by Rich Hayden
“All right, that’s enough,” a smooth, male voice announced.
Placed into the soft envelopment of a recliner, Amil was loomed over by an intimidating centaur. The mythical beast waved away the fairies that had taken to lounging upon Amil’s form. He then placed a glass of ordinary water atop a round table. It rested beside the chair, over a rug of azure and gold. The centaur had gray hair and lines over his skin that looked to be the trenches dug out over a land that hosted a tiny war. He raised the wick of a nearby lamp and gave a mild jostle to Amil’s knee.
“Come on now, you can awaken. They didn’t take that much,” he reassured.
Amil didn’t have the energy to move, but a trickle of fear pummeled through him all the same as his senses convinced him of the reality that stared him down. Although with little focus, his eyes eventually found those of the centaur. It was unexpected, but Amil discerned no malice from the creature that towered over him. In fact, he was somewhat relieved to be free of the fairies’ company.
“Who...who are you?” Amil asked, slowly.
“I wish I knew, but we have time for that later. Can you remember anything?”
“Not really. I...the name Ali comes to me,” admitted Amil.
“Your name?”
“No. No, it’s someone else’s, I think.”
“What about yours? Can you remember that? Think hard now, concentrate. Your name,” the baritone voice instructed.
Amil thought of what a name meant. He found it odd that a string of letters could be shouted in his direction to gather his attention. He wasn’t sure of how to respond, or even if he fully understood the question. His mind wandered, lost in contemplation for minutes that felt to him like hours, but at last, a collection of letters came to the fore of his memory.
“Amil...I think my name’s Amil,” he said clumsily.
“Hmm, a bit odd. That is good. How about a last name, or place of origin?”
“Fog Lake,” Amil said, his eyes closing. He didn’t really know what meaning it held. The words came out like an impulse, a reflex to a stimulus forgotten.
“Okay, sounds like a village. North American perhaps, possibly European,” muttered the centaur to himself. “To the last name again. What followed your name Amil? Amil what?”
“You...young. I think it’s Young.”
“Terribly common,” said the centaur, with a grimace.
The impossible combination of man and equine slapped his hands together and rapidly gathered the attention of the green fairy that was perched on a shelf close by. She didn’t move, but she raised her eyes to his thunderous clap and gave him her full audience, with a sneer that plainly told of her annoyance.
“Amil Young, human, probably American. Fog Lake, most likely a village. Search all entries from seventeenth century Earth to what we understand as their present time. Go on now, don’t give me that look,” he bellowed.
With a chattering of teeth that seemed to hammer off one another with a bit more ferocity, the teratoid little creature buzzed away.
“It won’t be long now. They’re ornery beasts, but masterfully efficient all the same.”
“What are they?” asked Amil wearily as he watched her disappear between a row of bookshelves.
“Please, have some water, wet your throat. Your body may no longer require such things, but it will be helpful. Please, I insist,” urged the centaur.
With no mind or means to resist, Amil brought the glass to his mouth with a quivering motion, and eased down the clear liquid. The centaur was right. The feeling that a seemingly banal glass of water delivered to him was indeed a blissful one. Amil felt as the cool stream soothed his dry insides, but it was the significance of the act that served to inject Amil with a small amount of resurrection. There he was, in a comfortable library, sharing a drink with friendly company. Sure, his companion was a fable, and the room around him was populated by devilish nymphs, but this was, at least, a version of solace.
“What are they?” repeated Amil after he downed the last of his drink.
“They are called Draymataya...dream nymphs,” said the centaur, while pouring his guest a fresh glass from a bottle tied around his neck.
“Thanks, that cleared everything up.”
“A sense of humor! In this place, a sense of humor is an essential weapon. Draymataya are the only creatures, other than Aphelianna, that have access to the world of humans. But where Aphelianna can only harvest the dead, Draymataya come to visit while you are sleeping. Lost in that scant void that resides between life and death...dreams,” explained the centaur, with a dramatic sweep of his hand.
“Dreams?”
“Yes. You see, the Draymataya are vampiric. To sustain themselves, they take a minute fraction of the living human as it sleeps. It is so inconsequential that without the unfelt touch of the Draymataya, human life expectancy would be lengthened by only three days. Even the most ravenous of their kind will only deprive the host of about one week’s time. But they are not wholly wicked. In return for the life that they extract, the Draymataya tell you stories as you sleep. They are what provide you with dreams.”
Amil thought for a moment. He was given a chill as he thought back to all his nights on earth and how, as he slept, he was visited by forces unknown. Unconscious, he was fed upon, murdered on the most diminutive of scales, all while snuggled in his bed. He tried to recall the strangest of dreams that he had experienced, and, oddly enough, they were his most vivid memories. He sucked in a deep breath, as the explanation offered to him was almost too much to process, and looked around the library. He hoped to spy a Draymataya, as though to locate one would help him to understand their nature.
“What did they inject into me?” asked Amil finally, as he rubbed the tiny hives that peppered his skin.
“Inject? No, no, no. I told you before, they’re vampiric. They take from you.”
“Alright then, what did they take?” asked Amil, with alarm.
“Just a small fraction of the life you are yet to have.”
“A Waste’s life?”
“You’re human, it is unavoidable,” said the centaur, with pity. “You should be grateful to have met the Draymataya. They can shorten the suffering you will eventually experience.”
“What about this?” Amil asked, as he withdrew his key, a foggy recollection of its terrible conditions swirling through his scattered mind.
“Even with that, they can help. Nothing endures forever. Even a cursed Waste will die one day. If you allow them to feed long enough, you might relieve yourself of a year or two of the fate you will come to face. I know it is paltry, placed up against an existence that seems interminable, but if it is yours to suffer, you will be grateful for their theft.”
Amil offered nothing in return. He took small and regular sips of his water in order to busy himself and to maintain a fragile quiet between him and the centaur. He sent his eyes across the sea of bookshelves, and was awed at how many volumes were within his field of vision. Filled with the illumination of the lamps, and under the glow reflected off the copper above, the room promised to extend out to forever, or so it seemed that it could, making the true number of books held in the library close to a figure that mathematics was yet to name.
“Have you read all these?” asked Amil, without looking to his companion.
“Ah! It’s arrived,” said the centaur heartily as he ignored Amil’s query. Instead, he thanked the Draymataya, who set a book onto the table next to her earthly visitor.
It was bound in black leather, unremarkable and plain, with pages of an eggshell hue. Down the spine, Amil’s name was printed, and as he gathered the humbling gravity of what the book truly was, he was saddened by the small size of the document. It was thinner than most that he saw, and with no need to turn a page or sweep his eyes over a single word, Amil was reminded of how short his existence had been. He ran his fingers over the cover, and, as he set the book into his lap, Amil crumpled under the weight of shame.
“Ther
e is a reason why your book is so little, Amil,” said the centaur, sympathetically. “I will understand if you choose to leave your memories lost. But if you decide to rediscover yourself, all that you have forgotten can be found upon those pages.”
“Everything I’ve done?” asked Amil.
“All that you are.”
“Why is this happening?” Amil asked, desperately.
“The condition of the present is the sum of the actions of the past.”
Amil got up. He didn’t look to the centaur nor did he extend an appreciative glance to the Draymataya who had recovered his record. He tucked the book under his arm and staggered away. Amil wandered through the library, down rows of labyrinthine design and around the curves of the more artfully crafted shelves. He sent his fingers through random sets and read the names that were pressed into every spine over which his nails clacked. His mind wondered about the lives of those whose volumes were impossibly thick, and was dogged by a brutal melancholy as the thinnest of books, sometimes no more than a single page, surely relayed the painful tales of sickly children and those stillborn.
To his astonishment, he was not alone in this paper museum of the dead. There were many others like him. He was startled by an old man. Fully absorbed into a book, he stood in a corner like an apparition as he thumbed through a saga, never bothering to raise a bespectacled eye to Amil. There was a woman who sat at a small table, with grief as her only company. It spread onto her from the pages, as she revisited the violent deaths of her sons in wartime. Amil came across a stout fellow. Charming in his ease, he gleefully amused himself with a refresher of the deeds committed during his obviously happy stay on earth. Amil then noticed a teenage girl. She looked the proper part of bookworm, but with stab wounds in her neck. She sat partially obscured behind a stack of other people’s achievements and shortcomings, and paid no mind to the lingering eyes of a stranger.
Unaware of what lay directly before his distracted stare, Amil nearly tripped up the first step of a staircase, whose handrail poked him in the ribs. He knew not where it went, but with no destination or sense of immediate purpose, Amil ascended the skeletal iron coil and advanced upwards on vertebrae of semi-clear stone.
He emerged into a tiny room, a mere pothole upon the road of outer space, and settled himself onto a wingback sofa. It sat under the watch of a crystalline fixture, which held an array of extinguished candles, its many points smoothed over by runs of dried wax. The few sticks that still burned poured a soft ambiance over the surroundings. A dusty lectern, the blackened planks of the floor below, and a tapestry of archaic symbols were all warmed by the light. The blocks that gave the room its octagonal shape stood exposed. They slept between lines of chipped mortar, hardened masonic blood once picked at by the likes of the morose and the bored.
Constructed for solitude and introspection, the room beckoned for Amil to open the book which rested beside him. The tight confines promised to withhold judgment and offer Amil the embrace of comfort, were the words held between the leather too much to bear. As the cushion at his back hugged him like a kindred spirit, Amil wondered how many others had been reintroduced to themselves in this very room. And so, with heavy eyes, and a mind that cautioned him against going forward to seek the truth, Amil opened to page one.
As with any refresher course, the minutia that clogged the hours of everyday life was left out, but the pivotal moments were all clearly described. Every high and low, all the decisions which had shaped Amil’s life, lay there for him to read. Events that had once seemed insignificant had their true identities and implications revealed as Amil sunk deeper into the book.
The mystic author reminded Amil of the brief stardom he had once enjoyed, and returned to him the sensations brought about by the warmth of a southern evening. Amil could smell the stale air of the bus station in Ashland, and he felt the chill of a winter in Pittsburgh as he nervously awaited a proper date with Ali. He walked the warehouse of the paper plant, and paced back and forth across the darkened space of The Back Shelf Bookstore. As Amil watched the dead and unreachable likeness of himself as he spent each day with Ali, he was made fully aware of the beautiful enormity of ordinary existence. It was a wondrous treasure, one which during the course of his life, Amil had never given a second’s consideration.
The chapters which chronicled the early days spent with Ali were read time and again by Amil. Wallowing in the purity he had failed to feel at the time, his eyes passed over the words slowly, as he joyously relived the carefree days of their young union. He happily dwelled upon every idiosyncrasy of Ali’s being, and not until he had memorized the passages, did Amil move on to the next segment of the book.
Sadly, but with cruel predictability, the book began to read like a tragic play, one in which the audience quickly realizes that the main protagonist will inevitably suffer great torments. The only solace offered from such a production is that when the lights go up, everyone is permitted to return to their comparatively better lives. But not Amil. He saw the disheartening end as it crept up on his literary self, and though he desperately wanted to warn the Amil of the past, he was nothing more influential than a bound slave. One who is forced to watch the erasure of life as it once was.
During this descent back into time, the lights went out, and a furious darkness settled over everything that came next. Amil’s eyes identified the signs of his unraveling, and his desire to read further evaporated. Words, terrible words like ACCIDENT, SURGERY, and VIOLENCE, came to his vision. There were clues, like harbingers of misery that haunted him: POOR, SADNESS, HANDICAPPED, BETRAYAL, and PUNCH! He was made to remember what they implied, and, as they harshly judged all of Amil’s earthly failures, the words chased Amil’s stare away from the pages, until he stood before a road that he could not take. Unable to bear the reminders of what he had put Ali through before he so selfishly invited a bullet into his own skull, Amil skipped ahead.
As he read on, past the surreal descriptions of his expiration, Amil had to remind himself of the safety that currently enveloped him. He was made to shiver as he again stood among the dead as they wallowed beyond Aphelianna’s fountain, and as he felt the gaze of the deformed Saint Calvino. He snickered at the memory of Uncle Cal, and felt his heart swell with pity as the stone maiden of the atrium came back to his memory with cold clarity. He walked the avenues of The Eternal City again, and, much like before, the decision to leave seemed a foolish one. Amil was made to smile as he again heard the voice of old Arcanus, but regretted the decision to read of the God of Music and the horrible curse that he carried.
It came to Amil at once, like a trick of the mind or a trick of the cosmos. He hadn’t sensed the last page as it rested between his thumb and pointer finger, but he turned it over and stared into the most bizarre of all mirrors. As he learned of the exploits of his life and then his afterlife, Amil watched as the words of the present scrawled themselves over previously blank paper. The dark little characters detailed the room that held him, and they told of his bemused visage, as though the book had eyes of its own that had looked back upon Amil the entire time.
He slammed the volume closed, and it clamped shut like a snare designed to subdue an animal. Amil flung it into the corner of the room and shot up from the couch. He tightened his fingers around the handrail, and, with feet that threatened to disobey Amil’s call for balance, he descended the stairs.
When he emerged back into the main area of the library, Amil was a changed man, different, as he had a knowledge that should have remained as far off as the earth itself. Like the zombie that he was, Amil plodded lethargically around, as it seemed he could never tire of absent wandering.
There was activity, and the day appeared busy, as many witnesses to the weakness of flesh passed by Amil. It was startling at first, how populated the library seemed to be, and as more examples of death crossed paths with Amil, he longed for solitude. He had no want for company, and so all greetings that were offered his way went ignored, his eyes shyly hiding fro
m the looks of others.
With a growing irritation, Amil noticed as a Draymataya took to following him. Her skin was yellow, a hue akin to mucus, and this unsavory pigmentation only served to make her pale eyes all the more sinister. Her hair was as black as her teeth, and the beat of her wings so unnecessarily strong that the vibrations could be felt by Amil. She may have just been curious as to the identity of this wandering stranger, and true harm was something that she seemed incapable of inflicting, as she nervously darted out of sight anytime Amil turned her way, but her presence greatly perturbed him. He needed to be alone, the way a plant longs for water. The distant company of the diminutive nymph was enough to make Amil feel crowded. With no warning, he swiped a book from off a shelf and flung it at the little creature. He didn’t turn to look and see whether or not he had struck her, and, unashamedly, Amil cared not for her wellbeing.
He drifted down between rows of shelves that towered high into the air. The opening of this dry mouth, created by the massive bookshelves, was so wide that a parade could have passed through the gap. But as Amil progressed, the aisle narrowed and closed in on him with yellowed rows of verbose teeth. The dust mounted in layers, like ancient rock as it tells of the past eras of time, and the tidiness that touched nearly everything in the library started to ebb away. Books were toppled over one another, and large spaces where tomes should have rested were empty, as though the previous readers had concluded that it would be better to burn the wicked books rather than return them to their brethren.
