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Paul’s day started at around seven thirty. He dressed and shuffled along with his zimmer frame, making the long journey downstairs to unlock the main door before going to the kitchen and taking the bacon and sausages out of the fridge. He sat at the table with the bread knife and chopping board, no longer able to stand for long without the frame’s support. It was slow, cutting bread like that, and he only had two slices cut when the kitchen door opened and the carer walked in.
The carer was called Rosemary and worked through an agency to provide at-home care for the ill or elderly. She was around forty, and had been visiting them in the mornings and at lunchtime for nearly ten years. She gave Paul a cheery greeting before lighting the hob, two rings flashing blue as the ignition sparked. Rosemary cooked bacon and sausages and eggs and hash browns, toasted some of Paul’s bread, and brought plates to the table. Tea, slightly too hot, was poured from the teapot and cooled to drinking temperature by milk, cold from the fridge. On the side were bacon sandwiches, untoasted bread cut into triangles. Alex preferred a cold breakfast, in contrast to Paul.
“What have you been reading?”
Paul and Rosemary spoke about books, mostly. Rosemary liked a wide variety of stories, and Paul liked hearing her enjoy them, and what she thought about them.
“I found a story yesterday. Not long, it took less than an hour to read. I thought you’d like it.”
“Oh?”
“It’s about a colony of ants that live in a large garden, and they see the gardener going about, doing his job, and they decide that he must be some sort of god.”
“The gardener?”
“Yes. Because he changes the garden, which is the ants’ entire world, according to logic they can’t understand and using methods they can’t comprehend. They start worshipping him, try to ask for things, and interpret his actions as the results of their prayers. They go right up to him and ask for things and he ignores them.”
Paul chuckled a little under his breath. “And I’d like this because I was a gardener? What happened at the end, then?”
“The gardener destroys the colony. The owner of the place found ants in the jam and got angry. There’s a bit at the end from the gardener’s point of view. He never noticed the ants behaving strangely at all. He didn’t even know they wanted anything.”
“A bit of a downer then.”
“Maybe.” Rosemary shrugged. “I enjoyed it. Maybe I’m explaining it badly. I found it on a writing blog, I’ll see about printing a copy for you.”
“Oh, you don’t have to go to any trouble.”
“It’s no problem.” Rosemary waved off his protests every time he made them until he acquiesced.
“Thank you.” He said. “That’s very kind of you. Do you have anything else lined up?”
“A friend leant me a poetry anthology.”
“I didn’t realise poetry was your sort of thing.”
“It’s not, usually. But these are about dreams. And I suppose I wanted to know what they were like.”
“Hm?”
“It’s just… I’ve never had a dream. It’s not that I forget them, I just go to sleep and wake up and I know that I didn’t have a dream. I guess I’m hoping the poems might tell me what they’re meant to be like.”
Paul shifted uncomfortably, as unwilling to speak on the subject of dreams as he had been since he was a young man. He said something into his mug about hoping she enjoyed the anthology. Rosemary set another pot of tea to brew and went upstairs to help Alex with dressing and the toilet. They came into the kitchen a short while later, Alex leaning on his cane, and the three of them shared the second pot of tea while Alex ate his bacon sandwiches.
Rosemary left after breakfast. She would be back to cook lunch, and Beth would come to cook dinner and help Alex to bed. Paul saw her to the door, wishing her well with the poems, then went about his day.
He and Alex listened to a book reading on the radio, an hour of the book every day, the narrator masterful with his inflections. Alex nodded off afterwards, lulled by the sun on his face as it poured through the window. Outside was the nyger seed bird feeder Paul had hung years ago to attract the finches. Throughout the radio broadcast he had watched the goldfinches come and go, tracking them by the bright yellow on their wings and their deep red faces. Among them was the odd greenfinch and the bullfinch pair, though he could only see the male’s pink breast and not the duller plumage of the female.
Paul napped until the front door slammed closed, Rosemary’s loud greeting waking him. He looked out the window again and a chill went through him. There was a crow in the bird bath, perched on the stone edge while it drank. As he watched it hopped down into the water, a quick shuffle of its wings flinging water into the air and over the crow.
A crow was not a raven, but large black birds were not encouraged on the grounds of Fawney Rig. If only there was a good way to keep them away.
He wondered if he was imagining the crow staring at him. He wondered if the crows of decades past had mingled with the long dead Jessamy, if she had somehow told them why she was there, if the children of those crows passed on the story. Crows were smart, a grand-niece had once told him. They could remember faces of individual humans and communicate to other crows whether they were good or bad to them. Was it foolish to worry that the birds might hate him?
The crow hopped back onto the stone edge, shuffling its wings back and forth, still staring directly at the window. With a final shuffle it took off, and Paul released an anxious breath. He scolded himself for a moment at his reaction. If the birds were going to do anything to them they would have done so a long time ago, and they were just birds besides, not anything magical.
Rosemary only came through to them after she had prepared lunch: some buttered bread, cold ham with mustard, a few cherry tomatoes, some lettuce, and a couple of slices of beetroot. She had made more tea, which was good and hot and warmed Paul from within. Lunch was mostly silent, save for Paul’s vague recounting of the ongoing plot in the book on the radio, Alex occasionally correcting him or reminding Rosemary of the context.
Rosemary made Paul think of ants, and gardener gods, and whether gods listened to the wishes of mortals. After lunch, after Rosemary did the washing up and Alex and Paul were sat in the library, he thought about the entity in the cellar, how little it moved and how it never spoke, and wondered whether it acted as it did from anger or ambivalence. He thought about ants and gardeners and how the entire life of an ant was only a short thing for a human and whether it was the same for humans and Dream of the Endless. Was the century and more nothing to a creature that had seen countless thousands?
There was a collection of books that Paul had read his way through slowly: the books surrounding Mister Burgess’ Order of Ancient Mysteries. Alex had refused to sell them, but also refused to read them, so Paul had done it instead. The books were the resource Mister Burgess turned to to try and get something out of Dream of the Endless, and they had failed him.
The books contained spells and rituals, stories and diaries. Mister Burgess had gone through every one multiple times in the years between the summoning and his death, adding more to his collection month by month, but none gave a true result. Paul read the books and read Mister Burgess’ journal on the subject, and knew every attempt made. The spells Mister Burgess never had luck with, though Paul understood from the books that they could be powerful if only the caster could make them work. Magic, a long dead magician claimed in her diary, was a matter of conviction, of believing the spell would work so hard that it did. It could be helped along by some artefact or focus, but a magician should be able to light a fire by the simple and singular belief that it was possible.
Mister Burgess had found magic in the ritual, the belief of his cult focused on him, the belief that the ingredients had some hidden element of power, all coalescing into a single moment of power. Even then, such rituals were unsuccessful in bending Dream of the Endless to human will. Paul had grown tired years ago of reading accounts of binding rituals and lengthy lists of threats and bribes. Instead, he read stories. He learnt the name of Dream of the Endless in different languages and different times, a hundred titles, a thousand tales, countless different shapes and appearances. He read stories of gifts, of wrath, of love turning to hate or indifference or somehow both. He read of a place a person went that wasn’t real although they walked through it for days, earning an audience with a king who sat before a throne rather than on it, standing in the throne room of a castle with infinite rooms, each of which filled infinite space, yet all of which was bounded by walls they could count the bricks of. The land had moved like the sea according to tides determined by a moon that blinked like an eye, and when they stumbled out from gates of horn into reality again, days of walking and talking gone by, it was to wake up as their head nodded forward, seconds after falling asleep, all truths learnt fading from their mind so fast that they hardly believed them at all.
Paul read the stories, and the theses of esoteric philosophers, and wondered whether Dream of the Endless could understand them at all, cut off as he was from his power, wondered whether Dream of the Endless needed to be attached to their subconscious to register them as thinking creatures at all.
Paul stroked the pages of a book, the sound of Alex’s audio book a distant jumble he could recognise as language without being able to hear words. He thought about ants trapping the gardener and demanding things in exchange for his freedom, things the gardener couldn’t understand and couldn’t gift. He thought: if he were trapped by ants, and ants demanded safety in exchange for releasing them, would he agree, or would he distrust the words of his jailors? If he agreed could he bear to leave them be, or would he destroy them for fear that they would tell others how to replicate their feat.
Paul closed the book and put it back in its place on the shelf, struggling to keep his balance with only one hand on his zimmer frame. He walked slowly over to Alex, settled himself in the seat beside him, reached out for the offered hand. He felt the thin skin pulled tight over bulging veins, a palm soft with age, and drifted slowly to sleep.
Beth woke them to eat dinner, the leftovers of a beef stew frozen from the week before, thawed and cooked until it was hot and the meat soft again. Mashed potatoes disintegrated where they met the sauce, coating Paul’s mouth with the texture of starch until he rinsed his mouth with the hot water Beth poured from the kettle before it could start whistling.
After dinner Beth left for another old person’s house she had to make dinner for, and Alex said: “I want to see him.”
Paul’s sister had once asked him if he was happy. He had been around forty then, had been with Alex since he was just in his twenties, and felt slightly offended at the question.
“You just seem despondent sometimes, is all.” Sarah had said. “Not all the time, just sometimes, but it makes me think that you would be happier with someone like John Anderson.”
“John and Michael—”
“I didn’t say John specifically, just someone like John.” She’d sighed. “I know people just get sad sometimes and that its awful to think that its because of Alex, but I can’t help wondering sometimes.”
Sarah never knew about Dream of the Endless, not from the day she learnt about Paul and Alex’s relationship to the day she died, and so Paul could never say that the times she noticed were the times that Alex decided to go down into the cellar and try to bargain with a being that never reacted.
Alex coped most of the time with a cane and the occasional arm to lean on, but the smooth stone steps down to the cellar and the almost-slick stone floor were too much for him to manage. Instead there was a small lift between the kitchen and the cellar, a leftover from when it was a wine cellar and crates needed to be taken in and out easily. Within the lift was a wheelchair that Alex sat in. Paul settled behind it, the wheelchair standing in for his zimmer frame as a support and balancing aid.
The lift descended slowly, settled on the ground with the sound of rattling metal. Paul pushed Alex into the chilly room. There was an electric heater next to the guards, sockets and lights installed in the cellar years ago by an electrician overpaid for his silence. The guards listened to the radio, read books, played games, anything to stop them from falling asleep.
And in the centre, his glass prison suspended over the painted circle, was Dream of the Endless. His eyes were open. Paul could never figure out whether he preferred them closed. Open, those eyes were black from sclera to pupil, silver stars glinting within them, terrifying with the depth of them, as if all of space fit within his skull. Closed, Dream of the Endless could pass as a human, naked and vulnerable, and that sometimes seemed worse.
Alex stood from his wheelchair, leaning on his cane to walk forward until he was face to face with Dream of the Endless, separated by an inch of glass.
“You know by now what I want, I won’t repeat it, just ask for your answer.”
Dream of the Endless looked forward and said nothing. He didn’t move a muscle, didn’t blink, didn’t acknowledge the question at all. Alex waited several long minutes, looking into his eyes. Paul saw his legs and arm trembling with the effort of standing for so long.
“I could have asked you for wealth or power, like my father did. But all I ever wanted was to be free of you. Surely you want that to.”
Paul knew this would be hopeless, just as every other attempt had been, and worried further about Alex’s health. He came forward with the wheelchair. “Alex, darling, please.”
Alex sat down again, still looking up into the glass. “Take me upstairs, Paul. I won’t be coming down here again.”
Paul turned the wheelchair, the wheel catching for a moment on the stone. He turned, looked down at the smeared paint.
If he alerted someone, the paint would be replaced within minutes, Dream of the Endless re-caged and rendered harmless. He looked up, met the inhuman eyes staring back at him, a being who was more than a god watching him and judging him. He thought of a gardener trapped by ants, thought that if an ant let him out, even by accident, the gardener might be more inclined towards mercy, but if his prison was repaired without a second thought then he would almost certainly be wrathful. Maybe, he thought, Dream of the Endless wouldn’t agree not to hurt them until it was clear they would actually let him go free.
Paul looked into the infinite space of Dream of the Endless’ eyes, and nodded. He walked forward instead, pushing the wheelchair, took himself and Alex away from the cellar and up into the house. Beth returned and helped Alex with his nightly routine, put him to bed, and the two of them slept.
Paul was woken at four in the morning by one of the guards shaking him awake.
“Sir! Sir! The- The- It is gone, and something’s wrong with Fred and Ernie. They won’t wake up.”
Paul got quickly to his zimmer frame, hurried along by Abigail, one half of the morning shift of guards. She helped him with the lift and into the cellar.
The glass sphere, never so much as scratched for a hundred and six years, was shattered. Fred and Ernie, the night shift, were asleep, their eyes shifting beneath closed lids, the guns they weren’t legally meant to have on the floor next to them, as though they had slipped from sleep-lax fingers. Kevin was trying to wake them up, but his shakes and shouts and pats on the cheek did nothing.
“I’ll wake Alex, ask him if he has any ideas.” Abigail and Kevin were both looking at him, eyes wide and frightened. Abigail helped him back to the bedroom. He touched Alex’s shoulder. “Alex, something’s happened.” Alex shook under his hand, twitching and jerking. Paul pressed more firmly, jostling him a little. “Alex, darling, you’re having a nightmare. Wake up.” Alex slept on, a quiet whine slipping from his mouth. “Alex. Alex, wake up, please.”
He looked up to Abigail, hovering nervously in the doorway, biting anxiously at the skin around her fingernails. “Call a doctor.”
He held Alex’s shaking hands in his own, listened to Abigail’s side of the conversation, her voice frantic and confused. He thought about ants and their gardener god. And that if the gardener could differentiate between ants, knew which to assign blame for his imprisonment and which had freed him, he might punish different ants according to their actions. Paul had freed Dream of the Endless, and Paul was untouched, free to wake and sleep as he always had. Alex had played no role in that, had not thought about freeing him during that last meeting, and now could not wake.
Or perhaps Paul’s punishment for being accomplice to Dream of the Endless’ imprisonment was to watch Alex suffer like this, and this was Alex’s punishment for Jessamy’s long ago death. In the end, the actions of a god were incomprehensible to a human, just as an ant could never hope to understand a gardener.