by Daniel Quinn
She shook her head, turned, and started walking across the living room.
“Showdown,” he repeated, and Matilda, the skeleton that stood guard at the front door, rose up out of her cart and rushed toward Agnes with a screech, brandishing her hatchet and knife.
Agnes paused, startled, and Matilda’s head flew off.
Headless, Matilda continued to race forward. She staggered back a step when her rib cage exploded, regained her balance, and came on. A foot twisted off and was left behind, and she went on stumping forward. Finally, as a thighbone parted from her hip, what was left of her crashed to the floor and dis-integrated, her hatchet sailing off harmlessly to one side and her knife rolling to a stop at Agnes’s feet.
Kicking aside the debris, Agnes took a step forward.
And sank into the floor up to her waist.
As she struggled, red faced, to extricate herself, Greg strolled over and hunkered down beside her. “Cement, Agnes. Fast drying. That’ll hold you for a bit while we have a little talk.”
She closed her eyes disdainfully, and Greg laughed.
“You know,” he said, “I guessed the truth about you a long time ago, Agnes. You must have realized that.”
Her eyes still closed, she gave no sign of hearing him.
“Are you ready for it, Agnes? Here it is. You’re not Agnes at all. You’re Franklin. Franklin in drag.”
Her eyes popped open, and she glared at him.
“Tell me something, Agnes. Did you really bring Alan here?”
She went on glaring but said nothing.
“Why, Agnes? What was he supposed to do?”
Before he could go on, there was a discreet tapping at the window behind him, and he stood up to see what it was. On the other side of the glass, obscured by the reflected lights of his living room, he could just make out the figure of a man, beckoning to him. He switched off a lamp, walked over to the window, and experienced a moment of déjà vu.
On the other side of the glass was the balding old magician in shirt sleeves who had “entertained” Ginny and him in one of his dreams. In that dream, he had stood slightly above them, in a storefront window, while they watched from the sidewalk. Now their positions were reversed. The old man was looking up from the very same sidewalk, and Greg himself was standing inside, in the storefront window. Beyond the sidewalk lay the same dismal street, jammed with dusty, abandoned cars.
Just as he’d done before, the old man very carefully rolled up his sleeves, waggled his hands to show that they were empty, reached into a pocket, and pulled out what looked like a silver dollar. He held it up briefly for inspection, then pressed it against the glass.
When he took his hand away, the coin remained, clinging to the window. Haying accomplished this feat, he just as carefully rolled his sleeves down, buttoned the cuffs, crossed his arms, and looked up expectantly.
Greg smiled and reached for the coin, which, as before, had passed neatly through the glass. On the front of it, he expected to see a mist-shrouded Charon ferrying the dead across the river to Hades, but it was nothing like that. It was so different, in fact, that it took him a few moments to make it out.
It was the living room of Ginny’s apartment on Dearborn Street, detailed in such exquisite relief that he could see each piece of furniture as he remembered it, drawing table laden with proofs and layout sheets, racks of press type, tabourets littered with brushes, pens, rulers, pencils. Down a hallway at the back of the room, a door stood open: Ginny’s bedroom. And inside, a shaft of moonlight fell upon the bed where she lay sleeping. He could see her face plainly; it was contorted with anguish, her mouth falling open in a voiceless moan.
Shaking his head, Greg turned the coin over and studied what was printed there:
ASLEEP, SHE
TOO DREAMS.
He looked up, puzzled.
And saw Ginny wandering in a daze down the sidewalk.
A chill skittered up his spine as he understood. This was not one of the Ginny-facsimiles that Franklin had conjured up to move through his dreams on demand. Those, like his own conjuration of Larry Fielding, had been akin to hallucinations.
This was the real Ginny, the Ginny who, in sleep, inhabited the realm of dreams: alone, defenseless, as easily manipulated as a puppet . . . by one who knew how it was done.
As she drew near, gazing round in confusion, the old man caught Greg’s eye and nodded meaningly to the coin in Greg’s hand. Greg glanced at it and saw that a second legend had appeared under the first:
IN DREAMS, THE
DEAD AWAKEN.
The old man stepped aside with a bow and a flourish, and in the car behind him at the curb a groping hand appeared at a window and slid down the glass, smearing it with gray. A moment later the hand was replaced by the face of what had once been a man, slack and empty-eyed, and Greg remembered: when he and Ginny had moved among them, all these cars had been tenanted by corpses.
The car door swung open, and the thing inside lurched out onto the sidewalk.
Ginny, her eyes cast upward to the darkened windows of the street, saw nothing of this.
Another car door opened behind her, and this she heard.
She turned as a body pitched forward onto the sidewalk and staggered to its feet. Terrified, she backed away from it, then turned again—and ran into the outstretched arms of the one in front of her. Her momentum knocked him down, but he held her, rolled over on her, and, nuzzling her, pressed her face to the cement with his own.
“No,” she whimpered. “Please . . .”
All along the street now, car doors were opening and twisted bodies were shuffling forward.
Shaking off his paralysis, Greg stepped through the glass of the store window and made for the man pinning Ginny to the sidewalk. Finding nothing better, he grabbed a handful of hair and pulled.
The scalp came off in his hand.
Retching, he threw it away, got an arm around his throat and heaved him off. Lifting Ginny to her feet, he put his arms around her and said, “Don’t be frightened. It’s only a dream.”
A heavy hand shammed onto Greg’s shoulder and an arm coiled around his throat.
“Run, Ginny! Please!”
She stared at him, wide-eyed with terror.
“Run!”
She turned and ran.
Another pair of arms wrapped themselves around Greg’s waist, and he was pulled down and engulfed in pulpy, rotting flesh. Even as he struggled for air and mobility, elbowing limbs out of his way, pushing his way upward, sinking his fists in torsos, a part of his mind remained aloof, analyzing the conditions of warfare in this realm. It seemed that, in any given battle, the upper hand automatically belonged to the one who chose the battleground. Greg had no power over this situation on the street, could only struggle with it, because Agnes had created it. If this was true of Agnes as well, then she was no better off than he was. She was struggling to work herself out of the cement trap he’d sunk her in.
Another body fell on top of the heap crushing him into the sidewalk, and Greg decided that, since struggling with Agnes’s initiative seemed useless, a new initiative of his own was his only hope.
Taking a deep breath of the fetid air, he allowed himself to sink into the sidewalk. Once beneath its surface, he turned in the heavy liquid, and with slow, labored strokes began to swim back toward the apartment.
After a few moments he realized he was never going to make it on the single breath he’d taken. My initiative, he thought, my rules, and began breathing normally. He couldn’t, however, make the swimming any less labored: this was the medium that had to hold Agnes in check.
After what seemed like half an hour but was only a handful of minutes, he angled upward toward the surface, which he expected to be the floor of his own apartment.
It was. He bobbed up midway between the windows and Agnes, who was just then pulling herself free. By contrast, he dragged himself out quite easily.
My initiative, he thought again, my rules.
> By the time he got to his feet, Agnes was at the front door.
He said, “I don’t know what help you expected from him, Agnes, but you’re too late. Alan’s dead.”
XXXXIII
AGNES THREW OPEN THE DOOR, started across the threshold, and found herself teetering on the edge of a dark abyss. Fanning her arms to keep from toppling into it, she stepped back and saw that she was standing on a subway platform. It was the abandoned station in which Greg and Ginny had become separated after escaping from the observatory.
In the train well, on a table straddling the tracks, lay a body covered by a white sheet. She knew without wondering whose it was.
“Alan!” she commanded harshly, “Get up!”
The body stirred, and the sheet slid away from Alan’s head and shoulders as he struggled to sit up.
“Need me, Dr. Jakes?” he asked weakly.
A public address system crackled into life, and Greg’s voice echoed off the walls: “Dead!”
Alan slumped back onto the table, his staring eyes lifeless.
Greg’s voice pounded out of the speakers, “It’s power, isn’t it, Agnes? That’s what this is all about! Power!”
The power rail in the train well sizzled and sparked, and an edge of the sheet dangling from the table began to smolder. Suddenly the table itself burst into flames, and Alan’s body was engulfed in the inferno.
Agnes glanced around and, satisfied that she was alone, hurried toward the back wall of the station and promptly disappeared. Anyone watching might have thought she’d walked through a solid cement block wall; in fact, she’d slipped into an opening masked by a cunningly placed mirror.
On the other side of the wall she threaded her way through a maze of corridors, passing a score of identical rooms, windowless boxes, all empty. At last, without hesitation, she turned into one no different from the rest and entered a dim closet at the rear.
She paused there for a moment until her eyes, adjusting to the darkness, picked out a flight of stairs that rose up at the back of the closet. She kicked aside a box of old toys and squeezed herself into the stairwell, which was little more than a foot wide. After a few steps, it turned at a crazy angle, and she had to suck in her stomach to get around it.
Shaking her head in disgust, she looked up, where, a few feet farther, the stairwell turned again.
It had once, she somehow knew, been the central feature of a playhouse that Ginny had visited many times in her childhood dreams.
She sighed and went on.
When she was midway to the next turning, the wall at her right, with the shriek of a hundred nails being drawn, lurched in on her by an inch.
Startled, she let out a squawk, then thundered, “Back!”
But instead of moving back, the wall slowly began to bow away from her, the wood beneath whining ominously as the pressure mounted. Suddenly it buckled and collapsed, boards exploding into dust, nails and splinters flying like shrapnel. In a final explosion, a massive beam crashed through the shattered wall like a battering ram and came to rest against her stomach.
Breathless, she began to edge herself around it. And the wall behind her lurched forward an inch, pinning her to it.
“Stop!” she gasped.
Greg stuck his head around the corner above and grinned down at her.
“Fun, isn’t it?”
The wall behind Agnes shuddered another inch closer.
She twisted in an effort to free herself, and when that proved futile, the features of her face began to writhe and flow like wax heated by the fury within. Her pudgy nose thinned as it elongated and drooped. The flesh of her plump cheeks flowed away from the bone until it hung in flaps from her jaw. But by then the fury-filled eyes, the long, drooping nose, and the wattled jaw no longer belonged to Agnes’s face. They belonged to the face of Franklin Winters.
“More comfortable in your true form, hmm? You’re a little leaner than Agnes, aren’t you.”
Wallowing foolishly in Agnes’s dark suit, the old man threw him a look of hatred as sharp as a dart.
And the wall behind him rumbled forward another inch.
Franklin screeched.
“That’s all right, Frank. I’ve got you now. Tell me, have you ever done battle with anyone else in the realm of dreams?”
The old man shook his head.
“That explains it then. I picked up a trick even you don’t know. I learned it out there on the sidewalk, playing with your pet corpses. Needless to say, I’m not going to share it with you.”
Franklin shrugged.
“I want some answers now, Frank. I want to know when this dream is taking place. Is this the same night I called to tell you I was giving Ginny up?”
Smirking, Franklin nodded.
“And ‘the next morning,’ when I got up and decided to go to New York to blow your head off, that was actually the beginning of the dream—this dream.”
He nodded again.
“You checked up on me while I was asleep and found out I hadn’t really decided to give Ginny up, so you decided to give me another dose of your medicine—a really big dose. That’s right, isn’t it. No, don’t nod. I want to hear your voice, Frank.”
The old man set his mouth in a stubborn line.
And the wall behind him trembled.
“Yes, that’s right!”
“Thank you. Now, just out of curiosity, what was Alan supposed to do, Frank? What was he along for?”
His mouth curled in a smug smile. “That’s the wrong question, young man.”
“What’s the right question?”
“The right question is, who was Alan?”
“All right, who was Alan?”
“He was, after Ginny and perhaps your parents, the most important person in your life.”
“Don’t play games with me, Franklin. Who was he?”
“Your brother.”
Stunned, Greg stared at him, slack jawed.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Alan was your brother, assembled from your own repressed memories of him—your own discarded memories.”
“You’re crazy. My brother was ten years older than I was.”
Franklin shrugged. “In your memory of him he’s just a youngster. In the realm of dreams, he will forever be a youngster.”
“Okay. And what was he supposed to do to me, Frank?”
“Ah. At the appropriate moment I would have seen to it that you recognized him at last. Perhaps you yourself don’t realize how deep your feelings of guilt toward him are. Properly orchestrated . . .” He sighed wistfully. “I assure you, it would have been a devastating reunion.”
Greg shook his head in rueful admiration of the old man’s unabashed wickedness. “And, now that I’ve caught you properly, what do you think I’m going to do with you, Franklin?”
“You’re going to let me go,” he answered promptly.
Greg sighed. “Yes, I suppose I am. You’ll stay out of our dreams now, because you know I wouldn’t be so kind if I caught you a second time.”
“I know,” he said, a bit sulkily.
Greg paused, frowning. “Do you really care for Ginny at all?”
Franklin looked away, his expression thunderous, and Greg knew he would get no answer to this question.
“Perhaps, if you asked nicely, like a normal person, Ginny might come and visit you some day. I can’t promise it, but it’s possible. She might.”
The old man nodded stiffly, once.
Suppressing a smile, Greg asked him if he needed any help getting out of there.
“You know I do,” he snapped.
“Think small,” Greg advised—and shrank him to the size of a cockroach.
Franklin got to his feet with enraged dignity and shook his fist at Greg, screaming an imprecation that sounded like the chittering of an infuriated gnat.
Greg bent over and with a puff of air blew the little man head over heels down the stairs.
The same puff of air carried G
reg up and away from there, into the black sky over Chicago. He hovered there, admiring the long sweeping curve of lights along the shore of Lake Michigan, a view far outstripping the one he’d had in his apartment in the Hancock Center. He smiled, wondering if he would ever have such a dwelling in waking life.
Here and there below him he saw figures moving on the street and behind the windows of apartments: countless figures of people wandering through their dreams. For all his dis-approval of Franklin Winters, he could sympathize with the temptation to take a hand in those dreams: perhaps to help—to save one from drowning, another from falling off a roof; perhaps just to play a few tricks . . . have a little fun . . . play God for an evening. He shook his head. The temptation was resistible.
He looked vaguely to the north and wondered what Agnes was doing, the real one—Agnes Tillford. As if propelled by some unconscious homing instinct, he found himself in motion, and was soon hovering over a building he didn’t recognize from above. Gliding down to street level, he saw it was their old meet-ing place, Freddie’s.
After taking a moment to refurbish his appearance, he entered that establishment’s perpetual midnight and was greet-ed by a maitre d’ in stunning evening wear (an innovation for Freddie’s). Greg told him he was meeting someone in the bar and from the man’s hurt expression realized that, for this evening at least, the bar was the lounge.
It was easy to see why. Its vinyl booths had been replaced by velvet banquettes, its candles flickered in the midst of crystal glassware, set on gleaming white tablecloths, and its patrons were dressed to the maitre d’s standards.
Agnes waved to him from a distant table, and he was glad she had. He wouldn’t have recognized her as she was in the dream—ten years younger and twenty pounds slimmer, dressed in a gown that looked like a Chanel. The dazzlingly handsome gentleman beside her rose as he approached, measuring Greg’s potential as a rival.
“Greg dear, what are you doing here?” Agnes asked.
“Just passing by. Thought I’d drop in and say hello.”
“How nice,” she burbled. “Of course you scarcely need an introduction to my friend.”