Alma Katsu - The Descent

The dreams came almost every night.

At first, I almost didn’t take notice of them. When they started, Luke had been gone only a few months and I was in that black fog that follows the death of a loved one. During the day, grief would fall on me suddenly. I’d look at the clock to find that an hour had passed and yet I couldn’t account for the time. Evenings were worse; I’d lie alone in the bed Luke and I had shared waiting for the night to inch by. Evening meant long hours of insomnia, listlessness, fitful snatches of sleep, and the pale lavender-gray of dawn coming too soon. The occasional nightmare could do little to impress me compared to that slow hell.

I first realized I was having nightmares when bits would suddenly bob to the surface of my consciousness: a flash of pale pink flesh, soft ochre candlelight, a streak of crimson blood. It was only by the end of the fourth month, when I started to have something resembling rest again, that the nightmares bled through, and I couldn’t fail to take notice of them then.

What made them especially unsettling was that they were not about Luke but about Jonathan. I hadn’t thought about Jonathan in a long time, certainly not after Luke and I settled on the upper peninsula of Michigan, in that lovely cottage where we lived together for four years. It would’ve been logical for Luke to be the one haunting my subconscious considering what we’d gone through at the end: his long, lingering illness; months shuttling him through rounds of treatments that all turned out to be for naught; weeks in the ICU; and the final stretch in the hospice, where he waited to die. That living nightmare had consumed my days for our last nine months together, and I couldn’t see any reason why it shouldn’t consume my sleeping hours as well.

I remember quite vividly the dream that made me realize something unusual was going on. It started up like the beginning of a movie I’d seen before, and sensing that I was about to have the same nightmare I’d by then been having nightly, I tried to wake myself up. But that never works in dreams, does it? No matter how hard you try, you can’t make yourself wake up. Instead, it’s like you’re Houdini trussed up in a straitjacket and chains and submerged in a dread that’s numbing and deadly, like ice-cold water. There’s nothing you can do but struggle against the restraints in the hope of freeing yourself or just keep going until, by the mercy of God, you’re released from the dream’s stifling clutches.

The dreams always took place somewhere that was both familiar and yet unknown to me, in the peculiar way that the subconscious works. Sometimes it was in a dark, shaggy forest that could almost be the Great North Woods that had surrounded my childhood home of St. Andrew, but was not; or a crumbling castle that I might’ve visited during my never-ending travels, but had not; or a dilapidated mansion with broken plaster walls and ruined woodwork that could’ve been one of the houses I’d lived in during my long, circuitous life, but was not. Strangely familiar, familiarly strange, these settings that tried to embrace me and push me away at the same time.

The dream that struck me as too strange to be simply the normal functioning of the unconscious mind started abruptly in a new setting, a dark, narrow passage whose walls were made of huge stone blocks. Those walls gave the impression that I was in a solidly made old fortress. From the cold dampness of the stone and the tang of mildew in the air, I assumed the passage was underground. It went on and on, turning and turning again, twisting in on itself like a maze. What’s more, the passage was disconcertingly narrow: a normal-size person wouldn’t have been able to fit, and small as I am I could barely squeeze through. I hurried along as quickly as I could, desperate to get out of the claustrophobic space.

Finally, I came to a door. It seemed to be as broad as it was tall and somewhat crudely made, its heavy wooden planks held together with metal straps. The wood stain had yellowed with time and almost glowed beckoningly in the darkness, but up close, the lovely patina gave way to a frenzy of scratches, as though the door had been attacked by frantic clawed animals.

Although this subterranean room was likely used for storage or perhaps as a wine cellar, the knot in my stomach told me that probably wasn’t the case. I knew from other dreams on other nights what I would find behind the door; something bad awaited me and I didn’t want to go on. I wanted to wake up, to break the dream’s horrible spell, but once I’d entered the dream world, I was locked in, doomed to play out the dream to its end.

I opened the door. Air rushed at me, damp and foul, the way air smells and feels when it has been shut up underground. There was very little light and I could see only a few feet in front of me. I sensed movement in the darkness ahead and went toward it. You might even say that I went toward it because of what was waiting for me, something I was helpless to resist under any circumstances.

The first thing I saw were his hands: a man’s hands wearing heavy iron manacles. Then I saw his arms, drawn overhead by a chain attached to the manacles. There were nights in my dreams when the man had been forced to dangle at the end of his chain, and let me tell you, that was a horrible sight, tendons strained to the snapping point, his arms wrenched from their sockets. Tonight, he had been allowed to stand, though his feet could barely touch the ground. Even though I couldn’t see the man’s face, I knew who it was; I could tell by the broad shoulders and the long torso, the elegant natural arch to the small of his back. All I could see of his face was a cheekbone and part of his jaw, visible through a tangle of disheveled black hair, but that, too, was enough.

It was Jonathan, stripped naked and bound in chains. Every one of the dreams, regardless of where it was set or how it started, always ended the same way, with Jonathan being tortured and punished by someone I couldn’t see, for reasons I wasn’t told. As he hung from his manacles, he reminded me of Saint Sebastian, his flesh pale and his head tilted sideways as though nobly resigned to his fate, ready to endure whatever punishment awaited him. There were bruises on his otherwise perfect body: a bloom of red and purple on one hip, a darker, larger one running the length of his right flank. His upper back bore crosshatched scrapes. He gleamed from head to toe with sweat and was flecked with grime. Needless to say, seeing him like this was a punch to the gut and made me violently ill. It also repulsed me to realize that despite his brutalized condition, I still found him beautiful—because it was impossible for him not to be.

I called his name but he couldn’t hear me. It was as though we were in two separate rooms and I was looking at him through soundproof glass. It was then that I realized his wounds weren’t healing instantly as they had when he was immortal, the same as I, and this meant he was again made of flesh and blood. And if he were mortal, that also meant it was possible for him to feel pain again. He was suffering.

The last I had known, Jonathan had been sent back to the underworld, to the land of the dead. It was his second trip, making him one of the select few—perhaps the only one, as far as I knew—to die twice. Four years ago, Jonathan had told the necromancer who’d brought him back that life continued on the other side, and in this life, he’d been made the consort of the queen of the underworld. When Jonathan had been dispatched a second time, I assumed he was gone forever, that his soul had gone back to the land of the dead, the queen’s domain—whoever she was.

Now I was having these nightmares, and they came to me almost every night. I couldn’t understand why I would dream of Jonathan—and why those dreams would repeatedly be filled with him being viciously tortured. He hadn’t been on my mind at all. I’d forgiven him long ago. As a matter of fact, I’d been the one to dispatch him from this world the first time, and that was only because he had begged me to. Under the conditions of our strange curse, it was the only way for him to end his immortal life, which he deeply wanted. I still felt guilty for what I’d done; after all, who can take the life of the person they love—even if it’s at his request—and not be torn apart by it? Still, I would’ve thought that if I were going to dream about anyone, it would be Luke, so recently departed from my side.

But it was Jonathan.

In my horrific nightmare that night, I tried (as always) to set him free. The chain that the manacles were attached to fed through a pulley in the ceiling that was affixed with a padlock to a ring bolted into a stone block. First, I tried to pry off the padlock but it held firm. Then, I began to search the floor on my hands and knees, groping in the darkness for a key, thinking I might find one for either the padlock or the manacles. The entire time, Jonathan stood quietly, his arms stretched overhead, oblivious to me, unconscious on his feet.

It wasn’t until I heard him make a sound, halfway between a grunt and a gasp, that I whirled back to look at him and, for the first time in any of these dreams, saw a sign of another person. A hand snaked lovingly along the side of his face, cupping his jaw. It was a woman’s hand, elegant and long, whiter than snow. He didn’t fight her. He let her caress him. I would be lying if I said that the sight of a woman’s hand didn’t unnerve me. It wasn’t because a woman was involved—this was Jonathan, after all; it was only natural that a woman would be involved. No, there was something strangely inhuman about that hand. I wanted to cry out and demand that she release him, but I couldn’t. In that peculiar way of dreams, I couldn’t scream. I couldn’t make a sound. My throat was shut tight, paralyzed with fear and anger.