Hero of Dreams (2 page)

“He cast his stones, gazed at my palm with his strange, invisible eyes, and said-“

“Invisible eyes?” Hero felt obliged to cut him short. “What sort of eyes are those, for goodness’ sake?”

The firelight flashed on Eldin’s grin and sent shadows slithering over the cave’s walls. “What kind? Why, invisible, of course! The kind when you look into them and see .. . nothing! The spaces between the stars-an empty void-you know?”

“No,” Hero shook his head.

“You can see their edges,” Eldin patiently explained, “Their rims, like craters on both sides of the nose-but inside them … nothing! I’ve met several such in dreamland.”

Hero slowly nodded and said: “You were saying?”

“Eh? Oh, yes. Well, I’d had a few drinks, I admit it-yes, and I fancy the old seer had, too-and so he read my future in the stones and in the palm of my hand. And he said:

” ‘Eldin, you’ll meet a man one evening in the northern uplands, and he’ll save your life. Then … he’ll join you on a quest-on several quests-which will take you to the farthest corners of dreamland.’

” ‘Quests?’ I said. ‘What sort of quests?’ But he’d say no more.”

Fascinated, Hero asked: “Nothing else? That was all he told you?”

“I’m afraid so,” Eldin nodded ruefully. Then he brightened and added, “Oh, yes! He did say that if we lived through these quests, how then that you’d have earned yourself a dream-name. That’s how I know you’re the one.”

“Because I have no dream-name?”

Eldin nodded.

“Well then, I reckon I’ll have to get along without one.”

“You won’t come with me?” Eldin seemed disappointed.

“Hero by name,” the other reminded him, “but not necessarily by inclination. And I don’t much care for the way your seer foretold the future. ‘If we live through it, you say? There’s one sure way to live through it, my friend, and that’s not to go questing in the first place! Sorry, Eldin, but you can count me out. Anyway, it all seems rather vague to me. We’re to go a-questing, you say? Where to? What for?”

Eldin shrugged. “I never did discover. But what does it matter, since you’re not interested?”

Now Hero frowned. He turned his face away and gazed out of the cave’s mouth into the night. “Let’s sleep on it,” he said, without looking at the other.

Eldin grinned. “I’ll take first watch,” he said.

David Hero

CHAPTER II

David Hero awakened to sunlight that burned through his eyelids and warmed his face. He briefly wondered how this could be, for he remembered that the cave he shared with Eldin faced south and away from the rising sun. Then, shielding his eyes, he opened them to squint up at latticed windows where they sloped down and formed the east-facing roof. Through the small panes he could see the morning sun rising over Arthur’s Seat.

Arthur’s Seat?

Eldinburgh! Of course it was Eldinburgh. No, Edinburgh, without the “l”! Now why on Earth had he called the city Eldinburgh? And this was his studio-flat in a converted attic in the Dalkeith Road.

In that split second of confused realization, David Hero was once again a man of the waking world. All accumulated memories of that other world-life shrank and receded into those half-suspected regions of mind at which students of the human psyche have occasionally hinted and upon which they frequently conjecture. Earth’s dreamland, in that moment, ceased to exist for him, or at least became a shadow in his subconscious.

Except …

Eldin? Now what or who in hell was Eldin? And why had Hero been so surprised upon awakening to find himself in Edinburgh? He sat up in bed, yawned and shrugged. The mind’s natural confusion in the transitory moments between dreaming and waking, he supposed. He had always had trouble waking up. Now what did he have planned for today?

A walk on the castle’s esplanade? He always enjoyed that: the view of the olden city from on high. He loved the marvelous silhouettes, which always seemed to remind him of-other places, beyond memory. And perhaps that was how he might explain the inspiration for his outre art.

He got out of bed and crossed scrubbed floorboards to peer at yesterday’s work. There, on an easel, a newly-daubed canvas was given a certain perspective as the morning light just failed to strike it. Basalt-towered and myriad-wharved, a gray and eerily fantastic city with leprous cobbled streets seemed to gloom back at him through the bleary, small-paned windows of its houses. Buckled pavements made dark-shadowed humps in subsided roads, and deserted wharves crumbled into a soulless sea. There was no sign of life at all and the whole scene was distinctly gloomy and disquieting.

Looking at the painting, Hero cocked his head on one side and frowned. The thing looked too damned dismal. Something utterly hideous had happened to that city, and he felt he should know what it was. He was not at all sure now that this was the effect he had wanted. There was nothing wrong with the painting itself; indeed, the work was good. No, the fault lay with the subject matter.

“Dylath-Leen,” he muttered to himself. “Yes-but much too dreary. A good name, though!” And he picked up a pencil and quickly scrawled “Dylath-Leen” in one corner of the canvas. “There, now I won’t forget it.”

Then he stepped back and yawned again, scratching his tousled yellow hair. The picture would be better, he thought, if done as a night scene; with dim-glowing lights behind certain of the windows, friendly groups of small people in the streets and the occasional figure on a doorstep, lanthorn held high. It would lose none of its other-worldliness, but it would certainly be made more, well-true to life? After all, Dylath-Leen was like that now … wasn’t it?

He snorted derisively at his own fancies and turned to peer at a second, older picture where it hung in a cheap frame. This one was more lively, its highlights accentuated by the glinting sun striking into the attic room. Trapped in golden beams, motes of dust seemed to float like a thousand tiny drifting airships among faery towers, domes and turrets; and below, overhanging a blue crystal sea, the foundations of the city were set in an incredible promontory of green volcanic glass. In one comer of the canvas Hero had long since scrawled the legend: “Ilek-Vad.”

Unwashed, unshaven, he frowned again, turned and seated himself at a small desk. His mind was usually strangely fertile during its first waking moments. Rapidly he sketched upon a scrap of paper. Heavy hills quickly formed a background to his sketch, and in the foreground-

He grimaced at the hairy, insect-like dog-thing he had drawn, then crumpled the scrap into a ball and tossed it in his wastebasket. Wherever the inspiration for that came from, today he could well do without it! No, today was a day for walking in the city-or perhaps a trip out to the Firth of Forth Bridge, whose massive cantilever of almost four thousand feet never failed to fascinate him-or better still a day on the coast at Dunbar, where the seagulls called and the boys collected and sold empty, fist-sized sea urchin shells washed in on the tide. There was a place where he liked to sit on the rocks at the edge of the sea and look down into deep pools, where tiny fishes darted in deeps of waving weed.

No sooner had this thought occurred to him than another, far stranger vision came. In his mind’s eye he stared down from Ilek-Vad’s cliffs of green glass into waters where the finny and bearded Gnorri swam and, with then-self-appointed and all-consuming industry, pursued the construction of intricate and utterly mazy labyrinths. This idea, coming so suddenly, startled David Hero. For this was surely inspiration! He had been commissioned to prepare a dust-jacket for an “Epic of Submarine Science Fiction,” and the vision his mind had just conjured seemed near-perfect for his purpose: a scene of gentle, subaqueous beings going about their business among the caves of a fantastic seabed-and in the foreground, to one side of the main picture, weirdly-suited and armed intruders about to burst rapaciously upon the scene.

Excellent!

… But it could wait until later in the day, perhaps this evening. Right now Hero must wash and tidy up, make his breakfast and decide where the day’s wanderings were to take him. Over eggs and bacon washed down with black coffee, he mentally reverted to his original choice: Edinburgh Castle. If ever a place were designed to create awe, wonder and inspiration in the eye of the beholder, surely this massive sky-climbing castle was that place. Yes, he would go there-and tonight he would start his sub-sea painting …

To the polyglot tourists who thronged the Royal Mile as Hero toiled up steeply slanting pavements past public houses and souvenir shops, he would not be too impressive a figure. In old jeans spotted with paint and faded by sun and sea, and wearing his yellow hair long so that it lay on the shoulders of his dark, open-necked shirt, he might well be just another wastrel idling his time away in the hot summer days. And indeed, if such was the general suspicion, then it were not too seriously misplaced.

He was academically qualified, to be sure, but his tutors each and every one had found occasion to remark that he was “much too much of a dreamer,” or “given to flights of fancy totally removed from his studies.” The one field in which he felt truly at home-and in which he somehow managed to make his way in life-was painting, and this was really as much as he wanted to do. Oh, it would be nice to be rich, certainly, but not if that meant joining in the rat race. Since he was not without a degree of responsibility he could not be termed a dropout, but at the same time his ambitions were very limited.

His trouble was that he was a man born out of tune, and perhaps out of place. He could well picture himself as a swashbuckling privateer on the Spanish Main, or an explorer of strange horizons on distant worlds-but never as an executive in some sprawling tower-block of offices on 20th Century Earth! Why, the very world felt alien to him, except in certain places. Edinburgh was one such place, with its fresh sea breezes and high-riding gulls, its castle, ancient monuments and general air of antiquity-for which reasons Hero could bear living here. And of course atmosphere was very important to his painting.

Eventually he found himself on the esplanade at the top of the Royal Mile, where he turned left out of the stream of tourists and went to lean on the old south wall. Beneath the wall the grass of the hillside fell swiftly away, merging into a rocky precipice which plunged down to a ribbonlike road that wound round the castle rock and into the labyrinthine city.

High overhead the seagulls wheeled and cried in distant discord, and Hero found one with his binoculars, following the great circle of its effortless glide as it rose in the castle’s thermal. For long moments the bird gained height, then deliberately turned out of the rising current of air and fell in great swoops towards me earth, down past the castle rock, down to where the circular structure of Granby Halls stood in the castle’s shadow.

On a piece of waste ground beside the Halls stood a billboard, and there the gull came to rest, keenly scanning accumulated garbage dumped amongst weeds and wild ivy. Hero, following the gull’s swoop, briefly scanned the billboard through his binoculars before he found the bird where it perched above the large, freshly-pasted poster. He found the bird .. . then frowned and lowered his glasses until the wording once more sprang into sharp relief. “Dreams and their Meaning,” said the poster, and beneath this heading it displayed a legend in letters which were far smaller and less legible at this distance. Hero adjusted the binoculars and tried again, and after a moment’s jiggling he managed to get the lower part of the poster into perspective.

DREAMS AND THEIR MEANING

The Extension of the Human Psyche into the Subconscious Realm of Dreams. Your Sleeping Fantasies explained in Layman’s Language, by Scotland’s Foremost Expert on the Hidden Worlds of the Mind!

There was more but the letters were much smaller and Hero was at a loss to further enlarge them and still retain a degree of clarity. Again he read the poster’s more readily legible lettering and frowned, lowering the binoculars to let them hang on his chest. Dreams and their meanings? Foremost expert?

An expert on dreams …

Almost without knowing it, simply letting his feet take him, he left die esplanade, turned right off the Royal Mile and wended his way down into the city. In a little while he had found his way to the billboard and was able to read the rest of the poster’s legend: Tues, Wed, Thurs, this week. 8 P.M.-9 P.M.- Professor Leonard Dingle (Psychology and Anthropology) talks on the fascinating subject of Man’s secret desires, the dreams which motivate his every waking moment.

There was a little more in much the same vein, but Hero read no farther. Professor Leonard Dingle . .. There was something about that name. Something that rang bells of inquiry in the back of his memory. A bright vision of a bearded, burly face flashed in his mind’s eye, then was gone. Did he know the man? But how could he know him?

And yet-

-It might be an interesting talk at that, and the dust-jacket painting could always wait until tomorrow. After all, what harm could there possibly be in attending a lecture?

The bells of inquiry in his mind turned to a distant, barely-heard clangor of alarm … but David Hero wasn’t listening.

Second Meeting

CHAPTER III

The hall was hardly filled to capacity, anything but, and Hero suspected that things were not likely to improve. Since this was Tuesday and the first night of the lecture, it fully looked as though Prof. Leonard Dingle was in for a lean time of it. In the height of the tourist season, he must have been extremely fortunate to obtain the use of the hall in the first place-and surely this was the most dismal looking audience.

The hall was about one-third full of middle-aged ladies who looked like rejects from the bingo halls with nothing better to do; foreign tourists who fidgeted and chatted in diverse tongues, obviously having paid their entrance fee in error and wondering what time the main feature began; jean-clad, leather-jacketed roughnecks who appeared to be “lying low” from someone or thing; and, in the rear row of seats, courting couples who plainly were not interested in anything the speaker or anyone else had to say.