Sleepeasy

by Wright, T. M.

  "Don't do that," Morgan shouted, and leaned forward, so his torso was over the back of the front seat. "You'll wear down the battery."

  "Leave her alone!" Jack South warned.

  Morgan looked quickly at him, grinned a little, then sat back. "I'm staying put," he said. "Whatever it is that's brought us here—"

  "We've brought us here," Amelia told him.

  "It doesn't matter," Morgan declared. "We're here and whoever is responsible for this ... nightmare is probably only too happy to have us wandering about unprotected."

  "You don't know that!" Jack shouted at him.

  "It's okay," Amelia said. "He's probably right. I think we have to assume that he's right at any rate."

  "So we're just going to sit here?" Freely asked, astonished.

  "I really don't think there's anything else we can do," Amelia answered.

  Jack turned on the radio.

  "Not right now," Amelia said, and reached to turn it off. There was a loud burst of static and she jerked her hand back, as if the radio were going to bite her.

  Jack tried the tuning knob. Nothing. "Dammit! No music."

  Amelia turned the radio off.

  "It's getting cold in here," Morgan said.

  He was right. The temperature had dropped a good ten degrees in the last few minutes. Amelia opened her door. The air outside was cold, dank, forbidding.

  "We've really stepped in it this time," Freely said.

  "I told you," Morgan said. "It's a trap."

  They heard another scream, closer. Desperately, Amelia tried the ignition again, but with no luck.

  "What's that?" Jack said, and pointed out of the driver's window.

  All of them looked. They saw what appeared to be a huge, dark house at the horizon.

  Freely shivered. "It's creepy," she said.

  "It's some asshole's idea of a haunted house, that's what it is!" Morgan said. "And I think we'd better just stay away from it."

  The car was getting colder. Goose bumps rose on Amelia's arm. "I don't think we have a choice," she said. "I think if we stay here, we'll freeze."

  "To death?" Jack said, and laughed falsely.

  "That's enough," Amelia scolded.

  Jack stopped laughing.

  "It's probably better to freeze to death than to freeze forever," Morgan said drily. "But I think if we try to hike across this landscape, we'll freeze anyway. That house is a couple of miles away. I mean, look at you, Amelia." She was dressed in her white shorts and white shirt.

  "Again," she said, "I doubt that we have a choice. I think we're being coaxed. And I think that if whoever's coaxing us wanted to harm us, he'd have done it by now. I think it's another game and I think we have to play along." She opened her door, stepped out and started walking.

  Jack followed at once and caught up with her, sniffling because of the pervasive smell of sulfur that hung in the air like a fog. After a few moments, Morgan and Freely got out of the car too and fell in behind. And as the little group walked toward the huge, dark house at the horizon, the air grew steadily warmer and clearer, and Amelia thought, Yes, we are being coaxed.

  But why? she wondered. And by whom?

  The boy on the snowmobile nudged his companion and told him, "She's dead. I think she's dead," meaning the naked woman floating face down in the heated pool.

  The other boy didn't know what to say. He could tell his friend was right about the woman, but all he could do was stare at her.

  "I think we gotta do something," said the first boy.

  A man appeared at the edge of the pool. He stood looking at the woman for a minute, jumped in, thrashed about for a while and then quieted.

  "Holy shit!" whispered the first boy.

  "We gotta do something," said the second boy, happy to have his voice back at last.

  "Yeah, I know. I said that. But what do we do?"

  "We go back home and call someone."

  "Maybe we should try and help those people first."

  "Help them what? They're drowned. What are we going to help them with?"

  "I don't know. Maybe they're not drowned. Maybe they're still alive." He revved up his snowmobile, as if getting ready to take off.

  The other boy shook his head. "Naw, they're drowned. Can't you tell? Look at 'em."

  They both looked for several minutes and then the first boy said, "Well, if they weren't drowned before, they sure are now."

  "Sorry, Mr. Briggs," said the cop, as he ushered Harry into a holding cell, "I know it's a lousy way to have to spend your Christmas Eve."

  "Christmas Eve?" Harry said.

  The cop locked the cell door. "Don't tell me you don't know what day it is?"

  Harry shook his head.

  The cop tutted pityingly and nodded at Harry's bare feet. "I think I can find some shoes that'll fit you, Mr. Briggs. What size do you wear? I'd guess eleven."

  Harry looked at his feet a moment, then at the cop. "It can't be Christmas Eve! What the hell am I doing here on Christmas Eve? I should be home with my wife."

  "Yeah," said the cop, "me too. But I'm stuck here. I'm afraid we're both stuck here." He looked at Harry's feet again. "Size eleven. That sounds about right to me," he said, and walked off.

  "The world's full of assholes," Harry heard. "But don't pin him down/Because he won't stop squirming,/He'll just thrash around." It was the voice in his head again and Harry wasn't sure if he welcomed it.

  The voice went on, "Meaning that he's right as rain, Harry,/Remember me—your friend in pain,/No, no, you're not insane. It's really me,/And if you can't see,/There must be a key,/A reason for the season."

  Harry nodded glumly. "Yes," he whispered. "I remember you. You're my sanity tiptoeing off into Never-Never Land."

  The voice chuckled.

  Harry grimaced. His inner voice was not only rhyming at him again, it was laughing at him too. That certainly wasn't a good sign.

  The voice said, "You made your little ride to the other side/And here you are/And here am I—"

  "Stop!" Harry shouted.

  "Stop?" the voice said.

  "Yes, that's very aggravating."

  "What's aggravating?"

  "That damned rhyming."

  "Oh," the voice said, sounding cowed. "Habit. I get loose on my own over here and that's what I do. I rhyme."

  "Just please don't do it anymore, okay?"

  "Okay."

  "'Thanks."

  "Do you know, Harry, that you made a little hippity-hop back in time? Don't ask me how. Or why. Maybe we have to go back to the moment that we died. Or earlier. Maybe if the world goes on without us ..." The voice faltered.

  "Yes?" Harry said. "Go on."

  "I'd like to, but I can't. What do I know really? I'm just a passenger on this train."

  "Aren't we all?" Harry whispered.

  "But I'll tell you what I do know. I think. You're alive again. Alive, alive-o. Breathing and sweating and salivating, and for real. Enjoy it while you can, my space-hopping friend, because I think your good fortune will come to an end."

  "Marvelous," Harry whispered.

  "Interesting anyway," said the voice.

  Harry sighed.

  "You're confused, aren't you?" the voice asked.

  "Yes, I am," Harry answered.

  "You think I'm . . . not real. Is that right?"

  Harry said nothing.

  "I thought so," said the voice, and sighed. "This is going to be tough."

  The cop reappeared. He had a pair of black oxfords in his hand. "Try these on, Mr. Briggs," he said, and pushed the shoes through the bars.

  Harry stared at the shoes for a moment, uncomprehendingly.

  "Go ahead," said the cop, "try them on. I can't give you the laces. Sorry."

  "Sam Goodlow," said the voice inHarry's head. "Remember me?"

  "Sam Goodlow?" Harry whispered.

  "Sorry?" said the cop.

  Harry looked at him. "Sam Goodlow?" he repeated.

  The cop shook his he
ad. "No. Robert Lawrence."

  "Shit!" said the voice in Harry's head. "Okay, howabout Sydney Greenstreet?"

  "Sydney Greenstreet?" Harry said aloud. It had the ring of familiarity to it.

  "No, Robert Lawrence," the cop repeated. "Not Sydney Greenstreet. Maybe you oughta get some shut-eye, Mr. Briggs."

  The voice in Harry's head said, "We came here to find him and bring him back to Silver Lake./For pity's sake/This is no cake . . . walk you're on, my time-hopping friend,/Your rat puppy is bringing people's lives to an end."

  "I told you to stop rhyming at me, dammit!" Harry shouted.

  "Rhyming?" said the cop.

  "Sydney Greenstreet," said the voice in Harry's head.

  "Sydney Greenstreet?" Harry whispered. The name was so hauntingly familiar.

  "Just try to get some sleep," the cop said. "I'd guess you have a long day ahead of you tomorrow."

  Kennedy Whelan walked past the desk sergeant at Manhattan North and said, "Sure, merry Christmas to you too," and then went into the squad room to find the policewoman who had put his libido in a stranglehold. He stopped just inside the entrance to the big room and looked around. It was nearly empty. A beefy detective he didn't recognize sat at the far desk, eating a jelly donut and poring over a copy of the Daily News, and close by a young, bearded cop with a ponytail looked up from some plastic bags filled with what looked like heroin, smiled and said, "Ho-ho-ho, Ken."

  Whelan said, "Yeah, ho-ho," and asked if the policewoman was out.

  The cop nodded. "Home with her husband."

  "Husband?" She'd never mentioned a husband.

  "Yeah. She's been married ten years." He cocked his head. "She never told you that, Ken?"

  Whelan shrugged. "Sure, she told me."

  "Sorry," the young cop said.

  "Me too," Whelan said, fished a cigar from his pocket and lit it. To hell with trying to quit.

  Two uniformed cops passed by on their way into the squad room. One of them said to the other, "I told him, 'No, my name ain't Sydney Greenstreet, it's Robert Lawrence.' The guy's nuttier than a fruitcake, poor slob."

  Whelan called after them, "Hold on a moment."

  The Reunion

  Chapter Thirty-two

  The huge, dark house that Amelia, Jack, Morgan and Freely approached sat precariously at the edge of a high, rocky cliff overlooking a dark and choppy sea. This sea appeared to rise at the gray and tumultuous horizon, as if it were preparing to overtake the land and sweep them all away. At first, this illusion was very disconcerting, but as the group moved closer to the house, the sea didn't grow, or change, and everyone in the group accepted that it was merely a bizarre facet of this space, the design of a madman.

  As they drew to within a couple of hundred yards of the house, Freely said, "It looks like something out of a Gothic romance."

  "It's creepy as a bug," Morgan said, which the others were surprised to hear from him.

  There were several dozen long, narrow, multi-paned windows at the front of the house. The house itself bore three gables and a steeply sloping slate roof that boasted four tall, grotesquely ornate chimneys.

  Huge, obscenely grinning, wild-eyed cherubs carrying dark pink gargoyles in their teeth peered down from several of the roof edges.

  One light burned in a third-story window, but as the group approached over the barren landscape, this light went out.

  "It's a bit stereotypical," Freely said.

  "Stereotypical?" Jack South asked.

  "Sure. It's like part of a Halloween pop-up book or something. It goes beyond spooky and into the ridiculous."

  "Speak for yourself," Morgan said.

  "Yeah," Jack agreed. "Speak for yourself."

  "The guy who created this has almost no imagination at all," Freely said. "Except for those nasty cherubs." She stopped walking and looked up at them. "I mean, they are a pretty nifty touch. Not simply sinister gargoyles and a host of irritatingly saccharine cherubs, but nasty cherubs with baby gargoyles in their teeth." She smiled. "I like it."

  Amelia reached back and grabbed her arm. "C'mon," she said, "we're almost there," and they were.

  Harry—head in hands and eyes closed—was sitting on the hardboard cot that served asa bed in the holding cell, trying to ignore the increasingly insistent voice in his head—"You're dead, goddammit! Don't you remember? The little rowboat. The ocean. The bulbous thing with the wild eyes ..."—when Kennedy Whelan startled him by saying, from outside the holding cell, "What do you know about Sydney Greenstreet?"

  He lurched, looked wide-eyed at Whelan and said, "Huh? Sydney Greenstreet?"

  "Yeah. What do you know about him?"

  "Nothing. I know he's an actor."

  "What else?"

  The voice in Harry's head said, "Don't mess with this guy. He means business."

  "What should I know?" Harry asked.

  Whelan grinned. Progress.

  The words etched in Gothic script in stone above the huge, arched doorway read: ABANDON HOPE, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE.

  "Charming," said Freely.

  She looked closer. There were other words etched beneath, but they were very small, and done less expertly, so they were harder to make out. "Can you read that?" she asked Morgan.

  He looked. "Yeah, I think so."

  Amelia read, "'Mothers and Fathers welcome.'"

  Jack South chuckled. "Someone thinks he's funny."

  Amelia stepped forward and looked for a door knocker. She saw none.

  "Look there," Morgan said, pointing to the right of the door. "I think it's a doorbell."

  Amelia looked. "A doorbell?" she said incredulously. She rang it.

  Loud, basso-profundo thudding, as if from a huge door knocker, arose within the house.

  Amelia grimaced, while Jack South smiled uneasily.

  "Now that's a doorbell!" Morgan declared.

  "This guy's okay," Freely said.

  "I don't know—something feels. . . wrong here," Amelia said.

  "That's the understatement of the millennium," Morgan said.

  "I mean," Amelia explained, "these little creative touches are very... interesting, sure. But there's something… wrong here," she repeated, "and I can't pinpoint it."

  "I think you're being female," Morgan told her.

  She ignored him. No one had answered the door, so she rang the doorbell again.

  Jack South asked, "Did you notice how clear the air is? That rotten egg smell is gone."

  "Yes," Amelia replied. "It disappeared as we got closer to the house. Someone's drawing us in."

  "That's what I think," Freely agreed. "Someone's drawing us in."

  "It's a trap," Morgan said.

  "And if it is," Amelia pointed out, "there's absolutely nothing we can do about it."

  Suddenly, the huge door opened.

  A plainclothes cop came into the holding area and said, "Mr. Briggs, you're going to have to come with me."

  "Wait a minute," Whelan snapped. "I'm questioning this man."

  "Sorry. This is urgent."

  "What's going on?" Harry asked, and stood. "You live at Twenty-six Portland Road, in Chappaqua?" the plainclothes cop asked. "Is that correct?"

  "Yes,it is. But I don't understand—"

  The cop unlocked the cell door and ordered Harry to turn around and put his hands behind his back, which Harry did.

  The cop glanced at Whelan, said, "Watch him, would you?" and went into Harry's cell.

  "For Christ's sake," Whelan said, "this man may be a key witness to a string of murders—"

  "Later," the cop said, handcuffing Harry and leading him from the holding area, out of the precinct house. He put him into the backseat of a waiting squad car and got in beside him.

  "Where are you taking me?" Harry asked. "Home," the cop answered. "Okay, driver, let's go."

  Sydney dreamed about cold water, gray snow, dirty hands, ducks with their beaks sawn off, black earth. He smiled as he dreamed. Saliva pooled at the edge of his mouth.
His small eyes moved rapidly beneath their white lids. His little cock stirred and rose up.

  The dream evaporated. His erection evaporated.

  He felt himself being tugged again, on all sides, as if something under his skin were pushing outward on every square inch of his substantial body.

  He thought that he was coming apart, and he woke up screaming.

  Amelia, Morgan, Jack and Freely had to squint against the light that flooded over them from within the house. It took minutes for their eyes to adjust to it, and when they did, none of them understood what they were seeing.

  Tilt-a-whirls tilted and whirled.

  Popcorn machines belched popcorn.

  Trampolines springed and sproinged, though they were empty.

  Multicolored plastic balls inside big mesh cages rolled endlessly.

  And there were swings and slides and teeter-totters. Jungle gyms too. And puppet theaters.

  Then they saw a little boy of eight or nine at the far end of the gigantic room. He was dressed in blue shorts and a red and white polo shirt, and he sat on a huge, ornate, pink chair.

  Amelia started across the room toward him.

  He looked up at her suddenly. "You'd better go away!" he shouted.

  "Why?" Amelia shouted back. The noise from all the paraphernalia in the room was deafening.

  The boy looked at her confusedly.

  "Why should we go away?" Amelia shouted again. "We have no place to go."

  The boy rose from his chair. He was short—even for his apparent age—and he was wiry and intelligent looking. "Did you bring my Mom and Dad with you?"

  Amelia shook her head. "I'm sorry, no. Are they outside?"

  The boy nodded, smiling. "They've been out there a long, long time. A hundred years, I think."

  "And you're in here all alone?"

  He nodded vigorously. "Except for you now." This seemed to please him.

  It did not please Amelia. The boy made her uneasy, though she couldn't figure out why. Perhaps he didn't seem completely real, though she rejected this idea at once. He was at least as real as they were. Obvious, as well, that he had to be very unhappy in this big house all by himself.

  "What is this place?" Amelia asked.