4

Victor Van Dort awoke in a patch of moonlight.

Or perhaps it wasn't really waking so much as a sudden return to awareness. One cannot wake into dreams that never seem to truly begin, after all. Without introduction, he found himself back beneath the window in the dark parlor; the endless ceiling creaked from far away, the marble floors beneath his shoes shone like glass, and the moon hung ever high in the sky outside, untouched by the swirling gloom that shrouded the earth and trees. However little he ever remembered about it after waking, this was always an old and familiar place to him while asleep.

The brown-haired girl at the piano was there again, and this time she was looking up at him with a wide smile and bright eyes. Victor found himself smiling as well. "Emily," he said, reaching out a hand.

"So you remembered my name this time," she said, laying a smooth fleshed hand on the piano keys. She looked more amused than annoyed, and her face was clear and pale and alive.

"Hm?" Victor asked, surprised. "Don't I normally?"

"Not always," she said, "but it's alright. Come on, sit down," she added, moving to make room for him on the wide bench. "We haven't talked in a while. How have things been going for you?"

"They're, ah," he said carefully, sitting down on the cushioned black bench, "not so well, I'm afraid." Ahead of him, he could have sworn that he'd seen something moving inside of the heavy mists, but no sooner had he looked than it had disappeared.

Emily looked concerned. "No?"

"No," he said. "My, ah..." He paused. "My parents chose to come calling two nights ago."

"Oh dear," she said, and he could hear her smiling. "How painful was it?"

"Very," he said, scooting away slightly on the bench in order to look at her. "The Everglots chose to come as well, and you know how well my parents and Victoria's get on together."

Emily laughed, but after a second admitted, "I don't really."

Victor shook his head. "I suppose you wouldn't, would you?" he asked. "You never met them. I'm sorry."

Emily shrugged. No matter how hard he looked, he never seemed to be able to see her quite as clearly as the rest of the parlor. "You could explain, I suppose," she said gently, laying a warm hand on his atop the keys, "but I can't help feeling like there's something else on your mind."

Of course there is. There's always something worse. "Nothing that should concern you," he murmured, brushing her hand away.

"Of course it should concern me, Victor," she said, sounding annoyed. "I'm as much you as you are."

He stared at her for a moment, unsure as to what she meant by that, but decided not to ask. He shook his head. "It's… It's Victoria," he said. "I'm afraid she's ill."

Emily placed her chin in her palm. Moonlight limned the curve of her shoulder and jaw and he could see her smiling at him, almost lazily, or perhaps with sadness. "Hmm. Yes, I've heard."

"Really?" Victor straightened his back and placed his hands on the piano keys. "I don't recall mentioning it."

"It was weeks ago, silly," she said, gesturing. "She has a cough. Do you have any idea how often we have this conversation?"

"Oh, no no no. Not a cough. I'm afraid you're behind the times." He pressed his finger against the piano, gently tinking a high key. "It's…" He sighed and placed his hands back in his lap. "She has consumption. There's nothing to be done for it until after the baby's born."

"Oh." On his left, Emily lifted her head from her hands and cast a regretful look at the floor. "Oh, dear. That, I didn't know. I'm so sorry to hear that, Victor."

The moonbeams all around him were thick with dust. What looked like a small white feather fluttered past the corner of his eye between the shadows of the window-frames. "Yes," he said distantly. "So am I."

Then, for an amount of time that could have been mere moments or perhaps the whole night long, they didn't speak to one another. Victor found himself thinking back on great vaulted ceilings veiled in the darkness with which he was intimately familiar in the nighttime but could never remember in the day, and an imagined nursery swaddling only dust – and of Victoria, of her proclamation that fire drowns because it never learned to swim, and neither had she. In the fast, fractured cut of dreams, he suddenly found dread pooling in his stomach like mercury.

"What do I do?" he asked aloud.

Emily spoke. "Oh, Victor." When he looked at her, she was shaking her head and he thought he could see tears in her eyes. "If I only knew for sure."

He didn't precisely intend to move, but before he had taken account of himself he was standing up at the piano, trailing fingers along its glossy black veneer as he marched toward the window to stare at the fat full moon outside. "I'm frightened, but I don't know why," he heard himself say, as if suddenly acting out a part in a stage play. "I know what happens when you die, so why do I feel this way at the idea of it? I must be…" He clenched one hand into a fist. "Why am I so weak?"

And without moving at all, he knew then that Emily was suddenly at his elbow. He felt a very cold breath on his neck.

"Do you remember dying?" she whispered to him.

He grew still. Yes. Sometimes, in the dark of dreams, he could remember what he had seen while traveling in between two bright worlds. There were no words for it.

"I don't know," he lied.

"Then you don't remember the cold," she whispered, and he felt her very chill hand on his elbow. It hadn't been so cold a moment ago. "You don't remember the pain the body goes through while it struggles to keep itself alive and inevitably fails." He did, but said nothing. The walls of the parlor around him seemed curiously thin at the moment. "You don't remember walking across the nightlands with a child's fear of the dark in your heart, searching for harbor in the black. They're right beyond that window, Victor," she said, and he focused his eyes on the swirling gray mists outside beneath the moon, where he thought he'd seen something enormous moving. "We're in between right now, and you have never known fear until you find yourself lost in a truly infinite place with no guide."

"I don't remember," he said again, but wasn't sure if it had come out right. Everything seemed wrong; his dream was falling apart at the edges. Where the parlor had felt a warm place when he first arrived, it now was growing cold, and it seemed that the moonlight was no longer touching the floor, casting it into an absolute black that was funneling downward on itself. When he turned around, Emily's once-full face at his side was cast back into the cold blue of death, an eye gone, a hand skeletal, and everything about her so, so sad.

"Oh, no," he said, laying a hand on her face as the piano slid slowly toward the hole they stood in. "Did I do this to you?"

"It's alright," she said, even as her face became more of a skeleton beneath his very hands. "But please, you are not weak. Never underestimate why life fears Death, Victor, no matter how well it understands it."

And then, in a voice that seemed not to come from her but rather felt whispered clearly in his ear: "Why, just ask the dead."

Everything then became chaos. His feet lost purchase on the ground; there was a flash in his mind of the piano plummeting down toward him from the face of the moon, and of falling through a hole deeper than the earth. Then he heard a scream and a thunk, pain exploded behind his forehead, his elbow hit the floor, and he opened his eyes to find himself on the wooden floor of the master bedroom, staring up at the windowsill on which an enormous raven sat, quorking at him with its wings spread wide.

"What in -" he muttered, rubbing furiously at his forehead as he scrambled to his feet. One of his shoes kicked something along the ground and he could hear it rolling away; the raven screamed again and then hopped onto the windowframe, fluttering its wings at him before flapping away. Victor found himself standing in his empty bedroom, one hand on the cushioned, feather-covered sill and the other clasped to his sore forehead, mouth agape, wondering how the window had been opened since he'd fallen asleep. He shook his head. Already the dream he'd been having was falling away from his memory, but he remembered that Emily had been there.

"Why, just ask the dead," she'd said to him.

Slowly, he sat down upon the sill with his back to the window. The moon had risen significantly in the sky since he'd fallen asleep, but a splinter of light was still leaking below the frame's arch, and as he looked toward the edge of the bed, something was glinting there inside the moonbeam.

It looked like a cup.

He approached the large bed and then dropped to his knees. It was a cup – heavy pewter, with a downy black feather inside that flew away with a breath. He stood up slowly, walking back toward the window. The rim seemed to be stained with an ugly red rust, which on pewter was a strange sight to see. No, the whole thing was; it was plain, but somehow looked familiar. Had a raven just opened a window to drop a cup on his head?

Just ask the dead, he thought, and felt the bottom drop out of his stomach.

Oh, no.


Today, while I wrote Corpse Bride as a dreamscape psychodrama wherein I exposed my own intimate fear of death, I realized that I might take my writing a little too seriously sometimes.