Leviathan Falls

Interlude: The Dreamers

The dreamer dreams, and his dream is unlike all that passed before. Where grandmother masks whispered and promised and told their secrets, nothing welcomes him here. Instead, there is the machine, and the machine is constant motion. Something that isn’t light glimmers in colors no eyes have seen. Shapes lock together and come apart too quickly for a mind to follow. The chitter of a swarm, rich with meaning he cannot find. The dreamer looks upon the truth behind the dream and finds no place for himself.

But a place must be found or made, so the dreamer imagines himself closer, wills himself in, and the machine bites at him, rips him, skins him skinless and raw. The pain is real, but it teaches. The glimmers glint patterns in their not-lights, the cascade of shapes has music in it, the swarm song is a static of words at the edge of comprehension. If there is less of the dreamer than there was, if the machine has taken what can’t be given back, the reward is a knowing deeper than bones.

The next time comes, and the dreamer fits his bleeding hands in the spaces between the spaces, breathes through the holes in number, and builds from abstraction a tool to crack wide the abstract. He sees the mechanism through its own strange eyes, and its depth astonishes and terrifies him. The voice of the machine grows deep and grand and horrifying: God whispering the obscenity that ends worlds. The darkness is the darkness of old, but terror has no face for him, and there needs to be a way, so there will be. A thousand bites, a million needle sticks, a ripping away of all that doesn’t fit.

And the bull-headed god turns to him, and for an instant that is an eon, they know each other with intimacy beyond names. There are no secrets between the two men dead without dying—their pain is one pain, their weariness is one weariness, their resolves braid together to a single rope that pulls at them both ways. Something shatters, and the horned god with his bloodied flanks turns eyes to the dreamer. Wheels within wheels within wheels. Where there was once a man, pitiless legions march.

The dreamer squares his shoulders and steps into the ring. There is nothing outside the ring. There is something within it, and it will have him dead.

The god that was a man finds the man that was a corpse and time skips in thunder. The dreamer feels the dream grow thin, and the thinness is pain. All he can do is exhale and know that when this breath is gone, there are no more breaths behind it. He fights like a raging storm, but the other man fights like a falling sea.

The dead man begins to die. Somewhere else, he feels a body ripping itself apart. He feels the heart he once had stopping. He hears human voices in the room beside pain, but there is no doorway back. The dreamer dreams an answering violence. A rat bites a tiger’s paw.

And then, more. A ghost made from hunger. A ghost made from longing. Graveyard children and prisoners. They touch their rage to his, and the dreamers dream together. They press into the machine, and the machine begins to shift and open. A thread swims itself into being, red and thin and tenuous. The horned god bellows a weariness vast as oceans and lowers its inhuman head.

Brightness floods, and for a time outside of time, they are lost in a sea of memories and sensations made meaningless, simple and confused as newborns. When they are again, the machine is the machine and they are outside of it.

The machine whirs and clatters. The little man rises. The hungry ghost rises, sparkling. The dreamers rise toward three brightnesses. Three holes in the ice that is the ceiling of the world.

The horned god forgets. The little man forgets. The sparkling ghost cannot bring herself to forgetfulness, and that is and will always be her hunger. The machine glimmers its idiot glimmers, it shapes its insoluble puzzles, it sings a buzzsaw shriek. And in a dream beneath the dream, a man stands alone in a lighthouse and faces an angry sea. His exhaustion and pain rhyme with something real, and Amos opens his eyes.

The lab was weirdly still. All around him, monitors chirped and alerts sounded. When he breathed in, it felt like his lungs were filled with glass shards. With an effort, he turned his head. Elvi wasn’t there. Jim wasn’t. He recognized Elvi’s second-in-command, though. Lee, he thought. The guy seemed stunned. They all seemed stunned.

“Hey,” Amos said.

Lee didn’t answer.

“Hey.”

With a shudder, the doctor seemed to come back to consciousness from whatever fugue he’d been in.

“What? Oh. Yes. Don’t try to move,” Lee said. “You’ve been through… You’ve been through a lot.”

“You all right?”

“Yes, I just… I had a very strange experience.”

“Yeah, I figured. But you got to tell Jim and the doc. There’s no way to get in. Duarte knows we’re here now. And I think he’s pissed.”