Dark Purpose - XVI

XVI.

Cairn could feel a shift in his mind as the dreams persisted night after night. He had abandoned his attempts to reach out to Greed. There was no way he could reconcile his discoveries with that man. Greed wouldn’t understand the implications of the other world being painted and presented to him in dreams. So he would have to strive alone with the writings and the visions. The intrigue he felt from entering this twilight plane at night, growing ever clearer with each passing night, his intellectual curiosity was overwhelmed. He had so many questions, so many wishes, so much he hoped to learn.

                The days since the first dream were spent in seclusion. Cairn walled himself off, let his phone ring off the hook, except when he remembered he was awaiting a call from Boston. Only then would he pick up the phone to find some media representative attempting to contact him for more talks. He was done with taking for now, he was too engrossed to spend his time doing anything else. He felt his full attention should be put in understanding this shadow world, not just the one from his dreams though, the shadow world that existed under the veneer of the real world he lived in. Learning of the Esoteric Order of Dagon, the occult entity behind such clandestine machinations to almost be an obscurity of historical precedent made his mind burn with inquiry. He fueled these inquires with reading whilst awake and attempting to acquire dreams without waiting for night.

                He acquired a prescription for a common sleeping draught and took it in the afternoon. He was never one to be caught asleep in the day but he was wasting time when he was away from that dream plane.

                Taking the pill and laying down, surrounded on the bed by the many texts depicting the Order, Cairn drifted uneasily to sleep. His body unaccustomed to the randomness of day sleep made him uneasy but within moments he felt he had returned. The ground around his feet rumbled as if a shudder was being sent from distant place to greet his footsteps. A beast snoring in the distance causing a disturbance in the very fabric of the world. A familiarity was forming in him while present in that place. As if, even though he had only dreamt of it a handful of times so far, that he had been a part of it for much longer. A longing in his heart tugged him from one spot to the next as if he were trying to relieve previous journeys amongst the shadowed figures. The same shadowed figures, silvery and ethereal, that greeted him every night, every time his eyes were shut. Phantoms creating a barrier between himself and the bounds of existence. They ebb and flow and contort with the vibrations. He reached out to touch them but they shied away from his grasp. Fascination as opposed to fear washed over him. As if he were a young boy looking in at caged animals at a zoo. He wished that he could have a pen and paper to jot down all that he saw and felt and heard while here.

                Time was no obstacle in the twilight. Cairn felt his feet move without his say so, carting him along on a path traced over years and automatic motion. His watch, normally strapped to his wrist, was absent and all sense of progression was halted. The only visible sense of movement in time came from the shifting lights floating across the sky. Bands of blue and silver danced above his and the shadow’s heads. It was tranquil, a phantasm, a ghost of the night sky that he knew so well. If he could feel temperature in this place he knew it would feel cold, colder than the coldest winter nights in Boston that he had endured for a lifetime. He felt no oppression, he felt nothing, except the vibrations.

                He hoped that while in this plane he would see someone, he felt that it was a link, not just a dream, to someone else. That if he could only be asleep the same time as they, he could meet them. A sense grew in his chest as his body floated from scene to scene that he was waiting for an introduction, some inclusion of a second entity with more substance and weight than the shadows. To Cairn the shadows were simply that, shadows with no real substance. As though they were the people occupying the outside world around him, unaware and undisturbed by the twilight. Though he partially felt that was incorrect. He had no basis for either reason so he couldn’t be sure but somewhere deep in his being, his humanity, wanted to call out to them. To make a connection but they simply shied away. They hovered and swam around him but made no attempt to know him.

                In the distance, as the bands of blue and grey were eaten by the jagged horizon Cairn could spy the ever increasing mountain in the distance. Part of his mind wanted to move closer to the foot of the mountain, to see if in fact it was a mountain, but his feet moving without his express will, only moved in circular motions. Up and around the same paths.

                As the tension grew in his brain, wishing and willing his legs to obey him he heard something new. The vibrations, increasing in frequency and intensity, felt less like the rumblings of snoring but the echoes of a voice. A voice leagues away, perhaps at the peak of the mountain calling down towards him. Closer now, having traversed apparent leagues himself, his feet heard the vibrations and turned towards them. With the first step towards the base he felt a tearing in his mind. He was waking yet again.

                In a cold sweat, having tossed and turned knocking all the books to the floor, Carin lay dazed. He scrambled to the desk where he had laid out a notebook with a pen and in quick messy strokes he wrote:

                Scale the mountain. He is there.

                An overwhelming feeling washed over Cairn as the dreams faded away. He had to scale the mountain in his dreams. He knew the architect of all this darkness, fueling the killer was there. And he would confront it.

Misty felt tired. More tired than she had ever felt. More than the nights after a rough client, more than the day’s spent sick alone in bed, more than when she first entered into Alfons’ employ. More than when she was left on the streets to fend for herself. She was tired to her soul. The darkness she sat in, her only company the rotting corpse and the feasting rats, ebbed and flowed around her as the days progressed. From her recollection, falling in and out of delirious sleep, a few days had passed already. The Butcher hadn’t returned to her just yet and she started to give in. Give in to her fate, give in to the imminent death that awaited her when she heard those footsteps again. She had no more tears to cry, no more bile left in her stomach, no more fight in her heart. She willed her body to give up and simply expire, but she wasn’t lucky enough for that. Her throat was hoarse from screaming, something she also gave up on two days prior. Her tongue still stung from when she tried to sever it with her teeth, which she hadn’t attempted again. She would pray, if she thought it would matter. All she was left with was her own thoughts and the scratching sounds around her. Nothing left but time slipping slowly away. Moving ever forward to her last day.

The Butcher sat alone. His plans had been disrupted but he had a schedule he needed to adhere to otherwise all his work would be in vain. His eyes were closed as he listened intently to the city moving around him. The sounds cascaded past the windows of the bar he occupied. He made no contact, spoke no words. No movement except the faint breathing making his chest expand. He wanted to fall asleep in that seat, in the warmth. He wanted to reconnect and hear his voice. The only one that knew who he was, the only one who had seen his face, the only one who cared. The man in his dreams. The man on the mountain.

End Part 1

The Mountain →