The Recluse (Cook)/A Fragment of a Dream
A Fragment of a Dream
By Donald Wandrei
All day long, under the dusky glare of a green sun that flamed across the sombre sky, he had been traversing a burnt and blackened waste in his quest of Loma. All day he had been crossing a dead and utterly lifeless land, and when the green sun set, he had not yet emerged from it. But even as it set, with its emerald glow it had lit darkly for a moment a forest of some sort far ahead. And toward it he went.
The night around him as the sun sank deepened from a strange twilight to a darkness, and from the darkness to an ebon blackness that crouched upon the land. But the wanderer paused not; on he travelled toward the forest, guided by the faint and unfamiliar constellations of stars that burned coldly and whitely in the sky above.
For a long tmie he kept on through the thick darkness, ever pressing toward that forest ahead, and it was only when he had gone more than half way that the darkness lightened dimly when a huge blood-red sun swept up from the eastern sky and cast a livid, leprous glow on the land. In tremendous bounds it fled across the sky, all-surrounded by a many colored rout of streaming satellites. The air hung heavy and listless, and in the unearthly light of the red sun seemed to ooze with a myriad globules of blood. The land, burnt before, took on a desolation and an aspect of solitude as if a red rot were creeping through its rocks and sand.
The wanderer kept on, and he had almost reached the forest when the rushing red sun sank with all its satellites. But from every side, from every one of the distant horizons, there rocketed upward a horde of twisting comets, and the suffering vault became alive with jagged streaks of light hurtling erratic and aimless from horizon to horizon.
Dank and dark loomed the forest; to the right and left it stretched in never-ending line until it faded and vanished in the distant gloom. The wanderer plunged forward. In a moment he was threading his way through gigantic trees that towered up and dark. The darkness deepened and deepened as the branches of the trees interlocked more and more closely, until the entire sky was hidden from his sight, and the sullen branches formed a solid roof over his head. He picked his way in and out through the gaunt trunks that rose around him, and all the while that he moved forward they became thicker and thicker. Creepers began to make their appearance. And from every side of the black forest he heard things chuckling in the darkness; ever and again faint whisperings reached him, and sometimes he saw shadows peering from behind the boles of the trees. The still air became pregnant with a thousand sounds of sibilant whispers moaning faintly through the forest.
But he pressed onward, always before his eyes a vision of the lithe and slender loveliness of his lost Loma. And the creepers thickened and thickened until he had to claw his way through them, until, finally, he drew forth the great sword that hung at his side and hacked his way onward. And every creeper that he slashed shrieked aloud, and from the severed ends dripped a soft, warm substance. … The forest became suddenly malignant and malefic. The baleful creepers twined insidiously about his legs, and all along his path the wounded ones howled in swelling ululations that made the forest echo with waves of fiendish sound. Ever and again, thick vines clutched at him like the trailing talons of some huge and hairy arm. And when he cut them, they wailed like flayed children. … He lunged ahead faster, and the branches whipped at him. His face grew scratched and bloody from the flailings of the branches that ripped his shirt and flesh and that twined around him. He beat them off and staggered onward.
And suddenly the ground underfoot grew damp. He stopped—just in time. For in front of him, stretching until it vanished in the night ahead and on either side, lay a vast, slimy slough. The forest came down to its very edge, and even throughout it, here and there, stood gaunt, dead trees, and in places half-submerged logs rotted. As far as he could look to his right nd left, the swamp spread its interminable length. He debated for a moment; he looked again at the logs, the stumps, and the occasional unfallen trees that rose at intervals. Then he ran forward.
The going was easy for a time. He walked across great tree-trunks lying in the ooze, or jumped from stump to stump, or swam through patches of stagnant water covered by a luminous green slime. Sometimes he dragged himself through mud that made a husky sucking sound when he pulled out his legs … like the sound of ghouls feeding. On one or two occasions it seemed to him that a shadow passed overhead, a sweeping shadow as of some huge nocturnal thing… He shuddered as he stumbled on.
And he came to an open space, brown-covered. Unthinking, he plunged in and swam forward. The entire surface instantaneously lived with a million million wriggling shapes that swarmed in hellish motion. Hissing snakes moved from his path and piled up on each side; cold vipers slithered across his back and neck and squirmed like fat worms in a carcass. He dived under the surface and swam as long as he could. When he rose, the water was moving with mounting waves of serpents, and great bunches of snakes threshed on every side. The affirighted air trembled in one mighty hiss that ascended from the hordes.
When at last the water ended in mud and he pulled himself upon a rotting log, he lay for a long while regaining his strength. The seething mass of reptiles gradually subsided, and when he took up his way again was quiescent. Above, the comets had fled the sky, and the heavens were void and absolutely empty in a terrible blackness.
Hour after hour he ploughed through foul swamps and slimy water. The noisome odors of the place made him dizzy after a time, but he fought onward. He sometimes thought of casting away the sword which hung heavy and cumbersome at his side, but he kept it. He knew not what he might meet.
He must have traveled leagues before he staggered from the slough unexpectedly. He was on firm ground, but the forest had ceased. He lay down on the earth for a time to rest his weary body, and carelessly looked back across the slough. From far behind came a shuddering heave; as he watched, something gigantic and horrible rose out of the depths and mounted upward. And from the top of the soaring bulk he saw a head swaying from side to side with one huge central eye gleaming blindly.
In a moment he was on his feet and trotting forward until the slough and the monster were entombed in the deepening gloom behind.
The ground was level with a tall grass or weed that rustled gently. And a soft night-wind began to rise in fitful moans and whisper with the grass in a reedy rustling. The plaintive music came dim from the sounding darkness, infinitely sombre, in strange, minor harmonies and chants of loneliness as if the drooping soul of misery itself were floating through the reeds. From every side as he passed came, low and elusive, the rhythmic cadences, a mournful litany from the susurrous grass. All the plain seemed weeping at his passing, and he became filled with a desire to rush through the trackless extent and soothe the crying of the grass. But there rose before his eyes the shadowy, haunting beauty of his Loma: in one fearful second the sounds melted together and streamed in speeding waves to the utmost darkness. And the plain was as a thing that, having lived, had died.
Winding and tortuous his way became, shortly afterward, when the plain ceased abruptly near a range of hills. And even as he entered them, the darkness again began to lighten. By the time he had crossed the hills, a wan, immense moon was spreading across the sky like a decaying thing that fled, shunned by the aloof ebon depths of the heavens. It cast a pallor, sick and deathly, on the ground; it limned the gaunt trees pallidly against the sky; it laid a soft and fat wave of white rottenness on everything it touched. And under the ghastly paleness the wanderer’s features took on the appearance of a walking corpse. A nameless fear began to creep through him, and he went on faster toward the mountains towering beyond the hills. An utter solitude and silence had settled over the dreary waste. The features of the country the traveller had crossed crouched faintly luminous far behind, but he turned not. Once he looked at the vault above, but the entire concameration was completely and desolately empty of all save blackness and that westward-waning moon. Only the steady, low pad of his steps broke the appalling silence; all things that lay on every side as far as he could see conspired to give him a sense of minuteness in an infinitude that bounded, ceaseless, upward and outward through the vacua overhead.
And as the wanderer mounted the trail that was now winding through the base of the mountains, the rocks and trees in some indescribable way began to absorb the light that fell on them, until they moved stealthily in slow corruption. And as he continued, it seemed to him that they changed their positions…as if to block his path. He accidentally touched a stone. A shiver of fear ran through him, for the stone was living panting like some monstrous toad. In a sudden anger, he grasped his sword and smote the rock. It was cleft, so that the halves fell apart. And even as the sword touched it, the rock shrieked. From its core poured forth a horde of worms… And the rocks began to converge toward him, like crawling heaps of liquescence, and the trees began to walk. Gasping, he slashed about him. He could do nothing. Wet, cold things were gathering about his legs and creeping up them…Dead horrors caressed his flesh…And in his despair, he though of Loma: There came to his mind the picture of her slim, willowy body and half-shut eyes…
With a start, he came to himself. The rocks and trees were still and lifeless. The moon had sunk with all its pale deathliness.
For hours he wandered on. The path steadily rose and wound upward through tremendous mountains that towered on every side. Darkness reigned, but the path lay distinct.
It was only when he had ascended nearly to the top of the central range of mountains that the gloom again lightened. Ahead of him loomed a cup-shaped circle of giants over which hung a faint and almost impalpable phosphoresence that illuminated slightly the grandeur of stupendous and colossal peaks which reared upward. But he paused not to survey the scene: he followed the path where it led through a rift in the cup into the hollow itself.
The phosphoresence shimmered everywhere, and, as he passed, seemed to be thickening. The air suddenly and indescribably became fraught with expectation. It was as if his arrival were awaited.
When he reached the center of the cup, he stopped; and when he stopped, It began. The slow-drifting phosphorescence leaped into life and rushed toward the walls of the mountains in one cataclysmic surge. There the sweeping luminosity collected and condensed, and around him, in a great circle, sprang up a low, running line of flame. In a moment, the circle was completed and the light rose upward. Almost before he could move, a solid wall of cold radiance burned about him, mounting in immense waves.
And all the light was flame; and all the flame was gold.
And now there began to come a sound, a faint sound, as of the moan of distant waters, while higher, higher, higher mounted the liquid waves of light around the cup.
And all the light was flame; and all the flame was red.
And the distant moaning came louder and louder, rising in the ever-growing roar of mighty, warring seas. The light began to converge in a funnel-shapen roof above his head, drawing after it the thicker waves.
And all the light was flame; and all the flame was green.
A titanic wash filled the air alive in quickening motion, and a thunderous roar as of all the billion billion waters of all the worlds boomed with a space-annihilating crash of sundering stars toward the funnel. And the sheeted flame above commenced a spinning motion until it whirled furiously and dizzily in a twisten wrack of shifting radiance.
And all the light was flame; and all the flame was black.
And a tremendous and terrible drumming of bellowing abysmal storms howled toward the funnel in road or deafening roar. The funnel widened and lengthened suddenly, and swept apart to form a maelstrom around an immense vacancy that led to outer Space. Far above, the blackness of the sky was moving and streaming in mighty rivers of ebon that serpentined madly toward the funnel.
He stood dazed and deafened at the fearful thunder of the space-leaping winds and the uncontrollable forces lashing themselves to savage fury all around. And instinctively he cried:
“Loma! Loma!”
The flame flung itself together in a coalescing bound. In one huge, solid pillar of fire it soared upward. He followed its lengthening league-long height far above. And it seemed to him that a greater glare gathered about its peak, and that Something had formed there.
“Loma! Loma!”
All the howling winds poured downward and fled in hurtling rout round the pillar of flame, walling it with a speeding blackness. He tried to move but he could not. Yet all seemed awaiting him, and the pillar became motionless in the screaming winds as if expectant. They were waiting—waiting—
But he moved not.
And the tower of flame which had hung still for a moment leaped upward toward the eternal blackness overhead. But the wanderer stood motionless. And the thundering madly rushing gales vengefully swept downward and about him. He felt torn by a million waters fighting, smashing, and the noise of all enormous washing seas filled his ears. And he stumbled, battered by angry pounding winds.
“Loma! Loma!”
But the mounting winds fled upward after the flying pillar of flame. Far above he saw a living stream of fire that rocketed outward. About him whirled and twisted the howling blasts, and all around was an ebon infinitude of shouting darkness that hurtled after the streaming flame.
“Loma! Loma!”
But there answered him only the fearful mockery of the vanishing hurricane—the hiss of a mighty sea that washed farther and farther—the dying echo of a cosmic whisper that faded into nothingness.