#maynia Day 15 – Renault’s Dream

Previously in our tale...
A group of Academicians held an emergency meeting at the Academy in 1940s America, because one of their scholars, Charles Renault, had gone missing for ten days. Renault had apparently been reading a document about a receiver in the Realm just before he disappeared.

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In his dream Charles Renault lay dead on a train station platform. In his dream, his eyes stared unmoving into a deep blue sky, at a single wisp of cloud, which he could see even though he was dead.

The cloud drifted toward the sun, which Charles found he couldn’t turn his eyes away from, but he could feel the hot light warming his eyes, like eggs beneath an incubator. To Charles the sensation was not unpleasant – not yet – but the sun burned on and he couldn’t move, because he was dead, nor could he blink.

A man stood over him, a tall man in a grey overcoat and a cowboy hat. In his dream, Charles realized that he knew who the man was – Alabama Zack. They had met in a barn once, at sometime in the dream’s recent past. But somehow that’s not how he knew the man’s name, Charles realized.

The dream skipped a little and became strange. His friend the doctor stood across his dead body from Alabama Zack. They spoke, or appeared to speak; Charles couldn’t hear the words. Charles recognized time-dimensional tracing – the doctor’s form multiplied in flashes, sometimes there were three of him, sometimes five or more, arranged in different positions and poses around his corpse, then all but one of the images would fade and collapse into the remainder.

Zack’s form never moved or multiplied, which meant Zack was in a time loop, jumping back to the same place to begin each cycle, while the doctor engaged with Zack through linear time, approaching him from a slightly different place in each of Zack’s cycles.

And then Zack was gone, and the doctor knelt beside Charles alone, shading Charles’ eyes with his brown fedora.

Charles felt groggy – and stiff – when he awoke in his office at the Academy. He pushed his face off his desk and leaned back in his swivel chair. The hallway outside was lit only by the fluorescent lights in his office spilling through the plate glass windows on either side of his door, which meant it was after-hours and that he had once again fallen asleep over his studies.

It was getting to be a bad habit. He ran his hands over his rough face and folded them atop his smooth bald dome. He found it surprising that he had dreamed about dimensional tracing – it wasn’t his specialty or what he had been studying when he fell asleep. Oh, but the doctor. It made sense that the doctor had made an appearance in his dream, since he was reading a document about the Realm, where the doctor was on assignment.

He had discovered the document in the library’s subbasement, in a section he thought of as the stacks. The stacks were simply a row of painted wood tables piled up with uncatalogued documents and books, in the deepest level of the Academy offices, one floor below where the lift stopped. The material came in from all over the known universe, and if the librarians couldn’t immediately figure out classify an item, it ended up in the stacks. Some of the material there was centuries old, but it was hard to tell how long it had been waiting in the stacks, since it arrived in the library from all possible points in time and space.

Charles had made it his mission, in his free time, to catalogue the neglected material in the stacks. Sometimes, of course, he got distracted as he sifted through the texts, and ended up reading more than he catalogued. The document in question had intrigued him, first because it was sealed in a protective case, which most of the material was not, and next because the document was a sheet of parchment that appeared so old that it would likely have disintegrated if he could have touched it. It could have been there for decades – there so no label or any indication of when it had arrived. So Charles had started reading.

The document – just a fragment of an account, written by a friar named Brother Geoffrey – told of an aberration in the Realm, a receiver. That had caught his attention, because there were few documented cases of receivers – so few that some of his fellow Academicians posited that they were purely fictional phenomena – and in theory they were extremely dangerous. A receiver functioned something like a black hole; it drew parts of other worlds – people, entities, and sometimes material – into its world, and, like a black hole, it grew stronger the more it ‘received.’

Generally accepted theory held that a continual, arbitrary transition between dimensions would destabilize both worlds. Charles reasoned that, if left to grow in strength long enough, a receiver could pull so much out of another dimension that it collapsed – while the dimension the receiver was located in exploded with the sudden influx of energy, in a kind of Big Bang.

There was no record of it ever happening, and Charles wasn’t sure if he believed the friar, yet. Aside from the rare occurrence of receivers, the document was just a firsthand account unsupported by any other sources, and just a fragment at that. It could be a fiction. But what if it was factual?

Charles leaned forward to reread to the document. He couldn’t find it. Usually when he fell asleep, his head ended up lying on whatever he had been studying at the time – learning by osmosis – but the document wasn’t there in front of him. Instead he found a book – with an image of the man from his dream, Alabama Zack.

“Alabama Zack: A Historian’s Take,” the book was titled. By Charles Renault.

But Charles could not remember ever writing a book. He picked it up and when he felt the weight of it in his hands, he did remember that he knew Alabama Zack.

The man from his dream was real, and in his dream, Charles had been dead.

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Next Chapter
Or start with Chapter 1

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Base image from Pixabay, by geralt: https://pixabay.com/users/geralt-9301/