Red Dreams

by Dennis Etchison

  He focused his attention. Time was passing even now, as inexorably as the falling of a scythe. He opened the book. He began to read.

  What he experienced during the next few minutes was simple but exquisite, as unexpected as a kiss in the middle of a fight to the death. So pure and direct, such a pleasant escape that Joe only wished he had read it when he was a boy. It was exactly what he needed, though he could not have realized that until now. The more he read the more familiar it became. It contained all of his favorite story elements, arranged and combined in perfect proportion. There was even a timeless yet unpretentious moral for him to ponder at the end. By the time he finished he was almost certain he had read it before, a long time ago, just out of reach of memory. I would have thought of it myself, if it had occurred to me. If I were a writer, of course. He could not find the name of an author or copyright owner anywhere in the book. It was without a doubt one of the best stories he had ever read in his life.

  He closed the book, amazed.

  No wonder the reading room is so popular, he thought. If everything is as perfectly written as that. So this is why Rose fell for their line. How could she not? If all the books

  are this good—if the introductory book in the lobby is half as good—then it's inconceivable that anyone could resist.

  He reached for the second volume, opened it and scanned a few lines.

  Unbelievably, it was even better than the first. Richer, more detailed, more psychological in its approach. It cut closer and closer to what was truly on his mind. The answers seemed to have been laid out for him in a neat progression, one step ahead of his own thinking.

  But there was no time.

  He flipped ahead through the laminated pages.

  Well, he thought, either my problems are more universal than I supposed, or else Mason Flowers has achieved a level of insight into the human condition that Freud only strived for. If this pseudo-scientific religion—or pseudo-religious science—is being franchised in every mall in every city across the country, there's no stopping it. The potential is awesome.

  But hold on. Hold on a minute.

  He closed the book and set it back on the stand. He leaned away from it. He watched as it appeared to flatten and become thinner, as the padded cover settled back into place.

  He counted off a few seconds to be sure. Then he reached for the third volume, flicking its cover open with his fingernail and quickly withdrawing his hand.

  The print inside was moving.

  It could have been an optical illusion, a trick of the lighting.

  But no.

  As he leaned out of its field the lines froze, half-formed, and then slowly proceeded to melt back into the center of the page.

  These books, he realized, are reading me.

  That's it. The books in the lobby are teasers, able to provide just enough of what you want to know in the middle of a hot afternoon to make you feel refreshed and renewed. And to be sure you come back for more.

  Of course you would want to go on to the first Step. How could you resist? The books are picking your brain, taking their cues from your own mind, replicating and mimicking and giving back what you want to hear but can't formulate consciously for yourself. Each person who handles Volume I thinks it's the best book he or she has ever read. How could it be otherwise? The volumes become progressively more sophisticated, and you're hooked. The ink, whatever it is—telepathic bacteria, if that can be believed; have mercy—is produced in strains of increasing sensitivity, so that the Final Step…

  He grabbed the carton and took out Volume X.

  I want to go all the way, he thought. I want the Big One, the full treatment, same as Rose. So I can know. So I can understand what's happened to her.

  Telepathic bacteria. What a concept. From where? From space, the kid said. From somewhere in orbit. How long have they been there? If that's the case, they could be out there forming and re-forming themselves into anything the world wants to see. Flying saucers. Invaders from Mars. Spurious television signals, maybe. Who knows? Escapees from Uranus. A message from the archetypal God of our dreams. The Living Word.

  That, he thought, is the Way of the Wach.

  The final volume was bound on a grand scale, huge and ribbed and weighty. To befit that last, Really Big Donation. Of course. He scanned the instructions on the cover.

  Do not hold in hands until ready to use.

  Place fingers in hand grips before opening.

  Wait ten seconds.

  Do not set book down until you are finished.

  Wait ten seconds before closing cover.

  You may feel slightly drowsy. Do not attempt to operate heavy machinery.

  Thank you.

  His hands were shaking.

  He balanced the heavy book. The hand grips were two sets of finger moldings embossed into the front and back covers. In order to use it, you had to insert your hands into the spaces. It was the only way you could get the book open without losing your grip.

  With difficulty he tipped the edge to the light and examined the openings. There was a tiny silver point at the end of each thumb space.

  He drew up his legs and supported the book on his knees. Touching only a corner, he raised the front cover an inch, two inches.

  The small silver point within, a needle, flashed in the lamplight as it extended a few millimeters.

  Enough to break the skin, he realized, and get inside you, into your bloodstream and so into your brain, to get to the thoughts that are most deeply hidden. The pain, the repressed memories. To seek them out and absorb them and take them away. To eat them, like bacteria. Yes. That is why each Volume X can only be used once. It feeds; it fills up. After it has cleansed you and made you free.

  I'm ready, he thought. Oh God, am I. Lift the scales from my eyes and the burden from my soul. Do it.

  He hesitated. He stopped himself. He put the book down.

  He climbed out of the chair and went to the shelf. There. Another recently-used Volume X lying in its carton, waiting to be resealed and returned for purging. Was it the one administered to Rose Marie this afternoon?

  It has to be, he thought. What it took from her is still trapped there between its bloated covers. I need to know what it was. The suffering she carried with her so quietly for so long until it became too much for her to bear. The pain of the last fifteen years. The pain of her life with me, which I never knew anything about, which I was too blind to see. Let me take it into myself, all of it, and if need be let it do to me what it did to her, if that is the only way. But let me know it before the last evidence of our life together is erased forever from the universe.

  He took the used copy of Volume X down from the shelf. He leaned back. He inserted his fingers. Into these poor hands, he thought. With a rush he opened the cover.

  His eyelids feathered shut. Darkness swirled around him.

  It was so easy and yet so hard to let go. Going away, he thought. Going. Gone.

  As this comes in, so much pain will go anywhere.

  Good-by to all I loved. Good-by to my years of idle dreaming, the minutiae which adds up to the definition of a human life. Good-by to those I never forgot.

  Good-by, at last, Julie London. You might as well go now. Good-by, Shirley MacLaine in Artists and Models, Patricia Smith in The Bachelor Party and Beatrice Pearson in Force of Evil and Barbara Ruick in Carousel… Good-by, Pat Crowley in Money From Home and Marge Champion in Showboat and Janet Leigh in Houdini and Barbara Rush in When Worlds Collide. Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday and Leslie Caron in Lili, Kay Kendall in Genevieve and Joan Collins in Sea Wife and Terry Moore in Beneath the 12-Mile Reef and Sophia Loren in Houseboat and Gloria Grahame in The Man Who Never Was… you lived on unchanged for a time in me. Debra Paget in Birds of Paradise and little Debbie Reynolds Singin' In the Rain, Sherry Jackson in Come Next Spring and Susannah York in The Greengage Summer. Sarah Miles in Time Lost and Time Remembered. Luanna Anders and Daria Halprin. Janet Margolin. Elizabeth Taylor in A Place
in the Sun. Young Lana Turner. Ingrid Bergman in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Claire Bloom in Limelight. Jean Simmons in The Blue Lagoon. Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief and Ida Lupino and Marilyn Monroe, and Brenda Scott and Annie Helm and Annie Ditchburn. Brenda Vacarro in Summertree. Jean Seberg and Jeanne Crain and Jessica Harper and Jessica Lange, Donna Mills and Donna Loren, Susan Penhaligon and Susan George, Barbara Carrera and Barbara Steele. Joan Goodfellow in Buster and Billie. Mariette Hartley. Senta Berger. Maria Schneider and Maria Schell. Catherine Deneuve. Monica Vitti. Joanna Pettet and Joanna Cameron and Joanna Lumley and Joanna Cassidy. Ursula Andress. Margot Kidder. Jane Seymour. Caroline Munro. Kathleen Beller and Kathleen Quinlan, Roseanna Arquette and Pamela Ludwig and Pamela Franklin and Bonnie Bedelia and P.J. Soles… Too many to name. And to the frame I never found, the most beautiful I've ever seen from a movie I can't remember, a girl surrounded by flowers with the sun at her back, burning her image into my brain, whose face I cannot see. Good-by to you all.

  He felt a cool jet of antiseptic spray on his thumbs, and then the images flowed in.

  His life—or was it Rose Marie's—flashed before his eyes, moments that became feelings, summers that went on forever, instants that flew past in the blinking of an eye. Days longer than any nights, nights that never ended. Every bit, every scrap and every second and the shadow of every move and the shape of every feature and the whorls of her skin and the contour of every touch, and the whispering away and the squandering of it all, second by second, the good and the bad thrown out together, as if none of it had mattered more than the flickering of a wing across the sun. All speeding backwards to the first, the second in time when it began, every breath of it back to the beginning.

  He felt it eddy around him, and clear.

  He was sitting. Only it was not he. It was she, Rose Marie. Someone was walking this way across the grass, an expanse of electric green spread like a bright carpet as far as the eye could see. A man, a young man, the sun flashing his hair into the brilliance of flames, behind him the forgotten buildings of a college campus.

  He looked down at his hands. She looked down at her hands, folded in her lap against the sparkling yellow dress. It was the first of May and there were flowers everywhere. He stopped in front of her. She looked up. In his eyes she saw herself reflected, beautiful for the first time. The flowers were all around, trembling behind her, the blazing sun coruscating through them and through her with a great and mighty light.

  He was, she thought, the most handsome boy she had ever seen.

  "Hello," he said, his voice vibrating the air.

  "Hello," she said, afraid that her own voice would not be heard for the pounding. "W-who are you?"

  Joe Ivy held to this image for as long as he could, until it flared out and burned through his eyelids. Then there was only the marking of his own pulse, alone in darkness.

  And:

  OFF.

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