Morpheus, the Woman; or, The Naïve Dream of Redemption

by Griffin R.K.

Dedicated to the authors of weird fiction.

Dear H.,

You’ve brought it to my attention that you’d be pleased by my outlining the events of a particular incident which occurred in June of 1640, when I was sent to redeem European slaves from the city in her dreams, and, dually, to outpace the English Levant Company in the demystifying or navigating thereof. I had left my native England some years earlier, like my eldest brother and uncle, Jesuits both, having suffered a range of injustices for my faith. Despite my studies at Oxford and Inns of Court, and my duteous paying of the exorbitant and usurious fees to both the nation and university, I was denied any baccalaureate. Subsequently, I had thought to myself “So be it!” and dedicated my entire being to the pursuit of some degree of seminary training in the Roman Catholic tradition, and to don the cloth, perhaps, in a more enlightened recess of the world. I was twenty-four years of age then and, at the time of the following story, a mere twenty-eight; at both ages I was an overconfident greenhorn, entrusted with too significant a power by the responsible institutions. The year before, in 1639, I had done some travel in Goa at the behest of the Portuguese, but my natural stupidity in respect to the learning or speaking of any language other than my native tongue and Latin, irrespective of my tutoring in Hindoo by the relevant faculty, hindered any success that I might have found there; that brief furlough from the Occident was the extent of my experience abroad, the trivia of which would seem quaint if placed or relayed abreast my experiences in the dream city.

We went in that month by special request of the dragoman George Williams—one of only a few fellow Englishmen I would ever encounter in my line of work—who’d spent many nights examining her slumber, feverishly recording and bracketing her unaware whisperings in his tattered commonplace books, charting some unbelievable and indecipherable map of her dream language. He alone had access to her closets, and sometimes, hidden amongst disinterested throngs of courtiers, even made observations of the waking lady Morpheus, as she indistinctly and prosaically played her vielle á roue, as was a particularly common pastime amongst young and highborn daughters of those days. “She’s drug-entranced this time of year,” he argued, “because, apparently, the poppies are in season; and, there is something stiller, perhaps, about her mind.” I had and have only seen brief fragments of the contents of Williams’ books, and even then I didn’t trust the nature of his keen fascination, which struck me as more intimate than academic; his secrecy could easily be taken for a kind of intellectual sanctimony, as, ostensibly, the one philologist who could successfully decrypt her nighttime prophesying: a sanctimony best described as a kind of apprehension, that being to permit lesser minds access to his work in such a convoluted subject. He made sure that his sole intellectual authority in the study of her dream language remained unchallenged, and it seemed like he was successful in ensuring only his ideas in regard to that matter were seriously considered.

Williams was a short, skeletal man of an especially consumptive constitution. He was also thoroughly alienated, and never rested in his musings, delighted as he was by the endless pomps and phantasms in his mind. In the weeks immediately prior to our leaving, from my window in Rome, I could see him walk aimlessly by, taking large steps across the rubbish-strewn and whore-frequented lanes toward the Piazza del Popolo, narrowly avoiding barreling coaches, and, three or four hours later, see him return again, seemingly having accomplished nothing in that entire period. I’ll recapitulate the depth of his alienation; however, and this is despite his seasonally inappropriate layers, collegiate livery, and accoutrements, he wore his hair and beard in the popular styles of that day and, I might add, was of an unexpectedly good humor. His coming was frequently preceded by a raucous laugh and the putrid aroma of tobacco smoke, somewhat tabu in the whole of Italy.

Then, of course, though I had nearly forgotten, there was our captain, the eminent navigator and keyboardist Vincenzo Lotti, first son of the organist of the same name. Truly a polymath of the highest degree, his advanced knowing of music extended not only to the playing of various instruments but furthermore to various minutiae related to their construction and proper tuning; and, on every voyage he undertook, presuming he was driving a new seacraft, he would acquire the constituent parts, usually by demand of his patron, of a suitably small mechanical organ (if they could be referred to as that), and construct it himself within the depths of said seacraft. Even after that eye-wateringly complicated undertaking, he would in some way rig that contraption to awake his crew at the proper time with the repeated and staccato playing of the so-called “wolf-fifth” on a high register; and, as a, what he called “exercise in asceticism” (he said this to me in Latin, of course—learned in various tongues as he also was), he would then gift the products of his labor to the inhabitants or sultans of his various destinations.

It was on the eighth, methinks, that we sallied forth from Rome, eastward for her mind; we traversed many of the Barbary planets and spheres and constellations of her inner space, walked or sailed under many avatars and degenerate farces of our sun, many somehow wrong—and many seemed to be red and small, as if setting, at zenith or noon. These were places where the learned charted the courses of wandering stars alien and uncontemplated, named in honor of unknown gods. If atoms four, a world can make, then see what several worlds might in an earring be! Williams never ascended from the vessel’s bowels to review the signs and phenomena in the stars, like the amateur ephors that constituted the remainder of the ship’s passengers, even including myself, or to see in full breadth the unpopulated shores of the unnamed landmasses which we would infrequently proceed by; he spent his time frustrated, instead, with some instrument or another, belaboring his inanimate tools deep into the night, as if they were incompetent people, their dysfunction owing mostly to the constant, incessant rocking of the craft upon the ravening waves, evocative of a territorial animal, raging against and creeping up the bulwark as it were—trying to eat us whole. Those waters would occasionally devolve into a ceaseless, uncontrollable tumult, moved, it seemed, by some nearby hoary moon—at least in one world. Our galley was barely a splinter as it uneasily traversed the insides of her head; I had learned rather quickly that the substance of mind and the illusions produced therein are far greater in magnitude and strength than any physical object can possibly embody.

Like Williams’ implements, Lotti’s organ ceased to function properly as we roved along toward our destination and, in fact, became somewhat perverted by the vagaries of the time; or, should I say, “the times.” Although we would frequently awake to the aforementioned staccatissimo chords only to discover it was pitch black through our portholes, Lotti would insist upon its application in sustaining a steady rhythm and equality of rest and activity, continuing to stir himself awake and work and perform his vigils at the indicated time (even after others had long since begun to disregard that particular command of his), until that too was undermined by the organ’s beginning to play at random intervals, sometimes as if the span of six hours had passed in only a few minutes or vice versa, and he was forced to deactivate the machine, which, by the end, had also begun ringing out the sound of a somewhat epicene human voice, rather than the expected, though not necessarily more palatable, sound of an austerely and hastily fashioned organ. I vaguely remember seeing his sad, Melpomene-like face (too, the bronze color of bottles in my dimly lit closet), hunched shoulders, and hobbled walk when he came to me and eked through tight lips something to the effect of: “No need to fret over my organ any longer.”

It wasn’t until we penetrated deep into a continent that we encountered animate life. The first native of the dream world we saw, though we heard him before we saw him (and though we knew there were others), was some kind of flautist, playing to himself like a lonesome Pan, blissfully and unaware on the riverbank, lying amongst the wildflowers and mandragoras in a pavonine garb, and deep in the throes of some languorous stupor. He was sitting in the shade of the foliage of a thick forest, lustrous and of insane colors, and so very thick that the trees spilled out and encroached over the river, obscuring the sky. Everyone awake came above deck to see him and listen, silently watching; even the most debauched and ill-mannered amongst us were silent as he played. Williams was stirring the tired stragglers awake one by one, beckoning and exciting them with whispers about the first sightings of life and the sudden advent of an oppressive but welcome summery heat outdoors, though he retired to his room before all of us.

I’m sure you could gather that it was a great relief when we landed at port, which constituted a narrow hole hewn into the side of a squat, ebony fortress. There was something gilded or aureate about its walls: a subdued brilliancy not unlike the feathers of a crow, or the subtle hues sometimes gleaned in a housefly’s skin. The trees were recent victims of a harsh wind, clearly; and the roses crawling along the walls of the rich estates were almost peering; and the fumy adobe skies were catching the tobacco smoke piping from the ground; and the sparse hoi polloi which inhabited the urban penumbra around the port of the dream city were singing sensuous doggerel, casting dice, divvying up their aspers, and their soles were turnt up in the coffee houses, perhaps puffing and sitting at the hooves of a bullock; though, by the second day, their popular enthusiasm seemed to have completely dissipated. I stood at the dock, my arms crossed, almost petrified with great interest in the barren pathways, while captain Lotti heaved his mechanical organ, now only half-assembled, down the ramp behind me.

The bizarre, masked dress of the peoples there—and their taciturn, obtunded demeanor as they sauntered about the streets and past us—were apparently in preparation for the so-called “Festival of Agamemnon,” as Williams so colorfully rendered it in plain English, ever so careful to specify that Agamemnon was only a mythological similitude to whichever obscure, foreign deity or saint the festival was truly dedicated to. It was an unfortunate time of year (contrary to Williams’ previous assessment), apparently, to insist on diplomatic business, with all the locals so thoroughly invested in the embodiment of their characters and vows of near silence. Captain Lotti, even after several unsuccessful nights, would go out, pulling his organ via tether up and down the coruscating and labyrinthine pathways of the dream city, much like an ox, in search of any official, sultan, or sultana accepting of his novel gift, then, defeated, finally left it in the street, where it would remain completely untouched until my departure.

I, too, would make excursions, as was imperative, in search of the slaves who had some months prior been seen devoured by our lady Morpheus’ runaway anima. My wanderings bore nothing of substance, not even a single vocal individual in any language whose nonsense noises I could memorize and perhaps bring to the dragoman. Everyone, dejected and, furthermore, lethargic in the heat, fell under the impression that we were compelled to simply bide our time until the forthcoming Festival of Agamemnon passed, fulfill our obligations, and then leave. Until then, we wasted our days idly, typically playing cards on the docks and drinking wine lees, careful not to unintentionally offend the sensibilities of the natives, stoic as they were even in the face of trespasses. Away from the clamoring of our gambling friends, George Williams and I would take walks in the verdant wilderness, sometimes coming across new glades to admire, &c. Reclining on some hill just outside the dream city’s walls, his eyes were fixed to the heavens for the first time, trying to determine if he could identify the Cygnus constellation, mirrored from our distant side, in the sky above him—or so he told me. After didactically rambling to me his findings, he turned to face me, slightly pink-eyed and lachrymose, and said, “I’m sorry, but we’re interred here, in this dream.” He quickly thrashed the other way, head in hand, crying. I placed my left hand on his shoulder and pleaded for elaboration. “My research has told me”—his breath hitched—“that there’s no escape from the dream; and that we’re doomed to die here. I promise, I didn’t know, but it was all there, quite plainly, too—there, in my notes.” I withdrew my hand and left him there to resolve his throes of despair (which I later characterized as guilt) unsure as to how to relay, without fomenting a horrible panic, to the crew their damnation; that, or if Williams might do so for me, in his usual, tactless fashion, which would be sure to do so. The inexplicable thrusting of this task upon me was, in fact, a great gift at the time, and left me feeling distracted, or empowered.

The festival was set for the following day, and when that day came the whole crew had quickly realized that Williams, our one specialist, had vanished, presumably of his own volition. I last saw him the night before, twitching and bouncing his right leg, benighted in the corner of my closet. He was gleefully muttering to himself some romantic verse of days past, much to my hypnagogic bewilderment; his pewter skin seemed especially sick this time around, and his grin especially crooked. There was a momentary intermezzo in his recitation, probably in reaction to the suitably aware-seeming movement of my bedbound head, and then his lips closed and he fled out the door in a kind of chthonic mania, his coattails and the repugnant scent of tobacco following him. I drifted back to sleep in my tortuous melancholy. So, the day of the festival, while the search party amassed itself, I descended our little trireme to Williams’ cabin, which was evidently one belonging to an autarkic mind. Unable to traverse his room, littered as it was by books and grimoires and queer little sketches, I resigned myself to the floor. For hours upon hours, desperately flipping through and skimming the pages belonging to but one of his hundreds of commonplace books, dated 1638, in pursuit of any legible information at all, I stumbled upon the only phrase in non-enciphered English I could find. In some transcription was a circumscribed sentence or two, and an arrow leading to a note in the margins; it read simply: “The Festival of Atrocities.” I had realized then the terrible extent to which we had been deceived, and in a blurry, delirious malaise, bound upward through the empty vessel, praying to save even a single soul from oncoming perdition.

I was suddenly thrust into the absolute depths of despair upon taking no more than two steps into the dream city; and, shaking, dropped to my knees in hopeful disbelief. There, I saw a parade of many colors roaming jocularly by, catamites and adroit jesters both emitting their clamoring and cheery cries as they hoisted jewel-encrusted litters of lovers and men and women on their shoulders; and, as this sickening, debauched cavalcade rounded the corner I could see the dismembered and disemboweled bodies of many a crewmate, slave, and friend, prepared for my entertainment on tall pikes. Lotti’s stoic expression could be vaguely discerned, thirty feet in the air; and, as for the dragoman, a terrible look of fright graced his disembodied visage as it bobbed along the avenue. I imagine he believed that he would be spared, or even loved, in leading us like lambs to slaughter for her majesty, the lady Morpheus. But, just before the thought of a prophylactic suicide could truly take hold, a divine presence made itself known to me: a literal winged daemon, the angel that was her conscience. I was overcome with fear as this deus ex machina moved me almost instantaneously to the countryside in Italy, a fear which subsided as I kneaded the grass below me, and realized I was kneeling upon familiar soil; the churning in my stomach, however, has never subsided.

Fourteen years after the fact, I returned as a matter of my own curiosity. I had overheard that the Levant Company had established three open shops of arms and munitions in the dream city, and many more selling tin and other loose or unwanted dross from the Old World; and that the Holy See had been entirely unsuccessful in proselytizing the locals to Christianity or otherwise cementing themselves. Furthermore, despite Williams’ claims, the Levant Company was successful in discovering a narrow window through which mercantile seamen and colonists could enter and exit her inner world. I arranged my presence there, somehow, and was unimpressed by the destination, now toothless or tamed by industry. Instilled with a new confidence, now seeing for myself that the danger had gone, I, for the second time, paid a visit to the Festival of Atrocities, only to find it reduced to a witless droll’s play: a pantomime of dull colors. That lonesome Pan became so distant to me then. I couldn’t even whistle what he had played. What had happened to him?

I loathe and regret my part in it. Even now, our Morphea is alive and somewhere, perhaps hidden deep in the belly of the Earth, turnt inside out and powering and dulling our imaginations, cranking or playing us like her vielle á roue into eternity, if you can indeed consider her the same Morphea. How is it that all our dreams have turned to mud or clockwork? How is it that last night, I had a dream about a city, and a technology?

I hope to see you soon,

archbishop emeritus Kenelm Dallam.

1694