‘They took my wallet as well,’ I say. ‘How many of them were there?’
‘Three,’ I say. ‘Maybe four. I can’t remember.’ It’s true, I can’t. I can’t remember how many there were, what they looked like, what it felt like when they hit me. It was fading like an uneventful dream and if it wasn’t for the bruises I might have believed that it had all been in my imagination. Except that I had a burn on my leg that could only have come from the red-robed figure in the torture cell and that, surely, had been confined to my dreams. A thought flashes across my crowded, rumpled mind and it scares me. Maybe the torture cell is real and the alley where I was mugged is in the wildlands of my imagination. I shiver and she asks me if I’m all right. I take a mouthful of whisky and wince as it bites into a cut inside my cheek. It makes my eyes water and I hope that she doesn’t think I’m crying. She reaches over and touches my shoulder.
‘It’s been one hell of a day,’ I say.
‘Tell me,’ she says.
‘Didn’t your policeman friend tell you?’
‘He said that you’d been held in a cell.’
‘And?’
‘Well, yes he did say that you’d been in a fight or something at the Corporation.’
‘A fight, yeah, that’ll be right.’
‘Tell me what happened.’
‘How’s your drink?’
‘Fine,’ she says with a smile. ‘Don’t change the subject.’
‘She’s got you summed up, hasn’t she,’ asks Ruth, but I ignore her. She walks stiff legged up to my side of the sofa and sits down heavily on the floor with a sigh as if she had the cares of the world on her shoulders. I reach down and ruffle her ears and she purrs.
‘You remember what you were saying about violent psi-discs, about the Corporation wanting to get the law changed?’
She nods and clicks her handbag open and ferrets out a packet of cigarettes and her lighter. She licks her lips before slipping in the pure white cylinder and the end smears with lipstick as she lights it with a chunky silver lighter. Last time she had a gold one, didn’t she? A slim gold one? She closes her eyes as she tosses her head back and inhales and then she looks at me. ‘I remember.’
‘Three Dreamers have died laying them down. That’s three of our Dreamers. Others have died at other companies. There’s something weird going on, something I don’t understand.’
‘But what does that have to do with your fight?’
‘The Corporation asked me to plug into them, to find out what happened. They were violent, very, very violent. And they seemed to effect me more than other psi-discs have ever done.’
‘In what way?’ She crosses and uncrosses her legs.
‘You’re staring,’ says Ruth. She’s right.
‘When I came out of them I was in a state of excitement, it was as if what happened in the disc was more real than reality, if you see what I mean. It was as if real life was a disappointment, as if my subconscious wanted to go back into the dream.’
‘Or try to act out the dream in real life?’
She understands. I can see it in her eyes. She sits there with her back straight, one arm holding the cigarette a few inches from her mouth, lips slightly pursed, the other resting on the back of the sofa slowly caressing the black leather.
‘Yeah,’ I answer. ‘It spilled over, the emotions, the desires, everything. Like I was possessed. God, if they affect me like that then what will they do to…..’
‘To ordinary people?’ She makes it seem like a term of abuse.
‘Yeah, to ordinary people.’ I sip my drink and feel the smooth malt flow down my throat and spread warmly across my stomach. The Japanese malts are worth paying the extra for. That’s what the ads say, and they’re right. My mind is beginning to feel numb and I wonder if the doctor has given me a painkiller and if it was reacting to the alcohol. There is a slight buzzing in my ears and my shoulders ache.
‘That’s why we must protect them,’ she says. ‘That’s why the Moral Crusade must stand up to the Corporation, and make sure that the discs are kept for those who can handle them.’
That jolts me a bit because I can’t imagine anyone being able to handle the discs. They were so strong, the images so vivid, that I was sure that repeated exposure would drive anyone over the edge.
‘What was so bad about the third disc?’ she says.
‘There was no plot to it, none that I could follow anyway. There was no dialogue, no characterisation. Nothing.’
‘Nothing? You mean it was blank?’
‘No, not blank. Just images, violent images. Torture, pain, for no apparent reason.’
‘Of a sexual nature?’ she says quietly.
‘Yeah, against a girl. A young girl.’
‘How young?’ she says. She looks tense, her eyes are wide open now, and I can hear her breathing. Or maybe it’s Ruth.
‘You wish, Jack,’ she says.
‘Fifteen,’ I say, ‘maybe younger.’
‘And who was hurting her?’
‘Men. A group of men.’
‘What did they look like?’
I want to tell her how I was plugged into the disc for too long, how the technicians at the studio had tried to run me right through to the end, how the robed figures kept appearing in my mind, but she keeps asking for details, descriptions, feelings.
‘They were wearing robes. So was I.’
She turns away from me to stub her cigarette out.
‘Tell me what happened. Right from the start,’ she says and then she turns back to face me and crosses her arms around her chest as if it was cold and she is hugging herself for warmth. The movement pushes her breasts upward and outward, emphasizing her cleavage.
‘You’re staring,’ Ruth says again. She’s right. Again.
The lights in the room flicker, twice, and the effect is like torchlight and I’m looking at her lips, her purple bruised lips, and she says ‘please’ and so I tell her. From the start. From the moment I see the parade of robed figures to the end, to the bit where the girl is helpless before me and I’m standing there with the branding iron in my hand and she is pushing herself back onto me. I tell her everything, as if it had been my dream, going over every detail, every emotion, building the story layer by layer, the sounds, the smells, the textures, pacing it subtly, taking her through it as if she had been there.
Several times she crosses and recrosses her legs and I am distracted by the sound of silk and the sight of the white skin of her thighs but I keep the story going. She keeps hugging herself and when I get to the torture cell she begins slowly rocking backwards and forwards, her eyes never leaving mine. My voice now sounds as if it is coming from outside my body, as if the words are being spoken by some unseen narrator. I begin to get caught up in the story as I tell it, and then I get past that stage and it’s as if the words are going straight into my subconscious without going though my ears. My hands start to tremble and I feel whisky slosh out of the glass so I lean to the side and put it on the carpet, still watching her, no longer aware that I’m still talking. It’s as is we are both there in the chamber, watching the girl being bound, watching her being hurt. My hand is wet with whisky and I raise it to my mouth and I lick it without thinking and her eyes are on my hand and she licks her lips.
I can hear her breathing and my head is pulsing in and out in time with my heart and she moves forward in a rush, her lips banging against my teeth, her breasts crushed to my chest. She pulls the bathrobe down off my shoulders and I feel her nails bite into my back and start to scratch as her tongue invades my mouth. She’s moaning and pulling me back onto the couch, down on top of her, her mouth never leaving mine, her eyes tightly closed. She bucks her hips and slips her legs either side of mine and brings them up high and crosses her ankles, squeezing me tight. There’s the taste of blood in my mouth and I realise she’s bitten my lip and I try to pull away but she grips me tighter and kisses me harder, sucking the breath from me. Sucking the blood from me. She begins to draw
her nails slowly across my back, hard, so hard that I try to cry out and ask her to stop but she kisses me harder and my head is spinning. Her nails cut into my flesh and I feel blood there and then she throws back her head and looks at me with wide eyes, still scratching and when I cry out in pain she laughs and grips me harder with her legs. There is blood on her lips. My blood, bright red against her dark lipstick.
‘Do you want me to stop?’ she says and I want to say yes but I can’t, the desire is too strong, too overwhelming and I force my mouth onto hers and kiss her with all my strength. I feel her legs relax and then she starts pushing the robe down and I lift myself up to help her. She gets it down to my waist and then pulls her legs up and uses her feet to push it off completely. I feel her silk stockings scratching against my naked skin. She turns her head away to escape my mouth and presses her cheek against mine and bites my earlobe, hard enough to make me wince, and then she whispers in my ear. ‘Undress me,’ she says.
I lift myself up on one elbow and with the other begin to undo the buttons on her blouse but she grabs my wrist and says ‘no, not so gentle. Rip them off me.’
The lights flicker again and we’re not on the sofa we’re lying on a stone floor strewn with musty hay and there is water dripping down the walls and somewhere behind me is movement, somebody watching, and then her hand moves up to my chest and she slowly scrapes her nails down to my stomach, the pain startling and exciting me and then I grab the material of her blouse and wrench and twist it and the buttons pop off one by one like coals crackling on a fire and then it tears. I move my head down to kiss her breasts and at the same time I tear her skirt off and throw it one side as I hear the rattle of chains and the sound of a door being locked. ‘Harder,’ she says. ‘Bite me, bite,’ she moans and I do as she says, clamping my teeth down hard on the flesh and she screams and her legs tighten around my waist again and she forces her hips up against me, grinding hard. I move my hand down between her legs and I’m not surprised to find she isn’t wearing briefs, just the stockings, and she’s so wet, so very wet. She thrusts her hands up against my shoulders and forces me up off her, panting with exertion, and I see red bite marks on her left breast as it rises and falls.
‘Wait,’ she whispers, and pulls her legs up and turns onto her side and then onto her front. She looks over her shoulder at me and smiles and then draws her knees up, raising her backside and opening her legs and I hear the sound of metal being pushed into burning coals and somewhere in the distance a deep, sinister chant like some unholy choir and she pushes herself back onto me and says she wants me to hurt her and I don’t understand and I tell her I don’t know how to, I don’t know what to do, and she laughs. ‘I’ll show you,’ she says. I grip her around the waist and I scratch my nails into her soft flesh and I let her show me. It is………
………night. I’m in bed and its dark outside but the curtains are slightly open and there’s enough moonlight coming in for me to see that I’m in my own room looking up at the silk canopy. My head is throbbing and so is the burn mark on my leg but there are new pains too, an ache in my shoulder and what seem to be bite marks on my arms and my back feels as if it’s been scratched with a rake. I’m naked and lying on top of the quilt and I’m alone. My head feels heavy and it’s an effort to keep my eyes open and I want to fold back into sleep but something forces me to sit up and look around the room. Helen isn’t there. For some reason it’s vitally important that I find her. A picture of her flashes through my mind, Helen lying on her front, her back covered in blood, her eyes blank and staring, one arm grotesquely twisted under her body. The image fades every bit as quickly as it arrives but in the back of my mind I have a terrible feeling of guilt and an overwhelming impression that she is dead.
I’m not sure if I’m awake or asleep, I can feel the bites and bruises and the burn but I can’t feel my feet as I stand on the thick pile carpet and walk to the door. There’s the smell of something burning, like meat cooking or scorched hair, and I head towards the kitchen. The walls seem to ripple as I walk and I can hear deep, baritone voices singing and the smell gets stronger and I close my eyes and rub them and I swallow hard but nothing clears my head.
The closer I get to the kitchen the longer each step seems to take until I’m standing there looking in. I go to run my hands through my hair but all I feel is bare skin and a slight stubble.
It’s all white units and gleaming appliances and looks more like a place to do open heart surgery than to prepare a meal. Helen is there, kneeling at the side of the massive German fridge, her back to me. There are deep welts running vertically down her skin from just below her neck to the base of her spine, not bleeding but bright red and raised. The light from the open fridge shines through her golden hair and makes her shoulders shine. There is a carton of milk in her right hand and she is holding the fridge door with her left and she is murmuring softly. There is a white china saucer on the floor, half full of milk. Ruth is lapping at it. She has her back to me and I see her tail twitch with pleasure as she drinks.
Neither of them see me and I back away quietly, the singing in my ears getting louder, and I keep putting my hand up against the wall to steady myself as I grope my way back to the bedroom. I fall onto the bed and sleep wraps itself around me like a shroud. A voice that sounds like Ruth whispers in my ear ‘you’re dreaming, you’re dreaming’ and then it’s…………
……….daytime. I’m curled up on my side with the quilt wrapped around me with my knees up against my chest and the first thing I see when I open my eyes are my clothes hanging on the back of a chair. I don’t remember putting them there. I can hear deep, throaty breathing and feel warm air on my neck and I say ‘Helen?’ and turn around but she’s not there, it’s just Ruth.
‘Whaddya mean, just Ruth?’ she says accusingly, one eye open, the other squashed closed against a pillow.
I stumble out of bed and into the shower and tell it I want it cold and hard and I inspect my battered body as I wash. The bandage has gone but the burn is still there on my leg and so are the bruises but as I twist around and check my back in the mirror I can see that the scratches have gone. Or maybe they were never there in the first place.
I tell the phone to get Herbie on the line. He sounds sleepy and tells me that it’s six o’clock in the morning.
‘I want to do it today,’ I say and I can practically hear his jaw drop. ‘Today,’ I repeat, just in case he doesn’t understand. He does.
‘Are you sure?’ he says, but he knows that it’s not something I’d joke about. It’s my call, we do it when I’m ready, anytime of day or night.
‘I’m sure,’ I say.
‘But there’s no storyboard,’ he says. He also knows that there’s nothing in the contract that says I have to produce a storyboard before laying down a psi-disc. It’s become the norm, and it’s sometimes useful to get your thoughts in order before you go into the studio and the Corporation likes it because it gives them a measure of creative control and gives the marketing department a head start, but again it’s my call and I tell Herbie that I’ll be doing it unscripted.
‘When?’ he says, starting to sound more awake.
‘One hour,’ I say.
‘Are you sure?’ he says again and I ignore him.
‘Just be there at seven,’ I say. ‘And send a car.’ I cut the connection before he can answer. An hour might not seem like much notice but the studios are manned 24 hours a day and there isn’t that much preparation to do, and almost all of it is in the head of the Dreamer.
I begin to get my head straight as I wash. Straight is a good word for it. I try to concentrate my thoughts into a single mass, and I shape the mass into a train, one of the old type locomotives, steam belching from a squat chimney, big wheels grinding around and pistons hissing and belching. I fill my head with the image, excluding everything else. The train is on tracks which stretch to the horizon in a dead straight line, unbroken and unbending. I force everything else from my mind, the pain, the bu
rn, the headache.
‘And me?’ says Ruth and I make the train sound a long, shrieking whistle to block her out, too. There’s going to be no walk around the lake before this one, no time for stray thoughts to move around my head, just the train, the black, steaming, roaring train, racing towards the skyline, unstoppable. I don’t eat anything and I don’t drink anything, and I don’t allow myself to put any thought into choosing what to wear, I just grab the first things that come to hand: a leather jacket by some fancy Italian designer, a pair of faded blue jeans and a denim shirt.
While I’m waiting for the limo I pace up and down between the bedroom door and the window, my face set like stone and my mind filled with the train. When the bedroom clock says its time I go down and pace outside the building. The car arrives and Herbie is in the back. He says hello and I nod but I don’t reply, I just get in and sit next to him, my hands gripping my knees tightly. My lips are clamped together and I can feel the place where Helen bit me last night and I block that out and concentrate on the train. There are carriages behind the train, half a dozen, painted royal blue with gilt trim and windows of black glass so that I can’t see inside.
Herbie tries to talk to me but I ignore him as we pull away and into the early morning traffic. He’s seen me tense before, but never like this, and I know he’s concerned but there’s nothing I can do to make him feel any easier. If I open my mind to him I open it to everything else so I just keep thinking about the carriages, the steel wheels spinning around and clicking as they pass over the joins between the rails.
He stops speaking and settles back into the plush leather seat. The train picks up speed and the clickety-clack of the wheels begins to sound like a chant, the chant of deep, male voices so I make the train sound its shrieking whistle again as if the driver has seen a tunnel approaching. I concentrate on the heat of the engine, the boilers stocked with red hot coals, heating the water into steam that forces the pistons faster, ever faster.
The car stops and the driver gets out and opens my door for me and I follow Herbie into the building, barely conscious of the security guards and the metal detectors and then we’re in the lift and the train is roaring down the line, a column of smoke wavering over the carriages and hanging in the air for hundreds of yards behind the engine before dispersing in the wind.
Dreamer's Cat: a sci-fi murder mystery with a killer twist Page 18