our feet. He took a beetle from the floor and rolled it between his paws until it buzzed and gave off a weak light. Beneath our feet the floor was carpeted with broken skulls.

This was a place of death.

And also birth.

The walls were collaged with handprints. He searched, then pointed to two ochre smudges, side by side. I placed my hands over them. Much larger, but patterned exactly the same.

A dream came unbidden from the chasm in my chest.

I rode on a mother-beast’s galloping sinewy back, fistfuls of fur in my hands, my throat thick with the scent of an impending feeding. A thunder-crack, then fear and terror. I voided myself, bit down hard, then was stunned and woke blind, in a world of white. The scent of blood, warm and safe, calmed me and I lapped it until the fire left my eyes, and I saw the face of Father, holding a ladle to my mouth.

I shrieked and scrambled back the way I came, but could not find the dream-cave that led me to this place. The mountain was a maze of warrens, all alike. There was nothing to do but sleep, however quickly beat my heart. I fled to the jungles below, settled beneath a broad leaf, and begged to wake in my bed.

Never had I been so thankful for dreamless sleep! I leapt from my bed to wake Amalthea, but our room has changed.

There is only one bed! No dolls or dresses, only a thick layer of black dust. I choked on a scream and ran downstairs, unable to vocalize my terror and loss. Mother’s post by the wood stove is blank; all that remains are the scrapes on the floorboards, where her shoes have worn a path. Father’s chair sat empty, his manuscripts torn and scattered across the den floor. The trophy room door stands open, the mounted figures toppled. I dare not think what has happened.

Below, the caves are extinguished of flames. They lead now to dank seeps, blank walls, the stones no longer glitter, the walls gouged, the golden statues pilfered by unseen claws. My family has been stolen as I slept, their house defiled. All I can discern is that the statues, now looted from the passageways, did not unlock our way into the world of dreams, but instead guarded the way back here.

And I had left them open.

All I can hope is that my family fled to safety, and that I may find them.

Once I piece together the scraps of Father’s pages, I will write more.

I am hungry, and the cupboards are bare.

Includes a newspaper clipping from the July 25th 1889 Vinalhaven Argus.

MATINICUS ISLAND, MAINE

Japhet Ketcham claims he has gotten to the bottom of the chicken slaughters on Lesser Fox Island, and it isn’t foxes like everyone thought it was. He was awakened at dawn by shrieking noises in his henhouse, and upon investigation, he says he found “a large black weasel, as tall as a man, with ash gray eyes, and hands like a raccoon” holding a pullet in each paw. He shot the beast as it fled into the woods. His dogs gave chase, and would not come when called. After chores, Ketcham and his sons tracked down the beast, which had been savaged by his dogs. “Now it looks like any old skinned bear,” Ketcham says, but “he knows what he saw.” So if you were betting that the culprit was a bear, collect your winnings at the Vinalhaven General Store.

Gambling is not encouraged by the Argus.—ed.

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