Prose: “The Oneironautics Conference,” by Nemo Arator

The Oneironautics Conference was scheduled to begin at eight o’clock Saturday morning in a city two hundred miles north of the town where I lived. So Friday night after work I set out, driving until I became too tired, then turned onto a dirt road and parked in the approach to a farmer’s field. I laid back my seat and nestled down, pulling my jacket over myself like a blanket, and within seconds of closing my eyes sank into a deep slumber.

Like splicing together two reels of film, I turned my head and I was awake. The sleep was black and restful, no dreams, one of those empty pits. I felt better now, rested and alert, like a battery that’s been charged. I looked at my wristwatch but the display was scrambled; I couldn’t tell what time it was. But I knew I better make haste so I drove back to the highway and onto the wide pave of lanes.

The Grand Hotel was on the southern edge of the city, across the street from a cemetery. I had been there before, and easily found my way to the back parking lot. As I walked toward the side entrance, I could see through the window a tall slender woman wearing a hood coming toward it from the other side. She was pushing a bicycle and talking on a cell phone. She hung up just as she reached the door and I held it open for her.

As she emerged she gave me a strange look, then laughed and said, “Thank you. I just remembered something and it’s very important.”

Then she turned around and went back inside and I went in after her. We went down a short corridor to the lobby where a sign directed conference attendees to the basement auditorium. Downstairs there was a big sandwich board outside and a register attendant was taking names. I signed in and took a seat near the back. The place seemed about half full. I wasn’t sure how many to expect shared my interest in this, but it looked like almost a hundred people. Today’s speakers were widely considered the greatest minds in our field and were going to share their latest discoveries and enrich the general milieu thereby.

After everyone was seated the conference host came onstage and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome and thank you for joining us. Today we have some very special people. Please allow me to introduce one of the foremost thinkers of our time, the great and wonderful, Mister Jose von Walpurga.”

Who then emerged onstage to much cheering and clapping. The host gave him the microphone and he proceeded to talk all morning.

“One third of our lives is being wasted,” he said. “You must make an effort to remember your dreams. Dreams are the inside-track of reality. They are a built-in metaphor of existence. Over time they serve all the functions ascribed to them: wish fulfillment, precognition, astral travel, symbolic messages from your higher self. Some dreams are like shit: they are simply the result of the mind digesting and excreting its contents. They are also the primary gateway by which one can access the collective unconscious. It is the responsibility of each person to get in touch with their dreams. This is our most vital task.” And so on, etcetera.

At noon they had an intermission and we all headed upstairs to the cafeteria where they had a huge buffet ready. As I stood in line waiting, someone entered my peripheral vision and gently slapped my arm. I looked down and saw a dead mosquito and a smear of blood on the side of my bicep, just above the crook of my elbow; then I looked up and saw the woman I met earlier at the door. I forgot about her and didn’t expect to see her again, but here she was and smiling faintly.

“I just saved your life,” she said. “That bug was gonna suck you dry. Lucky it wasn’t an arctic mosquito. Those things kill caribou pups.”

She must have sensed my incredulity because she laughed and gestured for me to move along, the way was clear now. I could hardly believe this was real. We loaded our plates and went to sit somewhere. Shortly afterward a tall thin blond woman swooped in and sat with us, a sharp looking professional type. She didn’t say anything at first; she hunched over a plate of sandwiches and gobbled them ravenously.

“God, I’m fucking starving,” she said. “What did you think of that guy?” The brunette shook her head and the blond said, “I think he’s a loser. Fucking crackpot.”

Then she laid into me with a series of questions. They were all very pointed, her voice like a knife, asking why I was here, where I’d worked, what things I’d done, travel, lovers, education, a rapid-action autopsy by interrogation. I felt eviscerated, cut to the core, all my innermost guts hanging out, naked and disgusting. I was so on-guard from the onslaught that I barely heard when the brunette threw in something provocative and teasing. She smiled at me but I wasn’t sure what to say. I looked at the blond and saw her biting into a lemon and watching me with avid interest, like a scientist watching a test subject.

Before I had time to respond the brunette excused herself and left us. The blond gave me an arched look and said nothing. When the brunette returned she was carrying a round silver platter upon which was a green bottle and two unmistakable glasses with a spoon and a pile of sugar-cubes. I watched her pour them out as if hypnotized, wondering if I was dreaming. Then she handed me a glass and we toasted.

“Prost.”

“Salud.”

As I put the glass to my lips and tasted of that sweet green elixir, my mind kicked out backwards from the driver’s seat in my head and I was suddenly displaced to a third-person perspective, hovering about two feet above my bodily self. I could actually watch that idiotic dunce start guzzling his drink, so stupidly pleased with himself to be sitting here with two beautiful women and I even saw them exchange a meaningful glance the like of which I didn’t understand but blithely thought was possibly good – they took me for easy game, a shameless glutton, already emptied his glass.

Then they excused themselves and after a while I began to worry they drugged me and went somewhere to wait until it took effect. They didn’t return for such a long time I decided there was no reason to think they would. So I reached over and guzzled the other glass of absinthe left by the brunette and sat there awhile longer yet, enjoying those fine moments floating in that greenish buoyancy. When I was ready I gathered our plates and put them in the garbage then went searching for a washroom.

The most likely place was down the hall from the lobby, but I must have missed it because I reached the end without seeing any sign of where it was. There was a window here, and I was momentarily transfixed by the picture-perfect scene it framed of the empty autumn field under the bleak gray sky and there was a rusty windmill way off in the distance.

It was because I paused here that I happened to hear voices from inside one of the nearby rooms. It sounded like the two women I just lunched with. Barely audible through a partly open door, they kept their voices low; I could hear them, but I couldn’t distinguish what they were saying. The general tone, however, seemed to be calm and reassuring, gentle and rhythmic, for I then heard the sound of another woman sobbing.

I peeked through the crack and saw a room furnished like a staff lounge with a kitchenette by the window. Those two women were on the other side of an island-style counter by the sink. They were tending to a third woman who was barely visible over the countertop. Her face was strained and she was sweating profusely. I could hear her rapid hitched breathing.

It was the exact moment I peered into the room that a sudden solid spurt of blood gushed up and hit the window over the sink and that woman groaned in pain and the blond started saying to her, “It’s okay, everything is all right, this is all perfectly normal, everything is going to be okay.” Saying this over and over with that calm masterful detachment while the brunette fiddled with wires and instruments, her face stern and focused. I quickly ducked back before they noticed me.

That scene gave me a sick feeling. Whatever was happening in there, I could do nothing about it. I quickly went back to the lobby and instead of going downstairs to the auditorium I went out the front doors into the parking lot. Across the road I could see the cemetery encircled by a low stone wall and populated by huge towering old trees with little paved pathways weaving between them. I thought how nice it would be to go strolling in there rather than be cramped in a chair with a bunch of people.

I didn’t know what I was doing but I was drunk enough to follow this whim. My mind was spinning, pleasant bodily detachment. I wasn’t in my head but floating nearby like a balloon; my body was a puppet just below my grasp. So I stagger-stumbled to the crosswalk and when the light changed I marched across the road like a stilted wobbling windup doll. Then safely within the enclosure of the cemetery and onward into the maze of trees and pathways and lawns with granite monuments in rows.

Somehow in my wandering I found myself somewhere in the furthest reaches of the cemetery, having undergone some winding, weaving, warping of geography and arrived into this backmost region. The city was the faintest sound in the gray fog of the day and I was alone in this peaceful place. I was standing in some sort of grove or clearing. There were a few dozen graves here. But the thing that caught my attention was the squat black pyramid mounted atop a low cement foundation. I went right over and knelt before it and placed my hands upon the cool smooth gleam of its surface.

This place, there was something here. Something came over me as I was kneeling there and I knew it and let it happen but it was too late: simply by having that thought I became conscious of my own ego again. I looked around at this pebbled clearing, fern-leaf grove and mossy statuaries. I got up and lit a cigarette and stumbled around, not wanting to leave just yet. My mind was like a compass needle spinning, trying to catch hold of north.

And then I suddenly felt the blind urge to push on that black pyramid as hard as I could. I expected only solid mineral resistance, for it surely weighed several hundred pounds, but in fact it did slide a couple inches. And the space that had been uncovered dropped away down into darkness. It was too deep to be a grave; it was some kind of tunnel, like a sewer man-hole. I gave the pyramid another shove and it moved a couple more inches and then I could see the rungs going down one side. Was I dreaming? How can this be real?

I felt a sparkle burst of fear and excitement – here was mystery incarnated right in front of me. I had been called, bidden to this place, and now had to decide whether to go see what was down there, or stay safe on the surface. I sat there and felt nothing either encouraging or discouraging any particular action, only a vague anticipation of the regret I would feel if I threw away such a rare and miraculous opportunity. I looked around and it was calm and quiet, not even a breeze. The grounds seemed to be deserted. I was alone back here; the city was muted noise, barely audible. This place was like an island, like a pocket bubble of oasis within reality.

Perhaps it was the absinthe; I was floating in a greenish haze. I shoved the pyramid again, making a big enough gap for me to slither in through. I climbed carefully down the ladder, descending about twenty or thirty feet, and set foot at the end of a tunnel that led into darkness. Luckily I had my Zippo lighter with me, which was an excellent torch. I brought it out and proceeded down the passage, shortly arriving at a round dome-ceiling chamber with three archways branching into further tunnels.

I went through the one directly ahead, down a short passage and entered into a rectangular gallery with four altar-like slabs upon which lay the bodies of three dead men, clothed in turn of the century attire; the fourth slab was empty. It seemed odd they had been left out in the open like this, for the walls were honeycombed with niches for the usual stacked entombment. They appeared to have not rotted for all the time they had lain down here; they looked merely withered. The moldering fabric of their clothes was the true indicator of how long it had been. It must have something to do with the air in here: it was dry and still smelled faintly of old chemicals.

There was another doorway that led to a room shaped like a wedge: the walls and ceiling narrowed to a point that was a two-foot square opening, which I crouched to investigate, then crawled through. I emerged into a small square room with a partly collapsed bricked-over doorway that led into a long corridor I started walking down. All I could hear was the damp echo of my footsteps and the sound of grit under my feet.

At the end there was a door almost rusted shut, but I was able to pry it open and went through into a small dingy room cluttered with mildewed furniture and cardboard boxes heaped about in blackened sagging piles. There was an electrical panel in one corner and when I flipped the switch inside an overhead light came on. I flicked off my lighter and looked around this damp rotting room and then I noticed a ladder bolted to the wall that went up to an aperture that contained a trapdoor.

I climbed up and gave it a push, and with a creaking groan it did open and fell with a bang and a puff of dust. I emerged up into what appeared to be the elevator motor room. Then through another door into a corridor that looked oddly familiar. As I rounded the corner and saw the wide staircase beside the elevator, I was jolted by the shock of recognition: I somehow emerged back up into the basement of the very same hotel I had drunkenly wandered away from however long ago.

Could it really be? I looked around and it seemed to be so. Indeed, I saw the last stragglers were just making their way to the auditorium now. And I marveled what an incredible adventure had occurred in such a short span of time.

“Excuse me! What are you doing here?”

A woman’s voice addressed me with such sharp politeness that I jumped, then turned and saw a short middle-aged woman with glasses wearing a peach colored outfit with a blazer and knee-skirt coming toward me.

“Sorry,” I said. “I was trying to find the lecture hall. The Oneironautics Conference. But I must have lost my way. I don’t know where I am.”

She glared at me suspiciously and said, “As you can see, it’s right over there. If you are trying to access the north wing you should know it’s been condemned and trespassing is forbidden.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “I came from that room there.”

She glanced doubtfully at the door I indicated, but something flickered on her face as if she almost remembered something.

“Well, what’s wrong with it?” I asked. “Why’s it condemned? What’s the story?”

“Well, about fifty years ago there was a tornado that wrecked that part of the building. Rather than rebuild it, management decided to simply seal it off and forget about it. However, when the squatters found out, they moved right in. And so when the new management took over, they had to ensure the squatters wouldn’t bother the hotel guests. They made a deal that allowed them to be here. Regardless of who owns the building, so long as it stands, the deal does too. The owners know what’s going on but they can’t really do anything about it. You don’t believe me? Come on, I’ll give you a tour.”

She smiled then and I agreed and she led me upstairs to the first floor, and then up to the second. There was a total of thirteen stories, she said. About halfway up she started telling me about a giant spider that lives on the roof and sometimes attacks the tenants.

“That’s why people here are always getting sick,” she said. “It’s because of the spider-bites. Then they get sick and then they die and then they get eaten. Nobody touches the bodies after they pass, they just disappear. The people on the roof are at the greatest risk, and most of them sleep with machetes. People closer to the ground are usually safe, though once it lowered itself all the way to the ground and grabbed somebody’s baby and hauled it back up.”

When she said that I could see it happening: screaming infant and ten-thousand eyes staring down on the stricken parents below.

It seemed increasingly dangerous to be here. As we ascended the floors each level got dingier and shabbier than the one below: the ceilings crumbling, carpets ripped, worn threadbare, wallpaper peeling, holes in the walls. Evidently no maintenance or repairs have occurred since the initial destruction, and anything that breaks stays broken. Yet the people stayed and tried to do what they could to live with the worsening conditions. The upper levels are the worst, she said, because the roof started leaking and now the whole place is slowly rotting from the top down.

Then we emerged up onto the roof itself and it was a ragged derelict vista littered with little shacks and crumbling huts pulled together with whatever materials they hauled up and battened down against the wind and rain and snow. There was even the ruined remains of an observatory up here.

“Look,” she said, pointing to a certain spot in the sky. “You can’t see it but there’s an invisible portal and that’s where the spider came through. Then it came down and took over the roof. That’s why there’s nobody up here anymore, the spider ate them all. Look, there’s nobody here. Nothing’s alive.”

I looked around and saw that it was so. Though evidence of former habitation remained, many of those huts had collapsed, and others seemed curiously cobwebbed inside, though I didn’t venture any closer to see for certain. We didn’t stay up there very long. She said it wasn’t a good idea to linger, she just wanted me to see this. And so we turned around and went back down the stairs. But it probably wasn’t wise to intrude upon the spider’s lair, for one can’t help but trip the wires and alert its attention. And as we descended I was sure I could hear an extra sound above us, a series of soft jumbled thudding sounds, like a handful of children stealthily following us, always a floor or two above us, just out of sight.

There was a crumble of bricks at the foot of the stairs, which we stepped over and went out the nearest door, emerging onto what had once been a patio type area and was now a debris littered courtyard. There was an old woman sitting in a chair gazing blankly at the collapsed section of the wall where one could see the empty field beyond, outstretched to the horizon. She didn’t quite have her back to us, but we couldn’t see her face, just her profile, which was partly obscured by her wispy gray hairs fluttering in the wind.

As we approached her I heard a sound behind us and I turned and saw the shape of something coming down the stairs. It was moving too quick to be clearly seen, and it was too strange to even figure out what I was looking at: it was some hideous disjointed thing, a contorted misshapen assembly jumbled clattering ungainly down the stairs—it was a travesty, a mutant parody of the human form – it was the blond woman I met earlier; she was crawling upside down and backwards and she seemed to have sprouted some additional limbs – but when she turned her head I saw that it was also the brunette – they had somehow fused into one. The shock of seeing this was incredible.

Like a broken spider on ketamine, I thought as she reached the bottom and started coming toward us. The other two said nothing and I had the sense of impossible doom; it felt as though I was standing on the precipice of some great and awesome mystery.

Nemo Arator is a writer from Saskatchewan. He studied journalism at the University of Regina and worked at various odd jobs while writing his first book. A surrealist, he seeks gnosis through dreams, intoxication, and objective chance. This tale is from his forthcoming collection, To What End.