‘What’s wrong?’ asks Ruth.
‘I’m confused,’ I say. She pads over and puts her head on my knee. I can feel her fur brushing over the grazes and bruises but it doesn’t hurt. She looks up at me with big eyes and smiles. She doesn’t say anything, she doesn’t have to, I know what she wants. What she likes. I scratch behind her ears and she purrs, her eyes still on mine. As always, touching her acts almost as a sedative, calming me down as I smooth my flesh along her fur. Her purring gradually replaces the thumping in my head and my breathing begins to match her rhythm as if our bodies were becoming one. We sit like that for a while and eventually she breaks the silence.
‘Better?’ she asks quietly.
‘You know it is,’ I say. I hold her with both hands, my palms on her jowls while my thumbs rub her ears. I can feel sharp teeth against my wrists. One bite and she could kill me.
‘You’d better believe it, Jack,’ she says, playing the tough alley cat.
‘I’m seeing things, Ruth,’ I say and she asks what’s new about that. Of course she has a point. I’m sitting on a cold toilet seat in a prison cell wearing nothing but a pair of underpants and talking to a figment of my imagination. It does not look good, sanity-wise.
‘It’s getting to the stage where I’m finding it hard to tell whether or not I’m dreaming,’ I tell her. It’s not just a question of things appearing or my imagination playing tricks on me, that I can cope with. Hell, I’m used to it. It’s much, much more than that. Now I can’t even tell if I’m awake or dreaming. Damn! I thought I was going to be able to make it, I really thought I’d do it. And now I can feel it all slipping away.’
I stand up, forgetting she was there, and I knock her head with my knee and she yelps.
I pace up and down the cell, my hands bunched into fists and my breath coming in ragged gasps. ‘It’s not fair,’ I shout and there are pinpricks of tears in my eyes. It’s not fair because I was doing okay, I had nine down and one to go and then I’d be out of it for good, and now Aintrell and Max and the rest of them had been playing with my mind to such an extent that I’d lost what little grip I had on reality. They should have left me alone, they should have got a younger guy to plug into the discs and do their detective work instead of pushing that filth into my skull. And then they had to go and push me to the limit, they had to betray me, they knew what would happen but they thought they’d try it anyway. The light flickers and the walls of the cell seem to undulate and then harden into stone and there are torches on the wall and burning pitch crackles and drops to the floor and a figure in a red robe pulls a branding iron from the fire and inspects it. I can’t see his face, he keeps his head down as he moves towards me, keeping the hot metal low, and then he jabs it into my leg and it burns, God it burns so much I almost pass out and there’s the smell of burning flesh and the pain hits me and I scream and step back against the wall. A second figure in red grabs my left arm and pins it against the wall and slaps me across my face and there’s blood in my mouth. The other figure raises the branding iron and puts it inches away from my face and I can feel the heat on my skin and then he draws it back and aims it at my eye and I begin to scream again and then there’s a blur of movement and a snarl and Ruth springs across me and grabs his arm and bites and he drops it and it clatters to the floor but she doesn’t let go. She pulls him to the ground and I can see her jaws tighten and then she throws her head from side to side, ripping and tearing at his flesh.
I grab the figure next to me and throw him against the wall. His head jerks back and thuds against the stone and I grab his hood with both hands and pull it back. The gleaming smile of Louis Aintrell leers at me and the blood vessel in my head hurts and a red film drops over my eyes and I headbut him hard the way I’d hit Herbie, whenever that was. My forehead slams into his face but it doesn’t feel like cartilage, it’s as if I’m slamming my head into a wall and when I move my head back Aintrell has gone and there’s blood on the plastic wall and I slam my head against it again. And again. And again.
There’s a commotion outside the cell door and groping hands pull me away from the wall and there’s blood pouring down my chin and the fury is part of me now. There are three policemen, one on each side and a third with an airjet hypodermic loaded with God knows what and I point my finger at him and tell him to get away from me. ‘I’m a Dreamer,’ I scream at him. ‘I’m a Dreamer and I can make you vanish. I can make it as if you were never on this planet. Now get the hell away from me.’ And then my arms are grabbed and the thing is placed against the side of my neck and I hear a click and somewhere in the distance I hear Ruth calling my name. It is………..
……..daytime. Light filters weakly through the gap between hastily closed curtains and just manages to etch an elongated triangle of light against the far wall of my bedroom. There is a strong feline smell and when I roll my head to the left I see Ruth’s face, her eyes closed in sleep. I turn the other way and I see her back legs. She’s lying across the top of my head like a scarf, half on and off the pillows. There’s a crystal decanter of water on the bedside table and I reach over for it but my co-ordination is all shot and I fumble the stopper and it falls to the floor.
Ruth opens one eye and grunts and then Herbie appears at the doorway, a mug of coffee in his hand. He has a wad of sticking plaster across his nose and he has two black eyes as if he’s been without sleep for a week. He sits on the side of the bed like a concerned mother and asks me if I’m okay.
‘I think so,’ I say and he helps me sit up and gives me the mug. I reckon he looks a darn sight worse than me, but what can I say to him? I’m the one that hurt him. I wonder if he’d be sitting here if he didn’t depend on me for his livelihood, but I know that’s not fair because Herbie is a good enough minder to work with any Dreamer.
‘Water,’ I say, my mouth so dry that the word sounds furred. He puts the mug down and pours me a glass of water from the decanter and watches as I drink it. Ruth gets to her feet and pads down to the end of the bed and walks around in a tight circle before flopping down by my feet, her chin on her paws.
‘How did I get back here?’ I ask Herbie. I remember what happened in the cell, I remember the alley, and I remember the dungeon, but they are all so mixed up that I don’t know which actually happened and which was in my head. My neck hurts where the cop hit me and my forehead hurts where I butted the wall and I feel as if I’m bruised all over, but I’m well past the stage of knowing which is real and which isn’t.
‘We did a check of all the hospitals and police stations,’ he says. ‘It was obvious the way you were behaving that you’d end up in one or the other.’ He grinned ruefully and put his hand up to his plaster as if reassuring himself that it was still in place.
‘Sorry about that,’ I say. ‘Forget it,’ he says.
‘I didn’t know what I was doing,’ I say.
‘Forget it,’ he repeats, but I can’t. I can’t forget any of it. The dungeon. The cell. The girl. The pain. It’s all locked in and running round and round my synapses, sparking and hurting.
‘What happened to your clothes?’ he asks. ‘Did the police take them?’
‘No, I was mugged,’ I say. ‘At least, I think I was.’
‘They must have given you a real working over,’ he says, taking the empty glass from my shaking hand and replacing it on the table. ‘The company physician gave you the once over while you were sedated. Said most of it was superficial. Except for the burn.’
The word lances through my consciousness as if I’d been speared with a rapier. ‘Burn?’ I repeat.
‘On your leg. Somebody took a red hot iron to your leg. Don’t you remember?’
Yeah, I remember, but I can’t explain that to Herbie. Hell, I’m not even sure if I can explain it to myself. I pull back the quilt and sure enough, there is a bandage across the part of my leg where the red-robed figure had attacked me before Ruth savaged his arm. But that was in my imagination, so how come the burn? And what would have happened if
Ruth hadn’t come to my rescue? I could have died.
‘You’d better believe it,’ she says, and I do.
‘I guess they must have done it when they attacked me. I don’t remember much of the last day or so.’
Herbie studies me as I take a mouthful of the hot coffee and put the mug next to the empty glass. I pull the quilt back over my leg because I don’t want to think about it, not for a while anyway.
‘Did you sort things out with the police?’
‘Of course,’ he says, because that’s his job, he’s paid to make sure that my life proceeds as smoothly as possible between psi-discs. Herbie will be glad when I’ve done the last one and he can pick up his bonus and move on to the next Dreamer. ‘They won’t be pressing charges.’ He smiles. ‘Nor will I,’ he adds.
‘Sorry about that,’ I say, but deep inside I’m not sure if I am. Herbie is part of the Corporation, they’re his lords and masters, I’m just his temporary charge. And if the Corporation is trying to set me up, then maybe he’s part of it.
‘Herbie,’ I say, as the thought enters my head for the first time, ‘have you ever heard of a woman called Helen Gwynne? She works for the Moral Crusade.’
He shakes his head. ‘I don’t think so. Why?’
I realise then that maybe it was a mistake mentioning her name because Herbie isn’t stupid, and if he knows I’ve been talking to Helen he might think that I’m going to spill my guts to her.
‘I was talking to one of the other Dreamers a while back and he said she’d been asking him questions about sex and violence in the new discs, I was just wondering if you knew of her.’
‘I’m pretty sure not,’ he says. ‘How do you spell her surname?’
I spell it for him and he takes a gold pen from his pocket and writes it down on the back of one of his business cards. Hell, I realise with a jolt that she’s left her card in the next room, next to the whisky bottle, and if Herbie’s been wandering around he could easily have spotted it. But if he has already seen it than he wouldn’t go through the charade of asking to spell her name. Or maybe he’s just playing games with me, maybe he’s already guessed that she’s been here and that I’m lying to him. Hell, why didn’t I just keep my big mouth shut?
‘I’ll check it out,’ he says. ‘You’d better rest, the Doc said you should take it easy for a while.’
‘I’m fine,’ I tell him, but I lie back and make myself comfortable. Ruth gets up and walks to the top of the bed and stretches out, laying the full length of her body against mine.
‘I’ll let myself out,’ says Herbie. ‘Call me if you need anything.’ He stops at the bedroom door and looks at me quizzically. ‘Leif?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Are you sure you’re okay?’
‘We’re fine,’ says Ruth. ‘Get lost.’
‘I’m fine,’ I say. ‘Get lost.’
I wait until I hear the main door shut and then I slide out of bed and go into the main room and over to where the booze is but I can’t find Helen’s card there. Maybe the cleaner took it. Or maybe Herbie did. Hell. I ask the phone to get Helen at home but there’s no record of a home phone number for her and there’s no answer from the Moral Crusade’s office.
‘What time is it?’ I ask the phone and it tells me its almost six so I guess they’ve closed for the day. I hadn’t realised it was so late. In fact I don’t even know what day of the week it is. I walk over to the window that runs the length of the room and look down on the city below. The sun is beginning to redden and it’ll soon be ducking down behind the horizon, fading like last year’s fashions. Then it’ll be night. A small knot forms in my stomach in anticipation of the dreams that I know will come.
Ruth pads up behind me and rears up on her back legs, her front paws on my stomach, claws withdrawn so she won’t hurt me. She rubs her whiskers against my bare flesh. They tickle.
‘They don’t,’ she says.
‘They do,’ I insist, and stroke her neck.
‘Can I have some milk?’ she purrs and drops back to the floor, shifting her weight from leg to leg, her tongue licking her upper lip.
I hold out my cupped hand and imagine it full of cold, frothy milk and she laps it up with relish. She finishes every drop and then sits down and cleans her face with her left paw, using it like a damp flannel.
‘Ruth?’ I say and she looks up.
‘What?’
‘How did you know they were going to run that psi-disc right to the end?’
‘I heard them talking,’ she says, going back to the serious business of washing her whiskers. I pat her on the head.
‘I’m glad you did,’ I say.
‘Me too,’ she purrs.
‘Who was talking?’ I ask her. The doorbell rings before she can answer and I walk over to the television monitor by the door. It’s Helen Gwynne.
‘Helen?’ I say, confused because I can’t think why she’s here.
‘I heard you’d been hurt,’ she says.
‘Can I come up?’
‘Of course,’ I answer and tell the computer to open the security door. While she makes her way up to my floor I go back into the bedroom and pick a thick, white towelling bathrobe from one of the wardrobes and check myself in the bathroom mirror. I look okay. No worse than usual. I’m cleaning my teeth when the doorbell rings again and I rinse out my mouth and get to the door on the second ring.
She looks stunning in a crisp white blouse under a black jacket with padded shoulders and a straight black skirt that ends just below her knees that is split up at the back so that I can see halfway up her thighs as she walks past me into the room. She’s carrying a white leather handbag with a gold clasp. There’s a small black bow in the back of her hair, the sort of decoration you’d expect to see on a schoolgirl. She’s wearing black high heels and stockings and she walks as if she knows I’m watching her.
‘Of course she knows you’re watching her, your eyes are practically out of their sockets,’ says Ruth. She goes and sits down by the stereo and sulks.
Helen turns to look at me with one eyebrow raised archly. ‘It’s a bit early to be in bed isn’t it,’ she says with a smile. Her lipstick and nail varnish are matching again, this time a glossy purple, the colour of a four-day old bruise. She sits down and there’s the whisper of silk brushing against silk and the way her breasts move under the blouse suggests that she isn’t wearing a bra.
‘I’m not feeling so hot,’ I say. ‘Can I get you a drink?’
She nods and says she wants a gin and tonic and I try to remember if that was what she drank last time she was in the flat. I don’t think it was, but I’m not sure.
‘You don’t look as if you’ve been mugged,’ she says as I fix her the drink.
The hairs go up on the back of my neck because I can’t figure out how she knew what had happened to me but I keep my voice steady.
‘You should see under the robe,’ I joke and hand her the glass. I’m surprised at how steady my hand is. One of her nails touches my flesh as she takes the drink and it feels like a cat’s claw. She raises it slowly to her lips and as she drinks I hear her voice in my head saying that seeing under the robe is exactly what she wants to do. I’m suddenly aware of the texture of the towelling robe against my groin and I flash back to the dungeon and to the robe I was wearing there and the flames and the manacles and the girl. The room dips in and out of focus and the carpet ripples and is replaced by the stone floor of the torture cell and I look at Helen and she moistens her lips and says ‘please.’
‘Sorry?’ Reality snaps back with an audible click in my ears.
‘Can I have some more ice, please?’
‘Of course.’ I take the glass and fill it with more cubes from the bar. ‘How did you know I’d been attacked?’ I ask her. Part of me is hoping that she’ll say it was Herbie because then I’ll know she’s lying but relief washes over me like a wave when she looks me straight in the eye and says it was a contact on the police, someone sympathetic to the aims of
the Moral Crusade.
‘He rang to say that a Dreamer had been pulled in and thought that it might be useful ammunition for us to use against the Corporation,’ she says. ‘He didn’t have your best interests at heart, I’m afraid.’
‘Few people do these days,’ I say.
She looks concerned. ‘Do you want to tell me about it?’ she says.
‘I wouldn’t,’ says Ruth.
I help myself to a 15-year-old Kumagai malt and swirl around the crystal tumbler. ‘I’m not sure,’ I say.
She pats the sofa next to her as if she was calling a small child to sit. I go, meek as a lamb. ‘To the slaughter,’ hisses Ruth and I throw her a reproving look. She wrinkles her nose and shakes her head. I ignore her.
Helen slips off her shoes and curls her right leg underneath herself, one arm resting along the back of the sofa, close to my neck. She sips her drink, leaving lipstick on the edge of the glass. Did that happen last time she was here? Did I clean the glass afterwards? I can’t remember. I just can’t remember. She puts the glass down on the table beside the sofa and it clinks against the wood.
‘Did the police hurt you?’ she asked.
‘No, it wasn’t the police,’ I say. ‘I was mugged.’
‘Mugged?’
‘Yeah, in an alley. They took my clothes.’
She throws back her head and laughs, her eyes sparkling.
‘It wasn’t funny,’ I say, but she looks so good when she laughs that I find it impossible to take offense.
‘It’s just that, well, I know things are bad out there but I can’t imagine anyone wanting to steal your clothes.’
She sees the way my face falls again and hurriedly adds ‘not that there’s anything wrong with your clothes.’
Dreamer's Cat: a sci-fi murder mystery with a killer twist Page 17