day thirty and nine: the befevered dream.
Dawn has barely arrived and already I find myself awake, eyes staring wide into the horizon, waiting for the sun to ensure me that it is not so terrible a thing to be awake, at least. that the dreams which plagued my mind in the hours following his departure, perhaps his turning his back his back on me, were not real. And that at least they were over, in any case.
It is yet dark. Once already I’ve bumblingly and dumbly dropped my pencil while scrawling in my journal—if only to argue to the animal inside me that it is I who have control. Yet the patch of wet yellow snow which it fell into, the patch of snow which moonstruck fear volunteered my own urine into as the nightmares lay siege to my slumber, argues otherwise. Yes, yellow, the color of fear. The cherubic light of the sun’s first rays seem hesitant to bathe it of its mark of evil.
I say, I dreamed last night of the ordeal which brought me into this chill isolation to begin with, and which I have not yet summoned the courage to manifest in writing. That this is being written now, by my own hand, argues in favor of the parasitic brute evolving within me. It has grown ever hungrier, and its food source has only swelled along with, in concert.
I dreamed of my brother’s cabin.
A fire crackled in the hearth. I held a hot tin of coffee.
“I don’t know why you shaved,” my brother laughed. “You’re cheeks will chap.”
“You can’t well con a man looking like a heathen,” I said.
My brother poured more coffee into my tin and lit a cigarette, which he passed to me, the lit one for himself. “Right. But you can’t well march through the tundra with a baby’s face and expect to come out the other side looking like a man one could trust.”
At this point in my dream a small turtle flew in through the window.
“Turtles. Always flying in through the windows, curse them.” My brother picked up a turtle swatter and swung, but missed. The turtle then blew a heart-shaped bubble into the air from out its rectum, and sped away with the sound of a tiny steam engine. A knock came upon the door. I set my coffee down and answered. There Bramford and Culley were, grim and sober.
“The guide is at the road with the dogs and supplies,” Culley muttered as he plucked his gloves off. “Mikhail should be arriving shortly.”
He shut the door and we sat in silence, drinking coffee.
A knock. It was Mikhail, riding a locomotorized Sphynx.
He slowly and very loudly rode it inside the cabin, knocking over a coat rack and an umbrella holder, made of a hollowed-out elephant’s foot. He rolled up directly in front of my brother and raised his naive jowels up. “Have you any decaffeinated beans? I like a hot drink, but not to suffer the palpitations of thrill.”
I clutched the ivory handle of my knife more tightly, whereupon 10 white tentacles grew out and ensnared my hand, weaving through my fingers. I ran my finger up the cold steel blade, then poked its tip, just enough to draw forth a droplet of blood. My motive in doing this are uncertain. Perhaps to feel something. Perhaps to simulate in some insultingly miniscule way Mikhail’s doom.
The blood then began to hiss and boil, burning itself back into my finger, poisoned by the air in the room, now rank with the pollution of Mikhail’s Sphynx-mobile, that cursed thing. My body choked on it, as if it were swallowing up its own hot excrement. I coughed.
“Bless you, my good man.” Mikhail rolled over to me and put his hand on my thigh. “We need you strong for our travels, now don’t we?”
We locked eyes…
It is here that I can no longer bear to continue, for my hand shakes so severely I can no longer decipher my scribbling authorship. The sun is now up, almost fully. Yet thick, dark clouds cover the sky, choking it out. The horizon is a wall.
new snowbeast chronicles entry. it’s been a while since the last one.
