The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe

by Kij Johnson

  The third day started worse still: everything sore and a new, searing pain in her right heel where a blister had broken. When she came to Hatheg-town, she posted her letter and purchased food but did not tarry, and by midmorning she had come far enough that she saw a faint viridian glow on the scattered clouds in the north, light reflected from the glowing fungi of the zoogs’ forest.

  Past Hatheg, the road became a mere track. There were no people and no roadhouses or farms, but many tangled, shrubby copses; rangeland a-haze with pollen and insects; weed fields that raised guerdons of flame-red blooms as high as her head. The green in the clouds grew brighter, and coming over a hill in the early afternoon, she saw the forest’s edge to the north. The line between the rangeland and the glowing woodland looked so precise that it seemed almost to have been ruled by the Elder Ones.

  She turned onto the next track that headed north. It was wide enough for carts but had fallen into disuse, and it ended a few miles later in the weed-choked yard of a ruined, crumbling grange, home only to dust and spiders. Vellitt walked to the well, but the reservoir was dry, and she thought better of trying the rusted iron pump. It would, she suspected, be shriekingly loud in this silent place. After a short search, she found a narrow path leading toward the forest, and followed it.

  Zoogs were small, essentially cowards that would not threaten humans unless they felt they could get away with it; but she had no wish to test the limits of their cowardice, so in late afternoon she stopped a half-mile from the forest’s edge at what must once have been a shepherd’s close. The high, tight-folded stone walls were still largely intact, thick and taller than Vellitt, with a single narrow entrance through which sheep had been driven. When she climbed a broken section, she found the stone remains of a shepherd’s seat that overlooked the area around the close. She made a pad from her rain-cloak and settled in, her electric torch and machete close at hand. It was surprisingly comfortable.

  Cats move fearlessly between the dream lands, the moon, and the waking world—and to other, unknowable places—but this cat was no fool. It stayed close to Vellitt, and as night deepened it climbed into her lap and would not leave. “You should have considered all this before you came,” Vellitt said, and her voice surprised her. It had been midmorning since she had heard any human sound.

  She could not tell if it understood her. In her far-travelling days, Vellitt had known a dreamer who claimed to understand the speech of cats, but of all the cats she had ever met in Ulthar—a town crammed with them—none had ever spoken to her, nor to anyone else; none that she knew, anyway. The dreamer had been a serious-minded man and dishonesty had not been his besetting flaw, so perhaps it was a waking-world thing.

  Time passed. As night fell, the forest’s viridian glow grew stronger, but this was the darkest sky she had seen in decades. She could see every constellation, every star. As well as she could recall from her schoolgirl lessons, she recited their names: Algol, Gemma, Arcturus, Mizar; the blue spark of Polaris; green-mantled Venus; the red disk of Mars, large enough that her outstretched thumb just covered it. Ninety-seven stars in the dream-realms sky; six constellations.

  Clarie Jurat had written, He says there are millions of stars. Vellitt had heard this before about the waking world, but she could not imagine it. Where would they all fit? The sky was hardly infinite: she could see its pendulous, titanic folds, its shifting patterns, black on black. And if each planet or star had its own buffeting, fretful, whimsical god, how could the waking world survive?

  And so the night passed and always Vellitt’s face turned to the scant stars and the moonless, massy sky beyond. Once she heard sounds, so faint that she wondered at first whether they were real, of long-toed paws pushing through grass, fluttering whispers. She turned on her electric torch and cast the homely yellow beam down into the grasses around the close. Silence fell suddenly. She was not disturbed again.

  * * *

  Vellitt Boe did sleep, though she had not intended it, and awoke to a coruscating sky turned rose-pink by the sunrise. She continued along the narrow path. The cat remained with her, hunched on her pack so that she felt the tickle of its whiskers against her jaw. When she turned her face, she saw its eyes glowing leaf-green and intent.

  The wall of underbrush that marked the forest margins thinned and was replaced by a thick mold underfoot, the rotting remains of the dead leaves that had fallen from the vast and towering oaks crowding everywhere. Young oaks pushed through the mold, as did ferns of surprising size and pale-domed mushrooms several feet across. The tree trunks were wound with ivy or ruffled with shelf-like fungi climbing as high as she could see, to where the oaks’ groping boughs tangled into a canopy. The leaves blocked the sun except as a mottled glow, but the forest was light enough, from the green shadowless luminescence emitted by the fungi. The air was clammy and smelled of decay.

  She remembered how to read the patterns the fungi made, and found her way to what passed for a zoog highway. She had a password she had learned long ago and she spoke it at intervals, though the noises did not come easily to her tongue, and she was not sure it would work after so many years. Though she did not see the zoogs, she heard them sometimes, just at the edges of what she could detect: the pattering of their narrow paws among the ferns, or a rustling that might have been mistaken for a breeze (save that there was none), and several times, the fluttering sounds of their whispered speech. The black cat crouched tight-muscled and unmoving on her pack. The zoogs would not have frightened her much when she was younger, but now . . . And yet, why? They were not changed, and, while she was older, neither had she altered in any fundamental way. Perhaps she had grown wiser with age.

  After a time, the highway branched and, recognizing her location, she took the right-hand path, coming at last to a clearing around a mighty slab of stone set into the forest floor: an access point to the under-realms fashioned by gugs in eons past. The zoogs feared it and would not approach, which made it a safe place to pause, provided the great slab did not lift.

  Vellitt knew something of the under-realms from her far-travelling youth. It had been an accidental horror to fall through a sinkhole in the Mnar swamps with her companion. At first, she would not have survived it without his knowledge, for he had alliances among the ghouls—slumping canine-faced creatures that ate the dead and were said to have secret routes into all worlds. He enlisted their aid in returning to the surface, and taught Vellitt bits of their glibbering, meeping speech. But the party was attacked by ghasts—scabrous, humped, horse-like; with flat faces and unsettling, intelligent eyes—and she had been separated from the rest of them. After endless dark whiles finding her way alone, she came to a city of gugs: enormous six-pawed monsters with vertical mouths framed by shining red eyes on stalks. Eventually she found a party of ghouls to whom she spoke in her limited way, and they brought her back to her companion. When they at last emerged, the sun had blinded her for hours. She had been underground for nearly a month.

  Vellitt ate and rested beside the great slab, and began again her long walk through the high-ceilinged tunnels of twisted wood. The zoogs returned to haunt her steps, and now she felt as though there were a purpose to their stalking. The password had not worked after all: too old, or perhaps the zoogs no longer cared what might happen if they failed to honor it. They paced her beneath the ferns and mushrooms and in the branches overhead. At times, small loathsome paws reached out to brush her ankles or back. Their flutterings sounded excited, even to her unaccustomed ears.

  Feeling like a fool, she drew the machete from its sheath; but perhaps she did not look like one, for the zoogs pulled back. Beyond the canopy, daylight was ending, but she was too far into the forest to retreat. It never grew truly dark, though the viridian glow was like corpse-light, faint and slightly sickening to her eyes. Her electric torch’s batteries would not last the night, so she fashioned a flambeau from a fallen branch and the contents of a small bottle of pitch she carried, grateful to find the skill remained.

&nbs
p; She walked. The zoogs began pressing her again, but with sweeps of the torch she kept pushing them back. There seemed to be scores of them, never fully to be seen: glimpses of brown fur among the ferns, a prehensile tail zipping from sight, yellow eyes gleaming out at her from hidden places. Her arms grew tired. The cat growled steadily, barely audible.

  A young zoog, bolder than its fellows, crept close and nipped her ankle. Unthinking, she swung the machete, which connected with a meaty sensation that ran from her hand into her shoulder. The zoog fell back with a panicking, quavering howl entirely unlike its fluttering language. Again, the zoogs retreated and she pressed forward. Again, they overcame their fear and crowded close. They were hunting her.

  And Vellitt found that, despite her exhaustion and her age, she could run. She threw the torch toward a zoog that approached too nearly, and fled forward by the green light: the cat afoot and running, a fluid shadow just ahead. She knew where she was, for she passed a standing stone she remembered from years past, ancient, hexagonal, and pierced. She was close now, but the zoogs seemed to know her goal, as well. Several had climbed into the trees ahead of her and were waiting to drop on her. She shouted, “Go on then, you!”—her voice breathless and hoarse with anger—and as she ran beneath them, she raised the machete over her head. They chose instead to drop behind her and join the pursuing band.

  The overhanging trees opened out as she ran into a clearing: a quarter-moon and the looming shadow of the mountain Hatheg-Kla against the black starred sky—and on moss-thick flagstones stood the gates, a free-standing basalt trilithon framing paired portals of black iron. For the first time she doubted herself, for only once before this had she seen the Gate of Deeper Slumber, and then it had been ajar; and now the gates were closed and might be locked.

  The zoogs poured into the clearing behind her, and for the first time she could see them clearly: scores of brown, shadowy forms with long, articulate limbs, knee-high as they loped on all fours. Their forward-looking hunters’ eyes shone yellow as they raced toward her.

  The cat streaked through a gap in the iron; and Vellitt following slammed into the portal with a deep ringing noise, as though someone had struck a gong the size of a city. At the immense sound the zoogs stopped short and with cries of fear tumbled backward into the trees. Vellitt tore open a gate—unlocked after all—and passed onto a broad staircase of pale moss-covered stone. She ran to the first landing and there halted at last. The zoogs did not follow her. She was, perhaps, safe.

  * * *

  It took a long while to catch her breath, and before her heart had stopped pounding, her sweat had turned icy on her face and under her breasts and arms. The cat crouched beside her, panting in its small-lunged way, so she poured water into the canteen’s cap, and the cat lapped it dry while she drained the rest. Her right ankle hurt viciously, and she bled in a dozen places from scratches caused by tearing through the branches. She had not known she could run so far—or at all—but as a young woman she had been quick and strong, and some of that remained.

  She looked about. The zoogs’ forest was not visible except as a glow that seemed to come from a great distance, much farther below than the steps she had ascended. From this side, the trilithon was the same rough-cut basalt, but the gates were not iron: one, elaborately carved of a single piece of ivory cut from some unknown but mammoth beast; the other, woven of broad strips of translucent horn. If she walked through those gates, would she find herself in yet another place, her dream lands? Did women have dream lands? In all her far-travelling, she had never seen a woman of the waking world nor heard of one, but she thought of the little picture card of Avignon, la Place de l’Horloge, the town square and all its women in their bright summer dresses. There were as many women as men in that image: was that even possible?

  Finally her exhaustion caught up with her: days of walking and only an hour or so of sleep in the past two. Vellitt dropped into something that was nearly a coma. If she dreamed, she remembered nothing of it.

  She woke to full daylight. Her arms hurt from holding the torch and machete, and her ankle had swollen, but otherwise she felt amazingly well, alive as she had not in years. She smiled, remembering something a travelling companion had said long ago: Nothing like not dying to make you feel alive. Hungry as she was, she ate nothing, for she would have no more water until she came to the temple.

  Curled close beside Vellitt’s pack, the cat slept on. It had found its own meal, for there were bloody paw-prints upon the railing, and tufts of fur the greasy brown of a young zoog’s pelt: impressive, for she would not have thought the cat was large enough for such prey. Only when Vellitt shouldered her pack did the cat stretch lengthily, blinking its vivid eyes against the morning sun. “Would you like a ride?” she asked and bent low, but it only leapt to the railing and trotted upward on its own.

  She had been told that the stairs between the Gate and the temple of Flame were seven hundred in number, but she quickly lost count. The stairs hairpinned up forested crags so steep that she could reach out and touch the rock as she ascended, for the stairs soon became no more than irregular granite ledges interposed with steep pitches of trail. She climbed beyond the tree line, until there were no living things but Vellitt and the cat, which, against the nature and character of its kind, was systematically picking its way up the mountain. She still could not see Hatheg-Kla’s uppermost reaches, only soaring cliffs fading against the pale patterns of the heavy-swelling sky.

  Her muscles were aflame, and she labored for each wheezing breath. The air was thinner here, and it smelled different, as though spiced by strange seas, ice fields immeasurably distant; and she wondered whether this were the smell of the waking world, or whether the scent was from space itself. Was she still in her world? When she paused for breath, as she often found herself forced to do, she saw behind her only an ocean of clouds eye-achingly bright in the sunlight, and overhead, the sky’s faint, coruscating anthemions.

  Not seven hundred steps but what seemed thousands, yet there was eventually an end to them. It had been a long time since she had looked up; her head was bent to watch her feet, focused on the next step and the next and the next, running with sweat until she ran out of moisture and it dried to salt on her skin. And suddenly there were no more steps and she raised her head.

  She stood on a granite ledge some twenty paces across and twice that long, smooth as a lecture-hall floor and glittering with quartzite. To one side the world fell away into the cloud-fields she had climbed through, and the moiréed sky, so close it seemed she might almost reach out and touch some coil of that mutable substance. To the other side was a concave rock face pierced everywhere with windows and doors and little balconies carved of living rock. A hundred feet over her head, the rock face bulged out, sheltering the ledge from the sun.

  She was still catching her breath when she saw a man in one of the upper windows. Perceiving her, he vanished, reappearing a moment later upon a stone balcony to descend a ladder, which he managed nimbly despite the voluminous draperies of his violet-colored robes and the laced sandals upon his feet. He was civil to the cat but disdainful to her, though he could not do less than the ancient laws of the temple demanded, showing her to a guest-cave and sending for food, water, and wine. She asked for news of the dreamer Stephan Heller and his companion: whether they lingered here or had passed already into the waking world—or had, perhaps, not yet arrived—but he would say nothing. He could not disregard her application for an audience with the temple’s priests, but he heard her with little courtesy and left immediately.

  She drank water until sweat finally broke out, then ate. Her cave was cold, glaring with light that streamed through a large opening high in one wall; but she slept as well as ever she had in her gabled rooms in Ulthar.

  * * *

  For the next two days, she waited in growing frustration. She sent messages to the high priests Nasht and Kaman-Thah via the disdainful acolyte assigned to attend her, and by every other violet-robed man sh
e saw, priest or proselyte. She gave her name but did not speak of the College, nor of her status as a professor of the University, for she knew that away from the garden-lands of the world, there was often little notion of educating women. Otherwise there was nothing she could do. She learned on the first day that she was the only guest.

  She filled her hours. She paced on the polished ledge watching the sky shift, picotage blurring into strange foliation and congeries of fracturing cubes; trying, as she always did, to understand the underlying rules. Since it was not forbidden, she also explored the honeycombed caves of the temple. Many of the corridors and rooms were torchlit, smelling of pitch and sweet resins, but there were deeper, less travelled tunnels, illuminated only by lichens that glowed a dull, cool brown; and once, a sickly pink that caused an immediate and intense headache that lasted for hours.

  Late the first afternoon, she found a long room lit by a row of windows high upon one wall. There were dark paintings on the walls, glass-faced cabinets, and tall shelves stacked with scrolls and hand-books. She took down a small scroll, written in a script she recognized as Ib’n, which meant it was unimaginably ancient; and indeed the vellum (if that is what it was) cracked as she held it merely from the pressure of her fingers. She replaced it carefully, and took instead a hand-book bound in dun-colored buckram with strange words on its cover: DANIEL DEFOE MOLL FLANDERS. They meant nothing, so she flipped the book open—it was her own language; the strange words were names—and she realized it was a book from the waking world. She looked more carefully: many of the books were similarly alien, and inside the cabinets were unfamiliar objects of steel or brass or a bright glossy substance like lacquer. She reopened the book and began to read, but an aged man in violet robes so old they had faded to lavender entered the room and castigated her for touching the books. Despite the differences in language, age, and sex, his tone was a mirror of that of Uneshyl Pos, the librarian at the Women’s College; for all librarians are the same librarian.