The Stuff of Dreams

The Devil himself appeared in Magda’s dream one night. He was ten metres tall and everything she’d ever been led to believe; goat’s eyes, horns and legs, a woman’s breasts, snake’s tongue and bat’s wings. Fire, brimstone and acrid smoke surrounded him as he smiled purposefully at her.

She tried to run but his reptilian tail swept forward and bound her feet. She tried to scream but her tongue had cleaved to her mouth. She was choking in fear as the Devil’s taloned hands reached out towards her.

Then she was awake, the sound of her own pulse washing in her ears. Her heart was hammering as she turned over to look at her alarm clock. Middle of the night. She tried to calm down and get back to sleep but her heart rate wouldn’t allow it.

She got out of bed, put on her dressing gown and became aware of a smell of burning.

Quickly she looked around the bedroom. There was no sign of anything untoward.

Beep! Beep! Beep!

The smoke alarm on the landing had been set off.

She ran down the stairs and rushed into the kitchen. No sign of anything there. Room to room she ran until she was left breathless, bemused and disorientated by the shrieking from the smoke alarm.

Pulling the step-ladder from the utility room, Magda yelled at the smoke alarm to shut up and then yelled again as she stubbed her toe, dragging the ladder up the stairs.

‘Stop it, stop it, bloody well stop it,’ she shouted as she climbed the ladder and hit the reset button on the alarm.

Blissful peace.

From the top of the ladder, Magda surveyed the upper floor of the house. Apparently, there was nothing that could have triggered the alarm so she folded up the ladder, took it back down the stairs and stacked it in its usual place.

By now there was no hope of getting back to sleep for a while and so she made herself a cup of hot chocolate and wandered around the house.

She set down her mug next to the sofa and went back upstairs to fetch her night-book as she called it; the notebook in which she made a note of all her dreams.

“Devil,” she wrote. “Big – bat’s wings and all that. Smoking, steaming, reaching out for me. Woke up in a panic with the fire alarm going off. That’s obviously what triggered the dream.”

Was there anything else she could remember? Nothing came to mind, so she closed the night-book and cuddled her chocolate. There remained one niggle. The alarm had started after she had woken up but then she quickly dismissed it. She often woke up just before the alarm clock went off. There was some change in rhythm, a soft click or something before the alarm fired. The smoke alarm was probably the same.

Then she began to muse about the significance of the Devil in a dream. What did the Devil represent to her? Evil, opposition, perhaps death. Yet she didn’t believe in the Devil per se, only as a personification of evil. So why might she have dreamed of such a creature? Was this her own dark side speaking to her? No – she was fairly sure it was Clive. Clive, her line manager. Clive the bastard. Either him or her burgeoning and frightening desire for revenge.

She opened up the night-book to answer her next question; when was the last time she had made a note of seeing Clive or the Devil?

Her disquiet returned and quickly transmuted to bewilderment as she went back through her entries. They weren’t her entries. Diagrams and drawings, passages written in strange languages and strange scripts filled the pages. This wasn’t her night-book.

She looked back at the cover. It was a black note-book exactly similar to hers and so she looked at the title page. Instead of her name there was a hand-drawn sigil that initially meant nothing to her.

Sigil. How did she know that word? How did she know what it meant? She looked closely at it and without reasoning, knew that it was the mirror gateway, the opening between worlds by reflective study of one’s own. Given that unbeckoned understanding, Magda went back through the book, page by page, failing to understand, partly understanding and then understanding with terrifying clarity. This book had been written by the creature she had seen in her dream; the very Devil himself.

Turning the pages, Magda’s comprehension grew. The Devil had written down his own dreams in this, his night-book.

‘May not even the Devil, dream?’ asked a deep voice, as clear as if spoken next to her ear.

She looked around the room but there was no apparition nor any sign that the Devil might be there. Yet she knew that she was not alone which caused her to feel, rather than fear, a thrill as if the arch-fiend had caressed her broken heart.

‘Restore my book to me,’ the Devil said.

Magda looked up and found herself surrounded by tanglewood forest with the Devil towering over her.

She was not going to let her fear get the upper hand. ‘You are a construct. A personification of evil.’

Likewise, the Devil had his fiendish nature under control.

‘Perhaps.’ He smiled. ‘But what if I’m real?’

‘Then you’d have to prove it to me in some way.’

‘Easily done,’ the Lord of Darkness replied as he stood back to reveal a pile of gold scattered between the twisted roots of the ancient trees.

Magda stared at the pile for a good minute as the Devil watched her.

‘Go on,’ he said, ‘pick some up. Feel the weight of it.’

Cautiously, Magda picked up one of the medallions. It felt cold and heavier that she had expected.

‘Uncorruptible purity,’ the Devil said. ‘Does that feel like a construct?’

Magda looked at the sigil on the golden disc.

‘You know it, don’t you?’ the Devil asked.

She did, although she didn’t know how. ‘It’s the Pilgrim’s Gate. Passage into another world.’

‘All this gold will become that gate if such is your wish.’

The golden artifacts shivered and moved around them until they formed a gate, slung between the twisting trees and the glowing mushrooms. Every part of her surroundings was transforming itself to best reflect whatever she was thinking or believing.

Being something of a neo-pagan romantic, Magda understood aspects of the Otherworld and its ways.

‘This will all turn to dry leaves in the light of morning.’

‘Only if I will it. This gold will remain as pure as it now stands for as long as I wish.’

Magda looked evenly at the Devil. ‘All this gold for your book?’

‘Is it not enough?’

Surrounded by all the gold entwined with the forest, Magda wondered how much it might be worth, as the Devil shuffled his hooves through it, kicking it around the mosses and ferns, pouring more from his hands as he did so.

She still didn’t trust the permanence of it. If he could make it rain from his hands, that surely meant that it could disappear just as easily.

‘I see that you are not convinced,’ the Devil said, wrapping his tail around a twisted willow and showering even more gold onto the ground from its branches. ‘Very well – this gold will remain here, or wherever you wish to keep it – for a half-turn of the moon. When that day arrives, I will take back my book and leave the gold with you.’

He opened his wings and flapped them once. ‘A wanion,’ he called out as he rose up into the storm-filled sky where her ceiling should have been.

The gate closed as she looked upwards. The old reality was restored as the trees shrank away into the walls and the sky was blotted out. She was back in the living room of her house with a monstrous pile of gold on her carpet, gleaming at her as if it were winking.

After a glass of wine – two glasses of wine - and some fortifying music, she went back to bed, fully expecting to find dried leaves all over her carpet in the morning, yet, not so. When she went downstairs the scattered gold remained where he had left it, glistering in the dawn light.

Out of that gold came his voice. ‘You didn’t trust me.’

‘You expect me to trust the Devil?’

‘It is your god who is capricious and vengeful, not me. My task is to maintain order by administering justice.’

Over breakfast, she tried to outstare that gold as if by concentration and force of reason, she could make it disappear, proving her point about its impermanence. Stubbornly, the gold reflected the light back at her and gave her blind spots from the glinting. She picked up a few pieces. They felt as substantial as anything else in her world. As she weighed them and pondered their worth, another series of thoughts streamed through her mind, mostly associated with Clive and revenge. A coldness crept through her as she caressed the gold. Perhaps her heart was mending and stiffening in its resolve. If the Devil was the minister of justice, there was one small matter in which he might be of assistance.

She told Frances, that week’s object of Clive’s undying love, that she was in trouble with cash liquidity, explaining that she had gold but needed something more exchangeable and quickly. As anticipated, Clive duly arrived in her office, offering to buy the gold at a reasonable price, considering her desperation. She showed him the bag-full she had brought with her and agreed; twenty thousand, knowing it was worth twice that.

Having checked online that the money had been transferred, Magda imagined herself in the bank vaults, the Devil at her side with his purposeful smile, watching Clive deposit the gold, aching for him to find the piles of dried leaves in its place, to crumple in despair. She knew it made no difference in the long run, piles of leaves, piles of gold, piles of paper money - each had equal value. The designation of worth was as capricious as God Himself. It had taken the Devil to teach her that simple truth.

Now that she had the money, she could travel. Ancient injustices needed to be redressed. Pendle. Salem. The legacy of the murderous God-fearing majority through the centuries. Magda was aching to resolve them although she had yet to understand how she might set about the task. God no longer held sway in the same way, so who was her enemy? To put it more pertinently; whose enemy was she?

She woke in the middle of the night again, her pulse racing. This time she had been dreaming of human monsters, reaching out towards her with leering faces. She switched on the light, picked up a pen and opened the night-book. It was her night-book to be sure but she could remember everything that had been written in the Devil’s night-book as clearly as if she were looking at it now.

Strange alchemy had been worked; a new way of being had been defined. Not only did she remember reading it, she remembered writing it.

Every shifting part of the world is redefined as Magda is transformed. In a rush of arcane knowledge, she walks the ancient places and meets the ancient people who seek to participate in her understanding, those who worship her and those that fear her very existence. She now knows what the Devil knows and dreams what the Devil dreams. Exploring that new amalgamation of herself and the Arch-demon. she is led to wonder whether she might become the new minister of justice wherever she might go.

She might yet save this God-forsaken, gold-hungry world.

May not even the Devil dream?