Somnium

by Steve Moore

  As for Somnium itself, I’m getting near the end. And I’ve grown so fond of Kit Morley as a character [fortunately, at this point, dear Rose, she brought the brandy]. I dreamt of him last night, back there in the old Bull, scratching away by candlelight with his steel-nib pen. When Somnium’s finished, we’ll have a celebratory drink in the new Bull, okay?

  In fact, he’s become so real to me, I sometimes have this really strange notion. What if I were to write a letter to him, addressed to the (old) Bull tavern… then would I get a reply? And what would it say? I actually had a very suggestive dream about this last night, so let me copy it here, straight from my dream-diary: ‘I was walking past The Bull with Alan, talking about Somnium, and I told him I’d decided to include a sequence where he and I were walking past The Bull, talking about Somnium, and including a sequence where he and I (etc., ad infinitum), and I was also going to include a letter, to Kit, from me in the present.’ In fact, the more I think about it, the more I like it, as one of those artistic pranks—‘author writes to his character; wonders what the universe will send him in return?’ In fact, let’s do it now, same time as I’m getting your letter ready.

  Anyway, my love, hope you enjoy the story, and I’ll look forward to hearing what you think. I’ll give you a ring next week [this seemed to me a rather casual way of proposing].

  All my love,

  S

  I read it all again, and still I had no slight idea at all exactly what to think. I had to guess that ‘S’ had put his letters in the wrong envelopes somehow, and I’d got Phoebe’s letter, while she, no doubt, was puzzling over mine. But surely such things only happen in farces on the stage. And no-wise could that possibly explain how a letter could travel back 200 years in time.

  And yet, I have to think… it’s only two or three days since I’d made the fair Diana Regina say that ‘all the world’s a dream’. And now it seems that what I said in fiction, might be true in fact.

  I could not get to grips with this at all, and so, instead, I started then to read the story…

  THIS DULL WORLD, AND THE OTHER

  Even though some few short weeks had passed by since his arrival, Théophile Delore still couldn’t quite understand why he had been selected for the post of assessing librarian at the shadowy and sequestered Château D’Argent. It was true that on his arrival la belle Comtesse had jokingly told him, with a soft and musical laugh, that she was fond of puns, and that ‘Delore’ would add a golden aura to the silver-frosted walls about the old château; but that hardly explained why one of such comparatively junior years as he was, fresh from the Sorbonne and with no practical experience whatsoever, should have been awarded such an elevated position without even a personal interview. There were times when he thought he must have been the only applicant; but then again there were times when even he thought such a thought inane and quite ridiculous.

  Nonetheless, he had found the post advertised in a small and dusty bookshop that he frequented on occasion in Montmartre, and thought the idea of cataloguing the library of an ancient château just on the near side of the towering Pyrenees precisely what he needed in order to defer such unpleasant decisions as young men have to make (or have to have made for them) regarding careers, or marriages, or military service. Applying forthwith, before he changed his mind, he promptly forgot all about the prospect in favour of those rather sweet distractions offered by the Comédie Française, the Folies and the Moulin, waking up one morning two weeks later, not entirely sure quite where or who he was, to find a letter most graciously addressed to ‘Monsieur Delore, Savant’, and slightly scented too.

  The Comtesse Eugénie de Sylvaire (‘Mademoiselle’, he noted with a certain astonishment) had written, in a very dainty and sophisticated hand and rather risqué purple ink, to accept his application, and to offer an extremely reasonable remuneration, from which there would be no deduction for his board and lodging (this being, she pointed out, a little less luxurious than he might be used to, as a denizen of la belle Paris). He was, therefore, invited to make his way to the château, by railway (changing at Toulouse) and hired coach from Pau (again, his expenses would all be reimbursed), arriving no later than the fourteenth of October, and to bring with him whatever he thought needful for a six-month tenure, free of interruption. A ‘librarian’s livery’, he read with even more astonishment, would also be provided (and more astounding yet, it fitted to perfection). And so, his head quite full (of Roncesvalles and Roland, of the Moors, and the mysteries of Andorra), his travelling bag the less so (the clothes he owned were few enough, and even a dog-eared volume of Baudelaire, the tenderest of letters from his sister, and a bottle of absinthe ‘for emergencies’, could not quite pack it tight), he said farewell, without a second thought, to fair, immortal Paris of the marbled boulevards; the pleasures that she offered, though, he wondered if in time he’d miss them.

  He arrived at the château, so high up in the foothills, its turrets soaring even higher, on October the twelfth, thinking punctuality a virtue; and found his welcome warm enough. By the fifteenth of November, the winter blizzards blew, and all his shivered dreams were icy hells with lanky, stalking frost demons.

  The establishment of the Château D’Argent, first built in 1564, he thought was somewhat strange. Within the main house lived only Mademoiselle la Comtesse, a butler, cook, two chambermaids and himself; a small number of other staff, gardeners, handy-men and veterans of the colonial wars who saw off wolves, both bestial and human, were billeted within the outer walls, quite separate. Without those limestone walls (quite tall and thick, he noticed from the start) were shrunken, twisted pines, large rocks and tumbling screes and, later, snow and ice.

  La belle Comtesse (and très belle, too, he thought she was) explained that she had been travelling much abroad, and only in the last few months, inheriting the château from an aged uncle, had she returned to France. She did not say where she had been (he rather thought the Moon, her skin it was so fair), but simply told him that her long-gone forebear Comte Alphonse, some century and a half ere then, had gathered such a library that now it filled up four entire halls, within the western wing. His duties, which she trusted he would carry out in the exemplary fashion of a Parisian savant far older than himself, would be to work each day from nine till half past four (Sundays excepted, if he wished) to conserve and catalogue the Comte’s collection; and on Mondays and on Thursdays, in the evening, he would dine with her and report his progress and whatever notable or peculiar discoveries he had chanced to make. The Comte, she warned him, though he died so long ago, had something of a reputation thereabouts, as a devil and a heretic, and so she had every expectation that the library would contain a number of items that would startle and surprise. She looked forward to his full reports; and Théophile, who thought he’d never seen such large and sparkling deep brown eyes, looked forward to his dinners.

  The library of the Comte was strange indeed (if far too dusty and neglected), and more than half of it deserved to be transferred forthwith to the Bibliothèque Nationale. For here were incunabula from old Württemburg and Mainz and London, by Gütenberg and Caxton, and manuscripts from old monastic scriptoria as far apart as Dublin and Byzantium. Here were tomes inscribed ‘Johannes Dee, his librarie’, lost volumes, rare beyond all price, of Livy and of Claudius (the Etruscan History, how it made his jaw drop); the Cypria, complete, and all five books of Dream Oracles by Hermippus of far Berytus; and next to these were other works which, if not quite the grammaries of darkest demonolatry, were somewhat on the uncouth side, and very odd indeed. The most part, though, it seemed that Comte Alphonse had been obsessed with manifestly cryptical works of ancient Grecian mystery, and, more, of all the iniquities of antiquity, so manifold and so diverse. And on Mondays (when she dressed in white) and Thursdays (when she dressed in gold) he told the Comtesse all he’d found. And when the autumn leaves were turning crisp and brown, she called him Monsieur Delore; and when the first snows drifted down, so many things he had discovered
, she called him Théophile. And then one night, to his delight, before a roaring fire she told him that, at dinner, and at brandy afterward, he might call her Eugénie, if so it pleased him to, but not before the staff. And Théophile, a young man as he was, he thought she was a Goddess; though which of them, he could not quite decide. The lovely chestnut locks that tumbled freely round her shoulders, he thought were just delightful; but there was something in the structure of her facial bones, he thought was quite unearthly.

  On other nights than Mondays and on Thursdays, she kept herself apart, and what she did he never had a slight idea at all. So absinthe drunk, and Baudelaire all read (again), he kept himself within the library, in search of wonders and new finds, with which he could delight her. And so, one icy midnight, when the righteous and the true are fast asleep in bed, he sat before a blazing fire, and opened up The Eight Great Wonders of the Ancient World (Now Fallen into Disrepair Save One, of Pyramidal Form). The strangeness of the title, unexpected, hardly registered with Théophile at all; instead, his thoughts a-wander from his much-beloved sister Délia (of whom he’d dreamt the night before), through the Delian isle, to ancient Artemisia, he turned straight to the chapter on the Mausoleum.

  By then, it must be said, the weariness was pricking at his eyes; his lids began to droop. And so he read (in old, barbaric French, it has to be remarked), how swarthy long-haired Mausolus, who loved his sister in a way that Théophile could only envy, had, long before his death, begun to build his tomb, with space enough for two and gold enough for thousands. The Sun he thought himself, his lovely sister was the Moon; and so each month in darkest night they’d come into conjunction; the tomb, he thought, in which they’d sleep forever, enfolded in each other’s arms, would be, not just a wonder of the world, but a monument to all the joys they shared, diurnal and nocturnal.

  And so, at last, the crinkling pages said, old Asiatic Mausolus, he died; and quoted some lost work of Suetonius the racy to say he did expire loud gasping in his sister’s bed. And Théophile, for all he thought of Délia, he thought of Eugénie as well. Distracted as he was, he hardly noticed then the things that he was reading next: how Mausolus’ brother Idrieus, already married to his second sister Ada, took Artemisia too into his ménage… and how the three of them then, too busy with each other, neglected to complete the Mausoleum. How Mausolus, robed in cloth-of-gold and crowned irradiate with amber, befitting to the Sun himself, rose up from out his tomb, a-rotting, with fiery eyes and lipless mouth of ivory teeth, and walked the streets of Halicarnassus, and gnawed the passers-by for blood and flesh until he came at last unto the palace; and all the things he did there to his sisters and his brother, too horrible for human tongue or hand to make account. And how he raved and haunted till the city was deserted quite, and only when Alexander, passing by upon his way to glory, gave orders for the tomb to be completed, did Mausolus at last rest peaceful in his storied Mausoleum.

  So startled was Théophile by this curious revelation, so widely variant to the history that he thought he knew, that not only did it fright him quite awake and make him drop the book, it filled him also with a sudden, unreasoning panic. The next he knew, he’d left the library and was fleeing, all blundering in the dark, along the corridors and staircases of the old château. With no idea at all just where he was, he clattered into a table, bruised his shin and knee, and fell down, howling, on the floor.

  A moment later, a door creaked open and the wide-eyed Comtesse Eugénie appeared, a silver candelabrum in her hand and, in a rather querulous and puzzled voice, asked: ‘Théophile?’

  And Théophile blushed that she should see him lying there like that, but looking up he blushed the more; for in her haste to see what made such gross disturbance in the silence of the night, she had no more than thrown a silken negligee (though trimmed with ermine, nonetheless) about a nightgown that was wisp of gauze and nothing more. Most graciously she helped him to his feet, and then the memory of what he’d read overwhelmed him once again.

  ‘Oh God!’ he cried and threw his arms about her, decorum all forgot.

  ‘Théophile!’ she exclaimed; then, more sternly and upbraiding: ‘Monsieur!’

  And Théophile, who suddenly realised he had his employer in his arms, all décolletée, and warm and soft, at midnight, in the dark, stepped back, and stuttered, and tried to find some way he could apologise.

  He must have looked so red-faced, so nervous and so utterly terrified, she smiled and took his hand, and asked him, very softly, what was wrong.

  He tried to tell her, but all that would come out, a-sputter, was ‘library’ and ‘book’ and ‘wrong’ and ‘Mausoleum’. And so she gently said that he should show her, and led him back along a trail of tumbled furniture and tapestries all disarranged, until they’d come to where he’d started.

  The first thing that he noticed, when he found it on the floor, was that the book was now called (he could not quite think how) The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World (Now Fallen into Disrepair Save One, of Pyramidal Form), and when he opened up the page it read as he would quite expect: how Artemisia, much distraught, had finished off the tomb, with love, and died, and joined her brother in it; and after was succeeded by Idrieus and by Ada… and never a word of rampaging Mausolus revenant.

  He slumped down in his chair and held his head, a moment, in his hands; she found herself a stool and sat down, sympathetic; and then, three deep breaths after, he told her next precisely what he’d read. And more, he told her that he knew he’d read it, and even if he had been awfully tired, he couldn’t understand why he should think to read of anything that was quite so utterly mad.

  And Eugénie then, standing up, she took his hand and pressed it very sweetly, commented not at all, and told him he should go to bed.

  And so, bewildered more than he had ever been before, he did.

  Next morning in the library, he thought that every book it wore a smirk, and mocked him when he turned his back; and whispered to its neighbour, of all the saucy secrets it contained, and how he must be stupid if he thought he knew the things he thought were true. And the books he catalogued were all of riddles, magic and illusion, and of making things appear quite other than they were.

  And when, the butler having brought his luncheon, of strongly-reeking Roquefort and of fresh-baked bread (still warm enough to melt the salty local butter), with one large glass of old Bordeaux, he paused to glance once more at The Seven Wonders, he found that it was bound in brown morocco; and the previous night, he knew, it had been bound in vert.

  The snow was falling very gently, in large flakes, outside; within the library, old logs were burning with a quiet sigh; and inside Théophile, the lunch that sat there in his stomach gave a warm and placid satisfaction. And so, to open up that same notorious book and read then of ‘the five-sided pyramid of Cheops’ was, for a moment, nothing more than natural. A moment later, of course, it was nothing of the sort. And Théophile then ground his teeth, and jumped up straight away, and slapped his hands about his sides, and looked again, and found a pyramid that had four faces, as he’d really known it should. And when he looked again, four sides it had indeed; and so it had all afternoon.

  At four o’clock, the Comtesse de Sylvaire came into the library and asked him, rather gently, how he did; and when he looked a little baffled, she took him straight away, and told him they were playing cards (he lost) until the cook had readied up some supper. For even though it was a Wednesday, and she was dressed in neither white nor gold, but green (her jewellery all of bloodstones and dark garnets), she thought it would be better if he did not dine alone. And Jacques the butler played the hautbois, and a bottle each of Burgundy they drank; and then at half past eight she bade him sweet goodnight and told him not to read.

  But once apart, of course, he went back to the library, his head a little piece awhirl, and opened up old Quintus Curtius. And read how god-like Alexander Magnus, resting there in hot and hoary Babylon, as old as all the world and twice as sinful, too, had p
assed away of neither drink nor fever; but Ptolemy, it seemed, surprising him asleep, had inserted up his fundament two long and slippery eels, flesh-eating and voracious. And Alexander, waking on the morrow, had suffered inexplicable stomach-pains, and soon thereafter died.

  Green, the book was, when he looked; and when he looked again it wasn’t. And when he looked a third time, Alexander, drunken, died of fever, just as Arrian always said he did, and Quintus now did quite agree.

  So Théophile, he rang for Jacques and asked him, employee though he was, if he might have a little brandy. And Jacques, who had a better soul and broader smile than all the other butlers in the world, then gave him what he asked for. And left the bottle too.

  So then he reached for Plutarch’s Lives, and opened it at Caesar. And there he found that handsome Brutus and the lean and hungry Cassius had used no knives at all, but rather with their pointed teeth and tongues had sucked up Caesar’s blood, for they were vampires both, and all the plotters too.

  And the book was bound in green.

  And then, again, it wasn’t.

  One last attempt he made, with much-loved and familiar Homer’s Odyssey; and there he found that, just arrived on hemitheic Circe’s isle, the moly fed by Hermes to Odysseus had made him quite complaisant, and when that lovely sorceress had turned his men to grunting swine, he gladly roast and ate them, and swore Penelope whored each night with every single suitor in their turn, and renounced the world of men and mind for Circe of the raven locks, delirium and spasm, and let her change him to a woman, evermore.

  So after that, Théophile, who thought perhaps the brandy might have played a part in all of this, left it behind him in the library, and took himself, with haste, to bed.