Dreams and Stranger Things

I am beginning to become accustomed to this peculiar device I purchased in Caledon. The clerk who sold it to me called it a typewriter, but its design is nothing whatsoever like that of the Remington I used back home in Providence. In the main, it is a more efficient device. I am placing the typed pages of this journal in an envelope inside a drawer in my collection. I cannot quite explain this need for secrecy. I know so few people here in Babbage, and those I have met certainly did not strike me as the sort to snoop about or pry where they should not.

Strange dreams last night. I suspect that I have been "traveling" again, and so perhaps it was no mere dream at all. But I was lost and wandering in an awful place, one of the worst I have glimpsed since the accident 23 days ago. I walked across a scorched desert in ragged clothes, and the blazing sun shown down like a hellish Cyclopian eye from the dead white sky. Scattered across this parched world were the corpses of all manner of fantastic machineries and derelict, ruined buildings. There was a buckled tarmac, running north to south, and also broken railroad. I awoke in the sand, near a vast gash in the skin of this place, a mighty canyon or fissure that dropped away for hundreds of feet.

Somewhere in my wandering, I met a man named Wyeth, who spoke a strange and broken tongue, and he was in all ways deranged. And it was here that the "dream" first began to assume nightmarish proportions, for he seemed at once taken aback at my appearance and pointed to my arm. When I looked, I saw that it was mechanical, as though some limb from one of my father's automatons had been grafted directly onto my shoulder. He warned me of slavers and worse things. He told me to find a woman named Nova, for she, too, was partly mechanical, he said. Later still, I wandered into what seemed to be a darkened theatre of some sort, and stood puzzled for a moment at what I finally realized was an image projected through the darkness onto a wall by some invention resembling what I have read of Mr. Ottomar Anschütz' "projecting electrotachyscope." However, the image it showed was a mystery to me. There was only a single man in the theatre, a bald fellow with spectacles, and he told me his name was Spider Enoch. We talked for what seemed a long time, there in the sweltering shadows and the glare of the projection, though now I have forgotten most of our conversation. He believed I was insane, but also that all men and women are insane, and that I was a machine, but that all people are machines. He spoke all in vexing riddles, and never once rose from his seat, where he perched like some Hindi fakir, nor moved to look me in the eyes. The lenses of his spectacles were mismatched, the left lens being green, and the right one red (unless I misremember, and it was the other way round).

There was so much more of this dream, but most of it is now lost to me, and I suspect this is for the best. It was a frightful, fallen world, poisoned somehow. I never heard anyone name it anything more than "the waste-land" or "the wastes." Indeed, I could conceive no more fitting appellation, for, from what I have heard, even the most sun-blasted deserts are more alive than was that dead place. If that was a vision of one of the many alternates created in the accident, which Miss Lightfoot referred to during our conversation on Wednesday as "doppelgängers," I am very grateful indeed that my connection to that Nareth Nishi is merely mental, and pray I will not ever have cause to witness the world she inhabits again.

And yes, I still need to write of my conversation with the remarkable Miss Terry Lightfoot, for it hinted at many revelations yet to come, and I told her much (though not all) of what I have seen, of those dreadful things I know for certain and other matters I only suspect. I asked her about Sen, and she spoke with me of the Time Lords and Dr. Oolon Sputnik and his time-traveling cabinet, which she referred to as a "Tardis." When I spoke of "the Eye," she grew restless and visibly distraught and would not say anything on the subject. She has promised that she and the doctor will try to help me if they can, though, I fear that I am beyond the aid of even such remarkable beings as they. I must confess that the greater part of the hope I felt after my conversation with the Sidhe (as she called herself) has left me. I will write more of her later. I need now to set my hands to other work.