dreamtime

I am Alessandro Cagliostro. I am an actor, in a play, performing the role of Cagliostro. During this play, I select members of the audience to come on stage, and then place them in small open coffins, lined with silk. Some of my victims are nervous, and some of them are clearly very scared, but none of them try to resist in any way. I then cover these coffins with silk, and disappear from the play, to discretely appear in the front row of seats, watching out the rest of the show. It is about Cagliostro, and suggests unspoken volumes about an unrecorded necromantic ability, but he is outside the spectacle. When the play is finished, and the hall is almost empty, a hall which suggests that this play is in a school or maybe college, someone from the audience comes up and sits behind me. They are quite convinced that I really am Cagliostro, and no matter what I say, I cannot outright deny the accusation. Everything that comes out of my mouth seems to insinuate that maybe I am him, and slowly I realise that my theatrical beard is not a prop. Slowly I realise that I actually am Alessandro Cagliostro.

While I slept I spent all last night in a different house. A square and squat, but towering, tenement block of a house. Four stories on the outside, at least that many on the inside, maybe more. The place was huge, and a warren. I took some paper, and a pencil, and went to map it all. Looking for a spare bedroom that wasn’t haunted, that a fugitive friend of mine could stay in. Amongst the doors that were locked, and the rooms you could only get into through hatches in the ceiling, and the rooms that made no sense, tiled green and long, someone told me that the man who lived there before us had travelled the world. Leaving town after a spate of murders only to arrive in the next and begin again.

Finally I made my way into the attic space, and there was a tarpaulin there, wrapped in sheeting and industrial clips. But it unrolled a little at my touch, and a toe poked out the end.

We took the girl downstairs dead, but later, not much later, I found her in one of the bedrooms alive, and cradling my sister gone mad. It was like shell shock, wide-eyed, tangle haired, and patterned with drying blood. I took my sister away from the dead girl, who said something I forget, and put her somewhere safe. When I came back to find the stranger she was in the ballroom, dancing with my mother, gleaming eyed and with a shining too-wide grin. Everything the girl touched became infected with a shattering animal lunacy. And as she looked at me, for the first time really, I woke up.

I’m in a house, and all I know about it is that it’s a bad place. Somewhere in the depths of it there are many corpses. The details are all indistinct and dark. I might be in the kitchen, I might be in the hallway. Where ever I am it’s crowded, and not a space for living. There are other people here, but the only one I really notice is, I think, a woman. She’s speaking to me. Half cajoling, half threatening. I am scared, but complicit. Something is moving in my chest, and as it does so the house (or my vision) gets darker still. I can feel it in my head that whatever makes this a bad place is becoming stronger with my co-operation. I feel increasingly claustrophobic, increasingly pressured, and everything is sinking into burningly cold blacks and reds, as if I am diving deeper than I should.

Within all of the badness, a memory floats, and I experience it as if it were happening now. I am in the same place, and a lighter woman comes to me smiling. She says something and the absolute opposite of the blackness gouts outward and into being. I am suddenly aware of my chest as it does so, and the living tattoo that adorns it. It is an orary. At its centre is the sun in all its slowly boiling fury. It’s hard to make out the rest of the pattern from the glare, but somewhere around the edges are other planets, maybe even other stars.

I cough my way back into the present, almost lost to the crushing hurricane, and I grit my teeth. I think my eyes are open, but I’m not sure. If they are, I know that they are black in entirety. This is not what I will be used for. I am not the gate I am being made into. I may have bitten off my tongue. I have other things to worry about. Somewhere in my chest is a bad moon, growling. There is an enormous pain as I fight the welling surge and gradually bring everything under control. My skull is fit to burst. My chest strains, full of blood. All I can see is the black and the red and the grey.

We get forgotten about far too easily: A shadowed little world in a tortuous orbit, populated by a handful of moonbaby angels, grown pale and thin. If I hold my hand up to the colony half-light, there’s barely a silhouette. It’s still plenty to see that my fingers are tapering and overlong. Our eyes are so refined we only spend a scant proportion of energy on lighting, and sometimes we don’t bother. We inherited this place from the Eurussians, here just sufficient time to build nearcrete bunkers, vomit pseudo-beuracratic grafitti over anything upright and flat, then adapt enough to the environment to freak out. We took the land out from under them when their morale broke, and now they deny they were ever even here. I don’t read Russian. I don’t read anything but Anglic and twelve different languages of code, and it’s not important. I can’t play golf, it doesn’t matter. I’ve never seen a stretch of green in my life. We don’t get the recreational bandwidth for imagery, the only green I have ever seen is luminous, or oily dark on the leaves of desert vine. The creeper grows on everything, and it’s the only thing that does. A leafy apex predator left by our predecessors. It’s edible, but it tastes foul. You can brew alchohol from it, but it ruins and cracks any surface it crawls across. It swallows walls, outhouses, ducting, and we don’t even have the excess air to burn it off. We spend half our time mining the halo, and most of the rest waging a losing war against the ivy. Half in shadow, and the other half crawling across a miles wide polar ring of frozen hydro-carbon that glitters and blinds.

A brief moment of respite in the realm of sleep- last night I spent not with the horrific recurring nightmare of doom or the freakish slideshow of bizarrity (chainmail wearing lobsters anyone?), but floating in space. We were adrift in a battered old freighter, no engine power, and one of the crew had taken to her quarters. She wouldn’t come out, I’m not sure why. I don’t know if we needed her help, or if we needed to stop her, but after we had the door open my companion went in weilding a sword.

While they fought he breathlessly explained why I couldn’t see her. Bones of silicon and ceramic, flesh something like that of a deep sea creature, she was entirely transparent except for pigment under control. He didn’t stand a chance against her, coming in again and again from above, and behind. She dropped him, I tried to talk to her, and that’s when she changed the lighting. All of a sudden she was stood before me, glowing darkly in the UV, dots of pigment mirrored across her gone bright blue. Eyes shining purple in the twilight: Terrifiying and beautiful. I have no idea what she said to me, I was in awe, and I never remember. All I know is that her name was Violet.