That nightmare I mentioned. I was in a library, reading a picture book that I would ordinarily describe as nightmare fuel, except that I just got it as a nightmare straight, no chaser. It was not for children. It was a novella with full-color illustrations in a style partly reminiscent of Mark Tedin and partly of Alan Lee, written by a nonexistent genre author equivalent to N.K. Jemisin. I remember its title as Ghost Animals, because it opens in a future where humanity has begun deliberately hunting the animals of the globe to extinction in a desperately self-destructive attempt to reduce competition for resources; the same familiar short-sighted cruelty prevails among the different factions of humanity, which is how one of the passing details of an early chapter, amid the catalogue of terrorism, heat waves, and governmental brutality, is the loss at sea of a refugee child thrown overboard by authorities. Time goes on. The biodiversity of the planet dwindles. I remember for some reason the sentence which noted when all the white animals were gone, from the rest of the world as well as the Arctic. Humanity convinces itself against reality that it can breathe a little easier. And people start being snatched into the sea by strange black animals. It is horrifying when it happens, as violent and helpless as a monster movie; it is doubly horrifying in such an animal-less world. No one can identify the creatures. They drip, they howl, they leave nothing but blood behind.
I remember no human characters in this story, oddly enough: no one to root for, no one to blame. I remember almost nothing of the human side of the plot past scenes of chaos and destruction, which after the fashion of dreams I had to live through as well as read. My clearest memory is of the illustration of the monster, if that's what it should be called, full-page facing its reveal in the text. Standing skyscraper-deep among black and blue waters: a triple-bodied young man like identical triplets conjoined at the hair, which is a mass of tangling, spearing black cables that smoke like blood in the water for miles, each terminating in a proliferation of snapping, razor-thick jaws like the slick abyssal fusion of eels and dogs. They are all the same being, but each body has its own name, and each name is a variant of the name of the child who was flung into the waves to drown. They are clean-limbed as sculpture, vast as a cyclone, hydrothermal-pale; they stride abreast across the seafloor like a tsunami gathering. The first has its eyes open, the second its mouth, both gaping the same annihilating blue; the third has a heart in its chest of radioactive fire. If they ever broke surface, it would be like an island breaching. But all they do is stand like a silent, perhaps not even sentient effigy, so huge in the deeps that whales are tiny against their shoulders and fish mere glitter above their heads, and the danger that comes off that image is the heart-striking terror of a pandemic or chemical warfare. It is not possible to survive something like that except by luck. It might not be possible to survive it at all. It is nothing personal. It is only the result of actions taken. It may be all that remains of us in the end.
Awake, this nightmare has obvious antecedents: Pacific Rim (2013), Assignment 3 of Sapphire & Steel (1981), Skylla, Sedna, the nuckelavee. Current events. I did not realize until I had written it out how much it still upsets me and at the same time how much I wish I could draw that illustration, if only to get it out of my head. I don't think it's even the kind of dream I can do anything with. Mostly I hope it's cleared enough to let me sleep before my family's Hanukkah party tomorrow.
For what it's worth, it did not manage to make me frightened of the sea.
I remember no human characters in this story, oddly enough: no one to root for, no one to blame. I remember almost nothing of the human side of the plot past scenes of chaos and destruction, which after the fashion of dreams I had to live through as well as read. My clearest memory is of the illustration of the monster, if that's what it should be called, full-page facing its reveal in the text. Standing skyscraper-deep among black and blue waters: a triple-bodied young man like identical triplets conjoined at the hair, which is a mass of tangling, spearing black cables that smoke like blood in the water for miles, each terminating in a proliferation of snapping, razor-thick jaws like the slick abyssal fusion of eels and dogs. They are all the same being, but each body has its own name, and each name is a variant of the name of the child who was flung into the waves to drown. They are clean-limbed as sculpture, vast as a cyclone, hydrothermal-pale; they stride abreast across the seafloor like a tsunami gathering. The first has its eyes open, the second its mouth, both gaping the same annihilating blue; the third has a heart in its chest of radioactive fire. If they ever broke surface, it would be like an island breaching. But all they do is stand like a silent, perhaps not even sentient effigy, so huge in the deeps that whales are tiny against their shoulders and fish mere glitter above their heads, and the danger that comes off that image is the heart-striking terror of a pandemic or chemical warfare. It is not possible to survive something like that except by luck. It might not be possible to survive it at all. It is nothing personal. It is only the result of actions taken. It may be all that remains of us in the end.
Awake, this nightmare has obvious antecedents: Pacific Rim (2013), Assignment 3 of Sapphire & Steel (1981), Skylla, Sedna, the nuckelavee. Current events. I did not realize until I had written it out how much it still upsets me and at the same time how much I wish I could draw that illustration, if only to get it out of my head. I don't think it's even the kind of dream I can do anything with. Mostly I hope it's cleared enough to let me sleep before my family's Hanukkah party tomorrow.
For what it's worth, it did not manage to make me frightened of the sea.
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