by Jack Gerson
Receded, but was not forgotten. Strange how every other dream was forgotten easily and naturally. Memory dissolved in the mind. But not this dream. Not even the first time he had dreamt it. Then it had remained clear, pristine, and horrible.
'I'm wide awake now,' he said, partly to himself, partly to the recumbent form beside him.
The reply was a seductive moan, denoting interest.
'But not energetic,' he added quickly with a wry smile. You just go back to sleep.'
Julia gave a mock pout. 'I'll forgive you this time but don't make it a habit.'
She turned away from him and curled up in the foetal position. She would be asleep again quickly, he thought, and she understands, thank God. Normally they would have made love, at first in that slow, gentle, half-awake fashion of lovers newly aroused from sleep. Gradually they would have responded to each other's passion with the rising excitement born of mutual delight..
But now, Tom thought, mornings were never normal after the dream. And for two months now it seemed he had dreamt the same dream every third or fourth night. Each time it drained and exhausted him both mentally and physically.
After five years of what he believed to be a good marriage there was now this disruption. It wasn't simply a shortlived reaction on waking. Some part of it stayed with him throughout the day; a trace of memory; a fragment of fear.
On the second occasion after the dream he had been uncertain as to whether the dream itself had actually recurred or whether he had merely dreamt the feeling of recurrence. He had then related it to Julia in some detail, a fact in itself surprising as he generally retained so little of his dreams. However as it recurred again and again he knew he was caught in some cyclic nightmare. And it was a nightmare that never changed.
Julia, still curled up, was breathing heavily. She was asleep. Tom pulled back the bedclothes gently and eased himself out of bed. He padded softly out of the bedroom, through the tiny hall and into the kitchenette. He poured himself a glass of milk from a bottle in the refrigerator and padded out through the hall into the lounge of the flat.
He pulled back the curtains. Outside, a grey dawn was breaking in the sky, a dawn that was fighting against rain clouds that were producing a steady drizzle, patterning the windows with tiny rain drops, creating narrow deltas down the glass.
The street below reflected yellow light on its shining pavements. Tom usually took some pleasure in the neat neo-Georgian lines of the buildings in the narrow Pimlico street; but this morning the weather matched his depression and the street seemed mean, almost ugly.
He came away from the windows and, switching on the electric fire, sat in front of it, the growing heat relaxing him. A few gulps of the ice cold milk took the sourness from his mouth.
He leaned back into the armchair. Time to think about what was happening to him. Up until the time of the dream he had considered himself a balanced, healthy adult. Prime of life, something like that. No serious illnesses, no psychological problems, nothing to disturb a reasonably healthy enjoyment of a reasonably good life. Perhaps an element of smugness had crept in; or perhaps the dream had some physiological cause, a harbinger of a latent illness, an initial symptom.
The heat from the fire crept over him. He felt drowsy. He had a moment of panic when he thought he might be slipping back into the dream. But it didn't usually happen like that. Once it was over, it was over for the night. He allowed the drowsiness to creep over him.
'Come on! Breakfast's on the table!' Julia's voice broke into his sleep. He sat up scratching his head.
'Must have dozed off,' he murmured by way of explanation.
Julia smiled down at him. She was dressed in what she called her Sunday lounging gear, an old pair of plum coloured slacks and a heavy polo-necked sweater.
'Very flattering. You have to get out of bed to go to sleep. Come on now. Bacon and eggs on the table. Don't let it get cold.'
Tom put on his dressing gown and sat at the small table in the corner of the living room. He ate in silence at first, deep in thought. The dream, the damn dream, he couldn't seem to get it out of his mind.
Julia smiled quizzically across the table. 'Where are you now?'
Tom looked up. 'Whales,' he said.
'Whales?'
Her surprise amused him. 'Whales. With an "h". Remember Moby Dick?'
Julia raised her eyebrows in mock disdain. 'Could I ever forget? What are you on about?'
'In Moby Dick, Melville writes about whiteness,' he explained. 'The absence of colour. The terror of whiteness.'
'Go on,' said Julia, pouring herself another cup of tea.
'The dream. Everything's white.'
He held out his cup. She poured in silence. He waited for another question. None came.
'Well, why shouldn't I have a recurring dream in which everything's white?'
'Reaction against your drab colourless life?'
'Ever thought about recurring dreams?' Tom pressed on. He found talking was relaxing him again. 'Do they really recur? Or do we dream they recur?'
'Mirrors reflecting other mirrors?'
'Something like that.'
'What happens in the room?'
'Same as before. I still have the same feeling of being absolutely powerless against something that terrifies me.'
She sipped her tea. He noticed again how small and delicate her hands were. He'd noticed them the first time he had gone out with her. Six years since they had first met. A year later they'd married. Small delicate hands.
She broke the silence. 'Like what terrifies you? You never really define it, Tom.'
'A bloody awful picture for one thing. Crazy unnatural perspectives. Battlements and pillars that are wrong somehow. And a feeling that behind the pillars there are creatures. Things not... not human.'
He felt himself grow tense again. Too detailed a description was close to seeing again; close to being in the dream again.
Julia stared at him evenly across the table. 'You've been working too hard.'
'Maybe,' he replied, thinking of the new series he was about to start on. Six new feature articles. The best feature writer in the business today in his own field. What was that field? Broad but not all embracing. Occasionally he wrote political pieces. More often he wrote about scandals, injustices, articles with insight into the darker regions of human behaviour. He was in the darkest region of all now. Or the craziest, depending on your point of view.
'Paranormal Phenomena and the Occult Today.' By Tom Crane. Six articles written, six more to be researched and then written. It had been the Features Editor's idea. Or had it. One of them had suggested it to the other over a drink in the Cheshire Cheese over a year ago. He should never have taken it on. It wasn't as if he'd been desperate for the money, large sum though it was. He was one of the highest paid freelances in Fleet Street; and there was plenty of work on offer. Hastings of the Mirror had wanted him to go to New York to do a series on corruption in the aircraft industry. He'd turned it down.
He'd told Hastings it was an old story and had been well covered. But so had 'Paranormal Phenomena and the Occult'. It was a subject covered regularly by the more sensational Sunday papers. Perhaps he'd kidded himself this would be different. Nothing superficial. Everything examined in detail, no sensationalism for its own sake. And the money was good; and it was a quality paper.
'If you've been working too hard you should see a doctor, Tom.' Julia broke into his thoughts. 'I mean it. I don't like the idea of you being ill.'
'No intention of being ill. Honest. Maybe I'm just worried about the follow-up series. Could be a lot harder graft than the first one. Six articles covering the more obvious, the better known. The next six, I'll really be digging for.'
He bit into a piece of toast, thinking of nights spent in so-called haunted houses; evenings in strange dusty rooms in semi-detached bungalows listening to self-professed mediums performing their mild conjuring tricks. Not that everything had been deception. A water-diviner in Devon had sho
wn some remarkable and inexplicable talents; a rather jolly middle-aged lady in Watford had told him things about his past life she could not have known; a down-to-earth bank manager in Northampton had moved small objects across a table without visible means of contact.
There had of course been the way-out characters. A thin young man in Chelsea, who proclaimed himself a white witch, had shown a considerable knowledge of certain esoteric writings and also an even more considerable appetite for publicity. An attractive blonde in Liverpool claimed magical powers and attempted to demonstrate some earthier aspects of these powers.
Every now and then, however, as with the middle-aged lady in Watford, he had come across the inexplicable; the genuine mystery.
Julia broke into his thoughts, 'You're away again. The dream?'
He looked up. 'No. Work. The next series. Speaking of which..?'
He turned and looked around the room.
'All right, all right,' Julia responded, rising.
She crossed to the sofa, lifted one of the large soft cushions and produced from underneath, the large bulk that was the bundle of Sunday newspapers.
'You will hide them,' Tom said, amused. 'Why do you do it?'
'In the vague hope,' she replied, 'that one Sunday you'll not miss them and actually have a full-length conversation with me before we finish breakfast.'
She dumped the bundle of papers on the table beside him and sat down again.
'After five years you want me to change?' Tom asked, as he flipped the top paper open. It was the paper that carried the first story of the series. He pulled the supplement out and stared down at a picture of himself.
Julia made a face. 'Why are they still using that ghastly photograph of you? Perhaps they think it fits in with the subject. Ghosts and ghouls and things that go bump in the night.'
Tom studied his photograph. 'I rather like it. Makes me look distinguished.'
'Makes you look old.'
'Thanks very much,' Tom looked up and raised an eyebrow in pretend scorn.
He turned back to the newspaper. He blinked. He was staring at a pure white page. Nothing but the glare of whiteness. He tried to jerk his head away, but his eyes were riveted to the white oblong in front of him. He forced his hand up across his eyes and pressed his eyelids shut.
Julia was watching him. 'Something wrong, darling?'
He opened his eyes. He was still staring at the page. His photograph stared back at him. Below it neat columns of newsprint covered the page and, next to the photograph was the heavy black type of his title to the article.
He blinked again and shook his head. In front of him everything was as it should be. But a second before, he knew it had been different. Nothing. A blank page. The whiteness. Or was it some momentary aberration, a trick of the light, or of his eyes?
'Think I need my eyes tested.'
Julia relaxed. 'Another cup of tea?'
'Please,' he replied and started to read his own article.
Julia gave a slight shrug and testing the teapot and finding it wanting she took it into the kitchen.
He had been pleased with the opening article of the series when he had written it and now, reading it again he felt even more pleased. The prose was lucid, the exposition simple. He had decided those months ago to begin with the proposition that since many people were deserting the churches, giving up religions they had been born into, they needed something else to take the place of those religions. They had turned to science and humanism. But science had proved a threat, a menace to society as it produced bigger bombs and the possibility of nightmare diseases evolved in laboratories; more than possibility, the actual creation of viruses and bacteria, the only function and purpose of which was to destroy.
Humanism provided no satisfactory answers or alibis that might give hope or purpose to lives that lacked both. Humanism, too, lacked the very mysteries that glamorised hope; those mysteries that religions had once used to hold in thrall their disciples.
This then was Tom's reasoning; that they had turned to other mysteries, to esoteric cults and beliefs that had no distinct answers but the excitement and glamour of the unknown.
He read on, feeling the old satisfaction, a repetition of the feeling he had first experienced years ago when his first feature article had appeared in print. It was a good feeling, one he never lost despite the pervading cynicism of his cynical profession.
Julia came into the room carrying the refilled teapot. She poured him another cup of tea and received from him no indication that he was even aware of her return.
'It's a nice morning,' she said. Still no response. He went on reading.
'Makes a change,' she went on, teeth clenched.
'Mmm,' he murmured by way of reply.
She sighed. 'Ah, what it is to be married to a master of words.'
Tom reached the foot of the page, gave a satisfied smile and pushed the paper aside.
'Now what shall we talk about?'
Julia shrugged. 'Anything special for today?'
'It's Sunday. Day of rest. Catch up on lost sleep through nightmare action.'
'We could go to my mother's. A thimble of sherry and she does the cooking.'
Tom gave a slight grimace. 'Much as I adore your mother, I can't make it.'
'Why not?'
'I have an assignation in Bethnal Green.'
Her eyebrows rose. 'With whom?'
'Someone who shaves his head and uses ambergris as aftershave.'
Her eyebrows rose even further. 'Sounds fascinating. Can I come?'
'Rather you didn't. Work, darling. And women unsettle him.'
'There's hope for him yet, then. Bit worried about you though,' Julia said, starting to stack the breakfast dishes.
Tom grinned and rose.
'Play your cards right and you might unsettle me quicker than you think. But for now, I have to get dressed.'
'Who is this fascinating gentleman anyway?'
Tom turned at the door, still grinning.
'He used to be a black magician, so they say. Quite genuine too according to the best authorities.'
'You just be careful who you keep company with, my lad,' replied Julia, only partially joking.
'Oh, I will. They say he's retired now. If black magicians can actually retire.'
TWO
Tom Crane was one of a large and ever-increasing minority, the London Scot. Born in Ayrshire, he had been sent at the age of twelve to a minor public school which had succeeded in eradicating his natural accent and done little else for him. His father, a chartered accountant, had once cherished literary aspirations and while these had later been abandoned, had left a legacy of a house full of books. Thus Tom's real education had been acquired during the holidays in his father's library.
He had been a lonely boy, his younger brother being separated from him by nine years. It was only at university in Edinburgh that he had discovered the benefits and pleasures of deep intense friendships which lasted through the university years and generally died after graduation.
With a good degree in English, Tom Crane then obtained a job with a local newspaper in Ayr as a junior reporter. He was a bad reporter of news but had an eye and flair for subjects worthy of feature articles. A few of these crept into the national dailies and at the age of twenty-five he went to London to work in Fleet Street with one of the more outrageous tabloids. He was a square peg in a round hole and after two years left the paper to freelance.
His friends and former colleagues reckoned he would starve within six months but he surprised them and himself by prospering. A flow of magazine articles for the small politically orientated publications led to commissions with the better-class nationals. He became an expert on the social scene in politics and big business, and a number of articles on various dubious machinations on the Stock Exchange were published in book form. It was a critical success.
Crane then found himself in demand. He was talked of as a budding British John Gunther, even another James Cameron. Hi
s income increased. This he welcomed, as his parents' death in a car accident left him responsible for supporting and educating his younger brother. Then, during his late twenties, at a party in Chelsea he had met Julia Northcote, a twenty-four-year-old computer analyst.
An attractive girl with a sense of humour that matched his own, Julia had allowed herself to be courted for three months before moving into his tiny flat in St John's Wood. Nine months later she had insisted on their moving to their present spacious flat in Pimlico and they had been quietly married at Caxton Hall Registry Office. The marriage, Crane reckoned, had been a success. He had discovered Julia was, at times, a rather secretive person. She talked little of her work and became irritated if he questioned her about it. To off-set that however he could say she was tolerant of his quiet, silent moods, a hangover from the lonely childhood. But apart from these very minor irritations their concern and passion for each other had increased over the years.
Now, at the age of thirty-two he believed they were a reasonably well-adjusted couple. They had a comfortable life, a circle of good friends, mostly from the world of journalism, and an income which was the envy of many of his erstwhile colleagues.
It was still raining as he drove past Victoria Station. He thought with a wry smile, he ought to be a contented man. He told himself he was contented. If it wasn't for that damned dream...
Twenty minutes later he was driving his Jaguar through the Sunday ghost town that was the City of London. Crane had an affection for the square mile that was the old city, its narrow streets shadowed by the formidable buildings that housed the great finance houses of the world. His affection was not sentimental. He owed his first success to the City and some of its less salubrious citizens. From that early series of articles five former City businessmen had been detained for varying periods at Her Majesty's pleasure.
Now, on Sunday, the City was dead : a shell occupied only by watchmen, caretakers and security men, a different place on the seventh day when God and the financial world rested.
The pavements came to life again as Crane drove into Floodgate High Street. Sunday was just another work day to the citizens of the East End.