But I, for as long as I can recall, have not had a dream. Every night while my grandfather sat rocking on his bed and my sister whimpered in the kitchen and my father wandered in search of a land where the dreams wouldn’t find him, I slept.
The whole village loathed me, and my own family would have hauled me over burning coals if they could. Though I can’t think of a reason why they didn’t. The villagers spat on my path, called me spiteful names and refused to step on my shadow. They said I had sold my soul to the devil in return for sleep. The village boys — they’ll burn and rot in hell — threw stones at me every time I passed by.
But the more they hated me the more I wanted to be one of them. In fact, every night as I lay crouched under the bed where no one could see me asleep, I tried to summon dreams. I tried so hard that I feared my skull would crack. But eventually I would drift into the complete darkness my nights were doomed to.
When my grandmother was alive, she tied me to the bedpost every night so that I wouldn’t sleep and knocked my head against the wall every time she found me dozing off.
I was fairly glad when, one morning, my sister found her in her bed stiff and cold, her eyes, the color of curdled milk, popping out and her face contorted in a sickening smirk.
My sister said I would dream if I fell in love. Lovers are known to be dreamers. But that was not as easy as it sounded, not for me. I was fat and dark and far from attractive. I even had traces of beard, tufts of hair, on my chin and throat.
Once, a few years ago, a band of gypsies came to our village. When they arrived the villagers squirmed in suspicion and frowned upon the filthy nomads. But when the word spread that the gypsies had mysterious powers and secret potions that could rid the village of their dreams, people flocked to their colorful tents on the fields, with pouches full of coins. Inside their tents the gypsies lit sacred fires and performed elaborate rituals that promised the villagers escape from their frightful fate. They brought out boxes engraved with strange inscriptions and in them were stones smeared with vermilion and sandalwood paste, barks of exotic trees, strings of beads, all of which they said had magical powers. Their leader, a fat, bald man with a mustache the color of the setting sun, wore a long, decaying tooth on a black thread tied around the sagging folds of his flabby neck. He said it was the tooth of a virgin tigress and had the power to perform extraordinary miracles.
Soon the villagers were drifting away on a tide of unrestricted merriment and unabashed profligacy. The fields where the gypsies had erected their tents turned into a carnival ground. There were fire jugglers and fortunetellers and acrobatic geniuses and light-eyed whores who wore enormous rings on their nose. The revelry went on for fourteen days and nights and during that time no one in the village had the heart to return home and leave behind the carousing.
And then fourteen days and nights later, when the villagers, delirious with joy and exhausted from the intemperance, retired to their homes to catch their breath, the gypsies left the village quietly. The only traces they left behind were mounds of excrement strewn around the field and ash pits where they had lit fires. The villagers sighed in despair when they returned to the fields in the morning to find them gone. Nonetheless, they blessed the gypsies for bringing an end to their anguish. For the rest of the day they went about their jobs with a zeal they didn’t know existed, looking forward to a night of soothing slumber.
But when night came they realized that they had been deceived, for the dreams were far from gone. They cursed the devious scoundrels, swearing to burn them alive should they return to the village again. And in all this while I slept especially well, dreamless. Naturally, the wrath of the village fell on me. And they cursed me more.
My only relief was my aunt, my father’s half-sister who was abandoned by her husband on the third day of her marriage. She returned home on a drizzly evening with bunions and bruises all over and has ever since refused to step out of the house. She was the only one who loved me and when I was a child she would hold me close to her bosom and in her coarse voice sing me a lullaby every night. I could hear her heart beat at an impossible rate and all night she would sweat so much that my clothes too would be soaked in her sweat.
And then on a day like any other a stranger arrived in the village. He knocked on our door while we were eating our evening meal. He said he needed a place to stay for the night. Though I wasn’t too keen on letting a stranger stay in the house, he took my grandfather’s robotically bobbing head as a yes and showed such gratitude that I had not the heart to throw him out. And while we finished our dinner, the stranger eating from our plates too, we talked about many things. The others ate in silence. I doubt if they heard us talking, because by evening all their senses became numb and they wouldn’t know if a limb was severed from their bodies.
I asked him what it was that he did for a living and he said wryly, “I eat dreams.”
I laughed, called him a clown and then, because I somehow knew he was not lying, I begged him to devour every dream that haunted our village. I would have to pay a price, he said.
I was ready to pay any price.
He spotted my grandfather first. The nutty old man was crawling in circles around the courtyard. He stopped every now and then, spun on his rickety knees and crawled again. At times he lay flat on the ground and stared at the red sky. And then he leaped up and went back to crawling. The stranger bounded across the courtyard and landed on my grandfather. I feared his weathered bones would crumble. I watched as he lay writhing on the ground, blubbering and moaning, as the dream eater wolfed down his dreams, gobbled them whole, slurped the little that trickled down his arm and gnawed at the tiny bits that lay scattered on the ground.
My sister and aunt came running. They froze at the sight. Before they could make sense of what they saw, the dream eater was tearing away their dreams too. Once done, the dream eater burped with pleasure, rolled on the ground and hobbled across the courtyard and into the darkness. Soon the entire village reverberated with the screams and wails of the villagers. I sat in my room and chuckled.
When I woke up the next morning, the stranger — I had not asked him his name and I didn’t quite remember his face — was nowhere to be seen. I went out to look for him but the sun-drenched courtyard was empty except for the cat, the same one that had bitten my sister. I went around the house once, and then again. But the man had simply vanished.
I went to the kitchen. “When did he leave?” I asked. My sister looked at me puzzled. Then she returned to straining the starch from the rice. My grandfather sat in the corner burbling as usual and my aunt continued to stare out of the window, the hint of a smile on her puckered lips.
“Where is he?” I asked again.
“Where is who?” my sister asked.
“The man,” I said, irked.
“What man?” she snapped.
“The one who stayed with us last night,” I said.
She said she knew of no such man and that I had lost the last dregs of sanity. I told her she was a lying whore, and my aunt threw a ladle at me. My grandfather roared into laughter and skipped about in the kitchen like a happy child. My sister said she wished I had been dead in our mother’s womb.
So, I went out again. The villagers would know, I thought.
It was a day like no other in our village. The women prattled excitedly, and the men hugged and kissed each other on the cheeks as if they were meeting after ages, and the boys who once threw stones at me didn’t notice when I passed. The portly woman next door even called me into the house to chat. But when I asked her about the dream eater, she laughed first and then looked at me warily. She said she had an errand to run and I should leave.
And not just the fat hag next door, no one remembered what happened the night before. I tried to remind them how they scuttled here and there like disoriented animals struggling to drag their numb legs behind them, and how the entire village echoed with their screams as the dream eater chomped on their dreams.
“You m
ust have been dreaming,” one of them told me. “Why we were all asleep. Have you gone mad after all?” said another.
They remembered nothing of their sleepless nights or the dreams that had haunted them for so long. By afternoon, I stood on the middle of the road screaming and yelling, reasoning, cursing, and crying, but they simply frowned and clucked their tongues and moved on.
So every night I stand here waiting for the dream eater to appear again. Sometimes I spot him scampering down one of the narrow alleyways that crisscross our village, keeping strictly to the shadows. But my legs have turned to stone so I cannot run after him. At times blood wells up in my eyes and they burn so much that I have to tear tufts of hair off my balding head to make the pain go. I cry out to the villagers, begging them to remember so that I can sleep. But so deep is their slumber they can’t hear me.
They sleep.
Priyadarshini Chatterjee is based in Calcutta (now Kolkata), India and currently working as a Sub Editor with a reputed English News Daily. She holds a Masters Degree in Media and Cultural Studies from the University of Sussex, United Kingdom. Though she has been contemplating it for long, she only recently started trying her hand at fiction. The Dream Eater is the first story she has written.
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The Face in the Moon
by Eric Kiefer; published May 24, 2013
It was autumn — the time of the Weeping Moon — and the harvest was finally done.
The boy’s fingernails were dark crescents after a day in the fields, and he was tired. He was in bed and on the verge of dream when Grandmother finally came to his bedroom and asked if he remembered to follow the tradition.
“Tonight,” Grandmother said, her voice always and forever a wistful rainbow, “is the full moon before the equinox. You had better put your seed out now, child.”
Slowly, the boy rose from his bed and did what he was told. He went straight to the kitchen, where he took a single pumpkin seed from its place in the jar and placed it on the windowsill. It joined two other seeds, his father’s and Grandmother’s. The boy’s sister had recently become a young woman, and instead, according to the custom, had eaten her seed that year for good luck. The trio of amber pumpkin seeds shone in the moonlight … little daggers … little gems … but the boy was tired and barely noticed. He returned to bed, and was almost asleep before Grandmother returned.
As she entered the room, the flame from her candle cast a brittle glow on hands that had seen seventy-seven harvests, and which were now little more than gloves of skin over bone.
“Did you put out your seed, child?” Grandmother asked.
He nodded, and she patted him on the shoulder and turned to leave. But suddenly, the boy called out with the request that they both knew was coming.
“Grandmother … will you tell me a story?”
Grandmother turned back to him, letting the kind light of her smile nestle on the boy’s face. She paused in thought, wondering if the moment had come for the story she had in mind. It was the time of the Weeping Moon, after all, and the boy would be a man in barely six more autumns.
“Perhaps I can, child,” she said at last in a teasing voice. “I can tell you about the Face in the Moon if you like. But it is an old story, from the days of Machines. You wouldn’t be interested in such things.”
The boy shifted in bed and flexed his hands, revived by her taunt.
“Pleeeeaaase,” he implored, until Grandmother acquiesced and sat on the side of the bed, brushing aside a small spider that had settled beside them. They sat for a moment silently, like two birds in a nest, until the boy got the sense that she was trying to tell him something important.
“The best stories are always lies,” Grandmother said, looking down at him. “You understand this, right?”
The boy nodded, his eyes wide.
Grandmother smiled and nodded. “We’ll see, my child … we’ll see.”
And she began her tale.
“It all happened many ages ago in the days of Machine, when our kind controlled the elements and had forgotten the gods. In those days, our ancestors mastered the ability to create iron from raw ore, just as we do. But unlike us, they could breathe life into their creations, just like gods. With this powerful magic, they manufactured minions to serve their every whim. They smith’d iron horses that could travel for days without slowing. They wrought steel veins through their homes that could siphon water from the rivers and lakes. They replaced their eyes with Machines, their ears with Machines, their arms and legs and hearts with Machines. And slowly, our ancestors began to surrender their lives to the might of their iron children.
“But all great civilizations have their liabilities, and their biggest was power. You see, the world that our ancestors created needed immeasurable energy to exist. The Machines were hungry — forever hungry — and our ancestors had placed their lives in the hands of Machines. The mother of them all was a great, ever-hewing creature — the Queen Spider — that exhaled smoke and weaved webs in the spines of all human creation. The Queen Spider’s legs stretched o’er the world, connecting every Machine to her will, feeding them all and drawing from their strength.
“And she felt each of their hungers a million-fold.
“The Queen Spider’s hunger was so consuming, our ancestors sacrificed all the riches of the Earth for her. They burnt the forests, corked the rivers, and caught the winds in colossal flowers. They dug enormous pits in Mother Earth herself, and tapped her fiery breath as easily as we leech sap from a maple tree. But most of all, our ancestors craved a secret elixir, distilled from the bones and blood of the huge, dead beasts of our world’s past. The elixir was black as midnight and just as powerful, tho’, thankfully, it was not as powerful as Dream.
“All of these treasures our ancestors sacrificed to the Queen Spider, and yet she was always ravenous, and her Machine children were always multiplying.”
The boy looked out at Grandmother from under his wool blankets, awed and puzzled by her tale.
“But why did they need so many Machines?” he asked.
Grandmother shrugged.
“They needed Machines to make themselves happy back then, or perhaps they desired to be Machines themselves. Who knows? The Machines simply were. Do we ask why there are birds, or fish, or frogs, or grain? Perhaps it was the same way for them… now back to the story, child, and try not to interrupt.
“Now, our ancestors were good diggers, just like our people. They were even better, in fact. Their Machines could tear down an entire mountain in a day and carve a lake before two suns could set. With the help of their Machines, our ancestors dug into the caves, under the ocean, and even into the ice of the cold, forgotten lands. But eventually, they dug too deep, just as all the great people through time have done. The black elixir they needed so desperately began to disappear. The Queen Spider began to gnaw her own insides with hunger, and the ancestors’ Machines began to fail.
“And their world began to fall apart.
“Now, I’ve told you about how our ancestors had conquered the Earth, muzzled her oceans, and subjugated her elements. But what you don’t know is that they had also started to plunder the heavens as well. With the help of the Queen Spider, they created Machines that could withstand the tremendous cold and loneliness of the outer realms, and launched these scouts into the heavens with a giant sling. ‘Find us food for the queen!’ they commanded.
“And the Machines obeyed.
“They soared through the black of the heavens, blacker and colder than any human could ever survive, traveling for years, searching, waiting. And then one day, just as our ancestors had given up hope, the Machines finally found what they were seeking.
“They reported back to their masters in the secret language of insects — clicks and whistles — informing their lords and ladies that they had discovered rare gemstones — incredibly powerful — more powerful than all the black elixir that ever was or would ever be. The gemstones lay buried at the c
ore of a distant land, deep within its heart, hidden away under miles of rock and dirt. They were enough to feed the Queen Spider for centuries — lifetimes — and all our ancestors had to do was claim them for their own.
“And so our ancestors decided to build a mighty ship, the likes of which had never been seen — the Leviathan. The ship’s hull could not be burnt by fire, yet it was lighter than air and blessed with the ability of flight. Aboard this ship, they loaded their biggest digging Machine, the one they called the Mountain Killer. And then the crew of the Leviathan set off, through the million unknown dangers and beauties of the heavens, through time and thought itself.”
The boy scratched a lice-bug from his head. “What did they do then, Grandmother?”
Grandmother glanced out through the wooden shutters of the boy’s window, setting her eyes on the night, focusing on something faraway that the boy could not see. There was no going back in the tale now. He must know everything.
“The Moon, child …” she said at last. “They tried to steal the power of the Moon.”
“But Grandmother!” objected the boy. “Weren’t they afraid of the Moon Goddess?”
The Grandmother held up her finger for silence. “To our ancestors, the Moon was only an orb made of rock and dirt, the same as the earth that we dig in each day. They did not hold her sacred in the same way that we do. And they knew not the terrible wrath of which she was capable.
“When our ancestors landed on the shores of the Moon, the Goddess appeared to them in all of her glory. Her silvery gown hung immaculate in the still winds; her alabaster skin gleamed like raw porcelain; her phosphorescence lit the heavens themselves.
WHO ARE YOU? the Goddess demanded to know. WHAT DO YOU WANT?
“But since our ancestors didn’t believe in the Goddess, her questions fell on deaf ears. To them, she had no more substance than a ghost. They couldn’t see her, hear her, heed her warnings. And so they unloaded the Mountain Killer — the Machine that could tunnel a hole through to Hell itself — and started to dig.