Dead Dreams

The first to see Oles in a dream was the widow Hanna. He stood in the corner of her house, though there were no doors in that dream. The stove was ice-cold, and on the table stood an extra bowl - her dead husband was not eating, he was asking to be given a spoon. Oles stood in the corner and said nothing, staring at the empty place behind her shoulder. Out of the darkness came a gentle but alien voice: "Let me sleep in your voice, Hanna." She woke with swamp mud in her mouth.

After Hanna the dreams went through the village like a plague. People woke exhausted, their nails packed with black humus. By their beds lay handfuls of dark silt that stank of the river bottom. And one woman saw her dead sister, who came in a dream and asked to be let in one more time - not into the house, but into her throat.

In the morning she could not swallow, and from her throat came a deep otherworldly rasping mixed with her own voice, like the sound of a choir of dark voices rising from an endless deep. Oles had been an ordinary miller... Until his beloved Marysia drowned by accident in the lake... He begged the night: "Let me see her, just once."

An old witch heard him and taught him what is forbidden: earth from the grave under the pillow, the stub of a church candle, and a thread from the dead woman's shirt tied around his neck. On the first night he saw Marysia. She stood by the stove, but her eyes were closed, and she whispered: "Don't call me again. I did not come alone." But he did not listen. The next night Oles fell asleep - and could no longer find his own dream...

From then on the miller slept in other people's dreams. He closed his eyes in his own house and woke in someone else's: in the widow's dream, in an old man's dream, in a child's dream. Oles could not get out until the dream broke off. But fear makes a dream deeper, like a pit, and then there is nowhere left to hide. He understood: when a person takes fright, the dream holds him tighter, like a bog. And the dead in dreams did not pound on the door.

They came in quietly and asked for a place under the eyelids of the living, for it is dark and frightening there, almost like a grave, only without the worms. At first everyone begged for his help to see their kin. By day they asked whether he would bring the dead. Oles refused, yet at night he came all the same, against his own will. To one mother her dead child appeared. The little girl stood motionless, unblinking, and said: "Mama, it's cold there.

Can I sleep in your voice?" The mother woke mute. And her son began speaking in his dead sister's voice - asking for food, though no mouth could be seen on him, only skin stretched over the gums. When she truly woke, the boy was humming his sister's favourite little song in the corner. The dreams became shared. People saw one and the same house without doors. At the table sat their dead.

Oles stood in the corner, grey, and whispered: "Don't look into their mouths when they speak." But people looked. The mouths of the dead were black with earth, without tongues, with roots instead of throats - and still they spoke, and their voice came out of the belly. Then one dead man turned his head, the head alone, toward Oles and said: "You are no longer a watchman. You are a knot."

The village tried not to sleep. People burned wormwood, brewed all manner of uzvars, sat in the inn till morning. But at some point everyone grasped it: the bodies were still sitting at the table, eyes open, hands holding their mugs - while the dreams had already gone off without them. The souls stood in that same house without doors. The empty bodies in the inn began slowly to lean over, like candles burning down. Oles was in the dream too. He wept: "I didn't mean it.

I only wanted to see her." From behind the stove came Marysia - but the face changed in an instant; it was familiar, yet the soul in it was a stranger's. Marysia spoke in a voice that did not belong to her: "You called me for so many nights that I brought others. They are all here. They are all hungry." Behind her in the dream appeared the dead of the whole village - hundreds of figures with empty eye sockets. They did not attack.

They held out their hands and begged: "Give me a hand." "Give me a voice." "Give me eyes." "Give me a dream." Oles understood: the dead want to hide inside the living, because dreams are the only place where they still feel a bond. To close the road, he had to find his own dream. Oles searched for his last dream. He found a small house where the memory of Marysia lived. But the house was dark, and at the table sat the dead, holding his place like watchdogs.

He grasped it: for people to stop seeing him in their dreams, he had to stay in his own dream forever and shut it from the inside - like a coffin nailed shut from within. He warned the living through the walls of the dream: "When the dead call, do not answer. A dream only opens. Stay silent." In the morning Oles went to his ill-omened lake, the body moving but not breathing.

Eyes open, pupils empty, and from his mouth juts a root - thin, white, like a thread from a dead woman's shirt. A moment, another moment. An enveloping blow and a slow vanishing... of the shell... The very next night people stopped seeing the dead in their dreams. But sometimes, when one dreams of a house without doors, a man in a grey homespun coat can be seen in the corner. He covers his face with wet hands and whispers: "Don't call. They will hear"...