Wake, he whispered, but I did not know how.
I must have fallen into sleep, for an insistent bell woke me at dawn, and the innkeeper entered with a tray. There were no burning eyes in my memory, nor was my body tender. I did not feel pains in my body that might suggest a night walk, nor did my mouth taste of metal. Within my body though, I felt the telltale motions of the stowaway, swimming in a tight circle.
“What is this?” asked the innkeeper, looking at my chains.
I looked at her with as much dignity as I could muster, and I said, “Might you release me? The key is on the pillow, just there.”
She placed the tray on the bed and fetched the key.
“How am I to know if freedom suits you?” she asked.
“My agonies occur only at night,” I told her, for the stowaway took no notice of the innkeeper. It did not wish for women, nor did it care for daylight. It slept within me when the sun was high.
“Will you continue your tale?” the innkeeper asked, unlocking my chains with less caution than I might have imagined she’d use. She poured a cup of coffee and delivered it into my shaking hands.
I indicated that I would, and the innkeeper withdrew long enough that I might tidy myself. Back then, to that sitting room downstairs, with its view of the silvery bay, a pot of coffee rather than tea, to increase my strength for the day ahead.
The innkeeper sat opposite me. “The night six months past,” she said, prompting me back to my tale.
I ate a spoonful of porridge and sipped my coffee, feeling the heat in my body, a healthy heat, not that of the stowaway. For a moment I felt hopeful.
“Though the stowaway’s presence prohibited guests to my house, I was at liberty to leave it. The stowaway seemed to see me as a gentle pet, a cat who might play about in the garden while its owner remained in the house. Thus were my days spent, with concerts and the usual occupations of a lady. It was not, despite the trouble in my house, a terrible life.
On the evening in question, I sat at the piano, picking out a song, and as I did, I noticed a stirring in the wall. I withdrew my fingers from the keys, fearing a mouse or moths, never imagining—”
I looked around the sitting room, fearing eyes and ears in the walls, but there was nothing visible here.
“A man emerged from the wallpaper, hair silken as fur, eyes like seaglass. Out of the floral pattern he came, his suit patterned with falling leaves, and I knew I could not trust a man who arrived that way, but there was no help for it. He stepped into the room, hung his coat on the tree, and walked across the carpet making no sound at all. I looked down at his feet, and they did not touch the ground.
He nodded at me, implying that I continue to play. I did, though my playing was nothing to be proud of, neglected in my duties as the keeper of a dead man’s house. When, at last, I stopped, the man looked steadily at me.
“Who are you?” I whispered. “Have you come to deliver me from my stowaway?”
He looked at me, and said “I am a dreamer come to save you from darkness, Annabel MacFarlane, if you will be saved.”
Why should I not allow the haunting, I thought. Why should I not give myself over to a dream? I had been alone for a very long time, and it seemed no harm to invite air into the house.
The dream gave me a ring, bent of a length of gold wire. He ran icy fingers over my skin—”
I hesitated.
“—and my nights became other than they’d been for nearly twenty years. For weeks, the stowaway stayed to its own side of the house. I heard the usual sounds of animals, of wind, of whispers, but nothing came through my chamber door. I thought the man in my house was, if not my secret, a guest the stowaway had no objection to. Indeed, I sometimes believed that he was an illusion, and that my joy was only something manufactured by waking dreams. I did not ask the dream who had sent him, and indeed, I did not dare to, for what if he came from the same realm as the stowaway? I did not wish to know.
The white marble of our staircase was sometimes marred with red footprints, and the rail as well, the marks of hands attempting to cling to the bannister. I had known of the stowaway’s habits these long years, but though I read the papers, I saw no sign that the stowaway preyed upon the unlucky of our region. It may seem cold, my failure to investigate the nature of the victims, but I was as frightened of the stowaway as any prisoner of a jailor, and I did not. I wished only that the beast be fed, and not by myself.
One night, though, there was a thunderous sound and down the hall outside my rooms ran a thousand hooves. Boar? Horses? I could not say. There was a wrenching creak, and a roar from no animal I’d ever imagined.
“Go!” I whispered to the man beside me, but he did not. The stowaway stood in my doorway, eyes flicking over the chamber. I stayed still in the bed, coverlet drawn close about my throat. The stowaway inhaled deeply, and then dropped to the floor, undulating until it reached the wall through which my husband had arrived.
Up the wall the stowaway seeped, leaving an ichorous ooze, and the leaves and flowers on the paper, previously verdant, began to wither. Night began to fall over the green kingdom from which my dream had entered, and slowly I saw stars beginning to reveal themselves, cruel points of light in a sky that had been day.
The stowaway looked at me briefly, eyes glowing red, and the printed plants withered and blackened.
“Come,” the stowaway said, and took a step toward me.
It was only then that my dream revealed himself, emerging from beneath the bedsheets. In his hand he held a pistol, and he aimed it at the stowaway, shouting.
“I am a hunter of Thule, and you will return to your prison!”
The stowaway’s eyes glowed brighter, and it growled the growl of a lion over an antelope. Its entire flesh was stars now, and its tail whipped as it leapt at the man who had been my own true love, and covered him as though the skin of the sky had slid down and over the land.
“I am stronger than I was,” the stowaway hissed. “You will not take me.”
The man I’d chosen as a husband was gone, hidden by pulsating dark.
The stowaway flowed over the carpet toward me, bringing cold, but also bringing fire. I felt my edges crackle.
“Annabel,” said the stowaway, its voice still the honey it had always been. “You have betrayed me. You might have spent your life dreaming, but you’ve made yourself hostess of a nightmare. Now you are mine, and I am yours. You will hide me in your skin, and together, we shall seek for my creator.”
It took my hand and pressed its lips to my flesh. I felt the points of its teeth like lightning striking, and the stars of its skin glowed brighter. With a rush, the entirety of the creature was absorbed into me.
The stowaway is no longer visible to the world, but I can feel it. The physician I visited in the city told me I carried nothing at all, but I know him to be wrong.
“Hysteria,” my father insisted, and the diagnosis was that. There was a movement from the men in my family to send me to a sanatorium, and though I resisted, I knew it was only a matter of time before they overpowered me. Hence my flight.
“This story explains my presence here, in your inn,” I concluded at last. “To no one’s satisfaction, not my own, nor yours. Yet am I here, and here I will remain until the stowaway is gone.”
The innkeeper looked steadily at me, seemingly aware that I’d omitted certain terrible facts, certain shameful aspects of the possession. I could not speak them. I would not. My mouth watered, even still, and my ribs ached. One morning I’d awakened with claw marks rending my garments, and traveling up and down my torso, and another I’d woken in the river itself, drenched and half-frozen, clutching a bloody fingerbone. In the papers, I began to see notices of disappearances, men of letters, men with dark dreams. Their bodies were not found.