Insomnia (31 page)

Ralph didn’t know, and for the time being he didn’t care. He only wanted to stand where he was, with his forehead against the wall and his eyes shut so he wouldn’t have to look at anything.

The beach was a long white edging, like a flirt of silk slip at the hem of the bright blue sea, and it was totally empty except for a round object about seventy yards away. This round object was about the size of a basketball, and it filled Ralph with a fear that was both deep and – for the moment, at least – groundless.

Don’t go near it,
he told himself.
There’s something bad about it. Something
really
bad. It’s a black dog barking at a blue moon, blood in the sink, a raven perched on a bust of Pallas just inside my chamber door. You don’t want to go near it, Ralph, and you don’t need to go near it, because this is one of Joe Wyzer’s lucid dreams. You can just turn and cruise away, if you want
.

Except his feet began to carry him forward anyway, so maybe this wasn’t a lucid dream. Not pleasant, either, not at all. Because the closer he got to that object on the beach, the less it looked like a basketball.

It was by far the most realistic dream Ralph had ever experienced, and the fact that he knew he was dreaming actually seemed to heighten that sense of realism. Of lucidity. He could feel the fine, loose sand under his bare feet, warm but not hot; he could hear the grinding, rock-throated roar of the incoming waves as they lost their balance and sprawled their way up the lower beach, where the sand glistened like wet tanned skin; could smell salt and drying seaweed, a strong and tearful smell that reminded him of summer vacations spent at Old Orchard Beach when he was a child.

He had closed half the distance to the object on the beach and there was no longer any question about what it was – not a basketball but a head. Someone had buried a human being up to the chin in the sand . . . and, Ralph suddenly realized, the tide was coming in.

He didn’t bail out; he began to run. As he did, the frothy edge of a wave touched the head. It opened its mouth and began to scream. Even raised in a shriek, Ralph knew that voice at once. It was Carolyn’s voice.

The froth of another wave ran up the beach and back-washed the hair which had been clinging to the head’s wet cheeks. Ralph began to run faster, knowing he was almost certainly going to be too late. The tide was coming in fast. It would drown her long before he could free her buried body from the sand.

He remembered, but he ran faster nevertheless, sending puffs of sugary sand out behind him.

No,
that
wasn’t how the poem went . . . or was it? Ralph couldn’t be sure. All he clearly remembered now was that it had ended with the narrator running blindly from something deadly

which was hunting him through the woods . . . hunting him and closing in.

Yet he
was
getting closer to the dark shape on the sand. It wasn’t changing into anything else, either, and when he fell on his knees before Carolyn, he understood at once why he had not been able to recognize his wife of forty-five years, even from a distance: something was terribly wrong with her aura. It clung to her skin like a filthy dry-cleaning bag. When Ralph’s shadow fell on her, Carolyn’s eyes rolled up like the eyes of a horse that has shattered its leg going over a high fence. She was breathing in rapid, frightened gasps, and each expulsion of air sent jets of gray-black aura from her nostrils.

The tattered balloon-string straggling up from the crown of her head was the purple-black of a festering wound. When she opened her mouth to scream again, an unpleasant glowing substance flew from her lips in gummy strings which disappeared almost as soon as his eyes had registered their existence.

I’ll save you, Carol!
he shouted. He fell on his knees and began digging at the sand around her like a dog digging up a bone . . . and as the thought occurred to him, he realized that Rosalie, the early morning scavenger of Harris Avenue, was sitting tiredly behind his screaming wife. It was as if the dog had been summoned by the thought. Rosalie, he saw, was also surrounded by one of those filthy black auras. She had Bill McGovern’s missing Panama hat between her paws, and it looked as though she had enjoyed many a good chew on it since it had come into her possession.

So that’s where the damn hat went,
Ralph thought, then turned back to Carolyn and began to dig even faster. So far he hadn’t managed to uncover so much as a single shoulder.

Never mind me!
Carolyn screamed at him.
I’m already dead, remember? Watch for the white-man tracks, Ralph! The—

A wave, glassy green on the bottom and the curdled white of soapsuds on top, broke less than ten feet from the beach. It ran up the sand toward them, freezing Ralph’s balls with cold water and burying Carolyn’s head momentarily in a grit-filled surge of foam. When the wave retreated, Ralph raised his own horror-filled shriek to the indifferent blue sky. The retreating wave had done in seconds what it had taken the radiation treatments almost a month to do; took her hair, washed her bald. And the crown of her head had begun to bulge at the spot where the blackish balloon-string was attached.

Carolyn, no!
he howled, digging even faster. The sand was now dank and unpleasantly heavy.

Never mind
, she said. Gray-black puffs came from her mouth with each word, like dirty vapor from an industrial smokestack.
It’s just the tumor, and it’s inoperable, so don’t lose any sleep over
that
part of the show. What the hell, it’s a long walk back to Eden, so don’t sweat the small stuff, right? But you have to keep an eye out for those tracks . . .

Another wave came, wetting Ralph to the waist and inundating Carolyn again. When it withdrew, the swelling on the crown of her head was beginning to split open.

You’ll find out soon enough,
Carolyn replied, and then the swelling on her head popped with a sound like a hammer striking a slab of meat. A haze of blood flew into the clear, salt-smelling air, and a horde of black bugs the size of cockroaches were pouring out of her. Ralph had never seen anything like them before – not even in a dream – and they filled him with an almost hysterical loathing. He would have fled, Carolyn or not, but he was frozen in place, too stunned to move a single finger, let alone get up and run.

Some of the black bugs ran back into Carolyn by way of her screaming mouth, but most of them hurried down her check and shoulder to the wet sand. Their accusing, alien eyes never left Ralph as they went.
All this is your fault
, the eyes seemed to say.
You could have saved her, Ralph, and a better man
would
have saved her
.

Carolyn!
he screamed. He put his hands out to her, then pulled them back, terrified of the black bugs, which were still spewing out of her head. Behind her, Rosalie sat in her own small pocket of darkness, looking gravely at him and now holding McGovern’s misplaced
chapeau
in her mouth.

One of Carolyn’s eyes popped out and lay on the wet sand like a blob of blueberry jelly. Bugs vomited from the now-empty socket.

Carolyn!
he screamed.
Carolyn! Carolyn! Car
—

‘– olyn! Carolyn! Car—’

Suddenly, in the same instant that he knew the dream was over, Ralph was falling. He barely registered the fact before he thumped to the bedroom floor. He managed to break his fall with one outstretched hand, probably saving himself a nasty rap on the head but provoking a howl of pain from beneath the butterfly bandage taped high up on his left side. For the moment, at least, he barely registered the pain. What he felt was fear, revulsion, a horrible, aching grief . . . and most of all an overwhelming sense of gratitude. The bad dream – surely the worst dream he’d ever had – was over, and he was in the world of real things again.

He pulled back his mostly unbuttoned pajama top, checked the bandage for bleeding, saw none, and then sat up. Just doing that much seemed to exhaust him; the thought of getting up, even long enough to fall back into bed, seemed out of the question for the time being. Maybe after his panicky, racing heart slowed down a little.

Can people die of bad dreams?
he wondered, and in answer he heard Joe Wyzer’s voice:
You bet they can, Ralph, although the medical examiner usually ends up writing
suicide
on the cause-of-death line
.

In the shaky aftermath of his nightmare, sitting on the floor and hugging his knees with his right arm, Ralph had no real doubt that some dreams
were
powerful enough to kill. The details of this one were fading out now, but he could still remember the climax all too well: that thudding sound, like a hammer hitting a thick cut of beef, and the vile spew of bugs from Carolyn’s head. Plump they had been, plump and lively, and why not? They had been feasting on his dead wife’s brain.

Ralph uttered a low, watery moan and swiped at his face with his left hand, provoking another jolt from beneath the bandage. His palm came away slick with sweat.

What, exactly, had she been telling him to watch out for? White-man traps? No –
tracks,
not traps. White-man
tracks,
whatever they were. Had there been more? Maybe, maybe not. He couldn’t remember for sure, and so what? It had been a dream, for Christ’s sake, just a
dream,
and outside of the fantasy world described in the tabloid newspapers, dreams meant nothing and proved nothing. When a person went to sleep, his mind seemed to turn into a kind of rathouse bargain hunter, sifting through the discount bins of mostly worthless short-term memories, looking not for items which were valuable or even useful but only for things that were still bright and shiny. These it put together in freakshow collages which were often striking but had, for the most part, all the sense of Natalie Deepneau’s conversation. Rosalie the dog had turned up, even Bill’s missing Panama had made a cameo appearance, but it all meant nothing . . . except tomorrow night he would not take one of the pain-pills the EMT had given him even if his arm felt like it was falling off. Not only had the one he’d taken during the late news failed to keep him under, as he had hoped and half-expected; it had probably played its own part in causing the nightmare.

Ralph managed to get up off the floor and sit on the edge of the bed. A wave of faintness floated through his head like parachute silk, and he shut his eyes until the feeling passed. While he was sitting there with his head down and his eyes closed, he groped for the lamp on the bedside table and turned it on. When he opened his eyes, the area of the bedroom lit by its warm yellow glow looked very bright and very real.

He looked at the clock beside the lamp: 1:48 a.m., and he felt totally awake and totally alert, pain-pill or no pain-pill. He got up, walked slowly into the kitchen, and put on the teakettle. Then he leaned against the counter, absently massaging the bandage beneath his left armpit, trying to quiet the throbbing his most recent adventures had awakened there. When the kettle steamed, he poured hot water over a bag of Sleepytime –
there
was a joke for you – and then took the cup into the living room. He plopped into the wing-back chair without bothering to turn on a light; the streetlamps and the dim glow coming from the bedroom provided all he needed.

Well,
he thought,
here I am again, front row center. Let the play begin.

Time passed, just how much he could not have said, but the throbbing beneath his arm had eased and the tea had gone from hot to barely lukewarm when he registered movement at the corner of his eye. Ralph turned his head, expecting to see Rosalie, but it wasn’t Rosalie. It was two men stepping out onto the stoop of a house on the other side of Harris Avenue. Ralph couldn’t make out the colors of the house – the orange arc-sodiums the city had installed several years ago provided great visibility but made any perception of true colors almost impossible – yet he could see that the color of the trim was radically different from the color of the rest. That, coupled with its location, made Ralph almost positive it was May Locher’s house.

The two men on May Locher’s stoop were very short, probably no more than four feet tall. They appeared to be surrounded by greenish auras. They were dressed in identical white smocks, which looked to Ralph like the ones worn by actors in those old TV doc-operas – black and white melodramas like
Ben Casey
and
Dr Kildare
. One of them had something in his hand. Ralph squinted. He couldn’t make it out, but it had a sharp and hungry look. He could not have sworn under oath that it was a knife, but he thought it might be. Yes, it might very well be a knife.

His first clear evaluative thought about this experience was that the men over there looked like aliens in a movie about UFO abductions –
Communion,
perhaps, or
Fire in the Sky
. His second was that he had fallen asleep again, right here in his wing-chair, without even noticing.