I stumbled blearily down the steps towards the front door. Who could it be at this hour of the morning? The doorbell rang again.
“I know,” I muttered angrily to myself. “Stop ringing already! There's no reason why whatever this is couldn't have waited until a decent hour.”
I reached the bottom of the stairs, and angrily wrenched the door open.
“You!” I exclaimed.
“I've had the most amazing dream!” William, my old college professor and now friend, said – too cheerfully. “You need to hear this!”
I stared at him blankly.
“Look,” he said, apparently realizing his mistake. “I know you're not too much of a morning person, but really, I would have called except I didn't think of it before I left. I really did wait a long time, I've been awake since two thirty thinking about this and finding all the mater-”
I cut him off. “You came hammering down my door at seven AM on a Saturday morning to tell me about a dream you had.”
He looked flustered. “But it was the most extraordinary dream!”
“Seven AM,” I said bluntly. “On a Saturday. Are you out of your mind?”
“Er, sorry.” He looked around awkwardly. “Really sorry about that. But you really do have to hear this.”
I couldn't believe this. “Can I at least have some coffee first?”
“Oh, of course!”
A short while later, as we were sitting at the kitchen table sipping our coffee, I asked, “So, what's this dream that's so important that you couldn't wait until a decent hour to tell me about it?”
“I still maintain that, given the circumstances, this is quite a decent hour,” he said stubbornly.
I waved my hand dismissively. “It's all relative. Just talk.”
“Okay.” There was a long silence while he studied his coffee intently.
“Well?” I said impatiently. “What was this dream about?”
“I'm not quite sure where to start,” he explained awkwardly. “It's a bit complicated.”
“How about starting by telling the dream?” I suggested, rather more patiently than I felt. One cup of coffee wasn't enough to make me into an entirely agreeable person, apparently.
He nodded. “Okay. The dream.”
“I was dreaming like normal. Can't remember what exactly it was about, perhaps something with tea, I'm not sure. Anyway, I was minding my own business and a messenger appears. She was a member of the Order of the Light, and carried the spear of the Guard. She seemed surprised to see me, but she said she was looking for a little girl. She asked me if I knew of a little girl. I asked her what the girl looked like, and she said that she was in first or second grade, short for her age, with brown hair and brown eyes. I said that I did know a girl who looked like that, she was my friend Eric's daughter. And the messenger was surprised. She told me she had an important message to deliver through me. Are you ready?”
I blinked at him. One cup of coffee had definitely not been enough to wake me up properly. Well, I decided to humor him. “What's this message you're supposed to pass along to me?”
“She said that your daughter is one of the girls chosen by the Goddess to serve as a member of the Order of the Light, to protect the Light against the forces of Darkness. Oh will you stop that? I'm not mad, really!”
I set the coffee down so I wouldn't spill it, and tried to suppress my frantic coughing laughter. “Let me get this straight. You come here at practically the crack of dawn to tell me that you dreamed that Elizabeth was chosen to be a member of an ancient order that fights evil? It's a pretty funny dream, but...” I trailed off, noticing his expression. “You're taking this dream seriously. Why? It can't be real, it doesn't make any sense.”
“Eric,” he said patiently. “Not everything that exists has to make rational sense. This is why I said I didn't know where to start.” He sighed. “You know I've been working on research for a long time now. I started when I was still a student at Oxford, you know. I've been researching a woman I saw one day. Oh hell, I still haven't started at the beginning, have I?”
He'd lost me, at any rate. All of his stories from when he was a student tended to lose me. “What's the beginning?” I asked, hoping to steer him out of his confusion.
He grabbed onto my question like a drowning man. “Yes, the beginning! Well, as a student, I had a theory. It had to do with parallel realities, and how you can project yourself into different ones. They're very like our own, except they're not populated by our mundane world but by other beings. And I was trying to devise a way to think myself into crossing that border.”
This was totally something I could see a twenty year old William trying to do. “Did you make it?”
“Yes, I believe I did.”
There was silence while I tried to think of something to say to that. He believed in the occult, meanings in dreams, and so on, but to claim to have visited another dimension – the realm of science fiction – wasn't something I'd heard come out of his mouth before. “You're sure?” I asked finally.
“Well, I don't actually remember it too well. I believe they sent me back to the normal world and modified my memory slightly so that I wouldn't remember them. But I remember some of what I saw. A cloaked figure and a woman with wings, and a house they lived in. It was stuck in the back of my brain for the longest time, and one day I decided to research what I'd seen and see if anybody else had reported seeing anything similar.”
“Did you find anything?” Despite myself, the story intrigued me. He was an avid scholar of myths and legends, and the tales he brought back from the libraries were always enthralling.
“Yes, I did.” He stared at me, perhaps trying to read my expression, I wasn't sure.
“Eric, I know you think this is just another legend. But can you please just try to suspend your disbelief while I explain this?”
“My disbelief is suspended,” I replied. My disbelief was always suspended when I listened to his stories.
“No, it's not. You've suspended it like you're reading fiction, where you'll sit up at the end and say 'Well, that was an enjoyable story. Now it's time to go get a cup of tea and get on with my life.' I need you to listen to this and, just for the time it takes me to tell it, to entertain the possibility that it could be real. Can you do that?”
I took a drink of my coffee to buy time for my response. He was asking a lot. I was a deeply rational person, and while he had every right to believe in whatever he wanted, I preferred to stick with things that could be proven. Footsteps on the stairs gave me a welcome respite from the pressure of having to answer.
“Dad? Mr. Garrett is talking too much again, he woke me up.” Elizabeth peeked into the kitchen through the banister poles on the stairs. “Can't you two talk outside so I can sleep?”
I laughed, and so did William, breaking the tension between us.
“Good morning,” he said to her. “Sleep well?”
“Until you started talking,” she said grumpily. “It's Saturday!”
“Aren't you on summer break?”
“It's still Saturday!” She climbed down the rest of the stairs and onto the reading char in the corner of the kitchen. “It's too early to have to be up, even for watching cartoons.”
“I agree,” I said devilishly, grinning. I'd lost my annoyance at William for waking me up so early – he obviously was completely overexcited, and it was best to talk it out with him.
“Well,” William said, “I was about to tell your father a story. Do you want to come listen too?”
I looked at him suspiciously. “What are you going to tell?”
“Just about my research. Don't worry, I'm not trying to steal her from you.” He looked vaguely wounded, and I felt bad.
“Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that,” I apologized.
“It's okay, I know what you meant.”
While we'd been talking, Elizabeth had come over to us. “You're going to tell a story?”
William smiled. “Yes. Okay, everybody ready? Here's what I found.”
No comments:
Post a Comment