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eredienGarry Kilworth, The Frog Chauffeur. I think about the delicious cool that comes over your skin when you drive under trees in summer when I read this story. I also think of Skye's house, and the long summer I spent there as one of the happiest of my life. Do you know whether the faceplate for the light switch went when you moved, Skye, as your mother promised?
--
I eventually want to do watercolor pencil illustrations for this dream, but have not yet got around to do anything more than buying watercolor pencils and doing a decent sketch of the first illustration.
I get dreams in three categories: Amazingly Uplifting, Screamingly Terrifiying, and Chameleonic Surrealist. Often, these dreams have hints of plotlines; I was able to wake and follow this quite long one through. I don't quite know what category it fits into. It was beautiful enough to go into the first, bits fit the second. But it wasn't quite as disconnectedly surreal as many of my dreams are.
This might be disturbing to some people.
--
I am an indentured maidservant for a free black man somewhere north of Maryland during the revolutionary war; I enjoy working for him as he is just and fair and humorous. He has been spending much of his life and not a small sum of money working to be a respectable person and distance himself from his rather disreputable mother, who is currently in Paris causing a sensation among the meaner noblefolk by impersonating scandalous wax museum figurines within the museums so perfectly the propiterors cannot tell the difference until she dashes out from under the velvet ropes holding back the crowds. She is also one of the more renowned and power-hungry witches currently living on the Continent. Her fame in the broadsheets has caused her some unwanted attention recently: she has disappeared. Before she did, she wrote a letter to her son. I know what it is about before I open it--the Straduvardis hurdy-gurdy, a musical instrument capable of terrifiying powers in the hands of the wrong person. I know things, dark and shadowed, are already tracing the letter to this ocean, this colony, this doorstep.
"What is it?" He walks in with a candle, sees my face, and knows.
I begin to read.
"--wait." He lights the hurricane lamp in the window, replaces the glass shade.
"Master Grey? What are you doing? Those candles are precious, and we--"
"Hurry, and help. We must light them all, and take care to see they remain lit. Now help me!"
He is nearly desperate, which terrifies me. He even goes into the attic, and lights the candle there in the single window against the dark. The house lights up like a candle itself in the autumn night; things brush against the window but do not get in so long as the flames hold.
*
I am a student at a school of arcana.
Today I am to learn about the hidden meaning of carved fireplace mantels. I am curious, and brought into a room: high ceilings, narrow, short, floors of unvarnished cherry wood whose splinters catch the dust.
"Watch closely." A tutor's hand reaches out, spins some hidden wall mechanism. A fireplace slows, stops, on the blank wall before me.
I try to speak, but cannot: it is too beautiful, carved of rich-veined rock in black, or cream, or cinnabar (I cannot tell), but made to look like it was painted on to the wall. A double fake. I walk closer, to see how the artist did it; fascinated and looking only for brushstrokes.
Something resolves itself in the corners of my vision. What is it, carved holding up the mantel? "Why," I say, stopping, "it's--" and then I throw up on the splintered floor, and cannot stop screaming. The viscera of the damned souls of hell twine around the caryatids, who reach out for me from the flatness of the carving.
I sense Tutor sighing at the waste of potential. "Next." Another spin.
This one is made of white marble and is perfectly featureless. I walk into the black opening in the middle and stand, waiting, for something that never comes.
Next is a very familiar fireplace. But, though I remember the hidden meanings of the sheild's blazon--three fesses sinister on a field of or, and translate the Greek correctly, I cannot place where I have seen that particular fireplace before. This, too, is part of the lesson.
"Denbigh Language Lab," says Tutor.
*
My next task. Much simpler. I am not to touch any of the candles ranged in a fairy-circle in front of me; that is the job of the tutors.
I never see the tutors--just the edges of their hoods, and their bird-hands, which flicker over the lit candles, pass over the flames, and snuff them out.
There are only two candles lit now; I can see nothing except the nearest half-circle of candles, waiting hands, and then blackness. I have been brought to the school because I am talented in certain gifts, chief among them foresight, but must learn to regulate the rest of them. The power to put out a candle in that fashion is complex taking years of study.
I am jealous of that. But at least, I think, I possess now the ability to put out my candles in the manner I can. I blow them out.
The ash and smoke twist in the air for a moment.
Then, they come back on; glowing dark and purple as plums in the secret heart of the wick. I stare, entranced, before I realize that was not supposed to happen. At all.
It takes all the skill of the tutors to fix the problem, which was quite severe. It was not my fault, exactly, but I must be better taught to control myself. So, I am assigned guard duty one afternoon for Titania's Chosen, the Fool.
*
It was once an honor to do guard duty over this mortal, chosen to be Titania's consort and sacrifice.
It is no longer. He is still very beautiful--his hair yellow, his eyes a blue so pure it is painful to look at them, as when he jolts me out of my thoughts by appearning, peek-a-boo style, from behind a box whose contents I had been examining. But something went wrong, or soft, in the mind of the only mortal under the hill who could make Titania laugh with his wit.
"What are these?" I ask him, sorting through the delicate pink box on the ratty old caned chair which would not hold the weight of a cat.
"Those are for my party," he says. He takes out the ropes of--are those stars?--and a beautiful headdress of cucold's horns fashioned out of glazed coral, and puts them on, and prances around the room with the gilded doors, dusty windows, and mice running through the ticking of the once-plush mattress. "Is it coming soon?"
The fey in the corner, the other attendant, looks at me before fading into the next room. We all know: he will die soon, too simple now to know he is undertaking the fate he chose for himself yesterday, or aeons ago. Titania has only pity for him now, and even that not for much longer.
And the date for the sacrifice approaches.
"Yes," I say. He dances around, stirring up dust motes, happy in his nakedness.
*
And then, one day, he is gone. Rumor abounds: Oberon's doing? But we students know our duty, and most of us are not beholden to that master of hounds.
"You must find him," says my tutor, staring around the roomfull of telepaths, farseers, glimpsers. He is the only dark thing in the morning room, made entirely of white.
He leaves. We concentrate, or do not, listen, or stay silent, as befits the practice and learning of each.
Instinct, always the strongest and most terrifiyingly immediate sense in me, kicks in.
He is about to jump off the balcony of the mall onto the rotunda below.
I run, green tail and wings and feet flashing bright color suddenly against the white walls, and my talons skid on the floor as a make a particularly sharp turn onto the overwalk hallway outside, knocking a small towheaded child over nearly onto the stairs. He was only stunned at worst. I am incapable of stopping to apologize; I mutter something and rush by to the doors of the movie theater.
"Why are you here?" The usher steps in front of me, blocking my way to the balcony. Oberon's hand, indeed; there are dragonfly wings out of the back of that tailcoat; he has been put here to stall me.
I see him perched, pink toes curled over the brass railing, knees flexed, jumping up and down like a bird on a particularly flexible branch.
I do very little, but the usher's reaction to my threat is that of a slug to salt.
The guards come around the corner, and manhandle down the Sacrifice in time.
My job is done; I cannot decide if I am happy or sad when I see the pomp of the parade to Hell, and the flower-wreathed towheaded boy now riding beside Oberon (on his very own pony), whose reason for existance is to make Titania jealous.
--
Okay, that's it.
Like I said, my dreams are not normally quite this plot-filled. Illustrations coming soon, I promise.
Maybe I should stop reading Dark Tower and alchemy texts before bed, though.
--
I eventually want to do watercolor pencil illustrations for this dream, but have not yet got around to do anything more than buying watercolor pencils and doing a decent sketch of the first illustration.
I get dreams in three categories: Amazingly Uplifting, Screamingly Terrifiying, and Chameleonic Surrealist. Often, these dreams have hints of plotlines; I was able to wake and follow this quite long one through. I don't quite know what category it fits into. It was beautiful enough to go into the first, bits fit the second. But it wasn't quite as disconnectedly surreal as many of my dreams are.
This might be disturbing to some people.
--
I am an indentured maidservant for a free black man somewhere north of Maryland during the revolutionary war; I enjoy working for him as he is just and fair and humorous. He has been spending much of his life and not a small sum of money working to be a respectable person and distance himself from his rather disreputable mother, who is currently in Paris causing a sensation among the meaner noblefolk by impersonating scandalous wax museum figurines within the museums so perfectly the propiterors cannot tell the difference until she dashes out from under the velvet ropes holding back the crowds. She is also one of the more renowned and power-hungry witches currently living on the Continent. Her fame in the broadsheets has caused her some unwanted attention recently: she has disappeared. Before she did, she wrote a letter to her son. I know what it is about before I open it--the Straduvardis hurdy-gurdy, a musical instrument capable of terrifiying powers in the hands of the wrong person. I know things, dark and shadowed, are already tracing the letter to this ocean, this colony, this doorstep.
"What is it?" He walks in with a candle, sees my face, and knows.
I begin to read.
"--wait." He lights the hurricane lamp in the window, replaces the glass shade.
"Master Grey? What are you doing? Those candles are precious, and we--"
"Hurry, and help. We must light them all, and take care to see they remain lit. Now help me!"
He is nearly desperate, which terrifies me. He even goes into the attic, and lights the candle there in the single window against the dark. The house lights up like a candle itself in the autumn night; things brush against the window but do not get in so long as the flames hold.
*
I am a student at a school of arcana.
Today I am to learn about the hidden meaning of carved fireplace mantels. I am curious, and brought into a room: high ceilings, narrow, short, floors of unvarnished cherry wood whose splinters catch the dust.
"Watch closely." A tutor's hand reaches out, spins some hidden wall mechanism. A fireplace slows, stops, on the blank wall before me.
I try to speak, but cannot: it is too beautiful, carved of rich-veined rock in black, or cream, or cinnabar (I cannot tell), but made to look like it was painted on to the wall. A double fake. I walk closer, to see how the artist did it; fascinated and looking only for brushstrokes.
Something resolves itself in the corners of my vision. What is it, carved holding up the mantel? "Why," I say, stopping, "it's--" and then I throw up on the splintered floor, and cannot stop screaming. The viscera of the damned souls of hell twine around the caryatids, who reach out for me from the flatness of the carving.
I sense Tutor sighing at the waste of potential. "Next." Another spin.
This one is made of white marble and is perfectly featureless. I walk into the black opening in the middle and stand, waiting, for something that never comes.
Next is a very familiar fireplace. But, though I remember the hidden meanings of the sheild's blazon--three fesses sinister on a field of or, and translate the Greek correctly, I cannot place where I have seen that particular fireplace before. This, too, is part of the lesson.
"Denbigh Language Lab," says Tutor.
*
My next task. Much simpler. I am not to touch any of the candles ranged in a fairy-circle in front of me; that is the job of the tutors.
I never see the tutors--just the edges of their hoods, and their bird-hands, which flicker over the lit candles, pass over the flames, and snuff them out.
There are only two candles lit now; I can see nothing except the nearest half-circle of candles, waiting hands, and then blackness. I have been brought to the school because I am talented in certain gifts, chief among them foresight, but must learn to regulate the rest of them. The power to put out a candle in that fashion is complex taking years of study.
I am jealous of that. But at least, I think, I possess now the ability to put out my candles in the manner I can. I blow them out.
The ash and smoke twist in the air for a moment.
Then, they come back on; glowing dark and purple as plums in the secret heart of the wick. I stare, entranced, before I realize that was not supposed to happen. At all.
It takes all the skill of the tutors to fix the problem, which was quite severe. It was not my fault, exactly, but I must be better taught to control myself. So, I am assigned guard duty one afternoon for Titania's Chosen, the Fool.
*
It was once an honor to do guard duty over this mortal, chosen to be Titania's consort and sacrifice.
It is no longer. He is still very beautiful--his hair yellow, his eyes a blue so pure it is painful to look at them, as when he jolts me out of my thoughts by appearning, peek-a-boo style, from behind a box whose contents I had been examining. But something went wrong, or soft, in the mind of the only mortal under the hill who could make Titania laugh with his wit.
"What are these?" I ask him, sorting through the delicate pink box on the ratty old caned chair which would not hold the weight of a cat.
"Those are for my party," he says. He takes out the ropes of--are those stars?--and a beautiful headdress of cucold's horns fashioned out of glazed coral, and puts them on, and prances around the room with the gilded doors, dusty windows, and mice running through the ticking of the once-plush mattress. "Is it coming soon?"
The fey in the corner, the other attendant, looks at me before fading into the next room. We all know: he will die soon, too simple now to know he is undertaking the fate he chose for himself yesterday, or aeons ago. Titania has only pity for him now, and even that not for much longer.
And the date for the sacrifice approaches.
"Yes," I say. He dances around, stirring up dust motes, happy in his nakedness.
*
And then, one day, he is gone. Rumor abounds: Oberon's doing? But we students know our duty, and most of us are not beholden to that master of hounds.
"You must find him," says my tutor, staring around the roomfull of telepaths, farseers, glimpsers. He is the only dark thing in the morning room, made entirely of white.
He leaves. We concentrate, or do not, listen, or stay silent, as befits the practice and learning of each.
Instinct, always the strongest and most terrifiyingly immediate sense in me, kicks in.
He is about to jump off the balcony of the mall onto the rotunda below.
I run, green tail and wings and feet flashing bright color suddenly against the white walls, and my talons skid on the floor as a make a particularly sharp turn onto the overwalk hallway outside, knocking a small towheaded child over nearly onto the stairs. He was only stunned at worst. I am incapable of stopping to apologize; I mutter something and rush by to the doors of the movie theater.
"Why are you here?" The usher steps in front of me, blocking my way to the balcony. Oberon's hand, indeed; there are dragonfly wings out of the back of that tailcoat; he has been put here to stall me.
I see him perched, pink toes curled over the brass railing, knees flexed, jumping up and down like a bird on a particularly flexible branch.
I do very little, but the usher's reaction to my threat is that of a slug to salt.
The guards come around the corner, and manhandle down the Sacrifice in time.
My job is done; I cannot decide if I am happy or sad when I see the pomp of the parade to Hell, and the flower-wreathed towheaded boy now riding beside Oberon (on his very own pony), whose reason for existance is to make Titania jealous.
--
Okay, that's it.
Like I said, my dreams are not normally quite this plot-filled. Illustrations coming soon, I promise.
Maybe I should stop reading Dark Tower and alchemy texts before bed, though.
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(no subject)
12/9/04 23:08 (UTC)(no subject)
12/9/04 23:44 (UTC)Also, go read Hope Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist for the novel somebody else got out of that in 1936.
Much love,
Lila
(no subject)
13/9/04 09:43 (UTC)If you do, we should blather at each other about fairies.
(no subject)
14/9/04 21:30 (UTC)Yes. Novel should be made.
Pretty pictures we should see.
(no subject)
16/9/04 08:20 (UTC)We're still waiting for you to come visit. ;-)
Cheers!