by Robert Bloch
But she would sleep then, and the dreams always came. They followed the same path as the wind and the shadows; they poured down from the sky, through the window. There were voices she heard but could not understand; colors she saw but could not name; shapes she glimpsed but which never seemed to resemble any figures she found in picture books.
Sometimes the same voices and colors and shapes came again and again, until she learned to recognize them, in a way. There was the deep, buzzing voice that seemed to come from right inside her own head, although she knew it really issued from the black, shiny pyramid thing that had the arms with eyes in it. It didn’t look slimy or nasty, and there was nothing to be afraid of—Avis could never understand why Marvin Mason made her shut up when she started telling about those dreams.
But he was only a little boy, and he got scared and ran to his Mommy. Avis didn’t have any Mommy, only Aunt May; but she would never tell Aunt May such things. Besides, why should she? The dreams didn’t frighten her, and they were so very real and interesting. Sometimes, on grey, rainy days when there was nothing to do but play with dolls or cut out pictures to paste in her album, she wished that night would hurry up and come; then she could dream and make everything real again.
She got so she liked to stay in bed, and would pretend to have a cold so she didn’t have to go to school. Avis would look up at the window and wait for the dreams to come—but they never came in the daytime; only at night.
Often she wondered what it was like up there.
The dreams must come from the sky; she knew that. The voices and shapes lived way up, somewhere beyond the window. Aunt May said that dreams came from tummyaches, but she knew that wasn’t so.
Aunt May was always worried about tummyaches, and she scolded Avis for not going outside to play; she said she was getting pale and puny.
But Avis felt fine, and she had her secret to think of. Now she scarcely ever saw Marvin Mason any more, and she didn’t bother to read. It wasn’t much fun to pretend she was a princess, either. Because the dreams were ever so much more real, and she could talk to the voices and ask them to take her with them when they went away.
She got so she could almost understand what they were saying. The shiny thing that just hung through the window now—the one that looked like it had so much more to it she couldn’t see—it made music inside her head that she recognized. Not a real tune; more like words in a rhyme. In her dreams she asked it to take her away. She would crawl up on its back and let it fly with her up over the stars. That was funny, asking it to fly; but she knew that the part beyond the window had wings. Wings as big as the world.
She begged and pleaded, but the voices made her understand that they couldn’t take little girls back with them. That is, not entirely. Because it was too cold and too far, and something would change her.
She said she didn’t care how she changed; she wanted to go. She would let them do anything they wanted if only they would take her. It would be nice to be able to talk to them all the time and feel that cool softness; to dream forever.
One night they came to her and there were more things than she had ever seen before. They hung through the window and in the air all over the room—they were so funny, some of them; you could see through them and sometimes one was partly inside another. She knew she giggled in her sleep, but she couldn’t help it. Then she was quiet and listening to them.
They told her it was all right. They would carry her away. Only she mustn’t tell anyone and she mustn’t be frightened; they would come for her soon. They couldn’t take her as she was, and she must be willing to change.
Avis said yes, and they all hummed a sort of music together and went away.
The next morning Avis was really and truly sick and didn’t want to get up. She could hardly breathe, she was so warm—and when Aunt May brought in a tray she wouldn’t eat a bite.
That night she didn’t dream. Her head ached, and she tossed all night long. But there was a moon out, so the dreams couldn’t get through anyway. She knew they would come back when the moon was gone again, so she waited. Besides, she hurt so that she really didn’t care. She had to feel better before she was ready to go anywhere.
The next day Doctor Clegg came to see her. Doctor Clegg was a good friend of Aunt May’s and he was always visiting her because he was her guardian.
Doctor Clegg held her hand and asked her what seemed to be the matter with his young lady today.
Avis was too smart to say anything, and besides, there was a shiny thing in her mouth. Doctor Clegg took it out and looked at it and shook his head. After a while he went away and then Aunt May and Uncle Roscoe came in. They made her swallow some medicine that tasted just awful.
By that time it was getting dark and there was a storm coming outside. Avis wasn’t able to talk much, and when they shut the round window she couldn’t ask them to please leave it open tonight because there was no moon and they were coming for her.
But everything kept going round and round, and when Aunt May walked past the bed she seemed to flatten out like a shadow, or one of the things, only she made a loud noise which was really the thunder outside and now she was sleeping really and truly even though she heard the thunder but the thunder wasn’t real nothing was real except the things, that was it nothing was real any more but the things.
And they came through the window; it wasn’t closed after all because she opened it and she was crawling out high up there where she had never crawled before but it was easy without a body and soon she would have a new body they wanted the old one because they carried it but she didn’t care because she didn’t need it and now they would carry her ulnagr Yuggoth Farnomi ilyaa . . .
That was when Aunt May and Uncle Roscoe found her and pulled her down from the window. They said later she had screamed at the top of her voice, or else she would have gone over without anyone noticing.
After that Doctor Clegg took her away to the hospital where there were no high windows and they came in to see her all night long. The dreams stopped.
When at last she was well enough to go back home, she found that the window was gone, too.
Aunt May and Uncle Roscoe had boarded it up, because she was a somnambulist. She didn’t know what a somnambulist was, but guessed it had something to do with her being sick and the dreams not coming any more.
For the dreams stopped then. There was no way of making them come back, and she really didn’t want them any more. It was fun to play outside with Marvin Mason now, and she went back to school when the new semester began.
Now, without the window to look at, she just slept at night. Aunt May and Uncle Roscoe were glad, and Doctor Clegg said she was turning out to be a mighty fine little specimen.
Avis could remember it all now as though it were yesterday or today. Or tomorrow.
How she grew up. How Marvin Mason fell in love with her. How she went to college and they became engaged. How she felt the night Aunt May and Uncle Roscoe were killed in the crash at Leedsville. That was a bad time.
An even worse time was when Marvin had gone away. He was in service now, overseas. She had stayed on all alone in the house, for it was her house now.
Reba came in days to do the housework, and Doctor Clegg dropped around, even after she turned twenty-one and officially inherited her estate.
He didn’t seem to approve of her present mode of living. He asked her several times why she didn’t shut up the house and move into a small apartment downtown. He was concerned because she showed no desire to keep up the friendships she had made in college; Avis was curiously reminded of the solicitude he had exhibited during her childhood.
But Avis was no longer a child. She proved that by removing what had always seemed to her a symbol of adult domination; she had the high round window in her room unboarded once more.
It was a silly gesture. She knew it at the time, but somehow it held a curious significance for her. For one thing, it reestablished a linkage with her childhood, and more and mor
e, childhood came to epitomize happiness for her.
With Marvin Mason gone, and Aunt May and Uncle Roscoe dead, there was little enough to fill the present. Avis would sit up in her bedroom and pore over the scrapbooks she had so assiduously pasted up as a girl. She had kept her dolls and the old fairy-tale books; she spent drowsy afternoons examining them.
It was almost possible to lose one’s time sense in such pastimes. Her surroundings were unchanged. Of course, Avis was larger now and the bed wasn’t quite as massive nor the window as high.
But both were there, waiting for the little girl that she became when, at nightfall, she curled up into a ball and snuggled under the sheets—snuggled and stared up at the high, round window that bordered the sky.
Avis wanted to dream again.
At first, she couldn’t.
After all, she was a grown woman, engaged to be married; she wasn’t a character out of PETER IBBETSON. And those dreams of her childhood had been silly.
But they were nice. Yes, even when she had been ill and nearly fallen out of the window that time, it had been pleasant to dream. Of course those voices and shapes were nothing but Freudian fantasies—everyone knew that.
Or did they?
Suppose it were all real? Suppose dreams are not just subconscious manifestations caused by indigestion and gas pressure?
What if dreams are really a product of electronic impulse—or planetary radiations—attuned to the wavelength of the sleeping mind? Thought is an electrical impulse. Life itself is an electrical impulse. Perhaps a dreamer is like a spiritualist medium; placed in a receptive state during sleep. Instead of ghosts, the creatures of another world or another dimension can come through, if the sleeper is granted the rare gift of acting as a filter. What if the dreams feed on the dreamer for substance, just as spirits attain ectoplasmic being by draining the medium of energy?
Avis thought and thought about it, and when she had evolved this theory, everything seemed to fit. Not that she would ever tell anyone about her attitude. Doctor Clegg would only laugh at her, or still worse, shake his head. Marvin Mason didn’t approve either. Nobody wanted her to dream. They still treated her like a little girl.
Very well, she would be a little girl; a little girl who could do as she pleased now. She would dream.
It was shortly after reaching this decision that the dreams began again; almost as though they had been waiting until she would fully accept them in terms of their own reality.
Yes, they came back, slowly, a bit at a time. Avis found that it helped to concentrate on the past during the day; to strive to remember her childhood. To this end she spent more and more time in her room, leaving Reba to tend to housework downstairs. As for fresh air, she always could look out of her window. It was high and small, but she would climb on a stool and gaze up at the sky through the round aperture; watching the clouds that veiled the blue beyond, and waiting for night to come.
Then she would sleep in the big bed and wait for the wind. The wind soothed and the darkness slithered, and soon she could hear the buzzing, blurring voices. At first only the voices came back, and they were faint and far away. Gradually, they increased in intensity and once more she was able to discriminate, to recognize individual intonations.
Timidly, hesitantly, the figures reemerged. Each night they grew stronger. Avis Long (little girl with big round eyes in big bed below round window) welcomed their presence.
She wasn’t alone any more. No need to see her friends, or talk to that silly old Doctor Clegg. No need to waste much time gossiping with Reba, or fussing over meals. No need to dress or venture out. There was the window by day and the dreams by night.
Then all at once she was curiously weak, and this illness came. But it was all false, somehow; this physical change.
Her mind was untouched. She knew that. No matter how often Doctor Clegg pursed his lips and hinted about calling in a “specialist,” she wasn’t afraid. Of course Avis knew he really wanted her to see a psychiatrist. The doddering fool was filled with glib patter about “retreat from reality” and “escape mechanisms.”
But he didn’t understand about the dreams. She wouldn’t tell him, either. He’d never know the richness, the fullness, the sense of completion that came from experiencing contact with other worlds.
Avis knew that now. The voices and shapes that came in the window were from other worlds. As a naive child she had invited them by her very unsophistication. Now, striving consciously to return to the childlike attitude, she again admitted them.
They were from other worlds; worlds of wonder and splendor. Now they could meet only on the plane of dreams, but someday, someday soon, she would bridge the gap.
They whispered about her body. Something about the trip, making the “change.” It couldn’t be explained in their words. But she trusted them, and after all, a physical change was of slight importance contrasted with the opportunity.
Soon she would be well again, strong again. Strong enough to say yes. And then they would come for her when the moon was right. Until then, she could strengthen the determination, and the dream.
Avis Long lay in the great bed and basked in the blackness; the blackness that poured palpably through the open window. The shapes filtered down, wriggling through the warps, feeding upon the night; growing, pulsing, encompassing all.
They reassured her about the body but she didn’t care and she told them she didn’t care because the body was unimportant and yes, she would gladly consider it an exchange if only she could go and she knew she belonged.
Not beyond the rim of the stars but between it and amongst substance dwells that which is blackness in blackness for Yuggoth is only a symbol, no that is wrong there are no symbols for all is reality and only perception is limited ch’yar ul’nyar shaggornyth . . .
It is hard for us to make you understand but I do understand you cannot fight it I will not fight it they will try to stop you nothing shall stop me for I belong yes you belong will it be soon yes it will be soon very soon yes very soon . . .
Marvin Mason was unprepared for this sort of reception. Of course, Avis hadn’t written, and she wasn’t at the station to meet him—but the possibility of her being seriously ill had never occurred to him.
He had come out to the house at once, and it was a shock when Doctor Clegg met him at the door.
The old man’s face was grim, and the tenor of his opening remarks still grimmer.
They faced each other in the library downstairs; Mason self-consciously diffident in khaki, the older man a bit too professionally brusque.
“Just what is it, Doctor?” Mason asked.
“I don’t know. Slight, recurrent fever. Listlessness. I’ve checked everything. No TB, no trace of low-grade infection. Her trouble isn’t—organic.”
“You mean something’s wrong with her mind?”
Doctor Clegg slumped into an armchair and lowered his head.
“Mason, I could say many things to you; about the psychosomatic theory of medicine, about the benefits of psychiatry, about—but never mind. It would be sheer hypocrisy.
“I’ve talked to Avis; rather, I’ve tried to talk to her. She won’t say much, but what she does say disturbs me. Her actions disturb me even more.
“You can guess what I’m driving at, I think, when I tell you that she is leading the life of an eight-year-old girl. The life she did lead at that age.”
Mason scowled. “Don’t tell me she sits in her room again and looks out of that window?”
Dr. Clegg nodded.
“But I thought it was boarded up long ago, because she’s a somnambulist and—”
“She had it unboarded, several months ago. And she is not, never was, a somnambulist.”
“What do you mean?”
“Avis Long never walked in her sleep. I remember the night she was found on that window’s edge; not ledge, for there is no ledge. She was perched on the edge of the open window, already halfway out; a little tyke hanging through a high window.
“But there was no chair beneath her, no ladder. No way for her to climb up. She was simply there.”
Dr. Clegg looked away before continuing.
“Don’t ask me what it means. I can’t explain, and I wouldn’t want to. I’d have to talk about the things she talks about—the dreams, and the presences that come to her; the presences that want her to go away.
“Mason, it’s up to you. I can’t honestly move to have her committed on the basis of material evidence. Confinement means nothing to them; you can’t build a wall to keep out dreams.
“But you can love her. You can save her. You can make her well, make her take an interest in reality. Oh, I know it sounds mawkish and stupid, just as the other sounds wild and fantastic.
“Yet, it’s true. It’s happening right now, to her. She’s asleep up in her room at this very moment. She’s hearing the voices—I know that much. Let her hear your voice.”
Mason walked out of the room and started up the stairs.
“But what do you mean, you can’t marry me?”
Mason stared at the huddled figure in the swirl of bedclothes. He tried to avoid the direct stare of Avis Long’s curiously childlike eyes; just as he avoided gazing up at the black, ominous aperture of the round window.
“I can’t, that’s all,” Avis answered. Even her voice seemed to hold a childlike quality. The high, piercing tones might well have emanated from the throat of a little girl; a tired little girl, half-asleep and a bit petulant about being abruptly awakened.
“But our plans—your letters—
“I’m sorry, dear. I can’t talk about it. You know I haven’t been well. Doctor Clegg is downstairs, he must have told you.”
“But you’re getting better,” Mason pleaded. “You’ll be up and around again in a few days.”
Avis shook her head. A smile—the secret smile of a naughty child—clung to the corners of her mouth.