by The Blumhouse Book of Nightmares- The Haunted City (retail) (epub)
Detective Ganza sounded surprised to hear Beth’s voice when she called her a few minutes later.
“How’s Toby?” Ganza asked.
“We’re making good progress.”
“Is there something I can help you with, Doctor?”
“I hope so,” Beth said. “In our last session, Toby mentioned something about the other foster child, Sara Brobeck, appearing traumatized by the accident with her mother, but I couldn’t find any information about the accident in the files.”
“There isn’t much to know,” Ganza said. “Sara was wearing a safety belt in the backseat and survived when her mother drove off the highway late one night and collided with a lamppost. It was assumed she must have fallen asleep at the wheel.”
“Why assume that?” Beth heard herself say. She had the sudden sensation of coming unmoored from her own body.
“Because she never used the brakes,” Ganza replied. “There were no skid marks on the road.”
Beth’s pulse exploded in her ears with a deafening thrum. She felt sick, a pit opening up in her stomach. Mr. Padesky said the Mouth spoke to Sara’s mother too, she heard Toby say, and Beth pictured herself sitting next to nine-year-old Sara Brobeck, strapped into the backseat of her mother’s car. Hold on, darling, her mother said with a smile, unbuckling her safety belt and pressing the accelerator to the floor. It’ll be over in a minute. Beth squeezed her eyes shut, struggling to will away the horror in her mind, but when she reopened her eyes, she was in the car again. Hold on, darling, she heard a voice say, but now it wasn’t Sara Brobeck’s mother behind the wheel. It was Beth’s father. He smiled back at her, unbuckling his seat belt. It’ll be over in a minute.
“What’s this about, Doctor?” Ganza asked. “Has Toby said anything about the case?”
“No,” Beth replied after she found her voice. “But I should have something for you soon.”
—
Beth sat across from Toby and for the first time since the start of their sessions together, she was the one who was afraid to speak.
“Are we going to play that game again?” he asked.
“Do you want to?” she replied, hoping against hope he would say no. Never in her life had she longed more for all the voices in the world to stop talking, but for a reason she could not fathom, she felt compelled to continue.
“Yes,” he said. “I have something else I want to tell you.”
“What is it?” she asked. The penlight felt like a weight in her hand. Click on. Click off. Click on.
“He made me watch.”
There was a deadly silence as Beth’s voice strangled itself in her throat.
“He made me watch it all,” Toby said. “When he killed them and when he killed himself.”
Beth felt the room tilting beneath her and all she could do to stop herself from falling was to hang on, desperate and clawing. Lock! Smock! Clock!
“Why?” she asked, her eyes stinging, tears welling up. It was a conditioned response, but she already knew the answer—an answer Detective Ganza would never be able to reconcile.
“Because the Mouth told him to. Just like It told Sara’s mother. Just like it’s telling you.”
As he said those words, Beth no longer saw Toby Rheva’s face. Instead she saw an enormous mouth, lips stretched wide in a sickening grin. Then the Mouth opened, baring Its hideously sharp teeth, revealing an abyss where a throat should have been. Beth felt the floor’s vertiginous tilt grow steeper until it became a cliff’s edge she no longer had the strength to cling to. She was plunging now, tumbling, end over end, into the gaping maw of the insidious thing that had taken hold of Jerry Padesky and Sara Brobeck’s mother and her own father before them as It continued on in a great generational line of parents and children, stretching all the way back to the age of Abraham.
—
The monster watched her husband sleep, the faintness of his breath, the gentle rise and fall of his chest. Even when she ran the knife across the fragile white of his throat, his sleep went on unbroken. The sedative she’d put in his dinner made sure of that. After it was done and the wet choking sound subsided, the monster that was once Dr. Beth Harper turned to see her daughter shivering in the corner of the room. “When your mommy’s finished, you’ll go and hide like we told you, okay?” The child nodded with an obedience born of fear, and the monster smiled with satisfaction. Then she raised the knife to her own throat, and the Mouth Inside Her Head sang her to sleep.
—
The girl sat silently, feet dangling off the chair, staring at the laces of her pink Keds. Someone had wrapped a blanket around her even though she wasn’t cold.
“Rose?” Detective Ganza said, kneeling down in front of her. “Can you tell me what happened?”
After a long moment, Rose Harper looked up at the woman whose face was serious but kind. She knew she had to talk to her, to describe every horror locked inside her mind. Sooner or later, she’d have to tell this woman what her mother had done to her father and then to herself. Speak, the Mouth whispered to Rose.
But she wouldn’t say the words.
At first it seems almost the same as her lovely first dream.
We’re in the same fantastical seascape filled with a whirling ballet of sparkling bream, swooping giant mantas, and flamboyant parrot fish. A pod of dolphins cavorts nearby as we swim toward the wreckage of an ancient, sunken city.
Gradually we notice differences. The shore is far away now. The beams of moonlight don’t quite penetrate all the way. We’re gliding deeper into the ocean as though pulled by a riptide. The marine life begins to change in a way that’s hard to put your finger on. A huge, serpentine oarfish ripples along the sea floor. We see the glowing lures of toothy anglers. A school of iridescent jellyfish. The octopi here are much larger.
We follow the sinuous oarfish, but a dolphin dances right in front of us, butting us with his snout. He’s insistent, and we pause as he swims a tight circle, as if he wants us to turn around.
We pass by him. And this time, none of the dolphins follow as we descend toward an ornate colonnaded temple shattered by a dark fissure tearing violently into its foundation. The oarfish disappears into it, and we trail behind.
Down here it’s still beautiful, but in an eerie, haunted way. The darkness cut only by veins of phosphorescent crystal reaching through the chasm’s rock walls. Below we see the architectural skeleton of some fossilized leviathan. Just as we’re swimming toward a strange anemone crawling from its eye socket—
The scene jerks hard downward into the ravine.
Our hand flails at the rock in front of us, but we’re yanked down again. Bubbles pour into view like our heretofore magic breath has been squeezed from our lungs.
Then another great heave. Our fingernails tear as we claw for purchase on the rocks. And then the last remnant of light we can see far above us is obscured with curling tendrils of dark liquid.
Blood.
There’s another sharp movement you can’t quite make out in the confusing dark whorls.
Then black.
—
That was when Cassie bolted awake so fast she slammed her head against the underside of the MRI.
Jerking upright after a scary dream is one of those things you see all the time in movies, but it rarely ever happens in real life. Though when you fall asleep in the coffinlike cylinder of a million-dollar brain monitor, I guess you’re more liable to bump your head when you wake suddenly.
That’s not to say bad dreams are at all rare. The famous dream researcher Dr. Antti Revonsuo has proposed that the very purpose of dreams is “threat simulation.” That we’re rehearsing encounters with predators to prepare our minds, should one actually come to pass. Which explains an odd attribute of dreams: we tend to think of them as pleasant interludes, weird and disquieting at worst, excepting a very occasional night terror like Cassie’s. But when you actually wake people from a dream and ask them about it, you find that nearly all of them are unpleasant. The most
common emotion associated with dreams? Anxiety. Most of our dreams are nightmares in one way or another.
But Cassie’s nightmare is special: we recorded it.
She’s one of my “Somnonauts” here at Dreamland—what we call the brand-new South Texas Sleep Research Center, a gleaming four-story complex just west of UT.
The Land of Nod has finally started getting the research attention it deserves, given that poor sleep kills more people than cancer. Thus the forty billion dollars we spend every year on sleep aids.
I was the first researcher to move into Dreamland. Contractors are still working on my floor, and the place is nearly empty. Everything bright and pristine, with that new-building smell.
My Somnonauts are all volunteers with chronic insomnia who signed up for a twelve-week “presearch” study on techniques to promote better sleep health. Yes, they’re confined to the facility, but they get $1,500 a week, free room and board, and (the key incentive for most) time to pursue whatever unfinished project has been haunting them. They’re almost all struggling writers.
The project demands very detailed pictures of my subjects’ unconscious brains, so I’ve trained them to sleep in the barrel of an MRI machine. No easy feat for insomniacs. They’re just now starting to get the hang of it.
That was why William Tynes showed up at my door.
—
I’d been disciplining my balky computer when I looked up to see him standing there just inside my office. A face from my distant past.
Though I’d last seen him twelve years ago, Bill seemed to have aged twenty-five, as if his body was in a hurry to honestly reflect his wizard’s brain. He had a patchy beard and long sandy hair hanging in a limp ponytail. Large amber eyes that always looked so tired, like he could never find enough fuel to light that incandescent mind.
A slightly embarrassed smile, then, “Hey, Glo.” Like we’d just had coffee last week.
I met Bill in graduate school at Rice University. One day, he sat down across from me at Fondren Library and said, “What’s up Glo? Hey, I was thinking…We need to figure out sleep.”
Then, unprompted, he detailed a program of neurological research he’d mapped out. Vast in scope, breathtaking in its ambition. I sat there spellbound for more than an hour until I finally asked, “Bill, why are you telling all this to me?”
He blinked, surprised at the interruption, then said, “We’re going to work together. I mean, sure, I can think up all this stuff. But you can actually do it.”
Over an amazing couple of months, we did work together. Until he unaccountably disappeared. I tracked down his mother in Little Rock, who said, “I can’t tell you where he is, but he ain’t dead, if that’s what you’re worried about. Anyway, you’re better off. You shouldn’t depend on that boy.”
And I heard nothing from him until the day he came back into my life a dozen years later.
“Bill…What a surprise.” I examined him for any trace of what had made him vanish. Once fulsome and free, his smile now seemed wary, as though dark years had taught him not to tempt fate with any expression of joy.
“Sorry…I just need to talk to you.”
I waved him in, and he sat and stared at me for a moment. “I’ve been over with Baynes writing the algorithms for MindDraw,” he finally said. “And I thought we might look at dreams.”
That made me smile. Dr. Robert Baynes was an undistinguished researcher at UT’s Institute for Neuroscience who’d suddenly shot to the pinnacle of our field due to his breakthrough work on brain imaging. Not just recording images of brain activity, though that was certainly part of it, but actually taking images from the brain. You think of a cat, an apple, a pipe, and bang! There it is on the screen in front of you.
He wasn’t the first to pursue this work. Kamitani attempted it back in 2005. Jack Gallant at Berkeley made some beautiful reconstructions in 2011, but Baynes’s stuff was on another level. They’d found one test subject who was so good with the system, he could instantly reel off hi-res digital photos of anything he could imagine. The papers Baynes now published at an unheard-of clip were revolutionizing our understanding of how the brain processes visual information.
I’d often wondered, admittedly with a little pang of jealousy, how that mediocre intellect was making such great strides. Turns out he had William Tynes.
And now William Tynes wanted me. Again.
“I hear you’ve got some residentials trained to sleep in an MRI,” he said.
That was the genesis of Project DreamCatcher. Was there a tingle of apprehension at letting Tynes’s project hitch a ride on mine? Not really. I had a lot of “middle insomniacs”—people who can’t sleep through the night—and I wanted nothing more than a clear window into what their brains were doing to shake them awake.
Beyond that, you just don’t often get the chance to work with someone like Bill. If we got results, there was no telling where the collaboration could take me. And he was that rare creature almost totally innocent of normal human motivations like pride, greed, and envy. He had only a voracious need to understand his subject. To my mind, the perfect partner.
Since Tynes’s MindDraw system already worked for conscious subjects, we thought that by adapting it for sleeping brains, we could vastly improve on the flickering abstractions of earlier attempts and really bring our dreams into the waking world.
—
As the architect of the whole thing, Tynes had to prove he could get our DreamCatcher to work for other people. Once we created a primitive prototype, we tried to test it on me, but I knew it wouldn’t work. I’m more than a little claustrophobic and, though I could tolerate lying inside an MRI machine long enough to learn MindDraw, I’d never managed to fall asleep in one. When we approached my band of Somnos with the notion, it looked like a no-go.
You want to record my dreams? Um, no thanks.
I understood. Who knows what we might see?
They glanced at one another uneasily. Everyone except Cassie. She looked right at us and said, “I’ll do it. I never remember my dreams. And I want to know what’s going on in there.”
We planned to give her the full three-day training course on MindDraw in the hopes that her brain would retain those image-making skills when she fell asleep. But Tynes came in that first evening, looking disheveled, with darker-than-usual bags under his eyes. He said, “Fuck it. Let’s just hook her up to DreamCatcher tonight.”
Cassie snuggled into the thin cot as best she could. She smiled at me, but I could tell she was nervous. I popped in the special earbuds that gave her the UnderTone, another one of Tynes’s innovations. MindDraw demands a kind of focused visualization that takes practice. Our brains can be lazy, and the images they produce tend toward chaos without careful attention. The MindDraw group found it incredibly helpful to give their subjects feedback regarding how well the system could interpret their brain activity as it tried to draw a picture from the data. Too much visual feedback distracted people from what they were trying to imagine, so the team introduced subliminal audio, using a fancy music-generation program.
Amplified and slowed way down, the UnderTone sounded like a tinkling fairy melody when you were resonating well with the machine. Atonal discord when your mental data stream was unclear. For reasons not fully understood, most people’s brains automatically adjusted to seek the “pleasant” music. Which made the UnderTone like a sheepdog herding the relevant parts of your brain, keeping them moving together in the right direction so the software could understand where they’re going.
I hit the button to send Cassie into the tube of the MRI machine. She gave me another faltering smile before her head disappeared.
“Sweet dreams, Cassie,” I said.
It took her almost two hours to fall asleep.
But once she did, what emerged from her mind that night was gorgeous beyond compare: a seascape of such surpassing beauty, it was bewildering. Great columns of flowering kelp. Filigreed arches of coral. All lit by bright rays of moonlight la
ncing through the water. She swam among glittering helices of fish dancing together as if to welcome her. Eventually she discovered the ruins.
—
In the morning, when we showed Cassie the video, her eyes filled the moment it started. I could tell she recognized it, knew it was from deep inside her. Pure wonder on her face, like a woman handed the ultrasound of her first child.
When it finished, she wiped her eyes and whispered, “It’s beautiful…isn’t it?”
—
That same afternoon, Marco Ilgunas came by my office. An enormous Lithuanian, he used to work the door at Tension, an unbearably au fait after-hours club off Sixth Street. At our first get-acquainted meeting, he told me he came to Dreamland to give himself time to work on his screenplay. I said, “Let me guess, it’s about a heroic bouncer defending Austin’s minor celebrities from the unwashed hordes.”
Marco looked away almost bashfully. “Nah, man. It’s about elves.” Then he flashed the warm, mirthful smile that made everyone here love him.
Weeks later, standing there in my doorway, he led with that same smile and said, “I want to go next.” Cassie must have shown him her dream.