Hardly the sort of shit you advertise when you’re trying to rent out a house, indeed.

Jesus fuck, the goddamn nightmares. Screw the seizures. Please just give me a pill for these goddamned bad dreams. I awoke from one about fifteen minutes ago, and stumbled out here from the bedroom for a drink (bourbon, yes, but I did cut it with water). I stood at the big window in the den for a few minutes, watching the eastern sky. The birds are awake and chittering away in the trees and bushes, and I know the sun will be along before too much longer — already, the sky is lightening — but the way I feel right now, soon can’t come soon enough. Maybe it won’tbe so bad having someone else in the house, even an artist from California. Even if she’s straight.

So, yeah, here I sit, typing on Harvey’s Royal after a measly four hours’ sleep. Not sleeping is one of the triggers; for the fits, I mean, so this can’t become a habit. I haveto sleep, bad dreams or no bad dreams. I have to sleep, but I just couldn’t stay in bed after that, couldn’t say “Fuck it” and pop another Ambien. I need to be awake. I need to be awake and in thisworld. And I think I really am going to write down what I can recall about the dream, with the dimmest hope that it will loosen its grip on me. I knowI am awake now, and not merely stranded in some mundane intermission between one terror and the next. I knowthe sun is coming. I know I can get a nap later, when the day is all around me, and I don’t have to go back down to sleep beneath the starry canopy of the fucking night.

It’s another oft-cited, so-called weakness of my writing, by the way. All the dream sequences. The “reliance” on dream sequences, and, some of the stuff I’ve seen said, you’d think I’d inventedthe blasted things. As though the reviewers (and here I refer particularly to those self-styled reviewers who leave comments at Amazon and suchlike) have managed to get through high school and college (big assumption here, I admit) without ever encountering such a basic narrative technique. Let them pick on Pushkin or Shaw or Mary Shelley or goddamn Shakespeare and leave mysorry midlist ass the hell alone. I’ve actually had my agent suggest that my novels would come across as more accessible and I might increase my readership if I avoided so many dream sequences. And I am appalled at authors and critics alike who brand the use of dreams in fiction as a “cheat,” used only by writers who cannot “figure out,” in a waking narrative, some other means of saying what he or she has to say.

This attitude denies so much of. yes, I have digressed, and I am on my goddamned soapbox. But, honestly, honestly. I have lost track of the times readers have complained that they couldn’t follow the “story” because they weren’t clear what was “really happening” and what was “only” a dream. Right now, from where I fucking sit, it’s all a dream, marked by varying degrees of lucidity. Get with the program or stick to television (though, it must be noted that film and TV rely very, very heavily on dream sequences, so you’d think — if for no other reason — the lowest common denominator would have long since become accustomed or desensitized or whatever to writers employing dreams to expand and further the story). Whatever. I did notsit down here to complain about readers who cannot be bothered to be literate. Yeats said (and this one I know from memory, and let it stand as my sleep-addled defense, if any defense is needed):

Outside, the sky continues to brighten. The sky is the color of blueberry yogurt. Harvey’s unfinished manuscript is still in its box, here beside the typewriter. I’ve read the first two chapters. And that probably wasn’t so terribly bright of me, not after I figured out what his book is about, but curiosity and cats and all that. My dreams be damned, how would I notread it?

Look at this. Two and a half pages already, and I’ve managed not to get to the point. I have managed to skirtthe point, to dance around the peripheryof the point. Stop writing about dreams, Sarah, and writing aboutwriting about dreams, and just writethe dream.

The sky is going milky.

I cannot recall the beginning of it, but I was back in the basement with my flashlight. I know that I wasn’t looking for Harvey’s manuscript, because I clearly recall setting it down on one of the sagging shelves of pickles or machine parts or whatever, so I’d have a hand free. I was on the other side of the archway, past that odd threshold and its preposterous array of glyphs. I was somewhere past the threshold, trying to locate the north wall of the basement, pacing off my steps, one after the other, doing my best not to lose track and have to start over again. I realized that I must have walked very far beyond the house, and the footing beneath me grew increasingly wet. There were stagnant pools of black water standing here and there, pools whose depth it was impossible to judge, and I did my best not to step too near any of them. They seemed. unwholesome. Yes, that’s the word. Of course, truthfully, the whole damned place seemed unwholesome, as if I had somehow stumbled into an actual gangrenous abscess in the ground, a geological infection that had hollowed out this cavity below and within Blanchard’s land.

Here, where the pools of water began, there were far fewer shelves, and all of them contained nothing but antique books, volumes swollen from the moisture, their covers warped and spines splitting open like overripe berries. I did not stop to examine them, to learn any of their titles. I didn’t want to know, any more than I wanted to approach those motionless obsidian puddles. And this is when I realized that I was not alone. I heard footsteps first, and looking over my shoulder, I saw Amanda. Only, in death (and she wasdead, of that I am certain) she had taken on aspects of various of her photomontages, the sick fantasies of her pervert clients. She had the ridged and lyre-shaped horns of a male impala sprouting from her skull, and her eyes were as black as the pools of stagnant water. When she came closer, I could see that her cheeks and the backs of her hands were flushed with tiny scales that appeared to shimmer with some internal light all their own.

“Changed your mind, did you?” she asked, and when I nodded yes, she laughed — and it was so much herlaugh, in no way distorted by the dream. It was simply Amanda laughing, and I was grateful to hear it again. And then she asked, “So, was it inquisitiveness, or was it peer pressure? Or maybe you just got to thinking I wouldn’t want to fuck a woman who was afraid of the dark.”

“I am notafraid of the dark,” I replied, a little too emphatically. “It isn’t safe down here. They seal these places for a reason.”

“So, you’ve come to saveme?” and she laughed again, but the sound was neither as pure nor as welcome as before. “Are you my Lancelot? Are you the kindly huntsman come to rescue me from all the big bad wolves?”

And I told her no, it wasn’t anything like that, that I was only trying to find the north wall of the basement, because I knew it had to be there somewhere. I explained that if there were no north wall, then there’d be nothing to hold back Ramswool Pond. And since the basement clearly wasn’t flooded, it stood to reason the wall was there somewhere.

She shrugged and pointed at one of the puddles, not far from her muddy, bare feet. “You never can tell,” she said, “what goes on down below. Given any thought to where these fuckers might lead?”

“They’re mud holes,” I replied, growing impatient with the argumentative ghost of my argumentative lover. “They don’t lead anywhere.”