The Sandman: Book of Dreams Page 17

"For breaking," he said, growing excited. "Precisely for breaking! What are you going to do?"

  "Overstep my bounds just a tad," she said, getting to her feet and helping him to his. "I'm gonna make you a promise that in a little under two months' time, I'll see to it that you personally get to ask Wanda how the story ends."

  "You swear? he said, as the orderly started rolling his body out the door. "You'll bring me back to the world just for that?"

  "That's not what I said. Just trust me. And in the meantime, try to enjoy that extra smidgen, will you?"

  He gave it a mere moment's thought, then said, "Okay. I'll trust you."

  And he did.

  And she brought him closer to her.

  THE WRITER'S CHILD

  Tad Williams

 

  Tad Williams bounded to prominence by writing huge, bestselling novels. When I moved to America, he moved to England, as a counterweight. When he moved back to the USA, I immediately crossed the Atlantic to work on my television series Neverwhere. Possibly, like a Chestertonian villain, we could in fact be the same person. After all, you've never seen us together, have you?

  You have? Well, scratch that hypothesis.

  Here the spirits of Byron and Pound conspire to give us a cheerfully nasty little horror story with some sweet dreams glinting through it...

  (Scanner's note; Spelling and punctuation are left as found in the book. This appears to be done for effect. Please do not correct without a hardcopy to compare against.)

  This is a story I made up. Its about Jessica. She is the Princess and she lives in the Glass Castle. Listen! It is really important.

  Jessica knows she is supposed to like it in the Glass Castle. Because there are lots of things to do there. Theres Nintendo, and television--Jessica likes Rescue Rangers because it would be really neat to go around and have adventures and go to far away places--and a bunch of other stuff to do. And she has dolls that are really old that she had when she was a little girl.

  But she is a princess so she doesnt need stupid dolls. And they never say anything. Thats why they are stupid. Sometimes she used to twist their arms and take off their clothes and rip them but they still never said anything.

  A lot of other people live in the castle. Jessicas mother is the Queen of Flowers. She spends a bunch of time in the garden. The peeyonees, she always says, are so darned difficult. Nobody really cares about the peeyonees but me, she says. She is very beautiful, much more beautiful than Jessica, and she always smells like flowers. She talks very slow and quiet and tired.

  Theres a special helper named Mister George, who is sort of a bear. The Queen of Flowers gave him to Jessica when she was really little and said Mister George will be your friend. But its okay because Mister George likes it. He is very good at listening and he is not like one of the dumb dolls, because he says things. He only talks at night, and he has a really little skwinchy voice but he says really smart things.

  It is hard to hide in the Glass Castle, he says sometimes. So make sure that nothing bad happens so you dont have to hide. Mister George is all brown and has funny raggy ears and one leg is crooked. Jessica the princess used to laugh at him sometimes, but he said that hurt his feelings so she doesnt laugh at him any more.

  Jessicas grandmother lives in the Glass Castle too. She is the Duchess and she doesnt come out of her room very much. She has a television in there, she likes to watch Jeopardy. How do they know those things, she says all the time. Jessica honey could you bring me a little more hot water is another thing she says. The Duchess likes to drink Oh Long tea, which is a weird name but real. She has funny hair, all white and curly but with pink skin showing a little where the hair is thin.

  The King of Glass is in charge of the castle. He is Jessicas father and he is very handsome. Sometimes he picks Jessica up and swings her up in the air until her head almost touches the ceiling and says helicopter, helicopter. This used to make Jessica laugh. He still does it but it is too much of a dumb kid thing now.

  The King of Glass likes to write things. He goes into his room, the only one in the Glass Castle that you can not see into and he writes things. Sometimes he doesnt come out for a long time. The Queen of Flowers says he is working really hard but sometimes he just comes out and says nothing nothing nothing. His eyes are really sad when he says it. Then he goes back in the room and makes those glass noises.

  Here is something the King of Glass wrote.

  THE WRITER'S CHILD OR,

  THE SECRET MURDERER OF TIME

  Let's make a baby.

  Wait, don't turn the page! I know this seems forward, even--to those of delicate sensibilities--dramatically rude. Let me explain. It's a sort of game.

  First off, I'm going to pretend I'm a writer, so please pretend you're a reader. Please. It's important that we get these roles straight. Have you found your character, yet? Have you--in the old Method acting parlance--got your motivation? Good. Then we can begin.

  I hope my first sentence didn't shock you. (Well, that's not true. I wanted at least to catch you off-balance. Most good romances begin that way. Stability and trust should be a late addition to surprise, I think, rather than the other way around. That's just my opinion; I'm sure you have your own.) I meant, of course, that we were going to make an imaginary baby--a writer's child. But the hint of an unexpected (and certainly unasked-for) sexual relation- ship between you and me, between reader and writer, was not at all spurious. Whether a writer is a man or woman, there is something masculine in the crofting of a story--a casting-out of seed, a hunger that results in a brief spasm of generation. The reader--again, your real gender is unimportant--has a more feminine part to play. You must receive the kernel of procreation and give it a fertile resting place. If it does not please--more importantly, if it does not effect--then it passes out again, unaccepted, and the union is barren. But if it takes hold, it may grow into something greater by far than either of its parents.

  In ancient civilizations, it was sometimes believed that the lightning was the generative force of heaven--that when it struck the waiting earth, life came forth. Let me be as a bolt of fierce lightning. Let me burn for a brief moment, flashing above your green hills. Then I will be gone, and you can accept or reject my gift. The choice will be yours.

  But surely, you ask, a book, a story, the things that writers make--aren't these complete births unto themselves, read or not? Don't some writers speak of their works as children? A little thought will tell you that they are wrong, or at least incomplete. Without you, I am lightning flickering in the eyeless void. A story unread is a zen conundrum, a shout in an empty universe. Unread, unheard, a writer is a dying thing.

  Let me show you. Let's make a baby: a writer's child, the one I often think about during the early hours of the morning, as I sit in my room. (I almost said study, since the phrase "a writer's study" comes so readily to mind, but I do not study in my writing room: I write. Occasionally I brood. I also change my clothes there, since that's where my closet is. But I study in a larger worn, with more light, where I can dally among my books without the mute, shaming presence of the typewriter.) Sometimes, late at night, when I think about children, I wonder if I will ever father one. If I do, what will happen? These are frightening things to think about, or at least they are to me. I have often wished I could try it out, make all the mistakes I need to, without involving an actual human being. No one deserves to be someone else's experiment. So, my grand strategy: I will make an idea instead. An idea cannot be hurt, cannot lead a ruined life, cannot regret that it was ever brought into existence. An idea-child. I will make one. No. We will make one together.

  Another question? Well, go ahead, but I warn you: my biological clock is ticking.

  Why "together"? Because, as with men and women, and as with all the living, mating pairs of the world, bonded by their different sexes as much as by their shared species, the sharing of individuality will make a child that is strong.

 
If I write, "our baby is small and dark and round-cheeked, with green eyes shading to turquoise around the pupils, with hair as black and shiny as a silk kimono," I have begun to make a child--but you have not really done your part. Like the children of the Pharaohs, married brother to sister for marching generations, the breeding strain has not been sufficiently leavened. The children of such unions have hidden, sometimes tragic flaws. If l say instead, "our baby is small, with a face that will someday be beautiful, but is now only an admonition to a parent's love, with eyes faintly peevish and hair as soft as a whisper," I have sacrificed some of the hard edge of realistic description, but I have allowed you to do your part, to add your genes to mine. The writer's child will now take on a shape even more particular to you--hair dark or fair, as you choose, eyes of any color that seems true at the moment that you read. Thus, I sow, you nurture, and together we will make something that is unique to us two.

  So, let's make our baby. But don't misunderstand-- some decisions must be made in the writing. Its sex, for instance: only a fool of a writer could engender and then raise a child while resorting only to indefinite pronouns. That is the stuff of a horror story: "When it was eighteen, it entered college." So we must choose. In fact, you, beloved reader, you must wait this time--as most parents must, at least in this still-primitive age--for the forces of creation (me, in my current lightning-guise) to make this choice for you: boy or girl.

  In my room, I have often thought about just this thing. Should my child be a boy or a girl? This is not an easy decision. I understand boys, and so I love them, but I also feel a slight, almost imperceptible contempt for them, like an old salesman watching the pitiable attempts of a young trainee. I have been there. I have done it. (I am, after all, a male writer. 1 realize that, in the context we have established, this may be deemed a tasteless reminder, especially for male readers uncomfortable with their feminine side. Forgive me. I am feeling revelatory tonight.)

  On the other hand, I am afraid of girls. Not, I hasten to say, afraid for my own person: women have been in many ways my closest and deepest companions. But as a man, I am already a little frightened by the capacity of women to hurt the men who care for them, so the awesome and unknown territory of girls and their fathers looms before me like a new country. I feel I could easily become lost in such wild, dark lands. Still, the false courage of authors is upon me. How could I look at myself in the mirror if I would not risk this exploration? And it's only a story, af-ter all--isn't it?

  So a girl it will be. We will make a woman-child.

  Princess Jessica found the pieces of paper in the garbage can out in the front of the Glass Castle. She was looking for the coopon off a box of Cocoa Pebbles to send away because she forgot to cut it off before the box got thrown out. Princess Jessica found a bunch of paper in there, a long story. She read it all while the King and Queen were out having a Togetherness Night and Jessica was staying home with the Duchess.

  And just in case you think that I am Princess Jessica, for your informayshun I'm not. The person writing this is named Jessica too, but she is not a princess and she doesnt live in any castle.

  Jessica read the whole story and then she put it back in the garbage can outside the Glass Castle. But Mister George talked to her after the Duchess put the lights out. You shouldnt throw that away, Princess he said. That is a magic story. There is a lot of magic in it and it might help you understand what to hide from.

  That is the problem for Princess Jessica. There amt any hiding places in the Glass Castle because it is all glass. And sometimes when she gets scared by something she wants to go and hide. It used to be okay in the dark with Mister George, because he would talk to her in his skwinchy voice and say not to be afraid, that you could hide in the dark but after a while even the dark did'nt seem like such a good hiding place and Mister George got scared too. So Princess Jessica figures there are better Hiding Places somewhere, Hiding Places that really work. She and Mister George are thinking very hard about where those might be.

  Here is more of the story the King of Glass wrote.

  This girl child will have hair that curls and eyes that stare and wonder. She will be beautiful, of course--how could our child not be beautiful? We will name her.,. Jessica. Yes, that's a good name, not one of those lighter-than-air names so popular among writers of romances and fairy tales. That's a name a real little girl might have.

  But this is a writer's child. We should not wallow in too deep an evocation of reality. We cannot simply allow her to grow up in a mundane ranch-style house in the suburbs, child of workaday parents passing blinkered through their own lives. If I, the writer, and you, the reader, are to experience the full gamut of parental emotions, we must make a world for our little girl. In any case, it's much safer to raise a child in an invented world. Much safer.

  Now, stand back. This is where a writer does what a writer does.

  "Jessica was a princess and only child. She lived in the Palace of Oblong Crystals, which was located in a small but prosperous kingdom just outside the borders of Elfland."

  Good so far?

  "Her mother was named Violetta, and was called by her subjects 'The Lady of a Hundred Gardens,'for indeed the Palace of Oblong Crystals had exactly that many gardens, gardens of every shape and kind--hedge gardens, water gardens, rock gardens, winter gardens, every son of place where things could be arranged and looked at. And that is what Violetta did all day long, wandered from garden to garden speaking in her soft slow voice to the armies of gardeners and workmen and landscapers. Sometimes young Jessica wondered if she herself had somehow been budded in one of the gardens, then gently pruned and brought back to the palace. It was hard to imagine her mother coming inside for long enough to have a baby.

  "Jessica's father, the king, was named Alexander. He was called by his subjects 'The Lord of the Hundred Windows'--although, unlike the numbering of the gardens, this estimation of the number of windows in the Palace of Oblong Crystals was probably several score too low. But the subjects of the king and queen liked harmony and neatness, as subjects often will, so they bent the facts in order that the fond nicknames should match.

  "The king had gained his name because many of the palace's windows were made from the strangely shaped crystals that had given the sprawling family home its own unique title. These crystal windows bent the light in strange ways, and at times a person standing before one and staring out across the great circular entranceway, or over Gardens Numbers Forty-seven through Sixty-eight, could see... things. Sometimes they appeared to be shadows of the palace and its inhabitants during past or occasionally even future eras, but at other moments the views seemed to be of entirely different places. There was no science to the strange refractory effects, nothing that could be expected and reproduced, and it happened infrequently in any case--the crystal windows generally showed nothing except the prismatically, distorted (but otherwise quite ordinary) shapes directly outside. But even that could be fascinating. So the king--having, as kings often do, a great deal of time on his hands--took to spending his days going from window to window in hopes of seeing something rare and uplifting.

  "One spring afternoon King Alexander stood before the Rosy Bow Window on the second floor. He had been watching the rather stretched and rainbow-colored image of Princess Jessica as she walked across the wide lawn beneath, apparently off to the Mist Garden in search of her mother, when the light streaming through the Rosy Bow Window shifted. The king saw a girl walking across the lawn, but this was not a child of seven but a girl at the doorstep of womanhood, a slender but well-rounded creature with an innocent yet somehow seductive walk. The girl's long hair streamed in the breeze and eddied about her neck and shoulders. As she turned to look up at a bird passing overhead, the king saw the delicate but stirring curve of her breast beneath her dress and was filled with a kind of hunger. A moment later, as his gaze traveled up the arch of her pale neck to her face, he was startled by the familiarity of the girl's face. A moment l
ater, he realized that it was his daughter Jessica, a Jessica grown to nubility. She was beautiful, but there seemed almost a kind of wickedness to her, as though her very existence, her walk, the swing of her hair, her long legs moving beneath the wind-stirred dress, made unwholesome suggestions.

  "A moment later, the window flickered and the prismatic light returned. He squinted and saw his young daughter striding away on slim but by no means womanly legs, wading through the thick grass toward the Mist Garden.

  "The king went to his bedchamber, shaken."

  Jessica doesnt like it when the King of Glass goes into his room, the room that no one can see inside. He makes funny noises in there, clinking things, and sometimes he cries. He has been in the room a lot since he wrote the story. Jessica thinks Mister George might be wrong, that it might be a bad story and not good to keep at all. Jessica sometimes thinks she should burn it in the Duchesses little fire place when she falls asleep after Wheel of Fortune.

  Some nights when she is almost asleep herself Jessica hears the Kings footsteps come down the hall going doom doom all funny. He stands in her doorway and just looks. Even though she keeps her eyes shut because she doesnt like the way those kind of footsteps sound, Jessica knows because Mister George tells her later. His eyes are buttons and they never shut.

  It is hard to hide in the Glass Castle, he tells her. He says that a lot more lately.

  Some nights she wakes up and the King of Glass is sitting on her bed looking at her, touching her hair. He has the funny smell, the closed door smell and he smiles funny too.

  One night he was touching her hair really gentle like it might break, and he said kind of wispery Daddys home. Princess Jessica started to cry. She did'nt know why, she just did.

  That night, after the King of Glass was gone Mister George said right into Jessicas ear, something must be done and soon. Hiding is not the anser. His raggedy ears made him look really sad, so sad that she started crying again.

  Here is some more of the story the King of Glass wrote. There isnt any more. This is all that he threw away.

  "Despite this troubling vision, the next day King Alexander found himself standing again before the Rosy Bow Window, admiring the pink-tinted view of the garden, but secretly waiting for something, although he would not or could not admit to himself exactly what it was. However, nothing more interesting than a small squadron of gardeners passed by, and whether the time-refracting qualities of the window had ceased to operate, or he looked upon something that, whatever future the window displayed, would always be the same--and gardeners certainly seemed an eternal feature of the local landscape--he could not tell. He went to his Private Study, poured himself a glass of frostberry wine, and thought deeply.