The Giant's Almanac Andrew Zurcher (books to read fiction TXT) 📖

Reality intruded on him like the clutch of talons, like still pictures – at intervals, in spasms between bouts of darkness. He was on his side weeping; he thrashed for a moment wildly; he grasped his foot in his hands, howling to extend his leg. At length he found himself hunched on the table, panting, with his arms round his knees. His body spasmed. Again. Again.

He held himself, and the hold held.

‘Sometimes it takes a man until the day of his death to live his own life,’ said the Riddler. He held the Collar in his hand. He turned away, and left the room through its far door.

Shivering, his stomach churning, Fitz crawled off the stone table and let himself out of the Sensorium. He climbed the stairs in darkness, threaded his way quietly through the courts, and – somehow, dragging his body behind him – subsided into the safety of his bed.

That was only the first time. The next night, the Riddler called him at ten bells; Fitz stole to the Lantern Hall, slipped between the huge wooden leaves of the carved door, and dropped himself into the well of the Sad King. Another night, he was called at eleven; days passed, and then the Riddler summoned him at nine. Each time he had loaded his pockets with stones; each time he fell through the forest of arms, knifed deep into the warm brine of the well, and then shed pebbles as he pushed down the underwater well passage and bounded up towards the light. Whatever the hour, always the Riddler stood there, in the hush of the deep-hewn antechamber, regarding Fitz with curiosity as the water drained from his clothes; sometimes he spoke in his inscrutable way, other times he didn’t, but always he ushered him into the white chamber, strapped the Fetters to his wrists and ankles, and while Fitz lay upon the stone table set the Collar in place. It became easier. In his dreams in the Sensorium, in the freedom of his imagination, he only ever went to one place, and the story always seemed to be similar – the Riddler would run through the wood, and Fitz would chase him, eventually cornering or catching him, sometimes among the branches, sometimes upon the ground, occasionally in a gully or by the railway line, or in one of the wood’s several clearings.

Always in the green light among the wide sailing wings of the moths and butterflies they talked; and from the Riddler Fitz learned a great deal. One evening, as Fitz hunted the motley through the trunks of the forest floor, the Riddler jeered at him from behind a great beech, saying, ‘It seems you aren’t very good at being alone.’

‘I am, too,’ Fitz retorted. He surprised himself with his vehemence.

‘I think you will find,’ said the Riddler in his ear, ‘that you are the one chasing me.’

Later, sitting on a yardarm above the forest floor, Fitz turned this over in his mind.

‘I like being on my own in the tower room,’ Fitz said.

‘And what do you do when you are there alone, at night?’ the Riddler asked him.

‘I look out of the window,’ Fitz said. ‘Both windows. I can see over all the rooftops to the west and to the north. I can see into the Lantern Hall, and across to the Jackery, and the room where –’

The Riddler was very close to his face, peering into his eye with his eye.

‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’ he asked him.

The words lashed through him like a streak of lightning. In a flash of sudden brilliance Fitz pictured the room at the cottage, the room that looked out over the wood and, to the west, the corner of the Old Friary and Mr Ahmadi’s study. And the library. The room with all his words –

‘What do you think of, when you don’t think of anything?’ asked the Riddler. As he spoke, butterflies poured from his mouth.

Fitz would have answered, but too much crowded into his thoughts at once.

‘You remind me of someone,’ said the Riddler. He told him of a pupil he had once taught in the Sensorium, who had at length proved so adept at imaginings that he no longer required the Five Fetters, but could slip into the suspension of the dream state entirely of his own volition – and out of it, too.

‘Like you,’ said the Riddler, ‘he could communicate with me in his dreams, though not in language. But he showed me many things, and in the end he uncovered much about me that even I did not know. He became gifted in these illusions far beyond the course normal even for those special minds who are selected to train at the Heresy; the Officers called him “Dreamsnatcher” for, not content with our explorations here, he began to adventure into the minds and thoughts of those who, in everyday life, for a moment or for many moments made themselves vulnerable to his observations, intuitions and musings. He could slide by night into a bedchamber and, sitting by the side of a sleeper, from his unconscious respirations draw his character and person almost complete. If a woman were to pause on a street corner, and for a moment dissolve herself in any light or temporary abstraction, in that moment the Dreamsnatcher might pounce, and from her worm and pilfer the innermost secret fancy of her heart, a fancy so precious, perhaps, it was locked where even she had no key to redeem it. From his subjects in sleep and wake the Dreamsnatcher harvested much: their hidden thoughts and desires, their regrets and wishes, those secret parts of ourselves from which most of us are permanently exiled.’

Fitz had pondered this for some time.

‘How can we be unknown to ourselves?’ he asked the Riddler.

‘Oh, child,’ answered the long man, and shook the bough on which they were seated, so violently that Fitz feared it might break, tumbling them into the thick green light, ‘how can we not?