Demon Core: Part 12

[heya_baru]

Part 1

Bodily-Self Neuromatrix

The synchronicities of the past week have proven too uncanny to ignore. The autopsy of the split-head man, as I had come to call him, had momentarily drawn my attention away from XDPH, until I recalled I recalled the notes in Hero’s fMRI data: anomalous activation of the amygdala and pineal gland.

Out of habit I checked her charts again; despite the passage of weeks since her disappearance, someone in the ER, another explorer who had found himself as drawn to her as I, had left a small note: past cEEG data resembles a nightmare? PGO waves suggest sleep, but she was awake at the time. No explanation.

It was another week before I found a specialist who would respond to my emails. Dimakis Katzouros, a doctor of experimental psychosomnology at the University Of Nevada, provided an alternate explanation:

“The seven powers of the office she has bundled, kept them handy, has fetched out the stored-away mittu-weapon”

So goes the ancient Sumerian myth of Inanna’s Descent, one of our species’s oldest works of literature; In the story, Inanna—later adopted by Akkadian culture under the Semitic name Ištar—delves to the underworld to usurp the throne from her sister. The rest of the story does not matter for this discussion. What matters is the number seven.

The number seven (Sumerian umun5) appears numerous times in the myth, most notably as Inanna enters the underworld; she must pass through seven gates, stripping off an item of clothing at each entrance. “After she had entered through the third great gate,” goes the myth in one paragraph, “someone had slipped off her the small lapis beads of her neck.”

The Sumerians considered seven to be a divine number, perhaps due to its indivisibility within the Sumerian base-60 number system. This mysticism was later imported across Mesopotamian cultures, and perhaps further north, and it may be why, millennia later, we have seven days in a week. Personally, I have seen this number haunting my sleep studies and patient records.

There are seven of these PGO burst waves on your patient’s cEEG record.

Dr. Katzouros’s conclusions seem spurious, to say the least; I told him as much, and he insisted that further elaboration would require a discussion in person.

“Eight years ago, Muri Stein Forensic Hospital thrust a patient into my lap.” Katzouros spoke with a voice as weary as an unmourned death. His syllables, battered by decades of nicotine, barely stood above the distant clatter of slot machines from the adjacent casino. “The court ruled her unfit to stand trial for the murder of her father, but that’s the least interesting part of her story. Her legal problems started—according to her—following an attempted overdose of Dimenhydrinate.” The doctor paused, lifting a plain porcelain cup of coffee to his lips. “As she was being rushed to the hospital, she said that she dreamed of a man, who she called Mister Object; even the noun man is my own description, used to aid in the telling of the tale, as this thing had a form scarcely recognizable as human, slender and upright, yes, but not a thing of flesh, a sheen inhabiting the air.”

Against my better judgment, I interrupted him. “Dimenhydrinate is a deliriant; shadow people and hat men are frequent features in anticholinergic hallucinations.” The drive from my home to the sloughing boil of Las Vegas had stretched into unanticipated hours, and I tried to shuffle my souring mood out of my voice and into a distant closet until lunchtime.

Katzouros nodded. “Of course; but these phantasms are usually limited in their interactions. They are a vague malign presence, often hovering over observers in a way that feels threatening, but rarely more. However, Mister Object could talk—and what he had to say was rather interesting. She refused to divulge exactly what the two of them said, for fear of betraying his trust, but her summary is this: Mister Object wanted to escape the dream world, and required her help in the form of a drug. In exchange for her aid, he would excise one memory from her mind for each ingredient of this drug that she acquired.”

“That seems like a rather odd trade.”

He shook his head. “I assume that she viewed her dealings as a way to shed herself of her childhood traumas, as extensive as they were. The first four trades—if you can call them that—happened without incident. She stole a handful of medications from a local compounding pharmacy, and according to her, Mister Object cut four of her worst childhood memories from her mind.”

A drunken argument broke out in the turnstile outside the buffet, bringing the story to a momentary halt. Something about missing chips, disagreements voiced in the anthropoid grunting borne of the city’s oldest atavisims.

Katzourlos laughed and refilled his coffee from the carafe. “Her plain derailed in its next act. First she gathered her remaining memories, and arranged them for excision—the next to fall to Mister Object’s knife was a memory of when she was eight, and her mother smashed a dinner plate over her head after an argument. She told me it was a memory that always returned to her at night, a poltergeist of her history, slamming doors and rattling chains in her mind.

“Either out of madness or confusion—or perhaps, I suspect, a mere desire for violence—she misunderstood the fifth component, and delivered to Mister Object the liver of her father, cirrhotic and bloody, which she had extracted from him in the night with a box cutter. That is how police found her father’s body, and eventually her. The neighbors in the retirement village heard the screams.” He snapped a pair of clubbed fingers, summoning a waitress who drifted out from behind a gilded counter to deliver a fresh carafe of overbrewed coffee and room-temperature creamer.

“I’m still not sure what this has to do with my patient.” It was around this time that I realized Katzouros was desperate to socialize. A pale band of skin at the base of his ring finger stood out among the forest of leathered flesh and dark hair.

“She was, after all these years, utterly distraught by the gravity of her mistake. Not the killing of her father mind you, but her failure to uphold her arrangement with Mister Object. He refused to exchange his liver for that memory. She failed him. Failed herself. The police found her in a park later that week, weeping inconsolably. But to answer your question. In that deal with Mister Object, she was to gather seven ingredients.”

“Heptaoneiric preponderance?”

“That number has haunted me since her arrival. She claimed that she could contact Mister Object in her dreams, any time she pleased, although he would merely ask for the next three ingredients, and nothing more. One night, on her suggestion, we preformed a sleep study during one of these contact sessions. She entered and exited REM sleep precisely seven times during the night. A week later we repeated the test. Same result.”

“I’m guessing you have a hypothesis as to why this is?”

He leaned back in his chair. “No. I do not. There is something lurking in the ocean of dreams, and it seems to come in sevens.”

I could not bear to take him seriously, this doctor and his idolatry of the unreal. We all tie ourselves into knots, choke ourselves in a million skeins of a million narratives, to silence the chanting of the truth. Truth, being our youngest god and thus wrathful in his rule, does not accept defeat with grace. That distant knocking, that appalling chant he has sung since his time in the cradle, rises above his siblings. There is no dream as deep as the bruit is loud.