Polly shook her head, her face drained of colour in the pale light. “Something woke me and you weren’t there. I was going to Jack’s room when I heard you cry out down here.”
“This can’t happen, Polly,” he said. “I—I can’t let it happen to him.”
“What can’t happen, Cale?” Her grey eyes searched his face. He felt cut off from her, drifting beyond her zone of familiarity.” What are you talking about?” she said.
He wondered at her inability to comprehend the vague shapes and shadows that flowed around him. Nothing he saw reassured him, not even her face. Her lips were moving but the words were drowned by the sound of the blood rushing through his brain. Someone had been outside, watching the house. Was he still there, waiting? For Jack? “Listen to me,” he said, trying to warn her, but there was something else too, something he needed to know. The shadows beyond Polly were melting into the floor.
“It’s all right, Cale. It’s over.”
She didn’t get it. The dream was there, but all scrambled in his mind. He’d seen this before. Years ago, he thought, when he was a child. The same nightmare Jack was having. A pitiful cry came from elsewhere else in the house.
“Oh please no,” Polly whispered, rising to her feet.
Instinctively, he grabbed her hand and said, “What time is it?”
“It’s Jack,” she said, pulling away from him, heading towards the stairs.
He realised what it was she’d heard. Jack was screaming upstairs. He struggled to get up from the floor. Heart pounding ferociously, he forced himself to look at his watch. It was twelve forty-five. Bad memories stirred inside him.
*
Caleb looked out through the crack in the curtains, at the three quarter moon hanging over Three Cliffs Bay and the mist rising silently up over the fields towards Penmaen. He leaned back in the armchair. Jack was sleeping. Polly had phoned the doctor again that morning, asked him to refer Jack to a child psychologist. Caleb knew it would do no good but he hadn’t stopped her. He’d wanted to tell her that only he could help their son, but fear and a sense of his own weakness, had prevented him from articulating this certainty. What mattered was the hour in which Jack’s nightmare came. The same hour in which it had come to him when he was a boy. The thirteenth hour. How many times had it haunted his sleep thirty odd years ago? That feeling of dread. A sense of being apart from the world, an isolation that had filled him with absolute dread. Lying in bed at night clinging to consciousness, fighting to keep the terror of sleep at bay. At least until the hour was past and even then not letting himself fall all the way, anchoring one strand of thought to the shore of reason.
It had withered inside him, he supposed. Withered but not died. He’d buried it deep down in the darkest recesses of his brain where it had lain in wait all these years till it had sensed the nearness of an innocent mind. The idea of it appalled Caleb. Every fibre of his reason screamed against the possibility. Yet he could no longer deny that his own childhood nightmare had transmigrated into the fertile ground of Jack’s unconscious.
All day Caleb had thought about the nightmare, trying to collate his own hesitant memories against Jack’s fragmented rememberings of the dream. They had both sensed a presence outside, watching the house. Jack had heard the stranger calling out, but he said it sounded a long way away. Sometimes he was inside the house, in the hall or on the stairs. Jack had never seen the nightmare through to the end, and if Caleb had ever done so, he’d forgotten what he’d seen there.
In the dim light, Caleb glanced at his watch. Eleven thirty. Knowing that Jack would soon begin to dream, he prepared to abandon himself to the lure of sleep. Even as it tugged at his mind, he felt the stirring of a residual fear, urging him to resist. His eyes flickered open for a moment but darkness breathed over them, drawing them down. The strands of reason stretched one by one and snapped as he hovered a while on the edge of consciousness, before drifting across the border into the deep of dreams.
Nothing moved in the room. The chill cloak of darkness made everything one and the same. Caleb held himself still, waiting. His hands hurt from gripping the arms of the chair and every nerve in his body strained for release. He listened, trying to shut out the pounding of his heart and the crackling white noise of nameless fears. Until, above the sound of his own terrible thoughts, he heard again a muffled footstep on the stairs. Silence again for a moment, followed by more footsteps, coming closer. He caught his breath as they stopped right outside the door. Where was Cyril, he wondered. Why wasn’t he barking ? His flesh crawled as he waited for the sound of the door handle turning. Instead, the footsteps began to recede. He exhaled slowly, peering into the darkness where he imagined the door should be. He turned on the lamp. Dim light pushed feebly at the shadows, barely strong enough to reveal the open door, the empty bed.
He choked back a cry and rushed out onto the landing. There was still time, he told himself. His breath misted in the chill, salty air. There were damp footprints on the stairs. Following them down, he felt the fear clawing at his back, wrapping him in its clammy embrace. The wet prints marched along the hall through the kitchen, to the open back door. A shroud of mist hung over the garden. Caleb hesitated, his arms braced against the doorframe. His son was out there. “Jack,” he whispered, despairingly. “Please Jack, come home.”
Hearing the dog bark out there, he forced himself to move, out across the crisp grass which crunched underfoot. He went through the gate at the bottom of the garden, then turned and saw the house rising up out of the moon-yellowed mist. He felt a terrible loneliness and could barely keep himself from rushing back towards it. But he caught the sound of a soft voice calling to him. He hauled himself up over the ditch and ran on through the fields that sloped down into tangled woodland. He could no longer hear Cyril as he beat his way through trees and undergrowth, slipping and sliding on the soft earth, until finally he stumbled out onto the muddy banks of Pennard Pwll. He followed the stream as it meandered out of the valley into the bay. Above the rustling of the water, he could hear his son calling to him.
Impatient, he stepped into the stream, wading across the gushing, knee-high water. He stumbled over a rock, fell and picked himself up again. “Jack,” he cried, as he struggled up on to a sandbank. Some distance ahead and to his left he saw the three witch-hat peaks that gave the bay its name clawing the night sky through the mist. Having got his bearings, Caleb raced across the sand towards the sea, energised by the blood pumping through his veins. The jaundiced mist billowed around him as he splashed into the wavelets lapping the shore. He waded out deeper, ignoring the current that tugged insistently at his legs. He beat at the mist with his arms, trying to open up a space through which he might spy his son. The sea was perishing, forcing him to snatch shallow, ragged breaths. One moment it was swirling around his waist, the next it was surging up to his chest. The mist seemed to be thinning out and he caught glimpses of the moon up over Cefn Bryn. A wave swamped him, leaving him treading water. The current began to drag him away from the shore. “Jack, please,” he called frantically, as he tried to keep his head above the surface. Another wave washed over him and when he came up he could see clearly out into the bay. The sea sank its bitter teeth into his flesh. He was swimming hard now, just to stay afloat. He was growing weaker but still he searched for his son, chopping through the moon-silvered water, all the time following the sound of a voice, his own voice, but distant and younger, calling to him from out of a long-forgotten nightmare. More water poured into his mouth as he went under again, still fighting. He rose in time to hear a distant church bell strike the hour. At one, there was still hope. At two, it began to fade. He heard the thirteenth strike as a muted sound beneath the surface, a strange echo of the pressure of the sea filling his lungs.
*
It seems like dawn, or maybe dusk. He has difficulty now, telling the time of day. It seems to be always twilight. But still he waits for them, anticipating the moment, imagining a different outcome this time. But wh
en they appear in the garden, the desperate longing he feels is as overwhelming as it always was. Jack looks bigger, more filled out. He must be ten, at least. Colour reddens Polly’s cheeks again, and the small lines around her eyes signify acceptance more than sorrow. He wonders what that means. He places a hand on the garden wall and as he does so, the house recedes a little, as if wary of him. He calls out their names and for one second, Jack looks up and stares directly at him. “Jack,” Caleb cries out again, waving to him. “I’m here.” For another moment, Jack continues to look his way, shielding his eyes from the sun. But then he turns and as Caleb looks down in despair, he sees no shadow on the garden wall, only sunlight falling right through the place where he stands.
The Dream Operator
Once again, Garrett Moon is dreaming. This time he dreams he is a man capable of falling back into a world he once knew, and hoping that it will be for real.
The girl came out of nowhere, bouncing off Moon’s chest and hitting the sidewalk. A few drivers at the taxi rank outside the station jeered and laughed. As the girl tried to stand, Moon yanked her up. “What the hell, kid!” he snapped. “You blind?”
She stared from beneath a grey hood, red eyes blinking, her face white and scared. “Help me,” she said, looking back towards the alley from which she’d emerged. “Puh-please. He tried t-to…” She shook as she tried to speak.
Moon let her go and held his hands up. “I can’t help you.”
She tried to compose herself, swallowed and wiped her tears away. She wore a Fila track jacket over the hoody, popper pants and trainers. “He said my name,” she said. “He-he tried to…”
She didn’t look more than seventeen or eighteen, he thought, glancing toward the alley. Her face was hard and pinched, like she’d already seen more than her age entitled her to. He figured she was new in Provenance. He felt a flicker of annoyance that morphed into sympathy. “Who?”
The girl shook her head. “Lu-Lucas said to wait. He’s been gone for hours so I came out to look for him and this motherfucker tried to grab me.”
Moon looked up and down Hennepin, saw no one apart from the drivers outside the station. “Well, he’s gone,” he told her.
“You don’t know that.”
Moon shrugged and made to leave but the girl grabbed his arm.
“Please,” she said. “Just take me there.” She pointed south towards the huge, crescent-shaped brownstone on the corner of Ninth Street. Moon recognised the building. It had been a hotel once, the Orpheum, but it had been abandoned years ago. Something quickened inside him. It held memories for him, most of them bad. He had no business getting involved. The girl took his silence as a positive sign and set off down the street. Instinctively, he followed her.
A cobbled driveway cut back from the street and swept along the front of the six-storey gothic façade. Black railings lined the sidewalk, separating the basement level from the street. Steel panels covered the entrance and the basement windows were boarded up. The gates to the lower level were chained and padlocked. The girl stopped outside one gate, glanced back at Moon and squeezed through a gap in the railings. He watched her descend a stone stairwell to a boarded-up doorway. He forced himself through the gap and followed her down. She pulled the board loose from the doorway and led him into a clammy darkness that brought back old, half-forgotten fears.
He followed the girl along a passageway smelling of stale piss and other things he didn’t want to imagine. Soon, she led the way up to the ground floor. Orange streetlight leaked in through gaps in the boarded windows set high in the walls. The foyer was an ocean of debris, and rats moved through it like strange amphibians. The walls had been stripped of their fittings except for one large oil painting above the wood-panelled reception counter, a depiction of Orpheus looking anxiously back over his shoulder. Opposite, a wide, ornate staircase rose up towards the first floor.
“Who were you waiting for?” Moon asked.
“Lucas.”
“You staying here?”
She nodded and pointed to the stairs. “Up on the second floor. There’s others here too.”
It figured. The abandoned hotel had long been a home for junkies, dreamers and derelicts—desperate, dangerous people running from the past towards a future they’d never find. “He’s your boyfriend?”
“Yeah.”
“Where’d he go?”
She shrugged. “He was meeting somebody.”
He sensed her evasion. The boyfriend had probably tricked himself to some dude for drugs. A blowjob for a thirty minute dream. That was about the going rate in Smoketown, but he guessed she knew that already. His first couple of years in Provenance he’d pulled tricks to get high and dealt dope to other scavengers. They hung out in places like the Orpheum where cops and immigration authorities rarely ventured. Back then, the difference between Moon and his clients was he’d always believed that one day he’d make something of himself. “You know this fella who attacked you?”
She shook her head. Moon figured it was probably some predatory resident who’d been waiting to catch her alone. Occupational hazard. It wasn’t his life anymore. So why are you here, when you could be home watching a movie? The Killers, maybe. Seeing Swede mess up his life over Kitty Collins would make you feel better about your own.
He asked the girl to show him where she’d been staying. She led him up to the second floor and down a twisting corridor that led them to the centre of the building. At the end of the corridor, she opened the door to a small cramped room. A single mattress lay on the floor in the corner. The narrow window looked out on a dark courtyard filled with service pipes and air ducts. “There’s some other empty rooms,” the girl said. “But there’s always fuckers prowling, looking to rip you off or something. Nobody’s bothered us up here.”
“Why are you here?”
The question seemed to confuse her. “What d’ya mean?”
“It means if you got any sense, you’d get out and go back to wherever it is you came from.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
She pushed the hood back off her head. Her short, black hair was tied up in a ragged ponytail. “I got nowhere to go.” She lifted one corner of the mattress and pulled a small backpack from underneath. She reached inside and pulled out a small, clear bag of pills. “I got these. If you stay with me till Lucas comes, I’ll give you one.”
Moon stared at the yellow pills. Cheap Rev. He shook his head. She pushed one sleeve up and scratched her arm. “I’ll—I’ll suck you off then.”
“I’m not one of your tricks.”
She looked surprised. “Well, what do you want?”
Moon shook his head. He had no answer to that.
“Lucas says I won’t have to no more if I don’t want. He’s got a connection, y’know. Says our situation’s gonna improve.” She chewed on the nails of one hand. Moon knew he should go. As if sensing his intentions, the girl spoke up again. “Can you stay till he comes back?”
“Grab your stuff,” he said, walking out of the room, not waiting to see if she followed. Soon, he heard her footsteps traipsing along behind him. He glanced in through open doors and saw broken dreamers who stared with vacant eyes, as if he wasn’t really there. Some muttered what might have been greetings or made sounds that barely resembled words. Most had surrounded themselves with odd pieces of flotsam—broken televisions, dead cellphones, pages torn from magazines—mnemonics to remind them of what they had lost.
At the grand staircase, he climbed to the next floor, feeling what he imagined to be traces of the past. It had been six or seven years since he’d been up here. He’d been living here, a year or so after he came to Provenance, when he’d met a dealer called Drake. Drake had come to the Orpheum looking for him. He’d heard Moon was a striver, a kid with the right attitude. I could use someone like you, he told him. A few months later, he was done with selling his own body and peddling cheap drugs to dreamers. Drake had had other things in mind for
Moon.
As they climbed to the sixth floor, the building began to lose definition. The walls shimmered and the floor undulated. Moon grabbed the bannister with both hands, hearing music rise up from below. Peering over the edge he saw the darkness dissolving as odd forms came together and moved in rhythm, shadow dancers making intricate patterns on the walls as they rose towards him.
He hurried on, leading the girl down dark, labyrinthine passageways that criss-crossed the upper floor, trying to shut out the strange melodies that trailed him, welcoming him back like an old friend. Eventually, he found a door that opened onto a closet at the back of which a spiral staircase climbed up through the dead space inside the walls. His heart beat erratically as he climbed and emerged onto a small low-ceilinged landing and stumbled towards another door. He waited for the girl to catch up to him, and saw the anxiety etched into her face. “I used to stay here, a long time ago,” he said as he opened the door.
She hesitated in the passageway, reluctant to enter. He waited, listening for the music and its insinuating whispers but the passageway was silent except for their own breathing. After a few seconds, he went in and saw the heavy curtains hanging over the arched dormer window, an old dressing table against one wall and a bed with a dirty sheet pulled over the mattress. Little seemed to have changed since he had last been here. The mattress held the imprint of a body that might well have been his. He ran a hand over it, imagining a connection between its contours and what he used to dream. “You’ll be okay here.”
“What about Lucas?”
“You should try to get some sleep.”
“Can’t you stay?”
Moon felt the lure of dreams. No, he lied to himself. That’s not why you came here. “I—I have to go. You’ll be safe.”
She grabbed his arm. “Please,” she said. “Just—till I fall asleep.”
The Dream Operator Page 27