I understood this when on the night of that following day I awoke from a dream: a dream of going after Dar Oakley, who was winging away from me. I found myself prone in my own bed (because I am indeed alive, alive-o). I lay quiet there so as not to wake the child, who it seems is now my own to care for, he and his mother, too, for as long as I last. I thought of Debra, and saw her bare feet on those gray grasses that I could not step on, saw her moving there as she once did here. And I thought, no, the dead are there, and do know themselves and others. I know it’s so; it can’t be otherwise. To be dead, though, isn’t to have further life like ours, just elsewhere; nor is it to live on in the memories of others, or in the dark aliveness of tombs, or in the voices that the still-embodied believe they hear. It’s not like any story that any traveler to that realm has told, or any spirit claiming to have come out of that land either. No. But I believe that even though their life is divided forever from the life we live in the day and the sun, we can know something of it: because we live part of our lives the way they do, in a realm that’s like the realm where they are. I mean in dreams.
In dreams we traverse other geographies; we walk the roads, we enter the rooms, we speak to the people and beings we encounter. We meet our kin and our dead, just as they were in their youth and in ours, or transfigured, not themselves. We see and hear but can’t quite smell or touch. We know ourselves to be there while we are there, but we don’t know we know: it’s only when we wake that we know what we saw and heard and felt. Usually we know that we saw and felt much more, but we can’t retrieve it, and so the experience of it is lost for good; in effect it was never ours.
And I thought that it must be the same in the sleep of death: there, too, we will do deeds, learn truths, pass through landscapes, meet other souls, think about the living, ponder, feel terror and delight, go always farther. The difference is this: from death we will never, never ever, wake to know of it.
It began to be dawn then as I lay there and the familiar pain began: the pain that tells me for certain that I didn’t go thence as I thought I did, or if I did that I’m not there now. I could hear labored breathing from the spare room. I listened to Crows gathering somewhere not far off, and I slipped from my bed and went to the window in a sort of hopeless hope, or superstition I suppose; but no Crows could be seen. What I thought I could see were the lithe, slow shapes of one or two Deer approaching in the mist: the real and common Deer of this world, as real as pain.
I am returned. We are still here.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JOHN CROWLEY was born in the appropriately liminal town of Presque Isle, Maine. He moved to New York after college to make movies, and found work in documentaries. In 1975 he published his first novel. He has subsequently published ten more novels, and since 1993 he has taught creative writing at Yale University.
In 1992 he received the Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is a three-time winner of the World Fantasy Award, including one for Lifetime Achievement. He finds it rewarding that most of his novels are still in print.
Visit his Facebook page: his profile picture is a Crow.
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2017 by John Crowley
Jacket illustration by Sonia Chaghatzbanian
Interior illustrations copyright © 2017 by Melody Newcomb
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Crowley, John, 1942– author.
Title: Ka : Dar Oakley in the ruin of Ymr / John Crowley.
Description: First edition. | London ; New York : Saga Press, [2017]
Identifiers: LCCN 2016054533 | ISBN 9781481495592 (hardcover : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9781481495615 (eBook)
Classification: LCC PS3553.R597 K32 2017 | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016054533