The Somnambulist's Dreams Read online

  It was a raven sitting on the hump of a large white bull.

  “You are ceasing to exist,” it said.

  When I opened my eyes, I was lying in the middle of the cold stone floor in the watch room with my arms spread out from my body. I was wearing my overcoat over my pajamas and my untied boots on my naked feet. I had on my hat and my gloves, and my scarf was wrapped tightly around the lower part of my face.

  I was, truth be told, bewildered by the dream. I am, like almost everyone else, familiar with the account of Scott’s doomed expedition and I immediately recognized the self-sacrificial act of Captain Oates.

  I will not attempt to rationalize this vision, if that is indeed what it is, but attempt to think of it merely as a vivid dream.

  It is my apprehensive hypothesis, that I am merely a repository for something infinitely more complex than I can fathom.

  He put down the sheet of paper and looked into the distance.

  “You are ceasing to exist.”

  He uttered the words and they hovered like a collection of vibrating fragments in the air before dissolving, leaving the room in palpable silence.

  He was perplexed by what he had just read.

  In his opinion this wasn’t a dream, rather it was a recollection of a real episode.

  He had of course read the varied accounts of the Antarctic expedition, and the detailed description of the journey from Scott’s personal journal. Thus he found what he had just read eerily aberrant. It was almost an exact replication of the events that had taken place on that ill-fated voyage back from the South Pole.

  Enoch Soule’s recollection didn’t make sense. It had too strong a consonance with the real event. It was as if Soule had actually been present on the ice and that he, not Captain Oates, had chosen to leave the tent to disappear in the blizzard.

  He got up from his seat.

  He looked at the last sentence.

  Although he had spoken the words softly, the sound of his voice had penetrated the silence like a pebble thrown into a well.

  “Aren’t we all?” he said. He lay the sheets down on the table and gazed into space, looking at nothing in particular.

  He thought about the selection of words. Somehow it seemed unlikely that Soule would have altered the statements that he had heard in his dreams, and yet he must have been aware of their obvious association. He wondered if the remaining dreams were connected in similar ways. He unraveled the teapot and picked it off the table.

  The tea inside was lukewarm, but his scarf was warm. He wrapped it around his neck and carried the pot and the cup downstairs.

  He checked his watch. Thirty-five minutes.

  He made another pot of tea.

  He didn’t discard the old leaves, but added a pinch of new ones from the bag. He fished a biscuit out of the tall red cylindrical biscuit tin and waited for the water to boil. As he bit into the biscuit, he thought about what he had read so far.

  He didn’t know how to decipher the dreams.

  Besides the words at the end, he couldn’t find any significant similarities between the two stories.

  He wondered if Soule’s dream about Africa was also somehow based in reality. Yet, how could it be? The inclusion of a talking bull was just too bizarre.

  However, he found the way Soule had portrayed the experience in the Antarctic especially unsettling. The description of Oates’s demise had been far more ominous inasmuch as it had seemed to be real.

  He poured the boiling water into the teapot and filled up the cup as well.

  He exchanged the stones and picked up the teapot, the cup and the lamp from the stove.

  He automatically counted the twenty-four steps as walked back upstairs.

  After he placed the things carefully on the table, he walked over to relieve himself in the fire bucket.

  His water left a faint trail of steam in the cold air.

  As he let out his water, he looked at the decrepit wall in front of him. One of his predecessors had made quite a delicate carving of a bird sitting on a branch. Both the branch and the bird were fairly generic and it was difficult to tell what kind of bird it was. He reckoned the carving must have been made some time ago, as the crepitating paint had added a fine mottled pattern to the bird’s plumage. A sad smile appeared briefly on his face as he recalled his small garden and the chirping sounds of courting birds in the spring.

  When he finished letting his water he checked the time. Just under ten minutes.

  He removed his gloves, grabbed the cup and moved away from the table, before pouring some of the lukewarm water over his right and then his left hand.

  When he had washed his hands, he placed the cup on the table and dried his hands thoroughly in his scarf.

  He walked over to the window and searched the horizon.

  He thought he saw something move close to land to his right.

  He held his gaze at the same point until he was certain that there was nothing there. It had probably just been a whale blowing or a larger fish breaking the surface.

  He checked the barometer, picked up his logbook and made the first entry of the night, before rewinding the mechanism.

  He sat down at the table, picked up the teapot and lightly swirled the liquid. He sat the teapot back down, covered it with his scarf, and pulled his coat tight around his neck. He put on his gloves and held onto the hot stones in his pockets for a while, before reaching for the next sheet of paper.

  The Cemetery

  I was high up in a large tree.

  It was nearly dusk and a fine mist was spreading on the ground below. I tightened my grip and looked down to see a pair of scaly black claws holding onto the branch upon which I was sitting. I loosened my grip and lightly jumped. A pair of wings unfolded from my shoulders and flapped cautiously at the air. I settled down on the branch and stretched my wings. They were iridescent black and shone like newly polished gunmetal.

  I held on to the branch and felt the air push against me as I forcibly flapped the wings.

  I hesitantly jumped to another branch, before I launched and flew into the mist below.

  The sensation was most extraordinary. It was as if I was slowly falling against a cushion of air that pressed itself ethereally yet purposefully against me. I instinctively operated my new extremities, glided downward in a large spiral and landed quietly on a tall column.

  As far as I could make out in the dwindling light, I was surrounded by a great number of grave markers in an extensive cemetery.

  I couldn’t see anything move in the twilight, but as I searched the grounds from my vantage point, I noticed a bulky mass lying on a bench not far away.

  I flew over to the bench and landed on the top crosspiece.

  The iron was cold against my claws.

  What had appeared from a distance to be an assortment of discarded clothes, was in fact a man.

  He appeared utterly disheveled.

  He was sprawled on the bench with one of his limp arms dangling over the edge. His clothes were in shambles. He had dirt on the knees of his black trousers, as if he had been crawling, and his white shirt and ruffled neck tie were both soiled by a variety of stains. A black coat was spread out underneath him and his black shoes were heavily scuffed.

  His face was ashen and smeared with dirt.

  He had a high and wide forehead and the hollows of his eyes were deep and dark. His receding unruly hair appeared oily, and a modest unkempt mustache sat over a small delicate mouth, from which a stream of pinkish spittle was running down his hollowed cheek.

  I observed him for some time.

  Due to his waxy complexion and the stillness with which he lay, I presumed him to be dead, but then I heard a distressing rattling sound in the depth of his chest as he laboriously took a breath.

  He opened his eyes.

  It took some time before his eyes adjusted to the dark, but then he clearly saw me sitting on the top of the bench looking down at him.

  He leapt up and pointed a shaky fi
nger in my direction.

  “You!” He shouted. “Have I at last ceased to exist in this world? Has your master finally dispatched you to collect my ravaged soul in this caliginous hour?”

  After this outburst, he immediately started coughing. He bent over and fumbled for his kerchief in the outer pocket of his coat and covered his mouth while his body was seized by convulsions.

  He sat down on the bench contorted in pain.

  I waited until his coughing subsided and his wheezing breath slowly returned.

  He turned to face me.

  “Still, I seem to be clinging onto life in this feculent world,” he said through forced breath,” so the question is: Are you real, or are you merely a figment of my cerebral malady?”

  “I am real,” I answered, not thinking how this might affect him.

  He instinctively moved to the far end of the bench, and looked at me as if he had encountered a phantasm. His eyes widened and one of his dirty hands flew to his face to hide his open mouth. He stared at me as if struck by horror.

  “You spoke,” he said at last. “That confirms that I have finally succumbed to my delusions and fully collapsed into madness.” He held his head in his hands and began to sob.

  “You are not mad,” I said, hopping a bit closer on the crosspiece, “I am as real as you are.”

  He looked up at me with tears streaming down his face.

  “That doesn’t prove anything,” he said sobbing. “The fact that you state that you’re as real as me, only proves that my mind is not to be trusted.”

  He dried his eyes and blew his nose into the kerchief. “However, if my mind somehow projects you as real, what message are you here to convey? What does your master want from me? My soul? Tell him he can have it. It is already beyond repair.”

  He again buried his head in his hands.

  “I am not who you think I am,” I answered. “I promise that you have nothing to fear.”

  “You are wrong,” he replied, wrenching his hands in his lap, “fear is bound to me like the kiss of a dead lover. It shall remain forevermore.”

  “What are you so afraid of?” I asked, cocking my head.

  “Everything,” he sighed. “Though mostly I fear what may be lying in wait at the end. I am terrified by the mere thought of oblivion.”

  He dabbed at his brow with the less than clean kerchief.

  “Yet I yearn for the end to come,” he added after a while. “I have not been feeling well for some time, neither in body nor in mind.”

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?” he replied.

  “It’s a simple question. What are you doing here alone, so late in the day?”

  “I believe that I will soon be dead,” he said. “I came to say goodbye to my beloved Virginia and my dear brother Henry. If I shall not have a chance to meet them in the afterlife, I wanted to let them both know how sorry I am to have wronged them in this one.”

  “What makes you think you are dying?” I asked, ruffling my feathers, jumping a bit closer to where he sat.

  “I have a terrible ache inside my head,” he said, rubbing at the area just above his right eye. “It feels like my brain continuously presses upon the cranium, as if it wants to escape its bony prison.” He kept massaging the area with his thumb, leaving a dirty mark to the right of his brow.

  “Also, I have premonitions.” He looked at me knowingly. “Just two days ago in Philadelphia, Virginia visited me in my room. She looked so beautiful and altogether halcyon as she stretched out her arms and asked me to join her.” He gazed into the approaching darkness, lost in the memory.

  “Alas, when I tried to follow her, I walked directly into the sun filled patch on the wall and knocked my head.”

  He looked at me with a wry smile.

  “Despite everything that I have done, I think she still loves me as devotedly as anyone I ever knew.” This he said quietly, then he stopped speaking and looked at the ground between his feet.

  I didn’t want to interrupt his apparent reverie, so we sat on the bench in silence.

  Suddenly he stood up.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  He seemed to no longer recognize the surroundings.

  “Are you the conductor?” he asked questioningly. “Is this the train to New York? I am expected in New York shortly, can you please let me know when we get there?”

  He then vigorously searched his coat pockets.

  “Where is it?” He sounded agitated. “Where is it? Have you seen it?” he asked frantically. “The letter of introduction to Reynolds. Have you seen it? It was here in my pocket only five minutes ago.”

  He began searching the ground around the bench.

  “No, no, no, it can’t have disappeared,” he cried out.

  “It has to be here somewhere.” He desperately searched his pockets. When he came up empty handed, he looked behind the nearest marker and began a feverish stumbling search between the gravestones. I heard him falling about in the darkness in his quest to retrieve the lost letter.

  As he searched, I flew from column to column to keep him in sight.

  After some time, he fell to the ground.

  I waited for him to get up, but this time he stayed down.

  I flew to where he had fallen and landed near his outstretched arm.

  He was lying on his back looking at the stars in the dark expanse above.

  “Is there an alternate form of life out there, I wonder?” He didn’t wait for my answer, but instead turned his head and looked at me intensely.

  “Some time ago I had the strangest dream. Or perhaps it was another hallucination,” he said softly.

  “These days it has become rather difficult to tell one from the other.” He paused briefly. “In any case; I was standing under a large tree in a foreign country. I was alone, but for the company of a large white bull, which was lying on the ground beside me.”

  There was another pause, before he continued.

  “Don’t think for a moment, that I don’t recognize the irony in telling you this, but the bull spoke to me.” He slowly shook his head and closed his fluttering eyelids. “It said that everything, everywhere at some point ceases to exist.” He turned his head and looked at the stars. “Although I admit that I didn’t fully acknowledge the importance of the dream at the time, I do appreciate it now.” He raised his hand and ever so gently ran the tips of his fingers down my feathered back.

  “You were always my favorite.” He closed his eyes. “However, I don’t believe I need you in my life anymore.

  When I came to, I was sitting in a hunched position on the floor in the sleeping quarters. My knees and lower legs were close together, pressed against my chest under my chin and my toes were aching on the cold stone floor.

  My arms were stretched down by my sides and I was completely nude, but for a dark grey blanket wrapped around my shoulders. I do not know how long I had been sitting in the position, but when I finally attempted to stretch my legs, they throbbed as the blood began to flow through my veins, and they continued to prickle for quite some time afterwards.

  I was, as you can imagine, very confused and somewhat disturbed by what had just occurred. I believe that I, in the form of a raven, encountered a distressed Mr. Poe at some point late in his life.

  What is the meaning of this? How can this be happening? You might ask. The honest answer is: I do not know.

  Everything that happens in my sleep, continues to be as great a mystery to me, as it surely must be to you. I am recounting the things that are happening to me, as faithfully as I possibly can and yet I understand how outrageous they must sound.

  He put down the sheet.

  Like the others, it was light as a feather.

  He felt the delicate brush of the fabric against his skin as he carefully placed it on the top of the small pile on the left. He absentmindedly ran his index finger over one of the fairly recent inscriptions in the table’s surface. “E” was
all it said. There was a small engraved heart next to it.

  He checked his watch. Forty minutes.

  He walked to the window and stared into the horizon. He thought he saw a small movement in the periphery to his left. He grabbed the binoculars from the hook and scanned the horizon.

  He once again kept his gaze at the spot where he’d imagined the movement.

  He had been mistaken.

  He replaced the binoculars.

  He remembered that the raven in Poe’s poem had repeatedly uttered the same word ‘Nevermore’ to the narrator, and that the narrator, already grieving for his dead lover, had driven himself mad by continuously asking the raven questions, to which he already knew the answer.

  He was wondering if Poe had meant for the raven to be aware of its actions and if it indeed intended the narrator to lose his mind, or whether the narrator, already driven to madness by grief, had been imagining the raven from the outset.

  Whatever the case, he knew that Poe had meant for the raven to be a messenger from the underworld.

  He could understand why Poe would have been horrified by the encounter in the cemetery.

  However, he couldn’t have been. For the simple reason that the encounter had never taken place. It was a merely a figment of an overzealous mind.

  Nevertheless, as he gathered up the things from the table, he thought of the image of the raven following the delirious poet through the graveyard like a dark phantom.

  He made his way downstairs.

  He put the teapot and cup back on the shelf in the cupboard and replaced the stones.

  Then he fished out a small pan from the back of the cupboard and put it on the stove. He walked over to the pantry and opened the door. He got out two small tins of beans and put them in his pockets. He then unrolled a small package and removed a thin strip of salted pork, that he held between his teeth, while he rolled up the package, replacing it on the shelf and closing the pantry door.

  The door squeaked on its hinges and parts of the flaking paint fell to the ground where they lay like small green pieces of mosaic against the grey floor. He thought it reminded him of something, but he couldn’t quite remember what it was.