The Dreamcatcher

An estate agent comes to an isolated island to find some way of selling an unusual, bizarre house. While there, they learn of a local legend specific only to this area, a dream-thing in the night.

The Dreamcatcher

House Michaelmas is a bizarre place. Finding anyone who would be willing to reside here, with all of its secrets and ever-so-slightly sinister artworks adorning those bleak walls, would be, frankly, a miracle (note to self: find an art dealer and get a valuation of those oil paintings of Egyptian deities, could be worth something despite their weirdness?). Harold (Mr Michaelmas, I mean) is very polite. When asked why he wanted to sell, he said it felt odd being alone in such a desolate, unusual house. It has been in his family a long time, but he has no living children and wants the house to go to a new owner rather than stand alone and empty.

(actually, I’m quite scared by the thought of this house being empty myself. seems like something out of a horror movie)

There is a lot of value in the House Michaelmas. Unsurprisingly, Mr M. has no desire to keep any of his family’s more absurd collections, for instance: the stuffed and mounted birds of prey posed in paused moments of flight; the numerous unsettling and unnerving black-and-white photographs of icebergs; the vast and extensive library (if one can call it a library, it takes up much of the house in still-growing piles of weighty tomes and lighter, more esoteric publications).

A stained glass window, of a cloaked female holding an oil lamp. She is  pale, her robes are green-grey, and cover her dark hair, her face unreadable. The piece bears the inscription ‘Memory’. It is located in the middle of a corridor, a random, nondescript place for the ironically forgotten Goddess Mnemosyne.

Tapestries of long dead kings (need to find out which monarchs, they don’t resemble any I know of but my history is less than perfect)

Rotting timbers (adds a dash of authenticity. only needs a little restoration, a project. anyone ambitious could do something with this building. holding up surprisingly well against the elements. would be good on Grand Designs, a modern extension perhaps, if you could get the planning permission - doubtful) a grey stone watchtower with spiralling stairs, which sometimes even now still acts as a lighthouse, when the weather turns to storms.

Isolation (selling point; nice location?) Yes, nice, quiet, nice location. Some eccentric would make pure art here, it could be truly breathtaking. The architecture is nothing short of subtly majestic, a castellan outpost against the world set atop a distant cliff somewhere with a name you can’t pronounce. There are ferries to the mainland on Saturdays. Some tourists come; it’s a spot of great natural beauty, after all, birds nest in the white rock, people come to see the breeding seals (perverse curiosity) or the whales which swim off the coast. It’s untouched, unmarred, still free of pests like rats and dogs, no cats, no people. Only the Michaelmas family home, and up until now, the Michaelmas family.

(weird buggers, if you ask me. definitely creepy little s***s. if they weren’t part of an incest-murder cult back in the day, then I don’t know what they did, why they came out here and built this weirdo house)

An old car in the shed, (black)  run-down and a definite antique, beautifully made. Bears a silver Chinese dragon icon on the bonnet. Undoubtedly, such a beast, which purrs when the engine starts, a hollow roar echoing from the furnace, such a creature must be custom made. Mr M does not know where it came from, only says his grandfather collected it.

The image of a man (is it a man how can you be sure?) of a figure, (better), of an entity  (perfect) standing against a tide of unstoppable stars, dressed in a long leather coat and swathed in fishing nets, with wickedly curved hooks in place of fingernails, is carved into one of the walls in the attic of House Michaelmas. Its head is facing away from us, it wears a broad-rimmed hat. Arms spread wide and finger-hooks splayed out, catching stars. Above it is written, in archaic, gothic font ‘the Dreamcatcher’. There are screaming faces in the background, contorted past the final point of humanity. There are bones strewn around the Dreamcatcher’s bare feet.

(honestly if it wasn’t so f*****g weird it’d be worth something the art style is quite fascinating but there is something irredeemable about it and yet it seems it seems like the ocean in the background is moving the detail the detail you can’t destroy it only, perhaps-)

“Consider covering that up, maybe? Move one of the tapestries?”

(but you can’t cover it up when you know it’s there it’s there alright you can feel it….not watching you just...there)

Even downstairs, you can sense something off about House Michaelmas and it isn’t until the attic that you realise, it’s that thing, whatever it is. The Dreamcatcher, fishing on the edge of your subconscious, somewhere out there. You can feel its presence, tainting the house.

(I hate that carving so much)

Mr. M doesn’t much like it too. He says it wasn’t so bad when he was a child, growing up with it there, it was something interesting to look at when you were stuck home at the weekend with nothing to do. He used to room on the mainland (that is, the nearest large island to this one) with one of the schoolmistresses, during term, and come home to House Michaelmas over the holidays. The carving was one source of entertainment; there was no television and he wasn’t much of a reader as a child; aside from his imagination, there was little else to do.

He used to talk to the Dreamcatcher.

“It was welcoming, coming back to its presence,” he says.

Now he’s alone, that same presence feels suddenly hostile. It’s like, it’s like, it’s like a haunting (no something else, more specific) it’s like the feeling after watching a horror movie (when you go around the corner you expect to see it standing there, always) when the monster becomes real and it’s following you (so yes, a haunting then) and it’s always around the corner, backing away so you can never see it.

That’s what the Dreamcatcher carving feels like.

More literally, it feels like roughly hewn stone, not native to the area. Ridges set out the pattern, putting the form of the Dreamcatcher down, defining it. It feels like nothing important or special, just an old carving in an old house. It’s impossible to tell if it’s art or something more sinister (psychological torture?) or the impact on the house’s value (detraction? addition?)

It’s there.

In a mythology that doesn’t exist, a fairytale found nowhere but this house on this island, the Dreamcatcher fishes, casting its nets into the sleeper’s mind, drawing out whatever it finds. It’s an anti-sandman, the destroyer of what our minds create. It lives in House Michaelmas and stands on the edge of night, on the edge of the world.

More literally, it stands on the edge of the cliffs on the island, so Mr M. says. He’s seen it sometimes, everyone has. The tourists (didn’t get much out of them about it, they assumed it was Mr M. having heard the man was something of an oddball which is unfair to him, he is a v ordinary person, it’s just this house that makes him seem unusual. ofc it is). Kids who came to the island on school trips. They write stories about the ‘fishing-monster’. Their teachers can’t deny it because they saw the creature too and they felt the same bottomless, incomplete dread. Not a nightmare. An anti-nightmare. Which when you follow the scale loops around (like left and right wing politics, both becoming equally bad) becoming equally tyrannical and fearsome, a horror and an anti-horror hand in bloody, hooked hand.

(I never considered it existed. a quaint local legend unravelling before my eyes and I never considered…)

It exists.

On the cliff it was standing (the night I was meant to leave) watching. It cast its nets out into the tidewater, making odd waving motions with its hooks (oh god his terrible hooks) and dreams came rushing in, all at once, the sea was filled with phantoms flowing like water down the plughole, towards the all-consuming drain upon the ephemeral. An unreality-vampire.

The Dreamcatcher fished, fishes and then turns, and faces the House Michaelmas where its visage is inscribed on the wall in awful precision. Who carved it? Which stonemason thought it would be a good idea to birth something like that into existence? Did the mason even get a say or was he press-ganged, forced by the spirit to transcribe it into solid form?

At least he spared us its face (thank f**k) , whoever the traitor was, he spared us the burden of those eyes (those eyes, those eyes, those terrible awful eyes I felt them cross over me when it stood upon the cliff. it looked at me and I saw two clear, milky white echos, two hollows in a faceless face, I saw them regarding me with a depth I couldn’t begin to fathom, an emotion I couldn’t possibly name)

Mr M. goes upstairs and brings forth an old red fishing rod, scarlet paint flaking away to be replaced by amber rust. He sets it out in front of the door and nods. The Dreamcatcher comes up the hill to House Michaelmas and picks up the rod, hefting its weight cautiously.

It smiles.

(dear god does it smile)

It smiles, and is gone again into the gloom. Upstairs, the carving shifts, stirs a little.

The carving is holding a fishing rod now.

(there is not a chance in hell anyone will buy House Michaelmas)

As if you could actually own it.

The house has and always will belong to another, to a being beyond ownership and mortality.

It is the Dreamcatcher House, not House Michaelmas, it is another country, another world, a glimpse of something nobody should see, be forced to see.

Mr. M says goodbye (I’m glad to go, sorry Mr M. not even a f*****g writer would want this house nobody wants this house I’m so sorry Mr M. you wonderful, equanimous man)

Not long after he passes on, heart failure (his body isn’t found for weeks, patient even in death), and the ferry is stopped when the fiercest of storms takes a group of Americans down, the ferry led astray by the absence of Michaelmas Lighthouse. The island is cut off again (good) and the Dreamcatcher House stands alone, kept alive by a few scattered estate agent’s photographs, and illuminated solely by the flickering, fading oil-lamp of Memory.

Author's Note

This is part of a loosely linked series I am working on. I am also in the progress of converting this to comic book format. If you can think of anything to contribute, constructive, please tell me.

Reviews

[David Reynolds]

Hi, just read The Dreamcatcher.

The strange scribblings of an estate agent who might be going mad. Like the premise. You get the feeling he could lose it at any moment. Reminded me of the man who traveled to Transylvania to help Count Dracula with his legal paperwork. His letters back home slowly dropping into madness.
I feel sometimes I should not have corrected grammar mistakes as the writer is going crazy, so his writing is incoherent in places as is his mind.
I see this as a prologue to a good story. are you writing it just now?

I have a word doc with all my comments, per line, so if you send me an E-mail I can post it to you?

Dave

[InsertImaginativeNameHere]

Yeah, it's kind of partially based upon the Dracula thing, partially just written out of spite because a theatre group I hate is doing a piece called the Dreamcatcher and I think it will be awful, and so I decided to write this because I'm an actual child.

It's a sort of start, though the next part of the story is in a completely different style, and the next, and it will be a very odd piece at the end, which is why I'm working on the medium of comic book scripts, because a lot of comic books dip into different styles of storytelling; ancient diaries interspersed with myth with the narration of the protagonist. The estate agent dips out of view for a little while, and is never named. I would email you but I don't know your email or where to find it so yeah.

[David Reynolds]

I'll make my E-mail public on profile. Cheers

[L. J. Devereaux]

Fascinating read. I'd like to see more of this. As with your review of my story, this wouldn't normally be my sort of thing, but it is terribly intriguing. I can see how it would lend itself well to the style of a comic book. There is so much going on visually that I'd love to see an actual artistic representation of the setting. I mean the Dreamcatcher is terrifying enough just in writing. I'd honestly probably not be able to read the comic book, because it would keep me up at night.

Yet the mystery is there, and it is somehow appealing. I want to know more about the house, its history, the Dreamcatcher, the agent, and Mr. M. With a few tweaks here and there, some of the sentences are a little wordy, this would make for a great read. I am all for good word choice, and you certainly have that down, but there are places that feel a little bogged down with vocabulary.

But other than that, this is a promising idea. I really hope you are continuing to pursue the "anti-nightmare" that dwells in House Michaelmas.

[InsertImaginativeNameHere]

Thank you! I know, I have a tendency to be a wordy person when writing it gets a bit out of hand. It's funny because normally I'm so informal and then you get me to write and I become pretentious af.

My friend is currently doing the art, and I'm working on the next story, which is from a completely different angle and is more directly from the Dreamcatcher's perspective, possibly demystifies it too much but I'm trying to keep it distant. It's a work in progress. I've written something about Mr M. too, which I might work in at some point.

Is there anywhere in particular you feel the vocabulary gets a bit too much? So I know exactly what will need altering.

[David Reynolds]

Oh, I just noticed the points rating thing. Dam that's hard. I think once the lose ends are tidies it could be an 85. F**k i hate putting a number on it, as it's so subjective.

[InsertImaginativeNameHere]

I feel you. I never give numerical ratings for exactly that reason. Thank you though, it does mean a great deal to me, like.