Page 16 of A Theory of Dreaming
Preston frowned. His thoughts rolled and snarled, an endless and inexorable tide.Hadhe ever believed in magic, truly? He had been a serious child, more inclined to get along with his teachers than with his classmates, as his mother often teasingly remindedhim. As much as he had loved literature, he had always been able to draw firm, stark lines between the real and the unreal.
Then, unexpectedly, one memory cleaved through. He recalled one of the occasions that his father would read to him before bed, from the book of myths that had once been his favorite, their heads nestled close against the pillows. He remembered how his father’s callused hands had thumbed the pages so tenderly, paper turned orange-gold in the pooling lamplight.
“‘But all was not lost, when the city of Ys sank beneath the waves,’” his father read, his voice a low rumble. “‘Under the sea, mermaids pray in the cathedral. Under the sea, fire burns green.’”
Preston exhaled softly. It was the only sound in the room.
And then the bells began to ring.
Preston opened his eyes, breathing in smoke and brine. He was still kneeling, but his glasses had vanished. And all around him, walls of gray stone rose; as he lifted his gaze, they seemed to resurrect themselves, as ifhewere building them with his stare alone. Bleary slants of light cast across the floor, from the window behind which the water rippled and shuddered. The statues were there again, too, in their hive-shaped niches, cloaked half in shadow. Preston found the statue of the scholar again, his marble countenance unchanged, unchanging, unchangeable.
Behind him, someone coughed and spluttered. Preston whipped around to see Master Gosse doubled over, bracing himself on the floor with his hands and vomiting up seawater.
He washere. Inexplicably, impossibly, dreaming the samedream. Whatever his fanaticism, Master Gosse had been right aboutsomething.
“Are you all right?” Preston asked. It was the first time he had spoken in this sunken castle. His words soared up, syllables scraping the vaulted ceiling, and then rained back down on him.
“What a question,” Master Gosse said, between gags and huffs. “A mouthful of seawater is a small price to pay for this—this—what is this? Where are we?”
Slowly, Preston rose to his feet. He found that he had none of the shaky nervousness that he expected; while Gosse wretched and writhed, he felt steady, strong. His whole body pulsed with a powerful certainty; there was not even room for the question—is this real?—to form in his mind. He offered his adviser a hand.
Gosse took it, and Preston hauled him up. Gosse’s palms were clammy, and a cold, glistening sweat had broken out across his forehead. Preston had not seen him look worse, even on the days that he came to class half-potted.
“I don’t know,” Preston replied at last. But strangely, his stomach twinged with guilt as he said it, as if he had told a lie. Had he? There was a certain awareness in the back of his mind, gleaming with a lantern’s steady light.
“I can’t say this is quite what I expected.” Master Gosse let go of his hand and began to pace, his footsteps rough and hurried on the stone floor. “But what a magnificent place. What a realm of grand esoterism, beyond the knowledge of any other scholar in the world—think, Héloury, of all the papers on this I could write! Ofthe influence I could achieve! Such a revelation could bring the world to its knees!”
Vaguely, Preston nodded. The bells were still gonging, faintly but insistently. “Can you hear that?” he asked. “That sound?”
“What?” Gosse looked irritated. “What are you talking about? I don’t hear anything.”
There was a low flutter in Preston’s chest. “Never mind, then.”
Gosse returned to pacing about, going up to each statue in turn and examining it, running his fingers along the bases. When he stroked at the scholar’s robes, Preston felt an unexpected but powerful sense of anger.Where is your reverence?he thought.This place should not be sullied with such banal human urges.
The thought was so unusual that it froze him in place. He was not ordinarily disposed to such sentimentality, such fanciful and archaic ideas about ceremony and tradition and religious-like ritual. But there was something different about this place. It demanded veneration.
Gosse was well-occupied, so Preston began to walk toward the archway, into the second chamber. The sound of the bells grew closer, more insistent—he would find them this time, he told himself, and smash them to bits if he had to, just to stop hearing their damned ringing. Such violent imaginings were also unlike him. Preston flexed his fingers, clenching and then unclenching a fist.
In the second chamber, Effy’s statue still stood, in its place of preeminence. The crack on her face had been mended, and Preston was so relieved to see it that his knees grew weak beneath him. He dropped to the floor again—because the great beauty and the greatstillness of her form deserved worship, devotion. Here, she was a princess, a queen, perhaps even a saint.
Set in their sconces, the torches burned with green flame. Just like in the fairy tale, as if they had been lifted from the pages of his father’s book. Preston took a deep, shivery breath.
Once he felt he had paid proper honors to Effy, he rose to his feet again. There was another archway behind her statue, and from it, the sound of the bells called to him. He strode toward it, heart pounding, blood racing. He was close, so close—
And then something moved in the periphery of his vision. A shadow? No, it was more substantial than that. Preston turned around.
A man stood before him. It was not Master Gosse. His was a face Preston had not seen in so long that he feared he might someday forget it, that the details of its features would be lost to him, eroded like a cliffside in a storm. But here he stood, impossibly, tall and broad as Preston remembered, slightly slope-shouldered, olive-skinned, black-haired, with eyes that hovered somewhere between brown and green.
Awe and reverence overtook Preston again. Slowly, tremulously, he reached out his hand.
“Tadig,” he whispered.
Father.
Seven
The purpose of a formalist approach to literature is to ensure that a text stands alone as a complete entity in and of itself. The focus, therefore, is on grammar, syntax, meter, and other elements of style that can be objectively quantified. Matters of culture, societal influence, and even authorship and content must be bracketed. One must operate always under this assumption: that the author himself is an enigma, and only the words on the page are real.
