The Dream Prison

I found the first name in a locked drawer of my husband's mahogany desk. Not because I wanted to—though God knows I had reasons—but because the desk had been his refuge for years, and when he died of a fever that swept through Manchester in the winter of 1887, it was the only thing I had left to know him by.

The drawer stuck. Marcus always pushed it too far when he closed it, and I had never bothered to correct him. Inside, beneath a stack of medical journals and a leather-bound copy of Pinel's Traite Medico-Philosophique, lay a small notebook. The cover was plain black, unmarked. I opened it, and the first page contained a single line: For the five muses, as recorded.

Five muses. The phrase caught in my throat. I turned the page.

Clara Duval. April 12, 1886. Dream harvested: contentment with husband (false). Duration: forty-seven minutes.

Rose Ashford. June 3, 1886. Dream harvested: first applause after performance. Duration: thirty-one minutes.

Mercy Whitmore. August 19, 1886. Dream harvested: being loved without condition. Duration: fifty-two minutes.

Dorothy Hale. October 7, 1886. Dream harvested: the sensation of flying (literal). Duration: thirty-nine minutes.

Beatrice Kellman. December 22, 1886. Dream harvested: revenge achieved. Duration: sixty-three minutes.

My hands were cold. I sat in Marcus's chair, the one where he used to sit and stare at the fire while I prepared his tea, and I read every entry in the notebook. Each of the five women had been visited multiple times—some as often as three or four times per month. Marcus had recorded the frequency of their visits, the dosage of laudanum and belladonna he administered, the particular questions he asked, and the notes on their dream content. At the bottom of the last page, he had written a word in his precise, surgical hand: Eleanor.

The date beside it was next Thursday. The night of the full moon.

I closed the notebook and carried it to the hearth. The fire was dying, embers glowing orange in the ash. I held the notebook over the flames until the edge curled and blackened, then let it go. It sat among the embers for a long moment before catching. I watched it burn until there was nothing left but ash and the smell of old paper.

Then I went downstairs and rang for Miss Hartley.

Miss Hartley came immediately. She was sixty years old, thin as a reed, with grey hair pulled into a severe knot at the back of her head. She had worked at the asylum for eighteen years—longer than any other staff member—and she looked at me with eyes that had seen too much to be surprised by anything I might say.

"I know what my husband has been doing," I told her. "I found his records. The five women in the west wing. Tell me the truth, Miss Hartley—what is happening to them?"

She stood very still. The gas lamp flickered in the draft from the corridor. "Madam," she said slowly, "there are things in this building that even I cannot fully understand. Dr. Blackthorne believes he is doing good work. The techniques he employs—mesmerism, targeted pharmaceuticals, the resonance chamber—they have genuine therapeutic applications. But somewhere along the way, the purpose changed."

"Changed into what?"

She looked at the floor, then back at me. "Into something more profitable, I think. Not in money. In something else."

That night, I did not sleep. At three o'clock, when the house was silent and Marcus was at his evening rounds, I took the candle from my bedside table and went downstairs. The asylum was in the east wing of the property—a separate building connected to the main house by a glass corridor. I had never been inside after dark.

The west wing corridor was long and narrow, lined with doors. Each door had a brass number plate. I counted them as I walked: Room 7, Room 8, Room 9, Room 10, Room 11. Five rooms. Five women.

I stopped at Room 9. The door was slightly ajar. I pushed it open.

The room was dim, lit by a single low lamp. A woman lay on the bed, her breathing shallow and even. She looked young—perhaps twenty-five—with dark hair spread across the pillow and her hands folded over a thin blanket. Her lips moved slightly, as though she were speaking in her sleep.

I leaned closer. Her eyes opened.

They were not her eyes. There was a vacancy in them, a glassiness that told me she was somewhere else entirely. She was not in this room. She was not in this world. She was inside a dream, and I was an intruder.

"Miss?" I whispered.

Her eyes tracked toward me. Her mouth formed a word I could not hear. I leaned closer still.

"—safe—"

She was dreaming she was safe.

I stepped back, and her eyes closed again. I moved to Room 10. This woman was older, perhaps forty, with sharp features and grey streaks in her dark hair. She was awake when I entered.

"Please," she said, and her voice was hoarse from disuse. "Please don't let him do it to you too."

"Who?" I asked.

"The man in the mirror. He lives in the walls of my head. When the medicine takes hold, I can see him. He's standing behind me, watching me dream. He takes notes, like a teacher grading a paper." She swallowed. "I used to dream about my husband's face. Now I can't remember it."

I left her and moved to the other rooms. Each one was the same: a woman in a chemise, restrained with leather straps at the wrists, connected to glass bottles of amber liquid that dripped slowly into their arms. They were all alive. They were all dreaming. And Marcus Blackthorne was taking their dreams and distilling them into something that kept him young.

I found the resonance chamber on the third night. Miss Hartley had left the door unlocked—a mistake, or perhaps an invitation. The room was small, windowless, with padded walls and a chair in the center that resembled a dentist's seat. A phonograph sat on a table against one wall, connected to a series of metal tubes that ran along the ceiling. On the wall, someone had scratched a message into the plaster: HE DREAMS SO WE CANNOT.

I understood then what was happening. Marcus wasn't just capturing dreams. He was harvesting the emotional content—the joy, the peace, the satisfaction—and somehow extracting it, concentrating it, injecting it into himself. The phonograph produced a specific frequency that induced a hypnotic state. The laudanum kept the women docile. The belladonna dilated their pupils so the staff could monitor dream activity. And in the space between waking and sleeping, Marcus visited them and recorded the best parts of their inner lives.

On the fourth night, I confronted him. He was in his study, preparing a syringe. He looked up when I entered, and there was no guilt in his face. Only surprise, quickly replaced by something worse: understanding.

"You found the book," he said. Not a question.

"I did."

He set the syringe down. "Eleanor, do you know what it's like to watch a woman you love fade away? To watch her age, her spirit dim, while you— a physician, a man of science—can do nothing about it?"

"What you're doing isn't science. It's theft."

"Is it?" He walked to the window and looked out at the garden. "I give them purpose. Those women in the west wing—they had nothing. No family, no means, no hope. I give them a place to live, food, shelter. And in return, I take something they don't even know they're giving: their dreams. Their happiest moments. The things that make them who they are."

"You're enslaving them."

"I'm preserving them. And myself. There's a difference." He turned to face me. "Next Thursday is the full moon. I need a new source. The others are... diminishing. Their dreams are repeating, looping. I need freshness. Your dreams, Eleanor—your intellect, your curiosity, your fire—those would be exquisite."

I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the cold room. "You planned this."

"I planned many things. Your marriage. My career. This building. I was always going to need a fifth muse eventually, and you were the most natural choice. You were always the sharpest mind in the room, my dear."

I went to my room and packed a small bag. I took nothing but a change of clothes, a few coins, and the key to my mother's locket. I did not take revenge. I did not burn the building down. I simply left.

At the door, I paused. "The five women," I said without turning around. "What will happen to them when you're gone?"

He was silent for a long time. "Miss Hartley will take over. She understands the work."

I opened the door and walked into the Manchester fog. I did not look back. Behind me, the asylum lights burned on through the night. In the west wing, five women dreamed their stolen dreams, and the man who loved me stood in his study, injecting the distilled joy of strangers into his veins, young and hollow and alone.

I am writing this from a boarding house in Leeds. I do not know what will happen next. I only know that every time I close my eyes, I see those five women in their five rooms, dreaming dreams that were never theirs to keep.

And sometimes, in my own sleep, I hear a phonograph spinning in the dark.

© 2026 - Authored by Z R ZHANG ( EL9507135 -- パスポート番号[ちゅうごく] 중국 여권 번호 Номер паспорта หมายเลขหนังสือเดินทาง Passnummerرقم جواز السفر CHN Passport)
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