Alma Katsu - The Descent

The dreams came almost every night.

At first, I almost didnt take notice of them. When they started, Luke had been gone only a few months and I was in that black fog that follows the death of a loved one. During the day, grief would fall on me suddenly. Id look at the clock to find that an hour had passed and yet I couldnt account for the time. Evenings were worse; Id lie alone in the bed Luke and I had shared waiting for the night to inch by. Evening meant long hours of insomnia, listlessness, fitful snatches of sleep, and the pale lavender-gray of dawn coming too soon. The occasional nightmare could do little to impress me compared to that slow hell.

I first realized I was having nightmares when bits would suddenly bob to the surface of my consciousness: a flash of pale pink flesh, soft ochre candlelight, a streak of crimson blood. It was only by the end of the fourth month, when I started to have something resembling rest again, that the nightmares bled through, and I couldnt fail to take notice of them then.

What made them especially unsettling was that they were not about Luke but about Jonathan. I hadnt thought about Jonathan in a long time, certainly not after Luke and I settled on the upper peninsula of Michigan, in that lovely cottage where we lived together for four years. It wouldve been logical for Luke to be the one haunting my subconscious considering what wed gone through at the end: his long, lingering illness; months shuttling him through rounds of treatments that all turned out to be for naught; weeks in the ICU; and the final stretch in the hospice, where he waited to die. That living nightmare had consumed my days for our last nine months together, and I couldnt see any reason why it shouldnt consume my sleeping hours as well.

I remember quite vividly the dream that made me realize something unusual was going on. It started up like the beginning of a movie Id seen before, and sensing that I was about to have the same nightmare Id by then been having nightly, I tried to wake myself up. But that never works in dreams, does it? No matter how hard you try, you cant make yourself wake up. Instead, its like youre Houdini trussed up in a straitjacket and chains and submerged in a dread thats numbing and deadly, like ice-cold water. Theres nothing you can do but struggle against the restraints in the hope of freeing yourself or just keep going until, by the mercy of God, youre released from the dreams stifling clutches.

The dreams always took place somewhere that was both familiar and yet unknown to me, in the peculiar way that the subconscious works. Sometimes it was in a dark, shaggy forest that could almost be the Great North Woods that had surrounded my childhood home of St. Andrew, but was not; or a crumbling castle that I mightve visited during my never-ending travels, but had not; or a dilapidated mansion with broken plaster walls and ruined woodwork that couldve been one of the houses Id lived in during my long, circuitous life, but was not. Strangely familiar, familiarly strange, these settings that tried to embrace me and push me away at the same time.

The dream that struck me as too strange to be simply the normal functioning of the unconscious mind started abruptly in a new setting, a dark, narrow passage whose walls were made of huge stone blocks. Those walls gave the impression that I was in a solidly made old fortress. From the cold dampness of the stone and the tang of mildew in the air, I assumed the passage was underground. It went on and on, turning and turning again, twisting in on itself like a maze. Whats more, the passage was disconcertingly narrow: a normal-size person wouldnt have been able to fit, and small as I am I could barely squeeze through. I hurried along as quickly as I could, desperate to get out of the claustrophobic space.

Finally, I came to a door. It seemed to be as broad as it was tall and somewhat crudely made, its heavy wooden planks held together with metal straps. The wood stain had yellowed with time and almost glowed beckoningly in the darkness, but up close, the lovely patina gave way to a frenzy of scratches, as though the door had been attacked by frantic clawed animals.

Although this subterranean room was likely used for storage or perhaps as a wine cellar, the knot in my stomach told me that probably wasnt the case. I knew from other dreams on other nights what I would find behind the door; something bad awaited me and I didnt want to go on. I wanted to wake up, to break the dreams horrible spell, but once Id entered the dream world, I was locked in, doomed to play out the dream to its end.

I opened the door. Air rushed at me, damp and foul, the way air smells and feels when it has been shut up underground. There was very little light and I could see only a few feet in front of me. I sensed movement in the darkness ahead and went toward it. You might even say that I went toward it because of what was waiting for me, something I was helpless to resist under any circumstances.

The first thing I saw were his hands: a mans hands wearing heavy iron manacles. Then I saw his arms, drawn overhead by a chain attached to the manacles. There were nights in my dreams when the man had been forced to dangle at the end of his chain, and let me tell you, that was a horrible sight, tendons strained to the snapping point, his arms wrenched from their sockets. Tonight, he had been allowed to stand, though his feet could barely touch the ground. Even though I couldnt see the mans face, I knew who it was; I could tell by the broad shoulders and the long torso, the elegant natural arch to the small of his back. All I could see of his face was a cheekbone and part of his jaw, visible through a tangle of disheveled black hair, but that, too, was enough.

It was Jonathan, stripped naked and bound in chains. Every one of the dreams, regardless of where it was set or how it started, always ended the same way, with Jonathan being tortured and punished by someone I couldnt see, for reasons I wasnt told. As he hung from his manacles, he reminded me of Saint Sebastian, his flesh pale and his head tilted sideways as though nobly resigned to his fate, ready to endure whatever punishment awaited him. There were bruises on his otherwise perfect body: a bloom of red and purple on one hip, a darker, larger one running the length of his right flank. His upper back bore crosshatched scrapes. He gleamed from head to toe with sweat and was flecked with grime. Needless to say, seeing him like this was a punch to the gut and made me violently ill. It also repulsed me to realize that despite his brutalized condition, I still found him beautifulbecause it was impossible for him not to be.

I called his name but he couldnt hear me. It was as though we were in two separate rooms and I was looking at him through soundproof glass. It was then that I realized his wounds werent healing instantly as they had when he was immortal, the same as I, and this meant he was again made of flesh and blood. And if he were mortal, that also meant it was possible for him to feel pain again. He was suffering.

The last I had known, Jonathan had been sent back to the underworld, to the land of the dead. It was his second trip, making him one of the select fewperhaps the only one, as far as I knewto die twice. Four years ago, Jonathan had told the necromancer whod brought him back that life continued on the other side, and in this life, hed been made the consort of the queen of the underworld. When Jonathan had been dispatched a second time, I assumed he was gone forever, that his soul had gone back to the land of the dead, the queens domainwhoever