Original Short Story by: David Cromer which inspired the Carnival of Dreams
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"Wise men of every time worth mentioning have bandied about the idea of wisdom. In my time I have come to the conclusion that wisdom is a farce and a fiction. I do not subscribe to its pursuit. Though perhaps that is simply the comforting lie I tell myself. Perhaps the truth is that I have seen wisdom and turned away, or more to the point learnt that wisdom would forbid some of my very favorite mistakes."
-Cornelius Cobb IV, 1623 A.D.
It was a few moments past midnight when the somber man in the picture frame began to smile. Slowly. With a building certainty the long dead soldier found life and seemed to be amused by the discovery. The only witness to this strange animation felt a long, icy nail of terror drag across his spine. Two wide eyes stared from above a heavy sheet. The boy who owned them reasoned that the moon, casting its light haphazardly through a dry and dying tree, was to blame. The boy convinced himself that the long, sharp shadows which danced about his head and the wall behind him were responsible for what must have been, had to have been a trick. They were not. It was not.
The passing moments turned a disciplined, grim expression long captured to a foreign grin. Jakob had never seen his father smile. For the instant curiosity dulled his fear. The snapshot’s mirth contained a warmth that flared and cooled almost immediately. It never spread to the unblinking eyes. Jakob's father's cheeks distended and folded outwards like an opening canvas bag. For as long as the boy could remember he had cradled the simple picture frame in the simple darkness of his simple room until dreaming overtook him. Now, sitting on the bedside table not three feet away the man in the polaroid seemed to mock him. The crescent of the smile crooked its corners into an impossibly wide sneer. Jakob noticed his father's teeth. They were wet and jagged, broken.
"Mighty strange man, your father." a whisper like tumbling gravel intoned. The stark shadows cast against the wall ceased their dancing and began to mist at their edges. Curls and coils of darkness rose with a billowing urgency like the edge of a wildfire cast in the moonlight. "Might fine passing too," suggested the whisper. "Mighty fine indeed. And you, his mighty fine son!" The voice appeared to rumble and roll with the rushing of the wind. Jakob found himself thinking of broken mirrors and splintered wood. A hailstorm thrumming against a field of bones.
A dark corner of his room became darker. Jakob eyed it warily. Framing the corner in question stood two bookshelves like a door thrown open to the black, filled to the brim with creased leather spines. Perched upon the aging cherry wood on either side were lions and crocodiles and other cotton beasts of every color and size. Button-eyed tokens to innocence too soon discarded. Their fur was matted and spattered with black, tin instruments clutched in their clothen paws showed their age in rust. There, in the corner, something stirred.
A hand dipped out of the darkness. Pale flesh with stretched fingers. Tiny, delicate features and milky pink fingernails. A little girl, thought the boy. Flexing and flowering outwards the hand rose, flesh twisting, turning thick and callused and huge. A carpenter or a tradesman, the boy ventured. Or, perhaps, a soldier.
Six feet above the obscured wooden floor of Jakob's bedroom (where he might imagine a man's mouth would be) the hand came to a rest, gnarled and crooked with age. A single finger pointed upwards. There was a sound like a pipe bleeding steam.
"Shhhhh."
"Who are you?" asked Jakob in hushed tones. Over and over he turned the events unfolding in his mind searching for reason and certainty but his thoughts were as blurred as the details of his room had become. Even as he spoke, Jakob could see the borders and angles of his bedroom become muddy, as though a great lens was becoming unfocused. In contrast the passageway into nothing which his bookshelves inexplicably framed stood in absolute, unforgiving detail. A silent guardian just beyond its shelter. Jakob eyed the smoking shadow which was collecting at the ceiling. The light was dimming. Everything appeared dimmer in fact; color was turning to ash and embers. Sharp lines around the printed stories of his childhood and the slithering hiss of rustling leaves.
"Have you ever pondered over your own birth, Jakob?" the corner asked casually, as though it were a question you would naturally pose from the darkest corner of a young man's room. "That first moment, that almost accidental blink when the world first blinded you and you screamed? You cried, Jakob, you wailed and mourned because behind your eyelids, behind your eyes there were wonders that the light stole from you."
"Did you know my father?" Jakob asked. A smile in the corner bloomed suddenly behind the pale hand, brilliant, lotus white. Jakob recognized the smile immediately. It was the same stranger's smile his father's picture now wore. “Please, answer me, Sir.”
"Stop trying to force all of this to make sense, Jakob," the voice chuckled. "It never will. We're well out of reason."
"Are you... who are you?"
The smile widened and split. "Ever since that first birth you have been waiting for a second, a better, a brighter birth. A new awakening!" The smile began to laugh independently of the voice with a grating sound like a thousand fingernails scraped across sandpaper. "A birth ushered in not by opening your eyes, but by-"
"I am not afraid of you," said the boy, quite surprised himself that his mouth had opened in the first place. The laughter died immediately. There was a quiet intake of breath. Bobbing in the corner, cracked lips straightened slightly, the manic joy of its broken bite somewhat dulled. Deliberately the arch of shattered bone began to drift out from the shadows until it was hauntingly clear that neither face nor body possessed it. Forty-two glass bead eyes turned to watch its approach, a cloth menagerie transfigured into blind spectators. The hand, still rising out of the shadow like a lonely tree rising out of the earth, began to wave.
"There's no need to lie to me, Jakob. We are going to get to know each other oh so very well, we should try and keep each other honest, you and I," said the smile, the voice in the corner suddenly finding vocal chords unseen down a terrible maw. Jakob was close enough to notice the lips that now bowed and smacked over the craggy grin were bleeding. Its breath was hot and damp and smelled like freshly sifted dirt.
“I am honest,” insisted the boy. “I am honest and I am dreaming and also,” he took a moment to pause. The world about him save for the smile was beginning to run like an oil painting left in the rain. “Also I am not afraid.” The smile was half-way to the foot of his bed now. Behind its snickering teeth the world was bleeding together.
“You are dreaming?” The voice asked at an even pace, its tone equal parts sincere and mocking. “This is what lies beyond the stage curtains you’ve always been acting behind. Would you believe that you are the product of a blind lie finally ready to see? You who has already lied once this very night?”
“These things don’t happen in real life though, do they?” replied Jakob. As he mulled over the logic of that sentence he became more certain of it. “Therefore I must be dreaming… and dreams can’t hurt you.”
A tongue appeared in the space between two shards of bone as the mouth turned toward the shifting ceiling and laughed enormously. Jakob shrank away against the headboard. He couldn’t remember the last dream that hurt him. Now a dream was deafening. The boy’s hand curled over his ears. Slowly the cacophony gave way to a measured chuckle and the faint sound of white-noise. When the mouth next spoke it was as though his voice were crackling through a transistor radio.
“Now then, who might have filled your mind with that particular bit of babble?” The dancing teeth chortled. Jakob stole a glance towards the place where his bedside table had been. The picture frame still bobbed gently in view, the picture still smiling. The eyes of Jakob’s father were bleeding. “Why cannot dreams, your oh so very interesting dreams, hurt you?”
“Because dreams… nightmares are lies,” Jakob answered.
“Ha! HaHA! No, Jakob! No, no, oh very much and in all ways, no. Nightmares, dear boy. Nightmares are the only truth left in this world. Every smile you’ve smiled, every thought you’ve thought, they’ve every one of them been a very convincing lie. Nightmares beg you to know the only truth worth knowing.”
“Which-what truth is that,” asked the boy.
“Have you ever dreamt that you were walking along a hallway and suddenly realized that a thing, a terrible thing was behind you? You started running, did you not? You ran, because you knew, you suddenly knew that a single step backward would be your last. Without knowing what chased you, you ran. Do you know what chased you, Jakob? Do you know what stalks the hallways?”
Jakob was silent.
“No. Of course you don’t. It was the truth, Jakob, it was the truth and you never even bothered to turn around and find its face. Now then to your question: no, these things don’t happen and you are not meant to remember that you are dreaming. Which you are of course.” The bright red tongue ran itself across the fractured landscape of the still giggling smile. “However you must trust me when I tell you this: you have never been nor ever again will you be more awake.”
Jakob’s bed was adrift in a churning sea of odd textures and trailing colors. Nothing but the floating grin had any firm existence anymore. Everything shifted violently as though his room had become all of it sand and a great storm now blew about the grains. The white noise came louder. Jakob did not move his fingers from where they dug into his scalp. If he tried the boy could almost feel the wind blowing through his window, but it was like trying to remember the details of a dream. A high, shrill scream began to creep into the rattle and hiss of the electrical noise. Jakob could hear it pleadingly rise and fall with misery. The screaming broke into sobs. It was only when the sobs began to force themselves into anguished words that Jakob recognized his mother. The mouth watched and was satisfied.
“Wake Up!” screeched the ever more audible voice. The boy felt a weight pressing against his chest. He could feel hot tears pepper his cheeks, but he was not crying. With a pit in his stomach he realized who was. “Wake up, please, please wake up!”
“I hope you hate goodbyes as much as I do, Jakob.” The smile was dripping. “Perhaps I should have asked you earlier.”
“No,” the boy barely managed. His right hand came free of his ear and began wiping frantically at his cheek. His mother’s tears were warm even as her pleas once again faded into the snow like a child walking further into a forest.
“You are reborn, Jakob.” Skin began to flow out from the grin into cheeks and over, behind a skull. The eye sockets were empty as the dark corners of the sky in-between stars. Yet something stared from them. As the waves of flesh tumbled across shoulders held stiffly back, clothing began to bloom and cascade towards the ground. A bright blue waterfall of fabric became a sharp tailcoat. The smile suddenly stood as a man. Glee beamed out from the newly knit sinews of a mocking face.
“You must,” gasped Jakob, “let me wake up. Let me-“
“No,” cracked the man’s voice sharply. “As one door closes, another opens. In much the same fashion, as you close one set of eyes, another finds light. Don’t close your eyes again, Jakob, you’ve no other eyes to flee to.”
“But you cannot-“
“I already have,” said the man, warmly. Around him the chaotic whirl of colors and textures began to segregate. “Now then, if we could take a moment to begin I have a very important question for you.”
Around his bed began a pooling of browns and greys. Before him, behind the man, two archways sprouted out of mist and grew together with tangles of metal unfurling and twisting into each other like vines. White noise quickly bled into harps and pipe organs in a mad crescendo. The boy felt the weight on his chest sink past his flesh and melt into a rich, toxic swell of absolute loss. Out from the archways a fence stretched its legs far, far back, stabbing into the solidifying world. Tents and torches slowly grew like flowers along the length of the fence. Jakob stared in shock at what was decidedly not his bedroom. The man held his arms aloft dramatically; sweeping away what little was left of the shroud he had brought with him. The waves of hissing turbulence abated into stillness. Shadows ran back to the moon. The world once again found its definition.
“Is any of this real, Jakob?” asked the voice in the corner from the lips of a man in the garb of a ringleader.
The boy lay in his bed. His bed lay in a field sweeping every direction into a desolate horizon. The lone exception to the barren blackness, a carnival blemished the empty night with life and sound. Bells jangled and voices cried out from within its brightly painted borders. Jakob was suddenly aware that he felt out of place; in what could only be a touch of madness he became worried that someone else might see him in his pajamas. Impossible, he thought.
“It is now,” he finally answered.
Surrounded by flesh in the shape of a man, the mouth grinned horribly and for a moment Jakob was certain he was insane. It was worse to think he was not. The ringleader nodded, satisfied, and smiled his shattered smile.
“Quite right.” He crowed melodically, gestured towards the high wooden arch which rose from the dirt like a stake stabbed into the heart of the earth. “Another question if you please, young Jakob. You are familiar with nightmares, I am sure. Which makes this quite important.” The venom had fled his voice, leaving only a trace of insincerity and an insistent enthusiasm. Electric lights buzzed and hummed around white and red paint, bold words bellowed their truth. All were welcome, the bold words proclaimed. Come one, come all, hurry, hurry. A great beast in the nothingness waited to pounce. The carnival opened its jaws.
“What sort of nightmare would you like to be?”