April 2022
His ventures only make one thing clear: He cannot do this alone. He wants to – every bone in his body and muscle attached to them by tendon and sinews of flesh wants to in an effort to be stronger than he has perhaps ever been, to handle his own despite the complexities of the mind and the magic attached to it like a parasite waiting to be weeded out – but at the end of the day, when the sun sets and Seattle slumbers except for the restless, the sleepless, the paths that are followed turn out just like the once-lives he is chasing: Dead.
A nibble of a clue here, a peck of a hint there, some bread crumbs on the ground in everything from black rye to ashen petals to lost fliers on big city sidewalks played years ago – they only do so much to paint an incomplete picture that, even now in his own mind, he can’t readily collocate as they jump and weave and burn into each other as if mixed ashes, forged again into something new – a firebird and a magpie, the phoenix and the false idol, a soldier, a civilian, a wolf in sheep’s clothing and a pawn in a treacherous game of immortality.
For now, he is simply as he is: A man, dressed not unlike any other, casual in sneakered feet despite the landscape that patches itself together around him, an amalgam of everything that had ever been. Walls tower over craggy rocks, stone pillars like bars of a cage that dangle precariously over deep, cold seas that crash waves onto the shore; pyres burn in the distance, carrying with them the smell of dried herbs – of muskroot, of myrrh, of amomum and cardamom – and the ashes of those left behind in the wake of resurrection; and the wind carries with it a cacophony of sound that doesn’t quite mesh together, natural as much as it is synthesized in an ambiance that would be overwhelming had all the doors been open.
But they are there, scattered among the landscape he has left open for this specific purpose: The doorways that keep everything sectioned, organized, thrown into the compartments where they belong, books shuffled into a “best case” chronological order that his mind can make.
Any other time, this would be a hallway. He wouldn’t allow them to spill so readily into each other, but in Ash’s single focus, perhaps it doesn’t matter.
All that matters is one door which he stares at as if Goliath ready to fall, the doorframe simple – something one might see in a hotel requiring a key with a tag and a room number he doesn’t know to unlock – which remains devoid of the yellow and black tape that once crossed it, torn and discarded, filtering off into the wind of such subconscious reality; and Ash seems to go through the motions, perhaps not as lucid as he anticipated he would be, as he clenches tight to a napkin with a number, and talks to a friend long gone – not through death, but simply the parting courses of life.
“I’ll call him tonight,” he explains, still staring at the door as if reviewing facts he does know. “I’ll call him tonight and we’ll meet. I’ll be nervous. I’ll be upset. I’ll even be angry over something that happened long ago, but I’ll call him. We’ll talk, and then we’ll meet. Again and again…” It is as it always happens – be it a short stretch of time, crossing paths in the city, or finding each other again in the wrong place at the wrong time and under the wrong circumstances.
“And then…”
And then it doesn’t happen and he can’t explain to his friend – to his brother in another life, blood bonds be damned – what he means, leaving it lingering in the air as if not to vocalize the cold truth of the matter. No one enjoys talking about death and least of all the wife of the Deathless; and it seems this friend, this gray wolf that serves very little in this dreamscape than a prop piece hazed in memory, understands.
“There is always an Ivan,” he muttered, “always a third son, always chasing the arduous path placed before him in capturing the Firebird, and there is always someone to take away.”
He just needs to know how.
Consciousness charts a journey with incomplete maps to a land he has never been. A distant shore that he has heard rumor of that no one has set foot on. There is a pull, a tugging, inside him; an unconscious steering that he believes to be the plane itself as if a rope is tied to the middle of his chest that tells him where to go with gentle pulls forward. But the feeling is not of the plane, it is his own, born within him; a tool of his waking mind that can feel the place he needs to be. The voyage from his body to this dream is marked by quiet senses and shifting suggestions, subtle yet so specific that he knows as he reaches the blurring edge of where the dream meets the plane, that he is where he should be. Water and stars give way to a collage of land and dream.
At the center of the dream he finds the dreamer staring down his wooden foe. The dreamscape around him is intricate and complex, an unfolding of so many details at once that it feels as though dozens of dreamers have arrived in this shared otherworldly place. Separate dreamscapes packed so densely together that they became shared among the many. But he knows the same way he knows the significance of many of these pieces of the dream, that these all belong to one man. One man who is many men, who has been many men.
For a time, he watches, crouching on a rolling hill a distance away; His elbows resting on his knees, his chin held in one hand. The conversation, both disjointed and at harmony in the ways only dreams can be, carries itself on the wind to his ears. It is not clear how lucid the man at the helm of all this is, but he knows he will need to nudge the dreamer anyway. It is the reason he has come. He descends from his perch toward the staring match between man and door.
“Is there no key?”
His hand meets the wood of the frame, feeling the significance of it, the weight of it, the frustration of it. He looks at Ash. The question seems too obvious, and it is, but he asks it anyway. Sometimes the suggestion is enough for the dreaming mind, sometimes it will weave the ideas presented into the reality of its own creation and solve the problem of its own making. He suspects this is more complex than that. He circles behind the door, examining it for hidden, unconscious details, and comes around the other side. Dan does not need to try to the handle to know that it will remain locked even for him or that if it did open, it would open only to the space behind it.
How easy it would have been to navigate with a key – something so simple yet so imperative to fill in the blank spaces and untangle the web long made of this life lived; and there is no reason he shouldn’t have a key. He had been the one to sheepishly rent the room and he had been the one to first open the door into that space; he had been the one waiting for a companion that wouldn’t meet him and he had been the one found; and though there is no question in his mind where the interruption had been made and who had done it, still, the door remains locked.
And, oh, how easy it would have been to burn it down, to force it open through unconventional means just as readily locked to the dreamer just as the ability to do so remained in the waking world where fire doesn’t so readily come from fingers like talons and feathers don’t trail him like a brocade of fire and he doesn’t burn such hot white and blinding flames; but he knows that part of the store too, the interruption that had been made and who had done it, and still, they remain locked.
But then what of the door in that case? What happens to it, to the information behind it, in the face of such brute force and the wake of destruction?
He eyes seem to swirl rainbow, bright yellow and deep sapphire, while he considers it, the ambient temperature rising, weighing down the air which humidifies with the patchwork coastline, but aside from shifting where he sits, aside from standing and taking a step or two as if searching for an answer unknown, there’s no flame conjured or wisps of smoke or bend of oily waves in the air.
“It’s foolish to think there isn’t,” he says though he remains oblivious in so many ways to the presence there, the not-yet-named figure about the door that seems to fluttered in and out of loose perception – not an intruder, but another piece of juxtaposed fragments of worlds that fold and bend and collapse into each other as lines are drawn together, pathways forged from one life to another, one man’s dream another man’s death and the chance for a third to start anew in a never-ending cycle.
And it is a dream.
The recognition as it moves, pushed, through the air doesn’t collapse the dream, but seems to strip it down as facades seem to tumble like molted feathers from high crests over the sea to be replaced by contemporary walls and the sounds seems to taper, quieter and quieter, until they more readily mirror that of the room he is in, and it isn’t so wholly fascinating as the sweeping landscape, the hallway that seems to erect itself out of nowhere, but there is still the door with its Art Déco trim and uninspiring stature; and it seems wholly too easy, but his hands move anywhere to his pockets to start digging through them.
Where else would he have put a key?
The rapid rise in heat is distinctive. It is the feeling of a desert being held over the open flame of a candle or torch; heat approaching from within it instead of beating down upon them from the sky above. He watches over Ash’s shoulder to see if the fragments of the dreams and lives will turn into impressionist paintings as the warm air distorts them in the distance, a mirage of secrets on the horizon, but they stay as they are. The impulse controlled. For now. Dan idly wonders if this dream will end in fire. If the burning of his flesh and blazing death will be what sends him spiralling back to his body where he belongs, a magnificent rebirth of his own out of the ashes of someone else’s past. It doesn’t scare him. The pain might be real, but he has died in worse ways in dreams.
The motherly, caring hand of the waking lucid mind arrives and rushes in to tidy up the room of her wild child. The tornado of everything the dreamer owns and its aftermath is tucked back into order. Heat and chaos slip into something calmer and organized. There is poetry in the shift. Fragments give way to structure; pieces give way to form. A floor comes up beneath them and walls create themselves around them. A knowing smile displays across his drifting features as the unmistakeable layout of a hotel comes into place. “That’s something,” he remarks and begins to walk down the hallway. “I think we can work with this.”
At the next room he finds no number on the identical door that could give away its partner. It would be too easy but still he checks. “I think the more you try to force out what could be behind that door,” he motions back to it with his open palm, “the tighter that lock will get.” He imagines the deadbolt turning to molten metal in the fire of frustration, sealing it up forever. “Why don’t we focus less about what’s behind that door and more about what’s out here.” His hands slip into his pockets, and he looks to each end of the hallway for a sign telling them which way to go.
There is none. No sign for stairs or an elevator. So, he picks the direction he was already going and begins to walk, trusting that Ash’s mind will fill in the world around them. “Come on,” he calls over his shoulder, “let’s find out what floor we are on. Maybe even what hotel we’re in if we’re lucky.” Is this an imaginative creation of what his mind thinks should be outside the door, or is it a scrap of memory that hasn’t been locked away? Dan can’t be sure. Whether they run into memories, or the designs of an unconscious mind does not matter. Both can hold the key to what is behind the door.
He imagines that the unfolding of past lives is not unlike remembering a dream. Those frantic moments when people wake, and they desperately grasp for the memory of what they have done in their dream. Tracing the footsteps of a person who is them and not them, wondering why they did these things they would never do. There is relief and anger and joy in remembering all that was lost. And then the slippery nature of dreams takes most of the memories away. He wonders if Ash’s past lives are just as slippery once he remembers them. “Do you recognize this place?” he asks his companion curiously.
Just like there is always a marriage to escape, a firebird to hunt and rings in the bottom of the sea to fetch, dragons with hoards of gold and precious metals, and an Ivan to save a Yelena with such honeyed promises of life far away, there is always fire. From one life to another, in all the rejuvenating qualities of the burning sun, there is always fire and Ash is always at the heart of it – the old, the wounded, reaching death much like the sun rising and setting in the sky, crashing in such spectacular display of red and orange and amber hues that fringe into violet in those hours before the sun rises again; and so rarely, as with much of the natural world, is it so controlled.
But life being what it was, circumstances being what they were, more time spent masquerading as a human than the avian herald of daytime seemed to make it easier. It makes a lot of things, not unlike the strange conversation he was having now, stepping towards, but not stepping over the line of a waking mind. There’s familiarity there – something to say that this is something that needs to happen; that against everything that might be behind the door, he must see what is behind it; and then perhaps he could shut it once more with no intention in opening it again – just as there is doubt for trouble always lies on the other side of doors forbidden.
“I’ve only been in this hotel once.” It comes off bashful, the admittance given as only so many pieces of the landscape colored themselves in, deep red hues on the white walls framing photos painted in bold greens and fleshy tones of what is clearly skin, black accents rounded in metal providing ornate accents to the hotel’s stylization. It is the patches of white that give way to outlines like erasure marks, some assumed features filling themselves in while paintings are missing subjects and photos their faces. None of them are truly that important when, much the same as they had walking the hall in real life, only one thing had been.
“Last seen at Washington Square Hotel, 103 Waverly Place, New York City,” Ash rattles again, this time contents of long cold missing persons case instead of regular fixtures in many of his lives after a single, concrete point in time he remembers far better than the rest. “I was supposed to meet someone here and I didn’t, the circumstances of which, I can assure you, are not good ones.”
And yet, there is no immolation, no fire, no guests and staff rushing out onto the street while waiting for the fire department to douse supernatural flames. From somewhere in the distance there are voices, sirens, but they’re whispers in the quiet, assumed thoughts of what is usual and customary rather than something he’d remember. There is just a hotel, white halls and a dark wood lobby, silvery-white in unknown corners or down unknown halls and a number like a mosaic that bends itself together over the dark green-railed staircase downward.
7.
Recognition seems to dawn on him though there is still no key, Ash glancing back down the hall as the room numbers start to scribble themselves onto one door at a time in no particular order. “I know which room it is.”
There is splendor in the way dreams can paint themselves on the canvas of the dreamscape. The swirling mix of minute details with the intensely abstract washes of implied scenery. Sometimes it seems as if the dreamer is conserving creative energy where it isn’t needed, only detailing what is in the scope of their attention and focus. Other times it seems to approximate what should be there; a placeholder for what once was but no longer exists in the dreamer’s memory. With both there is a feeling that all is as it should be, that what is seen is whole even when it isn’t. It isn’t until he is in another’s dream that he can appreciate the strangeness of it, that he can look at it without the dream rearranging itself for him the way his own do.
As they walk, he eyes the way art creates itself out of other art on the walls, and he wonders if it is a memory of this place, or the inventive décor added by the sleeping mind. When Ash confesses that he has been there only once, Dan does not turn but continues to walk, waiting to see if more reveals itself. As if the very act of turning around and placing importance on it will make the memory scuttle away like a cockroach when a flashlight finds it in the dark. “Oh?” he responds instead, casually, his eyes on the unfolding dream in front of them. It is only when the full address reaches his ears that he stops in his tracks and turns to meet Ash’s eyes.
It seems he knows more than he thought he did, and he wonders if his plan to find out more about this place is no longer necessary. All they need is a key, not information. Dan frowns and looks back to the door they had been walking from and then to his companion. “No wonder you don’t want to find the key for it,” he offers gently. That is what it is in the end, isn’t it? This man in front of him who holds all the keys and answers also holds all the doors shut that keep him out.
“What’s the room number?” He turns back toward the stairs and begins to take them downward. Just like the key doesn’t appear in Ash’s pocket, it seems unlikely that they will find it hanging on a hook at the front desk, but he leaves the floor with the intention of looking anyway. With the intention of giving Ash’s unconscious mind ample opportunity to give them what they’re looking for. “What else do you know about that day?” he asks. “Who were you supposed to meet?” There is a pause before he adds, “Maybe someone else here has the key.”
How much of it is placeholder and how much of it is realized aesthetic of the hotel, Ash can’t say with certainty as elements fold into themselves, twist and turn and paint themselves in concrete lines and blurred edges, framing a few out of place aspects as one life attempts to bleed into another. They’re sneaky, slippery, little fragments of what had been and what currently was, edges of gold, bright red and hints of porcelain, against the hard contrast of a bohemian gotham. It doesn’t overpower – these tiny little pieces of lives lived – rather blend as best as possible as they pass through the corridor, a samovar seated on a counter nothing of concern or the ornate glass pane of a strained window not a bit out of place in the filling voids.
But then again, how much of it matters when stricken with a very real, potentially factual consideration: That Ash, the man with the doors to open into a near-endless string of existences spanning centuries, if not longer, doesn’t want to open the door. That Ash, the man with all the keys to open them no matter what magic might have once been laid, doesn’t want to find the person who might be carrying it. That Ash, knowing full well what sort of trouble comes from chasing the firebird, even in such an obscure concept as chasing knowledge of oneself could be, doesn’t want to know what happened.
“714.”
The meanings are few as connected to the timeframe in question, but neither stop the swell of caution like hot air fills the hallway, reeking of unease and wrought with worry that pressing further would be nothing but minacious. It’s like a breath – a deep one – that inhales sharp and exhales slow, steadying nerves in a building that rattles as if ready to fall apart in fearful tremors; but this isn’t the country of life, this isn’t Buyan where the homes and shops and fountains are made of skin and hair and cascade blood. This is just a building, forged of rebar and concrete, built up and out over the years, dead, but still living.
In his hand is still a number – not the number, but a long outdated scribble of telephone digits that echo like an old song – which he takes a moment to look at, to skew and contort and deform as if the odd angling of numbers means anything; but it does little more than impart a wash of emotion, something like sorrow ill-spent in current circumstances, and in the same way he had dialed up a complete stranger from a payphone on the street, his gut seems to churn in foolishness.
“I was supposed to meet my husband,” though I don’t think he believed it at the time when it had been so long, “not for the first time surly not for the last,” because it always seems to work this way, “and all I know is that I wasn’t there to meet him,” because…
Because…
And there it is again – the wall, the closed door, the part of his mind that knows what lies behind the door, but also doesn’t; and his mind seems to harden the blockade though they’re no longer staring at the door. The building breathes again, a deep depression that echoes through the halls to follow them. “I can’t really recall why.”
The breathing building that rises and falls without crumbling to pieces and sending hotel patrons screaming for cover makes sense in the way it only can in dreams. As if all buildings must breathe, even outside the plane of dreams, and people are simply too busy to notice them. Too fast paced. As if it isn’t a question of if they breathe but how they breathe; that it is a function that happens over time, with the seasons, as cold and heat expand and contract the walls and floors. As the structure shifts around them in a steady sigh, Dan can’t help but wonder if it coincides with deep breaths of Ash’s body safely asleep in bed or if it is a sign that danger is upon them as they try to find out more about what’s behind that door.
“714,” he repeats as they descend, committing it to memory should Ash’s unconscious mind attempt to convince him that it’s something else if they get too close, “that’s good.” It isn’t a key, but it is something that they can work with. Something more than an unmarked door in a hallway. And if they find a key, they will at least know if it is the one that they need. At least, it is the theory he is working with. Whether Ash’s mind will let them find what they are looking for, key or otherwise, remains uncertain.
There is silent nod of acknowledgement as Ash reaches the point where he cannot remember, as Ash’s memory braces itself against the door to keep the contents of that room from him. “It will come to you. When it’s time. When we find it,” he tells him with confidence that belies the possibility that the answers might not be so easy to find. That he might not be of use beyond the way he can nudge him into lucidity if he starts to slip away into the dream.
That is frustration with stepping into dreams. He is not like the fae who gave him this gift, he holds no power in any dream outside of the ones of his own creation. It is with jealousy and envy that he watches Mina slip into his mind and manipulate his dream at will. How easy would it be to slip into Ash’s dreams and begin to redefine them, to unlock what’s behind the door by force of will. All the doors, even. But then, perhaps it wouldn’t be so easy. Perhaps it would still be a locked door just out of reach. It does not seem worth the risk of inviting the fae in to find out.
Seven flights of stairs go by faster than they should. At the bottom he looks up in the direction they have come to see if the dream had shortened their journey, but it still looks like seven flights to him. “All those other doors,” he ventures as he leads the way out into the lobby floor to see what will unveil itself to them, “how did you open those? Were there keys? Were any of them ever locked this tightly?” It is only when they are side by side that he notices something in Ash’s hand, and he wonders how he missed it before. “What is that?”
It is a number that means all too much and Ash, in a far more lucid, conscious state, could surely mull it over beyond all incomprehensible measure until he was back to square one, so caught up in the details, they were only ever confusing in an endless stream of ‘what if’s and tangents that steered one so readily away from the goal. It was a street term for drugs popular at the time as much as it was a room number, vacant at the time, and if he pursued it further, it wouldn’t have been surprising to find it in the numbers scribbled on a bar napkin. It was a number promoting of spiritual guidance, a series of strong, success-driven numbers that pushed one forward without look back – something Ash did ten folds – and provided credence to the thought that Ash didn’t want to figure it out when all was said and done or, perhaps, that it simply wasn’t the time.
And perhaps it was so simple as waiting for the right time – for that 7:14 in the morning or 7:14 in the evening that could have, like a time-release lock, swung the door wide open – but as with simply procuring a key or melting it open, it seemed far too easy.
“It had been the right time, the right triggers,” Ash explained as they walked, down and down stairwells long and short all the same, a simplistic means of explaining something that he didn’t know the ways and means of other than simply happening. None were complete. He knew bits and pieces just like anything else, fell into the familiarity of repetitive patterns and traits shared throughout one existence and another – an affinity for deep reds and orange hues and the shine of gold, spices and herbs and teas brought in from all over the world, an ever-present longing for what had been lost in the life before – but they were incomplete frames, pieces of himself that he could embrace into a life anew. It begged to question what was here that would have been worth it.
“But no,” he shook his head. “One or two, perhaps, but some were almost too easy, as if just waiting for acknowledgement before unlocking.” Those had been nicer memories – most of them, though Ash would have been foolish to believe each life didn’t come with its fair share of ups and downs.
And the napkin – he glanced down to it for a second, a prized keepsake of this place, before relinquishing the grip of his hand to allow it to fall open, revealing a phone number. It isn’t as clear as one would have hoped, but it doesn’t seem to matter as the numbers seem known easily enough, not unlike knowing a language unfamiliar in one’s own dream.
“And here I heard you never find romance in a bar,” he said, shaking his head. No, it wasn’t the whole story – there was a lot more to it, decades even – but with a self-effacing chuckle, Ash knows well enough no matter what had been found, trouble came with it.
Doors waiting to be unlocked. Dan imagines the amalgamation of dream pieces that they had been surrounded by before it gave way to the hallway and to the hotel. A world littered with doors. Behind each one a piece of who Ash was and is. There are many mysteries to the man who has let him walk through his dreams. How much of him is the same from life to life? How much of a person is made and how much of a person is born? When he turns that eye to his own life, he can see all the pieces and moments that made him the man who could walk through dreams, who could lay out playing cards and tell the future. But if all the circumstances of his life had been different, would he be him?
Dan considers this as he imagines all the doors that might litter a broken landscape if he knew what it meant to be born anew. If his life reinvented itself again and again. Would the stories behind each door be like feeling the stories of a stranger, or would they feel familiar? Would they feel like him? He cannot assume that they would; that life in any other circumstance would not be a life he recognizes or a person he recognizes. That a man who was cared for by a loving present family would strike the same chord as indifferent one seems impossible. But then, he was not made to be born again; his destiny may turn out to be ash, but it is not an ash he will ever be reborn from.
A man destined to be reborn must be meant to carry more from one life to the next. “You must be meant to remember,” he says, more to himself than as any revelation to his dreaming companion. “Not some glitch in the system, not seeing something you shouldn’t. Not unlocking things that are supposed to be locked.” He wonders what it must feel like to have those moments of his own history unlocked. If they would then feel like a memory or just a whisper that clings to dreams where the mind can weave it into a broken reality.
“If someone can find romance in a rundown public toilet, then why not a bar,” he returns, his tone kept light. “Your husband’s number?” he asks, trying to piece it together as the lobby pieces itself together in front of them. “Or someone else’s?” The desk of the lobby stands empty with no one behind it. “Have you tried calling it?” he asks as he reaches the wooden edge and rests his elbow on it to see if anyone comes. “Have you tried calling it in a dream?”
Next to his elbow rests a bell, and he regards his reflection in the silvery dome of metal. He seems to be him but also not him in the way only dreams can be. Curiously, he reaches out and taps the top of it, sending out a loud, clear ring into the air. The kind that seems too big to come from an object so small. A drop of water into a placid pool, sending ripples out like soundwaves.
They are all different despite their similarities, all strange despite their familiarities, and all versions varied despite the threads that seem to string them together, one being to another, like that of fate. The point of origin, disappearing into the depths of lost time, one may never know, but that thread – it is the lingering proof of the timeline, knotted at different points in time where frayed ends, burnt in fire, become the start of a knot – a life – anew. Ash can’t say he recognizes them all. He can’t even say he can recognize his own reflection through time, not quite the betrothed noble-turned-pampered wife and seemingly nowhere close to the wartime revolutionary that crossed Europe for centuries and not exactly the nervous mess seeking out trysts in Manhattan hotels, but yet, he knows he is all the same, broken in pieces, built in fragments, put together after the pieces that didn’t work burnt away.
“I’m sure there are worst places.” Like, case in point, a public toilet, the idea far more absurd and obviously so as his expression faults a little – not necessarily a show of disgust as much as it is a wash of concern for whoever was looking for love in some potentially foul places.
“Fortunately,” Ash nods. It doesn’t escape him that it could have been false, that the number could have been a dead end, ringing to some poor stranger somewhere in the unknown that wouldn’t know who he was or what he was talking about once the receiver clicked over. It isn’t like everyone just went out giving out phone numbers to strangers – not even ones with some minimal public recognition at the time, presumably a plan meant to keep his husband a little madder, a little more spun than normal. He regards the number again, this time with both hands on the napkin as if a piece of paper that could flutter away in the wind at any moment, before reaching over the counter in full expectation of a phone. It is a hotel: There is always a phone.
Still, the bell gives pause – not because there is any worry of what might come with such an echoed chime, but because he doesn’t know what, if anything, would. It ripples; he can’t see it, but he can hear it, feel it vibrate even in small, miniscule form, but even as the building takes a deep breath in and holds it, nothing but inexplicable silence that makes the punch of phone digits louder and the ring stronger, almost blaring, through the handset.
And much as he had been before, he’s nervous, palms sweaty, muscles prone to twitching as he tries to stop anxious tremors, seemingly without recognition that in this place, in this life, in the world away from this dreamscape, he’s a married man once more, a wife to a doting husband, and there’s no hide nor hair of Ivan the Fool to be seen.
So he lets it ring…
As the soundwaves give way to the air, as Ash pulls the receiver of the phone to his ear, Dan waits to see if anyone will make themselves known in the lobby of their empty hotel, waits to see if the dream will unfold an eager and obliging employee willing to aid them find their search for the missing key. When no one appears, when they are left just as they were, Dan pushes off the desk and moves around it, long strides taking him to the end where a small opening lets him in. It’s a step upward as they often are, to better look down on the guests arriving, and he takes it in stride as he comes back around to where Ash is waiting for a sign of life from the other end of the line.
There are no hooks for keys on the wall behind the desk the way they have in movies, so he busies himself with looking through the drawers to see if they can be found there. As if there will be a hidden box with every key of the hotel thrown haphazardly thrown into it and the clerks behind the desk must spend minutes fishing out the right one. Unlikely. But stranger things have happened in dreams. When he finds no such thing, his attention falls on the logbook for incoming and outgoing.
The pages are not blank but full of undefined words and names. A hazy imagining of what a hotel’s logbook should look like without wasting time and energy filling it in. Though there is not one name on the preceding pages that he can make out, he knows them to be names, just as he knows it is normal for a hotel to breath and stairs to go by faster than they should. Slowly, he flips from page to page, feeling the coarse paper on his fingertips. He skims each of them in the weeks leading up to the present day to see if any standout amongst the foggy conception of other guests.
When he lands on the present day his finger traces his way down the line of hieroglyphs until he finds 714, the only symbols he recognizes. With a hum of interest, he picks up the book and places it on the counter near Ash for his dreaming eyes to read for himself and decide if there is anything worth his unconscious mind finds worth filling in himself. That is, if his call does not answer all their questions for him.
It warps like much of the space around them does, the sound of ringing coming through the phone. At first, it sounds as it should, a droll, unanswered ring on the other end of the line, spaced out just so and almost muffled in comparison to contemporary mobile phone chiming. It crackles now and then, sounds he easily ignores as he watches Dan move around the desk to check the books when it doesn’t seem like there is anyone else around. It isn’t that he had come particularly late on this night – not any later than he had felt necessary to slip through the shadows and go unnoticed by anyone caring to look – but his memory picks up on the silence more so than the figures.
The names as well don’t populate as readily as they should, scribbles of varying penmanship that could belong to anyone who passed through with only a few coming to clarity as he peers over the page. His is certainly not the straight aligned cursive of his current hand, aligning itself more with a scribble – an autograph – that he may have used at the time, but Ash can read it easily enough: 714, Alex Hwang.
It is the next that draws some concern to his face though it seems unnecessary with common enemies known, a long draw of ink that makes it feel like the very same looms behind him, breathing against his neck like some sort of unearthly haunt, a long-time predator looking for prey that he knows will lead him to his real target. It rests a few lines up, jumping blank lines as if to make it extremely obvious to his dream-addled mind: 712, Tsarevich Ivan Sosnovich.
And then it shifts, the ringing, into something that doesn’t fit the era. It’s new – the ring that emanates through the receiver – loud and piercing, bringing Ash’s attention back to the phone as the fringes of the dream start to erase, fading out as the sound only seems to grow, perhaps his own phone ringing incessantly on his nightstand. Even as it stops, the called ended or picked up by his voice mail, he can feel the edges folding, his mind stirring into consciousness that threatens to expel the both of them from this place in his mind.
At first Dan does not notice that the dream is beginning to pull apart at the seams. Attention too caught up in Ash, in the phone call, in the book that he places before him prevents him from realizing that what feels like the mercurial nature of the dream curling around the edges is in fact the waking world intruding on their time. That the waking body is pulling at the tether to its soul, pulling pieces of the hotel apart. Dan watches the book with interest as the letters align themselves on the page before them under the guide of Ash’s consideration. Alex Hwang.
Dan does not know enough about the man before him to know if its significant, if it is a name that means something or if it is the name he had one lifetime ago. A man with many lives; with many names. The name does not seem to concern his companion and a crease of frustration forms between his brows as he watches Ash’s expression. They seem no closer to the key than they were before and he can’t stop himself from feeling that he has wasted Ash’s time, that he has been of no use in the quest to finding out what has been locked away. And then he sees his own expression mirror itself on Ash.
In that moment the sound of the ringing phone transcends the receiver, and he dares to look away from the man on the other side of the desk to see the way the dream is shifting around them. He knows what’s coming and that there is nothing he can do to stop the unraveling dream; that he does not possess the power to keep his companion asleep like the fae who gave him his powers. With a desperate grab, he pulls the book back in front of himself to read the name that painted that expression on his host’s face. Tsarevich Ivan Sosnovich.
Dan reads it again and again as the edges of the world begin peeling away in his peripheral vision, committing it to memory in the event Ash wakes up in his bed and remembers none of this and it falls on him to recall the name for him. “Tsarevich Ivan Sosnovich,” he repeats out loud, giving his own brain another way to latch onto the words and carry them with him on what will be the inevitable journey back to his body.
The focus shifts to Ash and he feels through the dream for the tether that is threatening to pull him back to the material world. He knows he cannot stop that he is waking, but he can give him a jolt of lucidity before he does in the hopes of helping him remember. He pushes a single thought down the line to Ash's body as he did upon his arrival.