“Which one?”
“What?”
“Which of the souls? It’s an old
fable Lord Morphei had three souls, three dream faces. Which one of the three
fathered you? Was it his centre? Or was it Phantasos? No, wait. I get it. The
screams and the rapes. You’re the nightmare. Phoebetor’s boy.”
During the confrontation, the world
around us became more solid and gradually bright. In the middle of the shapes
and shadows, he became more substantial. For a moment I thought he doesn’t look
so ugly at all. Now as he was leaning in closer (as he dared so), I could also
see the texture of his skin and the veins on his wrists, the earrings and the
needlework on his clothes and the shape of his toenails. A handsome little
thing, to be sure, but he didn’t worry me. Not even when he grabbed me and
threw me on the ground, nor when he choked me and shook me and hissed he will
show me how a woman is handled, before she is ended. He sounded
rehearsed.
“Is this how you killed lord
Morphei’s wife?” I croaked. It was difficult to talk, because his grip on my
throat was hard, but he heard me. He’s stopped trying to rape me altogether.
The grip loosened ever so briefly.
If he knew what he was doing, he’d be digging thumbs to in to break the oesophagus.
This was he was just slowly cutting off the flow of blood to my brain and I was
getting warm and fuzzy.
“What did you say?”
“Did you rape her first, too? … Did
you rip out her heart and whispered it how her husband and son are dead?”
“I didn’t kill Amis! What are you
talking about?! …”
“Who, then?”
The grip loosened entirely.
“Do you even know?” I pressed on.
The thing moved away from me,
kneeling above me. I didn’t try to sit up, I just wiped the tear that ran down
my eye due to pain. It was a reflex, not weeping. Perhaps angry weeping. But I
felt good otherwise. Extremely so. Valdemar would be proud of me, I was
certain. ‘Tis may be how I die, but I wasn’t going to let the little shit farce
relish in it.
I could see the rigid upbringing
kick in every time the threshold of panic and emotion was growing too much. He
snarled aloofly, nostrils flaring: “It is not your wit to know who governs
worlds that bleed pity and shadows on the earth you thread! My family is so
above you I couldn’t even begin to beat their majesty into you.”
“Oh, so it was your family?
We’ve been wondering about that. Why did they do it?”
“Why? Why do suns burn madly when
there’s no one watching, why do sons put spears into their eyes for their
fathers’ sins?”
“Why does a tiny nightmare inherit
the throne of dreams, even when it neither deserves, wants nor handles it?
Could it be because he’s but a puppet’?”
He pushed away like I was something
frightfully disgusting and stood up. “I am not a nightmare!”
I actually expected him to snarl: I am not a puppet.
“Your job is to murder people in
their sleep using night terrors! You were about to rape and murder ME and I’m
awake! How are you not a nightmare?”
“It is my honest joy to kill you!
All of you. Lord Morphei must never …!”
“What’s it to you? He is dead. He’s not a king
anymore; he’s just some scabs and brittle bones, rattling death from his
scratched lips, not poetry. He will never be a God again. Even he doesn’t know
if he even wants to be a human. Nobody can argue for him, because his voice is
too long lost. We were just a bunch of old fools, trying to right a cosmic
wrong. It has nothing to do with you. You go do your job. Blow some sand
around. Manage your estates. Try to build some nice buildings in the memory of
your cousins that got killed. Write a poem. You needn’t worry about us.
We couldn’t threaten you even if we tried. And we won’t try. We used to like
your people.”
If he heard any of this and
understood half, good, but the time it took to vomit such a speech gave me
enough opportunity to shake the strangulation haze and sit up, pushing from my
elbows. He frowned a sad, angry child’s frown and hissed, under his breath,
without looking at me: “Makes no difference.”
“Course it does. Does to us.”
“You all must perish.”
“Pull your head out of your arse and
create something beautiful! I’ve not had a dream for weeks and trust me, little
princeling, I know when a dream is void.”
“T’was wasted words on non-existent
ears. I cannot let you leave here alive. I will not.”
“We’re in dreamscape, you idiot. My
body’s on the floor in a small room in London.”
“Nobody can survive a death in
dreams!”
“I’m a trained fantasist, you daft
cunt, the first thing they teach you is how to combat a myoclonic twitch! I
will just wake up!”
It was actually sad to see how naïve
and lost he was. He just stood there, realizing he’s fucked up. He should have
done some research at least, his face said. This was all wrong. I should have
been a defeated thing by now. But I have gotten on my feet and started to fix
my clothes back to where they were supposed to compliment my modesty.
“Just leave me alone and go do
whatever it is you are supposed to be doing, reigning,” I muttered, tucking in
my shirt. “I’ll go home and go make some breakfast. Not that you’d know what
that is.”
He gave me a tired, warning look. “I
can make better pancakes than you.”
“Now you’re just being
delusional. You can’t even make a better speech. And your kissing is pathetic.”
“I wasn’t trying to kiss you nicely.”
“You weren’t trying to murder me
nicely either and you frakked that part up like a pro.”
What do they call your around here,
anyway? was my last question to him, before, after an eon of deafness and
darkness, I woke up in my bed (where it looks like I’ve been purposefully moved
so that I wasn’t in the way of the nurses.) in Notting Hill. Rhyannon checked
me, checked the damage and my vitals, then gave me a ‘you certainly can
bullshit your way out from underneath the gallows, boss’ look. I needed coffee,
though, surprisingly enough, I didn’t feel any particular need for a good cry.
They call me Morpheus, actually, he
sighed. But I think that’s their idea of a joke.
