|
The House That Dripped Cliches Part Two -stacking the deck in dreamtime- . . . in the beginning the dream is always the same. It is twilight and I hang from a scaffold, my feet bound and one arm lashed behind my back. The wind rocks me gently and I sway. I trace patterns in the dust with my free hand. My legs ache, my head pounds, my lips are cracked. The scaffold creaks with every movement. With each stroke of my hand the pattern below me evolves into something greater. "You cannot succeed, the path you have chosen is a doomed one." A black-booted foot sweeps aside the patterns in the dust and I am forced to look upward. The man before me wears a drab colorless uniform beneath a ragged ivory-yellow cloak. Caliginous eyes glare at me from behind a sallow mask. The mouthpiece of the mask is distorted and snout-like, it alters the Hierophant's voice, makes it a soft as a prayer. "How many times must this sad little drama play itself out before you finally give in to the truth?" I ask, "The truth wears a mask?" "The truth is something many cannot face directly." He reaches into his uniform's breast pocket and retrieves a deck of ornate cards. "You have placed the girl in danger again." "I don't believe you." "You should." With a blur of motion he shuffles the cards with practiced ease. I can see the bloodstains along the gilded edges. I force myself to look away and then suggest, "The premonition was valid, there is something terribly wrong here. Even Lorelei senses it." "She doesn't love you. Not really." "I-I should be on watch!" I realize, "I need to wake up." "But you can't, can you? Perhaps you're dead and you just don't know it. Perhaps your sweetheart slit your throat in your sleep." "Leave me alone!" "Shall we draw?" the Hierophant rasps. The cards flash and crackle, "If you win I will let you awaken with more than enough time. If I win . . . you leave the girl to the nightmare that haunts this house." I know I have no choice but I try to sound confident "I want more than that." "You always do." "The old arrangement. A clue for the first card, a prophecy for the second." "And if I refuse?" "I can wait, it's my dream isn't it?" "A prophesy and a clue . . ." the Hierophant arranges and re-arranges the cards, "one of yours or mine?" "Oh please." "Very well. I draw first." Staring into the cards, I watch as the remembrances and divinations fluttering by. He stops shuffling and slips a card from the top-the eighteenth card, THE MOON. A swollen orb hangs low over a landscape of blunted towers and baying wolves. This is the card of sleep and dreams and it grants me a vision of that pivotal night in Sandor Perth's manor . . .
Unisystem, specific game terms and icons are Copyright
© 2000 CJ Carella. |