He suddenly coughed, and so survived.
The sharp, cutting sound had frayed the magic cords. He tottered for a moment, full of horror as the memories returned to his overwhelmed mind and then, again, his ears pricked up and his eyes opened, and he had the power, if only for one moment, to close his eyes and jump forward, straight into the wall.
No one knows when the dreams of horror began: there are those who say it is a punishment for sin, and there are those who say that humanity is always changing within. But in the heart of those terrible days there rose a man and he said—it is all because of the one, the first dreamer—he who made.
And you shall be as dreamers, so he said.
The only source of light in the grey darkness was a simple interface with two buttons: up, down. He thought about it. On the one hand, you don't dream of the Empire State Building in order to sit in the basement. On the other, it stands to reason that a dreamer, as strong as he no doubt was, would not want to risk his real body with the dissolution of the building. His counterpart in the dream can spend all the time he wants upstairs, while the sleeping body would lie somewhere safe. Down, then.
The elevator sighed and began to move. In the almost-complete darkness it was hard for him to tell which way it was going, and suddenly he was no longer sure if he was standing or lying down. For a moment he felt a little sick, as the elevator descended into the earth. Then walls appeared and became transparent and dissipated and he could see from the building all the way out, and for one moment it seemed to him he was hanging from the ceiling, coming down from the stars to the earth, but no: he was still on his feet and around him the dreaming city's lights stood in all their awful, if not colourful, glory, and retreated from him, and the ground grew distant, and the elevator climbed and rose, climbed and groaned, towards the roof of the building and its residents, both seen and unseen.
And as it climbed so did his doubt. To achieve his goal he must confront the dreamer himself, face to face, but also reach his sleeping body. Body and mind—either one worthless without the other.
A sudden fear grasped him, and he held tightly on to the backpack's straps, to make sure it was still there. To draw courage from it. Well, he was as ready as could be, and will face whatever he met. At this point there was no choice, and no turning back.
The elevator slowed, then stopped with a groan. Doors appeared in it, their frames lit by neon, and opened. He passed through them. The lighting changed a little, and he turned and looked back. The elevator was no longer there. In its place stood a man.
“You've arrived.”
An elderly man, tall, grey hair, grey suit. A hat. Above, through the transparent roof, the three apes could be seen. The dreamer smiled when he saw the blue man's gaze climb up to them, for a moment. “You wanted to meet me.”
“Not only you.”
“That is not possible.”
The dreamer didn't ask. He looked like he received visits like this every night.
“Of course it's possible,” the blue man said with a confidence he didn't feel. “In fact, you're even interested in it. You want to know why I came.”
“Let me guess,” the dreamer said. “You want me to dream your dead lover back for you. Or your living lover the way she was when you truly loved her.”
The blue man was silent.
“Your children. You want them to be this way, that way, or maybe you don't have any and you want there to be, or you do have them and you don't want them to be . . .”
Silence.
“Money? Power? Command? You do understand I've already been asked for everything possible—and impossible.”
“No.”
“So perhaps . . .”
“No—you didn't understand me.”
“What?”
“I mean to say—you haven't been asked every possible or impossible thing. Not yet.”
“You know what,” the dreamer said, “tell me. You might succeed in arousing my curiosity.”
“I'm sure.”
“So tell me?”
“Not before I meet your body, too.”
“You do know,” the dreamer said, “that I could destroy you on the spot.”
“Yes.”
“And you won't tell me?”
“Only in the presence of your body.”
“I have an idea,” the dreamer said. “Give me a clue that'd make me curious enough, then we'll see.”
The blue man thought about it. “Fine,” he said at last.
“And the clue?”
“I want to be God.”
And the first dreamer, so it is said, had dreamed in his mind all the horror and the beauty, the fear and the dread. Seven days of creation, seven nights of invention—so some say—yet others argue that it happened in one single day, in a fit of incredible concentration. And he who dreamed had disappeared, so it seemed, from the world he esteemed, from the humans he dreamed—in his image he had made them, redeemed.
“It's a nice legend,” the dreamer said. “You don't really believe it, I hope.” Beside him, on a white bed covered in a white sheet, lay his body, and was quite similar to him. A little greyer at the temples and maybe not as tall, though it is hard to judge the height of a man when he is lying down, and the grey murky light of pre-dawn did not help.
“It probably is a legend,” the blue man said, “but that doesn't mean that it couldn't have happened.”
“Really?”
“To be exact—it doesn't mean that it can't happen.”
“Ah,” the dreamer said. “You want dream enhancing. There are doctors, you know.”
“No.”
“What?”
“No, I don't want enhancing.”
“So what do you want?”
“I want you to turn me into the first dreamer who could dream himself.”
Silence.
“You know that's impossible. A dreamer can't change his own dreams. Even if he is as strong as I am.”
“Doesn't that frustrate you?” the blue man asked. His hand reached casually for his backpack.
“I make do with what I have,” the dreamer said, but the expression on his face suggested that was not the case. The light grew a little, and the shadows of the apes above became sharper, more bothersome. There was not long until sunrise.
“You can't change your own dreams, but you can certainly change mine.”
“Say I'd do that—why should I?”
“Because then I'd do the same thing for you.”
The dreamer thought about it.
“Why should I believe you?”
“Because,” the blue man said. What else could he say? He felt a slight tremor from inside the backpack. The machine inside came alive.
“What do you have in there?” the dreamer asked.
The blue man fell silent. He didn't know what to say. The dreamer took the backpack from his unresisting hands and looked inside it.
“Interesting,” he said. “Is that why you wanted my body to be present? To use a brain-scanner on it?”
“It's not a scanner,” the blue man said. “It's an alpha wave generator. I hoped it would help me convince you.”
“I see,” the dreamer said. “It hadn't.”
“My offer still makes sense,” the blue man said.
“True,” the dreamer said.
“What?”
“True, it makes sense. I accept.”
“What?”
It didn't make sense. It really didn't. Too easy. Decisions on this scale didn't really . . .
“Stand here and don't move,” the dreamer said. “There isn't much time until the night ends.”
“But . . .”
“Silence. Don't delay me. Don't move! Already it took you too long to get here, and I always wake up with the sunrise.”
“I know,” the blue man said.
Something not right. Something didn't fit. How did he know? Where did the knowledge of the dreamer's sleep pattern come from? How did he know, with such confid
ence, to come here and not somewhere else? And the only decision he had reached on his own, now he thought about it, throughout this entire journey—the decision to go down instead of up—was taken from him. Why?
“Don't bother,” he said.
“Don't move,” the dreamer said.
The once-blue man closed his eyes and stepped and walked and ran through the wall and beyond it and fell, down towards the lights, towards the city he had never really grown in, towards the street where he had appeared out of nothing only a short time before, he and his backpack and his bulldozer, towards the nothing from whence he came and to which, now, even before he hit the ground, he returned.
And the dreamer in his high castle upon the Tel Aviv beachfront sighed in his sleep and turned, disappointed.
And when the sun rose over the city of nightmares and lights and fruitless escapes, there were gone from the skyline one building, and one street, and three apes.
Nir Yaniv is an Israeli writer, editor, musician and computer programmer. His story collection, One Hell of a Writer, was published in 2006 by Odyssey Press. In the year 2000 he established Israel's first online SF&F magazine, and has been editing it until early 2007, when he became chief editor of Dreams in Aspamia, Israel's only pro genre magazine. He lives in Tel Aviv with his girlfriend Keren and records his music in his own studio, The Nir Space Station.
* * *
THE WORDEATERS
by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz
In Which Ariel is Conceived Under a Set of Most Unusual Circumstances
She began by chewing on the words he left out on the sofa at night. They were little words he'd written on a napkin and they tasted of beer and peanuts and the salt of his sweat.
In the beginning, he used to write poems that made her weep. He created odd little tales filled with laughter, stories peopled with vicarious images, and pulsing with life.
Nowadays, she watched him scramble for words.
“They slip through my fingers,” he said.
She watched him write short jagged sentences on bits of paper, and discarded boxes. Sometimes, he hissed through his teeth, his breath harsh and labored with effort. She listened to him groan in despair and her heart cracked under the weight of his sorrow.
When they walked through the streets, she linked her fingers through his and cuddled up to him; wanting to arouse him, desiring to shake him out of the forgetfulness that made him walk like a man in a trance.
“Sorry.” He said when she complained about it. He looked at her and shook his head.
“Sometimes I want to write something so bad,” he said. “I can feel the words waiting to burst out, and here I am walking the boardwalk, desperate to go back home and all the while the words just keep on flowing. . .”
She knew better than to tell him what she thought about his words. She'd told him before and she didn't think she could endure another week of him languishing away beside the window, moaning about words that didn't come as they used to.
Nights, he came to bed late.
After the first blush of infatuation faded, she realized he was obsessed with only one thing. Still, she stayed, believing the time would come when he would wake up and recognize his need for her.
“I'll stay with him forever,” she'd promised. But she was growing weary of waiting and she was filled with longing for a baby.
One night, the moon shining through her window was a bright sliver of silver fire. It fell across the covers of her bed and she saw them. They were little creatures with skin the color of nothingness; dark eyes like an iguana's and thin sticks for extremities. They crept up to her, and peered into her eyes. Wordeaters. That was what they called themselves. They did not have teeth or claws, they did not threaten or hurt her, they simply slipped down her throat like water.
“Eat words for us,” they whispered.
When he came up to bed, she lay still. She waited for the sound of his breathing, listened for his snores rising and falling in the quietness of the room.
“Eat words,” they commanded.
She sat up and dragged on her housecoat. Shivering in the dark, she made her way down the crooked stairs to the living room where he'd sat all night, drinking beer and chewing peanuts, cursing as he watched the telly.
She found the words jotted down on a white napkin folded up to a fourth of its size.
In the morning, he walked through the house dressed in his bathrobe. His eyes were bleary and red, and she felt guilty thinking of the words she'd consumed the night before.
“Can't think straight,” he said. He headed for the fridge and pulled out a bottle of beer.
She smelled the despair on his breath when he shuffled away from her.
“I'll be writing today.” His words bounced off the walls and she caught them on the edge of her tongue. They tasted like dried up gum, but she swallowed them nevertheless.
Days passed and she watched him sink deeper into despair. At night, she ate the words that tasted like burnt Brussels sprouts and sour milk.
“Please.” She whispered to the darkness as she swallowed the words. “Please make him look beyond the words and see me.”
One morning he looked at her and she knew what he wanted even before he spoke.
He stopped writing and got a job at the local factory.
And her belly began to grow.
Inside her head, the Wordeaters grew more insistent. She developed a habit of going to the library. Wandering through the rows of books she became a connoisseur in identifying authors whose works were pleasing to the tongue.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez tasted like red wine and chocolate. Michael Moorcock was a feast of secret flavors with hints of exotic spices and expensive vodka. Virginia Woolf went down like a slice of paprika and lemon. Ernest Hemingway was tart, stinging her tongue like red chili pepper. Visions of luxurious banquets appeared before her eyes as she took in the words of ancient writers. Pliny and Plato, Aristotle and Dante. She wept as she savored their words on the back of her tongue.
She consumed a thousand literary works. Nobel Prize winners, the classics, current history, everything written with soul in it, she ate. They left behind a satisfying, nourishing taste that made the Wordeaters inside her head burp and sigh.
And her belly kept on growing.
They painted the baby's room blue with clouds floating on the ceiling and birds flying through the walls.
“There are words on the wall,” she said.
“Where?” he asked. His eyes searched the cloud covered ceilings and the bird dotted walls.
“There,” she said.
But no matter how he looked, he could not see them.
“I'm off to work,” he said.
He kissed her and walked out the door.
She smiled as she danced around the bedroom. Inside her, the Wordeaters were singing.
She opened her mouth and they floated out, they populated the walls, and filled the baby bassinet with their smell of warm earth, ripening rice, wild lilies and giant tuberoses.
“Time,” they said to her. “Time for the baby to be born.”
She gazed into their dark eyes and felt no fear.
She called him Ariel.
“Look, look how he turns to follow my voice?” her husband said. “I bet he's a genius.”
He leaned in close and, cradling them both in his arms, he sang a lullaby with nonsensical words that made her laugh.
In Ariel's bedroom, the Wordeaters were waiting. She smiled when she saw their stomachs distended with all the words she had swallowed for them.
“Feed him,” she whispered.
They floated around the baby, their stick limbs touching his head, caressing him.
“Pretty baby,” they purred.
One by one they crooned words to her baby. They gathered him up in their arms and comforted his sobs with weird songs, and jibber-jabber words.
“Beautiful child,” they sang.
The walls reflected the colors of their songs. They sang into
him, blood-red sunsets, purple mountains, hazy green meadows, and the black of night.
“Ariel,” they said. It was as if they tasted the sound of his name.
They looked at her and smiled.
“No need for fear,” they whispered.
In the morning the Wordeaters were gone.
She did not see the Wordeaters again and she stopped consuming books.
Ariel grew fast. At three his vocabulary was extraordinary.
“Constellations,” he would say. “Cosmos, curtail, constellations.”
He smiled, rolling the words on his tongue as if tasting them before releasing them with a sigh.
At four he told her a story about a world where dragons and unicorns lived together in harmony. Where fairies convened with naughty imps who jumped from moonbeam to moonbeam and answered the wishes of mortals on a whim.
“Imps?” she asked. “What do you know of them?”
He looked at her with wise eyes and smiled a slow smile.
“Listen,” he said. “There are stories on the wind.”
She strained her ears, but all she heard was the sound of the nightbird singing and the tall grass blowing.
“What did they do to you?” She wanted to ask him.
“Write it down,” he said. “Write down my words.
And he told her a story of dragons at sunset, of winds that brought news of secret wars. His words were filled with the dreams of a thousand warriors; they were heavy with the pathos of years, and dripping with the anguish of fallen nations.
“Write faster,” he said. But her fingers were too slow and she lost some of his words and his stories when she read them were only a pale shadow of what he had said.
“I'm sorry,” she said, when she read them back to him.
He smiled and looked at her with his eyes that were so dark she could barely see her reflection in them.
“Tell me a story,” he said.
And she told him the story of a woman who sat alone in her chair, waiting for the moon to come out. She told him of the silver sickle moon, of Wordeaters sliding down the moonbeam onto her bed, of the words she had eaten and the way they tasted.
Weird Tales, Volume 51 Page 6
