1. The Love Is in the Blood
This episode of Dreamhouse Row was intentionally scheduled for the 9th of September 2024 (NZST) when the Waxing Crescent Moon was transitioning through the constellation of Scorpio.
Written Transcript
In the quietest hour of a wet spring night, beneath the silver line of a Waxing Crescent Moon, your drowsy mind drifted into the liminal realm between wakefulness and deepest sleep. Not one breath had you taken in that timeless place when a tall, rugged man appeared in your mind’s eye: formidable, immovable, yet warm. The sight of this stranger filled the entire frame of your inner vision, but there was nothing else around him save the dense expanse of pitch-black void that closed in from every direction. You felt the unmistakeable press of cobblestones beneath your feet, but you were too distracted to look down.
‘Good evening, dear dreamer,’ the man said softly, half nodding out of courtesy, although his canine grin betrayed the formality of the greeting. He was slim and long-legged, with dark olive skin, and his bare arms glistened as he held aloft a burning torch. This torch, in fact, captured your attention the most, for a fey greenish glow was emanating from it’s uncanny fire; and when the man noted your interest in this he gently waved the blazing end from side to side, sending animal fat spitting from it’s hungry flames.
After a momentary pause he took a casual step towards you and peered down into your face, taking in the measure of you. Charcoal lined his piercing blue eyes and a mop of thick black hair, peppered with grey, lay slick across his forehead. A hard worker you thought, but in truth he was a hard player.
Faded tattoos decorated his forearms, shoulders and neck – a living tapestry of a life well lived; and there among them you spied a bare-breasted mermaid, entwined around an anchor; a devilish imp, brandishing a pitchfork; and the Fehu rune, ‘merkstave’, or upside down. Indeed, this was a man who could lose his bets just as quickly as he could lose his women, but you weren’t supposed to know that of course. You were only supposed to know that he had a tender side, which luckily, thanks to the grey puppy, you did. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the grey puppy, sleeping contentedly in the crook his free arm, you would have assumed that this person was bad news – or at least only bad news – and then jolted yourself awake out of fear; but that would have been a very great shame (and an even greater mistake), which you would soon find out.
See the stranger was a good-humoured host, and he enjoyed scanning the lines of your face, but when he read the uncertainty in the slight furrow of your brow he quickly proffered an invitation with his one empty hand.
Looking down into his sooty palm you saw the tiny skeleton of a red herring; small and perfectly formed. Fey-bound, you thought, picking the artefact up, for it felt as solid and as weighty as brass despite it’s diminutive size. ‘Is it a key?’ you asked cautiously, fingering the delicate fish bones as you lifted your face back up towards the man.
Still grinning, he nodded a silent yes – and then shot a sideways glance at an old wooden door that had suddenly appeared on your right.
Your nose caught the scent of sulphur and peat as a sharp gust of wind whistled through the key hole, and when you squinted a little harder at the door, you could just make out barnacles encrusting each corner of it’s frame. But above and beyond the door there was nothing to be seen; nothing but the dark, velvet space of eternity itself – nothing but the rich, dense expanse of pitch-black void.
‘You may enter,’ the stranger said at last, with a hint of caution at the edge of his voice. ‘But you mustn’t believe everything you see, do you understand? For your body now sleeps beneath the silver line of a Waxing Crescent Moon, but your mind . . .’ he paused, tapping the side of his head with one finger, ‘your mind ventures into the dreamhouse of Scorpio!’ At the mention of the latter he held your gaze intently to emphasise his warning; animal fat still spitting from the burning torch. His eyes danced. Neither of you spoke.
After many a silent beat you broke away from his penetrating gaze, and slowly approached the old wooden door. It was then that you saw the name SCORPIO carved in large capital letters beneath the lintel – each gouge as deliberate as it was haphazard – and you realised that your palms were sweaty; but you placed the herringbone key inside of the lock as you had been bid, and turned it stiffly to the left.
‘Clockwise!’ barked your host, coming to stand behind you. ‘We never open anything by turning widdershins – except the gates of hell!’
You fumbled then, and nearly dropped the key, but the man simply pushed you aside with one of his legs and kicked a heavy leather boot against the door, smashing it open on your behalf. There was a small suck of air, followed by a mouldy plume of dust, which tickled your nose as you stared into the vast interior domain of the Scorpionic dreamhouse.
‘The doors to the Great Twelve are always unlocked,’ he explained, and to your relief you could hear that the mirth had come back into his voice.
You placed a tentative foot across the threshold before turning back to face him one last time.
‘Long may you rest,’ he whispered down at you, ‘and long you may you revel!’ Then with one click of his fingers: the stranger was gone.
I’m A. K. Bonn . . . and this is Dreamhouse Row.
* * *
It was the smell of fetid bog-rot that assaulted your senses before all else. You coughed and then wheezed and then coughed again, as a jet of yellow marsh-gas rose up from the mud at your feet and hit the back of your throat. It stung your eyes, and seeped through your damp clothes, and soured your flesh. ‘Help!’ you tried to call out, but your desperate plea could only escape as a pitiful croak.
You heard an eruption of stifled giggles then, a little off to your left, and something within you came loose from it’s tethers to the sound of an audible ‘snap’. You screamed at the burnt-orange sky above you, at the endless expanse of swampland around you, at the foul and fearless creatures that crawled through the murk towards you. You screamed until the very walls of your throat turned to sandpaper and your tongue chafed so raw that it bled; but even then, even then, you could barely utter a sound.
‘Maggots!’ you spat through dry, chapped lips; and where your crimson spittle landed a sizzling, bubbling hole began to burn into the mud.
‘Would you like a drink?’ came a female voice; the words like cool, clear water; the tone like melting ice.
You instinctively moved towards the sound of this disembodied voice, and the unseen woman who it belonged to, while your blood-shot eyes scanned wildly from left to right.
‘Would you like a drink?’ she repeated, from somewhere nearby but out of sight.
‘Where the hell are you?!’ you railed, now frothing at the mouth, as you staggered through the thick, cloying filth.
‘I’m afraid you’ll have to do much better than that, dear dreamer,’ the woman chuckled, with a mixture of pity and scorn. ‘You can start by addressing me as Mistress,’ she commanded. ‘Now move!’
Anima marched in the direction of the north-blowing wind with a mischievous half-smile brightening her face. A stubborn one, she mused, and a spoilt one too. But she had worked with far less promising dreamers before – and not all of them had turned into nightmares.
‘Pick it up!’ she called over her shoulder, holding the hem of her cream-coloured shift just a few inches above the mud, but you could barely hear her words over the rush and rattle of your own ragged breathing. Tricksy bitch! you thought to yourself, but you were grateful that you could at least see her now; small mercy that it was. Your lungs worked like bellows, rusty from neglect, and your joints ground to ash with each burning step; but you kept your mouth shut as you straggled after the young woman, and just as well too, for she noted your self-restraint.
Anima brushed away the fringe from her sparkling green eyes and fixed her attention on the treacherous path ahead. Potholes and cesspools marred the hellish landscape in all directions, but she was completely undeterred by the offensive sight and smell. Squinting at a vanishing point somewhere in the middle distance, she murmured an urgent summons beneath her breath.
Two magpies suddenly cawed nearby and raucously took flight from the ground, for an army of ancient trees had begun to spontaneously erupt from the marshy terrain.
Easier than I expected, Anima thought, beaming with pride. She clapped once for delight, and twice for good manners, as the honourable men of the fertile earth broke their silence and broke their cover; arising, en masse, to reclaim their land. Oak and elm, birch and beech, ash and aspen; all of them stretched their leafless fingers towards the hazy sky above – groaning and creaking and straining and swaying – as they assembled themselves into a brand new forest and created a protective canopy overhead. In an instant the wind became still, and the light of day receded, and the chill of dusk began to creep it’s way through the newly formed woods.
Utterly overwhelmed with relief, you stopped your relentless marching and fell head-first towards the frosty ground below; but your face did not land in the squalid mire that you were expecting, for it alighted instead upon a soft, spongy pillow of heather and moss.
‘I found this!’ Anima called out, picking her way back towards you, and when she came to crouch down beside your prone, trembling body she added: ‘It has your name written all over it.’
Out of the corner of your eye you could see that she was holding a small smooth pebble, which looked remarkably like that of a miniature heart. Yeah – a stony, hard, embittered heart, you thought disdainfully, because you couldn’t tell if her ‘gift’ was a genuine one or not; and what irked you even more was that the stone didn’t have your name written all over it. But in spite of yourself, you had to admit, this sprightly, ethereal Mistress was breathtakingly beautiful; and you found that her milk-white skin and titian-red hair was both a morbid sort of comfort and a balm for your sore eyes. In fact, upon closer inspection, there was something about her demeanour that reminded you intensely of a girl from your past . . . so when she proceeded to cover you in a blanket of dead leaves (much to your chagrin), you couldn’t stop the tears from running down your cheeks.
‘Progress,’ Anima whispered gently, resisting the urge to stroke your face, and without a moment’s delay she pushed herself up on her powerful haunches and went off in search of kindling and dry food.
The fire leapt and crackled as you turned your aching bones towards it’s warmth. Nighttime must have fallen while had you dozed, for the closest trees to your make-shift camp were now nothing more than two-dimensional silhouettes; flattened spectres against a wall of black. It was then that you noticed a fey greenish glow emanating from the bonfire in front of you, but before your weary mind had a chance to register any danger, you heard the Mistress clear her throat.
‘There’s a handful of mixed berries here, dear dreamer; black and blue to be precise. Plus two ripe apples – no pun intended – and a jug of milk for half the price. Can I tempt you?’
You pushed yourself up onto one elbow then, wincing with the effort, but when you laid eyes upon the woman who had just made you the offer you nearly jumped out of your skin with fright.
The Mistress threw her head back like a half-cut maniac and split the night air with a blood-curdling cackle. Gone was her supple, lithe figure and creamy complexion. Gone was her honey-kissed lips and coppery mane. For her now-naked body had become a bloated, bulging spectacle of rancid fat and sagging skin; and as she slowly circled around the fire towards you (in an anti-clockwise direction you noted to your horror), you counted two empty, hatched eggs in the matted bird’s nest of her hair.
‘Mistress—’ you blurted out, surprised to find that your voice had fully recovered, but she cut you off at the pass.
‘If you aren’t a paying guest,’ she threatened, ‘then you must be an intruder. So which one is it, lovey?’
It was then that you heard a muffled conversation coming up from the ground beneath you, as if there were people just below in a downstairs room; and then you heard the sound of heavy boots – on creaky floorboards – not six feet above your head. But when you looked up towards the place where a ceiling should be, you could only make out the distant firmament of the star-spangled sky, twinkling from afar? Dreamhouse of Scorpio indeed! you quailed, for you hadn’t realised that you were ‘indoors’, let alone that there were other guests – and other ‘rooms’. In utter desperation you fished around in your breast-pocket for a means to pay your board, but alas: you only possessed a handful of mothballs . . . and a pint-sized, heart-shaped pebble.
‘Get out,’ the Mistress growled, the first time around. ‘Get out!’ she screeched on the second.
Anima watched on in silence as you fled from her presence – like so many other dreamers had done before now – and it wasn’t the first time that the demands of her job caused her to feel pain. She despaired of the role that she was sometimes forced to play.
Far off in the distance – and moving ten to the dozen – your terrified self ran blindly through the dark, but Anima could tune-in effortlessly to your thoughts.
The sound of galloping hooves pounded in your ears as you raced across the woodland floor, and it took you a moment to realise that the galloping hooves were your own. Indeed, when you partially turned your equine head to get a better look at yourself, you saw that a stallion’s body was running in place of your own – but this only spurred you into racing even faster. Your powerful flanks and whip-like tail and flowing mane were as white as the driven snow, and as you streaked past each tree like a pale ghost on All Hallow’s Eve, you snorted out a blast of hot breath from your flared nostrils. Plumes of mist rose up into the freezing night air before you, momentarily obscuring your vision, and it was then that Anima decided to strike.
‘Here we go,’ she muttered to herself, still watching you from back at the make-shift camp; but in the space of a hairsbreadth – or was it a hare’s breath? – she spontaneously appeared before you on the shadowed woodland path, mere paces ahead of your steaming snout. At the sight of your shock and horror she then spread her mouth wide in a ghastly smile, and it was the kind of gross provocation that even the most wicked or insane would find offensive.
It opened like a bear-trap, that fetid maw – a yawning abyss of noxious breath and rotten teeth; and just when you thought that her manifestation could not look any more horrendous, Anima began to emit a giddy, gluttonous gurgle from the depths of her frog-like throat.
You slammed your two front hooves into the loamy path before you, whinnying in terror, and then you felt – more than saw – the unstoppable ejection of your immortal soul as it catapulted from your body like a cannonball. It shot high up into the canopy of trees, your immortal soul; and when it reached the zenith of it’s ungodly arc and turned to face the forest floor below, beginning it’s hell-raising descent, you could feel it re-materialise into the familiar form of a human being.
Having correctly calculated the trajectory of your fall, Anima laid herself down upon the unforgiving earth to soften your brutal landing, but you obviously didn’t see this selfless act of hers. So when you smashed full-force into the rock-hard ground and heard the sickening crack of many bones, you mistakenly thought that they were your own.
‘It’s done,’ Anima croaked, as you lay spread-eagled atop her broken back; and when the fluorescent green bile spluttered forth from her mouth, and the last agonised groan escaped from her chest, you felt her once-formidable life-force slip out from it’s skin . . . seek the nearest exit . . . and swiftly depart from the dreamhouse.
It was the sound of your own crying that brought you back to your still-dreaming mind (although you had no recollection of temporarily leaving it), and you were disoriented to find that you had curled up against the trunk of a weeping willow. As you huddled there defenceless, and utterly spent, you realised that the dead Mistress was just a short distance away from you – just a hop, skip and a jump from the tree; but despite your jangled nerves, and absolute exhaustion, you couldn’t help thinking that her corpse looked unnaturally beautiful. For it had returned to it’s youthful appearance, thank the fates, and the sight of it’s milk-white skin and titian-red hair was both a morbid sort of comfort and a balm for your sore eyes.
In unison with your very own thoughts a solitary stave of moonlight decided that it, too, could not resist the Mistress’ state of grace, so it pierced a hole in the uppermost branches of the trees and illuminated her lifeless body in a pool of sylvan light. And when you followed the line of that luminous beam, you could see tiny motes of moondust spiralling within it: a glittering microcosm of stars.
Truly, the vision of the Mistress was so stunning and arresting that you couldn’t quite take it all in, because her corpse was not lying on the ground either – it was levitating above the frost-bitten earth like a fey-bound plank of wood; and as it hovered there in mid air, you began to notice that it was flickering in-and-out of visibility too. Indeed, an audible noise – like electrical static – crackled and hissed every time her corpse disappeared and reappeared, and with each reappearance it began to look more and more like that girl from your past . . . so her last remains were not just levitating; not just flickering; but transfiguring as well.
You wiped your nose on the cuff of your sleeve as a surge of remorse welled up within you, for it had finally become evident – or at least you could finally see – that the Mistress was the girl whom you had most admired during your youth, and yet she was also the girl whom you had most misunderstood. For she had shown you the best and the worst of herself, to be sure, and she had scared you witless to boot; but her intention had always been as straight as an arrow, and it was to draw the same realness from you. Because beneath your rage she had felt your fear, and beneath your overwhelm she had felt your grief, and beneath your surrender she had felt your trust, and beneath your shock she had felt your awe. Indeed, this fair lady had been the very first person to truly feel you – and the very first person to truly love you. Yes, yes, yes . . . it was clear as day! She had truly, and quite madly, and very deeply, loved you. But how was I to know? you thought weakly. She kept it so well hidden. And yet you had known . . . you had known . . . because a niggling, squirming worm of awareness had been burrowing it’s way through your psyche for many a midnight hour; and it was here now, on full display, levitating six feet above the ground – a butterfly transformed! And the beauty of it shamed you.
But it was just as well that you felt this way, because the dead and departing Mistress noted your sincere regret and she decided to give you one last gift from beyond the psychic grave.
Ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom, came a soft yet urgent beat; and as you looked down towards the source of that plaintive sound you suddenly felt – more than saw – a warm, crimson stain bloom thick and wet across your breast-pocket. The heart-shaped pebble! you remembered with a start, as a burst of realisation fizzed across the roof of the dreamhouse: a burning orange flare across the night sky. With a half-cough, half-sob you fished out the forgotten treasure from deep inside your pocket and held it’s bleeding love in your cupped hands; for you knew now, without a shadow of a doubt, that the dripping pebble was in fact the undying heart of the Mistress herself, and she had given it to you freely and completely and genuinely . . . in the very same way that the girl from your past had once given hers, all those moons ago.
Finally, you understood her. Finally, you appreciated her. Finally, you thanked her.
‘Progresssssssss,’ sighed the weeping willow, on the Mistress’ behalf. And then you watched, through swimming tears, as the levitating figure with the honey-kissed lips and coppery mane flickered brightly one last time . . . before permanently disappearing from view.
* * *
A smooth cobbled road stretched out before you as your mind slowly surfaced from the depths of deepest sleep, and it was only thanks to the nearby birdsong that you were able to gauge it was dawn. But you couldn’t see any birds; in fact, you couldn’t see a landscape at all. There was absolutely nothing beyond the cobbled road – nothing that you could perceive anyway – save the endless expanse of soft, white light that spread itself out in every direction.
A Victorian street sign towered above your head and you noted that it’s gilded letters read: DREAMHOUSE ROW. But it wasn’t until you saw a tall, slim man holding a grey puppy that you recognised where you were.
‘Congratulations, dear dreamer!’ the stranger called out, walking across the cobblestones towards you. ‘You found your way through the dreamhouse of Scorpio, and gave my good lady a run for her money! I’m impressed!’ The puppy yapped in agreement.
‘Your—your lady?’ you stuttered. ‘The Mistress is your—’
‘Mistress?!’ he laughed, as he came to stand before you. ‘Is that what she told you? Nay, my sleeping traveller. Anima would like to think that she governs the twelve dreamhouses, but they are in fact ruled by a Master!’
He smiled at you then, in the same way that a shark smiles at it’s prey, and something slid across the back of his piercing blue eyes that made you involuntarily swallow.
‘You may call me Animus,’ he said quietly, in a statement that sounded more like a threat. ‘But I shan’t be this informal with you next time, I can assure you. Not when you venture into the dreamhouse of Taurus.’ At the mention of the latter he held your gaze so intently that it bore straight into your soul, and yet you had the prickling feeling that he was looking at someone else entirely. Well enough, you heard him think to himself . . . and with one click of his fingers: the Master was gone.
