Dekker was dreaming, There had been a scattering of bright misty colours, a curve of soft grass, a woman whose eyes and smile were the most wonderful thing in all the world ... and then the dream went sour. It was as though swirls of ink were blending with clear water, as the dark familiar tints spread their stain over Dekker’s private landscape. Without any special feeling of transition, Dekker was standing suddenly alone, fuzzily peering at the something odd which was happening to his bare arm. Without pain a round black hole opened in the flesh, and tiny hairs sprouted; tiny hairs that were insect feelers probing out into the air. He was ready with a Band-Aid, but they wriggled underneath it, and now more of the small dark holes were opening in him. He gritted his teeth, and felt the teeth crumbling with a ghastly painlessness like stubs of chalk or like the clay pipe-stems which still came to light when he dug the garden. With a sort of dreamy double-vision he seemed to be watching the next step from both inside and outside as his eyes, his eyes, the eyeballs themselves—
‘No ...!’
Suddenly the far-off corner of Dekker’s mind which knew it was all a dream was in full command, and his private hell collapsed into a black stuffy bedroom, cramped arms and legs, a taste in the mouth as though some small furry animal had been nesting there—an animal of revoltingly unclean habits. He rubbed at his crusted eyes and painfully rolled over in bed towards the lurid glow of his bedside clock.
3.47 AM. Again.
His heart was beating like a disco drum, and messages of terror were squirting up and down his bloodstream. Gentle signals from his bladder suggested that a downstairs trip would be a clever idea: but Brian Dekker had been through all that before. Following these dreams there always came an afterwash of horror in which the darkness waited most terribly on the stairs, so for all their soft carpet they were about as inviting as the crumbled and slimy steps leading down into a graveyard vault. To turn on the light did not happen to be the answer; that simply pushed the dark into the blind doorways opening on the hall downstairs, and in those doorways it would wait coiled and compressed, ready somehow to leap out on you. Easier to stay in bed.
3.47 AM. Still trembling, he watched the red neon figures until (after what seemed like the best part of a week) they flickered to 3.48. Was this the fourth time or the fifth?
There wasn’t anything miraculous about the figure 3.47. It just happened that when you turned on this smart digital clock, some inner kink set it to that time at once; you had to fiddle with the little buttons at the back to reset it correctly, and whenever there was a power cut it would jump straight back at 3.47 AM afterwards. Just one of those things. Dekker had bought the new clock because he’d found the remorseless ticking of clockwork often kept him awake unless he hid the old alarm-clock in a drawer or under the bed—in which case the alarm was too muffled to wake him next morning. Now the electronic clock had a banshee scream which sliced clean through all the layers of sleep and bedding Dekker could wrap himself in: the only small problem was its red glow, faint by day but glaring in the dark, just visible even through closed eyelids. He’d solved that problem by sleeping on his other side—a triumph of original thinking, a victory of a man over machine. Now all he had to worry about was this tendency to wake up in the small hours with a strangled breathless grunt—a grunt which would be something more except that he was usually fully awake before he could gulp enough air to power a scream.
Five nights, then. Five in a row. Five times, the things he hated most in all the world: insect feelers against the skin, teeth crumbling and splitting because he hated dentists, and, because the worst things he could imagine happening to anybody were blindness and deformity, his eyes would—
No. Not to think about that, here in the stifling dark. Concentrate on real things, Dekker told himself, safe sharp-edged events, true facts, like in detective fiction.
Very well, Inspector, he thought. I’ll tell you all I know. I dream the same dream every night—every night now for a week. That makes five times. This dream is, is ... the way I’ve already described it. Each night I wake up terrified at just 3.47 AM. Yes, too scared to get out of bed—ridiculous isn’t it? Of course I’ve tried sleeping pills. I’m not a fool, you know, I can feel them sucking me back down again now as I lie here, but every night for the last five nights there’s been this hammerblow of fear, a million times stronger than the pills, five nights in a row ...
Every night since I bought the clock? Why, yes. That’s very significant, I’m sure.
Then the pills grabbed him and hauled him back down into a safe warm darkness where there were no dreams, no thoughts, nothing but the momentary glimpse of a pale brown woman whose features were not quite those of the Indians or Pakistanis he met in town or at work ...
In the morning the clock shrieked efficiently, and Dekker fumbled his way downstairs in a stale reek of sweat, groaning under a headache which he reckoned was in the brain-haemorrhage class. One, two, three paracetamol tablets with his breakfast coffee, and the third stuck on his tongue to leave a foul-tasting track as though slugs had been crawling down his throat. The slight psychological uplift of vigorous washing, shaving and brushing of teeth left him feeling no better: he thought about work, about checking balance sheets and preparing VAT statements, shuddered slightly, and went to the telephone.
‘Hello—Jenkins and Grey? That’s right, luv, Brian Dekker ... Can you tell Mr Grey I’ll be off sick today? Thanks ... Bye.’
The doctor agreed.
‘You need a rest, I expect. Been working too hard.’
‘I get these bad dreams,’ Dekker began to tell him.
‘Working far too hard. Your card says you haven’t taken sick-leave for three years. Ridiculous. We all need a rest sometime.’
‘I sort of wake up every night, about the same time—’
‘Prescribing you a tonic: here. Chit for a week off work: here. Come and see me again if you don’t feel better in a week. Next!’
‘Yes, but about these nightmares—’
‘Take it easy, take the tonic. Next!’
Dekker hadn’t very much faith in the bottle of gooey liquid into which the chemist translated his prescription. He decided to take a few extra safety precautions of his own, and on the way home he paused at the supermarket to pick up a bottle of medium-cheap scotch whisky. For the rest of the day he loafed about, reading detective stories (‘But surely, Inspector—’) and the newspapers (NEW STRIKE THREAT, MIDDLE EAST CRISIS, MALAY SWEATSHOP SCANDAL) while upstairs the clock counted off its silent, red-glowing minutes.
At eight in the evening Dekker warmed a dubiously Cornish pasty in the oven, and ate it with baked beans.
At nine, the washing-up cleared away, he opened the whisky bottle and poured himself a large glass, neat. He didn’t much like whisky ... but he thought he might as well try it in style. Cheers! And he raised his glass to the halfopened hall door, and to the gathering, lurking darkness out there.
At ten he was trying to remember the words of a song, which were right on the tip of his tongue, just a matter of fitting them to the tune, how did it go, Tum tummity tum ... that was funny, he couldn’t quite remember the tune, but all the time there was a gentle singing in his head. Somehow the level in the scotch bottle had gone down rather a long way. With a feeling of immense devotion to duty, he fumbled after the doctor’s tonic-bottle and—after some unsuccessful attempts to balance a five-millilitre teaspoon—took a generous swig. The taste sent him staggering hastily back to the whisky.
At eleven he had the sudden, terrible feeling of being absolutely cold sober with chilly winds whistling through his brain—except that his arms and legs wouldn’t move properly. But as he sat there, the pictures lit up in his brain with a dreadful clarity. He remembered how the insect feelers would come writhing from his flesh with a tiny wink and gleam of chitin. He remembered the painless horror of teeth which crumbled and sheared like soft shale. He remembered, he tried not to remember, the feeling of his head being blown up like a balloon, the e
yeballs which bulged until the lids wouldn’t close no matter how hard he screwed them shut, his eyes bulging until—
‘No, no, nooooo,’ he moaned, trying to stand up and falling.
—until they burst in small wet explosions of jelly, like squeezed pimples or boils, the stuff running down his cheeks in enormous slow tears while tattered remnants of eyeball dangled from the sockets ...
He managed to pour more whisky, more of it into his lap than into the glass. He tilted the glass against numb lips, and spilt more. The whole room was humming and swaying. The glass slithered from his fingers.
At midnight he was unconscious.
At 3.47 AM he was unconscious.
At 10.45 next morning, he stirred.
Later, having emptied his stomach a few times and dosed his massive new headache, Dekker thought again about his sleeping problem.
‘That wasn’t a whatsit, a controlled experiment,’ he said aloud. ‘Maybe being drunk keeps off the nightmares all right ... but if that damned clock has anything to do with it, I might just have missed the dream because I never went upstairs to sleep at all ...
‘Maybe I should just get rid of the clock. But that’s silly. It’s just superstition. It’s not a hanged man’s skull or an evil talisman from Transylvania. It’s just a blasted clock and only a few months old at that—only a few weeks, maybe ...’
He spent another quiet, aching afternoon. A photograph in The Times—more about electronic-component sweatshops in Malaya—caught his eye. The women who put together radios for a few pence a day because there was nowhere else to work ... the women in the picture looked familiar for a moment, and then not familiar at all when he peered at them more closely. That was the only odd moment in the whole long day.
That evening he still wasn’t feeling a hundred-per-cent fit, but a night without the dream had given him more confidence. He thumbed his nose at the clock as he clambered into bed; he pulled up the blankets and let the friendly dark snuggle round him; he drifted into sleep.
And after many adventures in strange glowing countries, he was caught again in the evil dream. Helplessly he wandered into the dark, into the stained dream-place where things with legs erupted from his skin, where teeth met grittily and gave way, where eyes ballooned hideously ...
Dekker woke gasping from the old hammerblow of dread, to see the figures 3.47 glowing in the night. He clicked on the bedside light to push the dark a little further away, and lay trembling and sweating, his mind an empty map of horror into which, from nowhere that he could tell, there drifted the memory that the longest and most complicated dreams are supposed to take only a few seconds of real time. One could cram a lot of frightfulness into those seconds, he thought as he lay there with a small child’s fear of the dark and resisted the urge to pull sheets and blankets up over his head. Like colours in a slowly turning prism, his fear shifted into exhaustion and the exhaustion to drowsiness; adrift from body and bed and 3.47 AM, Dekker sank into the cloudy shapes of almost-sleep. There, for a moment, a pale brown woman’s face peered at him with an uncomfortable smile. It’s nothing personal, but—Or had she said something else, wordlessly? Her hands were busy with a dismantled digital clock.
It was as if a switch had been thrown in Dekker’s head. The connection was made in showers of brilliant sparks, shocking him into rigidity. The night became neutral, empty of evil and of sleep, as he connected the familiar dream-face (so familiar, surely he’d glimpsed it each night of the dream) with that photo in The Times. Women at an assembly line. MALAY SWEATSHOP SCANDAL. He sat up and reached for the clock, which now showed a safe 3.50. It hummed in his hand as he lifted it, like some warm living thing stiff with fear, whose heart beat so desperately as to make a low buzz. It had come from one of those mail-order discount firms whose goods carried no trademarks or brand names, familiar or not. On the back though, he saw as he turned it over ... on the back, stamped into the thin plastic casing, it said: MALAYA.
He almost smiled as he put down the clock, turned off the light, prepared for another attempt at the unclimbable north face of sleep. Imagine that.
Imagine some ill-treated Malayan lady in an electronic sweatshop, taking her own little bit of industrial action by building an occasional curse into the circuits she put together all day long for so little money. He wanted to chuckle at the silliness of the idea, but the chuckle was lost in a sourceless feeling that to let it out might be unsafe.
It’s hardly fair, he thought. What did I ever do to her?
Well, he replied, I suppose you did buy this cheapo-cheapo clock and helped keep her rotten employers in business.
But ... ridiculous. I mean, how can you believe in a politically motivated curse? The right to work, the right to strike, the right to stick pins in wax images?
But ... well, then, why not?
In the morning, nursing yet another headache, Dekker looked through the newspapers and found two photos of oppressed Malayan women. He was disturbed to find that even though the faces there had a kind of family resemblance to the dull-golden face of his dreams, none of them looked quite like it. You might say that proved the dream-face wasn’t just a figment smuggled into his mind by study of The Times. You might say that proved, even, that it was real.
He ate his bacon (greasy) and eggs (burst, like ... never mind that), and went upstairs for the battered copy of the book on magic and religion which he’d bought years back. Frazer’s The Golden Bough, that was it. It came to light amid piles of old science fiction magazines in what estate agents called the second bedroom and Dekker called the junk room.
The abridged Golden Bough (good grief, the full version ran to twelve volumes) mentioned Malays quite a few times in the index. Dekker went through them all. The very first dealt with wax images and cheerfully mentioned: ‘pierce the eye of the image, and your enemy is blind’. He closed the book convulsively. He didn’t want to hear about eyes.
Well, if he dismantled the clock, was he going to find some wax model of a corpse lurking in between the integrated circuits? Unfortunately the thing was a sealed unit: to take it apart was to destroy it. Which mightn’t be a bad idea, at that; certainly it was something to keep in reserve. He opened the book again, and on page 105 found: ‘The Malays think that a bright glow at sunset may throw a weak person into a fever.’ So what, then, would they think of neon figures glaring red all night long? Onward ... ‘Nowhere perhaps is the art of abducting human souls more carefully cultivated or carried to higher perfection than in the Malay Peninsula.’
There was nothing specific, nothing about feelers or teeth, nothing suggesting how a charm could worm its way into electronic circuitry. Well, what could you expect from a book written in 1922? And nothing, nothing, on the mystical significance of 3.47 AM ... All in the mind, Brian me lad. You’re a weak person who’s been thrown into a fever. The psychologists would mumble about compulsive neuroses or something. You wake up with a nightmare at 3.47 one morning and somehow it sets your own internal alarm-clock ticking away, screaming at you every twenty-four hours—but only when you sleep near that clock because the psycho-whatsit is all tied up with those glowing figures. Those figures that you can feel glowing in a dim red way, even with eyes tight shut.
Through the day Dekker swallowed his prescribed doses of tonic with great conscientiousness. And in the evening he had another idea, something to break the bad luck and finish all this silly business. Before going to bed, he cunningly set the alarm for 3.30 AM.
The banshee wail cut through his vague and innocuous dream, blasting him awake with the gentleness of a bucket of cold water in the stomach. The red figures 3.30 glared at him. There was no hint of menace or oppression in the surrounding dark. Dekker turned on the bedside light, and then got up to switch on the main room light as well.
Break the jinx, he thought cheerfully. Watch 3.47 flash up on that clock with no bad dream in sight, and that should deal with any worms lodged in my subconscious!—Or if my little Malayan dream-girl is responsible, a dose
of cold hard facts in the small hours should help deal with her too, eh?
Though well-lit and warm, the room did contain a sort of bleakness, as though the walls were mere partitions in some enormous hall of damp concrete where echoes could scurry back and forth for hundreds of yards before dying of exhaustion. It’s the small hours that do it, Dekker thought. The human spirit at its lowest ebb before dawn ... didn’t someone say that?
3.42.
The only sound was the faint hum of the clock. He sat on the bed in his old worn dressing-gown and wished the clock would get a move on.
3.44.
3.45.
3.46.
The last figure seemed to glow there for hours. Subjective time stretching out and out like plasticene, like the eternity of nightmare you could fit into a few seconds of dreaming. ‘Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception ...’ Where had he read that line?
He was thinking these thoughts when he felt the tickling and crawling on his arms, as of insect feelers writhing from the flesh. My God, he thought. Hysteria, I won’t look under my sleeves, I won’t, it’s like those religious girls who sprout the marks of wounds in all the appropriate places, I’m expecting this and the teeth and the, the other thing, and so now I’m imagining—
But he was still almost sure he could feel motion under the loose sleeves of his pyjamas. He refused to look down. He clamped his jaws together, and with rotten snaps the teeth broke to powder. This time there wasn’t the painlessness of the dream: he screamed aloud, and stinking fragments sprayed from his mouth. He wanted to screw up his eyes, but already they were swollen to the point where the lids would not close, were swelling painfully further.
The Year's Best Horror Stories 12 Page 4