Charlie Dowd (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
the_second_noel) wrote2024-06-18 10:51 am
the_second_noel) wrote2024-06-18 10:51 am
echo 1
It starts with sharp little sounds, arrhythmic. Scratches.
"This dream has gone on longer than any of the others. There are maybe two hundred tally-marks on the wall."
Flickering in and out of view, silhouette-on-silhouette, Charlie looks like a shipwrecked castaway. Gaunt. Dressed in rags. Wearing a beard and hair that fall down to his waist, limp and unwashed. And there's no energy in his voice, no fight, no nothing.
"Far as I can tell, this is the longest I've stayed lucid. Able to remember the dreams that came before. Able to remember the entity I followed into them. It ain't the worst dream he's spun for me, but it's bad. It's a dream that I'm trapped in a prison pit, and that the jailers don't feed me so often. That my hunger keeps passing, gradually, into lethargy and dried-out crying. That, before the dream can end, someone lets down a bucket, and that when I see a thick shiv of bone over the bucket's rim I know the dream is gonna last a little while longer."
The picture shifts as if lights are moving across it, and now his face is lifted. Spellbound.
"There's a whole, fat arm in that bucket, white on one side and red on the other, and its skin slips off like the cream off milk, and it elbows my stomach from the inside like it's tryin' to get out, but I don't let it get out. I eat it there on the ground, right next to the rope that's still hangin' down. The idea of climbing is beyond my tired, shaking mind, except to know that, if I climbed, I'd have to leave the food behind. So I sit next to an escape rope and I eat.
"A creature at the edge of the pit starts to pull up the bucket. Once I've got the marrow out, I use a piece of bone to scratch another mark.
"This dream has gone on longer than any of the others. There are maybe two hundred and one tally-marks on the wall..."
"This dream has gone on longer than any of the others. There are maybe two hundred tally-marks on the wall."
Flickering in and out of view, silhouette-on-silhouette, Charlie looks like a shipwrecked castaway. Gaunt. Dressed in rags. Wearing a beard and hair that fall down to his waist, limp and unwashed. And there's no energy in his voice, no fight, no nothing.
"Far as I can tell, this is the longest I've stayed lucid. Able to remember the dreams that came before. Able to remember the entity I followed into them. It ain't the worst dream he's spun for me, but it's bad. It's a dream that I'm trapped in a prison pit, and that the jailers don't feed me so often. That my hunger keeps passing, gradually, into lethargy and dried-out crying. That, before the dream can end, someone lets down a bucket, and that when I see a thick shiv of bone over the bucket's rim I know the dream is gonna last a little while longer."
The picture shifts as if lights are moving across it, and now his face is lifted. Spellbound.
"There's a whole, fat arm in that bucket, white on one side and red on the other, and its skin slips off like the cream off milk, and it elbows my stomach from the inside like it's tryin' to get out, but I don't let it get out. I eat it there on the ground, right next to the rope that's still hangin' down. The idea of climbing is beyond my tired, shaking mind, except to know that, if I climbed, I'd have to leave the food behind. So I sit next to an escape rope and I eat.
"A creature at the edge of the pit starts to pull up the bucket. Once I've got the marrow out, I use a piece of bone to scratch another mark.
"This dream has gone on longer than any of the others. There are maybe two hundred and one tally-marks on the wall..."