The Long Sleep

by Dean R. Koontz

  Why?

  He stood in the open door, leaned against the frame, and surveyed the porch, the lawn, the open street, and the dark woods across the way. Nothing moved. So far as he could tell, no one was out there waiting for him.

  “Are you watching me, Galing?” he asked.

  Silence.

  “Hidden camera and microphones?” he asked.

  He thought that he was on his own, that Galing didn't know where he was. But he couldn't take anything for granted now. The worst paranoia fears could prove to be true.

  Anything could happen.

  “Well,” he said softly, “if you are listening, you'd better come after me right away with your hypodermic gloves. I'm starting to get the goods on you. Before you know it, I'm going to have you and this crazy place figured.”

  He suddenly decided that it was healthy to stand here talking to himself. He went across the porch, down the steps, and over to the open ground between this house and the next. He wanted to know why he hadn't seen the cement wall that surely lay between them. Even close up to it, he seemed to be staring at a vista of lawns and other houses on parallel streets, the winking red warning lights on a distant radio tower… He turned, searched the shrubs that grew between the houses, and in a minute he located the hologram projectors. When he kicked these part, the pretty pictures ceased to be and were replaced by a plain cement wall.

  Now he was getting somewhere.

  But he didn't know just where in the hell he was getting.

  XVI

  He trotted up the empty street to the intersection, turned the corner, and saw the wrecked fan shuttle. It was upside-down, on its roof as he remembered it, crumpled against the big willow tree. A smashed picket fence lay across the road like the vertebrae of a reptilian fossil. Four or five quarts of oil had leaked out of the shuttle and now lay in thick pools on the pavement, congealing like blood.

  He stood with his hands on his hips for a few minutes, taking it all in, and then he walked down to have a closer look. He leaned in the open driver's door and had an immediate, vivid flash of the accident.

  Here was irrefutable proof that the illusions had not been illusions at all — unless, of course, he was now in the same dream he had suffered through before.

  He turned away from the car, angry with himself. What in the hell was the matter with him? Was he a moron or something? He was, at long last, uncovering the truth behind the stage settings, and he should have begun to make sense of it. Not much, maybe. But a little bit, anyway. Obviously, he was still in the windowless building where he had originally awakened from the life support pod. It was an enormous place, and it had been dressed up to fool him. But the dressings were very shabby duds, capable of deceiving only a man who wanted to be deceived. Why all this trouble to confuse him? He could not get a handle on it no matter how hard he tried, and he became angrier and angrier as the answer continued to elude him like a darting fish.

  Looking down this second avenue, he saw a duplication of the first street: quaint houses, mown lawns, clipped hedges, a few fan shuttles parked at the curb, darkness except for the mercury vapor streetlamps, quiet. A long way off, a traffic light winked one amber eye; a long low car pulled up on the cross street where the light would be blinking red, paused, then drove through the intersection and passed out of sight.

  If they had not wrecked here, where would they have ended? How far did this grand deception continue?

  He walked down the avenue toward that distant traffic light. His footsteps rebounded from the fronts of the fake houses and the cement wall between them. Seventy yards later he confronted another wall upon which a hologram film of the rest of the street was projected. The redlight and the moving car and the rest of the pretty suburb were all features of a cleverly made background film, nothing more.

  Therefore, Galing had never meant for him and Allison to come this far. They would have plowed into the wall at sixty or seventy miles an hour; they would have been killed if they hadn't crashed back at the intersection. As violent as it had been, the fan shuttle accident was nothing more than another scene in the play, a carefully set-up drama that had been programmed to occur even before Joel had climbed into the car.

  Why?…

  Unable to cope with the complexity of the deception, he went back to find the hologram projectors that were responsible for this facet of the illusion.

  On the porch of the last house he discovered a projector concealed from the street by the banisters. He kicked it apart and brought darkness to one half of the corridor wall.

  Across the street, on another porch, tucked in behind a big outdoor chaise lounge, another projector was thrumming softly as the hologram cube whirled and whirled inside of it. He picked it up and threw it down. He kicked it into the wall of the house, kicked it again, stomped on it with his heel. He went out onto the lawn and picked up a child's tricycle which was turned on its side by a hedge, and he brought the tricycle back onto the porch, and he used the cycle like a hammer, flailing away at the projector with all of his strength. He enjoyed the destruction, even though he wasn't gaining a whole hell of a lot from it.

  He pretended that he was pounding on Henry Galing, the faceless man, and Richard.

  When there was nothing more for him to smash, when the machine lay in total ruin, when the sweat was dripping steadily into his eyes and dribbling in salty rivulets over his lips, Joel dropped the tricycle and staggered backwards and sat down heavily on the chaise lounge. He let his chin rest on his chest, and he breathed in slowly and evenly as his head began to clear. He was ashamed of himself for losing control like that; rage had accomplished nothing, and it might have lost him most of what he'd gained in the last hour. If Galing hadn't known he was out here, the old bastard might have gotten the idea from all the racket if it carried as far as the mansion. He'd been through a lot, of course; but this was thoughtless, childish, the last thing he—

  It was then that Joel noticed the neatly folded sheet of dark paper which had lain beneath the now demolished hologram projector. It was partly concealed by the bent housing of the machine, and it looked as if it had been put there for him to find.

  “Galing?” he asked, staring out at the street, searching for movement.

  But he was alone.

  “Okay,” he said hoarsely. “I'll play along with you, Galing. What have I got to lose?”

  He slid off the lounge, hunkered down, and picked up the paper. It was yellowed with age, and the creases in it were so dry that they cracked when he disturbed them. Flakes of paper speckled his trembling hands. The sheet fell into three separate pieces as he opened it.

  He went to the porch stoop where the light from the streetlamps was bright enough to read by, and he sat on the top step. Fitting the fragments together like pieces of a puzzle, he looked disbelievingly at the message. He read it three times:

  Dear Joel:

  Nothing is as it seems to be. Yet everything is what you suspect it is. Don't despair. You've been this way before — and you might even be this way again. Yet you're sane and alive. Sane and alive. Just remember that.

  The note had been written with a dull pencil.

  It had been written in haste.

  And the handwritting was his own.

  XVII

  The longer he stared at the ancient note and the more he tried to make sense of it, the less clear it became. If he had written this himself, he had done it decades ago — at least fifty years ago, judging from the condition of the paper. And how was that possible, when he was not even thirty years old? The pods? Furthermore, if he had been this way, why couldn't he remember it? If the intent of Henry Galing's deceptions was not sinister, why did he have this gut-level fear, this sense of impending disaster? And having taken the time to write this note to himself, why had he not explained to himself the circumstances behind this charade?

  Finally, he folded the paper, tucked it in his pocket, and went back to the middle of the street. The discovery of the fifty-year-old messa
ge had contributed to his sense of urgency. He didn't have any time to waste.

  He studied the gray wall where there had once been a long tree-lined avenue, houses, a redlight, a moving car. Now that the two hologram projectors had been smashed, the only thing of interest about the smooth cement was a door which the film clip had concealed. It was the same ugly gray shade as the walls. It had formidable stainless steel fittings and was devoid of warning signs, directions, and other labels.

  Perhaps the very anonymity of it was what made it so intriguing. He went to it and tried the knob.

  The door was unlocked, and it swung open silently.

  He looked back along the street down which he'd just come. No sign of Galing.

  He stepped out of the street into a corridor that was more than sixty feet long. Eight, closed elevators stood on each side, and the long hall ended in a set of bright yellow doors…

  He let the gray door behind him close quietly on the artificial residential street. Since he now suspected that his adventures had all taken place within a single building, the elevators were of great interest to him. With those he could more fully explore this place and learn the nature of it. Once that was done, it would be a simple matter to deduce the reasoning behind this program and his purpose in behind here.

  Or at least he hoped it would be simple. In the last few days he had learned not to count on anything.

  Although he was extremely pleased to find the elevators, he was more interested in those two yellow doors. Hesitantly, he walked down to them, pushed them open, and found the same long corridor into which he had first come when he had left the storm drains after escaping from that dungeon and from the murderous vegetation in the tunnels. At the far end was the six-foot pressure hatch that guarded the observation chamber. The computer display screen in the wall beside it was dark. He remembered the metal-walled room, the foot-thick glass window that looked out upon—

  Upon what?

  He had not actually forgotten what lay beyond that window; the memory had merely been suppressed, not erased. He had passed out in front of the deep glass, had been found and taken back to Henry Galing's mansion where he was fed that story about sybocylacose-46. He was aware now that the entire sybocylacose fantasy and — by logical extension — all the scenes that had come before it had been invented for a single purpose: to make him forget what lay beyond the observation room window.

  He stepped on the metal grid in the corridor floor before the pressure hatch, and he looked at the display screen as it turned a restful blue.

  CYCLE FOR ADMITTANCE.

  He put both hands on the steel wheel in the center of the door and wrestled it clockwise as far as it would go. The door remained locked, but the message on the display screen changed.

  WAIT FOR THE ESTABLISHMENT OF

  COMPUTER DATA LINKAGES.

  WAIT FOR VERIFICATION OF

  VIEW CHAMBER'S SANCTITY.

  What lay beyond that gargantuan slab of glass? What was it that would want to breach the view chamber and, having breached it, would pose such a danger that the pressure hatch was required to protect the rest of the building.

  He waited.

  The green light came on overhead.

  LIGHT BURNING.

  PROCEED SAFELY ON GREEN.

  As soon as it popped its seal, he opened the enormous hatch and went into the room beyond.

  Forty feet away, at the other end of the observation chamber, a muddy gray light pulsed dimly. Regardless of its source, even the light itself was ugly, frightening. It carried death within its bleak rays.

  He began to shake.

  He took one step toward the window and stopped.

  He felt sick on his stomach.

  Gasping, he turned suddenly and ran out of that place without taking a look at the smoke veiled thing beyond the glass. He pushed the hatch shut, watched the wheel whirl automatically into position.

  The green light flicked off.

  The display screen went black.

  Leaning against the hatch, Joel let his breath out in a long shudder of relief. He had nearly made a fatal error. If he had gone to that window again, he felt sure that he would have fainted just as he had done the last time. He was no more prepared for this thing, whatever the hell it was, than he had been previously. He would have suffered another trauma and fainted. Sooner or later Henry Galing would have found him, and then he'd have awakened in yet another lie, right back on square number one.

  This the rat learned when it ran the maze: don't make the same mistake twice.

  He went back through the yellow doors and studied the floor indicators above the elavtors, Fourteen of the lifts served only the fourth to the eighteenth floors. The other two went to the bottom of the building. One of these was not working. He summoned the functioning cage, stepped into it, punched the button for the bottom level, watched the door close, and went down.

  He came out of the elevator into the familiar hallway that led to the pod chamber observation deck. The narrow room, where he stood in the center of it, was as he had first seen it: black command chairs, purple lightstrips, computer consoles, file cabinets, the lockers with names stenciled on them.

  Only the age-lain blanket of dust had changed. Galing and his men had cleaned off the chairs and the computer consoles; and the dust on the floor was marred by many footprints, those made when they had tried to fool him with the aquamen.

  He went to the nearest window and looked into the adjoining room where the life support pods stood, dust-filmed.

  They were real!

  When he was expelled from that pod, he was thrust into reality, no matter how bitter and inexplicable it seemed. The world was not hobbling hopelessly in a stream of universal chaos; it was immutable, waiting to be explored and understood. But from the moment the faceless man touched him, he had been living in Galing's illusions. Now, once again back to reality, he set out to explore this eighteen-level structure, anxious to learn all that he could.

  He hurried, though he wanted to give himself a chance to notice every detail, to find anything that might enlighten him. He could not forget that Galing's crew still held Allison as a hostage.

  XVIII

  Two hours later Joel had a working knowledge of the building. It was an inverted pyramid lacking both windows and doors to the outside world. More likely than not, it was a subterranean installation — an enormous one with considerably more than a million square feet of space, perhaps two million. He hadn't been able to cover a fraction of it. Nine of the eighteen levels had been established as living quarters, while the other nine contained laboratories, offices, and storage rooms. At one time the pyramid must have housed in excess of two thousand people, though now there was not a clue to their fate. The top floor, where Henry Galing maintained his “house” and where the fake streets had been built, was the garage. The corridors there were several times wider than those on lower levels, and two huge rooms were parked full of cars, buses, armored military jeeps, tanks, amphibious troop carriers, taxis, pleasure cars, as well as a wide variety of utilitarian shuttles. Only one small segment of the topmost level had been used for the phony streets, the telescoped forest, and Galing's private estate.

  Yet, knowing all of this, Joel was still confused. He could find no reason for the existence of the strange building or for his own presence here. It was like the central puzzle of astronomy: man could learn countless facts about the universe without ever grasping the why of it.

  Now, Joel lay on a bed of ferns at the edge of the impossible forest. He was watching the rear of the Galing mansion. Once he had learned the basic nature of the building, he knew that he was going to have to go out of it — even if there were danger in that — to get a good perspective on the events of the last couple days. But once he was out, Galing could keep him from getting in again. Therefore, rather than be cut off from her, he had returned to get Allison before he left. And he intended to observe the stage before making his entrance: the house was dark and silent, the
lawn dark and deserted. When he was finally convinced that no one had yet missed him, he got to his feet and brushed the leaves from his clothes.

  A light came on in the kitchen.

  Joel knelt down until he was hidden by the underbrush.

  The kitchen door opened, and three men came out of the house: Galing, Richard, and the faceless man.

  Joel stretched out flat, snuggling in the shadows.

  The three men walked purposefully towards the forest. Each step they took gave them a sudden, impossible growth — one flaw of the illusion that made the lawn seem much larger than it was. In a moment they stood at the perimeter of the trees.

  “He could be anywhere in the fortress,” the faceless man said. “That's a lot to cover. More than the three of us can manage. Hell, he could be right here in the woods, as far as that goes, and we could walk right over him without knowing it.”

  “We should have foreseen it,” Galing said. He was angry with himself. He spat into the weeds.

  “This wasn't part of the program,” Richard said. “There wasn't any way we could prepare for it.”

  “His escape from the dungeon mock-up wasn't part of the program either,” Galing said. “When he went out through the drains instead of through the door, we should have know the program was breaking down. We should have taken precautions.”

  They were silent for a minute, listening to the recorded calls of night birds in the trees. Then the faceless man said: Maybe this time he'll have convinced himself about the girl.”

  Galing laughed bitterly. “Oh, wouldn't that be nice! No more of these damned charades! But you know something? I don't think it's going to be that easy.”