The Lighthouse
This is a short story I wrote based on a dream-vision I had a few nights ago. enjoy. Copyright 2010 Cheryl Anderson
She awoke in the deep black silence of the old house knowing how to activate the beacon. The dream still lingered; attach the copper wire here, replace the wires in this section, and more than anything, the strange syllables she now knew would charge the entire apparatus. If she could remember them. They sounded older than Enochian, different from the recordings Crowley had left of how to call out the sacred names. There was something more ethereal, more alien, about the way they were pronounced in the dream. She knew it would work.
It had been two weeks since she’d found the house of her dreams; the house that had followed her at night, house of changing stairways, rooms that appeared and disappeared at will, house of its own mind. The house that had grown more clear and prescient since she’d been moving, since she’d been traveling, since everything in society had collapsed and people had been forced into living from day to day, scooping up canned goods, looting, trying to survive. Since time had changed. Since dream-like houses and strange voices in people’s heads had become the norm, not the anomaly, although they were still only discussed in hushed voices, far away from the light of barrel fires and tent cities. It was the only thing she dreamed about, and it was time. It surprised her that the house was uninhabited already, although few things truly surprised her since the Shift. She’d been squatting in its first story, exploring the changing rooms during the day and staying quite away from them at night. But now she knew the passage had to be opened. She rolled out of her makeshift bed of blankets and coats. There was half a candle by her side. She lit it, and walked down the hall to the second story staircase.
As she ascended, the dream came back in more vivid detail. The tall ones, the grey-white shadows, she called them, chanted the innumerable names of potential energy into her skull. They grew louder with each step. The symphony of bells, bells that sounded simultaneously like the vibrato of strings and the pulse of singing bowls, thousands of them, filled the house and her mind. She turned the corner of the staircase and ascended then to the third story, music and voices rising as her feet paced out the rhythm, slow and plodding, reminiscent of a great wheel turning, grinding gigantic galaxies into singularity.
The top story of the house consisted of one octagonal room, twelve feet in diameter, with windows on all sides and a sun roof at the top. There was a ladder from the second story (or was it third, now? The house was dreaming), and she began to climb. The music, the singing white shadows, all that she had feared as a child and all that she had loved, pulled her upward. She knew now where to find the lever to open the sun roof, which would allow the beacon to radiate up into the sky. She stepped up on the solid redwood floor and smiled in relief; the crystal in the center of the room pulsed with sound. It wasn’t just in her head, it was coming from the giant rock, thing of the earth, a crystal amplifier better than any speaker system in the world.
Activate the beacon. Her hands went to work as though they had done their duty a thousand times before. She was no machinist; even in the days before time had changed, she had always left the mysteries of electricity and machines to her husband, who was gifted at understanding invisible forces. What she conceived of in her work as an artist, he could build; what he dreamed of as a machinist, she could visualize and create on paper. Thinking of his hands, how tenderly they would have caressed the ancient wires of the device around the crystal, she began to cry. Long, hard sobs wracked her lungs as she thought of the last time he’d held her, the last time she’d wanted to be held by any man. He had been so different from everyone else, so giving when people had come looking for food, giving shelter and laughter and healing to them. He was a survivor in the world before the Shift, but few had survived when the plague came. She’d been pregnant; one day she’d awoken bleeding, and it had been shortly thereafter when the effects of the virus appeared in her beloved.
“I’m sorry, please forgive me,” he’d said, coughing, the pestilence which had swept across the land devouring his immune system.
“I don’t care, just promise that we’ll find each other again.”
“You know we will. There is no time left, only dreams. I love you, and I’ll be with you, even in dreams, until we can be together again.”
She tried hard not to allow the tears to fall into the wiring, and to keep her calm. When it had first happened, she’d thought about just going off a cliff, or using the knife, or walking into a firefight when the United troops arrived to bus off one clan or another into the camps. Quarantine, they said. For their own good. She actually tried that once, but was pushed out of the way by a sympathetic soldier and told to take cover in a forest that the troops were too afraid to investigate. You don’t want to go to the camps. She’d spent a month out there in madness, talking to ghosts, screaming at demons, and grieving. She’d eaten nothing but worms and some fermented berries, vomiting ever few days, but somehow remained alive. Creekbeds would turn from rushing fresh streams into ditches bogged down with human waste and bodies. Spinal cords still leaking hung from trees where she thought she saw vines. This was life after the Shift; ghosts and dreams seemed to have more substance in the waking world than they had before. When her eyes were open, she could see all the horrors of the world reflected in an impaled animal on a twisting branch or an abandoned traincar loaded with rotting corpses; she could scry its miseries in the carcasses of wild game. But after a couple of weeks, the dreams of the lighthouse snuck back into her nightmares and gilded them with a painful beauty. And though she screamed at the unknown God who saw all of this and did nothing, screamed at him to return her beloved to her, her husband only came to her once during that time. It was the first dream where she’d seen the outside of the lighthouse. It was decrepit and strange. She stood outside of it, afraid to go in.
“You know, you cannot leave this world until you do what you have to do.” Her ghost-dream-husband said.
She erupted with rage. “Why? Why can I not just go easily, now, and not suffer in this horrible place? I’ve suffered enough, I want only to be with you and not be in this world any more.”
“We are not the music itself, only the instruments.”
She emerged from the woods a crone. There had been little joy left in her heart, but that joy was the only precious thing she had; that there was a way to get back, that she did have something to do, and that her dreams would carry her through the motions until she was once again free.
Her tears stopped. She aligned the last wire, tweaked the last bolt, and looked at the thing of beauty under the open roof.
She spoke to nothing. “I know you hear me. I know you know that I have heard you. Please, if there is anything that makes any sense anymore, let it be this. I love you.”
Then she folded her feet under her thighs and sat upright, allowing a voice that was not hers to arise out of her belly. She echoed the chant which rang in her mind, which radiated from the crystal, which had sat dormant in her belly for her entire life, untraceable, unspeakable, until spoken.
The crystal began to glow. It pulsed with every breath she drew, and she drew out her heart in each chant. Then the light from the crystal formed into a single pillar, reaching up to the sky, growing into a miles-long beacon. The sound was deafening, and singular. She saw, felt, and heard the white shadows singing in unison.
I know the magick of the Arc, she thought, the secret of the pyramids, the aleph and the Philosopher’s Stone. It is a brazen disregard for the definition between dream and reality. It’s finally broken through. And I am not alone in it, I am not the only one, I am not the only one who will hear this, who has been dreaming of it…I am not alone, and neither are the dead, or the dreamed of, or any other…I am one instrument in a symphony, and I am the symphony…
Her body was found weeks later by those who had heard the song and knew it was time to gather to it; she was preserved by the blast of energy, sitting still with her feet tucked under her thighs, eyes frosted with tears, arms open in eternal embrace.
