Bad Dreams (24 page)

‘You have to go with it, Annie.’

Judi’s face was shrinking again. She was starting to look as she had done in death. Old and unidentifiable. The bulbs were swollen now, turning a fleshy red. Trails of yellowish fluid dribbled from the pockets, and ran down the waistcoat. Judi was leaking badly.

‘Come on, Annie. Let’s make up.’

Judi was feeble now, unsteady. She was not up to coping with the motion of the train. Tentacles from the region of her waist wrapped around poles, and she stayed upright. The new growth looked strong. They had the power of constriction, and Anne guessed they would be sticky to the touch.

A tentacle waved towards her. It was like a bloated anemone frond. The train was slowing down, coming to a station.

Anne grabbed the tentacle, and yanked hard. It was warm and unpleasant in her grip, but it did not slide free. She felt a mild nettle sting. Judi gasped, and bent double. The tentacle came out of her body as easily and unendingly as a roll tape measure. Anne swallowed the gulp of hot bile that came up in the back of her mouth.

Judi was coming apart inside her waistcoat. Anne pushed the thing that had been her sister away. It went into the crowd, deflated and insubstantial, and was caught as they surged forwards.

‘Annie!’

The shout died as Judi’s emptying clothes fell on the floor. Rivulets of yellow filled the grooves in the floor.

The dead were coming for her. She kicked out in imitation of martial arts movies, putting her hip behind the blow and landing her foot sideways into the hooligan’s stomach. It did not give, but bones broke like sticks somewhere inside him. He was in the way of the rest of them.

The train was in a station. The single door beside her slid open, and she pushed herself out of the carriage. She stumbled on the steady stone of the platform, and put a hand out to stop herself slamming into the curved wall. She took the impact on her wrist.

‘Mind the gap,’ said an automated voice, ‘mind the gap.’

The train moved out, its doors still open. She saw hateful faces pressed to the windows. Judi looked lost among so many dead people. Sparks flashed under the wheels. The noise of the train receded and went away.

She had stopped crying.

I
n the darkness of the Dream, he floated. His feeding frenzy exhausted, he was torpid, unable to pay attention to the rat in her maze. For the moment, he was the shaper of her world, the worker of her destinies; but he was too tired, too caught up in his own changes, to follow her progress as conscientiously as he should have done.

A swarm of ghosts gyred around him in a multiple helix, allowed some measure of self-determination by his preoccupation, furtively snatching their existence from his body and his mind. The strongest of Amelia Dorf ’s guests had already been processed and were settling into their new shapes, raw recruits in his army of phantoms. The lesser personalities – Clive, Anders, Amelia – were completely absorbed, gone forever unless he should choose to make the effort to reassemble them. They would do his bidding, more or less, and for the present they would have to cope with Anne.

Of course, she had her own ghosts, as she must almost be ready to realize. She would hardly have been able to get as far as she had already without a very strong image of the outlines of the world, of her own personal dream. She had even been able to effect an imperfect superimposition of her reality upon his own. He had come across very few others not of the Kind, with that strength of vision. He wondered whether it was a hereditary factor, passed down from her father, gained by him through osmosis. After all, he had been one of Ariadne’s protégés.

Anne Nielson was an extraordinary woman, as he had known for years. Her father, when he came up before the Farnham Commission, had proved extraordinarily resilient, but he had still caved in, and then he had proved richly satisfying. More recently, the lesson had been reinforced by delicious, dangerous Judi. Even the son had had a tang to him, although he had proved surprisingly hard to digest at the end. It was a varied and satisfying meal, but the last dish would be the most exquisite, the most sustaining. He would need to fast, to recuperate, to change, before he would be ready to take her.

He had sifted through Judi’s memory, had scooped into Anne’s mind, but could find no traces of Ariadne. The girls had never met their father’s one-time patron, had never even heard of her. Cam had a vague memory of a glamorous ‘aunt’, who had once taken a remote interest in his father, but it was no more than a shadow. He was disappointed somehow. Perhaps he should seek out Ariadne. By the standards of the Kind, their sole meeting had been almost yesterday. It was probably too soon to see if she had changed in her opinions of him. No, the best he could do was to fortify himself with the Nielson family, and wait a century or two. Everything would change in time. Things changed faster as time progressed, he had noticed in this dizzying century. He would meet Ariadne again. Things would be different between them.

Like an Elizabethan tickling the back of his throat with a peacock feather to induce vomiting so he would be able to face the next enormous course, he brought up another cloud of ghosts. Insignificant, meagre, thin and tasteless presences who could safely be ignored, who could safely be set free. Most of them came apart like butterflies in a whirlwind and were dispersed; some struggled for infinite moments, trying to summon up enough reserves of strength to achieve reality, before they were spent. A few tried vainly to coalesce into a hardier entity. Amelia fluttered against his lips, entreating to be let back in. He blew her away.

He had only sampled Cameron Nielson Sr during the hearings, then let the man live out a diminished, unproductive life. There were no more prizes for Cameron, no more Pulitzers, Critics’ Circles, Nobels. And he had never taken home a statuette on Oscar night. He had had the playwright in his power, and been tempted to astonish the court and the television audiences by sucking him dry on the stand. But, rather than feed, he had just taken away Nielson’s reputation, his genius, his worldly stature. He had even been rather touched by
The Rat Jacket
, that last flare of Cameron’s talent, and had been amused by the author’s recreation of his Hugh Farnham persona as the intellectual, bullying cop. Had he known that the man should be allowed to father his children? Or had he been too cautious, too frightened of his increasing visibility?

This was a strange century. He could no longer run his course in one place, and simply leave a continent to start again. The faces, manners and origins of notable men were too highly publicized. He could change his appearance, but not enough to become immediately unrecognizable. From now on, he would have to devote himself to private achievements. That would limit his amusements, but nevertheless he was confident in his ability to find purposes to suit him, enthusiasms to pursue, people to relish… It would be a long while before he turned into one of the Elders, hiding away in a living death, nurturing their effete Dreams, too fastidious to get involved with the tumult of humanity.

A wraith approached him, and latched on like a bat, suckling greedily from his surplus, desperate for a shape, for an identity. It was Judi; she had been seriously ruptured. He let her have her fill. She was important to him, a link with Anne, a shared ghost. He touched Judi’s conscious memory, curious about the meeting on the train. She put up a token resistance, but, knowing that she only existed on his sufferance, opened her mind to him and let him prowl.

The train scene was fresh and painful inside Judi. His admiration was excited by Anne. She was picking up the knack. It was such a simple thing, to go against the consensus reality, but so few human beings could work up the willpower. Given time, she could learn to shape the Dream to her will. But, of course, he would not give her time. Hers would be an untried talent, an unfulfilled potential. Even in its protean state, however, it would make the business of feeding off her protracted and tiring. But incomparable.

He twisted, and descended in his dream.

He delved deeper in Judi’s memories. He considered Anne as a child, as a schoolgirl, as a college student, as a would-be parent substitute, as a journalist. Judi had read practically everything her sister had ever written, including an uncharacteristic series of pieces on tin toy collecting, sofa beds and other arcane subjects published under a pseudonym (Angela Buonfiglia) taken from one of their father’s plays. Further back, Judi had envied Anne her college boyfriend, had always tried to impress and amuse the older girl, had briefly tried to copy her clothes and food preferences, had longed to be asked to share her toys so that she could express her devotion through generosity. He tried to dilute Judi’s images of her sister with objectivity, with his own observations, with Cam’s tightly-guarded feelings, with the pathetic and stupid judgements of Clive, Amelia and a few of Amelia’s guests, and with the slight tastes of her he had sampled at the entrance to the maze. He had less than a tenth of the jigsaw puzzle pieces, but even the fragments of a picture he was able to put together made him ache for Anne. He was motivated, he would have to exert himself…

His feet settled on the concrete of the tube platform. He reined in his multitudes, incorporating them. Even Judi. He was alone. He had seldom been more powerful this close to a change.

Anne had gone. There were no egresses in the featureless white tile walls. The tunnel was the only way out. She had chanced the darkness. She was a clever girl, to realize that there would never be another train in this station.

Already, the rails were softening, the circular tube was becoming ovoid. His presence froze the decay, but it would start again when he followed Anne into the tunnel. In time, the station would resolve itself, healing as invisibly as a wound in the deep of his brain. The overhead lights started going out, but that did not matter to him.

He stepped off the edge of the platform, onto the track. He knew which way his rat had bolted. Balancing on the dead third rail, he tightrope-walked after her, into the tunnel.

S
he knew she was not in a tube tunnel any more. The wall she had been feeling her way along in the dark had given out. There were no longer regularly spaced Christmas emergency lights to give an outline of her surroundings. The narrow path she was walking was not bordered by a shiny track. If she stopped to sit and rest, she could feel cold earth and a few scrubby patches of grass either side of the rough strip of asphalt.

Above her, around her, was total darkness. There was no ceiling, there were no walls. The darkness was infinite. She was out in the open somewhere, but there was no trace of light. No stars, no fireflies, no streetlamps, no fires.

There was no wind, but the still air was freezing. She wished she was wearing thick trousers rather than a skirt and tights. Preferably arctic survival gear. Walking through the chilly night was like wading through pampas grass. The cold was as sharp as a straight razor. She could not feel her toes. Her hands were deep in her coat pockets, fingering the last patches of warmth near her body. There was probably ice on her cheeks where she had been crying.

She kept on walking, picking up her feet and putting them down. Going somewhere.

It had not been Judi on the train. At least, it had not been all of Judi. Just as it had not been all of Nina in the wardrobe. Just ghosts.

But no one believes in ghosts really. Not M.R. James/Jacob Marley/white sheet-type ghosts. Ibsen-type ghosts, maybe. Not that she had ever actually read old Henryk, or seen
Ghosts.
Judi had one-upped her in the literacy game again.

Then there was a light ahead. Three indistinct lines, shaped like a soccer goal, silhouetting an oblong. It was some kind of a building, with the light source squarely behind it. She could make out the hard black edges, and see how the light diffused around them.

It was obvious that she would not like what she found there. That much she had picked up from the way things were going. But she was glad to have proof that she had not gone blind in the dark.

The building was further away, and bigger than she had guessed. She could not measure time that well any more, but it took a considerable while to get there.

This side of the building, there was a single, small light. It was above a door, above a weathered sign she could not read.

Knowing she would regret it, but knowing she had no choice, she took the door handle and turned…

Something sizzled above her, and hissed. She really was blinded, by the light this time. She turned away, into the darkness, electric blue and orange lines imprinted on her eyes. They faded quickly.

She looked upwards. There was a neon sign, flashing on and off, crackling slightly. It was familiar.

SAM’S, it said in big letters, BAR-B-Q AND GRILL.

She pushed the door open, and went in.

W
orlds away, across an ocean, it was late afternoon, time to take hot chocolate to an invalid. Outside, it was just dark, and there was thick, Christmassy snow on the ground. She had put up decorations all over the house, although the invalid could only get to two or three rooms. The tree was in his bedroom, and she had made paper angels for the bathroom. She had put fake snow and a silver star on the mirrored door of the medicine cupboard. She had finally arranged with the agency for a substitute nurse, a single girl who needed the triple overtime, to take her place over the holiday. But she would be back before the New Year, doing her best to make the old man’s last months mess-free and painless. Tonight, she would sit up with her patient in his study and watch
It’s a Wonderful Life
on television. It was on every Christmas, and was one of her favourite films. She remembered seeing it many times as a child, and was looking forward, after several years, to rediscovering its pleasures. She found it hard to believe that her patient had ever worked in Hollywood, had known people like Jimmy Stewart and Gloria Grahame. There were signed and dedicated photographs of them in his collection, unframed and unsorted after some long-ago house-moving. Also, photographs and letters from names she knew: Lauren Bacall, Tennessee Williams, Alistair Cooke, Arthur Kennedy, Paul Robeson, Jean-Paul Sartre, Cole Porter (another invalid), Lee Strasberg, Adlai Stevenson, Elia Kazan. She wondered whether they all had letters and pictures signed by him. As soon as she entered the study, she knew that he had given up. He was slumped into his chair, his blanket on the floor, a paperback book by his foot, spine-broken, pages down. She tried to find a pulse. Nothing. He was gone.