"Of course, it's very good. Very realistic."
Not at all, Daisy Day. Not realistic in the least. Some uncomfortable moments after that I found out she had to be leaving. It seemed she had made girl plans with a girlfriend of hers to do some things girls do when they get together with others of their kind. I said I understood, and I did. There was no doubt in my mind of the gender of Day's companion tonight. But it was for a different reason that I was distressed to see Day go off this evening. This is the first time, and this I could read in her every move and expression, that she has truly possessed an idea of my secrets. Of course, she always knew about the meetings I go to and all such things. I've even paraphrased and abridged for her the discussion which goes on at these gatherings, always disguising their real nature in progressively thinner guises, hoping one day to show her the naked truth. Well, tonight I think, the secret was stripped bare. Whether she believes them or not, which doesn't make any difference, she has as clear a notion as Clare ever did of all the secrets about me and the others. She has thoroughly gotten the picture now.
September 16th. Tonight was our meeting, though it was not of the regularly scheduled sort. The others feel there's a problem, and of course I know they're right. Ever since I met here I could sense a growing uneasiness, which was their prerogative. Now, however, all has changed; my stupid, romantic misjudgement has seen to that. They expressed absolute horror that an outsider should know so much. I feel it myself. Day is a stranger now, and I wonder what her loquacious self has to say about her former friend, not to mention his present ones. Many others could find out. Eventually we would have no peace. The secretness we need for our lives would be lost, and with it would go the possible keys to a poignantly hard sought kingdom. We can all feel the horror of that estrangement. We've been through this before, and I'm glad to say not only with me (Harley and his "lads", for instance). We, of course, have no secrets from each other. The others know everything about me, and I about them. They knew every step of the way my relationship with Daisy. Some of them even predicted the outcome. And though I thought I was right in taking the extravagant chance that they were wrong, I must now defer to their prophecy. Those lonely names, mes freres. "Do you want us to see it through," they said in so many words. I nodded, finally, in a score of ambiguous, half-hesitant ways. Then they sent me home. I'll never do this again, I thought, even though I've though this before. At home I stared at the razory dentes of my furry sculpture for a perilously long while. What she saw as tongue-like floral appendages were, of course, silent: the preservation of that silence is their whole and soulless purpose. I remember that she jokingly asked me once on what I modelled my art...
September 17th
To Eden with me you will not leave
To live in a cottage of crazy crooked
eaves.
In your own happy home you take care
these nights,
When you let your little cat in, turn
on the lights!
Something scurries behind and finds
a cozy place to stare,
Something sent to you from paradise,
paradisically so rare:
Tongues flowering; they leap out
laughing, lapping. Disappear!
I do this to pass the hours. Only to
pass the hours.
September 17th. 12:00 a.m. Flowers.
Return to the latest version.
Dream Of A Mannikin (1982)
First published in Eldritch Tales #9, 1982.
Also published in: Songs Of A Dead Dreamer, The Nightmare Factory.
This version taken from: Unknown source.
The girl who came into my office Wednesday for a session at two o'clock said her name was Amy Locher. (And didn't you once tell me that long ago you had a doll with this same first name?) Under the present circumstances I don't think it too gross a violation of professional ethics to use the subject's real name in describing her case to you. Certainly there's something more than simple ethics between us, ma chere amie. Besides, I understood from Miss Locher that you recommended me to her. This didn't seem necessarily ominous at first; perhaps, I speculated, your relationship with the girl was such that made it awkward for you to take her on as one of your own patients. Actually it's still not clear to me, my love, just how deeply you can be implicated in the overall experience I had with the petite Miss L. So you'll have to forgive any stupidities of mine, which may crudely crop up in the body of this correspondence.
My first impression of Miss Locher, as she positioned herself almost sidesaddle in a leather chair before me, was that of a tense and disturbed but basically efficient and self-seeking young woman. She was dressed and accessorized, I noticed, in much the classic style, which you normally favor. I won't go into our first-visit preliminaries here (though we can discuss these and other matters at dinner this Saturday if only you are willing). After a brief while we zeroed in on the girl's immediate impetus for consulting me. This involved, as you may or may not know, a distressing dream she had recently suffered. What will follow, as I have composed them from my tape of the September 10th session, are the events of that dream.
In the dream our subject has entered into a new life, at least to the extent that she holds down a different job from her waking one. She had already informed me that for some five years she'd worked as a secretary for a tool and die firm. (And could this possibly be your delicate touch? Tooling into oblivion.) However, her working day in the dream finds her as a long-time employee of a fashionable clothes shop. Like those state witnesses the government wishes to hide with new identities, she has been outfitted by the dream with what seems to be a mostly tacit but somehow complete biography; a marvelous trick of the mind, this. It appears that the duties of her new job require her to change the clothes of the mannikins in the front window, this according to some mysterious and unfathomable schedule. She in fact feels as if her entire existence is slavishly given over to doing nothing but dressing and undressing these dummies. She is profoundly dissatisfied with her lot, and the mannikins become the focus of her animus.
Such is the general background presupposed by the dream, which now begins in proper. On a particularly gloomy day in her era of thralldom, our dummy dresser approaches her work. She is resentful and frightened, the latter emotion an irrational "given" at this point in the dream. An awesome load of new clothes is waiting to attire a window full of naked mannikins. Their unwarm, uncold bodies repel her touch. (Note this rare awareness of temperature in a dream, albeit neutral.) She bitterly surveys the ranks of crayon-like faces and then says: "Time to stop dancing and get dressed, sleeping beauties." These words are spoken without spontaneity, as if ritually used to inaugurate each dressing session. But the dream changes before the dresser is able to put one stitch on the dummies, who stare at nothing with "anticipating" eyes.
The working day is now finished. She has returned to her small apartment, where she retires to bed... and has a dream. (This dream is that of the mannikin dresser and not hers, she emphatically pointed out!)
The mannikin dresser dreams she is in her bedroom. But what she now thinks of as her "bedroom" is from all appearances actually an archaically furnished hall with the dimensions of a small theater. The room is dimly lit by some jeweled lamps along the walls, the lights shining "with a strange glaziness" upon an intricately patterned carpet and upon the massive pieces of antique and highly varnished furniture around the room. She perceives the objects of the scene more as pure ideas than physical things, for details are blurry and there are many shadows. One thing, though, she visualizes quite clearly as the dominant feature of the room: there is a wall that from the floor to the lofty ceiling is completely missing. In place of the absent wall is a view of star-clustered blackness, which she sees either through a great window or irrationally in the depths of an equally great mirror. In any case, this maze of stars and blackness appears as an enormous mural and suggests an uncertain location for a room formerly thought to
be nestled at the cozy crossroads of well-known coordinates. Now it is truly just a lost point within an unknown universe of sleep.
The dreamer is positioned almost on the opposite side of the room from the brink of the starry abyss. Sitting on the edge of an armless, backless couch of complex brocade, she stares and waits "without breath or heartbeat," these functions being quite unnecessary to her dream self. Everything is in silence. This silence, however, is somehow charged with strange currents of force, which she can't really explain, an insane physics electrifying the atmosphere with demonic powers lurking just beyond the threshold of sensory perception. All is perceived with elusive dream senses.
Then a new feeling enters the dream, one slightly more tangible. There seems to be an iciness drifting in from the area of the great mirror or window, perhaps now merely a windowless aperture looking out on the chilly void. Suddenly our dreamer experiences a cumulative terror of everything that has happened, is happening, or will happen to her. Without moving from her place on that uncomfortable couch, she visually searches the room for clues to the source of her terror. Many areas are inaccessible to her sight—like a picture that has been scribbled out in places—but she sees nothing specifically frightening and is relieved for a moment. Then her horror begins anew when she realizes for the first time that she hasn't looked behind her, and indeed she seems physically unable to do so now.
Something is back there. She feels this to be a horrible truth. She almost knows what the thing is, but afflicted with some kind of oneiric aphasia she cannot articulate any words or clear ideas to herself. She can only wait, hoping that sudden shock will soon bring her out of the dream, for she is now aware that "she is dreaming," for some reason thinking of herself in the third person.
The words "she is dreaming" somehow form a ubiquitous motif for the present situation: as a legend written somewhere at the bottom of the dream, as echoing voices bouncing here and there around the room, as a motto printed upon fortune cookie-like strips of paper and hidden in bureau drawers, and as a broken record repeating itself on an ancient Victrola inside the dreamer's head. Then all the words of this monotonous slogan gather from their diverse places and like an alighting flock of birds settle in the area behind the dreamer's back. There they twitter for a moment, as upon the frozen shoulders of a statue in a park. This is actually the way it seems to the dreamer, including the statue comparison. Something of a statuesque nature is back there.
Approaching her. Something that is radiating a searing field of tension, coming closer, its great shadow falling across and enlarging her own there upon the floor. Still she cannot turn around, cannot move her body, which is stiff-jointed and rigid. Perhaps she can scream, she thinks, and makes an attempt to do so. But this fails, because by then there is already a firm and tepid hand that has covered her mouth from behind. The fingers on her lips feel like thick, naked crayons. Then she sees a long slim arm extending itself out over her left shoulder, and a hand that is holding some filthy rags before her eyes and shaking them, "making them dance." And at that moment a dry sibilant voice whispers into her ear: "It's time to get dressed, little dolling."
She tries to look away, her eyes being the only things she can still move. Now, for the first time, she notices that all around me room—in the shadowed places—are people dressed as dolls. Their forms are collapsed, their mourns opened wide. They do not look as if they are still alive. Some of them have actually become dolls, their flesh no longer supple and their eyes having lost the appearance of moistness. Others are at various intermediate stages between humanness and dollhood. With horror, the dreamer now becomes aware that her own mouth is opened wide and will not close.
But at last, through the power of her fear, she is able to turn around and face her menacer. At this crescendo of the dream she awakes. She does not, however, awake in the bed of the mannikin dresser in her first and outer dream, but instead finds herself directly transported into the tangled, though real, bedcovers of her secretary self. Not exactly sure where or who she is for a moment, her first impulse on awaking is to complete the movement she began in the dream—that is, turning around to look behind her. The hypnopompic hallucination that followed she claims as a "strong motivating factor" in her seeking the powers of a psychiatrist. For when she turned around in her bed, there was more to see than a dumb headboard with a blank wall above. Projecting out of that moon-whitened wall was the anterior half of a head, the face upon it that of a female mannikin. And what particularly disturbed her about this illusion (and here we go deeper into already dubious realms) was that the head didn't melt away into the background of the wall the way other post-dream projections she'd seen in the past had done; but instead, this protruding head, in one smooth movement, withdrew back into the wall. Her screams summoned a few unsympathetic eavesdroppers from neighboring apartments.
End of dream and related experiences.
Now, my darling, you can probably imagine my reaction to the above psychic yarn. Every loose skein I followed led me back to you. The character of Miss Locher's dream is strongly reminiscent, in both mood and scenario, of matters you have been exploring for some years now. I'm referring, of course, to the all-around astral uncanniness of Miss Locher's dream and how eerily it echoes certain notions (very well, theories) that in my opinion have become altogether too central to your oeuvre as well as to your vie. Specifically I mean those "other worlds" you say you've detected through a combination of occult studies and depth analysis.
Let me digress for a brief lecture apropos of the preceding.
It's not that I object to your delving into speculative models of reality, sweetheart, but why this particular one? Why posit these "little zones," as I've heard you call them, having such hideous attributes, or should I say anti-attributes (to keep up with your lingo). To whimsically joke about them, as I've heard you do, with phrases like "pockets of interference" and "cosmic static," belies your talents as a thinker in general. And the rest of it: the hyper-uncanniness, the warped relationships that are supposed to obtain in these places, the "games with reality," and all the other transcendent nonsense. I realize that psychology has charted some awfully weird areas in its maps of the mind, but you've gone so far into ultramental hinterlands of metaphysics that I fear you will not return (at least not with your reputation intact).
To speak of your ideas with regard to Miss Locher's dream, you can see the connections, especially in the tortuous and twisting plot of her narrative. But I'll tell you when these connections really struck me with a hammer blow. It was just after she had related her dream to me. She was now riding the saddle of her chair in the normal position, and she made a few remarks obviously intended to convey the full extent of her distress. I'm sure she thought it de rigueur to tell me that after her dream episode she began entertaining doubts concerning who she really was. Secretary? Attirer of mannikins? Other? Other other? She knew, of course, the identity of her genuine, factual self; it was just some "new sense of unreality" that undermined complete assurance in this matter. (So what else is newrotic?)
Surely you can see how the above identity tricks fit in with those "harassments of the self" that you say are one of the characteristic happenings in these zones of yours. And just what are the boundaries of self? Is there a communion of all things or just some things? How do animate and inanimate relate? Really boring... zzzzz.
It all reminds me of that trite little fable of the Chinese (Chuang Tzu?) who dreamed he was a butterfly but upon waking affected not to know whether he was a man who'd dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterly now dreaming, etc. The question is, "Do things like butterflies dream?" (Ans.: no. Recall the lab studies on the subject, if you will for once.) The issue is ended right there. However—I'm sure you would continue—suppose the dreamer is not a man or butterfly, but both... or neither, something else altogether. Or suppose... really we could go on and on like this, and we have. Possibly the most repellent concept you've developed on this subject is that which you call "divine
masochism," or the doctrine of a Bigger Self terrorizing its little splinter selves, precisely that Something Else Altogether scarifying the man-butterfly with uncanny suspicions that there's a game going on over its collective head.
The trouble with all this, my dear, is the way you're so convinced of its objective reality, and how you sometimes manage to infect others with your peculiar convictions. Me, for instance. After hearing Miss Locher tell her dream story, I found myself unconsciously analyzing it much as you might have. Her multiplication of roles (including the role reversal with the mannikin) really put me in mind of some divine being that was splintering and scaring itself to relieve its cosmic ennui, as indeed a few of the more conventional gods of world religion supposedly do. I also thought of your "divinity of the dream," that thing which is all-powerful in its own realm. Contemplating the realm of Miss Locher's dream, I came to deeply feel that old truism of a solipsistic dream deity commanding all it sees, all of which is only itself. And a corollary to solipsism even occurred to me: if in any dream of a universe one has to always allow that there is another, waking universe, and then the problem becomes, as with our self-scaring Chinese, knowing when one is actually dreaming and what form the waking self may have; and this one can never know. The fact that the overwhelming majority of thinkers reject any doctrine of solipsism suggests, perhaps, the basic horror and disgusting unreality of its implications. And after all, the horrific feeling of unreality is much more prevalent (to certain people) in what we call human "reality" than in human dreams, where everything is absolutely real.
See what you've done to me! For reasons that you well know, I always try to argue your case, my love. I can't help myself. But I don't think it's right to be exerting your influence upon innocents like Miss Locher. I should tell you that I hypnotized the girl. Her unconscious testimony seems very much to incriminate you. She almost demanded the hypnosis, feeling this to be an easy way of unveiling the source of her problems. And because of her frantic demands, I obliged her. A serendipitous discovery ensued.
The Collected Short Fiction Page 129