(1989) Dreamer

by Peter James

  She could hear him breathing heavily, grunting, like a pig. She felt a cold draught of wind up between her legs, then the fingers thrust in even further, so hard they were going to split her apart, heard the pop of a button, then the sound of a zipper. Her assailant was moving, slowly, cautiously, preparing himself.

  No. God no. Please God no.

  ‘Kiss me. Tell me you love me,’ he said in a bland North London accent, and she felt his mouth nuzzling her ear. ‘Tell me you love me,’ he repeated, in a seductive French accent this time, nuzzling her ear again, and she jerked away, from the wetness of his mouth, from the stench of cigarettes and beer and onions on his breath. The fingers slipped out, probed gently through her pubic hair, caressing. ‘Tell me you love me,’ he said again, harshly. Then there was silence as she stared around the dark, her heart crashing, her brain racing, thinking, thinking, listening to his panting, which was getting louder, faster.

  Outside she heard footsteps, and she felt her assailant grow tense, the hand over her mouth tighten.

  Help me. Please help me.

  The footsteps passed by, two or three people. She heard someone call out, someone laugh, someone shout something back. They faded away. There was a deep rumble, and the floor trembled slightly for a moment.

  ‘Tell me you love me,’ he said. ‘Tell me you love me.’

  She felt the hand lift away a fraction, enough to let her speak, and she lunged out with her mouth, as wide open as she could stretch it, and bit, hard, tried to bite a chunk out of his hand.

  ‘You bitch!’

  As his grip released, she sprang away from him, kicking out, smashing with her fist, then kicked again, felt something soft, heard a groan, then her head smashed into the wall and she bounced off, dazed.

  ‘You cunt bitch!’

  She kicked out again, as hard as she could, scrabbling with her hand to find the door, then kicked again, hit air, could not see his shadow in the darkness. She felt a hand grab her hair and lunged forward with her finger, felt something soft, gelatinous, and he screamed. She thrust forward, kicking out wildly again, pushing with her finger and again he screamed. The grip on her hair slackened.

  Door handle. It was in her hand. She pulled, and the door opened and she fell out onto the stone staircase. ‘Help!’ she tried to scream, but it only came out as a whisper. ‘Help me. Oh God help me!’ She scrambled up the steps. Christ, run, for God’s sake. Run. She tried, but she couldn’t even raise her leg to the next step up. She heard the door opening behind her. Run, run! She pushed forward against the air that was like a wall. Help! She tried to scream again, but nothing would come out.

  She grabbed the hand rail, trying to pull herself up the staircase, but it was steep, too steep. She pulled again, feeling her arm muscles tearing against the strain, against the force that was preventing her.

  ‘Cunt bitch.’

  She tried again, but still she could not move.

  The hand closed around her neck, and she was jerked violently back.

  She lashed out with her elbows, but her arms were being held tightly and she could scarcely move them. ‘No!’ she screamed. ‘No! No! No!’

  She jammed her feet down onto the steps, trying to get a purchase, but it was no use. She was being dragged back down, back to the dark room.

  ‘No! No! No!’

  ‘Bugs?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Bugs?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Sam?’

  The voice had changed, was gentle now. A different voice.

  ‘Bugs, are you OK?’

  She felt a cold draught blow across her face.

  ‘Bugs, darling?’

  She felt the sweat pouring down her face.

  ‘Bugs?’

  Her whole body was drenched, and she shivered.

  ‘Bugs?’

  She heard the rustle of sheets, the clank of a bed spring, then a click and there was brilliant white light that dazzled her, brighter even than the moon.

  ‘You OK, Bugs?’

  Richard’s face, close, so close she could not focus.

  ‘Horrible. It was horrible.’

  ‘You were screaming,’ he said.

  ‘Sorry. I’m sorry.’ She eased herself up in the bed, and sat, her heart pounding.

  ‘Probably the booze,’ he said.

  ‘The booze?’ She was aware of a sharp ache in her head.

  Jumbled memories jostled in her mind. Christ, how much had she drunk? How had she got home? She tried to remember, panicking. There was just a blur.

  ‘You were pissed as a fart.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said blankly.

  ‘It was bloody funny. The way you kept telling Julian not to worry.’

  ‘Julian?’

  ‘Holland.’

  Holland, she thought. Julian Holland. Edgar’s father. She remembered now. He had been in the flat when she had arrived home. ‘I felt sorry for him.’

  ‘I think he thought you’d flipped. You virtually sat on him, and kept telling him it was all your fault, because you’d ignored your dream.’

  Dream. She shivered. ‘He looked so – so unhappy. So guilty.’

  ‘Can hardly expect him to be jumping up and down for joy.’

  ‘It was nice of him to come round.’

  ‘I played squash with him. He wanted some exercise.’

  ‘Did I thank him for the flowers?’

  ‘About a hundred times.’

  She stared at the curtains, flapping gently in the draught. ‘They’re grubby,’ she said.

  ‘Grubby? The flowers?’

  ‘The curtains. We’ll have to get them cleaned soon. We’ve never had them cleaned.’ Her head ached and her mouth was parched. She smelled onions again. Hot warm onions and booze and stale smoke. ‘Have you been eating onions?’

  ‘Yah. Pickled. We had fish and chips and pickled onions. They were seriously good. From that place – that little parade of shops.’

  ‘You played squash and then had fish and chips?’

  ‘Yah.’

  ‘I thought you were trying to lose weight.’ She sipped her water, then closed her eyes tightly against the light and felt herself back, suddenly, in the dark room. She shuddered and sat up, afraid to go to sleep.

  ‘OK?’

  ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘I’m fine. I think I’ll just – read – for a while.’

  18

  Bamford O’Connell’s waiting room smelled of furniture polish and musty fabric, like every medical waiting room Sam had ever been in. Tatler, The Field, Country Life, Yachts & Yachting and Homes & Gardens had been laid out neatly. Too neatly, fanatically neatly. She wondered if they had been laid out by the patient who was closeted with O’Connell now, behind the closed door.

  I’ve got this thing about tidiness, Doctor. I’ve just tidied up your waiting room. If there’s someone out there untidying the magazines, I’m going to chop their head off with a machete. You will understand?

  Of course. If that’s what you feel you must do. It’s important not to repress your feelings.

  It would be a good thing if I did chop her head off, wouldn’t it? Stop her dreaming.

  Yes it would.

  I could take her head home in a plastic bag and stick it on a spike in the garden. And every morning I could say to her ‘Naughty, naughty, naughty, who had another bad dream last night?’

  Someone with a ballpoint pen had added tiny round glasses and a goatee beard to the model on the front of Vogue, making her look like a rather sinister Sigmund Freud.

  The door behind her opened, startling her, and she heard Bamford O’Connell’s voice, slightly softer than usual, with less of an Irish accent. ‘Sam, hallo. Come in.’

  The psychiatrist was wearing a sober Prince of Wales check suit and serious tortoiseshell glasses. The eccentrically dressed bon viveur of the dinner table had changed into a studious man of authority. Only the centre parting and the hair that was too long remained of the private Bamford she knew. She found
the change to this new persona oddly reassuring, as if it put a distance between her and Bamford the friend.

  He closed the heavy, panelled, privacy-assured door with a firm click, and the sudden silence of his consulting room startled her. She wondered if it was soundproofed. Like eyes adjusting to light, her ears slowly adjusted to the stillness that was only faintly disturbed by the hissing of car tyres from the rain-soaked Harley Street three floors down, and from the gentle, more constant hissing of the wall-mounted gas fire.

  The room was neat, elegant, sparse, with a mahogany desk, an oak bookcase, two comfortable reproduction Victorian armchairs, a chaise longue, and a large painting on the wall that looked like rhubarb in a thunderstorm.

  ‘Sit yourself down, Sam.’ He pointed to one of the armchairs. ‘Great evening that was, last week. Wonderful fun.’

  ‘Good. It was nice seeing you both. Harriet’s looking well.’

  He sat down behind his desk, the window framing him in a landscape of rooftops, grey sky and falling rain; heavy, steady rain, the sort of wet Sunday afternoon rain you saw falling in movies and through French windows on theatre sets. He tugged his jacket sleeves up a fraction to reveal a smart watch with a crocodile skin strap, and neat sapphire cufflinks. ‘So, to what do I owe this great honour?’

  ‘I need some help – advice. It’s professional, this visit. I want to pay you for it.’

  ‘You’ll do no such thing.’

  ‘Please, Bamford, I want to.’

  ‘I won’t hear of it. Anyhow, I shouldn’t be seeing you without a referral from your doctor.’ He winked. ‘Tell me.’

  She looked down at the carpet, expensive, pure wool, mushroom coloured, then up again. ‘We were talking at dinner – about dreams . . . premonitions.’

  ‘That air disaster in Bulgaria,’ he said. ‘You’d dreamed about it.’

  ‘Yes.’ She paused, glanced up at the light bulb hanging from the ceiling and felt a cold chill. ‘I – I had another dream.’ She stared at the bulb again. ‘Over the weekend . . . which came true.’

  He tilted his head slightly and interlocked his fingers. ‘Tell me about both the dreams.’

  She told him of the air disaster dream, and the Punch and Judy dream, and Punch appearing with a black hood and the shotgun, and what happened subsequently. He sat in silence staring at her so intently he was beginning to make her squirm. He seemed to be reading her face like someone reading the small print on a policy.

  ‘This black hood that was in both dreams – do you have any associations with it?’

  She sat still for a moment, then nodded.

  ‘What are they?’

  She looked down at her fingers. ‘It’s . . . something from childhood. I – It’s a long story.’

  He smiled encouragingly. ‘We’ve got plenty of time.’

  ‘There was a boy in our village,’ Sam began. ‘I suppose you could call him the village idiot, except he wasn’t comical. He was nasty . . . malevolent, evil. He lived with his mother in a farmhouse just outside the village. It was a creepy place – quite big, isolated. There were always rumours of weird things going on there.’

  ‘What sort of things?’

  ‘I don’t know. Black magic, that sort of thing. His mother was sort of . . . a witch, I suppose. She was foreign. My aunt and uncle used to talk about her occasionally, and the rumour was that she was the wife or the mistress of a German warlock who was into ritual killing, and that Slider was his son, but—’ She shrugged – ‘that was village gossip, probably. She was certainly very weird. Reclusive. There were a lot of strange goings on at the farm. A friend who lived in the village told me years later that the woman had had an incestuous relationship with her son, but I don’t know how she knew that.’ Sam smiled, ‘You get a lot of strange gossip coming out of a small community. She – the woman – got pregnant, had a daughter, but no one ever saw her. I don’t know whether it was by her son. There were rumours of ritual orgies and God knows what else. All the children were always told to keep well away. The house had a very creepy feel. I can still remember it very clearly. People’s pets used to disappear – dogs and things – and they always said that Slider had got them.’

  ‘Slider?’

  ‘That was his nickname. He had a glass eye which he used to slide in and out. He’d walk down the High Street and when he saw anyone he’d slide it out and wave it at them. It was all red, livid, behind, and his eyelashes used to bend in the wrong way.’ She looked up at O’Connell, but he showed no reaction. ‘Sometimes he put a small onion in his eye instead. He’d take it out, wave it at someone, chew it, then spit it out.’

  O’Connell frowned slightly.

  ‘No one knew how he’d lost it. The rumour was that a cat he was torturing had scratched it out, through I think he’d been in a car accident and had lost it then. There were rumours that he used to torture animals – the pets that he’d taken. After he died and his mother moved away the garden was dug up. Apparently it was like an ossuary.’

  ‘How old was he?’

  ‘Early twenties, I suppose. He also had another deformity. On one hand he only had one finger and a thumb; it was withered – horrible – almost like pincers.’

  ‘Was that from an accident?’

  ‘I don’t know. I think it was something he was born with.’

  ‘How did he die?’

  Years, she thought. I haven’t talked about this for years. Not to anyone. The fear had been so strong that she’d never even told Richard. In case . . . in case just telling it brought it all back. She felt something moving towards her, a shadow like a cloud, or a wave that was piling up behind her; she shivered, and stared at O’Connell again, for courage, for reassurance.

  ‘I killed him.’

  There was a long silence. ‘You killed him?’ he said finally.

  Sam nodded and bit her lower lip. Talking about this . . . weird. She thought it had all faded away; thought that if she forgot it all for long enough, it might be as if it never had happened. Thought that after twenty-five years she was safe, finally. Safe from Slider.

  ‘You murdered him?’

  ‘No . . . I – I was playing out in the fields, and I heard this scream coming from a barn. It was quite isolated, almost derelict – hardly ever used. I ran over to it and heard noises up in the hayloft – horrible strangling noises – so I climbed up the ladder and saw him – Slider – wearing – this black hood . . . strangling – he’d just raped and strangled a girl.

  ‘He chased me across the loft, then got on top of me. I didn’t know who he was at that moment, because of the hood, but I knew he was going to kill me. I bit him, and kicked and somehow I gouged him in the eye and his eyeball flew out. He got even madder, then . . . I don’t remember exactly what happened but part of the loft was rotten, and he fell through and got impaled on an old machine on the ground.’ She was shaking now, shaking so hard that even when she clenched her hands together she could not keep them still. ‘There was a metal bit – a sort of spar – that had gone right through his neck. I could see him staring up at me; there was blood all around him. It was dark in the loft, because the light bulb had broken – it had got broken in the struggle. There was myself and the girl that was dead. I knew she was dead – I don’t know why, but I knew – but I didn’t know if Slider was dead or OK. He still had the hood on, and all I could see was the one eye looking out of the slit at me. I didn’t know if he was going to climb up off the machine suddenly and come and kill me . . . And I didn’t dare go down because—’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I stayed up there. I’d worked out that somehow I could stop him from climbing the ladder – I would throw bales of straw on him if he tried – but he still didn’t move. Then it got pitch dark and I couldn’t see him any more, and that got even more frightening. Then, later, I heard voices, saw torches, and I heard my father. I just screamed and screamed.’

  ‘And Slider was dead?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who
was the other girl?’

  ‘Someone from the village. I didn’t really know her. She was older than me – in her teens.’

  ‘How old were you?’

  ‘Seven.’

  ‘That’s quite a memory to carry from childhood, Sam.’

  ‘There’s more,’ she said. She looked down at her wrist and began to toy with her watch strap. ‘After this happened, I started dreaming of Slider.’

  ‘One would have expected you to,’ said O’Connell.

  ‘I used to have the same recurring dream. That I heard the scream and went to the barn and climbed up into the loft, and Slider would come out of the darkness at me. Except he didn’t die in the dream. He was always about to get me – lying on top of me, with his one eye missing and just this red socket coming closer – then I’d wake up, and something bad would happen.’

  ‘Such as what?’

  ‘It started small. The first time I had the dream, my hamster died the next day. Then, each time, it seemed to get worse. I’d get sick, or my mother was having a baby and lost it. Then last time I had the dream I woke up and . . . my parents had been killed in a car crash.’

  ‘That was all when you were seven?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you didn’t have the dream again after that?’

  ‘No . . . it was almost as if he’d got what he wanted, I suppose – got his revenge.’

  ‘Could you tell at all from your dreams what sort of bad things were going to happen?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And now you’re getting the image of this Slider with these two dreams?’

  ‘There have actually been three dreams with him in.’ She told him of her dream in the taxi. ‘I had a very weird dream the night before also,’ she smiled. ‘You probably think I’m cracking up.’

  ‘Tell me it.’

  She told him about her dream of Hampstead underground. When she finished, it was still impossible to read his reaction.

  ‘This hooded man – Slider – was this the man in your dream down the underground?’

  ‘I don’t know – I didn’t think so. I couldn’t see his face, but there didn’t seem to be a mask – except—’ She tailed off. ‘He smelled of onions.’