Steam City Pirates (15 page)

All was dark at that moment, and then it became light, and the woman on the pile of skulls was facing me. I looked hard at her face, as her eyes were closed in sleep or deep meditation, or both, and then I recognized her. It was her nakedness that caused me to not see who she was at first. Her breasts rose with each breath she inhaled, her wrinkled stomach sagged from childbirth experiences, and her hair was blowing inside the cage from a breeze that only she could feel. It was the face of my mother, who had died from starvation in Kilkenny, Ireland, before we came to America.

“How did you make this?” I asked, stupefied by the uncanny resemblance. It was much more realistic than any wax figure Madame Tussaud could ever create.

“Make? We do not make the dreamer, Detective. You do. The dreamer, you see, is the physical manifestation of that which most causes you to cling to this world of illusion and pain. It is her dream, however, that creates the mystery you must solve.” The steam was still rising from Dusty’s body, and it added an extra ethereal quality to this catacomb.

“What in blazes do you mean?” I felt a panic deep inside, and I wanted to run, but my feet were adhered to the floor of this pit.

Bessie Mergenthaler seemed lifeless and inert, as if by coming down these stairs with me she had defused her soul. She stared at me with uncaring, magnetized eyes.

“Each moment becomes lost upon another. We move in our lives like restless angels, and yet we are but creatures of the earth. Why do you have faith in what you believe, Detective?” Again, the voice was coming from the misty clouds that were now circling around us. The dreamer—my dreamer—was also creating steam! This steam was like an elixir that infused the hovering voice with passion and illogical meaning.

I concentrated hard. I tried not to go insane. I closed my eyes, hoping that when I opened them this would all be gone, and I would again be back inside my little apartment on 42
^nd
Street. There was no flying boy, no time machine, and no sanctuary beneath the temple. I would be back to the everyday monotony of a city’s private investigator.

I opened my eyes, and she was still there inside the cage, seated upon the heap of Hamlet’s Yoricks, dreaming the dream for me. “What is she dreaming?” I screamed into the moist air.

“Outside this tabernacle, there is a mystery. Each life has its own tabernacle, its own mystery, but your life has become one of detection. Some minds become too insane with the possibilities of the universes out there, so they force themselves to believe in one choice and one destiny at one time. They fill their activities with an avaricious quest for material wealth, and yet they have no dreamer. They love only themselves, or their families, or their nation, and yet they do not love the endless possibilities out there. You see, Detective, your life’s puzzle is like the ones given to only a select few.”

“Puzzle? What am I doing here? How did all this happen?” I could barely get the words out of my mouth. I could see these words pour forth like iron filings, the tiny shreds hovering in front of my face, and only the magnetic force of the dreamer’s breath gave them shape and meaning.

“In your first puzzle, you were able to free the soul of the murdered Edgar Allan Poe. His dark reality and wisdom were allowed to sublimate into the world’s consciousness and continue to haunt some of the non-dreamers, the nescience crusaders, who want us to believe this world is the only reality. What did Edgar teach you on that first day you met him, Detective? Think back. You were standing in the rain, waiting for the great writer to go back into the bedroom to retrieve his manuscript so you could take it to his publisher in Manhattan. Fordham Road was dark and screaming with windy rain, like a tortured being. And yet it was at this exact moment that your destiny here, in this universe, was hatched. Your puzzles were beginning to be created by your dreamer as soon as you heard Poe’s words. Think. What were those words that sent your soul into the Mount Sinai Hospital, into those haunted slave quarters with your holy grail of panspermia, and into the deepest depravity of men’s lust with Jane the Grabber’s little business? Think, think,
think
! Drip, drip, dripping wet. You were afraid you would go insane then because your mother had died, and your father and brother were ignorant, racist louts. Only the thought of the looming war gave you any excitement, and even this was not enough to give you meaning. Poe’s words that day began your dreamer and led you to us and to your next puzzle.”

I thought back to that day. I was standing, wet and hungry, inside Mister Poe’s doorway. Poe was not a rich man. In fact, he was existing on a brief cloud of fame brought to him by his writing of the famous poem, “The Raven,” and he was spending all his waking moments trying to acquire some magic formula to save his dying young bride, Elizabeth, his beloved Sis. He saw me standing there, my pale face looking at him for some kind of answer, and he suddenly turned and dashed back into the bedroom.

When Poe returned, he held in his hands a paper, which he proceeded to read to me, with no explanation, with no preface, and with no afterward. The words alone were, to him, enough said. These same words came to me later because I had remembered them—all of them—all these years following that day. I had used them on the battlefield, when I thought I would be the next to catch a bullet in the brain, or when I was so alone and frightened before another coming battle that I believed Satan himself was orchestrating my life. I spoke these words into the foggy mist of that dark catacomb:

Take this kiss upon the brow!

And, in parting from you now,

Thus much let me avow-

You are not wrong, who deem

That my days have been a dream;

Yet if hope has flown away

In a night, or in a day,

In a vision, or in none,

Is it therefore the less gone?

All that we see or seem

Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar

Of a surf-tormented shore,

And I hold within my hand

Grains of the golden sand-

How few! yet how they creep

Through my fingers to the deep,

While I weep- while I weep!

O God! can I not grasp

Them with a tighter clasp?

O God! can I not save

One from the pitiless wave?

Is all that we see or seem

But a dream within a dream?

After I spoke these words, my mother figure, the dreamer, opened her eyes and stared at me, fixedly, as if I were the one who was now dreaming. “What are you saying? Are you saying these puzzles were all meant for me alone to solve?” I asked.

The Italian-American ambassador began to dance in circles with her tiny Roman soldier. “Yes! Now you have it, Detective O’Malley! The dreamer creates your difficulties. She is your nemesis. As you attempt to solve the dilemmas we place before you, she will devise another false clue, another dead end, and you must find your way out of her mazes in order to move on to the next level. Don’t you see? Poe was right! Each one of us creates our own reality, yet only those amongst us who are wise enough to find the true source of pain and struggle are allowed to change dimensions and battle for the highest reward of all.”

“The highest reward? What are you saying?” I could not take my gaze from my mother’s eyes. It was if she alone could allow me to go on playing this puzzle game.

“The reward is discovering who the Master Dreamer is, of course! He is the one we worship. He is the one who has created all of this we see in the multiverse dimensions. If you can solve the little puzzles leading to the Master Dreamer, you will have approached the Ultimate Science.”

My mind watched her through my eyes, and as she, my dreamer, my dead mother, began to close her eyes, my eyes also began to close. Slowly, drip by drip, sin by sin, desire by desire, I became unconscious to this reality.

* * *

Outside, in front of the Italianate mansion, Bessie was beside me. I looked over at her. “What can we do now?” I asked, my voice trembling.

“I’ll get some money from the bank, and we shall continue the charade. We can learn about the science of this charlatan next week,” she said.

I looked at her aghast. “Did you not see what just happened down in that pit of demonic subterfuge? My mother was the dreamer. I read the lines from Poe’s poetry. She told me it’s all a puzzle for me alone to solve.”

Bessie stopped walking, took hold of my chin, and stared up at me. “Patrick, are you feeling well? Would you like to see Doctor Jacobi? I know he’s on duty today at Mount Sinai,” she said.

I knew at that moment that I was the only one who had experienced the illusion or delusion down in the tabernacle. Perhaps I was out of my mind. What was insanity? To what truth does one refer when one’s complete reality becomes utterly clouded?

* * *

Later, back inside Temple Emanu-El, I told the group what had happened inside the mansion of the World Scientific Advancement Society for Progress. They all stared at me for some time. Doctor Adler rubbed his shaved chin. Walter shook his head from side-to-side. Becky walked over to stand behind my chair and massage my shoulders. Bessie, bless her, did not tell them that she had not seen anything. I knew she would have to tell them, but at least she was holding back the truth to give me a chance to explain myself.

“This dreamer could be their attempt to make you question your own thinking. The mind has ways of tricking our senses so we question what we think we know. By telling you about this game to find the Master Dreamer, they can lead you away from the truth and into their chicanery and illusions,” said Doctor Adler.

“I could see my mother. Although it was all without color inside that room, she was truly there. I was told she was my nemesis. She was the one who creates the blind alleys and false clues that I experience in all my cases. What if it were true? What if all of you are creations of her dream? Poe’s poem said it. A dream within a dream,” I said, brushing my head against Becky’s soothing hand.

Becky took her hand away. “I am very hurt, Patrick James, that you would call me and my love for you a product of a dream. My body is real, and my love for you is real. How can you say that it is not?”

“Me thinks yer slippin’ over the edge, O’Malley. We need a strong man who can think straight right now,” said McKenzie.

Bessie decided it was time to tell them what she had experienced. She moved over to stand in front of me. Her face looked serious as when she worked as a hospital administrator. “Our ruse went well. We are returning to the mansion to give this Dusteby woman a payment to purchase a share in their inventions. In return, we are to receive medical information about how she is allegedly able to exist with a steam-powered pair of lungs inside her rib cage. I certainly have my doubts, and this may prove advantageous to us. As for Detective O’Malley’s experiences in this dungeon of his. Well, the only event that occurred was when the little butler informed the Vicereine that he had found the door to what he called the ‘Tabernacle’ unlocked. That was all. We were escorted out of the mansion to eventually return here.” She looked back at me and frowned. “I am sorry, Patrick, but they have to know the real truth.”

“Daughter of Lilith! You are not on the same plane as this man! I was there, and I saw it all happen just as he described it!” Seth Mergenthaler, the
mazikeen
, appeared, small hands on his thin waist, admonishing his mother.

“How could you see and not your mother?” I asked him.

“My spiritual half is privy to transcendent matters. Mother is all earth, like you. She is destined to live many more lives to come. She is trapped on the wheel that the Buddhists call ‘Samsara.’ I heard what they told you, Mister O’Malley. I was invisible inside the pit of your dreamer. She was there inside the cage on a hill of human skulls! It is quite an adventure, is it not?” Seth did a little jig in place, raising his feet and skipping as well as any Irishman.

“Adventure can be both a blessing and curse, I would say,” I told him.

“All right, Patrick James. You have a corroborator here, but how does what you experienced change our tactics? We still have to stop this group from sinking ships in the harbor. We still have to discover where they do their dirty work. You have only found a place where your dreamer exists,” said Becky. “You don’t even know what she really does when she dreams.”

“I know,” I said, a bit frustrated with it all. “But what if this is leading me to a confrontation with this Master Dreamer? When I remembered Poe’s poem, I felt as if my life took a different turn. Becky, you always taught me to trust my insights. This event was the most insightful and most frightening experience I have ever had. And yet, you believe I should just cast it aside.”

“I never said to cast it aside. Everything we do must be applied to the immediate task at hand. We need evidence to show us how these pirates can develop a device to blow-up ships. All this other information about midgets, dreamers, steam-powered inventions and Italian women needs to be held in abeyance unless we can relate it to the primary goal,” Becky explained.

“What you say is true, up to a point, but this mystery is exactly the way she described it to me in their catacomb. We are being given false leads, and whether they come from an inventor employed by a nefarious underworld demon or from a dreamer sitting on skulls who looks like my mother, I must face the same task. This was the meaning behind Poe’s poem. ‘Yet if hope has flown away
,
in a night, or in a day, in a vision, or in none, is it therefore the less gone?’ We cannot lose hope because of the obstacles placed before us. It matters not how hope is stolen. Once it is gone, we are left without a higher purpose,” I said. I was quite confused from what had happened, and my mind was searching for meaning. I knew that if I didn’t grab onto something real my mind could float away.

“I am also a dreamer,” said Seth, matter-of-factly, and we all turned to look at him. His eyes had that focused look I had seen before, and I knew he was seeing his telescopic vision into a future we were not allowed to see, unless I were to hop into my time machine and travel to it.