The Canyon

There is a village in a place where a river once was. On abundant days, when there is little work to be done, the children dig their claws into the packed-down soil of the streets to hunt for the fossils of long-dead fish. Our homes crawl up the jagged rock walls of the canyon, the muddy hovels measure one deep but many high; the children must learn to climb to their neighbors before they may wander the village, and whey they are older they will carry their elders on their backs as they climb. They must also learn to never venture beyond the rocks.

There are two gates, sunk deep into the loam. They open once a year, and those who pass through them will never return. Some pass through to die, others to be exiled, but most leave with the Fossil in two of their hands.

When I came of age to climb the muddy hovels and carry my elders on my back, I was not given work to heap mud upon the canyon walls, nor to put up the nets that trap the birds, nor to learn wise and healing words. My name was pressed onto a clay coin and placed into a vessel, along with many others, by the four hands of a wise woman. With three hands she carried the vessel to the highest hovel and dropped it into the street. All the coins are shattered but mine and those of four neighbors. The coins are returned to a new vessel and dropped again, and only mine remains whole. That evening I take my place in line before the elders and am allowed first helping of the birds caught in the nets. I permit myself two thrushes, their meat warm and bloody.

That night the chitin that gives me shape is pried apart. The sound is a wet, thunderous snap, as though I was the thrush and the knife was my teeth. Many hands push aside my innards so they may cut something, but I do not understand what. As a child I heard the rattles of pain echo off the many mud hovels on the first night of spring, and now they are my own.

In the morning I understand what they cut: I can see, I can speak, I can hear the birds as they break their wings in the nets, but something else is gone. Five people who say they are my family have come to see me past the gates, but I do not know them, because I cannot smell them.

The wise woman places a fossil in two of my hands, and tells me that with the nerve-that-binds severed, I will speak to the spirits of the dead river. I will pass through the gates, to the place where those who left before me live, and spend my life in devotion to the spirits, so that the water does not return to drown us.

With the fossil to tell me apart from the dying and exiled, I leave and follow the canyon as it curves towards where the sun rises from the earth.

By the moonlight I see the remains of those who came before, the carapaces, deformed by disease or marked as unfit, laying like rocks among grass and flowers. Some I cover with soil to respect them, but others I read the words-of-exile carved into chitin, and I do not touch.

The days of travel reach two more than the number of eyes I have to see; I wish that the legs I have to carry myself number as many as the arms I have to carry others, as the two I have grow weary. The loam has turned wet and the canyon walls green, but I have seen neither shrine nor temple nor hovel as the wise woman has told. I see only the bodies of the deformed and exiled, growing more numerous. In desperation I look closer: they all carry fossils in their hands.

The Tower

As expected, precisely twelve hours before my thirtieth birthday I was given the name of my first Predecessor. A knock awoke me at 04:23 sharp, but the messenger was gone by the time I draped myself in a towel and opened the door, leaving only an unmarked envelope resting on my doormat. The name written on the embossed cardstock inside was in a language I did not know, its script a set of neat, serif bars I had never seen. The location, printed below, was in my own tongue:

Earth-Green-Sagittarius A*-Tlön-Calumny-Temerity. Box 12.

Planet. Color. Month. City. Words. Box. In the time it took me to dress myself, make coffee, and buy a train ticket, I memorized the location. The words cycled over in my mind as I sat with my forehead against the window, watching the trees dart by. Earth. Box 12. Temerity. I spoke them in time with the train wheels thudding against the breaks in the track.

I first saw a Tower when I was young, accompanied by my mother, who came to retrieve her third Predecessor. Due to my age I was not permitted inside, and even if I was, I would not be able to comprehend it. A great obelisk, ink black, without end, barely tapering before it was swallowed by the sky. Its exterior was unblemished, save for the faintest of series of jagged lines, as if mirroring the stairs that ran up the interior. It was said that on clear days, if one was at the peak—and if the the Tower had windows—you could see its six nearest sisters, great spikes that thrust out of the bedrock to pierce the heavens.

It wasn't even 06:00, and there was no line. Earth: The third in a series of eight staircases branching off from the ground floor. Green: the first of three lifts when one exited the stairs. Sagittarius A*: floor fifty of one thousand, for the first thousand named black holes. Tlön: the fifth section out of a hundred on the floor, for each of the one hundred great cities. The remaining words could be mapped from a book that rested where Prague ended and Tlön began. Calumny: Tenth row. Temerity: fifth shelf. Box 12.

I gently extracted onyx vessel, no larger than a paperback book, from its home. The smooth black stone slid noiselessly from its wooden slot in the shelf. My mother told me that the first person to be appointed a Predecessor was given the box of god's only daughter, who gave her life in a war with the Kassites. According to a librarian, this is a myth, but he informed me that her box is in a Tower in Iraq: Mercury-Green-3C 273-Urik.

I placed my card in the empty crevice and left, clutching my Predecessor to my chest.

I did not open the box until I returned home, at which point I still had plenty of time. The notice arrives twelve hours before. After your thirtieth, you have twenty-four hours.

I sat on my bed, among unmade sheets and pillows and half-read copy of Operette morali. I put the box on my lap, felt with my finger where the lid was mated to the sides, and pulled it apart.

Inside was a worn pewter ring, cold, plain, and heavy. I turned it over in my hands. I assumed it was a wedding band, although the words written in the interior were in the same script as the name on the card. For a minute I just sat, cupping it in my palm, as though it were a bird or rare insect; I half-expected a vision, a flash of light, the voice of god whispering sacred axioms in my ear. There was nothing.

It felt wrong to put it on my hand, even the index, so I fished an unused silver chain out of a jewelry box in the bathroom and threaded it through. It rested low on my neck, enough that I could idly turn it over while resting my elbow on a desk.

Centuries ago we warred with god, and when he tumbled from the lap of heaven onto the dirt, this was the result. A worn wedding band, belonging to someone who was never given a Predecessor.

Six months later I consulted a librarian. The language on the band, and on my card, was a dead Germanic tongue, perhaps Dutch, or Swedish. I had been too nervous to make a copy of my card before I left it in the Tower, but another librarian supposed it was a Scandinavian name based on my vague recollection of the shapes, perhaps sixteen hundred years old.

Five years on, I still kept the band on that same necklace, and every evening I would sit on my desk and roll it between my fingers. What if the ring had been mine, and it was god who pulled my spirit from darkness and told me that an act of armistice required me to pick a single object, small enough to fit in a box, to represent my life?

It was fifteen years before I started to understand, and I started to feel the weight of the ring around my neck at every turn I took in my house. The bookshelves and the espresso machine and the porcelain trinkets and the boxes of carefully curated childhood memorabilia: All larger than the small stone box, yet somehow lesser than the ring. This was the point, of course. The war ended, with god bloodied and humanity quartered. We got our immortality, but if we didn't know death, we would be forced to forever mourn its passing. Forget your Predecessor, forget all those who did not get the gift you were given, and you would loose the gift yourself.

Much to my parents' and siblings' dismay, I had started to clear my house of things. My ownership of the ring had gone on for fifty years, with fifty more left, but it still grew heavier. The handmade mug from a vacation to the west could not fit in a small stone box, nor could it distill a century of my existence. My desires, lusts, and heartbreaks could not be contained in vintage dinnerware or leather-bound dictionaries. No traumas could be transmitted through surplus kitchen knives and drawers full of trinkets.

Ten years later I had reduced most of my study to little more than a desk. An unfinished collection poems I had written could fit inside the stone box—I had even checked—yet the papers still loomed over my psyche every morning from the corner of the desk, as though accusing me of some dishonestly. I had not added to them in nearly twenty-five years. Surely something so neglected could not mean much. My predecessor had, I assume, worn that ring every day, until he died. But surely, I had time enough. What was one lifetime to someone to someone who had enumerable lifetimes?

For ten years I looked at the poems gathering dust, along with the half-finished manuscripts and wooden dog I had carved from the tree I climbed as a child, and I told myself that a year of my Predecessor's time was a single breath to me, and that soon the book would be done, the dog painted, the couplets resolved. When I was done, I could even carve my own box, for my own totem, and surely then, I would feel at peace.

Another decade passed, the poems bleached by sunlight in a corner of my room. I noticed the cracks in the wooden dog I had carved and left on a windowsill, nearly forgotten until I re-discovered it while looking for a misplaced house key. I took the ring off my neck, returned it to its box, and placed it under the bed, where I would never again see it.

Adventures In Passage

Lost Media Wiki

Adventures In Passage

STATUS: Partly Found

Adventures In Passage was a children’s radio drama produced
and broadcast by the Reconnaissance Church of Fairfax, California. The
series originally aired from 1988-1992, and was later distributed on
cassette tape.

Plot Summary

Adventures In Passage focused on residents of the series’
titular city, the fictional coastal town of Passage, California. Most
episodes feature a smart-but-clumsy HAM radio enthusiast named Milo, and
a wizened old astronomer named Maxwell. HAM radio, survivalism,
technology, 19th Century Philosophy, and nuclear science feature heavily
in the recovered episodes.

Availability

7 episodes are recovered, and are available online.

The first 5 recovered episodes, first aired in late 1990, all
originate from a cassette box set discovered at a Goodwill in Novato,
California in 2009, and later uploaded to the Internet Archive. The box
set itself states that Adventures In Passage aired weekly from
1988 to 1992, allowing for a maximum of 288 episodes.

A partial box set, containing 2 out of the 5 cassettes, was also
found at a Salinas, California Goodwill in 2010, dating from early
1992.

Most episodes are 25 minutes long, and—befitting their background as
church productions—often end in a moral lesson.

Notably, a number of the cassettes in the Novato set appear to be
censored, and contain re-recorded static at specific intervals.

Episodes

110

While out hiking, Milo meets a geologist, Jeanine. While climbing
down into a cave, the rocks collapse and Jeanine falls and breaks her
leg; Milo uses his radio to call for help. While trapped, Jeanine
discovers a number of cave paintings that appear to depict a meteor
shower. After the residents of Passage turn up to rescue Jeanine and
Milo, the two have a conversation about the importance of amateur radio
skills, and how ancient societies paid close attention to astronomical
phenomena. In the show’s closing scene, Milo speaks directly to the
audience, warning children to tell their parents if they hear a
particular sound on their radio. The remaining moments of the episode
are destroyed by a re-recording of static.

111

Milo hears a strange noise while experimenting with his father’s HAM
radio equipment. His father tells him that the sounds, a series of rapid
pulses repeating at a frequency of 10Hz¹,
are from a military radar. Milo and his father then go on a nighttime
expedition to the top of a hill, where he shows Milo the antennae from a
distant military installation. Milo’s father then tells his son that not
all radio broadcasts are voice, but are instead data. The episode ends
with Milo hearing another anomalous broadcast on his radio. The ending
is again recorded-over with static.

112

Milo and Maxwell go for a hike in the California desert. Milo,
determined to bring home some kind of souvenir, goes off-trail and
discovers a cave lined with dazzling yellow rocks. However, he quickly
becomes lost in the cave. Unable to find the entrance, he soon discovers
that his radio is no longer functional. After a number of fearful hours,
Maxwell finds him in the cave and leads him to safety. Maxwell then
tells Milo that the yellow rocks are Carnotite, a radioactive mineral.
Maxwell’s mood turns sour on the hike back to camp, and he tells Milo
that knowledge of nuclear science is a gift from “the travelers” that
humanity has squandered.^{2 3}

113

A lightning storm, and subsequent power outage, strikes the town of
Passage.⁴ An overeager Milo takes his
battery-powered radio up to the roof and attempts to make contact with
other HAM radio enthusiasts. Instead, a number of the frequencies are
occupied by an identical transmission of harsh, warbling beeps.⁵ Milo recognizes it as a digital
signal, but is unsure of what it means, or why it appears to be
overtaking such a wide signal range. After a nearby lightning strike,
Milo is thrown from the roof, breaking his arm. He is rescued by
Maxwell, who tells him that the mysterious signals are not from earth at
all, but from “the travelers.” After the clouds clear, Maxwell shows
Milo a pair of floating lights in the sky.

114

With the help of his father and another mathematician named
Danzig⁶, Milo deciphers the signals he
recorded during the lightning storm in episode 113. They discover that
the transmission is a set of GPS coordinates, and Milo decides to call
Jeanine and hike out to the location.⁷ After a long road trip,
the characters discover an abandoned Uranium mine closed by the US
government. Milo’s handheld radio cuts in, it’s another signal similar
to one heard in 113. The rest of the episode has been replaced with
static.

117

Continuing from a previous, lost episode, Milo and Maxwell make a
long, tumultuous road trip through the woods with the corpse of a deer
in the bed of their truck. The deer, apparently radioactive⁸, must be brought to the town of
Passage before a radio broadcast that is set to take place the following
day. Maxwell darts around roadblocks while Milo listens in on a police
scanner. After nightfall, they park the truck offroad and prepare to
spend the night in the woods. Milo notices that another signal is
jamming the police radio; Maxwell suspect the “travelers” are helping
them on their journey to Passage.⁹

118

The next morning, Milo and Maxwell return to Passage with the deer.
The streets of the town are empty, and the deer is becoming increasingly
radioactive. The deer is quickly placed into the Reconnaissance church
hall by church members wearing leaded clothing. Jeanine refers to the
animal as “incubating” as her and Milo rush inside to avoid helicopters
overhead. Inside the church hall, radio transmissions become erratic as
night falls, with the same digital signal occupying an ever larger
portion of the radio spectrum.¹⁰ The episode ends with
a cliffhanger, as a commotion from the church hall breaks through the
radio noise. Maxwell rushes in, Geiger counter blaring; the “incubation”
is apparently complete.

---

1. As noted by wiki user /u/Cas3_11, this signal reproduced
   on the episode is identical to the infamous Duga radar, which would have
   been offline for a number of years by the time this episode was first
   recorded.↩︎




2. As discovered by wiki editor /u/Paransis, one of
   Maxwell’s lines, For all the progress we have made in the fields of
   reason and science, the frailty of the human spirit has remained
   unchanged appears to be a quote from 19th century philosopher
   Alessandro Puccini.↩︎




3. Puccini’s philosophy may be relevant to the teachings of
   the Reconnaissance Church, as Puccini believed that the world was too
   senseless and amoral to be ruled by gods, and instead postulated that
   “traveling progenitors” created, and then abandoned, humanity.↩︎




4. Per wiki contributor /u/gherkin_off: I grew up in
   Larkspur, outside of Fairfax, in the early 90s. There were a number of
   power outages (thanks PG&E…) during that time period.↩︎




5. Per wiki contributor /u/0ssman (callsign KA7WID): The
   sample played in the radio drama is actually two different signals: the
   first is an unknown digital signal that appears similar to old-school
   cold war era MFSK signals. I’ve posted the one sample on sigidwiki, with no response. The
   second signal is actually an OTH radar (Over The Horizon, normally used
   for detecting ICBMs, etc) signal. It sounds similar to US Navy ROTHR
   samples. (Personal aside from /u/0ssman: It’s odd that a show so
   determined to teach actual amateur radio basics to children (Episode 110
   includes a completely dry and factually correct explanation of the
   differences between technician and general radio licenses, and
   exceptions to license requirements) would commit a basic factual error
   like confusing a radar signal for digital radio comms)[^6]↩︎




6. Per /u/Paransis: perhaps a reference to early 19th
   century German Philosopher and theologian Arthur Danzig; Probably
   suffering from some unknown mental illness, Danzig believed
   “himmelgeister” (“sky spirits”) used shooting stars to transmit
   numerical messages to him. His exegesis is supposedly based in these
   numerical messages.↩︎




7. These coordinates are a location along the
   California-Nevada border. [^9]↩︎




8. A Geiger counter can be heard throughout the episode,
   usually increasing in counts when someone approaches the rear of the
   truck.↩︎




9. Per /u/0ssman: This portion of the episode contains
   specific (for a children’s radio drama) information on the jamming of
   trunked radio systems, and the design of Motorola SmartZone trunked
   radio. A quick search says that this is the system used by police and
   emergency dispatch in Fairfax.↩︎




10. Editorial note: /u/0ssman and /u/hc265 have put
    considerable effort into deciphering this signal, as it may be the same
    as the “censored” radio signal in episode 110. The basic structure of
    the signal is as follows: a long 10kHz beep, a 6-tone DTMF-like header
    repeated 4 times, followed by a sequence of 20 DTFM-like tones. This
    identical message is repeated about 4 times over the course of the
    episode. Frequency analysis of the tones suggests a basic text encoding
    scheme.↩︎

Complexes

In the theology of our Complexes no heresiarch has proven quite as contentious as the great-aunt on my mother's side, who posited in an anonymous exegesis that the dispensation of corpses to trash chutes was neither blasphemous nor necessary. For the sake of my social standing I cannot comment on the former charge of blasphemy, but upon the death of my grandmother, my mother chose to wrap her body in parchment paper and leave the corpse in the hallway of the apartment complex. This deed was executed out of ideological commitment, of course. Her corpse was gone by 5AM, her name added to the great concrete necrology of the Complex. Things always disappear here—hair ties, bread heels, feces, corpses. We always assume it's because they are meant to. As anyone who has observed a pot left to boil for too long can tell you, what seems to disappear often changes form instead.

My mother, her lineage perhaps cursed since before that fateful manuscript, decided to take the lot of us and leave ten years later.

My great-aunt was too old to join us, and so the first order of business for the rest of the family was to decide what to do with her. My father thought she should live with our neighbors, who would almost certainly be too polite to object. My brother suggested we build a tent out of deli containers and plastic wrap for her to live in the hallways, preferably a quiet corner by an electrical cabinet. This raised an additional set of questions, of course—if Mercer's Summa Portus was correct, the electrical cabinets placed every fifth floor were never opened, and their interior existed outside creation itself. My father vehemently objected, arguing that the electrical cabinets were maintained in secret, much like how cobwebs never seem to appear when one is looking at them. The debate continued until my great-aunt piteously suggested that she leap off the balcony into the children's playground ten floors below. We agreed this suicide was a noble sacrifice in the name of metaphysical truth. Such things happened occasionally; the balcony railings were low and the hallways narrow. If our family's experiment with my grandmother ten years prior was representative of general reality, her body would be gone as long as she flung herself off the balcony after midnight. My father opined that things are never truly destroyed, and that the complex would simply turn her corpse into rust, wheat, or the moss that grows in the cracks of concrete.

Five days and many prayers later, we had placed our earthly possessions into packs made from moth-eaten peacoats belonging to my grandfather, and left the apartment behind.

My mother's reasoning was thus: all things have an inside and an outside: a corpse, an egg, a complex. I argued this reasoning was faulty, of course; if one can breach the interior of a thing, it is either because the thing was made to be opened, or because it has been destroyed. In the former category one may place boxes and rooms, while eggs and corpses belong in the latter. The Complex, as is self-evident, belongs to neither of these categories. My mother could not be dissuaded; it had to be possible to leave the complex.

We knew the Complex had an end—some unknown hundreds of floors down, there was a sub-complex, a place not of people and homes but of pipes, concrete, and rust. My great-aunt had supposedly seen it (or knew someone who had), as had numerous other itinerant denizens who lived long enough to drift upwards from there to here over the course of their lives. The source of contention among the family was if there was if there was anything beyond the bottom.

It was only a few days—and around a hundred floors—before discussion of the sub-complex turned to the inevitable: the Benthites. Save for my brother, we all knew Benthites were a myth, a fable refined across generations to frighten young children who may be tempted to wander after the lights faded. My brother, however, had ruined his nerves with Candelan-era natural philosophy, during which time it was in vogue to theorize that the Benthites were in fact quite real—and lived in the sub-complex. I told him that if he sees a naked man with ashy skin, red eyes, and who crawls around like a cellar spider, he can go ahead and warn us. He was not amused.

Two months in—two months of stairwells, rats, cobwebs, stale air, and the omnipresent hum of electrical work—we awoke one morning, three hundred stories down, to find my father gone. The nighttime chill and dire selection of food (again, there are a great many rats in the complex) had slowly chipped away at his health, and so we were forced to come to the conclusion that he either died in the night and befell the same fate as his in-laws, or that the horror of our journey had simply drove him to leap over the edge of the railing.

The bottom of the complex was within sight—less than a hundred floors—but my father's death snapped the threads that my mother's lifelong ontological struggle had wrapped around me. I had enough. The following night I waited until after dark, and abandoned her and my brother.

Within hours I realized with sinking horror that I had no idea how to return home. The floors had passed as minutes or drops of water—uncountable, indistinct, pooling together into the urn of time. After months of my mother's pilgrimage I no longer saw floors, just anonymous landscapes of concrete, doorways, and the clattering drumbeat of footsteps echoing through stairwells.

It was a month before I found a roof over my head in the form of a noodle shop carved into the carapace of a former two-bedroom apartment, where I exchanged dishwashing duties for a spot opposite the walk-in, just large enough for a bed. In another two years I found a second family, in the form of a woman two floors down who lived with her brother and grandparents. We married only a year later, rushed by a familial insistence on great-grandchildren, and by my emotional wounds from all the pilgrimage had taken.

Shortly after the marriage, on the advice of a priest who I consulted on matters of the heart—and the only living person besides my wife who knew of my past—I traveled the remaining fifty-six floors to the bottom of the complex. Beset by a heart-rending terror that I would again become lost and loose both home and family, I carried with me a pen and paper which I used to count the floors between my home and the bottom.

The denizens of the final floors spoke in hushed tones of the sub-complex, and to my shock, firmly believed in the Benthites that the rest of us regarded as childhood fables. All who I talked to, no matter how cordial and neighborly, refused to direct me to the doors of the sub-complex. I asked if they had seen anyone like my mother and brother, and they had. They had reached the final floor three years ago, my mother's grim and rancorous disposition still memorable to any who had met her. After that day, they were never seen again.

I eventually found the doors on my own, set at the end of a vertiginous concrete hallway. Folk-magic symbols and obscene graffiti covered over the layers of rust and off-white paint. I refused to come within a dozen paces, fearing that the Benthites would reach out and pull me inside.

My daughter was born six months later, bearing eyes that resembled my mother's to a startling degree. Being a rational adult I considered this nothing more than an accident of genetics, and for a number of years I settled into domestic life with a routine comfort that I had not known since my own childhood. What wounds cannot be healed by time are often healed by love, and soon Summa Portus, the pilgrimage, and the lifetime of ideological furor passed into memory. On late nights, when the wet summer heat interrupted my sleep, I would sometimes wonder what had become of my remaining family. Had they found something in the sub-complex?

Some eight years later, I again found myself on the bottom floor with my wife and daughter, where we had come to seek the advice of a well-regarded priest. For months our daughter had been dogged by nightmares: twisting hallways, tangles of rusted pipe and red eyes peering at her through cold, black murk.

By happenstance we passed by the doors leading to the sub-complex. My daughter stopped and turned, those familiar green-blue eyes widening before she let out a throat-torn scream that would not cease until my wife pulled the girl into her arms and tore her away from the hallway.

Skykomish Never Sleeps

Correspondences from the Journal Of New American Archeology and Philology

Issue No. 487

Iwona Żuławski

Eight pallbearers with the name of god written under their eyelids in blue ink carried Klaas Veenhof to a leaden sepulcher. There he joined the other first responders felled by a patch of land in Skykomish, their names etched into a stone memorial the shape of a tree with eight branches, set sixty-four meters away from the sepulcher itself. It is no secret that over the last decade the devil has pissed on us and our profession, yet I still believe I carry the burden of Veenhof’s death.

One year ago to the week as I write this, a letter to the editor in this very journal referred to the Skykomish Exclusion Zone as a sleeping giant¹, but the past three months have spoken to the fact that the giant never sleeps, he waits. Along with Veenhof’s fate, a deteriorated manila folder, christened The Esterbrook Artifact, has ignited the public imagination for less frightful reasons.

Mora has stooped on my chest and put me at the center of these events, some of which have yet to reach the public eye. In the spirit of academic openness I present the following, originally a research paper, in order to drag our misfortunes into the light.

My story begins not with the Esterbrook artifact, or even Veenhof himself, but with a historical text I first translated as part of my doctoral thesis. My initial study of the text was purely philological in nature, separated from broader questions of how the text itself came to be. My academic career continued but the mystery remained; one year ago, I decided to unearth the rest of the book’s story.

The Perfect Abduction: The Disappearance of Abigail Labat And Charles Geller

The Perfect Abduction: The Disappearance of Abigail Labat And Charles Geller is a true crime novel written by Harris Baker and published as a mass-market paperback in 2018 OCE, concerning the disappearance of two young children from the town of Monroe, Washington. The story within is almost unexceptional compared to the novel’s more recent history—The Perfect Abduction has stood on the cliff of obliteration from the historical record, only to survive against exceptional odds. As recently as eighty years ago, five extant copies of the text existed in various libraries across the world, and all were partly or completely destroyed in some form; two copies were lost to fires, while the final three victims befell more unusual fates, unknown until relatively recently.

One copy, held at the University Of Vancouver, was stolen by university president and noted eccentric² Theodore Farber for reasons that remain unknown.³ Once a day, at precisely 6 AM, Dr. Farber would tear a page from the book and leave it beside an offering of fruit and nuts on the back of his veranda; a murder of domesticated crows Dr. Farber kept on his estate would take the offerings, and use the page as nest material. Thus one of three remaining copies of The Perfect Abduction met its fate over the course of approximately thirteen months.⁴ With considerable avian resistance, the shredded and crow-eaten remains of twenty pages were later recovered from a pine tree by a team of university ornithologists and archeologists after Dr. Farber’s death.

The penultimate example fell into considerably more dangerous hands, when the now-infamous Church Of The Universals purchased the tome in a bulk lot from a university fifteen years ago. Believing that books printed before the detonation of the first nuclear bombs in 1945 possessed unique palliative properties, the Church ground up the first two hundred pages of The Perfect Abduction, and nearly a hundred other books, in order to feed the resulting slurry to their ailing prophet. This act was doubly unfortunate: not only did it destroy an extremely rare historical text, but the Church’s dating of The Perfect Abduction was late by nearly seventy-three years. The surviving portion of text then spent a number of years in the possession of various legal authorities following the Church’s mass suicide, before it was sold at auction and purchased by the University of Helsinki.

The last known copy fell into the possession of occultist, ceremonial magician, and philosopher Yevin Lipiński De Moor, who acquired the book following the closure of an archival library at the University of Łódź. According to De Moor’s journals⁵, Nisaba, the Sumerian god of literacy, revealed the name of the book to him in a dream. He purchased the book not for any historical purpose, but as a magical artifact for ritual use. De Moor’s description of this ritual is frustratingly vague:

A ritual is not a dull formality, akin the daily acts of rubber-stamping bureaucratic simians or mumbling priests with incense-baked skin. The gods are spiteful giants and you are an annoying bird chirping outside a window at sunup. Careful solemnity will not save you, only violent passion and lust for revelation in equal measure. Nisaba grasped me by the throat and said: thou shalt live by my words, and welcome the involution of our wills. I am no longer an oat-fattened sow waiting under the roof of a slaughterhouse. The rituals that Nisaba spoke to me are gentle to neither body nor mind, but the star that burns in my breast is not that of a common man, torpid and degenerated by society’s cultish notions of fear, shame, and subservience. Nisaba, to my surprise, spoke to me of a sacrifice not of flesh and blood, but ink and fiber. The new Aeon is arriving, and the words stamped onto these pages whisper not the instructions of ascension, but perdition.

Thankfully, we know from Millovic Stone’s biography of De Moor⁶ that the ritual involved slicing his tongue in two with a razor, and using his blood to write messages from the god Nisaba upon the pages of the book. When the text was recovered from De Moor’s estate following his death, the last one hundred pages were burned, and the remaining text was obscured by blood.

The entirety of The Perfect Abduction was reconstructed by myself as part of my doctoral thesis, using the extant pages of the De Moor, Farber, and Universals texts. This reconstructed copy is mostly complete, with only a small handful of lacunae. This paper deals exclusively with the mystery described in The Perfect Abduction, for a contemporary translation and literary analysis of the text itself, see Żuławski, I. The Perfect Abduction.

A Mystery For The Centuries

In contemporary historiography, discussion of The Perfect Abduction begins nearly a century ago, with a brief mention by Swedish philologist Jo Granerød ⁷ :

Baker’s novel, nearly forgotten, functions today as representative sample of commercial chaff during the genre’s cultural peak; Baker not only fails to solve the double-murder of two young children, he also fails to meet the lowest bar set by the genre’s conventions: to construct a believable profile of the killer. Hobbled by a lack of evidence, Barker instead becomes lost in the weeds of the town, and the strange, oppressive mood of its people.

Granerød’s criticisms, perhaps harsh, hint at why The Perfect Abduction stood so close to obliteration from history. This appraisal will change dramatically as we adjust both context and metaphysics throughout this paper. But first, a brief summary.

Harris Baker arrives at the town of Monroe, approximately half an hour from Seattle, on the urging of a family friend from the area. He describes himself as a former corporate lawyer, his change of career and heart motivated by Monroe’s spate of ill luck: An all-American small town, brought to ruin by the recent wildfire that destroyed the nearby hamlet of Granite Falls, as well as half of Monroe itself. Arriving on a bleak winter’s day, Baker intends to step in where the police have failed: the body of a missing boy washed up in a nearby river last fall, followed by the body of another girl a month later. Charles Geller and Abigail Labat, respectively. No arrests have been made, and no credible suspects interrogated. The mood in the town is bilious—a city council meeting nearly came to blows, and the night before Baker’s arrival, a woman shot a late-night deliveryman in her yard, believing him to be the killer. Through a combination of subterfuge and charisma, Baker obtains a copy of Geller’s autopsy report, and written testimony from the pair of hikers who discovered Labat. The pilfered documents paint a grizzly picture; Geller’s corpse is discovered with the lower jaw, right arm, and part of the skull missing. Labat’s visage is described obliquely—“the stuff of nightmares.” No cause of death could be determined in either case. Lacking any leads in the criminal case, Baker finds himself dissecting the mood in Monroe. Besides the boiling-over suburban paranoia, another mood is taking hold: superstition. A number of locals believe the wildfires, and the razed town of Granite Falls, are somehow responsible for the murders. Monroe is host to the sole surviving family of the Granite Falls fire: Anne Esterbrook and her grandson. His attempt to find them is in vain—upon arrival at the motel, he is met by a throng of police and television crews. He later corners an investigator, who describes the scene as a murder-suicide.

Baker turns to a town historian, who informs him that the locals have long considered Granite Falls cursed, citing an autobiography of Monroe’s inaugural mayor, N. P. Heintz, written over a century ago. The biography, long out of print and possessed by only the local library and the historian, briefly mentions an infamous crime which supposedly took place in Granite Falls twenty years prior. The historian, forlorn over the lack of sources, states that the only evidence of said crime is a Seattle newspaper from 1930, decades after the crime took place, describing the anniversary of a grizzly triple-murder as told by the grandson of a victim. Contemplating his failures and the indecipherable history of the area, Baker ends the novel with a fable:

Richard II, a man of god, pious without fault, lay prostrated before the sepulcher of his wife, and he was furious. The black plague had seized Anne Of Bohemia, pulled her from the throne and returned her to god. Richard II mounted his horse and fled to a monastery along the Welsh coast, where he was received by a wise ascetic. After stabling his horse and taking tea with the priests, he tells the ascetic of his bitterness and grief: he must know why god would do such a thing. The ascetic nods solemnly and tells him to understand the reasoning of god, he must learn the language of god. When the king asks him how he could learn such a thing, the ascetic falls silent for many minutes, pondering the question as he finishes his tea. As the king’s patience wanes, the ascetic tells him: To speak the language of god, one must first learn to write it. Every day at sunup, you shall strip yourself naked, walk into the frigid sea, and hold out your hands until a sea shell drifts into one hand and a leaf of kelp in the other. You will snap the shell in two, and with the jagged edge carve the patterns on the leaf into your stomach, then wash the blood in the waters of sea. You will do this until you understand the messages god has written with the kelp venules. Undeterred, King Richard takes the monastery’s storeroom as his lodgings and begins the routine prescribed for him. Every day, just as the sun crosses the horizon, he steps into the icy seawater, waits for a shell and leaf of kelp to drift into his hands, then shatters the shell to carve the patterns of the leaf into his skin. After letting the saltwater wash the blood from his abdomen, he returns to shore and spends his remaining hours in contemplation and prayer, meditating on the stinging wounds he had drawn into his flesh. He continues his routine first for days, then weeks, then months, and onto years. His abdomen, keloidal and septic, finally yielded no more room for new cuts; the scars began to intersect each other, an ugly bramble, the measured rendering of leaves lost under layers of scars. Exhausted and tearful, King Richard II returns to his teacher. He has suffered daily, subjected himself to mutilation, pain both acute and chronic he tells the ascetic, for which his only reward has been confusion and defeat. His years wasted, the patterns carved into his weakening body are without meaning or purpose. The ascetic listens in silence. Hearing the king’s desperate testimony, he nods firmly and says: “and so god has answered.”

Granite Falls and the work of Asher Niehr

With a modern archeological and historical record at our disposal, we can piece together what Harris Baker could not.

A full archeological dig of Monroe, and the surrounding area, started under the administration of my current thesis advisor, Erin Ləšx̌iʔ, then co-chair of the Archeology Department. In the fifteen years prior to my inquiry, the dig of Monroe itself only unearthed one item related to my investigation: The grave of Robert Heintz, grandson of N. P. Heintz. Included in the grave goods, along with a locket and gold cufflinks, is a copy of N. Heintz’s autobiography. As expected, the book is heavily degraded and contains numerous lacunae. Crucially, a restored portion contains a brief mention of Granite Falls, as well as the town’s then-mayor, Wagner Bissell. ⁸ :

In the matter of Granite Falls, […] such fellows make for interesting company over dinner and whiskey, and he was no exception. As the young man told it, before Bissell’s entry into politics, and the unfortunate events that befell his family, the mayor of our neighboring town had returned from an archeological dig in the orient, […] a [bibl]ical city […] had pilfered a few things for himself, which he kept at his estate in Granite Falls. He intended to eventually donate them to the city, but after […] are presumed stolen. Considering the sudden and ugly demise of Mayor Bissell’s family, and the various misfortunes the town has seen in recent years, one can’t help wonder if the artifacts, whatever they may be, or perhaps Bissell’s minor acts of thievery, have cursed the place. I have always been an honest man in my dealings, but I considered the story of Granite Falls to be a warning from god to remain as such.

When this excerpt was first uncovered, Ləšx̌iʔ ordered a excavation of Granite Falls, then only recently found twenty kilometers outside of Monroe. The man put in charge of this excavation was none other than Asher Niehr.

Then a postdoctoral researcher, the father of the Skykomish Incident is by far the most infamous, and most widely-known soul to collide with the long and strange history of The Perfect Abduction.

Niehr and his team began excavation the following spring, quickly unearthing the remains of Granite Falls’ main street, post office, and the estate of mayor Wagner Bissell, dating from the late 1800s and maintained until the wildfire of 2017. The latter discovery quickly turned the entire excavation sideways. The main building of the estate, a three-story manor house located less than a mile from Granite Falls’s main street, is highly unusual in one regard: unlike every other period example of its architectural style⁹, the manor is host to a large sub-basement, constructed from brick and iron, and spanning just over 300 square meters. The precise purpose of this room is still hotly debated, but we know it contained a number of stolen artifacts taken by Wagner Bissell while he was working under Assyriologist Hormuzd Rassam in 1879.¹⁰ In fact, Rassam briefly mentions Bissell in his final memoir, Asshur and the land of Nimrod:

A week after my arrival I halted for breakfast at a Koordish encampment in the village of Amis, where I was met by W. Bissell, an odd and bookish undergraduate from Oxford. The chief of the encampment was away at the seat of war; but his son, a very handsome young man, received us with every civility. He told us that he had been fighting against the Russians, and had just returned with a number of followers laden with booty of arms and clothes, which they captured from the enemy. It was very amusing to see some sedate Koords wrapped in the gray cloaks of the Muscovites, and others actually wearing the boots which they had brought from the field of battle. […]

My host having learned that we took a great interest in antiquities, informed us of a property outside the encampment, considered cursed by his fellow villagers, but which was built with an artifact placed into a wall. It was a long walk to the abandoned home; and when he hit upon it, the room was so dark that we had to wait some time before we could get a light to enable us to see our way into the chamber. After having exhausted my patience, I was ready to remit the search, but Bissell insisted on the contrary. The antique, a cuneiform tablet inlaid with shards of lapis lazuli, proved to be worth more than double the time spent. My host, out of an abundance of concern, told us that if we were to avoid whatever curse the tablet brought upon the house’s former owner, we should walk our camels North into the desert until the beasts vomited blood seven times, at which point we could return home.

To date, we believe most of the iron-age artifacts taken by Bissell are now missing. Niehr would write about his discovery with an fascination that seems chilling in retrospect¹¹:

The find of my career! The goods found in the undercroft(?) of the estate are undoubtedly from a completely different time period than the rest of the site. We have no idea where they came from, or how they made their way to Granite Falls. A few of the artifacts are particularly striking, and I find myself drawn to them, even at the end of a long and tiring day. I’ve already asked the university for any resources they have, contemporary or from the period, regarding translation of the clay tablets found in the estate. One particular tablet, set with dazzling blue gems, has seized my attention from the moment I saw it. I already have plenty of work to do, but I must be the one to translate those texts. Must.

As anyone familiar with Niehr’s story could guess, this lead is a dead-end for the purposes of our contemporary study. The aforementioned tablet, along with a number of other curiosities from the Bissell temple, are presumed stolen by Niehr and are most certainly located in the ten square kilometer Skykomish exclusion zone.

The Malign Texts

With a contemporary understanding of metaphysics under our belt, we can take the investigation of Labat/Geller in a direction Harris Baker could never dream of. I have no proof, but I suspect the metaphysical properties of The Perfect Abduction lead De Moor to describe the text as artefakt mroku i chaosu¹²; as eccentric as the man was, his occult qualifications and assessment of the book seem unquestionable in retrospect.

Having exhausted all archeological leads in the Monroe murders, it was early in the fall of last year that I turned to the metaphysical properties of the surviving Abduction texts. With the aid of Klaas Veenhof, co-chair of the Occult Studies department and surviving first responder of the Skykomish Incident, we set out to design an automatic writing ritual using the remains of the Universals Copy of The Perfect Abduction. The basic structure of this experiment would not be unlike the one undertaken by De Moor a century prior, although with less blood—or so we hoped.

We initiated the experiment at precisely three hours, thirty-three minutes and thirty-three seconds past midnight on the third day of March. The ritual lasted seven hours, after which time Veenhof’s automatic writing yielded a single set of characters in a language that neither he nor I understood:

𒆪𒋙 𒊏𒁀𒀀

Initial research on this set of characters yielded nothing. On a hunch, I reached out to a former undergraduate acquaintance, Sahid Al-Rawi, now at the Museum Of Iraq. Al-Rawi, a keen philologist and student of ancient literature, quickly succeeded where I had failed.

The text in question is Akkadian, I presume a Neo-Babylonian dialect from approximately 3500 K.D.E. The Cuniform characters are TUKUL-šú ra-ba-a, which normalizes to kakkašu rabâ. Or in English, “great weapon.” This phrase is attested in period literature, entirely religious myth or royal propaganda. For an example, see The Erra Song:

imittašu miṭṭa iṣṣabat iṣbat kakkašu rabâ
"He gripped a mace in his right hand, his great weapon."

I’d be curious to hear more about where you came across this phrase. There are numerous Sumero-Akkadian antiquities that made their way across the Atlantic over the centuries, but I was hardly expecting an archeologist of American culture to unearth something so specific.

Unfortunately, I would not be able to respond Al-Rawi’s message in time. Kakkašu Rabâ had its own plans.

The End Of The Investigation And The Death of Klaas Veenhof

The morning I received the translation from Al-Rawi, I left for Veenhof’s lodgings at the university at nine in the morning, and arrived on foot ten minutes later. It was a temperate and wet fall day, the kind I have enjoyed since childhood, and I neither noticed nor felt anything out of the ordinary.

I do not know why none of his neighbors noticed the blood on the windows.

Due to Veenhof’s connection with the Skykomish disaster, the incident response was immediate and uncompromising. The entire building was evacuated and quarantined. The university metaphysics department, honed by years of drills, took one hour to clear every person, animal, and object in the building. Even weeks later, the unreality of the morning still reigns in my memory: a team of a dozen undergraduate students, armed with survey gear, drawing a heptagon around the entire building with powdered elk bone. Erin Ləšx̌iʔ interrogating me from behind a mask, her voice muffled under layers of chokeberry-stained pinewood. They had to draw straws to find someone who would take Veenhof’s body to the university lab.

Despite days of sagings and purification rituals, from both my own and Ləšx̌iʔ’s traditions, I have been beset by constant nightmares since Veenhof’s death; his mutilated visage, like the knotted roots of an ancient tree, hover over me as I sleep. According to a priest, they are nightmares of the mind, and not the soul. I’m not sure if I believe him.

Ləšx̌iʔ demanded I halt my investigation, and I was in no position to disagree. In a bleak twist of irony, less than day after I put The Perfect Abduction behind me, I received a message from Salo Ti’lasal, current lead of the Monroe archeological dig.

In a remarkable spate of good luck, Ti’lasal’s team discovered a number of archives from Monroe’s municipal court system, including a report on the murder-suicide of one Anne Esterbrook and David Esterbrook, the last surviving citizens of Granite Falls.¹³

In The Perfect Abduction, Harris Baker learns little of the Esterbook family, beyond their status as sole survivor of the 2017 wildfires, and later death. The police report paints a much more explicit picture of their final hours. Per Johann Van Den Driessche, a postdoctoral researcher working under Salo Ti’lasal:

The variety of Middle Modern English present in these legal reports is very bureaucratic, making it difficult to translate for someone schooled in literature from the period. A brief summary is as follows: Twelve hours before her death, Anne Esterbrook, sixty-five, lured another resident to the motel room, and killed him with a small pocket knife. She then stripped the victim’s tendons from his arms and legs, tied them into a single strand of sinew, and arranged the strand into an heptagon outside the bathroom door where she had locked in her grandson, David. The boy died six hours later, presumably by Anne’s hand, however a precise cause of death could not be determined. The report describes his face and head as “violently mutilated at time of death.” Anne Esterbrook died four hours later.

Per Salo Ti’lasal, in a later message:

The ritual geometry described in the Esterbrook report is groundbreaking, to the point that department chair Ləšx̌iʔ personally verified Van Den Driessche’s preliminary translation. She has ordered a complete halt of the Monroe excavation until the report, and Anne’s final moments, can be fully understood. The sinuous heptagon was as surprising to myself as it was to Ləšx̌iʔ. As is so often the case with students of history, we have fallen into a trap of underestimating our subjects.

The Graves

After a difficult month, marked by poor sleep and bouts of anxiety, I arrived at the Monroe dig to witness one final discovery: a particular set of graves at Monroe’s burial ground.

The graves in question nearly went unnoticed, saved only by Ləšx̌iʔ’s careful study of the field reports following Van Den Driessche’s translation of the (as it quickly came to be known) Esterbrook Artifact.

Approximately two kilometers outside Monroe, the graves in question belonged to two American adolescents, as determined by skeletal development and grave goods. The skulls of both were heavily damaged, and one found without an arm. The headstones were worn beyond legibility, but I knew we had found Abigail Labat And Charles Geller.

Their graves will only be of peripheral interest in the investigation into Veenhof’s death. Still, the discovery of their remains has allowed me to close my own malign text, one I opened nearly five years ago, when I found the tattered and bloody remains of a book hidden in the dark corner of a library. I left the shores for good, decorated in scars that told me nothing.

---

1. Correspondences from the Journal Of New American Archeology and Philology, Is. 415↩︎

2. For a (mostly) complete account of Dr. Farber’s actions during his tenure, consult The Ubyssey Is. 547-678. Notably, in the tenth year of his tenure, he forced the chair of the Esotericism Studies department to create a living golem in his image from cement and clay, in the event he was assassinated by metaphysical forces.↩︎

3. What follows is a highly speculative explanation for this theft: As is made clear in Dr. Farber’s doctorate dissertation, Die Weisheit von Metal, Farber was a vociferous proponent of molybdomancy. Farber also believed (See The Ubyssey Is. 601 and 558) that certain books in the university’s extensive historical archives were somehow “malign.” It’s possible that the result of a molybdomancy revealed to him that The Perfect Abduction was one of these malevolent texts.↩︎

4. See Belmap, M. Vancouver: A Postwar History↩︎

5. De Moor, Y. L. Książki Osobiste.↩︎

6. Stone, M. The Wickedest Wizard of Europe: The Life and Writings of Yevin Lipiński De Moor↩︎

7. Granerød, J. A Taxonomy of early 21st Century True Crime Writing, Journal of American Nonfiction studies, Is. 478↩︎

8. Fijałkowska, N. Excerpts from from the journal of a 20th century Washington Politician, The New Journal of Northern Philology, Is. 302↩︎

9. For a period example, see Grant, H. (1987) Early American Architecture↩︎

10. van den Hount, R. Onderzoek Naar Het Bissell-huis, Nederlandse Archeologie, Is. 672↩︎

11. See Vogelzang, K. Commentaries On The Journals Of Asher Niehr↩︎

12. See De Moor, Książki Osobiste. De Moor, despite his fraying mental health towards the end of his life, still displayed a keen understanding of literary metaphysics. Ten years before his death, he located a prayer to an ancient proto-semitic demon in the Łódź university library, using nothing but a plumb bob and the semen of a goat.↩︎

13. A full report on the findings from Monroe’s municipal government archives will be forthcoming.↩︎

Oneirosis

July 31st

Nikolsky Charnoyevich, whose ancestors routed the Ottomans in Vienna and buried their unwed children with a bottle of liquor to bribe both god and devil, was reduced to stealing a knife from the hospital cafeteria. When the time came, he whipped the blade from his robes and smashed it down onto the table in his whitewashed inpatient room, tearing through layers of plywood laminate and three fingers on Johannes Klaus's left hand.

Johannes screeched like a shot bird and collapsed onto the concrete floor. No words passed between the two for a number of minutes. Johannes spoke only to god, delivering an unbroken oration of curses to the heavens as he groped through the pool of blood for the remains of his thumb, index, and middle fingers. He directed a few choice vulgarities at Nikolsky between the prayer of contempt.

"A devil spat between your mother's legs the night you were conceived. Dogfucker. None of this had to end with our feet in Tartarus." Johannes tore off his coat and wrapped the fading linen around the remains of his hand.

Nikolsky took a wheezing breath, something in his lung threatening to dislodge itself. He told the following, by way of an apology:

"As the reeds along the Tigris began to grow, a Babylonian princess prayed to Marduk for forgiveness, as for a week she had forgotten to utter his name in prayer. It is a minor sin, said the King Of Kings, and the Tigris shall bear it away if you let it. So the princess took her sin from her chest and threw it into the river, as sculptors of the divine images cast away their tools. But as fate would have it, a man bathing in the river noticed the princess throwing her sin to the Tigris. He did as her, and soon he told others as well, and before the shorebirds could daub their muddy nests among the reeds, the whole of Babylon had learned to pull the bolus of sin from between their ribs and cast it to the river undammed by the eye of Tiamat. A morning came when the river flooded, gravid with rites unperformed and libations unmade. The dams and waterways of the city failed, swept away in a deluge that grew until all that remained was Atrahasis upon his raft."

Johannes scoffed bitterly. "I hope you die screaming."

"We will both die quiet deaths. Is it not desirable to die in one's dreams, where distant gods can summon palliatives to our bedsides?" Nikolsky raised a graying eyebrow. "Have you counted your fingers, doctor?"

Johannes paused. His hand was wreathed in pain, the wailing of individual nerves indistinguishable from the whole. He gingerly pulled the blood-soaked coat from his hand.

Three fingers gone. Seven left.

Johannes collapsed into his chair and held his head in his hands. A hush of icy silence fell over the pair in the gaps between Nikolsky's rattling breaths.

Nikolsky sighed. "The world has ended many times. Ouranos plucks out his eye and lobs it at Chicxulub. Enlil breathes smoke across the earth. What new and terrible beasts, I wonder, will rise from the rolling hills of ash and carrion."

Exhausted of his insults, Johannes did not respond. The sound of wet, hitching sobs emanated from the broken man in the chair. After what could have been minutes or hours, Nikolsky wasn't sure, the crying stopped. Johannes slumped over, and for a moment Nikolsky thought the doctor dead, until Johannes raised his head and peered across the table with a single gleaming eye through the part in his hair. Something in the air shifted; the overwhelming scent of blood yielded to something darker, older.

"It is hemlock I taste on my tongue in a trice—as the flavor of death like the seeds is so sour, for in death all one tastes are the dreams that one lost."

July 16th

Cora recognized the city block sprawling out before her in the moonlight, but only as a familial corpse: the shape and features remain, but the thing itself is wrong, a cold and waxy verisimilitude. The voice one heeds in darkened allies howled at her, to run, to flee in any direction, to shed all the stillness from her body. She did not.

She laid down in the middle of the street, arms crossed over her chest and eyes facing the ashy sky, as though the hollow five-over-ones on either side were the mourners at her wake. Dread grew in her chest. She reached into her jacket and pulled out a deck of cards; she removed them from the slipcase and let the first two rest on her chest, the others scattering across the asphalt before the wind carried them away.

She recited a poem from her youth to a leaden sky: "When, lonely little bird, you reach the evening of that brief day of life the stars allot you, then you will not regret your way of life; since least each inclination of yours is natural."

If god had his ear to the earth he heard her and responded with rain, warm drops pregnant with carbon and smelling of wildfires. The howling inside her rose to a wail, but when she tried to stand up she found she could not; something inside her had severed itself from her limbs, and all the thrashing in her soul could not stir her body, save for her lungs which expended themselves uselessly. She could not force her throat into a scream.

A terrible roar grew in her ears, the sound of a hundred suns burning themselves to death. The din crowded out all thoughts, save for fear, a primordial ape burrowed in her brain that told her the sound was coming for her, that flame and ash would turn her to a Vesuvian corpse as she laid helpless on the ground. Time passed at an insomniac rate, hours and minutes indecipherable.

She felt him before she saw him.

Terror burned across her skin, catching the air in her lungs and itching down her arms. He came to her as a shadow, but not a silent umbra of the kind that occupies the underbrush of forests or empty homes, but a whirling vortex of absence. His body was the heart of a dead star, his silhouette the darkened snow of a volcanic winter.

He loomed over Cora and said nothing. He did not need to. With what little control she could wrangle over her body, she took the top card on her chest and turned it over. Seven of diamonds.

The blackened rain made her fingers slip from the second card, the seconds passing in frenzied desperation before she lodged her limp thumb under the cardstock and turned it over.

Seven of hearts.

Cora awoke to the feeling of needles prickling down her legs. She instinctively extracted her arms from the covers and draped it across the other half of the bed, where Sarah was still asleep. She felt her hand around in the darkness until she found Sarah's arm and let her hand rest against it as she stared into the night, adrenaline still pouring freely into her blood. After her nervous system calmed, she pulled herself from the bed and felt her way to the terrace in the living room.

The night was warm, cloudless, and silent. Pale light draped itself over the city, distant lights from far-away buildings mingling with the stars that crept over the horizon. She did not look at the clock that shone on Sarah's side of the bed, but the slightest ridge of purple light suggested dawn was imminent. Cora still felt a terrible weight in her chest, one that would not remit itself with the fresh nocturnal air.

She did not hear her rise from bed, but a moment later she felt Sarah's arm wrap around her chest.

"One more nightmare to rive you in rest?"

Cora paused for a moment, discomforted, although she wasn't sure why. "You—yes." Tears welled up in her eyes, and the weight in her chest turned to a hot, lacrimal lump. If Sarah noticed, she didn't say anything. "You should go back to bed. I won't ask breakfast of you this early."

Sarah responded by planting a quick kiss on Cora's cheek, before her arms fell away from Cora's body and she walked back into the darkness.

Cora stared at the horizon until the rising sun stung in her eyes. Even after the tears ceased the weight in her heart remained, a sensation she couldn't attribute to elation or grief.

Cora closed the glass patio door, but stopped as she noticed something gleaming in the dawn light; letters shone in the morning dew that stuck to the exterior of the glass, as though someone had climbed up seven stories, and wrote with their finger by wiping away the condensation on the window. The text, being on the outside, was reversed, and it took Cora a moment to read it:

IT DOES NOT HAVE TO END LIKE THIS.

July 15th

Johannes Klaus, ten hours late on his report to SVP Nichols, thrust a hand into the pocket of his lab coat and pulled out a worn eight-sided die, chipped in one corner. He held it in front of Nikolsky like a forked radish.

"Do you want this back?"

Nikolsky glared at the doctor above a landscape of liver spots and darkening lines under his eyes. He responded through gritted teeth, what few of them were left. "Yes."

Nikolsky reached out to snatch it, but the doctor pulled his hand back. After a tense moment, Johannes let the die fall onto the cheap plywood table between the pair. Seconds fell in slow drops until the die settled. Five.

Something in Nikolsky's posture unwound itself. A moment later he snatched the die from the table, and returned it to the shadowy folds of his clothes.

Johannes activated a recorder he kept hanging from his breast pocket. "How long was it? The oneirosis."

"Ten years." Nikolsky croaked.

Johannes raised an eyebrow. "Yesterday it was four."

"Yes, and that was yesterday."

Johannes gestured expectantly. "Go on then. Tell me."

"That was a decade. You can't be serious."

The doctor's expression suggested otherwise.

Nikolsky folded the die over in his withering hands. "I wore a crown in a steppe where gravid marshlands bore carp that leapt into nets, and where grain grew in golden floods without ash or irrigation. By folk legend I was born from the roots of an elder willow, as with its age came tears that wept from the leaves and impregnated the soil, but by the words of my hagiographers I was the child of a tryst between my mother and the sea itself, so that after I was born I would teach fishermen to rig their boats with sails, so they might reach the end of the world.

My wife gilded herself with the spoils of the earth but remained as somber as a long dusk. When I asked of her mood, she told me that a heron with a septic eye from which spare dreams wept had come to her in the night, draped its wings over her body and fed her fragments of time from its crop. When she awoke, the heron spoke:

"Gilgamesh in his sleep by ashcakes will not know:
were there tears on his bread that were wept by the wife
of the boatman who heard of a flood from the reeds?

Once a queen did beget the god Erra then wrote
on his cheek a cuneiform curse in the blood
of the cedars she took from the orchard of An:

As a man he would tear the old soul of the Earth
from Abzû as one tears the red flesh from a bone,
And the dams of the world would then buckle and burst.

And the fish from the dams when they swam to the blue
said a thanks to the god and his rage just before
they were speared by the bill of a wading bittern."

"Nine months later, my son was born. Before the boy turned ten, he swallowed the egg of a plover he found along the river—the egg incubated inside him, and one day the fledgling burst from his stomach to its rightful home. Knowing that he would surely die, my wife called for every mystic in the kingdom to assemble at the palace, and the most competent among them would be made to heal our son.

"Dozens of men arrived at the lapis gates, and to test them she drew a sword across her arm, so that if no man could heal her son, she would die alongside him. It was a grim procession. The first six failed, and left a disgrace. Her blood poured down the limestone steps of the city gate like snowmelt over the mountains.

"The seventh mystic, a man with a cataract in one eye and hair that drifted between the stars when one looked at him at night, drew his palm across her arm and closed the wound. He called himself Sebetti, for he was born four thousand years ago, when a divine heptad of warriors fell into a pool of bitumen that was his mother's womb, impregnating her. He placed his hand on my son's stomach, and availed him of his mortal wound. When we asked him what payment could possibly suffice for the life of a prince, he said only this, before I awoke:

In the night I shall nest by the shore of his dreams,
til his greed for the aquifers ancient and dark
has him drink far too deep from an umbra of mine.

Johannes frowned like a fledgling. "You think of me as Šukaletuda, foolish and cruel in equal measure."

Nikolsky shook his head. He seemed tired, his posture making him curl in on himself. "I faithfully tell only what Sebetti has shown me. To him, I suspect, I am a messenger."

The doctor stiffened. He glanced at the one-way mirror that covered one wall of the room, then whipped his head back around to Nikolsky. He briefly opened his mouth to say something, but instead he merely fumbled with the recorder in his breast pocket until he found the off switch, then left. The light fixture hanging from the ceiling swayed slightly when he slammed the door behind him. Nikolsky sat alone beside concrete walls and bolted-down furniture.

Cora half-watched the scene unfold from the other side of the mirror, one eye on her phone. She returned it to her pocket and feigned interest in her laptop when she heard the door unlatch.

"He acts like this every time you talk to him, and yet he still annoys you." She typed the first lines of Leopardi's The Solitary Thrush into a spreadsheet to mimic productivity, compressing one line into each cell.

Johannes leaned against the table and glared at Nikolsky through the glass, where the man's deathly gaze could not assault him in return. "This will be the end of us. The institute. Everything."

Cora stopped typing. "So say most, well after they cut the bull of heaven."

"I think he believes what he says, not that it matters." He sighed heavily, and composed himself. "I have a meeting with the CDC. Tell the orderlies he can return to his room."

"He's going to die before we learn anything from him. We should be fretting over the overrun morgues, not one man."

Johannes stopped on his way out the door. "You think I don't know that?"

"Perhaps he's telling the truth. About Sebetti. There are other cases that report seeing men like him. Here. In Seattle."

"Dreams are as alike as they are unalike. His own hat-man means nothing. You're more desperate than I am." The final syllables lifted without subtlety; it was a tone that Cora knew foreclosed any possibly of winning the argument.

"I just didn't expect to spend my dream postdoc position watching a man tumble to Tartarus."

"Count yourself lucky. My father always said you taste your unfinished dreams upon your death, and the flavor is always sour."

Johannes sulked out the door.

Cora waited for a moment, her ears shadowing his footsteps until they were swallowed by the whitewashed walls. She closed her laptop and slipped out the door into the interrogation room, and sat down at the table. Nikolsky looked up and said nothing, either from exhaustion or disinterest. Cora reached into her jacket and pulled out a deck of cards.

Nikolsky nodded. "That will do."

July 20th

Cora leaned against the metal grating of her terrace and watched a circle of city crows form around the corpse of a small animal that had laid itself to rest on one of the empty streets. The crows cawed amongst themselves, saying grace to their god before plunging their beaks in.

"See, it's done."

Cora stuffed her hands into her jacket and returned indoors, where Sarah had hung one of her paintings above the hearth. A small family of birds nesting among the marsh reeds, the hollow apartments of the city towering over them.

"What is it?" Cora asked, largely out of habit.

"A killdeer, who all roost in the marsh on the sound." Sarah reflexively rubbed the pastels from her right palm, raining color down onto the worn oakwood.

Cora fell onto the sofa. "Why killdeer?"

"Not all things need be symbols or signs."

"But they are rather tragic birds." Cora's eyes drifted between the art and setting sun outside.

Sarah humored her. "Do tell more."

"If a predator approaches the nest, one of the parents will run away from the eggs and feign injury, as to draw the predator's attention."

Sarah finished the thought. "So the child will persist, and the parent to predator falls."

Cora nodded. "If they cannot flee in time, yes. And often they will charge a predator many times their size, condemning themselves to death. Such is their instinct." Cora exposited slowly, while Sarah drifted through the apartment, and by the end of the thought Cora heard her opening one of the pomegranates that appeared on the kitchen counter the day prior.

"I abide the sad moods you beget in our home—yet I think if you speak of a truth, then perhaps 'twas a curse from an iltum to the forebear of killdeer before the Abzû was undammed by Mātāti in war."

"A million small birds damned by Ištar, as she did Enkidu. What did an ancient killdeer do to anger a rancorous god, I wonder."

Sarah handed her a fragment of the pomegranate. "Says the cynic I know and I love."

"I'll stain the sofa."

"Then eat hunched by the sink like a rube with his bread, as bad habits of yours so demand when I leave you with food that I cooked on the day just before." She kissed Cora on the forehead to soften the blow of her ribbing.

Too lost in thought to recognize her wife's sarcasm, Cora pulled herself to her feet but stopped as she walked by the door, where Sarah kept the mail on an antique melamine tray. There was a single letter, addressed to Cora by name, without stamp or sender.

"Sarah, where did this come from?"

Sarah looked up from her pomegranate. "Did a letter arrive?"

Cora jammed her index finger into the folds of the envelope and tore it open.

I WILL FIND YOU.

June 20th

Sometime during the night, Nikolsky tore himself from the grip of Mora and ran naked through the south wing of Firecrest State School before his escape was aborted by a shard of glass lodged into his clavicle, following a dive through an interior window. Already in a concussed torpor, the orderlies did not sedate him. From his bed the next morning he told Johannes that a Serb named Miloš had, for the past year, stood in the window outside his bed and whistled a folk tune that turned to hemlock as the notes rained down onto the flowerbed.

"You dreamed that he did this for a year?"

Nikolsky's face twisted into a frown. "No. I told you. In the dream, one year passed. The dream started in fall, then winter, then spring, then summer, then fall again, when I woke. I celebrated Christmas with my mother in Rijeka, I heard the birdsong in spring, when a family of sparrows nested beside the cherry trees in my garden; in the summer the birds fledged, there were—fuck."

Nikolsky fumbled around under the bedsheets, searching his clothes, before he turned to his bedside table, tore open the drawer and reached for an eight-sided die. He threw it onto the ground. Two.

"Damocles, you hang your own sword above your head."

Nikolsky scoffed. "Where is your daughter? She is kinder to me."

"Cora is more interested in studying you than curing you, Nikolsky."

"Better the pet of a scientist than the cattle of a madhouse."

"You are here of your own volition, Nikolsky. You can leave any time."

"You know that's not true. One such as yourself does not release his Gaëtan back into the wild." He returned the die to its home in the drawer. "Do you want to hear a story, doc?"

Johannes raised his arms in an exasperated shrug by way of an answer.

"Ten years ago, not long after I received my masters in library sciences in Kyiv, a man representing the Schøyen Collection approached me while I was visiting my family's summer home in Drammen. He offered me a job, on the condition that I travel with him to Oslo to meet that infamous proprietor and collector himself. If I was a fool in my youth, I was a Leander, not a Naram-Sin; when god looks you in the eye and asks something of you, you do not decline. Schøyen's disposition fit his role as a man of infamy, he walked always with his left eye pointing down, towards hell, so that his right would remember to look before crossing a street.

"It also turned out he had been aware of my name for a while. Six years ago he purchased a number of looted antiquities stolen during the Bosnian War, you see. Among these pilfered antiquities, or should I say, between them, was a journal belonging to my grandfather, Ivan Charnoyevich, who spent most of his life as a museum administrator under Tito. Despite the unbound papers of his journal serving as packing between a collection of thirteenth-century Christian manuscripts, my grandfather's writing consumed Schøyen, and he hoped I could illuminate a story from these journals, which went as follows:

"In the north of the world there was a woman who bartered with the blood of snakes and traded her menarche for a spell that burned her name from the lips of her parents; she fled the swords of Skien in 1563 and made her home in the lapland, beside the herders of caribou, carriers of stone, and hewers of wood. The laplanders called her Hyndla, from a name that descended upon an elder in a fevered dream.

"It was said by later Celtic soothsayers who nested like birds among the fjords that Hyndla never laid with a man, but one winter, after the war ended, she returned from the south with child. After a short spring that withered crops and draped the aurora past the eyes of the world, she gave birth to her daughter in the nest of harpy.

"But the harpy, fearing neither Hyndla nor the loons that carried her song on the wind, refused to cut a prayer into the child's back with her talons, and so it came to pass at one year that Mora crept into the child's crib and stole the breath from her lungs. Hyndla was furious. The next morning she she carried the corpse of her child up the mountain to the harpy's nest. She draped herself in feathers and larch bark while she waited for the harpy to return, then spat the urine of a caribou between the bird's eyes, and the harpy fell down dead. She split the beast's chest in two and placed her child in the crib of viscera, but neither god nor demon permitted the return of the child's soul to her body.

"Hearing the sweet song of her tears pattering onto the snow, a man who leant his left eye to Muninn crouched over Hyndla's chest as she awoke the next morning. He called himself Sáfḫaw, for his mother fed him seven scorpions of Isis to render his tongue as sharp as a sting. Sáfḫaw offered the witch a deal: he would take a fragment of Hyndla's soul and place it in her daughter's chest, but in exchange, he would eat well from the rivers of Hyndla's dreams, for two days of rain would fall into her dreams for each day of her life. Hyndla agreed to the Stranger's terms.

"The moment Hyndla opened her lips to permit the compact, the cries of her daughter emanated from the foot of her bed, and she wept for joy. For ten years Hyndla raised her daughter, and taught her to hold beetles under her tongue and curse men in secret on nights when the moon was smothered by snow. And it was after ten years that Hyndla came to understand the curse that enclosed her dwindling years: For every day of her life, the man who saw from Muninn's beak took two in the night, and so it would pass that Hyndla would die a crone before her daughter came of age.

"When Hyndla learned of her fate, she ascended the oldest pine in the north and stole the demon's eye from the nest of Muninn. She held the eye in the pocket of her cheek as she slept, and for nearly two days in her dream, she waited for him to appear. On the evening of the second oneiric day, he arrived at the wine-dark shores of her dreams in a ship masted with fishing nets, and negotiated for the return of his eye: in exchange for the plucked organ, he would amend Hyndla's curse. For the final three hours of her rest, he stated, he would strike he sun from the sky, and Hyndla would travel for ten years with a candle held in her belt to the seven corners of the earth, and in each corner light forty-nine fires. If she succeeded in lighting all three-hundred-and-forty-three fires, the sun in her dreams would rise, and she would awake with her daughter to live a long and natural life. Should she fail, or should the flame of the candle die, he would take what fragment of her life remained, and raise her daughter as his own.

"The story Schøyen found ended there. I did not learn of the true ending until a dream two nights ago. I have always been a curious man, and one night while my sister and I vacationed in Germany, I found a tree once planted as a sapling by Dumuzid on his wedding night, and cut the bark from its trunk in six places; Sáfḫaw cursed me from the dark corners of the world, and in exchange for cutting the final section of bark, he told me the remainder of the story, although I suspect his unbounded ego may have altered the telling of the tale, which went as follows:

"As clever as she was, Hyndla knew not of the man with whom she bartered away her life—conceived in a womb of pitch, one-seventh dragon, one-seventh a viper, and one-seventh a flood, an inveterate manipulator and itinerant drifter who gorged himself on time. His wickedness was matched only by his wisdom, for in his centuries of life he had come to understand a truth Hyndla did not: it is easier to extinguish one's own light, than to banish the surrounding darkness.

"For five years Hyndla meandered through the night, across marshes without birdsong, plans without caribou, and shores without tides. The eater of time refused to say what broke Hyndla's spirit, although he told that after she lit the tenth fire, she placed the candle under her chin and let her tears extinguish the flame. Sáfḫaw took Hyndla's daughter for himself, and fed her a pomegranate that put her in a dreamless sleep, until he needed her again."

Johannes frowned. "Is this what you believe to be the cause of your oneirosis, Nikolsky? A demon eater of time?"

Nikolsky rubbed his injured shoulder, appearing unimpressed. "By now you must know it's not all in my mind. There are others. Even I know from my hospital bed."

"I don't believe your condition is entirely psychological, no. Your insistence on the supernatural is merely tiring at a time like this."

Nikolsky leaned forward. "Have others seen him?"

"If you're going to attempt mindgames with your doctor, I think my time is better spent elsewhere."

"Why so busy? I imagine a man like yourself would be in a senior position, surely you have people to do your work for you." The question was more pointed than Johannes expected.

The doctor snapped his notebook shut. "A number of people have called in sick. I think there's something going around. Flu. Covid."

"What's wrong with them?"

"That's hardly your business, Nikolsky." Johannes got up to leave.

"You should ask them. Perhaps the oneirosis is spreading faster than you realize." He stood up. "The Man is a Locusta of dreams—some drink willingly, but for others, by the time they have gorged themselves on sleep, it will be too late."

Johannes ignored him, but stopped before he reached the door. "Schøyen. What did you tell him? To explain the story."

"I told him there is patrilineal curse of madness in my family, dating from 1683, when a wounded soldier serving under Kara Mehmed of Diyarbakir cut the throat of a hag, stole her dying breath and used it to curse the name of the Cossack soldier who stabbed him in the gut. He gave me a job."

July 31st 7:00 AM

When Cora awoke, she found herself not in her bed, but laying on the cold and wet mud path that encircled the wetlands to the south. Her head ached, and she tasted dirt in her mouth. She unstuck her clothes from the mud and pulled herself to her feet, calm despite the growing pang of panic—she did not remember falling asleep. She wiped her hand on her jeans and pulled a deck of cards from her jacket, and split the deck with her right hand, the top card falling into her left: seven of clubs. She returned the deck to her pocket.

When she looked up, she found Johannes standing in front of her, looking as though he had fallen down a flight of stairs.

"Do you know where you are?" Despite his haggard appearance, he clearly knew the answer to his own question.

After Cora adjusted to her new surroundings, she reached into her coat and returned the deck of cards to her hand. Again, she cut the deck with the thumb and middle finger of one hand, then tipped the card over with the opposite thumb. Seven of hearts. "You still treat me like a child."

"I told you I'd find you. I left you messages—"

"How did you find me here? How did you do this?"

Johannes frowned, the same frown he always made when the two battled for familial dominance. "Nikolsky told me."

"Nikolsky, or The Stranger?"

"Cora, that's not important. Nikolsky told me what you were planning to do to yourself. He said he helped you make a deal with—with him."

The reeds shivered in the morning wind. Far off in the distance, the urban glow of a thousand bedroom lights thrummed like dying stars. All was as silent as a dolmen. Cora turned the deck over and thumbed through it before picking a card. Five of diamonds. She extended her hand and with one finger held the card to Johannes's chest, pressing it against his wrinkled pinstripe shirt. "Tell me something I don't already know."

"Cora—"

"Nikolsky taught me a few things too. You could be anything that looks like my father. You could be The Stranger. Tell me something I don't already know."

Johannes thought for a moment. "When I was a small boy, my mother tried to take her life."

"Mom told me that. How she explained all the time you spent sulking at work."

He sighed. "That same night, I wondered from my crib and swallowed a peace of glass on the kitchen floor. I only survived because my grandfather had a bout of insomnia, and decided to check on me."

Cora returned the card to her coat pocket. "If you came all this way to walk me back, you won't."

Johannes lowered his head, the dim sunlight illuminating his tears as he wiped them with the back of his hand. It was the most emotion Cora had seen from him since her mother died. "I did the best I could. Raising you. We both—we both deserve better. Better than this. Better than what we got."

"Perhaps that's true. Perhaps it's not. For all our furor and struggle, we still wake to seven loaves of bread."

"Your fate is not fixed, Cora; we are all unfired clay."

"A tablet written by the gods and left to the elements will still harden in the sun."

Johannes sat down on the dirt trail and held his head in his hands. Somewhere off in the distance, a killdeer cried to the sun. "Christ. You needed love, not your mother's history books."

"You shouldn't call to god in a place like this. It may answer."

It was a moment before Johannes spoke. Cora watched wordlessly as he pressed his palms into his eyes, fighting back further tears. "You have a long life ahead of you, Cora."

Cora leaned over him, an animal ready to strike. "What are the fruits of old age? You should know as well as anyone. Infirmity. Frailty. Carrying the ever-growing weight of life while you watch the people you love die. While you watch the world die." She picked up a stone from the waterline and turned it over in her hands. "It's still spreading, isn't it?"

Johannes nodded.

"Nikolsky said as much."

"I have a meeting with him later today. I have ideas. On how to end this." He looked up. "You could help."

Cora took the five of hearts from her pocket. "Sarah usually makes pancakes on Sunday mornings. I don't want to miss it."

"Cora, Sarah is—"

Cora turned the card over in her hand, so the front stood inches from her father's face. He fell silent, and his body fell into the umbra of dawn, a shadow fading into the pale forests of cattails and reeds. Cora let the card fall onto the ground, and started walking home.

June 15th

"Doctor Klaus said you're very attached to that die, Nikolsky."

Nikolsky sat hunched over in a leather chair that threatened to consume him while he turned the eight-sided die over in his hands. He dropped it on the floor. Seven. He snatched it off the carpet and dropped it again. One. A sigh of relief. Cora made a note on her tablet.

"The longer the dreams get, the more you become lost in them. If I told you, right now, that you were dreaming, you wouldn't believe me, would you?"

Cora humored him. "No, I would not."

"But if, in this moment, it turned out you were in fact dreaming, you still wouldn't believe me, would you?"

"No, I suppose not. Is that what the die means to you? Proof? That's related to your septiphobia, isn't it?"

"It's not a fear. Also, sept is a Greek root and phobia is Latin, it should be heptaphobia."

Cora laughed. "I'll take that to mean that it is related to your dreams."

"Last night I dreamt the same way I always have, since learning lucid dreaming. I was in Norway, in my family's summer home, the one my father purchased in the 90s. For two weeks we stayed there; everything was peaceful, snow quieted the earth, and I would sit on the porch with my wife, reading poetry and drinking coffee."

"That sounds like a perfectly pleasant dream."

"It was. Many months ago I would say I designed it that way, but such autonomy has been seized from me. Still, two weeks of my life are now gone in the span of eight hours."

"As they would be if you spent two weeks awake on that porch."

Nikolsky laughed humorlessly. "You're humoring me, I can tell. To answer the unasked question: What started cannot be halted, soon I will become Atrahasis, watching the lands drown." He looked around Cora's office, eyes climbing the wall of books.

"That sounds a bit dramatic, don't you think?"

Nikolsky took in a great breath, and spoke. "Ma in ultimo quelle stolte e superbe domande commossero talmente l’ira del dio, che egli si risolse, posta da parte ogni pietá, di punire in perpetuo la specie umana, condannandola per tutte le etá future a miseria molto piú grave che le passate."

Cora paused halfway through jotting a note. She did not look up, her lips mutely reciting Nikolsky's speech. "Truth troubled the minds of men and struck them with such horror that they, though bound to obey her, refused to adore her."

"You studied Leopardi in college, no?"

Cora jolted forward. "How did you know that?"

"A stranger told me in a dream. The night after I came here. I lived in a city with no inhabitants save myself, until a man approached on a camel and whispered your name through teeth the color of pitch; he placed two fingers under his eye, pulled down the flesh of the eyelid and hatched a shorebird from the milk-white sphere. The bird flew from his eye socket into the sky and wept, sending down a great rain for seven days. When the deluge ceased, he told me of you, eater-of-many-seeded-apples, whose ancestors were felled by curses and mystics."

"Do your dreams speak often of me?"

"Only so that I may convince you that they are not merely dreams."

"And why do you believe you must convince me of such?"

Nikolsky appeared despondent. "There's a marshland not far from here. It used to be the city dump. Have you been there?"

"Of course, it's right by my apartment."

Nikolsky nodded. "In the spring, the beavers arrive to cut the trees and shape the waterways. They flood the streams and turn them to lakes, until the lakes spill over and waters rise. When they do, the herons and kingfishers come to roost, and to hunt in the shallow water the flood made for them. There is something that lives on the edge of time, who stoops over you as sleep, as the heron peers into the waters, and awaits the flood. I fear there was a night in January where I dreamed too deep, and it noticed."

July 35th

Cora laid down on the carpet and stared at the wall, above the fireplace cluttered by Sarah's paintings. She was tired, so much so that she couldn't be bothered to relocate herself to the bed. Sarah laid down beside her, and stared into her eyes.

"I feel like I'm dying." Cora said. She had not left the apartment in months. The stairs took too much from her.

Sarah hummed thoughtfully. "We all die."

"You seem undisturbed by such a thought."

"The pacific is home to a tree, for a thousand and more of our seasons she stands. She has seen: the Yokuts who where murdered in scores, then the settlers who came as a flood on the children then men, the Yuki, then Cheyenne. By the thousands she sees her kin razed by the flame as the hills of her home turn to ash. If god willed her to speak she would scream to the lands where her roots have her chained."

Cora took a labored breath. "Something in my soul has tarnished yours. I miss that quiet optimism of yours; I think it started with that painting you made. The killdeer."

Sarah laughed. "You remember the day that I placed my pastels of the birds on the wall? All the time we let drip from our lives since the date add to decades perhaps...it was five?"

"Think so."

"And a decade that passed from the time when we met."

Cora nodded. "Of course. Seventh grade. Computer room at school. You were playing Oregon Trail 2 and I kept arguing with you, because I could tell you were going to get your party killed. Didn't bring enough meat."

"Your words passed as a dawn and I thought: girl so bright and so sharp, she can teach me to pass my math class."

A quiet titter passed between the two of them. "It was all of a month," Cora said, putting her hand over Sarah's, "before I started to dream of spending my life with you."

"To you fate is the night to the owl."

"How so?"

"When you die with no dreams that remain in your soul, you will taste of your death not the bitter regret but the sweet and the cold."

May 9th

Cora stood up from her desk and offered her hand, which the man shook. He was about her age, with an expensive haircut and hazy blue eyes. He had already traded in his tailored suit (or that's what Cora pictured a man like him wearing, something in his posture suggested as such) for the inpatient scrubs. The kind that tear easily, so one can't hang themselves with it.

"Cora Klaus." He said, reading the badge on her desk. "Any relation to that dour-looking administrator?"

"He's my father. And yes, he's always like that. Nikolsky Charnoyevich, correct?"

Nikolsky sat himself down in Cora's overly-plush leather chair, opposite her desk. "And you're the first American to say it properly." He motioned to a wedding portrait on Cora's desk, the frame tilted just enough to allow him to see it from his side. "You have a lovely wife. When I was a boy I had a nanny who looked just like her. A Russian woman."

Cora's face fell. She responded with a curt thanks.

"I feel as though I shouldn't have gotten personal. Did something—"

"It's not your fault. Cancer. Six months ago."

A tense quiet fell over the two before Nikolsky apologized profusely.

Cora tried to twist the furrow out of her brow. "It's fine." She fiddled with a stack of papers. "I read your intake paperwork, but it leaves much to the imagination. It said you believe something in a dream..."

Nikolsky elaborated. "Three months ago my father died in his sleep. A month later my mother and brother fell to the same illness. Soon it will take me, and perhaps many more as well."

"You believe their deaths are related to dreams, and to your habit of lucid dreaming?"

"Not dreams, but time." He paused, leaning forward in the chair while he turned something over in his hands. Cora squinted. A eight-sided die. "Tell me, doctor—have you ever woken up from a dream, and wished you had never awoke at all?"