The Dreamer

This is an idea I had for a dark, eerie short story. While the execution may be a bit rough the plot is one that is both classic and expansive. It may have potential. I was going for a Lovecraft or Shelley feel in the prose, almost romantic sort of baroque feel, an agelessness that defies strictures of horror or fantasy, like a supernatural Dickens. There is an intended scene with the Dreamer later on in the story, if I ever finish. 

Update: I added some stuff. 

            The old man gestured towards Edward. “You like books?”

            Edward didn’t. He liked book stores. The smell, the look, the feel of gnarled and worn leather against his hand. Thick, tarnished bosses on the spines like taxidermied creatures of eras bygone.  He never read them, curiously enough. What had started as a harmless walk and browse an evening after work had become near obsession. He chose books purely on aesthetic appeal. The more beautiful or different the book the greater the draw it exerted on him.

            “No.” Edward said simply. The man smiled, teeth gapped and angled like broken sidewalk tiles.

            “I have a book you’ll like.”

            Edward hadn’t been to this store before. It was off Burbank and Chancellor street in Grand Braxton, England. The door had been broken off a lorry and hung in a frame of some sort, and Edward had found it by taking a wrong turn and ending up in front of it, staring at the curious sort of place.

            “What does it look like?”

            The wrinkled little man brought out a very plain book from behind his teetering counter. Edward liked it. It was as though someone had sat down and very carefully thought of how to possibly make the plainest book imaginable, except the cover was wood. There was no ornamentation, and the cover was a sort of blackish, stained, gouged out wood. The pages were yellowed but cut perfectly even. The pages were so thin that the whole think resembled a block of layered wood or clay, not a book at all. Edward touched it and nearly recoiled. The cover was like ice, so cold it burned for a moment.

            He opened it. Every page was blank, but with the faintest suggestions of words like ink had once stood like marching soldiers on the cream pages before fading like ghosts. The harder he tried to make out the words the less the words seemed to matter or exist.

            He bought the book and left, taking a right turn and a left and finding himself once again in the familiar streets.

            At home, he placed the book on the table that sat next to his bed. It sat there unmoving as Edward stared at it. He shook himself. It was as though he expected it to move, to jump or dance or speak like men. It remained comfortingly, or disappointingly, booklike. The evening grew chill, Edward warmed a potato in the coals of his oven and baked two rolls in a pan. A bit of cold beef came out of the icebox, and Edward drew the heavy velvet curtains to his apartment and ate his meal in a silence that was neither lonely nor comfortable. The sounds of passing trucks and carriages grew seldom, the voices of the adjacent apartments faded into the swaddled night. Up the stairs, into bed Edward went, pausing a moment to brush his fingers across the cover of the book. It was warm to the touch now. As he laid down in the bed, he pulled the curtains of the bed closed. He thought almost he heard a soft, catlike step across the floorboards, but a breathless moment passed without further sound. As Edward fell asleep he turned his back to where the book sat, and whether this was conscious or unconscious flickered through his mind a moment longer than a thought of that sort might.

            Edward awoke in a cave.

            The air was warm, like the breath of a stranger on one’s neck.

            Thinking himself in a dream Edward thought nothing of it. The passage in front of him was lit without light, and stretched away for a short distance. Edward followed the passage, feeling the walls thoughtlessly as he went. After a moment he reached an opening. He stood in a cavern so enormous a feeling of something like terror flitted over him. An ink dark pool stood as flat as a plate in the center of the enormous cavern. The pool was round like a porthole, opaque but reflective, and so large the other wall of the cavern was swallowed in darkness. Edward found himself drawn towards the pool as though not of his own volition. He reached towards the pool and awoke.

            The moon threw shafts of deathless light threw the bubbled glass of his windows, etching grids on the floor. Edward pressed his hands against the glass, reassured by the coolness of the window against his palms. The street below and away the window rested like a stone river. A faint feeling, neither hunger nor nausea but some brother of the two knotted Edward’s stomach. He took the stairs with the care of the recently awoken, standing in his silent kitchen as he poured a glass of water from the silver pitcher he kept in his icebox. The water drove needles into his teeth and swept the musty flavor from his tongue. Edward left the glass on his counter and returned to his room.

            The book lay open on his nightstand. Edward tried suddenly to remember opening it, and could neither determine that he had or had not. He closed the book. It shut with a slap that was not unlike that of a water snake sliding into a stream, a sound that ran a cool finger down his spine.

           The next morning was the chill gray that heralds bone-cracking cold. Edward sat on the edge of the bed and regained wakefulness before rising to dress. In the middle of putting his waistcoat on he remembered the book. It wasn’t on the nightstand, but instead another book had been set there. A copy of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth sat in its place. Confused and not a little unsettled, though he wouldn’t admit it to himself, Edward searched the apartment half-dressed until he came upon the volume sitting on his kitchen table. It was open and on the page was a strange symbol, filled with intricate hairlike lines and knots that so tricked and confused the eye it was hard to follow, seeming only to change position and orientation the longer you looked at it. Edward flipped quickly through the other pages, looking for new symbols but nothing was there. When he tried returning to the original page, the symbol was gone. Edward looked at the clock that sat in his foyer, cursed, and resolved to search for the symbol another time.

            He worked at the First Anglican Bank on Halifax, across from a seedy pub he took lunches in. At noon, Edward walked across the street for a bowl of fish soup and a muffin. Inside, a group of sailors had taken up residence at several of the tables Edward would normally sit at so he was forced to take a position at the bar. Not three minutes later a large Swede, stinking of rum and ocean, stumbled to the bar and sat directly next to Edward.

            “Have you heard?” His ice-blue eyes bored into Edward’s brown ones.

            “Heard what?”

            “The graffisk. They found a graffisk in morning.”

            “What’s a graffisk?”

            The Swede emanated exasperation before replying. “A white squid was found this morning on the beach near the pier. Bad omen.”

            “What does it mean?”

            “Death is coming.” The Swede hailed the bartender before turning back to Edward. “Death is going to come to Grand Braxton, mark my words. It won’t be pretty.”

            “What should I do?”

            “Leave. Go to the states, or up north, if you can. Ireland or Scotland. South, per’aps. The West Indies. Anywhere but ‘ere.”

            “Will it reach London?”

            “The last time we found a graffisk was the beginning of the Great War. Before that, the potato famine in Ireland. When it happens, it will be bad.”

            Edward nodded, shaken, and returned to his soup. The Swede drained the beer he was given, threw a coin on the counter and shambled off.

            That night, Edward went to bed with some trepidation. The book was still sitting on his kitchen table where he’d left it that morning, but with shaking hands he put it in the cabinet below his desk and locked the door. Mentally laughing at himself for his superstition, he traipsed upstairs, locked the bedroom door and after getting into his nightclothes, pulled the curtains on his bed. Sleep didn’t come at first, but deep into the night rain began to fall and somewhere in the depths of his racing thoughts, Edward fell asleep.