The dreaming took me and I just woke up.
I only partially recognized the land in which I woke. The world was strange, tilted slightly on its axis. The barn I had stepped into looked like one I knew years ago, but what lay on its shelves and against its walls was nothing like I had known when it was; if not new, younger.
Various jackets marched across long poles between shelves, dishes and candles and books lay in scattered piles covered in dust. And, in one corner where the hardware and boxes of nails lay thrown together, several broken black velvet ring boxes held jewelry that found its way into my pockets.
Several tiny rings, ear pieces, and one tiny bracelet made of moonstone and diamond.
They all disappeared the moment I crossed the barn’s threshold, left standing under a large, spreading, barren tree as the wind whipped by overhead. I heard laughter in it, high and screeching with the howling of the winds. I was carried down in the direction of the house which before my eyes became a large and sprawling stone building. Its halls were complicated and lay in a tangled heap of limbs, as though some stone cephalopod had landed there.
I wandered the halls and in time, forgot how I had come to be there. I found hidden passages and roamed its mostly-empty byways until I came across an artist I recognized. There was rage in my shaking voice as I pointed her out in the sunlight-dappled stone hall. Denied a free-for-all because of the content of some blog or book of mine. Some “moral failing” she decided I’d had instead of anything concrete. As if its existence declared any creation she offered me provided tacit approval, instead of luck-of-the-draw. Annoying, and rage-inducing when I knew her own past was hardly as shiny as she claimed.
She ran, and I pursued.
I saw others hanging her pieces, large canvases covered in tiles to match the patterns of the walls behind. Smudges across the walls that they hid with the monstrosities. As I ran, I followed her through various passages I’d had yet to see. Warm yellow-orange brick, same odd sunlight shafting through the windows, same worn rugs underfoot.
Somehow as she sapped the color from the room in which I cornered her, some circle alcove set against the back wall, I saw another face. As she melted from view, two others came and stood at my shoulders. A bare-chested boy who looked decidedly attractive, and a girl beside him I didn’t recognize. I made some crack about whether or not they were together as we headed down a spiral staircase to the lower floors. An awkward laugh from him, a dagger-glare from her. Together, then, and not public… I hate those couples. Though my motivation was unknown even to me. (To be honest, looking back, I think I wanted to be him more than I desired anything else. Washboard abs don’t happen by accident, after all. And I prefer to have them than to be with those who do.)
When we reached the outdoors I was alone again, and the witchy artist was nowhere to be seen. I flew on quick feet into the wood, following the trail laid out before me. Off into the wood, lightly across the muddied and wilted-looking trail. My feet made no impressions in the dirt as I followed the glowing flowers that dimmed yet further as I passed. The dirt track unspooled before me, twisting through strange and desiccated trees as I passed.
I came upon a new house on a hill, and saw nothing of good. I was mobbed as I tried to climb the stair to the door, by shuffling, blinded, beings who might have been teachers once. I drew cards for luck and against the rising tide of flesh and bone, and threw them… where they struck, blood did not appear… only more of the growing things that surrounded the house. Vines grew through their bodies, leaves and flowers overtook their melting flesh, and kept them from moving any further. As I jumped from the roof of the house’s porch, i landed much more heavily. It would seem I would no longer pass unnoticed.
I found myself returned to the large, sprawling building made of stone. This time, when I had found my way through the passages and out into the open air, I found myself on the back deck. It matched, precisely, one I had experienced as a child. I found my companion there and my cat, and took up the two broom poles that lay against the enclosure next to the very, very deep and grown-over pool.
“Escape then, and only two to do it on. Time to (static)” took over and the tinny, pitched ring of it still echoes in my ears. I took up the carved poles and jumped the fence to the bank of earth behind the pool. I did what I could to cut down as much of the marshy long grass as possible and bound it to the blunt ended poles as possible, creating a green broom. Quick and quite words were said over these and the carvings glowed for a moment as, blinded, I came to a few moments later flying down the boundary upon which our original witch had flown.
The boundary looked melted. The meadow and tangled wood I had come from looked twisted and as though it would disappear, like a painting under chemicals or chalk in the rain. To the right, lay the open planes and the grass and flowers that bent with a wind I could neither see nor feel. I saw her, far and away, and strangely, also coming from behind, her eyes like fire. I took off across the same path, low to the ground until the long flowering prairie closed overhead and there was nothing to my world but strange tunnels of woven greens and browns and whites and pinks and purples flying past my eyes.
In time, i found myself on the boundary of the creek, now swollen and raging with the autumn rains. It had flooded its banks, the well-known trails I had followed as a child and, where it spilled out across the fields, there formed a new river. It was this I followed, my cat clinging to the broom pole as I sped across the rippling water as closely as possible. The grasses hid me from view from above, and I saw no human shape following behind. No distant shriek of laughter.
No sound at all save for the wind, and the stream below me, and no sight but the great grey clouds and the barest peak of starlight shining down across the water to turn its edges silver and gold in the dark.
I found myself in another den I knew well from childhood. Another tree with deep and tangled roots, and spreading bare branches stripped by wind and autumn’s chilly embrace. There was frost on the ground when I woke, and the cat was nowhere to be seen. The roots embraced me, the fallen leaves in drifts hiding me from view, as the growing vinery traced with ice held it all tightly to itself.
There I huddled, clutching at the ground, shining things scattered through the loose and crumbling black earth, coins and more precious things sunk into the loam and leaf rot mere inches from the water that raced by just a breadth away from my feet.
Despairing, I looked up. I woke.
House Of Crows 