DREAMS OF A CONJUNCTION

Copyright © 2005 Alfred D. Byrd

For the third morning in a row Enoch Waite saw in the fires of dawn an uncharted star. As he stood, looking from a hilltop towards the east, he noted the location of the star, a baleful spark, in respect of the moon, Mercury, and Mars. Satisfied with his observation's accuracy, he turned his attention to a wide-angle camera mounted on a tripod beside him. Through the camera's viewfinder the star still appeared to him. What would appear on film would confirm -- or deny -- the truthfulness of what his eyes had told him.

While he took exposures he recalled his previous observations of the star. When he had first seen it from the steps of his house, he had assumed it to be an airplane's lights. When the star had stayed unmoving among nearby planets, he had wondered whether it might be a warning light atop a newly raised radio tower. A brief glimpse of the light through a telescope, though, had shown him no visible disk, or connection with a structure. Only when he had driven his car in search of that light and learned that it held its place among the planets regardless of where he went did he grasp that he was dealing with a heavenly, not an earthly, phenomenon.

That first day of the new star he had stayed uncharacteristically awake in daytime to search television and the Internet for news of a supernova, or of another celestial event that might explain his observation. It at first puzzled, then disappointed him, to find no such news. By the next morning he had nearly convinced himself of his observation's having been an hallucination.

The star had appeared again. In excitement he had called the department of astronomy at a nearby university to which he had reported cometary motions and transits of asteroids. To his dismay the astronomer who answered the phone, an astronomer normally friendly to Enoch, had moaned at his latest report. "Not you, too! You're the fifth crank who's called us about a new star in Leo. I observed that part of the sky this morning from when it rose till it was lost in the sun's light, and I didn't see anything unusual. What's more, none of my instruments found anything there, either."

The astronomer's mention of instruments had suggested to Enoch the wide-angle camera. Film, unlike the human eye, was insusceptible to illusion, or self-deception. Now, at the rising sun's light overwhelmed the planets in the camera's viewfinder, he could go home, develop his film, and have what would convince the astronomer -- or disconvince himself -- of what he had seen.

He drove his car to his house on a wooded height, the house devised to him by his parents, whose deaths had left him financially independent, able to pursue his vocation as an amateur astronomer. In the blackness of a darkroom in the house's basement, he carefully unloaded film from the camera. While the film soaked in trays of developer and fixer, he recalled in his mind's eye the view from the hilltop where he had exposed the film. He could see clearly the baleful star amid the known planets. He could feel, moreover, a call to him from the sky, a call that reached him from a point overhead and to his left. From years of observation, which let him determine the location in the heavens of any object from any point at any time, he knew that the call originated at the star's current position in the sky. I can see, he thought wryly, that, if I reported this observation to the astronomer, he would have grounds to call me a crank.

At length he could take the film from the fixer and turn on an overhead light. In its sudden glare what met his eyes on the film called into question his abilities as an observer. Although the crescent moon, Mercury, and Mars were clearly in focus in dawn's glow, the film held no trace of the new star.

With a methodicalness that belied his inner dejection, Enoch hung the film on a line to dry. When he left the darkroom, his dejection produced action as he sagged onto a cot and flung his right arm over his eyes. How could he have imagined a nonexistent star? He could hear the astronomer's scornful tone as he called Enoch a crank. Now, Enoch himself agreed with the astronomer's assessment of him.

With the astronomer's epithet as a lullaby, Enoch passed into uneasy sleep. In this he dreamed. He stood at the foot of a bed in a hospital. On the bed lay, ensnared in tubes and drains, his grandfather, his mother's father, who against his daughter's and her husband's wishes had infected their son with a love of the stars. This son heard weeping that he recognized as his mother's. From this he knew that his grandfather had just died. As Enoch looked with grief at his grandfather's corpse, though, its eyes of crystalline blue opened and turned towards him. From the corpse's throat a dry, papery voice issued. In this a horrified Enoch caught words of a verse:

"A star unseen by the world of men
Will signal the death of what has been
And the birth of what will be:
The children of earth, bemused by greed,
Will mock the star as myth of a creed
For dreamers to see."

His heart pounding, Enoch awoke in the gloom of his basement. As he recalled the dream of his grandfather's deathbed, a bed by which Enoch had stood as a boy, he wept anew for the death of a man who had meant more to him than his own parents had. It pained him afresh that his mother had scorned her father as an eccentric and had tried to impose on both him and his grandson a standard of respectability to which neither was called. It was the money that your eccentric father earned in his youth, Mother, Enoch thought, that let first you, then me, live free of care in this house. It gladdened Enoch that his grandfather had bequeathed his eccentricity to his grandson.

It infuriated Enoch, though, that he could still feel the new star's call overhead. As he tried to understand this, he recalled the astronomer's words that Enoch was the fifth crank to call the observatory about a new star in Leo. Why, he asked himself, would five persons imagine such a thing? He felt that there had to be a basis for it in fact, a basis in something that had suggested to each of the observers the vision of a new star. He could, he saw, get from the astronomer the names of the other observers. At least, he told himself, I can meet my fellow cranks.

With the energy of sudden excitement he rose from the cot and stumbled upstairs to a phone. When he called the astronomer, though, Enoch reached only the observatory's answering machine. With a wry chuckle he saw that the astronomer was asleep in the daytime, as Enoch himself would normally be.

While he stood, irresolute, by the phone, the dream of his grandfather's death recurred to Enoch. He recalled that his basement held a trunk filled with papers and other effects that he had barely dissauded his mother from discarding after his grandfather's death. Could the trunk hold the key to the strange verse that Enoch's grandfather had uttered during the dream?

Going downstairs again, Enoch rummaged through the trunk's contents, redolent of mildew. Many of the papers were astronomical, covered with observations written in symbols cryptical to all but stargazers. Reading the papers, Enoch frowned. Many of them seemed to him to deal with motions of planets in star systems unimaginably remote from the sun. Other papers seemed to him to be written in code, or perhaps in an unknown language, in which capitalized words such as Cthulhu, R'lyeh, and Hastur stood out like landmarks.

He found at the bottom of the trunk an artist's sketchbook. The first several pages of this held drawings of astronomical phenomena, some viewed from the familiar perspective of the house's grounds, but others from perspectives that Enoch's mind failed to conceptualize. As troubling as he found the latter drawings, they were less troubling to him than was a sketch towards the middle of the book. At first he took the sketch as a drawing of a maned lion's head. Perhaps, he thought, it is a personification of the constellation Leo. Only when he stared at the head did he notice that its eyes were clusters of tiny pupils in a gel-like matrix. The pupils disturbingly reminded him of frog's eggs. As he continued to stare at the head, he learned that what he had taken as fur, mane, and whiskers was actually composed of tiny, overlapping scales. Completing the transformation of lion into unknown being, a pair of horns, one above either of the creature's eyes, sprouted from its forehead. The creature's bizarre appearance held for Enoch a power and dread that he was helpless to fathom.

Below the sketch his grandfather had printed a title, ANAGRAM OF DESPAIR. Enoch shook his head at this title, which seemed to him to have nothing to do with its subject. Seeking an explanation of the title, he flipped through the sketchbook's remaining pages. He found among them, a few pages after the sketch, a poem in the same meter as the poem of his dream:

Rasidep, lurking at end of space,
Awaits a time for a brood and race
Of darkness and rage to rise:
To eyes deceived, the stars being right,
He will come to purge a world of blight
And muzzle our sighs.

Rasidep, he thought, is certainly an anagram of 'despair.' What, though, can the name mean? Is it something that my grandfather imagined, or of which he read in a book?

He pondered the poem and the sketch and the papers till his head throbbed from futile thought. The sketchbook clutched to his chest, he shambled upstairs, turned on a radio and tuned it to soft jazz, and collapsed onto a sofa. There he let notes of horns wash over him, and star and face and poem run through his mind, till music and mysteries receded into unattainable distance...

He came awake to mocking tones of a talk-show host. "So why can't the rest of us see this star, Mademoiselle Petrova?"

A Slavic woman's voice, etched with weariness and disappointment, answered the mocking tones. "I cannot say, sir, why only some have received the gift to see the star, but I can say that all must hear and heed its message, to come to a hilltop and await the star's arrival--"

"What will happen to us if we come there? Will we be carried off to heaven in a flying saucer to have probes stuck into our belly-buttons ?"

"I cannot say, sir, what we will become, but I can say that we will survive, transformed into what the star desires us to be, while those who spurn the star's call will fall into endless darkness--"

The talk-show host chuckled. "You're asking us to buy a pig in a poke, Mademoiselle Petrova. I think that I'll wait for this movie to come out on DVD. It's time for our next caller."

Enoch felt sudden fury at the host's cutting off someone who knew something of the star, however outré her knowledge might be. He sought a phone book to learn, if he could, a number at which he might call her, or an address at which he might meet her. He found both number and address in the Yellow Pages under a listing of astrologers. Viewing the listing, he felt in quick succession dismay, fury, embarrassment, and wry amusement at his having sought the woman. I should have guessed her profession from her line of talk, he told himself. Well, I did want to meet my fellow cranks.

Taking with him the sketchbook and the exposures that he had developed that morning, he set off to meet the astrologer. Driving his car to the address in the listing, he found a tawdry storefront bearing the legend MADEMOISELLE PETROVA: HOROSCOPES AND PALMISTRY. Why don't you read tea leaves, too? he thought cynically, pushing open a door that, as he passed through it, set off a tinkling bell. In the storefront's gloom he glimpsed a shelf of books, the garish covers of which promised a reader expertise in occult arts. I was a fool to come here, he thought.

"Do you wish for me to tell your fortune, sir?" the Slavic woman's voice said suddenly, startling him. Turning towards the voice's source, he felt new starlement at the sight of the speaker: a tall, almost spectrally thin woman with skin of an Arctic pallor, eyes of the blue nearest the noontide sun, and hair of spun flax that fell in braids to her waist. Her face was grave, but the appearance of wry mirth tugged a corner of her thin lips downwards. "No, I see, sir, that you have come here, not for my customary services, but for another purpose entirely."

"I've come here about the star," he said awkwardly.

Mademoiselle Petrova made a snort of laughter. "How many believe me about the stars; how few, about the star! Have you come here to mock a poor, deluded woman who sees what does not exist?"

"I've seen the star myself. I've also seen this." He held towards her the photograph of the morning's sky.

The woman looked down a long nose at the photograph, then shook her head slightly. "What you have shown me confirms what the astronomer at the university told me he had seen. When two such compelling witnesses as the astronomer and your picture deny the star's existence, why do you trouble yourself further about it?"

"I've seen it three days running. I feel its call from the sky even now. I was hoping that you could explain what I've seen and felt. I was also hoping that you could explain this." He now held out to her the sketchbook, open to the drawing of the unknown being.

The wry detachment of her features twisted itself into horror; her breath hissed between her teeth. "Rasidep!" she croaked out.

The world fell away from Enoch. Till then, he now saw, he had hoped that what he had experienced had been but a confused recollection of what he had learned from his grandfather. Now, with the astrologer's utterance of the anagram of despair, Enoch knew that he swam in deep waters from which there was no ready escape. "How do you know of Rasidep?"

"The name, and the face that you have shown me, came to me in a dream."

Perhaps to save his sanity, Enoch ventured a joke. "Now you're a medium as well as an astrologer?"

Mademoiselle Petrova made a wry smile. "All of us are what we must be when Rasidep calls us. Do you wish to hear of my dream, or not?"

When Enoch nodded, Mademoiselle Petrova told him of her wandering the university's grounds while its students around her sauntered to classes, threw Frisbees, or made loveplay on benches. As she beguiled her time with watching the students, she heard a voice -- or, more than a voice, a mingling of the shouts of a multitude of persons and a fanfare of trumpets -- call her attention to the sky. There, Mercury, the waning crescent of the moon, and Mars stood in conjunction. A star of baleful redness hung between the horns of the moon. As she looked at this star, it rushed towards her and grew into the face that appeared in the sketchbook. Seeking a name for the face, she heard the word "Rasidep." When she murmured this aloud, she felt herself being pulled upwards into the face and bursting into flame as she rose. Below her the world fell into ruin.

"At that point in the dream, as you may have guessed," she said dryly, "I awoke."

Enoch felt excitement at a detail of the dream. Tomorrow morning there would be a triple conjunction just as Mademoiselle Petrova had described. When he mentally charted the new star in respect of the conjunction, he saw that the star would share celestial coordinates with the moon. "An occultation!" he cried out. "The moon will occult the new star."

Mademoiselle Petrova chuckled faintly. "An occultation! Oh, would that so simple a phenomenon were all that awaited us!"

Enoch peered at her. "Clearly you know more of this matter than I know. What do you make of this poem?"

When he showed her the poem in the sketchbook, she looked at it with clear interest, but without comment. She displayed to him the same interest and lack of comment while he recited for her the poem in his dream. Only when he had fallen silent did she murmur, "Clearly the writer of these poems is wise. To what they contain I can add only that there is a hilltop where we must take refuge if we want to escape ruin when Rasidep arrives."

"You know the name 'Rasidep.' Could you have learned it from the writer of the poems? He was my grandfather, Enoch McIlvride. My mother gave me his first name."

Mademoiselle Petrova shook her head. "I never met your grandfather, young Enoch. I have met only one person other than you who knows of Rasidep."

"Who? Can I meet him?"

"He is a professor at the university, and one who has seen the star. Disturbed by it, and disturbed by a dream that it inspired in him, he came to me to learn what I could tell him of it. He left, though, dissatisfied with what I had to tell him, and unconvinced of what he had seen and dreamed. YOu have little hope of getting help from him."

She frowned a moment, then nodded. "You cannot have less success with him than I had. Besides, how better can I fill the hours before the conjunction than by talking with him?

He drove her to the university. There, as classes had ended for the day, he actually found a parking space near the building that she pointed out to him, the ivy-covered, red-brick Peabody Hall. Scanning a directory in the building's lobby and questioning students in the building's gloomy halls led Enoch and the astrologer to an office where the professor, a thin, balding man with thick glasses, huddled over a deskful of paperwork. He looked up from this at their approach. "You again!" he said, his gaze on Mademoiselle Petrova. "Didn't I tell you that I wanted nothing more to do with you?"

"I have brought you young Enoch, another who has seen what we have."

The professor's watery gray eyes shifted to Enoch. "Your misfortune, then."

Despite the professor's coldness towards him, Enoch recounted his observations of the star and his grandfather's verse in a dream. Enoch showed the professor the drawing of Rasidep and the poem in the sketchbook. At the end of Enoch's account the professor shook his head. "The only pertinent piece of evidence that you have, sir, is your picture of the morning sky, the picture that shows no new star there."

"You saw it yourself, else why would you have come to Mademoiselle Petrova?"

"I saw a light in the sky at dawn. Nothing makes that light a star, or connects it with some phantasmal Rasidep."

"You also had a dream of which you told Mademoiselle Petrova."

The professor made a snort, a sound of contempt. "So I had. I'll tell you of the dream so that you can understand the folly of what you're seeking." The professor described to Enoch viewing the new star from a hilltop near the campus. On that hilltop the professor had seen the star rush towards him and metamorphose into a face not dissimilar to the one in Enoch McIlvride's sketchbook. Terrified by Rasidep's face, the professor had fled from it towards the safety of his office in Peabody Hall. On his way there, an earthquake opened rifts in the walkways, lawns, and gardens of the campus. From the rifts emerged first fire, then nests of horrors, webbed, scaled, fungoid, and fanged. Tentacles from the horrors engulfed both students and buildings. A tentacle from the most loathesome of the horrors wrapped itself around the professor and dragged him towards the horror's maw, a churning pit that opened into vistas of dizzying geometries...

"Any reasonable person," the professor said, "would see the dream as a product of anxieties born of news of today's wars and terrorism, news viewed through the filter of muddled prophecies popular with weak minds. You may pursue such prophecies if you wish to, sir. As for me, I have a respectable academic career that I won't risk further upon inanities."

"Will you still have your career after tomorrow's conjunction?

The professor snorted again. "After you view the conjunction tomorrow morning and find yourself still on the earth, come back to my office so that I can say, 'I told you so!' Just now I have work to do."

The professor returned his attention to his paperwork. Enoch and Mademoiselle Petrova, dismissed from the professor's presence, made their way to Enoch's car. Only when he had seated the astrologer in its passenger seat, closed her door for her, and taken the driver's seat did she break the silence. "You spoke well, young Enoch, but had no more success with the professor than I had."

"We must warn others," Enoch murmured. "We must tell the Press our story."

"Hm. To which branch of the Press do you plan to tell it?"

"I know the science editor of the daily paper. she would give us a hearing."

Mademoiselle Petrova made laughter like the rustling of dried leaves. "Our story, if true, young Enoch, can hardly await tomorrow morning's edition."

"Television, then, or radio. Perhaps we can still make the eleven o'clock news."

"I believe that you heard, young Enoch, the success that I had with radio. Still how better can we spend our remaining hours than on a task of hope?"

Enoch and Mademoiselle Petrova made the rounds of the city's television stations. There the bearers of warning found receptions at first amused, then harried, and finally hostile -- receptions that grew shorter as the hour of eleven approached. When this passed without a story of the new star on the air, the bearers of warning returned to Mademoiselle Petrova's shop. There they resolved to try again the medium of talk shows. The host and callers of some of these mocked the story of the new star as a ranting of false prophecy. The hosts and callers of other shows looked down on the story as too mundane for their flights of fancy. On none of the shows did Enoch and Mademoiselle Petrova hear the voice of rational belief in their warning.

At length, just before the rising of the planets in conjunction, Mademoiselle Petrova murmured, "We have done what we can, young Enoch. It is not our fault that our warning has fallen on deaf ears."

In response to her words, a verse came to him. He murmured it aloud:

"The voice of warning has failed to wake
A world of greed that awaits the quake
To finish both work and play:
A time of pain and death will follow
Rasidep's coming; horrors swallow
In darkness our day.

By unspoken consent Enoch and Mademoiselle Petrova went to a hilltop near the university, the hilltop of which the professor had spoken. Forlornly, Enoch hoped to see him there, but recognized that the professor had been true to his vision of what was important. Although the city's lights made it difficult to distinguish from the city's haze, Enoch was certain of the zodiacal light's having already appeared in the east as the harbinger of dawn.

As he stood beside Mademoiselle Petrova and awaited the new star, he noticed a young couple's walking hand in hand towards the hilltop. As he turned to them, the young woman bespectacled and long haired, smiled at him in the dim light. "Good. Someone else has come to see the star."

"Did you hear our warning on the radio?" Mademoiselle Petrova said in an eager tone.

The young man shook his head. "What warning? We've just come to see the new star as we've come to see it the past three mornings."

"We called the observatory about it," the young woman said, "but the astronomer just laughed at us."

At least I've met the rest of my fellow cranks, Enoch thought.

As he started to speak to them, Mademoiselle Petrova lay her hand on his arm. "Why should we trouble their time together," she whispered to Enoch, "with a warning that will do them no good?"

As he nodded, the young woman pointed towards the east. "Look! There it is!"

Following the direction of her forefinger, Enoch saw that the planets in conjunction had indeed cleared the eastern horizon while the three on the hilltop had been talking. To the left, there was the pale yellow of Mercury; to the right, the fiery red of Mars; in the center, the upward-pointing horns of a crescent moon. Between those horns the new star hung impossibly--

Not impossibly, Enoch thought, if what appears as a star lies between the moon and the earth. The new star was brighter than ever at its fourth rising and seemed to Enoch to be growing brighter and wider as he watched it. It became a blinding spark, a blazing disk, a face of scales and fangs and horns. He heard from the sky a mingling of the shouts of a multitude of persons and a fanfare of trumpets--

As the young couple made unearthly laughter, and Mademoiselle Petrova a gasp of fear and wonder, Enoch felt a will behind the face, an irresistable, transhuman will, lift him from the hilltop. A fire, a fire of refining, a fire of destruction, awoke in his flesh. The fire consumed him, consumed his companions, and transformed what had been human into what would serve Rasidep's purpose in calling a few out of the earth's destruction. Even as the fire purged him of humanity, Enoch could glimpse the rending of the earth far below him as horrors webbed, scaled, fungoid, and fanged, released from aeons-long imprisonment now that the stars were right, wreaked their fury on the world of their bondage.

It was a measure of Enoch's transformation that he no longer cared for the world perishing far below him. He turned his attention to Rasidep to learn his master's purpose for him and his companions among the stars.