A sheet of water rolled over her eyes like a curtain being drawn. She lay flat in a rocking boat, tumultuous velvety black waves crashing over its sides. The ferryman stood tall above her, untouched by the spray. He was humming.
The wind was blowing haughtily from the east.
He held a lantern to his faceless face. “Are you ready to take care, now that we can both see?”
“I don’t—“ she started, then sputtered as another wave of starlit sea smacked her face.
She sat up, coughing. “I still don’t know what you mean.”
His eyeless eyes looked sullen. “This picture show needs to end, I’m sorry to — say.”
“Picture show?”
What?
“Aye,” he nodded, as if it made sense. “Dream waltz. Seen me as a good many things, I ken. I ken.”
Out in the dark of that writhing sea, she saw their destination puncture the gloom: a distant isle, sand white as bone, just barely visible above the phantasmal waters. There upon it like a tooth jut out a rectangular thing of girth and height immeasurable, tapering as it ascended into the impossible sky towards a pyramidal top. It was an obelisk. Its sides seemed almost amphibian — like scales seen from afar, reflecting unnaturally the half-light of the ferryman’s lantern. The thing looked disjointed, simultaneously uniform and not, a paradoxical testament to something her mind could not hope to comprehend, both inhumanly good and inhumanly horrible all the same. It was in memoriam to something beyond time itself.
They were going towards it. Eyes unfocused, she looked idly off the side of the swaying boat. Even in the dark, she could see other things in the water, other things in the waves. Chest-sized pockmarked stones began to peek above the sloshing ebony rapids, themselves emitting a sickly grey light to guide her unwilling passage for the monument.
In the churning of the frothy tides, they looked almost like faces.
Your fault. She choked back a sob.
“This isn’t— why are you bringing me here?”
The cloaked ferryman said nothing, only lowering his head an imperceptible amount. She saw now that he was not faceless — that had been a trick of the dark; within his hood swarmed a million beetles, all joyously pressing into and scuttling around and copulating with one another in some terrible orgy that was in itself wrought the larger shape of a great scarab's head, dark and green and red and golden, near pulsing in the lamp’s cold light.
“Would you not listen to music?”
It was speaking, its strange tongue seemingly wrought of sunlight itself.
“The night is longest ‘fore the dawn, and we’re not far into the former.”
“This is-“ she started, casting a glance over the edge of the gold-inlaid reed boat. In the tumult of the waves, she saw what looked like the legs of a beetle reaching from the depths and grasping for one of the stones. She looked away quickly, perturbed. “Y-you’ve, done nothing but fuck with me this whole time, and now you want me to listen to your- song?”
“You have not met me yet — only my unfortunately curated, predecessors.”
Still just speaks nothing but gibberish, was her only thought. The ferryman lowered his gestalt head even more, as though he’d heard.
He didn’t reply, only steering onwards.
“W-what’s this stuff in the water?”
He spoke again with Will’s voice, but she knew what came from that golden tongue was impossibly dissonant to him. “The snake coils in the reeds, the beetles thrust through the water. All sounds like gibberish, aye?”
“…Aye.”
Aye. The Egyptian boatman speaks like a Scot.
Your fault, your fault…
“It is gibberish, to an extent,” he went on, as though he couldn’t hear her terrified musings. It was begrudgingly comforting, in a way that frightened her. “Gibberish made up by particularly clever scribes — like you, a bit — to describe what they didn’t want to know.”
How’s that fair in love and war?
“Like- like that song, the one the…” she paused, trying to find her words. “The boy was singing.”
The cloaked beetle’s head of beetles nodded. “A dream with more credence than most.”
Their boat veered away from the bulbous rocks dotting the waves, ferryman’s oar pushing it ever onward along its obdurately isle-bound path. “You’re… Different now,” she said, holding onto one side of the golden reed boat as it turned.
“I am more true. More — keep th’ heid, if you will — awake.”
The heid?
She couldn’t help but say it. “…and you speak oddly half in Gaelic, for an Egyptian.”
The ferryman shrugged, his strangely toned arms plowing his oar through the water like a scythe through wheat. He was shaking, a reedy sound she only realised later had been a laugh coming from his ruined throat. “An Egyptian? What can I tell you, the snake makes mockery of us all. Even me — ‘cept, this close to the Dawn, it gets rather… difficult.”
Another half-answer.
“I’ve always had a soft spot for scribes,” he continued. “Even in the real — for this is only half — they’ve been some of my favourites, my… chosen. You’d know, you are one; Makers in their own right.”
She coughed, dust fluttering by the light of the ferryman’s pale lantern. “But they don’t make anything- it’s just recording what’s already there.”
“Ain’t that just it!” He exclaimed, steering the reed boat around another stone. “Like that song you heard- ill-fitting for your own situation as it was, the one who wrote it was doing just that — recording what had already happened, all those eons ago…”
Two things she sensed vividly then, in the ferryman’s rich voice. One was a distinct yet strange admiration — as though all the psychotic lines of seeing and not seeing had been only half-truths, and that this was the one who could see her truly. The other was a sickly melancholy, like a parent leading a kid to the doctor’s office and distracting them along the car ride.
Both coiled through one another in his speech, one fact ringing true in her mind: he was only talking because he admired her, yet he would still ferry her onwards to her fate.
Even now, the events of the white room played out again in her head, the contradictory echoes of her own admission tearing at her, the dark voices tearing at her mind.
Your fault, your fault, your-
Am I going insane?
“So that song was— was real, then?” She choked out over the spray.
“Not in this world. Or the next. But, in one far away… mayhaps.”
“But the dream was—“ His eyes had been golden that day, brighter than the now-absent sun. “I-it was in… New York.”
The ferryman nodded, still pushing his oar through the inky sea. “That’s all this is. Echoes of echoes, shadows on the dirt wall of a snake hole.”
Even in the silent emptiness, his voice seemed to echo, too. Around them, the sea still churned, the faintly glowing stones in the water still mumbling. Dark shapes moved at the edge of sight, rolling across the plain.
In the back of her mind, she felt a snake coil, the scraping unbearable. “That— includes you?”
Am I going insane?
She couldn’t stop her own thoughts.
Again, he tilted his head downwards, hood drooping, smaller beetles dropping to the floor of the boat like clumps of mud off a stick. “An unfortunate shadow of a person is still, at its clearest, the person.”
“But you’re so—“ the reed boat came grating against a stone, the ferryman calmly pushing it away with his oar. Beneath the waves she saw again those beetle’s forelegs, grabbing and then rolling the vaguely head-shaped rock like a dung beetle would retrieve its prize. Do not dwell on it, her voice of reason commanded. She cleared her throat. “You’re so, strange- you don’t belong in this dream, if it is one. I was- ” her voice caught on nothing. “I was told to avoid you.”
He dodged her last comment.
“Only,” the ferryman said, his voice now a soft drawl emanating from that golden beetle’s tongue. “This is not a whole dream. Half, yes- the echoes within, yes- but not in whole.”
The thing coiled tighter around the back of her mind. “…You mean the snake, that the dreams talked of. That - Sean, spoke of.”
“Sean?”
He didn’t know. How can he not know?
The water broiled beneath.
“Not my- not my cousin Sean, the other one. The Knight.”
He said nothing. They’d drawn near to the monument’s shore now, that archaic glistening chunk of shadow reflecting only the cerulean light from the ferry’s lantern. The sand from which it came emitted its own sickly bone-shine, callous and bleached yellow as it glimmered against the black backdrop. There were more faces in the water now. Shore-bound stones jut through waves, paradoxically black whitecaps crashing onto them and wetting head-like carven features. The ferryman hummed once more in some nonverbal parallel to that bygone dream-song from earlier, and the thing in her mind coiled ever-tighter.
It was the boy’s song.
Your fault.
When their boat finally came aground, there was a flash in the water. She jumped from her seat, turning to see what would no doubt be some other bastardized Egyptian nightmare- only to find the face of her cousin in the waves. Not the knight who had stolen his voice; her cousin, of the blood of her blood and the flesh of her flesh, reflected from nowhere onto that sloshing black mirror.
He held a gun like some parody desperado, aiming hopeless into the dark horizon, and soundlessly fired into the dark-capped waves. Beside him were more reflections, she saw, of other things — some true, some gross misinterpretations of things she only half-remembered and half-dreamed of some older time — child-dreams, hopes and memories beholden; she saw her first university, her high school, her cleaning the studio, her second, full graduation, her time in the Authority, therapy, doing what she loved…
And every other mirror-wave, it seemed, held Will. Always caught in some forcibly misremembered but terribly vindictive moment, she couldn’t help but turn to face the Ferryman. The thing that’d stolen his voice, the thing that’d brought her to this great and terrible place.
He only hung his thousand-beetled head as if in mourning, refusing to even look at her. More insects dropped onto the deck, struggling afoot.
She felt both angry and sorry for him, but for the latter she didn’t know why. Her head turned towards that island-bound obelisk, as if driven as per the programmed orders of some grand design, metal parts moving under her neck and skin and bones, forward onto the sand.
I’m an animatronic, she thought absently.
She had no control, not anymore.
The spired thing stood obnoxiously high into the sky before her, jaunt extrusions twisting from that otherwise orderly monument of shimmering scales. Up close now, it was only a few feet away from where they’d hit the shore, and she saw that its base was comprised not of stone but of millions of things, all dead or dying: some insects, some vaguely aquatic, others almost wormlike in reflection of the lightless mere. The spindly corpses had been knit together by a dark velvet gum, flowing liquid scale binding them all into a shape clearly not meant to be. It was a bulbous thing, bursting at the seams, with a sickly allure.
It’s a surprise, he’d said, even as the cold snows of Central Park had blustered around them.
He’d proposed that day. She’d made a choice.
She moved towards the prow of their reed-boat, and nearly stepped ashore. A muscular arm jut out in front of her as suddenly as she’d begun moving, two-toned golden muscles holding itself mechanically steady in front of her chest. She turned, and saw the ferryman’s cloaked head staring at her.
“Are you sure?” It asked.
A nod. “Your lies have been sweet, but they were— that, lies.”
You lied, too.
Your fault, your fault, your fault…
Emily fought off the tears, staring hard at the being that was hindering here. Never had she seen a thing look so simultaneously sorrowful and… content. His arm slid back beneath his cloak, and she stepped off the reed boat. The sand shuffled in response, once, then twice, then kept shuffling.
Instantly she felt a stinging warmth rise in the back of her mind, cold rings shooting through every nerve. With horror, she saw faces in the bone-sand — faces just like that in the water’s dark reflections, but all staring up at her at once in a way that had been invisible from the boat, obscured by the waves. They whispered from beneath her feet, horrid lies and spiteful insults. A mouth chomped wildly on the sole of her foot, and she fell screaming into the sand.
The obelisk leered above her.
Their whispers became yells, engulfing her in a current of hateful noise. Your fault, they jeered, and she saw in those mounds the faces of her once loved ones: cousins she had played with as a child, boys she had loved, and family members she’d all but forgotten, all were there, screaming and screaming and screaming.
Above them stood the ferryman, his shimmering face sullen from his perch on that battered boat.
He was still.
You bastard, she tried to call, but nothing came out. She felt at once in unison with that frightful mind-snake’s hatred, felt it rise within her like a spring uncoiling. It felt good- and that was the part that scared her the most. She wanted- needed- a way to put a stop to it, a way to make both of them stop their incessant howling.
Ultimately, it was the ferryman who gave her the answer. From his cloak he pulled a strange thing- she could barely make it out before it was tossed onto the sand near where she lay. A scrimshaw razor, engraved with thousands of tiny scenes; she didn’t care for the engravings.
“A choice,” he said, the voices rising. He was so, so sad. “To make it right.”
In an instant the razor was in her hand, then in her hand; cutting and scratching and then horribly grinding against her free forearm. The pain barely bothered her anymore - she needed something, anything to stop the howling,the jeering, the mind-shatteringly false accusations that seemed so horribly true. A great wheel of bone turned at the base of the towering monolith as she cut away at her arm, a snake wrapped around the pit of her mind. It felt paradoxically good- good to be rid of their jeers for but a moment, good if only because the pain of her now unrecognizable forearm was greater still, drowning out the memories that plagued her.
The car was kareening off the bridge.
Just like the one that killed him.
Voices, voices, voices…
Just like I killed him.
The snake cried alongside her, the pathetic thing. She ground and ground, ivory against bone, the faces in the sand screaming unbearable words. When her arm was no more than an angled spike of viscera and boney chunks, she cast one last pained look to the ferryman. He cast his head down like he so often did, and she saw again the flash in the waves. The face of her cousin, who she’d taken so much solace in, now shining with self-perceived malice through the black tide.
When the flash came on his face again, she snapped the spike of her arm in two. A hollow cry ripped unwillingly from her throat, the scrimshaw razor cast to the sand by bloody fingers. She fell forward alongside it, turning the spike inward through her gut as her face hurtled towards the jeering crowd writ in sediment beneath her.
A choice, the Ferryman had said. It was her choice.
She’d lied to herself enough, anyway. In the sand there was a final face- Will’s face, his eyes glistening gold in the dark. High above, atop the blackened capstone, she heard that terrible snake bawl louder and louder, shrieking over the blackened plain in some unholy dirge. She couldn’t stop what she’d begun.
Suddenly, the cold wind shifted to the east. Bloodshot eyes lifted from the body-strewn sand.
In the distant horizon, set tall and dark against the shattered sky, so solemnly sailed the ferryman, away into an early light. Behind, rising luminously over the black meres like a lantern but with none of its warmth, there was a pale sun, its light playing off the wind-whipped waves as if they were crystal.
It was bleeding.
It was then that the bone-spear did its job. It was then, that the whole world turned to darkness.