Songs of Dreaming Gods

by Meikle, William

And the Dreaming God is singing where he lies.

  There was a soft thud.

  When Janis looked over at the high shelf, there were only four dolls there, all staring, all smiling. Their cheeks looked like they were full of blood.

  There was no sign of the fifth.

  11

  “You lied to me.”

  “I lie to everybody,” the blonde replied, “so don’t take it as a personal insult.”

  Constable Williamson, now recovered from the cat induced sniffles, stood in a corner of the room. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes red and watery, but when he’d told her what Ma Phillips had said she’d insisted on being in on the interview. Getting a break on a case this big, and being in on it from the start, was going to help a few careers in the station, especially if the sarge and the inspector stayed AWOL. It was getting late in the afternoon now, and if they were in a bar, their session would already have them too far along to be of any use to anybody even if they returned now. So, Todd took matters into his own hands. He decided to have another crack at the witness, armed with the fact that she had obviously not just been a random pick-up the night of the party.

  But the revelation that he knew hadn’t had the desired effect.

  Samantha, call me Sam, was no longer crying, dry-eyed and with a grin now that told Todd she now considered this a game of cunning, and one she thought she was winning.

  We’ll see about that.

  He sat down opposite her and immediately realized something else. At some point in the past few minutes he’d started to enjoy himself. He felt guilty about it, it being a murder case. But he liked this woman, liked the sassy demeanor she was showing him now, and the way she carried herself. In other circumstances, he could see himself asking her out for a drink, or two. He had to fight to keep a smile from his lips as he started again.

  “Now that we know you were John Phillips’ girlfriend, that puts a new spin on things. You obviously know more, a lot more, than you’ve been letting on.”

  She picked at her fingernails.

  “Firstly, I was never his girlfriend, we just hung out, that’s all. He got me weed and I gave him a mercy fuck or two, no big deal. And secondly, can I get a smoke?”

  “Maybe later,” Todd replied. “First you need to start telling me the truth.”

  She laughed loudly.

  “There’s a good reason I lied, you’ll never believe what really happened, hell, I’m not sure I believe it, and I was there.”

  “Try me.”

  She looked him in the eye, and must have seen something she liked. Todd saw her decide to trust him.

  “Okay, just remember, you asked for it.”

  “I didn’t lie about being out in George Street last night,” she began. “We were in that big Irish place, I can never remember its name, the one with the green mirrors and the shit singers. We were there for a while, a few beers, a few slammers, you know how it is. And neither Peter or John, or Don for that matter, had mentioned anything more than a party later with a few drinks and smokes. I knew Peter was into all that voodoo bullshit crap of course, we all did. It’s why he started living in that house in the first place. Peter, and Don too, bought into all that haunted building shit, even said he’d seen some weird stuff himself, and heard stuff, footsteps on the stairs, toilets flushing when there’s nobody there, some old fart singing the blues in an empty room, you know, weird Scooby Doo shit.”

  Todd had started at the mention of the self-flushing toilet, he hadn’t expected his own recent experience to be echoed back at him by a witness, but forced himself to pay attention as she continued.

  “Peter was convinced that the place was some kind of psychic hot spot. You should have heard him go on about it. Multiple dimensions of reality, astral projection, dreamlands, spiritualism, you name it, Peter read up about it. And he believed it all, even when one book would contradict the next he still found a way to mangle it up into his theory, that the house was a way to go somewhere else, somewhere better. Somewhere away from all this shit. And last night, he wanted to try.

  “Of course, he didn’t tell us until we were all back in the apartment, and by the time he mentioned it we were all too stoned to disagree. Besides, we’d heard it all before, we’d tried seances, Tarot readings and just sitting around and thinking hard in the past, none of it had got us anything but bored and sober, and that’s no fun at all.”

  She stopped talking and cocked her head to one side, as if listening.

  “Did you hear that?”

  Todd hadn’t heard anything.

  “Hear what?”

  She shook her head and tousled her hair.

  “Never mind, probably a flashback. Top tip, never take LSD, it fucks with your brain. Anyway, where was I?”

  “Peter was about to do his thing?”

  “Oh, yeah, everybody was pretty stoned by then, you know? So, we just let him get on with it. He had a new idea, something about a sigil, a drawing that would act as gateway, some shit like that. I don’t remember all his spiel, as I say, I was pretty stoned. But it involved him doing a painting, he said it had to be him. Then all of us were to sing some old song, the one he’d said he kept hearing coming from the television. We were all too stoned to argue, and too stoned to be scared.

  “So, Peter drew his summoning poster, it looked like an old Seventies rock album cover to me, and we all sang his song for him, some shit about a sleeping, or was it dreaming, god? Some blues thing, reminded me of my dad.”

  She went quiet, remembering. Her head tilted to one side again. She listened for a few seconds before rooting about in her right ear with a finger. Then she seemed to lose the thread of what she’d been saying and stared into space.

  “And then what?” Todd said.

  “And then nothing, at least not right at first. John rolled us up a smoke and we all got a bit mellow. Peter was pissed of course, I think he really thought he was onto something. He went through to the kitchen, said something about hanging the poster up there, about how it would start working eventually if it was away from our bad vibes.

  “He was through there for a while, and when he came back, he brought a bunch of black eggs trailing along with him, that’s when things really went to shit.”

  “Wait, back up. Eggs?” said Todd. “When did we get on to eggs? Do you mean he painted them too?”

  “No,” she replied, rooting about in her left ear now. “They were eggs, but they weren’t really, they were something else, shiny. Look, have you dropped acid? No? I thought not. But if you had, you’d know exactly what I’m on about. Black eggs, first there, then, pop, we went somewhere else with them. Somewhere hazy and wavy and dreamy and all fucked up.”

  She started crying again, laying fresh tracks of mascara down her cheeks, but Todd wasn’t even sure she noticed. Her voice had taken on a dull monotone that he’d seen before, usually in car crash victims. She was heading deep into shock.

  “Then the screaming started. I didn’t really know what was going on, some big fucking winged thing had Peter by the balls and tore his belly open, guts and all spilling everywhere. Don tried to help, and the fucker tore his spine out, I heard it, all wet and sucking and horrible. One of the other guys, the one that Sheila was after, oh God, I forgot about Sheila. She…”

  The tears got worse, and she couldn’t speak. Todd sent Constable Williamson to fetch some cigarettes, and when she returned the blonde took to one as if her life depended on it. She almost had it smoked down to the filter before she could continue.

  “Look, you don’t believe any of this shit anyway, I can see it all over your face. So, long story short, a big fucking demon with bat wings tore all my friends to fucking pieces, John Phillips, bless him, got between it and me and threw me out into the hall before it got him. The last thing I remember is John screaming and it getting foggy, then it went dark and I woke up when your man found me. End of story. Good fucking night.”

  12

  It seemed to John that he had been
descending forever, spiraling ever deeper into the dark well of the tower with never a sight of any bottom, nor of any way out.

  There were windows on most of the landings on the numerous levels he had passed, but there was nothing out there that would help him. The last time he had looked out he had seen nothing but dense swirling fog. It reminded him all too acutely of the house in St. John’s, the second house as he had started to think of it. His last sleep in the old battered armchair seemed very far away now, part of another dream, a dream that was rapidly being eaten up and consumed by this current reality.

  His feet padded along, kicking up swirls of dust from where it had lain for years, maybe even decades, undisturbed. Most of the time his own footsteps were the only sounds, although every so often he heard the scratch of talon on stone or a flutter of leathery wings, reminding him that the Burdens were still there above him, still following, still blocking any escape the way he had come.

  He reckoned that he must be a dozen levels below the room that nearly fell in on him now, he had stopped counting a while back, trying to concentrate on keeping moving, creating a sense of purpose for himself.

  But he couldn’t get the vision of those dancing black eggs from his mind. He was formulating an idea as to what they might be, where he might be.

  Quantum foam.

  That’s how he thought of it, a memory from a long-ago class where he was told that what is perceived as reality consists of many, multiple, maybe even infinite, universes, each in its own bubble, each connected by the thinnest of membranes to many of its neighbors. Quantum foam, if you like. Here, in this place, John preferred to think of the eggs as possibilities, opportunities even. He’d already seen what happened when one burst—a gateway had opened, a portal, to somewhere else, somewhere that wasn’t here, somewhere that wasn’t permanently in the dark.

  He guessed that he’d got here in the first place through one such portal, and if he had crossed over to here, where else could he go? Might he even be able to go home if he could but crack open the right egg? He was actually looking forward to his next encounter with the phenomenon, he needed to study them. More than that, he realized that the possibilities raised by their presence had strengthened his purpose, giving him a real reason to continue on this downward path, and his footsteps in the dust are just that bit quicker and more sure than they had been earlier.

  He still had not eaten, nor drank, nor slept, yet did not feel in the least bit tired, nor had there been any need to pish or shit, and he couldn’t say as that was not a blessing. There was no demarcation of night and day here, and now that he had obviously descended to levels that sat in the fog there was not even the gibbous moon to tell him it might be nighttime. All he knew was that he had been here for many hours already, with no bottom in sight.

  There was just the descent, and his footsteps in the dust.

  He went down.

  The Burdens seemed to be getting steadily bolder. John had been trying to ignore them completely, and they took the opportunity to keep closer order at his back. They were only five yards above and behind him, already coming down from the previous level as he stepped onto another long run of steps. As yet they showed no signs of pressing an attack; the pistol stayed cool in John’s hand. If there was any danger, it wasn’t imminent.

  As he looked down, he saw that the Burdens were going to be the least of his worries for a while. He paused, impressed despite his situation at the colossal scale of the building enterprise that must have been undertaken in the construction of the view below him.

  A staircase, no more than six feet wide and with no handrail at all, ran around the inside wall of a hollow chamber that fell down the center of the spire at this level until reaching a landing that was at least a hundred yards down. The drop in the middle channel was vertiginous in the extreme, making him dizzy just contemplating it. A wind blew up the shaft, tugging at his clothes, and making his already precarious sense of balance far worse. A wave of nausea hit him at the thought of the drop, and his knees went weak. He’d never been great with unprotected heights at the best of times, and this was a long way from the best of times.

  But going down was the only option he had, so he made a tentative move, out of the passageway and onto the open staircase. He hugged the right-hand side of the steps, his shoulder almost touching the wall as he made sure he was as far as possible from any fall. One trip, one false move and he’d be sent tumbling away into the darkness, and even here, where the laws of nature seemed mutable to say the least, he did not think much of his chances of surviving it.

  He was concentrating so hard on just shuffling one step down at a time that he didn’t notice that a new group of black eggs hung beyond the stairs, out in the center of the shaft almost at his eye level, and they were already calving.

  The song started up from below, the bass voice booming.

  He sleeps and he dreams where he lies in the deeps.

  Sixty-four, each a shimmering pearl of black light.

  He dreams and he sings in the dark.

  The colors filled the whole height of the shaft, spilled out over the stairwell, crept around John’s feet, danced in his eyes, in his head, all through his body. Above him on the steps the Burdens screeched and danced.

  He sleeps and he dreams with the fish in the weeds.

  A hundred and twenty-eight now, and already calving into two hundred and fifty-six. He was doing arithmetic in his head as they calved again, and again. By the time there were more than two thousand of them he was coming to the certainty that they would not stop, unless he stopped them.

  And the Dreaming God is singing where he lies.

  The pistol gave him a blast of fiery heat in his hand as he raised it. The spinning mass of eggs had now grown large enough to be within the reach of his arm if he stretched over the chasm. But he was still afraid that even the slight recoil of firing might be enough to send him tumbling off the edge and down into the depths below. Four thousand and ninety-six eggs spun and danced and seemed to mock his cowardice.

  Knowing that at the next calving his position on the stairs might well be engulfed, Jon finally fired. There was indeed a recoil, one that almost overbalanced him and forced him to drop to one knee to avoid falling completely down the steps, but he hit his target. An egg, one right at the edge of the group, popped. The swirling colors blazed in a flash of blinding light. The mass of eggs broke up and fell apart in wisps of black ash that drifted down and away into the depths. The Burdens squealed and took flight, bat wings fluttering like sheets in the wind in the middle column high above, but John was blind and deaf to everything but the thing that now stood, rather precariously, six steps below him on the staircase.

  It was impossible, here in this cold tower but equally, here it was, a sleek black fifty-inch television set, tuned and broadcasting static despite it having no obvious power source. The picture coagulated and congealed, the grays thickening until a crude picture showed, grainy and as if seen through thick fog, but he knew who it was immediately.

  It was Janis, standing, eyes wide in terror in an opulently furnished room, dark shadows, almost too black, swirling and surging around her like demons attempting to tug at her clothes.

  “Janis!”

  He rose and stepped forward, bringing the gun up, intending to fire, to blow that impossible television apart in a wild hope that it might help his sergeant in her predicament. Just before he pulled the trigger the scene sharpened and changed to show an old battered recliner chair, a full ashtray, and a bottle of Scotch.

  The song rang out, loud and clear.

  Where he lies, where he lies, where he lies, where he lies.

  The Sleeping God is dreaming where he lies.

  John overbalanced again, and nearly tumbled into the depths, but even then, he had the luck to pull the trigger. His shot hit the television full in the center and it too collapsed into black ash, all too quickly gone and dispersed into a fine dust that was blown off and away down the stairwell in
the breeze.

  “Janis?” he whispered. He leaned against the wall to keep his balance, again only too aware of the dizzying fall just feet away, even more aware that, if what he had just seen was true, then his Sergeant was in trouble, somewhere, possibly even somewhere in this endless tower.

  More likely, back in St. Johns, back in the strange house. But what happens if she comes through the bedroom? Will she get here? Could I get back through the open door?

  Another thought.

  Is it real or is it Memorex?

  He remembered the soft armchair, could almost feel the upholstery fold around him. That had certainly felt real, as did this place, but neither was home, neither was his life. And he wanted to get back there, more than ever, now that he knew Janis needed help.

  Above him, the Burdens screeched.

  Some of the black dust lay on the steps at his feet. He kicked at it and it rose in the air, then was taken into the cavernous stairwell in the breeze, drifting away down into the deep. He understood now, or at least was creeping closer to understanding. The shining eggs were indeed possibilities, but they were impossible possibilities, if there could be such a thing, not ways for him to get home, but ways back to that other house, the strange, empty house in the fog. He wasn’t sure what the connection between the three, seemingly distinct, locales might be, but at least he was now sure there was a connection.

  Whatever the case, that scarcely mattered for now he had another incentive to find his way back, at least partially.

  Janis was there, and she looked terrified.

  After what seemed to be another age of inching nervously down the precarious steps, John finally reached the foot of the huge internal spiral staircase and walked through a tall archway into an open, almost airy chamber some twenty feet high, with tall vaulted window openings. Once upon a time, back in the distant eons during the building of the edifice, they might have looked out over the yellow moon and black sea below, but now there was only more of the swirling fog, so dense it almost looked like gray soup.