The Dreamer in Fire and Other Stories

by Gafford, Sam

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Rice,” the smooth voice dripped. “I told you that I’d hoped I’d see you again soon.”

  Noyes pushed himself inside and closed the door behind him. No screams were emitted from the house. No blood was ever found. Still, at that moment, Morgan Rice was erased from this earth.

  In the air, the sound of German airships laden with atomic bombs came ever closer and closer.

  Sunspots

  They come at night, mostly. Blinding, bright lights that smash their way into my mind. No matter where I am, they find me. I’ve tried to hide, but they always find me. I’ve hidden in stables, under bridges, even in the sewers—and the lights always appear.

  They’ve been attacking me for years. Even as a child in Whitechapel, I wasn’t safe. I would be asleep in the back room with my brothers and sisters, and the lights would come. There would be loud noises like a train engine wheezing as it goes up a hill. I’d clamp my hands over my ears and shut my eyes tight, but they’d find their way through. Their thoughts worming their way into my brain, becoming my thoughts, my desires, my actions. No one else ever heard or saw them. The lights would be so bright that everything else would become blurs and stretched out like sweets on a taffy pull. Heads would look squished and thin while their fingers became long sticks.

  When I woke up with my mother’s bloody and bruised body below me, I ran off into the streets and tried to hide from everything. I wandered through the workhouses and asylums, growing up among the poor and the mad. One night, in Bethlehem Hospital, the lights came for me while I was in the open room. Later, when I awoke in the straitjacket, they told me that there had been no lights and I had been stopped from attacking a female patient. They said that I was shouting about lights and that the patient had been hiding something inside her body.

  I was in Bedlam for a while.

  That’s when I learned not to talk about the lights. I worked on my control, on being aware when I had my ‘spells.’ I couldn’t stop them but, when I felt them coming, I would find a dark, tight place to hide away. That’s how I learned what they were doing and what they wanted.

  I begged the doctors to kill me. They would not. Men and women around me were subjected to the most horrifying treatments ever devised in the name of healing, but we were never allowed to die. So I escaped and ran back to the streets of Whitechapel, the only home I’d ever known.

  On the nights when the lights did not come for me, I would dream odd, terrifying dreams. My thoughts were not my own and were nothing known to me. In the dreams, I’d see strange places with unnatural landscapes. The buildings were tall and thin and sat at odd angles to one another and there were things that flew in the air and creatures that swam through liquid that wasn’t quite water. I’d see vehicles that spun and split through the skies and vast expanses of stars and dark spaces that would zip by at unbelievable speeds. I’d feel sadness at leaving those horrifying landscapes with their unholy creatures, but a sense of purpose, of need, would drive me forward. When I would awaken from these dreams, I’d be shivering and covered in a sickly, cold sweat. Several times I would look at my hands and scream, horrified at their short fingers and pink skin.

  I tried to kill myself several times.

  My coat pockets loaded with heavy rocks, I threw myself into the Thames, only to be pulled out by a passing bobby. I jumped in front of hansoms, but they always managed to stop short no matter how close I timed my leap. I picked fights with dangerous men in bars and let them beat me unconscious, but I never died. Each time, something kept me from death. Eventually the lights revealed that this was because I had to fulfill a great purpose, a mighty task that was the sole purpose of my life.

  But I would not do it.

  So the lights came more often and were more and more insistent. They pressed down upon my mind, crushing my thoughts until I couldn’t tell the difference between their thoughts and my thoughts. I could see through my eyes, but so could they. I lay in the middle of Commercial Street, screaming. People ignored me, thinking that I was drunk, while children mocked me by screaming along with me. When I stood up, the lights in my mind moved my body and I watched as I walked down the street.

  I found her in Buck’s Row.

  She looked young but said that she was older. Her name was Polly. I’d seen her around before, when I would be trying to drink the lights away at the Ten Bells Pub. She’d been nice to me and could see that I was not right. She was drunk and led me down the street when my hand suddenly shot out and slit her throat with a knife I hadn’t known I had.

  After that, I went away and hid in my mind. I did not want to see the things my hands were doing.

  I awoke the next morning, lying in the park behind a bush. My hands ached from the activity of the night before, but there was no blood on me or my clothes. I was sure that it was all a dream until I heard the newsboys shouting about a horrible murder. Mindlessly, I plodded along.

  The lights came again a few days later, but I bashed my head against a stone wall until I was unconscious. After that, they came every night and I could no longer fight.

  Annie died in the back of a run-down house on Hanbury Street. This time the lights made me scoop out her intestines and throw them over her shoulder. There was something inside her that they made me look for, but it wasn’t there. I could feel them making notes as my hands cut her open as if they were charting a road map.

  If I couldn’t kill myself, I’d give myself up. The East End was exploding in a riot of outrage. I’d confess and the police would execute me. But when I went up to a PC, my mouth would not work. The lights would not allow me to speak. The PC snorted at me in disgust and punched me in the gut with his nightstick. I lay in the gutter, sobbing soundlessly.

  The next weeks were spent in an alcoholic blur. The lights pushed me out into the streets but, thankfully, the women were so terrified that none would approach me. We were searching, ever searching. Eventually, even terror subsides and a tall woman fell beneath my knife. Many times I’d thrown the knife away and just as many times it found its way back to my pocket.

  But another had spotted us as the tall woman bled onto the sidewalk and my fear overcame the lights to allow me to flee, but they pressed ever harder on my mind. The world became nothing but a bright white space, and people were blurs. As I stumbled mindlessly through the white light, they would direct me with arms raised and fingers pointed. Their hideously long fingers and weird, misshapen heads with large, doll-like eyes were always before me.

  I found myself in Mitre Square. My hands were digging inside some woman I’d never seen before. They had me looking inside her for something. I cut and pushed squishy things aside until I saw it—a tiny little light, no larger than a pollywog. It was what they’d been looking for for so long and which had been denied them. It was the mother/ brother/sister/father/lover/killer that hid beneath the flesh. The lights inside my head rejoiced and my hands lunged for it, but it slipped through my fingers like quicksilver and was gone into the night.

  The lights screamed and ripped through my brain. I pounded my head relentlessly, but they would not stop. Dazed, I fumbled along, trying to follow the prize.

  “I would know it now,” the lights told me. I had seen it and would be able to spot it wherever it hid or whomever it hid in. When I captured it, it would mean the end. That’s what the lights promised me. I didn’t know if that meant I would finally be allowed to die or taken into the stars or ripped apart by an angry mob—and I didn’t care. It meant that I would no longer be here and I would no longer be me and the lights would no longer need me and that’s all I cared about. What did it matter if it was the peace of oblivion or the hell of the afterlife? I would no longer be me.

  It took nearly a month. Several times I thought I had found it, but it jumped before I could lay my hands on the woman. It was watching for me now, so I had to be careful. When I saw it, fluttering behind Mary Kelly’s eyes, I kept my distance. I put laudanum in a dark green bottle of gin and gave it
to a girl to share with Mary. As they walked out of the Ten Bells, I followed closely behind. Barely standing, they made it to Mary’s room and I waited outside. When the other girl came out later, Mary was drunkenly signing a song about a violet on her mother’s grave.

  She was passed out when I walked into the room. I built the flame into an inferno to keep the lights at bay. Then I started my work.

  An hour later, with pieces of Mary about the room, I found it.

  I cupped my hands softly around it and slipped it out from the dead body. The lights jumped and leaped about as I raised it before me. I heard the sounds of the wheezing engines whirling about my head as their hideously thin fingers stroked and caressed the little, errant dot of thinking light.

  I smiled as they gorged themselves on the small, tiny soul and took me away and ripped me apart among the stars. I still smiled because I knew, sweet Mary, that because I took you and the others with me, we walk among the cosmos and dance among the eons. We are immortal and, in the space between the stars, there are, finally, no lights.

  My Brother’s Keeper

  Grandfather used to let me out some nights so I could walk in the grass and stare at the stars. “Yew too big for that naow,” he says, and there are no windows in the attic. Sometimes I think he’s afraid of me.

  He doesn’t say it out loud, but I can hear it in his mind. When he reads to me from the old books and teaches me what to say, he gets a look in his eyes that makes me think he hates me. It’ll pass quick-like, but I see it. I can’t help being what I am.

  There was a time when I lived in the shed. It was small and I would spread out all over it. Grandfather would come and tell me to stop making so much noise, especially if the man with the cows was around. I couldn’t help making noise. I needed to spread out and let all my limbs uncurl; but the shed was so, so tight.

  The first time I was out in the air and could feel the grass on my skin and mouths and reach toward the sky, I cried out for my father. Noises from under the hill answered me, but that only seemed to make Grandfather angrier. “Damn ye! Don’t be going on like thet! Ye’ll only rile ’em up moaning thet way. Ye’re here to sarve Willy, don’t forgit!”

  I don’t like Willy. He’s mean to me when Grandfather and Mother aren’t watching. Just because they can’t see me, he thinks he can get away with cutting and hitting. I don’t know why they can’t see me. I see myself just fine and can even count all my legs and mouths and eyes. Grandfather says it’s because there’s more of the ‘outside’ in me, but I don’t know what that means. I guess I get that from Father because Mother isn’t at all like me.

  I make Mother nervous. She doesn’t like me to be around. When Willy is away, she has to feed me and I can tell she hates it. I try to talk to her, but my words aren’t right. It’s hard to manage all my mouths to talk or be silent. She is always pale and her face is dull as if she’s somewhere else. She makes me sad.

  Some nights I slip through the corners and my mind goes to the ‘other place.’ That’s where my friends are, and they teach me things that even Grandfather doesn’t know. Willy thinks he’s so smart because he can speak the Aklo language, but any child can do that. Father talks to me sometimes. He tells me things about how the world will look when he comes to visit, but all I know of the world is wooden floors and walls. I want to burst free and stretch myself out, but I can’t. The attic is too small now.

  Once Grandfather and Willy had brought me my food and there was a sound at the door they use to come up into the attic. The cow was stronger than I was used to and I had to get my arms and mouths around it in order to feed right, so it was making noise. Grandfather looked frightened, but Willy wasn’t. “Let ’em come up,” he said. “He needs to feed anyway.” I could hear Mother through the floor telling someone not to open the door.

  When the noise stopped and the voices went away, Grandfather slapped Willy. “Ye fool! Ye ain’t ready and nor is it! Ye’re too weak right naow. All it takes is one damn fool to see somethin’ he oughtn’t. Then it’ll be a mob and fire!”

  “Yew said that fire cain’t harm him,” Willy said. His voice always sounded as if he had too much spit in his mouth.

  “Hurt yew well enough,” Grandfather said. “Remember that ye be more of this place than it!”

  They won’t bring me along when they go and make the services anymore. “Ye be too big naow,” Grandfather said, “we cain’t risk it.”

  I didn’t mind. While they are out, I have my own services and they are better than theirs. I did all the ceremonies the way the ‘others’ taught me, even though my mouths wouldn’t work right and my limbs wouldn’t always go in the right direction. The Scarlet Ceremonies are the best. They let me see further outside. They tell me things. I know more than Grandfather and Willy now. My learning did not come from books but at the feet of the ‘others’ who are depending on me. I have a great role to fulfill. I just don’t know what that is yet.

  Why are there no windows in this attic?? I must see!

  Birds are flying around outside the attic in large numbers. I hear them but cannot see them. There are voices downstairs that I do not know. They are loud and concerned. Something about Grandfather. He is ‘dying,’ but I do not know what that means.

  The birds chatter in a rhythm. I can hear Grandfather wheezing in the same pattern. It must be some sort of a game, so I move back and forth over the floor in the same rhythm. I hear Grandfather talking to Willy downstairs and then, suddenly, he stops talking and the birds go silent. I’m the last to stop, so I’ve lost the game.

  Later, Willy comes upstairs and tells me that Grandfather is dead. I don’t understand. Willy tells me that it’s like the cows when I feed too much. I go looking for Grandfather in the spaces in-between, but he is not there. I’m beginning to think that Willy and Grandfather and Mother are less than me. This makes me happy.

  Willy keeps trying to explain ‘Time’ to me, but I don’t understand. There is no ‘time’ outside. He gets angry and tells me to call him “Wilbur,” but I begin to see how small he truly is. Father does not talk to Willy. Sometimes he asks about my brother, but I do not answer. Willy cannot open the way without me. I am more important than him.

  I asked Willy why he wears clothes sometimes. He answered that it is to protect him when he goes out among what he calls ‘people.’ He explains that there are others like Grandfather and Mother, but I have never known anyone but them. I hear voices downstairs sometimes and hear minds that are different. Are these ‘people’? What are they?

  I like when the light comes through the seams between the planks in the wall. It feels warm on my skin and it makes me lazy. I have never felt the rain or what Willy calls ‘snow.’ It sounds cool and fresh. Willy refuses to let me out to feel it. He makes me say the rituals over and over again even though I know them better than he does. I correct him on his speech now, and he does not like that.

  I hate my brother.

  I hear yelling. Mother is yelling at Willy. She is calling him words that I do not know, but they sound dark and ugly. I hear her mind and it is angry and sick and full of hate. She wants to go somewhere, a place Willy will not let her go anymore. Why are the birds here again?

  What are you doing, Willy?

  The noises in the hill are louder, louder than I’ve ever heard them before. They growl as the birds gather about and shriek. I have never heard so many birds. Downstairs, Willy is doing something to Mother. I cannot see clearly. His mind is nothing but red.

  I pound on the floor.

  Stop it, Willy! Leave Mother alone!

  The birds shriek louder and louder in a rhythm that gets faster and faster. Someone is gasping for breath. I catch an image of fingers clutching a throat and the birds burst into a mad song.

  There are no sounds from downstairs. I pound on the floor. Willy comes upstairs slowly.

  “Ain’t no use moaning like thet,” he says. “Mother’s daid. Like Grandfather, ’member?”

  I made some noises whic
h made Willy madder.

  “Jes’ be quite naow,” he said. “Daid naow or later, makes no difference.”

  He left and I could hear him pulling something across the floor downstairs and then the front door slam shut. Later, I got a flash of a fire up on a hill and Mother on some kind of stone table. I remembered that table. Grandfather had taken me there before when I was smaller and told me that “one day, ye’ll be a-callin’ yer father’s name up here.”

  There was a fire and Willy placed Mother in it.

  Now I had no one but Willy here in this place. My friends ‘outside’ could not come here yet, so I was alone. My eyes felt warm and moist.

  I got larger again. Both Willy and I did, but I was bigger and always would be. I was learning faster than Willy and it made him nervous. He moved out to the shed I used to stay in and tore up the attic floor.

  At last I can stretch!

  I can go to my full height now. No longer cramped and I feel stronger. Willy knows it too and eyes me strangely when he feeds me. I instruct him now on what is to be done. He tries to hide his thoughts from me, but I can still see them. He is worried that he will fail.

  So am I.

  There are certain things that only he can do. I can’t say some of the words or move properly while on this sphere. I can open the way but only a thin crack; nothing large enough to go through. We need each other for now. But later, when Father is here and the world is wiped clean, Willy will know what it is to fear me.

  He came and admitted his failure to me. Grandfather had told him what was needed, that a page out of a book had to be found and he waited too long. He claims that he tried to get the book from others, but his words made no sense to me. I know nothing of ‘mail’ or ‘libraries.’ I only know that he should have resolved this before. Willy claims that he was afraid to leave me alone and go and get what we needed. I chastised him greatly for this. If my welfare was of such a concern, he could have gone away while Mother was still here to feed me. I’ve ordered him to go and return quickly. After so long, my will reigns.