I, the Key
1
When I was
eight I lost the ability to dream. I often compensated with wakeful dreams and
fancies of imagination I scarcely put on paper or canvas, even though my mind
whispered to me that I should. When I did resolve to portray my wakeful dreams,
I would enter an absurdly lucid state. Barraged by images I could only assume
came from my youth, I struggled to maintain my visions until they assailed me
to such an end that I had to cease. They filled me with a singular terror. As a
result, I not only stopped writing and drawing, but also forced myself to not
do it again. I knew the images were the culprit of my disorder, yet I knew facing
them might mean a shattering of an already fragile mental state. I buried them
instead. Deep enough for them to eventually manifest in a schizoid disorder, one
I was acutely aware of, yet could do nothing to assuage it. I became intensely
fearful of all public events.
It was
because of this chronic avoidance of man that I was most surprised with myself the
day I endeavoured to visit a gathering I would have otherwise shunned.
I was
invited via an acquaintance of mine over a social networking site. He was one
of those friends we all have on our list: a person who you never talk to and
call a 'friend' only in the nebulous cloud of the internet. But then again most
of my acquaintances were of such nature. I decided to go, and it was here that my
true madness began.
I arrived
fashionably late. Unfortunately, everyone else was vastly
more fashionable than myself. The result being me and the proprietor engaging
in conversation and watching as people trickled in, all of whom eventually
insisted on talking to me. Questions
such as, “Where have you been?”, “Long time no see, eh bud?” became a
constancy. Horrid.
Nevertheless
the evening turned out delightfully droll, despite the fact that social
anxieties got the better of me on numerous occasions, forcing me to withdraw (more
than once) into the relative safety of the bathroom. At one point after
midnight, matters in my head became unbearable. So much so, I decided it would
be best for me to take my leave. But first, for reasons unknown to me, I
resolved to wait and sat on a chair facing the bar’s entry.
I remained
there longer than I had expected – some impulse keeping me in place despite my
anxious sweat. I struggled to maintain a mask of bored vacancy, until she
walked in and the walls seemed to breathe. She had an air of neglect about her
which made her seem messy, but in a way as though it is her soul that is in
disarray and all attempts to mask it goes unnoticed by those with less
sensitive faculties. Her hair was auburn and fell over her shoulders in waves,
her face and posture both immensely likable. Our eyes met as though following
each other’s orbits for unknown ages and only now coming close enough to spot
each other, like two comets that pass every few thousand years. My world became
her eyes and I was blasted with a fear of such depth and intensity I nearly
fainted. I could not explain the source of this fright and resolved to find out
what might be the basis of such irrationality. I looked – for how could I not –
and saw that she appeared just as lost in my gaze as I was in hers.
No one
appeared to notice as she walked towards me. The movement of bodies around her
became a blur, each unconsciously stepping aside and forming a corridor for her
to meet me.
“I know
you,” she said with an, aha! there you
are.
“Do you? I
don’t think I know you,” I lied. I did know her, though I could not say from
where.
She seemed
puzzled by my answer. We eyed each other until she offered a hand, the gesture
awkward after our silence. I expected a soft handshake but instead she used it
to yank herself closer to me. I could smell the piney fragrance of her hair as
she whispered, “Let me show you where the ocean and they sky become one.”
For a
moment I was dreaming again. Images both forgotten and half-remembered
superimposed on the scene before me. I smelled the ocean and the breeze it
carried; a reek of decay from some nameless place I visited once but never came
back the same. A cold seeped into my bones. She stepped back, her eyes pressed
into mine as if she knew me from another plane or dimension, knew me more
deeply than anyone ever has or ever will or even could. I took a breath,
realizing I had been holding it for a while. Then remembered her and wet myself
and the chair I was sitting on.
2
“I accidently
spilled beer on him,” she would giggle to those who asked why we are leaving. Ridiculous.
There had
been silence outside the bar as I came in; and a greater silence as we got to
her car, for the silence was in my head. It felt like there should have been
thoughts there, thoughts about who this woman is and how it was that I knew
her. Thoughts about where we are going and what we shall find there. But there
was nothing. The moon hung bright above the road and that too made me forget.
We drove the silvery plane of the illuminated highway and it felt like driving
into oblivion.
“How much
do you remember?” she finally asked.
“I remember
the cave,” I said, and that the two of
you are strangely connected. “But not really as the cave, more like a black
abyss where everything gets sucked into. My dreams, my thoughts, belching out
my fears and my... I don’t know.”
“I’ve been
looking for you, you know,” she said. “For a while now. I’m too afraid to do it
myself and I remember you used to be different before it happened. It’s funny I
find you randomly in the end.”
How does she know I was different? Even I could no longer remember
being any other way.
“Nothing is
random. And I haven’t gone far, I just hid.”
She nodded
and I could tell she wondered why I do not ask any questions. I did not want to
ask. I knew things would be easier for me if I asked, but it felt like asking
would open a doorway I closed for a reason. Or that the reason closed the
doorway.
I stayed
quiet and allowed her to take me where my dreams could not.
3
We arrived
in the misty half-light before the dawn and stopped the car on a cliff carpeted
by waving grass. The high crag overlooked the ocean where waves seemed like ripples
in silk. I opened the car door and stepped outside.
A soft
splashing in the distance below.
The smell was
not what I had expected. I whiffed a grim foulness of dead whales. Autumn was
ending and everything was preparing to sleep, even the wide expanse of the
ocean seemed lazy and uninterested in any endeavour to move. A lone freighter
sailed through the misty distance. For a while I tried, but could not get over
the smell.
“What is that?”
“Memories,” she said, the smaller strands of
her hair held aloft by the first morning breeze. “They’ve growl foul over the
years.”
Her answer
felt irritatingly obtuse. Her face seemed odd and I could not place the reason
why, until the sun rose into sky, red as blood, and illuminated her aspect in
colour. A face cross-hatched by scars. It felt inappropriate to ask, but I knew her, it was just all the specifics
of her that eluded me. “What happened?” I motioned a finger around my own face.
“Some
things you need to discover for yourself for the truth to have an impact,” she
smiled.
She led me
to the cliff’s edge and sat down. The grass was soft and the soil cold, yet I
soon forgot about the chill as I listened to her explain things I have wondered
about for two decades. The more she talked, the more I could feel her words chipping
away at my already fragile edifice of sanity. The more she spoke, the more her
words became a source of dread. It seemed to me she must have crawled out of
the sea, her voice slowly becoming as expansive as the sea. I could not speak
in any way save to ask questions. Hours passed.
“We’ll have
to get down there,” she said, and pointed to a lone, stone house on the edge of
where the land met the sea. “It used to be a lighthouse, but a lighthouse
stands there no more.”
Obviously. “Why?” I asked. “What’s in there? How should
we get down?” There seemed no way of doing it save going all the way around.
“Because we
need to wait,” she said, looking skyward. “The stars are not where they need to
be. Follow me,” she smiled and was on her feet, skipping down a path I had not
noticed.
We walked the
narrow trail between the knee-tall grass painted gold by the meridian sun. As I
watched her, smelled her as she walked ahead of me, she seemed to me the type
of person that would never die. A ridiculous notion, I knew, but such was this
feeling – the timelessness of her voice – that it gave me hope. Perhaps she would never die and teach me the secret so that I may never die with her. She suddenly stopped and looked up, then
back to me and said, “Come to the Moon with me.” She laughed and hurried ahead.
In an instant my mind pieced together all of her words and caused a sudden
shift in perception. I am following a mad
woman. A lunatic, certainly? It
would make sense for me to not notice such a thing, being somewhat odd myself.
“What’s the
holdup?” she waved at me from up ahead. The scars on her face looked less
hideous from a distance and I hurried to meet her with masked reluctance. The
ground levelled and I followed her prints upon the wet sand. Tall walls of foam
splashed against the rock to my right. A cold breeze came with them and
something else, a feeling as if the sea was not just the sea, but a great
leveller pulsing with age and history, yet timeless and ageless because it
knows such things do not matter.
“I never
asked for your name,” I said to her.
“No, you
didn’t.”
“What is your name?”
She gave me
the broadest smile a person can give without appearing sinister, and said, “I
am Forever.”
4
It was when
we reached the lighthouse that I figured Forever must be mad indeed. What
maddened me the most, however, was
that all of the things she had told me appeared to have slipped out of my head.
The feeling of memory-loss pervaded my thoughts to an almost intolerable degree.
It was pushed aside when she pulled out a massive, silver key, unlocked the lighthouse
gate with a clack and ushered me inside to stand beneath a badly-thatched roof.
She said,
“Welcome to my humble abode.”
It felt
like I had stumbled into a zone of instability where every aspect of the
without portrayed the within of her mind. Canvases and books, most half-torn or
wet, lay scattered about everywhere. The deck was carpeted by papers,
handwritten notes and partially-washed off or smudged by rain. The bed was
covered by a stack of them, each with crude, charcoal drawings. In the gloom I
could make out noting for certain, yet all carried a heinous quality of madness
and delirium. Above all hung the prevailing smell of fish and the sense that
such a place could not be inhabited by anyone sane. There were tons of things scattered
about of which I had no idea what purpose they might serve.
“You seem
to have some problems with the roof, dear,” I said. Light pierced through the
many chinks and apertures above in spears of light, illuminating each dust
particle through which Forever began to dance and twirl with arms spread wide.
“Home sweet
home. Isn’t it wonderful?” she smiled. “Lovely. The spots of sunlight remind me
of myself: spotted with moments of sanity.” Her words only served to confuse me
further as she seemed fully lucid of her condition.
She stopped
dancing and undressed before me, and dear God I would be lying if I said her
frail body didn’t arouse me. She carefully placed the clothes into a closet and
picked from the floor a set of torn short jeans and a shirt equally as torn and
stretched out. The shirt left one of her smooth shoulders bare. She looked at
me with a shy expression and said, “You know, a gentleman never looks at a lady
while she undresses, who knows how he might offend her delicate sensibilities.”
“Sorry,”
was all I managed. I wished to say something else, when I noticed a picture
behind her. I walked past her, drawn to the painting as if it were a magnet for
my consciousness. What I saw upon it made me collapse into myself with horror.
The outlines of the painting – if it could be called such – were of a house
standing on an island, most of the island underwater. The material used as
canvas was wood, and the technique seemed to be a kind of scratching, the
scratches filled with strange-coloured paint or some mucus. Beneath the house,
in the ocean which felt so real, was a large whale with its mouth gaping open
in unnatural proportions. Everything about the artwork innerved me as it seemed
to so adequately display my host’s insanity. I stared at the painting for a
while, until I could have sworn the whale moved its roaring head. There came a
trembling and a black abyss, surrounding me. A sound, a bass rumble of
‘uuuooooooo...’, as the devouring maw approached from some nameless distance.
Petrified and so frozen in place, I watched as the mouth drew nigh with its
million fangs and a flapping tongue. It encompassed me and with a loud crack snapped
shut on top of me...
I woke up
hours later with Forever scribbling and talking madly over something on the
floor. She was on her elbows, her behind exposed in what my mind interpreted to
be undeniably sexual way, with her short, cut-out jeans revealing aspects of
her I could not look away from. Her words came out in a series of meaningless
vowels.
I coughed
so that she might notice me. She didn’t. I coughed again, this time louder and
with fervour. Instead of looking up she rushed outside.
I considered
myself without options – I certainly did not wish to stay here – so I ran after
her, stealing a glace towards what she had been drawing and wishing I hadn’t.
What she portrayed was something so appalling I do not wish to describe. The
image would not leave my mind even as I chased her, yelling for her to stop.
She did not
heed me until she came below the cliff-face above which we had left the car.
“Yes. Yes!
Finally, the stars are in their proper place again. Look!” She pointed at the Moon
and I thought I must surely be dreaming.
In my years
as I recluse I often picked up hobbies that involved the least amount of human
contact. Astronomy proved an easy route for a mind such as mine. And when now I
looked at the Moon and could see Venus, Jupiter and Saturn forming a near
perfect triangle around it, I became convinced I am still sprawled in the
lighthouse, dreaming all of this.
“It’ll soon
be over, Jon, just come with me, you’ll see,” she said. I was at once horrified
and profoundly relieved. She reached out and grabbed my hand, leading me ahead
the narrow path. Waves crashed against the rock below us, foaming and splashing,
frothing and recombining with the ocean.
“I don’t trust
this,” I said. “I don’t want this anymore.” I had no idea what waited at the
end, and even though I knew most of my fear didn’t come from something that was
real but from something imagined, I could not shake it.
“Then go
back,” she said. Somehow that proved even worse.
She saw my
resignation about the prospect. “Then trust me,”
she smiled over her smooth shoulder. I decided I had come too far to chicken
out. Too far to run as I have from most of my dealings with people. I would see
this through to the end and so followed her swaying hips until the path below
us became rough with odd chiselling – narrow to a point where we had to step
sideways. Soon my back was pressed against the cliff with the fall and the
ocean below.
“Careful,”
she urged, “it’s slippery here, don’t fall.”
“You’ve
been inside yet?”
“No,” she
said. “I had to prepare the way. Don’t mind the voice.”
I didn’t
know what she meant until I took a careful look at the hieroglyphs below our feet.
They were scratched into the rock like the scratches in the wooden painting had
been. They consisted of no signs or letters I could identify, nor would they form
any suggestion in my head as to what their relation might be. Around them
appeared a faint aura of suggestive meaning. I was certain I could remember
them if I tried hard enough, looked long enough. When we neared the pathway’s
end, a voice called out to me. I tried listening to its whispers but soon
realized it must be a fabrication of my own imaginings, as I realized I had
become immersed in a frightened and highly suggestible state. And yet, no
matter how hard I tried, I could not shake the absolute fact that there arose
from the whispers a drumming in my marrow which spoke to me of things I have
long forgotten.
“Don’t be
frightened,” she said, which served to do the opposite – a panic rose in my
throat. How had she gotten those scars?
They looked more like her skin had been torn, or peeled off. Had she fallen
down this slope and injured her face?
“Don’t tell
me these things. Tell me something else,” I said.
“What
should I say, then?”
“That I’m
dreaming?”
“Well... you
are not,” she said as we reached the passage and entered the cave below the
black arch.
5
The walls
had a bioluminescent quality, outlining Forever’s shape in stark cyan. She
seemed a ghost to me. My breathing felt heavy. My heart relentless and loud in
my ears.
We passed
various obstructions in the cave system, my hand always in hers as she led me through
the increasingly cold cavern. Soon the draft became ice on my skin and after a
while it occurred to me that I should take a closer look at the walls, even
when the reason why was not immediately apparent.
“What the
hell are these?” I asked. She did not respond – her hand had gotten cold.
“Aren’t you cold?” No answer. An anxiety of singular force made my hand sweat.
I noticed the strange incrustations upon the walls were getting smoother, as
though whoever had left the place in ruin had time to sand out a section of the
within. We had passed numerous forks in the system, suggesting the cave was of
great elaborateness and scale. All of these and other, inner impulses slowly proved
to me that she must have lead me here – where the walls began to smooth out –
for some sinister purpose.
I heard
mumbling ahead; a burr of ghastly character on the very edge of hearing. It
took me a few strides to realize it was the voice of Forever. Her tonality and
the strange chanting with which she repeated whatever she was saying made me
start planning my escape immediately. Surely I had come into the grasp of a
mad-which, and was now trailing the path of her insanity. Suddenly the belief
that she had lead me through this inextricable maze so none would find me
became absolute. We entered a vast cavern peopled by hunched and robed figures,
staring into what seemed like silver mirrors that reflected nothing. I
attempted to break free of her grasp and managed to dislodge my hand. I turned back
to try my luck in the caverns, only to bump into a solid wall where moments
before a tunnel had been. In a second, or it might have been more, I felt
everything all at once and vomited over the roughly hewn floor, then suddenly
felt nothing. I looked up to see the scar-faced Forever gone, replaced by a
figure whose hands were in his sleeves, staring down at me from a hooded robe and
empty eye sockets. His eyes had been gouged, replaced by a black bump in
between the two sockets. My fear became a physical menace. I shook as my ears picked
up an odd chanting of synchronous rhythm resonating at a pitch my mind had not
encountered before.
I had seen
many sights in my wakeful dreams, but none so hateful as I saw in the
expression of the ancient and robed man now standing before me. All my senses
were drawn to his one, black eye. The world seemed to stop until I noticed but
one movement: an otherworldly-hued substance splurting out in aetheric waves from
the black and never-blinking eye in the centre of his forehead. In a roar of
unexplainable mindcasting, I realized my whole existence had been an
initiation. I became complacent, but within yelled for my own self to stop as I
was ushered forth in a mindless stupor to where my true purpose lay. I had come
to a radiant well where all reality emanates from, and from where a set of
robed figures pulled out a ball made of what looked like mercury out of which I
would forge my own mirror to gaze into eternity. All of this made strange sense
to me and I proceeded towards my task with unstoppable zest.
I have no
idea how long I polished that piece of mercury that wasn’t mercury and shaped
it into a smooth, oval window – a plane where everything explained itself to me.
It showed futures and pasts interwoven into an infinite cosmic cycle where
humans and their existence formed transient thoughts in reality. I felt more
than I saw, for in the darkness only my mirror and our chanting became real. My
eyes atrophied until their insistence on seeing became an unbearable
distraction. I gauged them out myself.
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