by Kell Inkston
The eel adjusts his glasses. “My name is Sampsaing Estradia, resident surgeon, psychologist, and eh… scientist. Now you said you needed my help?” He gestures to a couple of chairs, one with metal restraints.
Grancis gently sits into the chair, folding her limbs to miss the restraints. “Thank you. Colette’s been having some strange dreams.”
Sampsaing raises a brow as he takes up a decanter filled with coffee and pours two cups. “Strange dreams, you say?” He starts over for her with the two cups of coffee to sit down.
She nods, eying the violent surgical tools and unnerving syringes lined up across the wall for easy access. The only doctor’s office she’s been in is her father’s and this looks like a horrific, demonic corruption of it. She mind reels with ideas as to what all those terrible-looking tools could be used for. “That’s right,” she says. “Something about… bells?”
Sampsaing, halfway to Grancis, drops one of the mugs and fumbles with the other, as if what she said surprised him.
Grancis, hands on her lap, squeezes in anticipation.
“Bells? Oh my. And she’s a pure human, too,” Sampsaing says, gaze jutting out of the single port window, as if to ensure that no one is watching. He hands Grancis the mug, now only half-full due to the turbulence, and he turns around to clean up the mess. “What else has she said?”
Grancis dips her finger into the coffee, partly to check the temperature and also on the change she might feel a dissolving pellet of something devious. “No, that’s all she said… I think.”
Sampsaing takes the moment to pull down his glasses to his rubbery, slimy nose, and look her in the eyes. “You think?”
Grancis averts her eyes and takes a sip of the coffee with a nod.
Sampsaing finishes cleaning in just a few seconds and gets another cup. He sits in the chair opposite to Grancis and takes a deep breath. “Okay… Can I call you Grancis?”
She nods again. The coffee’s actually really good.
“It could just be that she had a dream with bells in them. There’s all sorts of shit people dream about, but this close to Jess missing roll call… it’s probably not. What it would be if my concerns are validated, would be something called The Cathedral Dream.”
Grancis squints an eye. “Okay.”
“Basically…” He sighs. “Okay, how long have you lived on the Eversea?”
She looks aside and purses her lips. “About a month and a week or so.”
“And you’re Boris’ kid, right? The apprentice chef?”
Grancis squints an eye at the thought of what a child of Boris might look like. “Eh, yeah, I guess that’s me.”
“So I’m sure you’ve fished a little.” He takes a long sip.
“Yeah.”
Sampsaing raises a slimy brow. “What have you seen in the water?”
“Well, lots of creepy stuff.”
“Eldritch is the word we like to use. The deeper down you go, the more horrible they become. Their favorite food?” He takes a sip. “Human souls, and that’s just the nice ones.”
“Oh… Yeah I kinda guessed they’d want something like that.” She takes a sip. The coffee suddenly tastes mediocre at best.
“The Cathedral Dream is when a certain eldritch sea monster attempts to influence someone through their dreams, luring them to take the plunge into the water to ‘join the cult’ per se. I have no idea what happens to the people who actually hop in the water. On a clear bright day a human has about one minute to get out of the drink before something pulls ‘em down- at night, when the creatures come close to the surface, it’s more like ten seconds, if even that. Eversea travel is not very helpful for humans that enjoy living.”
She sighs. “That sounds like an understatement.”
“Indeed. I’m glad you brought this up. The condition has no directly physical side effects until it’s too late and they’re scrambling to hop in the ocean, so it was lucky you brought this up when you did. I promise I won’t tell The Captain you were here.”
She nods her head. “Thank you. So how do we fix it?”
Sampsaing hisses lightly- a sign of discomfort. “Well, I’ll be honest. The only way we can do it is if we get another human to split dreams with them. Have you heard of it?”
Grancis draws back slightly. “Shared dreaming?”
“Precisely. I can cause the two of you to operate subconsciously at the same… wavelength, we’ll call it, tuning you into her dream. It’s quite a complicated process, but all you’ll need to do is sleep next to her… that’s what presents our first problem.”
“What’s that?”
“We need her to be next to you. Makes configuring the two of you much easier. You need to go get her, preferably unconscious.”
Grancis squints. “Well, I’m not very strong. Couldn’t y-”
“How much more suspicious would you think it, a grown man like me drugging a young lady and dragging her into my private office?”
Grancis pauses a moment and then nods. And Doctor Estraudia is especially creepy, so it definitely wouldn’t be received well. “Right… so how do I do it?”
Sampsaing points at her as if to say “good point” and he gets up with his coffee. He steps over to a locked cabinet filled with vials and bottles of who-knows-what and dabs a cloth with a clear liquid. “You’ll have to take her by force, there’s no way she’d willingly go out into the outer decks after curfew.” He steps over, holding the cloth carefully in his hand. “Don’t breathe this,” he says as he hands it to her, “even a whiff’ll take you off your feet for a few seconds. Hold this to her face, and she’ll be out in the moment.”
She looks pensive. “And I couldn’t just tell her to come with me?”
“She has to be unaware that you’re there in the dream for it to work. Her subconscious needs to perceive that it’s a natural dreaming environment,” he says, stepping over to the door.
Grancis stares at the dabbed cloth with purpose. “Okay. I’ll get her.” She takes a stand and turns for the door.
Sampsaing nods and opens the door for her. “Good luck.” Grancis starts for the door, but Sampsaing imposes himself in the frame. “Of course, I trust you’ll do your best not to get caught. As it stands you’re the only one on the ship that hasn’t been punished by The Captain for breaking a rule I hear. I’ll tell you now it’s something you don’t want. There’s a reason people only push it a single time, and if you get “punished” you’ll be out for the rest of the day, I guarantee you. We only have one shot at this, alright? The Captain won’t believe you.” He says with a pointed, serious gaze.
Grancis exhales at the thought of it- the screams, the people dragged into the interrogation room and emerging hours later, silent, horrified, and entirely loyal. She remembers Colette had nightmares days after her punishment. As it’s also breaking a rule to tell someone what the punishment is, she still doesn’t know; she very much doesn’t want to find out. “Absolutely. He won’t know.” She steps out, creeps down the stairs, around the side and into the quarters. In a blink of inspiration, she uses the cloth on Dunks to ensure that he won’t rise for the short time she’s collecting Colette, and she turns to the back of the room. Colette’s in her bunk, snoring loudly as expected. Grancis closes the door behind her, ducks and crawls forward under the rows of bunks. She gets to Colette, prepares the cloth and pushes it into her face. Colette’s hazel eyes jolt open in the dark and just a second later she’s out.
Now comes the hard part.
Grancis stows the cloth in her pocket and takes a deep breath. She pulls up Colette, laxes her to the floor and starts dragging her across the quarters. Her breathing precise and her moves spry, she hovers Colette across the room, unheard by all, but then she feels it.
Just as she gets Colette to the door, Grancis can feel she’s being watched, but she doesn’t know who, or from where. It’s as if an unseen, incorporeal force took a breath, as if she’s being viewed by something beyond the waking realm. She would almost pre
fer it was The Captain. A chill down her spine, she promptly gets Colette up to the infirmary and opens the door. Dr. Estrada’s waiting with his cup of coffee- he’s still as he sees her enter. “Well! Looks like you’re sneakier than I thought. That, or the Captain must’ve cracked into his bottle poison early. Now put her on this table,” he says as he helps the dreaming Colette up onto an operating table. Sampsaing pulls up the infirmary’s rest bed next to the operating table. “Now you.”
Grancis promptly takes to the bed and lies down.
Sampsaing nods with approval and turns to get a few more things. “Alright, we need to cause a distinctly abusive outcome in the dream, so that her subconscious will be less likely to bring them up again. The power of the mind is great in the world of the sleeping, and if we crush her fast, we’ll have saved her life.” He spreads a line of salt across and around them “The subconscious attempts to prevent nightmares, and if we make the Cathedral Dream a nightmare for Colette, her subconscious will be much more resistant to it in the future- we can only do this once, so you need to make it as painful as possible.”
“I need to make it painful?” Grancis squints up at the ceiling, the bright lights giving the room a distinctly medical, dentist-like quality—the anticipation of pain incoming.
“That’s right. You need to kill Colette as slowly as you possibly can. If you do it too fast her subconscious will pull her right out from the trauma. Make it last- make it emotional- make it personal. Have her trembling and afraid to even rise from the bed when she wakes up. If Colette has the dream any time again, her subconscious will almost certainly spark and wake her up. This doubles for you two, if she attempts to, she can traumatize you out of her own dream. Also, remember that she’s having this dream because something’s inciting it into her. It might also be in the dream, whatever that may be.”
Grancis takes a deep breath and looks to Colette’s calmly sleeping face. “G-… got it.”
Sampsaing injects Colette with an unpleasant looking orange liquid, then steps over to Grancis. “In the subconscious realm, you can do as you please if you concentrate on what you need. What’s most important is feeling as if you’re experiencing what you want to be or have before it actually manifests. Alrighty?”
“Alright.”
“Good, you have roughly five hours until sunrise. This would give you about fifty in the dream world, but dreams don’t usually last that long— so be quick. You need to engage Colette before the primary events of the dream take place.”
Grancis furrows her brow and nods upon the bed. “Okay, let’s do it.”
“Rodger. Good luck, kid,” Sampsaing says as he injects the same liquid into her along with another to knock her out. Just as she feels the lurid liquid come from the syringes to her arm, she feels a rush of determination emerge in her head. Everything, her vision, nerves, the sounds she can hear, shrouds and swirls into the void of her own mind for only a moment, and then she can feel the otherworldly tug of her entering a dream in complete lucidity.
Above, Sampsaing stops hiding the grin across his face as he picks up a pen and note pad and begins monitoring the two. “Academy of Medicine, here I come,” he says to himself with a smirk. Just as he gets comfortable, he hears a knock on his door. His gills slime themselves the moment he looks up and spots through the porthole, the face of The Captain, staring in.
The Cathedral Dream and the Hideous Intruder
Grancis does not so much open her eyes as she simply becomes aware of her surroundings. The dream is dark, but in the way one wrapped in a warm blanket on a cold night would feel, spanning out into the distance, the silhouetted movements of great, indescribable creatures can be seen. She’s on the side of a blacker-than-pitch, flowing ravine and in it she can see a blond girl prancing down a path of lanterns. It’s Colette, though looking like she did as a kid. Grancis sighs and takes one final moment to push aside her desires to nurture Colette- she must strike down with absolute impunity. Her thoughts turn to what she should appear as and how she should torment her. What would hurt her most? Grancis can feel herself change just as she mulls through the possibilities in her mind.
Colette dreams of a pathway of lanterns, leading up to a shining light on the top of a hill. Without a thought as to why, she decides to climb the hill- after all, nothing that bright could be evil. Certainly not, rather, there’s the most hypnotic, most beautiful chiming sound one could imagine. Colette was never a fan of most instruments, but these bells are something she could get used to. She bravely trots up the path, the silent, sacred lanterns guiding her way as they shine a deep, aquatic blue color. She finally reaches the top and sees the source of the light. It is the doorway into a great marble hall- carved deep and full with symbols of the water. Colette runs her hand through the grooves of a great tentacled beast in a moment of fascination, and then a cloaked figure approaches from the inside of the glowing hall.
“Ahh, come in,” the cloaked figure says, gesturing inside. Colette squints to see the face of the greeter, but it is shrouded by what seems to be a physical darkness, defying any source of light. She enters with the figure and it continues. “We’ve been waiting for you for quite some time, you know.” The two go down the pure white corridors, the melodies of the sunken bells reverberating throughout every inch of the structure.
“What is this place?” Colette asks as they turn down a right hallway.
“Your destiny,” the figure says, leading her through a door into a low-light room, as if a show were about to begin. Right behind them, a hideous creature dashes out from a hall to them, myriad tentacles grasping and slithering to reach them. Colette’s eyes widen in horror just as the figure snaps its fingers, closing the doors behind them.
“Wh-what was that?!” Colette asks, the doors locking and disappearing into the scenery of the dark countryside.
“Just an interloper that wishes you to avoid your destiny. We should be safe in here.” The figure leads Colette up a hill. Though it’s dark, she can tell it’s a hill by seeing light wrap around the shape. The hike is shockingly easy for the incline and a moment later they reach the summit. “Tell me, Colette.” The figure is silent a moment. “What do you want more than anything else?”
Colette frowns. “Power- so much power that evil can’t exist.” She turns to the horizon and sees another strange, large silhouette, like a house.
The figure nods as the invisible doors are being smashed in below by the assailant that the figure blocked off. “What are you willing to give up for this power?” The figure asks, looking back to the doors with a cautious gaze.
Colette does not even need to blink. “Everything. I’d give up absolutely everything.”
“Your life?”
“I’d need that to be strong.”
“Ahh,” the figure nods. “Your friends?”
Colette looks aside a moment. “The only person I can trust is myself, I think… No, Gran, too. Together we’ll bring peace to our home. We’ll fix it.”
The figure turns its head to the side in the other direction. “Well, leave that behind.”
Colette squints an eye. “What do you mean?”
“I offer you absolute power, but you must allow all to die for your sake.”
She shakes her head. “N-no. Giving that up is giving up my humanity.”
The figure grins- great white teeth shine from under the hood. “That is as The Captain did- you must as well. Let me help you.” The figure raises its hand and lights up the area.
Illuminated by the theatrical lights, Colette’s old home is as it always was. Colette’s eyes widen at the sight. “Just like… Just like before.” She says. Colette immediately hears humming behind her. It’s a young Colette, her fishing rod laid against her shoulder like a rifle, and a young Grancis, carrying a bucket of caught fish. Colette marvels at the two, and a wave of realization washes over her. “No…” Colette turns around to the house just as a wide, tall shadow looms over the horizon. “Stop!” Colette shouts at her young
er self, but she’s ignored by the aberrations. The young Colette and Grancis stop at the apex of the hill, watching a horrific figure loom over the home just as Colette’s mother comes out to greet them. In a single, magic word uttered by the dark figure, there is a great flash, the house bursts into flame- her mother killed in the same instant.
Colette drops to her knees. “The overlord… He’s here.”
The figure, listening to the door behind them slowly give way, nods. “And the only way you can defeat him is if you kill everyone you love! You cannot surpass those who do not love by loving others- that is what keeps you down! You must build a stair of corpses to take the crown of the sky.” The figure says in a half-hearted tone.
Colette stares at the flames of her old house, and she slowly begins to nod in agreement. “You’re… you’re right.”
The figure jolts. “Wh-what?!”
“I have to destroy everything that’s dear to me. I have to take away what I hold dear- that will make me stronger than him. You’re exactly right. It’s pain that makes people great.” Colette’s gaze is wide, clear, and horrified by the realization, but she speaks as though she believes nothing else.
“Wa… wait! Please! That’s not ri-” The figure is suddenly interrupted as the doors it used to block the assailant are smashed through- revealing the horrific eldritch beast before them.
Colette does not move as the figure descends into a panic. “P-please, Colette! Whatever you do, just don’t listen to what it has to say!” The figure says this just as it feels something strange, like an otherworldly, extra-dimensional hand applying pressure, like a needle being pushed into her. In the last, confused moment, the figure feels cool water poured over it. Grancis opens her eyes, a glass of water drizzled onto her forehead. She sits up with alert speed, and before her, sees an unconscious Sampsaing, and directly in front of her, The Captain, an empty glass in his hand.