Paula Guran - The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

“This won’t last much longer,” says Nan as the wheels of the platform sing out an unpleasant note. She’s right. One of the wheels has gone wobbly and so the load is badly balanced. When it tips, Tom’s mother begins to slide toward the edge. I lay my hands upon the long folds of cloth in which she’s swaddled. The blanket is more brittle than I had supposed and much more coarse. At last, Nan turns back to me. “That’s a very good description of mori .”

“I’ve a question,” I tell her. “If mori means an inward movement, is it very like somniare , which is to dream ? That’s like an inward movement too, isn’t it?”

“What do you dream about, darling?” She’s not looking at me but rather at Tom’s mother underneath the blanket.

“Sometimes I have a dream that I’m dead, or that death is a thing very close to me, but it isn’t so much a passage as . . . a breath, which is, I suppose, a movement of the air from inside to outside, and so it is like a passage.”

“And how do you know that you are dead?”

“Because a great voice whispers it to me. Moriris . You are dead.”

Now Nan looks at me very closely and I can see a strange yellowish cast to her eyes, which seem folded in dark and heavy flesh. “Each of those things is very like death, but it isn’t the same thing.”

“I’ve another question,” I tell her, “must all caro, carnis suffer from death?”

“All things suffer from death except salt.” She eyes me warily.

“Why not salt?”

“Salt has never lived.”

“I’ve another question,” I tell her, “if all caro, carnis must suffer from death and I am caro and this house is caro , does that mean that I’ve suffered from death and this house has suffered from death?”

Nan clucks again with her tongue, which is the sound she makes when she’s thinking.

“When your mother and father died, did you suffer?”

I think about this for a moment. I don’t remember Mother and Father very well. It has been Nan for so long that it may as well have been Nan ab aeterno , which is forever , like the salt. But then I think of the dream I’ve been having, and how the breath is very warm on my face and how it smells very nice and the dream whispers I am your mother but for some reason this isn’t a happy thought but a sad thought.

“I think I did,” I tell Nan.

“Then you have suffered from death.”

I can tell that Nan’s being wily with me. She has only answered a question very like my question but not my question at all.

The path through the house is long. There aren’t any branches in the path, no need to navigate — only the task of setting one foot in front of the other. We pass through the domus , which includes the pantry, and the sitting room, and the bedrooms, each one marginally smaller than the last.

“Would you come along the rest of the way with me, dear?” Nan asks in a kindly voice, for I’ve begun to fall behind her. I’ve never gone beyond the eleventh chamber before and the prospect of further travel frightens me a little although I can’t rightly say why. And Nan has never asked me to before. In fact, she often distracts me from the thought, saying I must learn the Latin, and then the Greek, and then the Egyptian afterward. Perhaps I’m progressing beyond her expectations.

Or perhaps it is something else. The grocer’s mother was much younger than Nan is now, and I’ve seen the hump growing upon her back. The way it twists her spine.

“Don’t fret, Caroline—”

“Caro,” I remind her.

“—I shall manage well enough without you, I suppose. The grocer’s wife isn’t so large as some of the others. But am I warm enough, do you think? It gets so very cold . . .”

Nan glances down at the grocer’s wife, and, for a moment, I’m a little frightened that she’ll snatch the sheets away. Her hands are trembling.

“Take my shawl, Nan, I won’t need it. Not today. The weather hasn’t turned yet.”

“That’s nice, dear,” she murmurs as I tuck my shawl around her shoulders. She pats my arm very gently.

The days pass easily after that, almost indistinguishable from one another. Soon I’ve produced passable translations of Apuleius, Pseudo-Quintilian, Marcellus Empiricus, and Pliny the Elder — and then Nan tells me it is time to return to the village again.

The weather’s been growing colder and darker and so I must begin the climb early in the morning as soon as there is light. To avoid thinking of the fall, I repeat to myself another conundrum: If when I dream I can see figments, then is it possible those figments may also dream? And if so, isn’t it possible that I’m a figment of another’s dreams? This is very like the problem Plato proposed to Glaucon about the prisoners who saw shadows upon the wall of the cave for the shadows are very much like dreams. And yet Plato never asked if the shadows themselves perceive — but it’s certainly possible that they did!

I feel quite clever in coming up with this conundrum. I wonder if, perhaps, no one else in the world has ever thought this particular thought before.

“Hello, miss,” says Tom as he begins to count out my share of potatoes. He has on a black jacket, which I’ve never seen before. I confess it shows off his broad shoulders rather well. He has slim black trousers too and black shoes that shine as if he has polished them with his sleeve.

“You look uncommonly fine today, Tom,” I say to him with my best smile. “I would not have taken you for the grocer’s boy at all, but rather for a prince or perhaps for a duke!”

“That’s very kind of you to say, miss.”

It’s the second time he has said that to me. And, indeed, he has said nothing about my best smile. Perhaps he’s in a mood, and I may draw him out of it.

“May I ask you a question, Tom?”

“If you’d like.”

“It’s a problem, really, a very difficult one. One that takes ages and ages to solve. But I’ll tell you my conundrum because—” And now I feel quite shy I’ve begun this line of talk with him. “—because you yourself made me think of it.”

I won’t tell him the rest. I won’t tell him that sometimes I dream about him and that the things he whispers to me are very nice. Instead, I try to explain to him the conundrum about the dream and the dreams and the cave and the shadows but try as I might I can’t make it exactly clear what it is I wish to say.

But Tom seems not to notice my missteps. “We solved that one years ago,” he says carelessly. His eyes are a very delicate shade of blue. I’ve not noticed this before, but then I’ve not noticed how peculiarly changeable Tom’s moods may be.

“Will you give me the answer?”

“I’m near shocked you haven’t solved it for yourself, and you being so learned too, miss!” His tone is cruel. “ We are the dreamers.”

“And me?” I’m trembling.

“You’ll see, won’t you, when we wake up! And we will, you know, we shan’t be so dozy about what goes on below us forever.”

His smile is quite terrible. He will not look at me, he only counts the potatoes, one by one and places them into the sack for me.

“Are you very angry with me?” I say softly.

“You’re a murderer,” he hisses

“But how can you say that, Tom? I’ve never murdered anyone!”

He glances at me, all sly now, like he’s playing a trick. “You wake in the night, don’t you? So there’s someone you’ve murdered, there must be!”

“Please don’t be so unkind, Tom, I can’t bear it, not from you!” I’m clutching at the hem of my dress now, just like Nan does. And then, softly: “I’m so sorry about the apple. I shouldn’t have taken it from you.”