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Dreams are funny things. Sewn from the cloth of past and future, they unravel their spools in the dead of night, slow-fingered but sure in the weaving of their tale. Tomorrow’s seeds plant themselves in the slumbering mind while yesterday’s weeds are plucked from its soil. What is memory and what is imagination when bygones sprout to life beneath the mists of dawn? When ghosts and birds sing the same tune?
And though these dreams can haunt you beyond the darkness – a voice in your head, a hand on your back – even then they are not complete. Fragmented images, maybe; a collage of fact and fiction. All vaguely familiar – but only fleetingly whole come the rising of the sun.
~
“What did ye see, Sassenach?” Jamie asked into the nape of my neck, arms engulfing me. His body absorbed the force of my trembling, and the two of us lay bound and moved by the small ripples of my fear. I sighed into his touch, warmth suffusing the icy fingers still pawing at my bedclothes. I swallowed, trying to gather my wits, but the visions of my dreamscape assailed me even now as they had in sleep. A man dancing at the foot of my bed, low-voiced and shadowed, keeping vigil over my sleeping form. And my parents just down the hall, alive but blissfully unknowing.
Taking a deep breath, I offered only a nondescript, “I – I’m not sure exactly.” I could only think to take stock of my limbs – each one was present, each one unmarred – to free my mind from the haze that fogged it.
It had been a night terror, certainly. Peppered with distorted figures and too-sharp angles, it belonged in a museum among Picasso’s geometric faces and Schiele’s contorted limbs. I could make no more sense of its shape or palette – entirely monochromatic, save the odd burst of saturated blue, red, or green – than I could the grip it had on me. For beyond the immediate strangeness of it all, lurked a nagging sense of déjà vu…Hadn’t I lived this scene already? Heard that conversation, known those faces? And the man, the mysterious sentinel – had I not met him once before?
“A ghràidh,” Jamie said, sensing my anxiety. “Nothing will harm ye now; I’m here.” An affectionate hand rubbed my back. “When I was a just boy, my Da told me how ye might drive away the brollachan that torment ye. ‘To kill the brollachan, bhalaich,’ he said, ‘ye must bore them half to death.’”
The brollachan. The shapeless ghosts of the night – and our steadfast bedmates. For years, they had stolen into our bedroom and shared our pillows, working a darker magic than even the blackest November midnight. They left no evidence of their visits but for the sweat-soaked shirts and purple half-moons beneath my husband’s eyes.
“And how does one bore the brollachan?” I asked, undeniably curious.
“Why, by repeating everything they told ye, of course! Over and over again until you canna even bear the telling of it yerself.”
“Oh. Naturally.” I replied, amused by the matter-of-factness with which my husband treated such age-old superstition. But his voice was serious, and his arms tightened around me.
“I dinna ken if ye’ve met him, Sassenach, but do ye recall me speaking of a man called Arthur Gibbs?”
I did as a matter of fact. A miniscule stable-hand with a hunchback, what Arthur Gibbs lacked in stature, he more than made up for in conversation. Endless, bumbling and – for reasons unknown to me – passionate conversation on the subject of dung beetles.
I nodded.
“Weel, everyone knows that if ye say but a word to auld Artie, ye willna make it home to yer supper – or to yer breakfast, for that matter. He’ll talk yer ear off until ye either collapse w’ hunger or die of boredom.” He shifted me so that I faced him, pressed nose to nose. “And it’s much the same w’ the brollachan.”
“Hmmm,” I said, planting a light kiss on his jaw. The distress borne from my sleeping imagination had yielded to the immediacy of my reality – but still it hovered at the edges of consciousness, a ripped and oozing scab.
“It was…odd,” I said, struggling for an explanation. Where to even begin? “A dream, obviously. One minute I was standing on the stairwell, and the next I was flying backwards, lying in my childhood bedroom. A man was there.”
Jamie’s brows drew together, concerned.
“But it was a memory, too. I’m sure of it. Something I’d forgotten, but…”
Understanding softened the hardened planes of my husband’s face.
“Aye, Sassenach. Ye told me of such things before, when I’d wake from my own nightmares and feel as though I’d lived them once already. ‘Suppressed memories’, ye called them.”
I nodded absently, my mind still half-removed.
An inherent defense mechanism, the human brain will shy away from the unbearable, pulverizing faces and words and sounds until not a trace of them remained. But now, teeming with the resurrected spirits of my past, I began to navigate the labyrinth of my denial. Key in hand, I gave it a name and I set it free.
You need not fear me. We were friends once.
With a sudden burst of electricity, lightning coursed through my veins. The missing pieces of the puzzle that had scattered upon my waking fell rapidly into place. A scene, previously broken, began to take shape, surging forward with an astounding clarity.
“Tell me about the dream as best ye can, mo chridhe,” Jamie encouraged. “And I’ll help ye scare the brollachan away.” We both sat up then, legs crossed and hands intertwined, as we faced each other and my demons together.
“Well,” I started, sinking into the rhythm of my tale. “I was four years old and listening from the stairwell…”
~
“Just listen to me, Julia,” my father plead.
Rising quietly from my hiding place, I tip-toed carefully down the stairs. A red smog clouded the kitchen doorway, veiling my parents with fire and casting the room in a menacing glow. I peered through it, baffled, but as equally enraptured by the bizarreness of it all as I was afraid.
My mother sat rigid at the table, fingers spinning anger in the air. My father stood above, all nerves and stone-cold conviction; hands on hips.
“I thought we were done with this,” my mother replied. A cascade of dark blonde hid her face, but I knew her lips to be pressed together, grim and screaming in silent reproach.
They had been fighting for days with arguments running in endless, nonsensical circles. A white-hot fury had spilled into their movements and darkened their eyes beyond my recognition. My parents, the almost-strangers. Feeling startlingly alone, I had buried my fear like a dead corpse and would not visit its grave.
I crept closer, ears straining, and heard my mother whisper, “I’m so tired, Henry.”
My father knelt to the floor and rested a consolatory hand on her shoulder. His face turned up, and I was suddenly struck by the similarities of our features. Whiskey eyes and brown curls, a smattering of freckles dotting his nose. They were muted in my dreamscape, color drained from his body and fused to create an external glow. My mother shined in the same way – but she was limned in green, not my father's purple. These colors clung to the space around them, deepening and fading with the tides of my parents’ anger.
“This time is different,” my father insisted. “You heard what your brother said…”
“I don’t care what Lambert said!” my mother burst violently. She stood, bearing down upon my father and ready to challenge what rebuttals he would make.
Grown careless with excitement, my feet stumbled forward and found a weak spot. My mother’s shoulders tensed, chastised by the creaking of the floorboards, and she lowered her voice.
"It’s been months, Henry. Years,” she spat, throwing up her hands in exasperation, “that we’ve spent looking for her. And what have we to show for it? Not a thing, not a trace, not a –”
But my father was not deterred by her resistance. He stood and stalked across the room, returning with a fistful of unlabeled folders. He flicked them open on the table, pointing a stern finger at what documents lay within.
“And what do you make of this then?” he cried, “Did you read what Lambert said? This man knows of her – he met her. Don’t you see? We’ve been too literal, too shortsighted. Looking in all the wrong places.”
“Oh, there’s always ‘a man’! And there’s always another place, isn’t there?” Neither of my parents had a care for volume now, frustration detonating their words like atom bombs. The kitchen blazed red and orange, tongues of flame licking the walls and writing accusations on every surface. “I can’t do it anymore, Henry! I can’t go on hoping that....”
Moved suddenly to tenderness, my father went to take her hand. She drew it away, just beyond reach, and I saw the gulf widen between them.
“This is it, Julia. I can feel it. We are so close. I – I know it.”
Craning my neck around the doorway, I could see my parents’ more clearly now: my mother, nearly broken; my father, at once hopeful and melancholic. My heart ached and yearned for them, though their conversation had taken to paths I could not follow.
“We can save her,” my father continued. “We can keep her here and put an end to this before it begins. You only have to listen. The Prophecy says…” But my mother only shook her head, adamant in her defense.
“I don’t care about the bloody Prophecy!” she sobbed. Another hand floundered mid-air, dropping to the table in silent surrender. Her sentences became stilted, and she resigned herself to just a whisper. “What if – what if it is meant to happen? What if finding her does more harm than good?”
The question hung heavily in the air, draping the kitchen in a thicker cloak of doubt and dread. But then: a knock at the door. Once, twice, three times bony knuckles pierced the quiet of our home and set my bones to shaking. My mother spoke again, but now her lips moved in soundless vowels and consonants. Pressing an ear to the wall, I thought I heard her say: “I will not leave her again.”
Realization dawned.
In recent months, my parents had been away more often than not. On business, they always assured me. We’ll be home before you know it. But weeks had sometimes stretched between their departures and returns, and it was during these lengthy absences that I’d fallen under the temporary care of my Uncle Lamb. A man of few words, he left me largely to do as I pleased, and so I had settled into a strange half-orphan existence.
But it would be another year yet before my parents would leave me and never come back. Death found in an overturned vehicle, purple and green auras extinguished. My world shattered and changed forever.
“That will be him then,” my father said. Without looking at my mother, he stood to greet the stranger beyond the door.
Still confused – Me? Was I the object of their search? – I scurried back to my hiding place and waited with baited breath. The door swung open and I heard a voice – foreign but distinctly familiar, like a cat’s faint scratching – and the December gale whipping round the house.
"Mr. Beauchamp,” the voice began, “It’s a pleasure.”
My father stepped to the side, welcoming our guest across the threshold. Cowering in the shadows, I saw the visitor look up in my direction as if sensing my gaze and seeking it.
Fearing discovery, I made to run but found my limbs had turned to jelly. Suddenly, the world folded into thirds and fourths, stairs collapsing and the roof tearing free. Like a ragdoll, I felt myself lifted from the stairs and thrust into No Man’s Land, ending finally in a bed.
The room around was me was undoubtedly my own – a doll collection in the corner, flowers blossoming on the wallpaper – though everything inside shone an eerie blue. I felt hallow, my stomach growling, and my bones seemed unusually brittle for a girl of four. I smelled antiseptic, sickness. Too weak to manage sitting, I lay at the mercy of a silhouetted stranger, sprung from the darkness and at the foot of my bed.
I knew it to be the man from downstairs. For while his face remained hidden, his voice – that voice – rang as clear as any crystal.
I opened my mouth to speak, but he pressed a finger to his lips. “Hush, child,” he spoke. “You need not fear me. We were friends once.”
My mind turned inwards, flipping through a mental catalog of images. My parents and Uncle Lamb, my scuffed school shoes and the scar on my shoulder. New visions came to me, too: a dog and a wooded clearing, alien symbols and pale flesh. I felt blind, seeing vague lines and shapes dance before my eyes – but no concrete images of my visitor presented themselves.
“It was long ago,” he explained. “A different time – though you’ve changed little since, I see.” Shadowy arms gestured grandly at my supine form, now squirming for escape. A strength far greater than my own kept me fixed against the pillows, wrists cuffed by unseen shackles.
The man chuckled. “I do not begrudge you your forgetfulness, my dear. But – and forgive me for saying so – I did suspect you of a sharper mind than this.”
I growled, still futilely struggling.
“Oh, never mind that,” he continued, waving the insult away. I did not need my sight to recognize the ghost of a smile as he watched me grapple for words.
“Who are you?” I asked finally. “Why are you here?” Loaded questions I knew he would not answer – but questions which bubbled out of me, nonetheless.
The man shook his head and clucked his tongue.
“Time stretches much farther than you imagine, Claire.” And here, at the use of my Christian name, my blood froze. “But still – it is precious and it is not infinite. I will not waste it giving you answers you know already.”
The shape swayed then, retreating towards the far window. Though moonlight seeped through the panes, I could discern nothing of his face but a crooked nose, a neckless head, and a hand reaching out. It brushed the crucifix fastened to the bedroom wall, more curious than reverent in the way it examined the wood.
“Am I an unholy man, Claire?” he asked. At my silence, he chuckled. “We’ve discussed things like this before, you and I. It is unlike you to be so shy. But ah! Time does change people, however slightly.”
“I do wonder it, though…Is it immoral for a man to lie? Knowing that, in doing so, hundreds might be saved – and two lost?” He did not await my reply, mind grown visibly restless at the thought. He sighed. “I suppose one cannot know such things until the day of His Final Judgment, hm?”
With each passing minute, my confusion grew twofold. I lay there speechless and felt increasingly unnerved by the pregnant stillness between us.
“I must go now,” the man said, resigned. He had turned to face the window but addressed me now over his shoulder.
“They will leave you, quite suddenly. I have done my part to make it so, whether God or the Devil deem it just. For it is essential that you go to him, Claire, just as the Fates scripted long ago…”
The silhouetted figure began to dissolve, reduced to a swirling, black cloud. I mustered what strength I could, wanting to leap up and demand further explanation. But my body remained as heavy and leaden as ever.
“Who?” I cried out. “I don’t understand! Who must I go to?”
The room spun around me, colors and shapes and sounds bleeding into one another. I choked, suffocated by the collision of atoms and molecules, of the planets and stars. But still, I heard his voice amidst the deafening chaos, ringing wise and true:
“The Red Man, Madonna. Go to him.”
And with that, he was gone.
~
In recounting the dream, it had taken on an unsettling vividness. The answers that had eluded me in sleep now echoed throughout our bedroom – and with them, a thousand more questions I felt too afraid to ask.
One step forward and two steps back, I thought. And as deeply entrenched in confusion as when I’d woken.
My skin was ice-cold again, bare shoulders shaken free by my sobs and dappled in goosebumps. Jamie placed a hand behind my neck, bringing his forehead to mine and comforting me in the Gaidhlig. He let me weep until exhaustion bade me silent, and the ghostly faces of my dream melted into the night.
“Dinna cry, Sassenach,” he soothed. “For the brollachan have heard ye now. They’ll not pester ye again.”
I gripped his wrists tightly, still plagued by frustration.
“But what does it mean?” I asked, pleading for clarification. But he could not give it to me, no more than I could give it to myself. “What could it mean?” I amended weakly. The implications of my half-understanding – the identity of the stranger, the subject of my parents’ conversation – swarmed around me, agitated wasps ready to sting.
Jamie reached out to cup my face, and I sighed into his palm. I found no answers there, but a promise of reassurance – and perhaps that was all I truly needed.
“We’ve tomorrow for that, mo nighean donn. And the days after that, too.” He pulled away from our embrace and lowered his head to the pillow. Blue eyes beckoned me, gentle and warm, and I noticed the vestiges of my fear reflected there, too. I grabbed his hand and kissed it, feeling infinitely grateful for my husband’s compassion.
He was right, of course: whatever the meaning of our dreams, solace could always be found in the day’s sun – and in each other’s arms.
“Lie down beside me, Claire,” Jamie said. “For I’ll guard ye as ye sleep, and I’ll keep the brollachan at bay.”
FIN.