by Peter James
‘Why would someone suddenly become psychic?’
‘I don’t believe anyone does suddenly become psychic. We are all born with these powers but they fade out very quickly in most of us, because we don’t use them. Our society actively discourages us from using them, as you’ve been discovering from the people you’ve been to for help.’ He turned round. ‘Most people are afraid of being ridiculed, so they leave it at that, don’t give their psychic abilities any chance to develop. But these powers don’t go away; we still have them. Some of us have the ability to use them instinctively; some of us need a clonk on the head to re-activate them.’ He shrugged. ‘They’re there. We are all born with them, as much as we are born with arms and legs.’
‘I don’t remember having a clonk on the head.’
‘You don’t have to be dropped on your head. A trauma can do it just as well. Look at yourself – someone tried to rape and kill you when you were a little girl, a ghastly man in a black hood . . . you lost both your parents together. Pretty big traumas.’
‘But these dreams stopped after my parents died. Stopped for twenty-five years. What’s started them again?’
‘Well, that’s what we have to try to discover. There’s some trigger – something obviously linked with this hooded one-eyed man. Perhaps we’ll learn something from the laboratory.’ He looked at his watch again, as if he was anxious to get out of the room.
Anxious in case his wife came back?
‘I think we’d better get across now. We can continue talking.’ He stood up, fetched her coat, helped her into it, then insisted on carrying her overnight bag.
It was dark outside and beginning to snow. They stopped at the kerb, waiting for a gap in the thundering traffic, the howling, blattering heavy rush hour traffic, cars heading home and trucks heading to the docks, wipers clacking, lights glaring, gears grinding, and he shouted at her, above the roar, ‘If you tried to walk across this road with your eyes shut, you’d be knocked down and killed. Yet most of us travel through life with our minds shut.’
The slipstream of a lorry buffeted her sideways and her lungs filled with foul diesel exhaust. Another dark shape loomed down the road, blasting the night with its exhaust, its tyres churning the white flecks of snow to pulp and flinging slush up at them. They sprinted across and walked in through the gates of the university.
She felt envious of the students they passed in the harsh glare of the campus lights, thinking she’d like to be a student now, that she’d like to be young and starting it all again. A boy and girl passed them, talking earnestly, clumping along in their Doc Martens. Street fashion. Street cred. She would look ridiculous in Doc Martens, she thought. She would feel ridiculous in them.
Students. Target market. Future As, Bs, Cs. Consumers. Future yuppies. Come autumn, you’ll all be eating Castaways.
They went across the quadrangle, in through a door and up two flights of stone stairs.
‘I’m afraid it’s not much, but it’s quite comfortable,’ Colin Hare said as they walked across the second floor landing. He pushed open a door and turned on the light, then stepped aside.
It was a neat, small bedroom, with a wide single bed that looked as if it was fresh out of a furniture store, and an unmarked beige carpet. There was a wardrobe, chest of drawers, television and a wash basin. The room smelt new. The curtains were drawn, and the navy-blue counterpane on the bed had been turned down. It could have been a hotel bedroom anywhere in the world, except for the cluster of wires dangling from a pod on the wall above the bed.
It scared her.
Something about it wasn’t right, and she did not know what. It was like a show bedroom with fake walls on the furniture floor of a department store. It wasn’t real. It would be like undressing and going to bed in a shop window. Only it wasn’t that either.
Something else. She shivered. Tell him ‘no thanks’. Tell him you have to go now.
Why? He’s trying to help.
That’s what you think.
‘It’s quite different to what I had imagined,’ she said. ‘It’s very ordinary looking. Nice. Much nicer than half the hotel rooms I’ve stayed in.’
‘We need it to feel normal for people.’
‘I thought I was going to be in a glass booth.’
‘No, we don’t need to watch you whilst you’re asleep. We get all the information we need from the printout. I’ll show you the monitoring room.’
As they came out of the door, a studious-looking girl holding a bundle of papers walked past. ‘Good evening, Dr Hare,’ she said in a Scottish accent.
‘Ah, good evening, Jane. This is Mrs Curtis – a new subject.’
Subject. Like a laboratory frog in formaldehyde?
‘Good evening,’ said the girl politely, before disappearing down the stairs.
‘She’s one of our researchers, doing a post-grad at the moment. I’ll show you my office,’ Hare said. ‘I prefer to see people out of the office. It’s quieter.’ They went across the hallway, and he pushed open the door to a chaotic room littered with papers, computer terminals and overstuffed filing trays; it wasn’t much tidier than his bed-sitting room.
They went further down the hallway and into a small brightly lit room with a battery of electrical equipment, computer screens, and two massive graph plotters. A young man in his late twenties was poring over sheets of graph paper. He had dark, Slavic features with heavy black rings around his eyes. He shovelled a handful of jet black hair off his forehead and studied something intently. His hair tumbled forward again and he shovelled it back again, mildly irritated.
‘Laszlo, can I introduce you?’
The man looked round at them and rubbed his eyes blearily, as if he was grumpy at being interrupted. ‘Mrs Curtis?’ he said, in an abrupt, disinterested voice. Sam wondered if he had been the person who answered the phone yesterday.
She smiled. ‘Yes.’
‘Good,’ he grunted, then yawned.
She frowned. There was a silence.
‘Er – Laszlo calls this place the Hull Hilton,’ said Hare, sensing the awkwardness.
‘Ah,’ she said.
Laszlo turned back to his graph, and began studying it again. ‘Have you ever been in a sleep laboratory before, Mrs Curtis?’ he said, without looking up.
‘No,’ she said.
‘No problem.’ He made a mark on the graph with a pen, pursing his lips in concentration. ‘You don’t have to do anything. Just sleep.’ He giggled, an unexpected, high-pitched, boyish giggle. ‘Just sleep. Have dreams. You have the fun, we do the work. That’s right, Dr Hare?’ He addressed the professor by his surname as if it was a joke.
Hare turned to Sam. ‘People don’t realise quite how boring dream research is,’ he said. ‘One of us has to sit in here all night, watching the graph. It’s pretty intrusive on the private life of the investigator.’
Sam wondered if that was why he had got divorced. ‘Can’t you leave me sleeping, then read through it in the morning?’
‘No. We have to keep an eye on the plotter. Pens run out, the paper has to be replaced.’ He picked up a sheet of graph paper, on which she could see eight rows of blue lines, some zig-zagging, some squiggling. ‘Each of these is just twenty seconds of sleep. We get through two and a half thousand sheets in a night’s sleep. We need to interact with the sleeper. If we see some unusual activity, we want to wake them up right away, find out what was going on. And the other thing we do is this—’ He smiled proudly, and tapped a small control panel with a row of gauges and switches on it. ‘Lucid dreams,’ he said. ‘Do you ever have lucid dreams?’
‘What are those?’ she asked.
‘When you become aware in a dream that you are dreaming?’
‘I’ve had one,’ she said. ‘A long time ago.’
‘Yes? And were you able to do anything about it?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Were you able to control the dream? Manipulate it?’
‘No. I just knew that I
was dreaming.’
‘Do you know much about sleep? About dreaming?’
Sam shrugged. ‘Not really, I suppose.’
‘How often do you dream?’
‘Normally?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t know – once or twice a week.’
‘No. You dream every night. All human beings do. In eight hours of sleep, you’ll have between three to five dream periods, starting from ten to fifteen minutes long and increasing to about thirty to forty minutes. But you probably won’t remember any of them. You’ll only remember them if you wake up either in the middle of a dream or immediately after.’ He showed her a wodge of printout sheets. ‘You’re looking sceptical. It’s all here. If you stayed long enough, I could prove it to you.’
She watched the jagged lines, as he ran his finger along each one in turn. ‘That’s low-voltage flat stuff from the front of the brain – not much activity during sleep. That spidery one is the Rapid Eye Movement Scan, REMS. Your eyes blink very fast when you are dreaming. These are other regions of the brain: respiration, cardiovascular activity, body temperature.’ He scratched his head. ‘You see, when you remember a dream, fine, great, we can analyse it, log it, see if any parts come true. But what about all those dreams you don’t remember? Those five periods every night? Two or three hours a night, of which you maybe remember a few seconds once a week? What’s happening then? We know you’re dreaming, but what are you doing? What’s happening to you?’ He tapped his head. ‘What’s going on in there? Are you having premonitions that we’re missing because you don’t remember the dreams? Are you out of your body, out on the astral? Travelling in time? If you could become aware that you are having a dream, then you might be able to remember it. You could wake up at the end and tell it. We have a microphone in the bedroom and a voice-activated tape recorder.’
‘You can really do that?’
‘There’s a big bonus. If you can be aware that you are dreaming, then you can control your dream.’
‘How do you make someone aware they are dreaming?’
He pointed to the grey control box. ‘This sends out an extremely low voltage electrical signal. We wire it to the subject’s median nerve, and when we see that they’ve entered the dream state, we fire the signal. What it does is let that person be aware he or she is dreaming – without waking up. Then they can take charge of their dream.’
‘And if they were on a plane that was crashing, could they save it?’
Hare dug his hands into his pockets. ‘It may help to identify the difference between a precognitive dream and a dream that is simply a nightmare.’
‘If you stop the plane crashing, then it’s just a nightmare?’
‘We don’t know, but that’s the sort of area we’re researching. You might be an excellent subject for that. When I get back from America—’
‘It’s good for your fantasies,’ said Laszlo, without looking up from his work. ‘You’re having some dull old dream, then you get the buzz that you’re dreaming. You can have anything in the world that you want. You want to shack up with Tom Cruise, you just imagine him, and away you go!’ He looked up. ‘You begin to wonder what’s so smart about being awake.’
‘I’ve been wondering that for some time,’ Sam said.
32
Sam ate supper in the canteen on a formica-topped table, amid the chatter and bustle of the students and the smell of chips and batter and tinned oxtail soup of the day. Then she went to bed just the way she would have in any hotel room, except the bathroom was not en suite, but across the corridor, which was awkward.
Hare and Laszlo came in and wired her up, wished her sweet dreams, then went out and closed the door.
She sat up in the bed and turned the pages of Vogue. Smart women stared back at her, cold arrogance on their chiselled faces, preening at her in their finery as if she was a mirror. Elegance. She wondered how elegant she looked now, with the wires taped all over head. A girl in a negligee sat on the shiny black bonnet of a Porsche. Two male models looked disdainfully at her, a father and son pose, the old man in tweeds, on a shooting stick, the son in a sharply cut suit.
‘Old Men Dream Dreams, Young Men See Visions,’ said the caption beneath.
She put the magazine down on the bedside table, had a sip of water, then turned out the bedside light. She settled down slowly, carefully, making sure she did not dislodge any wires. Her head hurt where the wires were pulling her hair, but she did not dare touch them. The bed was comfortable, soft, more comfy than her own. There was a chill draught from the window which she had left open a fraction, and she heard footsteps in the quadrangle below.
‘Ouch. Keith, you bastard!’
‘No!’ a girl screamed, giggled, then screamed again. ‘No, I didn’t mean it, no, not down my neck! Oh, you bastard!’
They were clearing away in the canteen somewhere near by. Clattering trays, cutlery. Taps were running. A record played faintly in the distance, Buddy Holly’s ‘Every Day’. Christ, it was going to be hard getting to sleep tonight. Strange noises. The greasy smell of chips from the canteen. The painful tugging of her hair.
Premonitions.
Hare believed her. But. There was something odd about Hare. Something not quite right. And about Laszlo.
Were they both sitting in the lab now, in front of the plotter, watching her brainwaves? What had Hare talked about whilst they were wiring her up? Five stages of sleep. Stage one, the hypnagogic state. Hypnagogic.
When you’re just beginning to drift away. You often see strange faces, weird faces, scary images.
Then there was stage two – deeper sleep; stage three – when the body was shut down; stage four – deep sleep, the mind a blank; and then stage five – REM sleep. Dreaming.
She hadn’t even gone into stage one sleep yet.
She turned over again restlessly, fumbled for the control panel above the headboard, and pushed a switch. The television came on. She wondered how her brainwaves were going to look now, as she blinked at the sudden brightness of the screen and watched a commercial she did not recognise.
A long shot of a mountain, covered in snow, the sun bursting over the peak. In the distance was a tiny speck, coming towards them; then a sign flashed across the screen.
‘AROLEID.’
The sign vanished and the speck got closer, and the sign flashed again.
‘AROLEID.’
It strobed on and off, intercut with the speck that was getting bigger all the time, until it filled the screen.
‘AROLEID,’ said a voice she vaguely recognised, in a whisper followed by a laugh. ‘AROLEID.’
She frowned. Aroleid? What on earth was Aroleid? She switched off the television and stared up at the ceiling, and saw the blades of a large fan revolving slowly, like a propeller. Strange, she thought, she had not noticed it before. It was cold in the room, cold in the bed. She wondered why the fan had been switched on.
The door of her room opened, then closed quietly. She heard someone breathing, the clink of a key, and the distinct click of a lock sliding home.
Someone locking it from the inside.
She stared, trembling, into the darkness. ‘Who’s there?’ she said. Who the hell was it? Dr Hare? Laszlo? Why had they locked the door? ‘Who is it? Who’s that?’
Silence.
She could see someone standing by the door, a dark shadow, almost motionless, but not quite. A dark shadow that she could hear breathing.
‘Dr Hare?’
Her voice was sounding strange, constricted. Christ. Who was here, in this building? How loudly would she have to shout to be heard? What was showing on the plotter now?
Surely they would see it?
Unless.
Laszlo?
Christ, no.
The shape began to move towards her.
‘We’ll see how this looks on the graph,’ said a voice she knew. The same voice on the commercial on the television a few moments ago. Not Dr Hare’s. Nor Laszlo’s.
‘Calm down, you silly bitch. I’m just going to fuck you, that’s all. You’ll like it. You’ll love it.’
She stared up at the dark shape. There was a click and the bedside light came on and she blinked at Slider standing over the bed in a metallic green jump suit, like a motorcycle racing suit, thick black gauntlets, and goggles over the eye slits of his black hood.
She shrank back, and saw his mouth grinning through its slit.
He held something out towards her, offering it to her, something orange and white: an airline boarding card. He waved it over her eyes so that she could read it, clearly.
CHARTAIR 35A.
‘You’ll be needing this. Very soon. You shouldn’t leave it lying around in the back of taxis. That’s careless, so very careless.’ He let go of it and she watched it flutter down onto her chest. ‘Oh look, it’s fallen!’ He leered at her. ‘You’re slow, aren’t you, bitch? So slow. The fall. From the balcony? Good, wasn’t it?’ He grinned again, showing all his filthy broken teeth. ‘There’s more to come. So much more. So much further to fall. You’ve got the really big fall to come.’
She watched him, as he strutted over to the wash basin and picked up her toothpaste. He unscrewed the cap, held the tube up. ‘Like games, do you? Puzzles? Riddles? See what you think of this!’ He began to squeeze out the toothpaste. It fell in long streams onto the carpet as he rolled up the tube until it was empty, and then dropped it onto the floor. ‘Messy stuff, toothpaste. Don’t bother with it myself.’
This is a dream, she thought; surely this is a dream? A lucid dream?