Session 40: What Dreams May Come

Paris fell away in ribbons of smoke and lamplight, the Simplon Express whispering south through the dark. In the berth-lamp’s weak gold, the fragment in their luggage might as well have been a coal with breath—glowing without light, heavy without weight. Claire had relayed the visitation in Latin, a voice like a talon scraping the inside of one’s skull: find the missing pieces or be devoured. They had tickets to Lausanne and a name scrawled in a six-month-old letter. They had resolve. They had nerves. At last, they had sleep.

Sleep did not have them gently.

Claire ran. Stone corridors received her in a cold clatter of footsteps, their floors gritty with dust, their side rooms choked with furniture that had forgotten its shape. She recognized the smell: the old, brined breath of basements and institutions, the asylum’s bones. Mortar filled her throat when she clawed at a bricked arch—one brick missing, the rest unyielding—while behind her a gathering thing scraped along the ceiling, whispering in the language she now understood too well. When the door opened, it was not an escape but a change of weather: warmth touched her cheeks, and the air smelled of riverwater and grass. The stone under her palms became earth. The brick became bark.

She sat at the base of an oak and blinked into a fog the color of old amber. The houses around her leaned over a cobbled road like curious aunts, their eaves heavy, their upper stories shouldering outward. A cat—no, cats—threaded the scene. A gray tabby trotted across the road with a purpose only cats understand; a tortoiseshell arranged itself on a rooftop’s rim and narrowed its eyes at Claire as if appraising her soul’s luggage. To Claire’s left, a cat twenty feet tall sat in stone majesty, its twin across the road keeping a stone vigil of equal dignity. Their paws flanked the cobbles like gates.

She reached instinctively, and in the place where logic would have objected, dream allowed. Her fingers closed on the crinkle of paper and the brine of oil: tinned fish, dried and ready. “All right, sweeties,” she murmured, and broke the fish with her thumbs. The cats accepted the offering without gratitude but with ceremony, each piece disappearing with a sound too small for the sacredness of the exchange.

The street climbed, steep and certain, toward a tower drowned in ivy. Claire rose and found Suttcliffe kneeling between the colossal paws, administering scritches to an orange mouser with the benevolent severity of a godmother. “We oughtn’t be late,” Suttcliffe said, though to what, she could not yet say. A figure sat between the stone forefeet: an older gentleman with tweed that had once been expensive and a pipe that had outlived at least one generation of owners.

“Mackenzie,” he smiled, pronouncing his own name as if it were a country he had visited often. “Between trains, as always.”

“Between worlds,” Suttcliffe corrected under her breath, smoothing her skirt and looking around. “Do be gentle with the cats.”

Memory stirred then—the way a creek stirs under ice, not breaking it but making it sing. Ulthar. The name came to Suttcliffe with the soft click of a key in a long-closed drawer. The tower held an ancient patriarch. Here the law had weight: no man may kill a cat. Reverence, accommodation—the city was arranged around those watchful pupils. She said as much, not to instruct so much as to warn. Even dreams had constables.

A voice rose out of the fog: “The train will be here soon!” The cats heard it first. They fanned, a furry tide, toward a platform at the road’s end where a red flag snapped in an unfelt wind. The platform was elaborate but trackless; beyond its edge lay only grass wet with dew. A velvet rope guarded one end of the platform, a brass sign declaring with cheerful tyranny: ONLY CATS. Cushioned benches awaited like thrones, and the cats assumed their places with the solemnity of dinner guests who know their host too well to misbehave.

Arthur and Walter emerged from a side street mid-argument, their voices trimmed with familiarity and the kind of good humor that keeps sharp things from cutting. They could not say what they’d been doing before arguing—memory frayed at the edges, as if the dream had carried them in by the scruffs of their minds. They found the others by the simple method of stepping into the only certainty available: the shared center of the impossible.

They almost missed their footing there. A rush of felines swarmed Claire’s ankles, those who had received the fish eager for another rite and those who had not insistent on fairness. The whole platform became a diagram of tails. Claire stumbled, Suttcliffe pivoted to spare a paw and lost her own balance; both went down in a tangle of apologies. A small tabby limped away, affronted but alive. The city did not send constables; perhaps contrition counted. Perhaps cats, too, understood accidents.

Per, whose mind cataloged meanings as quickly as others breathed, noticed first what the platform did not contain: rails. In the grass beyond the edge, two parallel paths of circular impressions sank into the earth as if some great padded thing had passed this way repeatedly and with ceremony. Walter, always the priest even here, pressed his nails into his forearm—a small experiment to test the seam between dream and waking. A young woman caught his hand. “Best not, sir,” she said with a smile that held both kindness and the authority of native law. “You’re for the train. It’s a rare privilege.”

Others waited: a man draped in fur with rings that flashed like confessionals, who introduced himself as Karakov and spoke in polished English smoothed by travel and an eastern burr that showed only when he turned his head; an elderly woman in Elizabethan black with a ruff framing her face like a moon’s halo, a heart-shaped valise held to her lap, her gaze snagging and slipping away from everyone as if she were keeping an appointment with memory itself. A vendor shouldered his empty crates, glanced back, and muttered a single word that Per alone heard clearly in his mother tongue: dreamers.

The crate on the platform rattled. It swung open like a wardrobe into which someone far more interesting had been stored. The man who stepped out wore blue and gold reminiscent of the Express, but time had struck flourishes: a tricorne hat, white gloves, and a porcelain mask whose beak suggested a bird that had learned to speak and then had sworn a vow of silence. He adjusted the cuffs, smoothed the lapels, and inclined his head with choreography that felt both ceremonial and deeply practiced.

“Mesdames et messieurs,” he said, “the train will arrive presently. Please stay back from the edge of the platform.” His voice had the reassuring timbre of someone who had shepherded anxious minds through worse. “I am Henri.”

He produced tickets from a breast pocket that should not have held so many, each card an engraved firmament: gilt lettering and filigree, and between them a darkness not of ink but of depth, as if one could tilt the ticket and angle the stars.

On their reverse, terms etched themselves in the eye:

Human dreamers—or those whose waking selves had ended—would travel for free. Passage required sleep aboard the mundane Orient Express. The Dreamlands Express served Ulthar, Dalethlin, Zar, Afarat, Thalerion, Zura, Ira, Sonanil, and Serenian. A human dreamer might wake at will, ending the journey; return invitations might follow after death. Those who rode beyond Serenian proclaimed by deed a wish to cast their burdens into the Gulf of Nodens, from which there was no return. At journey’s end lay the Waking World. Any who made that casting could never ride again, not even with coin, for bargains require shape and sacrifice gives it.

“What sort of sacrifice?” Suttcliffe asked, reading the letters and weighing meanings invisible to the rest of them.

“Your fears,” Henri said gently. “A weight that keeps you smaller than you are. A dream you have lost and can no longer carry. The train needs no rails, madam, but our hearts do better for having fewer.” He did not counsel which fear to name. Wisdom is the only instruction one can give about such things, and even wisdom serves only as well as one dares.

The platform trembled. A thudding rhythm approached, chaos disciplined into cadence, as steam unfurled in pale banners through the fog. Then the front of the thing appeared, and the dream placed a hand over the part of the mind that screams.

It was a train if one chose to call it that—a procession of pale, glistening bodies lashed together in an anatomy that suggested millipede, octopus, and nightmare. Limbs bloomed and retracted; maws opened and closed with an almost conversational patience, revealing teeth suitable for a clockmaker’s bad dream. Golden eyes studded the flesh like lanterns sunk in fat. Upon their backs stood pavilions and coaches very much in scale for human travel, a tender where it ought to be, polished railings and lamps crafted for comfort, swaying with the grave imperturbability of luxury. The first of the creatures came to a stop with a smoothness that suggested practice, not hunger. Steam jetted from orifices at the platform’s height and blew warm across their shoes.

Every small voice of instinct that had kept their ancestors alive suggested flight. Another voice, older and stranger, said simply: train. The dream deferred panic in the way dream always does, by making comprehension feel impolite.

Henri turned slightly, and something about the set of his shoulders tugged at Suttcliffe’s memory. The mask hid his face, but not the scar at the throat where porcelain met skin, nor the stippled eyelids that blinked when he thought, nor the brief glimpse of hand when glove slipped: burn tissue, newer than dignity could quite conceal. “Ms. Suttcliffe,” he said, and for a moment his poise was replaced by the relief of recognition. “I had hoped our paths would cross.”

“It seems,” she said, “your wish carried farther than most.” She did not ask about the scars. The dream had politenesses, too.

He inclined his head. “A long labor. A bargain set in the right place, with the right name. She runs, and she will carry you as far as you let her. There will be a banquet once we are underway. Tea immediately, or something more fortifying, if you prefer.” The cats, at their velvet thrones, watched from the corner of their eyes as if weighing the whole arrangement and finding it sufficiently catlike to permit.

Karakov declared himself hale and hearty with the forced cheer of a man who has long wrestled with his own blood and refuses to let it be called an opponent. Mackenzie muttered something about rumors of infirmity and then waved it away with an old traveler’s tact; between trains is no place to count ailments, only stations. The Elizabethan woman kept her counsel, the heart-shaped case unmoved as a verdict. Per, listening with the part of his mind that chews on symbols, filed away the law of Ulthar and the list of destinations with the same care he reserved for his clippings and notes in the waking world. Arthur watched the beast-train with a soldier’s narrowed gaze—as one watches an artillery piece whose allegiance has not yet been proven. Walter smoothed his sleeve where the experiment had threatened to become a wound and, just for a second, smiled at the absurd holiness of it all: a law for cats, a bargain with Nodens, a conductor in a porcelain beak promising restoration.

“Let us get you settled,” Henri said, and offered the way aboard with a gloved hand. The steps were steel and proper beneath the foot; the railing’s brass was as warm as a palm. Behind them the dew shone in its two laddered paths where the creatures came and came again, and the velvet benches held their feline congregation like jurors who had already decided and were now curious to see whether the accused agreed with the verdict.

They stepped across a threshold that was also a mouth and not a mouth. Upholstery sighed as it received them. Somewhere far forward, bells sounded—real bells, tuned for hospitality rather than alarm—and the Dreamlands Express shuddered with a living patience, as if suppressing a purr out of consideration for new travelers. The ticket in each pocket pulsed once, a heartbeat borrowed from elsewhere, then settled back into the weight of paper and promise.

There would be a banquet; there would be cities whose names already felt like the memory of a lullaby. At any moment they could choose to wake, fling the vision off like a blanket from an overheated bed, and find themselves again hurtling toward Lausanne and a letter signed months ago by a man whose curiosity had ripened into danger. Or they could ride past Serenian, to Nodens and the edge where one throws overboard the fear that has threaded itself through one’s days like black twine. The bargain had been written in tidy letters, but it had the gravity of scripture.

For now, they accepted tea. For now, they let the coach’s lamps polish their reflections into more forgiving shapes. Outside, the cats arranged themselves like constellations on velvet, and the law of Ulthar watched them depart without blinking.

The dream had opened its mouth and called itself a train. They went where it would take them, because the other choice—returning at once to a waking world already commanded by a thing of mist with talons and Latin—felt, for a precious while, like the less reasonable course.

The Express gathered itself and began to move. The platform drifted away. The red flag became a thread, then a thought, then nothing. The oak under which Claire had first breathed this new air would remain in its place, and perhaps the cat on the rooftop would keep its ledger of fish owed and fish given. In the compartment’s glass, each of them saw a shape that belonged to them and not to them, softened by the kind of light that dreams have and trains learn. Somewhere deep in the car, something living flexed in time with the wheels they could not see.

Between Paris and Lausanne, between what haunts in Latin and what waits in ivy, they chose a third rail, unwritten and alive. The Dreamlands Express bore them forward, and for the first time since the fragment slid into their luggage, the heaviness they carried felt like a thing that might be set down.