The Dream Walker

by Charlotte Armstrong

  “Oh, Lord, Cora, she’s busy. I can’t bother her.”

  “But I’ve got such a bad thing about her. Please. Meet Kent at the theater. He says they are reading this morning. They’ll break around two.”

  “Meet you and Kent Shaw?”

  “Not me.”

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t go, Ollie. I’m too scared.”

  I was her friend, wasn’t I?

  Josephine Crain is a great and gracious lady. She led us into a bare dressing room, me and Kent Shaw and that tape recorder.

  “Jo,” I said, “I’ve got a funny thing to ask you. Can you remember anything about where you were or what you were doing on December the sixth, in the afternoon? Can you place it?”

  “I must have been on the beach,” she said. “I always am after lunch.”

  “Did—?”

  “Wait,” said Kent Shaw. “Miss Grain, may I turn this recorder on?” Jo’s lovely eyebrows moved. “I want to record what you say. You’ll see why.” He was terribly excited, must have been. He hid it fairly well.

  “Is this all right, Olivia?” Josephine had amusement in her warm rich voice. Her eyes asked what I was doing, traveling with Kent Shaw. “I’m not going to be sued, am I?”

  I said, “I think perhaps it’s a good idea. It will settle some foolishness. I’ll explain later.”

  “If you say so.” She smiled. So Kent Shaw plugged in the machine.

  “Now, Jo,” I said, “please try to remember December sixth, around about two thirty in the afternoon. You were on the beach, you say. Did anything the least bit odd happen?”

  “Odd? December sixth was a Sunday, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes. It was.”

  “What do you mean, odd, Ollie?”

  “I don’t want to suggest anything.”

  “You don’t mean the woman in the green dress?” said Josephine Grain.

  I was stung with surprise and then immediately by unsurprise, by suspicion. I heard Kent’s breath whistle out. “Go on,” I said.

  “Well, that was certainly odd. This perfect stranger came plodding along. Spoke to me. Called me by name, in fact. Asked me to tell her where we were.”

  “What time was it? Can you quote her exactly?” I asked the questions. Kent Shaw didn’t speak. Perhaps he didn’t dare.

  “It was … oh, middleish. Between two and three, I would say.” Josephine’s voice changed to one sharper and harsher than her own. “‘Josephine, please tell me where we are.’”

  “What did you do?”

  “I goggled, naturally. Then she said, ‘You are in Florida. But where am I?’ So I said, ‘You are in Florida, too, for heaven’s sakes. What’s the matter?’ But she went away very fast. She vanished.”

  “Vanished?” I gasped.

  “I mean, of course, she just disappeared.” Jo gestured impatiently.

  “Disappeared!”

  “She left the beach, to be perfectly literal. What is the matter, Ollie? She went between two buildings to the street, or so I suppose.”

  “Describe her, Jo?”

  “Brunette. Slim. Not as nice a figure as yours, but not bad. Green cotton dress. White sandals with some kind of heel. Nothing to say about the face except a longish nose with a pulled-over flattened tip to it—”

  “Oh, me,” I said, “Oh, my! You don’t know a Cora Steffani, Jo?”

  “No.”

  I reached for a clipping from an old theater magazine. “This face?”

  Josephine’s eyes narrowed. “That is the nose. I don’t think I’m liking this, Ollie.”

  “No. You won’t like it,” I said.

  “I’ll play back the other piece of tape,” said Kent Shaw in his shrill voice.

  Well, of course, it was all there. The time, too. Verified by the fragment of the TV program and somebody’s questions. Josephine Crain didn’t like it one bit. “What is this supposed to be? A trick?”

  “Very like,” I said, feeling stunned.

  “Yours, Mr. Shaw?” Josephine lifted her brow, in that instant divining what we weren’t to know for a long, long time.

  He bared his teeth. “I think I’ve been used,” he snarled. “I don’t appreciate it.”

  “What made you bring that machine to Cora’s?” I demanded.

  “Someone had borrowed it. I’d picked it up to take home. Cora spied it and insisted.” His dark face looked intent and angry. “Only how could she know I would have it?”

  “The whole thing is ridiculous,” Jo said. “If it is a trick, why? This woman is a friend of yours, Ollie?”

  “Let me play the tape for Cora Steffani,” I said slowly. “I’d like to see what she does about it.”

  “We can always erase it,” said Kent Shaw boldly and as if he had a mind to do it, then and there.

  But we didn’t erase it. Kent Shaw and I, and Charley Ives and Mildred Garrick (who’d heard about this somewhere) all watched Cora listen to it. Watched her cut off a scream and fall to weeping. She hung on to Charley’s sleeve and wept on his jacket. She wouldn’t talk. She seemed terrified. After a while, she begged us not to talk about it. Mildred Garrick pinched her lips together.

  How could a woman be in two places at once? How could she walk in a dream? How could Cora lie on a bench in her own room surrounded by people, and walk on a beach in Florida, too? No sensible person could believe such a thing. Mildred was suspicious and had no comment.

  Nothing, apparently—happened. Oh, there was some talk in Cora’s little circle. Cora seemed to try to squelch it. She put the tape away. Did not destroy it. Jo Crain refused distastefully to answer questions. Nothing seemed to come of it.

  Kent Shaw acted as uneasy and suspicious as anyone else. He must have been throbbing with triumph and excitement.

  Because it was a brilliant beginning. Almost flawless. Josephine Crain was above suspicion. Josephine Crain needed no sensational publicity, of course not. So the incident was just odd. Hushed up and very odd.

  But the tape and the unimpeachable witnesses, one of whom was myself, to prove a woman had dreamed in New York and walked in Florida—this existed.

  Now I will tell you about Darlene Hite, and how she did it.

  Chapter Three

  She was the fifth child in a family of seven. (Darlene! Lord knows what they named the other six!) The family was poor. It hadn’t gone in for education, either. Darlene had to meet the world on her own, with no help, financial or otherwise, from her background. She was born in San Diego, California, and she was bright and not bad-looking. She left home at sixteen and made a try for the movies.

  Any girl who launches herself toward any form of show business runs into difficulties. Nobody ever made it easily. If she is like Josephine Crain, both sensitive and tough, both delicate and indestructible, she isn’t hurt and she makes the top. If she is like me, just sensitive, she draws away from pain, does something else. If she is like Cora, just tough, she fights tooth and claw, never admits she is hurt or a failure. If she’s a Darlene Hite, she is either toughened or destroyed.

  Darlene Hite never knew the world to be anything but a jungle and everything that happened to her made her think she was alone in it. She was cool and clever, but she was limited. When she needed help, she didn’t know where to turn for it. Darlene was betrayed and cheated and had no recourse. What she learned by “experience” was what she had already expected. Darlene, she believed, had to look out for Darlene. She was toughened.

  She went to work in a third-rate nightclub, still show business, although she was only intermittently a performer and most often a kind of Johanna Factotum. She was a lone wolf. The loneliest of wolves, living a cruelly underpaid and defensive existence with iron control, until Kent Shaw came after her.

  Darlene by this time was thirty, a somewhat artificial blonde, but slim, medium high, and gray-eyed, like Cora Steffani. Her face was not as narrow. Her eyes were, in fact, larger and lovelier. The mouth was not the same either. But the nose, the long nose with that
distinctive tip to it, gave all the character to her face. And it was Cora’s nose.

  Kent Shaw had seen her during his Hollywood phase some years ago. Now he approached her with what must have seemed like perfect candor. He had a scheme on. She, and only she, could help him work it. Therefore, she could name her price and he expected it to be high.

  Darlene listened. Wouldn’t you?

  It was a publicity stunt, he told her. He was going to raise a certain actress into a blaze of light. Darlene vaguely understood that this other woman had a wealthy protector who could pay. To accomplish what he had in mind, Kent Shaw said, he needed Darlene for a series of performances over a period of months, which he would devise and which must be played exactly as he directed. She was cool and clever and could do the job. But it wasn’t her cleverness he wanted to hire. Many girls were as clever. She, and she alone, was qualified. Because of the shape of her nose.

  How much would it pay? Darlene wanted to know. He told her. Darlene did not ask if she was going to go against the law or do harm. She asked what she had to do. The money must have looked like a shaft of sunlight cutting down into the jungle. When Kent Shaw swore her to secrecy, Darlene understood that, too. In Darlene’s world, secrecy was natural. Of course one kept one’s business to oneself, and especially a Good Thing.

  If she had known the true objective of the plot, would she have agreed to work for wages? I don’t know. Maybe Darlene would not know. She had narrow horizons. The meaning of a man like Marcus might not have been visible to her, from where she struggled alone down in the dark thicket.

  Kent Shaw invented the scenes, chose the costumes, picked the sets, wrote the lines, set the timing. Darlene had, as Cora had, a tiny sheaf of narrow paper slips on which, in a kind of shorthand they well understood, this script was written. Such an aide-mémoire was necessary. For it was a long drawn-out show. The scenes were to be played weeks apart. But time and sentences had to be exact, to the word and to the minute. Communication with the director, once the curtain went up, would be (almost) entirely cut off. Darlene hid her script in the same place Cora’s was hidden, a place always close about her person, that no one ever suspected.

  She got into Miami the night before the sixth of December and went to a modest rooming house, appearing quietly dressed, not too prosperous, not too young, not very interesting. She wore on her dyed-black hair a small hat with a nose veil. The veil had a fancy edge that nicely obscured the tip of her nose. She used a name that I’ve forgotten and implied that she had come to town to take a job and would seek permanent living quarters on the morrow.

  She stayed close in the room until after noon the next day. She left, then, wearing a cloak of darkness. It was a lightweight garment, something like a duster, with loose sleeves and a belt. Darlene already had her hair piled high with a comb like Cora’s but she covered this with a scarf. She walked to the quiet little hotel on the water where Josephine Grain always stayed. She went into the ladies’ room and slipped out of the duster. It hung inconspicuously over her arm and hid her handbag into which went the flat-heeled dark shoes and out which came the white sandals. Now she appeared in a duplicate of Cora’s green cotton dress. In fact, she was close to a duplicate of Cora.

  She walked out upon the beach and spotted Josephine. Darlene checked the time, to the minute. She was a very cool and competent person. She walked on stage, said her lines, and fled.

  Going between two buildings, Darlene slipped from white to dark shoes, pulled the comb from her hair and let the hair hang to her shoulders. She was inside the duster and buttoned up in a matter of seconds. The woman who stepped into the street would not even have been shouted after by any pursuer of the woman who had left the beach. Thus, she vanished.

  She went quickly back to the room, burned the first little slip of instructions, paid her bill, left town by bus immediately. Nobody noticed her. Why would anyone?

  The whole thing, of course, rested on the invariable habit of Josephine Grain, who was “always” alone under her umbrella on the beach in the early afternoons. The gamble was that she would be there on the sixth day of December. If she had not been alone, it wouldn’t have mattered much. But she had to be there.

  She was there.

  Kent Shaw had done brilliant research. He chose for his unconscious cast and took his gambles on people with routine habits. They were people above suspicion and therefore of good repute. Well-known people, who had set themselves in patterns. He had combed the nation for such people. They were all middle-aged or older. They were all successful people who did as they pleased, who had developed routines which were respected. There are more of such people than you would think.

  The gamble was the weakness of the plot. Ah, but when it paid off, it was the plot’s wicked strength! None of these people could possibly have been bribed. Their testimony was truthful and unimpeachable.

  The first incident went off beautifully.

  Still, the result was meager, for all the planning and all the trouble. Why weren’t they discouraged?

  Kent Shaw, watching, delicately prodding in his own person the course of events, playing for the biggest stake of his life and having planned it this way, was simply absorbed. To Darlene Hite, it didn’t matter. Placidly, she, the employee, could go on, win or lose, to the next part of her job. Cora Steffani was, after all, on stage, even though so far the stage was very small and obscure and the audience merely her own circle of quite insignificant people like me. Still she had the role and must henceforth play it to whatever audience.

  But Raymond Pankerman could have seen and heard nothing at all for his money (since Kent Shaw was ruthless that they communicate in no way whatsoever). Still, Raymond was surrounded by harassments of his own. And, after all, the bulk of his investment in this strange affair was not to be paid out except for value received. The big money lay in a shabby old safe which stood in a run-down, cheap-rent, one-room office, taken in Kent Shaw’s name. But Raymond held the combination to this safe. Kent Shaw couldn’t get into it … yet. So, Raymond could afford to shrug and be patient.

  There was, as I said, some talk. I remember the first argument I heard. One Saturday, after Christmas, I ran into Charley Ives, downtown, and he begged me to come and look at his idea for Marcus’ birthday present. He took me to a jeweler’s and showed me a letter cutter, gold and steel, an exquisite thing.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said. “Of course, Marcus has paper cutters.”

  “Marcus has everything,” Charley said lightly, “but a token of love is a token of love. I wasn’t sure of the design.”

  I don’t know what took me by the throat. I said to myself it was outrageous that a man, a big strong healthy intelligent man like Charley Ives should be fussing over a little bit of a birthday present; should have the time for such fussing, however exquisite the gift or beloved the recipient.

  “I know I’m no artist. What’s the matter?” said Charley innocently. “I kinda like it. You tell me if it’s all right, Ollie.”

  “Of course, it’s all right. You know it’s all right.”

  “Gosh,” said Charley.

  “Gosh what? Charley, my boy.”

  “I don’t know why you’re cross with me, Teacher. I’m being a good boy.”

  I might have blazed out at him if he hadn’t turned to tell the clerk that he’d made up his mind. Then he grabbed my arm. “Don’t apologize,” he said cheerily. “Come on, let’s have lunch.”

  We wheeled into the nearest restaurant and there was a man Charley knew, another big man, named Bud Gray. Somehow, this Mr. Gray attached himself and joined us and I was glad.

  One of these days, Charley and I were going to have another fight. The truce between us had gone on too long. When Charley came home, at the war’s end, so briefly, I was fighting the battle of Broadway, and Charley, worrying about postwar problems in Europe, had no time for mine. Besides, I avoided him, knowing and feeling guilty about it in my soul that all civilians fight a war in safe soft places. W
hen Charley came home after his spell in occupied Germany, I was teaching. We met at Marcus’ house and Charley seemed mildly surprised that I wasn’t trying to be a great actress anymore.

  I told him, to put it simply, that I had failed. “I didn’t have what it takes,” I remember saying.

  “What does it take?” He’d seemed amused.

  “Among other things, courage,” I’d told him.

  Charley said to me, “Doesn’t everything?”

  “Cousin Charley,” I’d said, “let’s not fight. I withdraw the word ‘courage.’ Probably I don’t know what it means. I know I haven’t got it.”

  “Whereas, I’m as brave as a lion but I ‘don’t understand,’” Charley had said coldly. “Okay, Teacher. No fight. So be it.” The truce had set in.

  It wasn’t long after that that he met Cora Steffani and there was fire and flame and they ran off. Two months later, she went to Reno and Charley went to Japan.

  That was just as the Korean affair broke out, so he was gone again quite a long while. Then he came home and became (of all things) a publisher and we began to meet (of all places) at Cora’s.

  I’d seen a lot of him. (He’d seen a lot of her.) And sooner or later I was going to tell him how I thought he was wasting himself and I was going to sound like Teacher, sure enough. When I announced that I thought there was an awful lot of man to waste, when I told him to his teeth that I knew he was no boy. When I asked him why … why … why … was he hanging around, playing the playboy?

  And I didn’t want to fight with Charley Ives again.

  To get back to the restaurant … pretty soon Kent Shaw came in, saw me, came over to ask me how Cora was. He said he hadn’t seen her in a couple of weeks (and no more had he). This led to Kent’s sitting down with us to wait for his date, and all of us telling Charley’s friend, Bud Gray, about the strange dream or trance Cora had gone into, and how it seemed as if she had been in two places at once.

  Mr. Gray said he’d call such a thing impossible because, in human experience, it was unknown.