Pseudo Nicolas Flamel

More about Pseudo Nicolas Flamel

The trouble began with a stag. There it stood in the upper right of the engraving, minding its own business above a cave. Below it, angels were lowering a crown onto a woman’s head. Farther down, a skeleton kept an hourglass beside a man in bed. Everybody in the picture had a job. I was the only one sitting around in my socks.

I’d pinned the Hieroglyphics of Pseudo–Nicolas Flamel over my desk. The word Pseudo cheered me considerably. Here was a man whose name could do a full day’s work in his absence. I figured I could arrange something similar with my sleeping self. He had been getting eight hours a night on my money and had yet to produce anything I could use.

Every morning at six I made up a dream. I put the date at the top and wrote in the past tense. Then I added some wretched little detail that no sane man would bother inventing. The stag had a burr in its ear. The angel on the left kept shifting the crown from one hand to the other. The skeleton turned its hourglass over and gave it a tap.

I started with a good fountain pen. By the third week I was using a pencil from the hardware store. That was when I began to understand the operation. If the coffee was cold, I wrote anyway. If I could think of nothing but the price of eggs, I put eggs in the dream. One morning I wrote that the crowned woman took the crown off and used it to hold down a receipt. It was the best thing I’d written all week.

At the end of the first month I took the notebook to the corner store and showed it to the woman behind the counter. She read three pages while I stood there holding a carton of milk.

“You dream an awful lot about that picture over your desk,” she said.

I told her I was working through something.

“I can see that. Your milk’s leaking.”

For eleven weeks I kept at it. The only sign of progress was that I began buying pencils in boxes. Then one morning I woke up laughing. I’d dreamed the skeleton. It turned the hourglass over, tapped it twice, and held it up to its ear. There was a little sound inside, like a pea rattling around in a tin. I sat down to write it and found the entry I’d made weeks earlier.

I had given it one tap. The second was its own idea.

That unsettled me more than the skeleton. I’d been doing all the work around here. Now the thing had taken my hourglass and found a sound I couldn’t have supplied if you’d given me a week and the run of a hardware store.

I went to bed early that night. At three in the morning I woke convinced somebody had left the front door open. In the dream I’d been standing on the stone bridge from the engraving. A stag came toward me with a strip of yellow survey tape tangled in its antlers. It lowered its head to pass under a branch, and I heard the tape snap in the wind.

I wrote it down before I checked the door.