The Dream Walker

by Charlotte Armstrong

  “Kent’s an odd one,” I said to Cora. “I’d have thought he’d have been right in the thick of all this dream life of yours, spouting theories. You?”

  Cora shrugged. “Sorry little man. Burnt himself out, years ago.”

  “Speaking of getting burnt, are you giving up?” I asked her.

  “Giving up what?” She peered over her glasses.

  “Theater?”

  “Never.”

  “I don’t notice you running around to see who’s casting.”

  “Ollie, I can’t. You know that. I mean, not now.”

  “For how long can’t you?”

  She pulled her glasses down to hang around her neck and looked at me thoughtfully. “Oh, this will die down,” she said lamely. “I may never have a dream again.”

  “If you do, I advise you to see some doctors,” I said. (I don’t know why.)

  Cora took hold of her glass of water and her fingers whitened. “At least you can see it’s an affliction,” she said angrily. “Most people think it’s a great joke. I’ve got a notion to go ahead and get married again and the hell with it.”

  I was startled. I know my mouth opened. Then I knew that although she stared at her plate which was probably a blur to her without her reading glasses, she was really, by nerve and ear and eye corner, watching me. I felt a wind of malice.

  “You think if you get married again you’ll stop this dreaming?” I asked her in my most detached manner.

  “They do say it’s the end of dreaming,” she murmured facetiously.

  I could have asked her if she’d found it so. She’d never talked to me about Charley Ives, nor told me why she had so soon divorced him. But I didn’t ask. I never had.

  Kent Shaw got up, then abruptly sat down again, studied his check. A signal. Cora’s head turned slowly. “Why haven’t you ever married, Ollie?” she cooed.

  “I’d rather dream,” said I.

  “Of course, you do have your work,” Cora grinned nastily. “I suppose the high-brow temple of fine art where you serve couldn’t do without you.”

  Kent Shaw was now arguing with the cashier. He paid, with an air of anger, and he left the place.

  “It better not do without me tonight. I’ve got some grades to figure.” I could always pretend her cracks didn’t hit me. “So shall we …?”

  “In a minute,” said Cora, swigging coffee. “No offense, huh, Teacher? Excuse me, Ollie?”

  She went to the “Ladies.” And I sat, wondering whether I was fond of her or not. Whether she hadn’t become more like a relative with whom I was involuntarily entangled. Whether she would soon become a relative (in law) again.

  Meanwhile, Kent Shaw nipped around the corner, went in a side passage, and broke a taboo. He rapped on the “Ladies” and Cora let him in. The door was in nobody’s view, back in a warren of interior partitions. I didn’t suspect a thing. I’d seen Kent Shaw go out of the building. I didn’t even know there was that other way in. When Cora came back, we paid and walked home. Me to my work, to sit remembering my girls and assessing their progress and being too generous, I suspect. (And beating down that question. Who wanted Cora to marry him, again, and had been refused, so far? And how had I gotten it hindside forward?)

  Meanwhile, Cora sat before the TV set, swinging one ankle, smoking, looking lazy, but inside the dark head, the brain was busy memorizing new instructions.

  Kent Shaw told her there would be no San Francisco episode because Jocelyn, the writer, had gone away. Therefore, he thought it wise to move the Los Angeles episode ahead in time. Iron was hot, best to strike, and all that. But he said he was leery about Patrick Davenport’s eyes. Davenport, that famous movie director, was an eye-minded gentleman and as smart as they are made. “This Hite kid,” Kent said, “just hasn’t got it. Her walk, for instance, isn’t yours. She doesn’t carry herself as you do and I can’t teach her. Now, Davenport might get that. He could catch on, too fast, to what’s going on because he’s reading the papers. Don’t think he’s not. And I’m afraid of that eye. In his own house, too. I’m nervous about it. We can’t wreck this thing now.”

  He was nervous, all right, ready to jump out of his skin. But he did not tell Cora what really made him nervous, or anything at all about Ed Jones. He said he had changed this Los Angeles bit to a device he considered safer. So he told her what she was to do. He told her it depended on his getting in touch with Darlene. So he would signal. He told her how he would do that. If he gave the signal, she was to use the revised version. If not, then they would have to stick to the original, because they must coincide with Darlene, if she went through with it. So Cora made a note or two on her script, which was always with her. He told her the title of a certain book and described its jacket, which she noted. After that, she saw that the coast was clear for him, and Kent Shaw left the way he had come, and Cora joined me.

  And if I suspected nothing, I truly believe, neither did she!

  Kent Shaw flew off to Los Angeles. On the twenty-fifth, he met Darlene. She was as disguised and inconspicuous as ever. He congratulated her on her finesse, said he’d even raise her pay, said the scheme was going like wildfire and everyone was pleased with her. He must have been probing shrewdly into Darlene’s emotions and sensibilities. The praise braced her but she remained cool. More money, of course, she approved.

  He told her that the one unforgivable thing would be exposure of the plot, ever. He said it must remain the mystery of the decade, and never revealed. He said there had been only four people in the world who knew, four who would be forever silent. He was one, she another, and Cora, and one more. But now there was Ed Jones. Oh, he said she had done well to tell Ed Jones. He understood that. But now, he, Kent Shaw, would take over. This Jones liked money? Darlene said that he did, but he was vain and he was after her.

  “You don’t want him, do you?” Kent Shaw asked her outright. Darlene said placidly, “No.” So Kent Shaw told her not to worry. This Jones would follow her no more. She probably wouldn’t see Ed Jones again.

  Darlene sighed relief. It had been a strain.

  Kent pried into the past. Who was Ed Jones? Darlene said she had known him in high school, where he’d never paid much attention to her.

  “You don’t mind what I tell him about you?” Kent asked. And Darlene said no. “New leaf?” Kent Shaw had asked suddenly and shrewdly.

  “When I get the end pay,” Darlene had said.

  “You’ll have to be careful. Remember, don’t let any tax man start wondering.”

  Darlene implied that she’d thought of that long ago, not having been born yesterday. Then Kent Shaw, perceiving once more her relationship with law and authority, told her he had changed the script and what she was to do.

  She was to do nothing in Los Angeles.

  He was taking a risk with Darlene, but he had to. She left that city on the night of the twenty-eighth of March. She wore her little veil, her inconspicuous clothing. She spoke to no one on the bus, caught nobody’s eye. She changed to a train in Reno, went east, then south, and by a round about route to New Orleans, where she checked in at last for a “vacation.”

  But by this time she knew what, I do believe, she had not suspected, either.

  Chapter Eight

  So March went along and the Dream Walker affair seemed to be dying down. Some people pointed out that the dreams had occurred in December, January, February, and one should happen in March and Cora was watched. But nothing happened until March was nearly gone.

  The night of the twenty-eighth, there were people in Cora’s apartment. Mildred Garrick (who by now took a proprietary interest toward the whole thing and came as frequently as she could) was there. Charley Ives, of course, and four or five other people who do not really count. It was a gloomy Sunday. The weather was dull. People were in some kind of depressed state, longing for spring, which would tease us for weeks before it really came. The evening wasn’t jelling socially. Mildred was restless and glum. She wore a black-and-silver buckle i
n her hair and told Charley Ives, who was kidding her, that she knew it was not a success. Mildred had a blind spot, a certain lack of humor about her famous idiosyncrasy.

  Charley was sprawled all over a sofa big enough for two.

  A couple of guests were quarreling bitterly without saying a word to each other, using the rest of us as way stations for nasty cracks. One other was getting as drunk as he could, all by himself. Cora seemed irritable and almost on the point of throwing everyone out. How I wished she would!

  She was wearing a violet velvet jumper with a white silk blouse and she looked very handsome. She’d put it on after I had turned up in salmon silk and we clashed so dreadfully that I couldn’t sit in the room near her. So I was on the window bench, withdrawn. I was tired of living with Cora. I wished I could read. My tongue was hanging out for a book.

  Cora swished over to her TV set and somebody groaned and said, “Oh, no, have we come to this!”

  “Don’t complain,” said she. “You’re not being amusing.” It was her house and her set and no one could stop her. She clicked around the channels and we got a snatch of one commercial after another. “What was that?” she said and turned back.

  A panel. Everyone groaned. “Wait a minute,” said Cora in a bright interested voice. “Look who’s on!”

  It was Kent Shaw. There he sat, hunched and tense and bouncing ever so slightly. The camera wheeled along the faces and steadied on the so-called contestant. That panel show was an imitation of its betters, originating in Hollywood, making heavy hash of a stale idea. People in Cora’s room began to make wittier remarks in criticism. The great boon of television! Sometimes the wit and nonsense that flies among friends during a B-movie is more entertaining than an A-movie in a politely silent theater could possibly be.

  The camera came to Kent Shaw and he put his thumb in his mouth, a most unfamiliar gesture, something I’d never seen him do. How could I know it was a signal?

  Somebody had just made a crack about the unfortunate contestant that to us in our low state seemed hilarious, and there was laughter in Cora’s room for the first time that evening, when she slowly toppled over from where she’d been sitting on a cushion. Cora, in violet velvet, was out on the floor.

  “Is this one of those?” a guest said, awed and delighted.

  Charley was kneeling beside her. For a big man, he can move as fast as a cat. I knelt, too, as he worked the cushion gently under her head. She was in no faint. Her pulse was quick and jumpy. It occurred to me that Cora was excited and the blood was telling us so. I could not believe in her. I had tried. I’d done my best to give her all the benefit of every trifle of doubt. But I knew she was faking.

  “Where do you suppose she is?” a girl said shrilly.

  “Be quiet,” said Mildred. “Eleven thirty-eight, E.S.T. Who is going to take this down?”

  The man who had been drinking too much looked remarkably sober and said he could do it. Mildred’s cold eye didn’t trust him. There was a muted dispute going on over our heads while Charley and I knelt there and Cora was still.

  She was relaxed. That took control. Most trained entertainers know how to do it. I can do it, myself. I teach my girls the trick of letting every muscle go. The heart will quiet.…

  But Cora didn’t stay out for more than five minutes. She rolled her head, opened her eyes, and the whole room became utterly still.

  “I was walking in a street or a road,” she said. Charley’s arm held her sitting up. “No one … no one was there. I could tell there were high banks or hills on both sides. The street was like a ditch, deep down. I saw a sign by a street lamp, next to a palm tree. Cameroon Canyon Drive. I crossed the crossroad. I could see lights, very high up, to my right and left. But I was down in a kind of slot. I was scared. I’m always scared.” Her lips trembled. No one else in that room so much as breathed.

  “I kept walking,” she went on. “There was nobody … nobody to ask. I saw a pink house, with white frosting, number 11880 … 11880,” she repeated. Then she screamed. “Look in the ferns! Look in the ferns!” she cried out. “In the ferns!” And she put her face into Charley’s coat. She put her arms around his neck, her fingers clutching, her body shaking. I felt sick.

  Mildred was bending over. “What else? Now, come on, Cora. Never mind the hysterics.”

  Charley said, almost absentmindedly, “You shouldn’t pester.” And how he did it, I don’t know, but he got up from the floor with Cora in his arms. He put her on the couch but she wouldn’t let go of him. I saw him gently prying her fingers loose.

  “No use to get a doctor,” Mildred said disgustedly.

  Cora turned. Now, her back was to the room and her face was in the upholstery. She wasn’t making a sound.

  “Cora.” Mildred shook her shoulder. “Is that all, for heaven’s sakes! Cora?”

  Cora said the one word she shouldn’t have said. She said, “Dead.”

  “What did she say?” No one could make anything of it and Cora lay silent with her head buried.

  “Oh, let her alone,” I said.

  “Ollie?” She made the faintest whimper of my name.

  “I’m here.”

  Charley got up from the edge of the couch, poker-faced, and I sat down. The salmon of my dress against the violet of hers was enough to put your teeth on edge.

  “Palm tree, eh?” Mildred said. “South, then. Florida again?”

  “With lights up high and a road in a canyon, it sounds like California,” Charley said.

  “Sooner or later,” said Mildred grimly. “Oh, sure. Southern California. Beverly Hills, I presume. Well, well. Let’s see.”

  Somebody argued for Palm Springs but Mildred, rummaging in drawers, found a street map of Los Angeles. On the TV screen, Kent Shaw, with sour brilliance, was guessing something or other, when somebody finally turned it off.

  Mildred Garrick got on the phone. The rest of us sat dumb and dazed and listened to her.

  “This is Mildred Garrick, in New York City. A funny thing just happened here. I want to ask you to make a check on it. Can you get a man up to number 11880 Cameroon Canyon Drive? It should be a pink house somewhere in your city.… Yes, I know. I’ve been there. It’s quite a city and I’ve seen the colors of your houses.… Sure, I understand that in a polite way you’re saying I’ve got a crust.… Listen, I called the police because I’m a law-abid … I work for the newspapers.… Because I want somebody with authority.… That’s right. To go to this address right away and look in the ferns.… 11880 Cameroon Canyon Drive and how should I know what ferns? What trouble can it be? Pick up one of your telephones.… Nope, I can’t explain. You wouldn’t like it.… Doesn’t look like Beverly Hills to me and I’ve got a map here.… Even so, don’t you people speak to each other?… No, I won’t call Beverly Hills. I can call a newspaper and get somebody right out there.… Okay. They can print the result I got out of this call, too.… Look in the ferns. That’s right.… No, I’ll call you back in about thirty minutes.… I told you, I run a column.… Okay.”

  “What could be in the ferns?” someone said.

  “We may find out.” Mildred looked grim and powerful. “Cora, if you want to make this really good, kid, better tell us from here what you saw in those ferns.”

  Cora wouldn’t answer. She couldn’t. I will always believe she did not know that the policemen, three thousand miles away, were finding in the ferns the dead body of a man named Edward Jones.

  I’ve said Los Angeles was murky. It still is. I don’t know, and no one will ever know, how Kent Shaw did it. That he did it isn’t open to much doubt.

  Ed Jones was killed by poison from a hypodermic needle, not a noisy way to kill a man. One could manage it in an automobile, for instance. How and when Kent Shaw got the body into the huge decorative mass of tall ferns on the front corner of Patrick Davenport’s wide lot we do not know.

  When Mildred called Los Angeles back in thirty minutes, even she let out a yelp. She stammered and stuttered and promised to explai
n. But first she turned around to tell us. “A body!” she said. Cora was still lying with her back to all, and she did not move. “The house belongs to Patrick Davenport,” said Mildred, “and there is a dead man in the ferns!”

  I then saw the ripple of shock go down Cora’s violet back. So did Charley. Our eyes met.

  Mildred left the phone hanging and yelled at her. “Did you see a dead body? Did you? Now listen, Cora, this isn’t funny!”

  “I … don’t … remember … anything … at all …” sobbed Cora into the upholstery. “Go away. Everyone go away.” Now she shook and when I touched her she was cold.

  And no wonder. Now, if never before, Cora Steffani knew her role had to be played forever. Kent Shaw had told her he would put an animal in the ferns. He told her not to say what kind, because he wanted to make it as bizarre as possible. A monkey, if he could find one. But he might, he said, have to make it a dog. Oh, I believe she did not know the dead animal would be man.

  Kent Shaw took a risk with Cora but he had her in a terrible position. She’d made it too good. She’d said that word, “dead.” And no one would doubt she’d meant a dead man.

  I could tell she was really terrified and I had a vision of the uproar that was coming. It was Charley who said thoughtfully, “When this breaks she has got to have some seclusion. I’ll call Dr. Harper.”

  “Now, wait a minute, Ives,” Mildred said. “The cops are going to want to talk to her and you can’t hide her.”

  “I’m going to get her into a hospital,” Charley said. “Cops can talk to her there can’t they?”

  “Oh, please!” Cora rolled over and pulled herself up. She was green with fright. “Yes, a hospital. I’m scared. I can’t stand this. Take me to a hospital. Help me, somebody! There’s something terribly wrong.”