Sothis Medias

Early in the morning I wake up to go to work. I hear the phone ringing before I’ve even got my pants on. It goes to the machine before I can get it. My cousin Chris is telling me a story.
“I’m observing,” he says, “the process of whale slaughter. People are taking the big gray humpbacks out of the water and with long pieces of hooked iron, ripping them open. It’s horrendous.” His voice is horrendous, blurred by the low fidelity fuzz of the answering machine. He continues. “They take the blubber and use it to make candles, lamps, cooking oil. They take the meat and put it in cans, and ship it to Japan where they make burgers out of it, using seaweed instead of lettuce and green curry instead of mayo. Still huge amounts of the whale are wasted, and blood stains the Antarctic shore, so much that the penguins get red splotches on their fur too. Hey, but look, I’ve got to get back on deck of the S.S. Fitzroy. It is time to reel the harpoons back in.”
I shudder, grab my coat, hat, scarf a bite of toast and head out the door. It always seems like I am racing against the bus, and before I know it the moon is up as I stand outside my palace of deployment. It’s an old museum, a bibliotech, a reliquary of forgotten texts, but a good feeding ground for the silverfish who like to nibble on yellowed pages.
Every time I come here I remember there is a whole wing of the museum I have never explored. Having clocked out of ordinary time I make my way into the foyer of the abandoned wing. Unlike other museums everything here is covered in dust. It is a labyrinth of stairwells that go nowhere, and creaking boards. The swirling motes caught in the lamplight contain a thousand worlds. The bookshelves tower above me like menacing angels. As I walk through I catch a glance at the titles (Felix Nobilis, A Feather on the Breath of God, Shimmers of the Secret Fire, and the Oneironomicon). I get a creeping sensation, goose bumps prickle on my shoulder blades. Coming into a room where the artifacts are kept in glass cases I see an old mirror with curly cues of gilded ivy wreathed around its oval form. The reflection leering back at me is composed wholly of shadow, all my rejected and unassimilated forms, the discards. He trails a long chain of baggage with him everywhere he goes. For a moment we acknowledge eachother and then go our separate ways.
I hear sounds coming from below. There is a trapdoor. I open it, clear the cobwebs and walk down the steps. The old kitchen is lit only by stumps of candle. The red haired Valkyrie stands at the counter chopping up a duck with a cleaver while smoking a cigarette. Dried sausages are hanging from the rafters, and limburger cheese sits on a plate. An old man smears some on a crusty piece of rye before quaffing it down with a swig from his stein.
“The ghosts are in the library again,” he says to the woman, “all seven of them>”
I’m curious. Excited. I hear the chaos down the hall, a high-pitched whine, and flutter of papers riffling through the air, spines breaking when they hit the wall. Something crashes.
I rush down the hall to see. The globe has become unmoored and rolls out of its orbit, a crack along the equator. The busts of roman gods have fallen to the ground, split into chunky marble fragments. The poltergeists swirl about their dominion, uncaring, unafraid.
The old man is behind me. “Who are these ghosts?” I ask.
“The seven ghosts of the library,” he says.
“The trivium of grammar, rhetoric and logic, the quadrivium of geometry, arithmetic, music and astronomy. They’ve all but disappeared from our shelves, leaving behind only these despot shades.”
I blink.
I’m in a movie theater. The reels start spinning. Freshly skinned animal hides are stretched across the screen. A priest is crossing the street. He points his cross up at the sky. The screen goes blank. Alien spacecrafts have eclipsed the sun.

Tags: dreams, Fiction, ghosts, library, surreal
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