Resurrection

Interlude: The Hand and The Spider

Theo sleeps uneasily, his mind screaming for a respite from the night's sudden descent into ghastly depths.  The battle he fought was more of a skirmish, a taste of the cards in hand, a flashing of feathers between foes.  He knows more is to come, and he knows the temptation to swim in the furious obsession of Berlioz's mind will beckon him again.

But for now, as with every night that he uses the eye drops, his brain and heart are exhausted, his life force drained in some way.  The Backstage exacts its price for his uninvited presence.  He wants the world to slip away.  He wants to not think of balancing the books for his beloved Gadmop.  He wants to not hunt the eldritch mysteries of the unknown and pull them kicking and screaming into the light.  He longs to shut the Solid-Liquid-Gasdom out as much as he wants to shut the Backstage out, curl into the fetal familiarity of unconsciousness and simply... float away.

But those like Theo are not so lucky.  Those who walk on the edge of the mortal veil must never forget that dark things long to be seen, and will devise their own means of making themselves known.  One who sees into the dark is himself like a lighthouse to them, like a town crier in an abandoned village inviting every shadow out of its corners.  When Theo sleeps, he is not on his guard, and so the shadows visit, crowding his unconsciousness.

Tonight-- as Claire snores softly on the couch, as Berlioz weaves hungry imaginings in the elephant totem, as the Gadmop broods with its treasury of macabre and terrible artifacts-- is such a night.

There is a nightmare that recurs in Theo's sleep.  Recurs is a gentle verb.  It invades him, invades the solace of oblivion to wakefulness and repeats its irreverent cinema when he has forgotten it.  The where of the dream is irrelevant.  It always happens in a place where he feels comfort, where he feels at home.  Tonight it is the Gadmop itself.  His fortress is used against him in the dream.

In the way that dreams begin as if they've always been reality, he comes to awareness running through every wildly decorated corridor of his museum.  He runs from The Hand.  He can't see The Hand, only the way it affects the things around him.  Massive and unrelenting, it moves like a breathless shadow through the hallways and exhibits, pursuing him without hurry.  Like a slasher film villain, it knows where he hides, what corner he has doubled back on, how to melt through the locked doors he has stowed himself behind.

Theo, sweating and panting, darts out of one secret spot into another, always believing he's outwitted The Hand.  But this disembodied appendage is no fool.  It knows his smell, knows his tricks of evasion.  It wants him.

There is a point in the dream, tonight just as every hateful time he dreams this, that Theo escapes the walls and hideaways of the Gadmop, or whatever place he has been hiding.  He finds a way outside just before those tree-trunk fingers curl around his quaking dream-body.    And lo and behold, he is like an action hero all of a sudden, with the ability to make fantastic leaps.  To the grounded eye, he can fly.  He springs into the air with only a little preparatory squatting and mounts the surrounding buildings with ease.  A surge of pride in his freedom floods him, and a wonder at how he discovers this power, this flight, at just the moment he needs it.  He escapes The Hand, which has an advantage in close quarters.  Now that Theo is outside, his pursuer can't keep up.

But The Hand is hungry for him; it knows no other goal than the dreamer fleeing its grasp.  So the Hand reaches its grasping fingers into the air and floats up, a cloud of black smoke hovering about it.  Theo must keep running, keep jumping, keep vaulting over banks and schools and hospitals in the everlasting escape from those relentless digits.  Past fields of corn and plains filled with electric windmills and oil fields infested with pumpjacks, he leaps, he flies, until at last he realizes the only escape is upward, into the thin-aired stratosphere.  Into the stars.