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By Root 2270 0

asleep in my bed, dreaming away on pleasant topics, when suddenly I would begin to hear screams, and my dreams would get bent into nightmares. I would hear these half-human noises—bursts of bloody-throated, high-pitched screaming. I dreamed of a prison, a torture garden where both people and animals wandered the grounds—or crawled along the floor, or were chained naked to posts—while guards marched up and down the halls of the castle (sometimes it was a castle), selecting the people or animals to be brought below to some place that was underground, for tortures or cruel scientific experiments. The guards wore uniforms: some of them wore crisp, fascistic brown uniforms with gold buttons, like the zookeepers would wear, and others wore the uniforms of scientists—flowing white coats—and carried clipboards. A scientist would point out one of the people, and the zookeeper would yank at the chain the person wore around his neck, and with a whip drive the person four-legged down a cold stone staircase. Soon we on the surface would hear his screams, rising up from the vents in the floor. The screaming would grow louder, more painful and terrifying, until I woke up, and it was morning. This dream would recur with slight variations. What’s interesting about this dream is that it might have been the first dream in my life that I remembered any of at all. Before, in an alexic universe, all my dreams had bled right out of my brain only seconds after waking, but by this time I had learned enough language to begin to capture and keep my dreams.

I discovered the source of these dark dreams when Lydia and I met Griph Morgan. I do not know exactly how long Lydia had lived in that apartment before my arrival, but apparently she had never met Griph, her reclusive upstairs neighbor, until we bumped into him on the stoop of the building one afternoon when we happened to arrive home at the same time. Lydia and I had come home from the lab several hours earlier than usual that day for some reason—perhaps that was why she had never crossed paths with him before; Griph’s and Lydia’s schedules had never chanced to align. He was struggling with his keys in the door to the building when we came up the stairs. Griph Morgan was not very old, but he was in poor health. He was missing one leg (he was a veteran) and walked with a cane. He had one normal leg (though a little on the pale and flabby side) and the other one was a thin metal prosthesis, which culminated unsettlingly in a fake foot inside a sneaker; but what made this doubly unsettling was that one of the many points of pride Mr. Morgan took in his Scottish heritage was the tartan kilt he usually wore, a pleated green-and-red plaid skirt, decoratively completed by a broad black belt and a rabbit-pelt sporran. Additionally, Mr. Morgan played the bagpipes, which that afternoon he had slung over his shoulder, as he was returning home from practicing in the park. To me Mr. Morgan’s bagpipes looked less like a musical instrument than a creature from another planet: a glossy black velvet bag for a body, from the top of which protruded a series of segmented stalks that looked like they could be sensory organs, and a long infundibuliform tube coming out the front of it that could have been some sort of silly nose. Lydia introduced herself and me, and he gruffly told us his name. Lydia began talking to him in the hallway of the building, though Mr. Morgan had already begun his slow clumping three-legged ascent of the stairs. First she asked him a neighborly question having to do with recycling. The question seemed to be a bit of a conversational ruse, Lydia’s real curiosity being more about her previously unseen Caledophilic upstairs neighbor than about what exactly the building’s protocol for disposing of glass and aluminum was. Mr. Morgan—who sported an interesting style of facial hair that he called a Vandyke—was characteristically laconic.

“I don’t drink anymore,” was all he said.

“But what about cans—?” Lydia must have asked, provoking a dismissive snort from beneath the mustaches of Mr. Morgan