by The Blumhouse Book of Nightmares- The Haunted City (retail) (epub)
Of course now the others wanted in. We started training them on MindDraw that day. You can’t see something like Cassie’s beguiling undersea idyll, spun from nothing more than a night’s sleep—something it would take an animation studio a year and millions to produce—and not wonder, Can I do that too? Do I have that inside me? And all you have to do to find out is fall asleep. Who knows what you’ll have when you wake up? Maybe nothing, but that first dream of Cassie’s was a work of art.
Her nightmare was one too.
—
There in Lab A-4.107, Cassie keeps watching the dead black of the last frame for a moment before turning to me. She seems perplexed. Like she missed something she expected to find. She’s still shaking like a drying drunk despite the thick flannel pajamas she wears against the lab’s merciless air-conditioning.
“I guess that was it…though…” She folds her arms around herself, trying to stop her delicate, avian frame from trembling. Technically we’re never supposed to touch our subjects, but her gesture evokes my daughter, Maya, so I can’t resist embracing her.
“I can see how that frightened you,” I say. She disengages, staring again at the monitor.
“I mean, yeah, it’s sort of spooky, but…” I tilt my head, asking her to continue. She says, “There was just a sensation. Or like a presence…I’ve never felt anything like it.” She shivers again.
“I’m happy to stay up with you until you feel like you can get back to sleep.”
I silently curse as my phone chimes, and Cassie looks away from me. It’s Maya, of course:
Good night Mommy. I love you!!!
I have to tamp down a spike of irritation. She knows she’s not supposed to disturb me at work. But then I think, What’s wrong with you? You’re mad that your daughter texted to say she loves you? Okay, let’s try to focus.
Cassie’s edging toward the door. “No way I’m going back to sleep tonight, but I’ll be fine. You should go home to your daughter.” On her way back to her room, I hear her cough a couple times, like she’s trying to clear something from her throat.
I text Tynes.
Cassie had a nightmare.
In the ensuing silence, I wonder what made me bother him with that information in the middle of the night. It just seems like he’d want to know. One thing I’m sure of, he’ll be up. My phone chimes:
Send it to me.
That’s a little strange. The files are huge, and sending one via e-mail would surely be frowned upon from a privacy perspective. He can look at it all he wants tomorrow—
My phone chimes again:
Right now.
So I send it.
Then I head home to Maya.
—
My daughter always gets up early. She doesn’t wake me, but sits and draws until I rise to throw something together for breakfast. So I wasn’t surprised to see her kneeling on her chair, bent over the kitchen table, when I shuffled in to start the coffee. But this morning, I can tell from the rise and fall of her chest that she’s crying silently.
My amour fou with Maya’s father, Joaquin, a musician, lasted until just after the moment she came into being. Somehow he knew before I did and vanished like he’d been a figment of my imagination. Of course that put pre-Maya in grave danger. I’d just gotten my doctorate and a pretty good postdoc fellowship at UT. People like me don’t have children out of wedlock. Everyone I knew was secretly horrified when I broke the news. I still remember Dr. Wilson, my fellowship sponsor, saying, “Well…that’s wonderful.” His eyes already turning inward to riffle his list of applicants to replace me.
I tell myself that her name, taken from the Buddhist teaching about the illusory nature of what we call “reality,” had nothing to do with my feelings about her father. I should have thought of something else, but it’s such a pretty name, and she responded to it like she already knew it was hers.
Maya’s the reason I’m where I am today. I’ve got a fairly good tenure-track faculty appointment. My research on sleep-cycle disruptions is interesting but not groundbreaking. I’m well respected in the field but not celebrated. At conferences people don’t flock to the podium after I give a talk. Since high school, I’ve been the smartest person in most rooms, but not one of the real stars. I work very, very hard.
But now Maya always comes first.
Which isn’t really a sacrifice. She’s a precocious, happy, wonderful little girl—though not this morning.
I rush over and take her in my arms. She buries her face in my hair. “Sweetie! What’s wrong?”
Maya wipes her nose and says, “Look.” She points to the picture she was working on. “It’s ruined.”
Indeed, the graceful unicorn she’d been crafting over days had come out great, except for an unfortunate jerk of her colored pencil that made a thick line neatly bisecting his eye. It had gouged into the paper, and there’d be no way to erase it.
Maya suffers from a condition they call “essential tremor.” Her hands shake when what she’s doing requires fine motor control. It gets worse when she’s stressed. To compensate, she’s developed a lovely crosshatched style that almost makes an asset of her limitation.
“He looks great to me. I’m sure we can fix it.”
“No, we can’t, Mom.” She sobs. “This always happens. I can never draw anything right. I don’t even know why I keep trying.” The heartbreak in those last words is about more than I can bear, but then she queers my sympathy, pushing it too far: “I can’t go to school today. Everyone is going to laugh at me.”
Maya is always trying to get out of class, even though she knows I can’t ask our nanny, Rosalind, to stay with her on short notice. She wants me to stay home today, as though I can constantly place my career at the whim of a nine-year-old. Particularly irritating about this little demand is that we’ve been engaged in a long-running battle of wills over the emotional energy she invests in her drawing. I just want to spare her the pain of inevitable disappointment. The harrowing loss of dreams coming undone.
I’ve been subtly suggesting that she find a different creative outlet. One that, given her tremors, makes fewer demands on—
That’s when I have the idea.
“How’d you like to take the day off and come to work with your mom?”
—
Maya and I spend a little while looking for Tynes. He lives very much alone and had seemed particularly pleased to see her the last time I brought her in. For her part, Maya liked his twinkly wryness. “William the Wizard” she called him. But Tynes hasn’t come in to work.
I load the MindDraw program on our DreamCatcher machine and start Maya with the training module. She’s a natural. By the end of the day, she beams with delight as her best effort glides off the printer. A majestic unicorn of far nobler bloodline than the mutilated hack now grazing in our kitchen wastebasket. She names him Gyllandynion.
I try to make a portrait of her, but it doesn’t turn out nearly as well. Maya’s brows knit as she compares my crabbed and blurry image to her masterpiece. She’s too polite to say anything, but I’m thrilled to see her private glee that hers is so much better.
Nothing like watching your child find something amazing in the world. Especially if she realizes that what Mommy does every day isn’t always the tedious grind that she suspects, but actually can be kind of magical.
Back at home, Maya hesitates when I invite her to hang Gyllandynion up in her room. When I insist, she takes the thumbtack from me and solemnly gives him pride of place over her bed.
—
At seven, my phone wakes me with a text alert from the server I use to store all the sleep data from the wrist monitors my Somnonauts wear 24/7. With insomniacs, you’re going to get someone who pulls the occasional all-nighter. Staying up a second night is far rarer. My database tells me that Cassie hasn’t been asleep since she had her nightmare two days ago.
She takes a long time to answer when I knock and doesn’t invite me in. She won’t quite look me in the eye.
> “Cassie, is everything all right?”
She stares at the floor. “Doesn’t seem that way, does it?”
“No. What’s wrong?”
She turns around and wanders away from the door. “I’m just…afraid.”
I follow her in. “Of what?”
“Of sleeping. I can’t explain it. Just feels like something terrible’s going to happen.”
“It’ll be terrible if you don’t sleep. Look”—I reach into my coat pocket and pull out an Ambien sample—“why don’t you take one of these?”
She regards the tablet suspiciously. “I thought we were ‘learning strategies to promote nonmedicated sleep.’ ”
“Sometimes we need a little help getting back on track.”
Cassie turns away from me and gazes, I’d have to say longingly, out the window. “I don’t want—” She turns back to me. “You know what I want? To get the fuck out of here.”
I’m not easily shocked, but those words coming out of her mouth throw me. I clear my throat. “Listen, Cassie, you’re exhausted. Why don’t we discuss this after you’ve had eight good hours and you’re feeling more like yourself?”
I press the pill on her again. She looks at it like I want her to eat a scorpion. I have to take her hand and place the tablet in it. “Honey, you just need some rest. Everything will look different then. I’ll be here when you wake up, and we can talk about it.”
“I’m not sleeping in that machine.” She puts the pill on her tongue and dry-swallows. “Dr. Dennings, will you check on me? Make sure I’m okay?”
—
Leaving Cassie’s room, I feel like I could use a sedative myself. I want to talk this over with Bill, but he still isn’t in the empty office he’s appropriated. Isn’t answering his cell. I walk a couple blocks over to the anonymous complex off Guadalupe Street that he shares with a bunch of graduate students twenty years his junior.
After knocking for a long time, in sheer frustration I try the knob, something I never do. The unlocked door creaks open. That’s disturbing.
But there’s Bill hunched at a twenty-dollar folding table under which he’s stashed about sixty grand worth of high-powered workstations. He clearly hasn’t been to sleep in two days either.
Tynes has the annoying tendency common to alpha geeks and supervillains of not turning to greet someone when they enter the room. An affectation I guess is meant to say “The work is more important than you.” I forgive him, because he’s studying Cassie’s nightmare.
“What’s going on, Bill?”
“There’s the problem.” He points to an on-screen image he’s poring over. Then taps it with his too-long fingernail three times, hard, like he’s trying to pin it in place.
I step up behind him for a close look. But that only confuses me.
At first it’s just an undifferentiated blob of swirling gray on gray, like the kind of storm clouds that spawn tornadoes. But after staring at it for a couple of seconds, features emerge. If those two darker regions were eyes…then I can make out a slightly angular face. Those wedges high on either side could be ears…or maybe the peaks of what? A crown? Then below an oversized gash of a mouth stretched into a macabre grin. “Maw” would probably be a better word, given the hideous jumble of teeth. Black iron nails and jagged shards of obsidian. I guess you could say fangs.
I force myself to look away. “You found it…?”
“In Cassie’s nightmare.”
“I don’t remember seeing anything like that.”
He finally tears his eyes from the screen. “You didn’t. It’s in the data.”
“What?”
“This image is encoded in the data DreamCatcher recorded and then rendered into her dream. Took me forever to find the right set of filters, but it’s there the whole way through.” On another monitor Tynes pulls up Cassie’s nightmare, and as he scrolls to the start, the insidious face in the main window mostly disappears, then gradually coheres in the middle of the dream. Near the end, it seems almost to press against the screen. Stretching it. Like the face is trying to push through an invisible membrane.
It’s deeply unsettling. I ask, “You’re saying she was dreaming two things at once?”
“Not exactly. I doubt she was ever aware of Mr. Smoke here—”
He’s already got a nickname for that thing?
“—but the dream she had was carrying him along with it…”
I ponder for a minute how your mind could embed a hidden parasitic image into a dream. “She can do that kind of math…in her sleep?”
“Not like we have a real understanding of what goes on in the old noodle.” He flicks his temple. Then frowns. “For the life of me, I don’t know how her brain could produce a multimodal signal like this. It would be a thousand times harder than, say, singing two notes at the same time. Only a few people in the world can do that, and they have to train their own vocal cords for years. This is…” He whistles.
“Bill, are you sure you’re not—”
“Torturing the data? Conjuring ghosts? Check it out yourself. See what you think.”
“I think I’m worried about my group. Cassie hasn’t been back to sleep since she had that dream…and Marco never went to bed last night either. Losing that much rest can be dangerous.”
“I know.”
“What do you think this is?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe a deep process in the brain we don’t even know about is tuned to respond to signals like this one. And it turns on an acute stress response. We’re constantly finding new mental phenomena that are…schizogenic. So—”
“So your machine transmitted some kind of dream disease to my subjects?” I freeze for an instant as a blade of panic cuts into me.
Maya used that machine.
No…We only tried the MindDraw software that day. Not our new dream-reading code. Neither of us ever went to sleep hooked to the machine.
Bill says carefully, “I’m sure we’ll find a better way to characterize what’s happened, but—”
“We need to figure out what to do.”
“We need to study it.”
“We need to help her.”
—
Bill tells me he has some ideas, but I have to leave him there staring at that baleful face while I race back to the lab.
Because it looks like Cassie is melting down.
Her sleep tracker says she’d been in REM for a minute and twenty-three seconds before she shot awake. Since then, any short period of immobility indicating that she’s falling asleep is immediately followed by a burst of frenzied movement. She’s fighting the Ambien.
Her door’s cracked, so I don’t knock. She jumps like a scalded cat when I barge in.
“I thought we agreed you’d try to sleep.”
I notice first her guilty eyes, then the way her fists are balled, like a child trying to conceal something in each one. “Cassie. What are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
A moment passes as I wonder how hard I can push her. I’m about to try another tack when I see the drop of blood trickle out from her left palm.
I lunge over and grab both her wrists. “Open them.”
She finally breaks, deflating with a helpless sigh. Both hands slowly unclench, and she looks at them with horror. In one she’s squeezing the blade to a penknife. The other is covered with a hundred small cuts in an intricate starburst pattern.
“Cassie! What is this?”
“It’s…the pain. It’s the only way to keep Him away.”
“Keep who away?”
She looks at me, I guess figuring what will happen when she says something totally crazy to me. Then her eyes narrow and her mouth opens with surprise.
“Wait…You know, don’t you? You know who!…What are you doing to us?”
Her accusation rattles me. What I learned from Tynes was so bizarre I haven’t really processed all the implications. Cassie brings them home:
You’ve infected your subjects with something that
you don’t even begin to understand.
Telling her that isn’t going to help. I need some time to think, so I deflect. “I know you’ve had a nightmare, and now you’re so afraid to sleep, you’re hurting yourself. And we can’t have that, can we?”
“You think I want to do this? Dr. Dennings, what’s happening to me?”
“You need rest; I’m going to give you some lorazepam. That’ll put you down and help with your…anxiety. You won’t have any dreams, or none that you can remember anyway. Tomorrow morning I’ll take you over to my colleague Dr. Hendricks in neurology, and he can run some tests. But I’m sure a good night of sleep is really all you need.”
Without waiting for a response, I go down the hall to the supply closet my clinical partner Mark Hendricks keeps stocked with all sorts of tranquilizers and hypnotics. I’m obviously not supposed to have access, but I found an extra key taped to the floor of the cabinet when it was installed. Cassie doesn’t protest when I slide the spoon into her mouth. She seems, in a very profound sense, exhausted. After swallowing, she collapses onto her bed. I scan her desk for more sharp objects. From behind me, her voice is almost a whimper:
“Will you please leave the light on?”
—
Late that evening, Tynes lifts his fancy earphones off and looks at me with the ghost of a smile. “I found it.” He hands the headset to me. “Here. Listen.”
I subdue a little spike of worry. I don’t really want any contact with our system now. It feels toxic. But I got my group into this. It’s my responsibility.
What he plays for me is a cousin of the fairy music you get when system and dreamer are in sync. But this is different. It’s darker, minor key, mysterious. More Bartók than Bach…Thirty seconds in, I think, I like it. It’s seductive.
I rip the phones off my head.
“It’s all subliminal,” he says, “but that ‘track’ is playing at a different frequency than the main UnderTone. It creates its own feedback loop, and that must be what puts Mr. Smoke into the dream data.”
Something feels off about that explanation, but I can’t put my finger on it. This dark thing infects your head through a tune you can’t even really hear? On the other hand, that music came from somewhere. And for now it’s what we have.