Bad Dreams

by Kim Newman

  'No, we'd have run into her.'

  'Maybe.'

  Anne called out again. There was no answer of any kind. Clive wondered why they had not heard anything from downstairs. It was odd that the party should get so quiet. There was no music, even.

  Then, he felt the world shift on its axis, and knew that a new reality had slotted into its place. New physical laws, new moral dictates, new topographical patterns. It would be a major adjustment, and he did not know how to cope with it yet.

  'There's something wrong here,' he said.

  'She could be on another floor.'

  'I don't think so… Let's give up and go back downstairs.'

  He turned his back on the darkness to argue with Anne. That was when, with a glass-cracking shriek, the harpy brought him down from behind. A talon punctured the flesh under his chin, and tore…

  SEVEN

  CLIVE SPUN around and collapsed at the same time, heaving from his shoulders in a spasm which threw Nina off his back. Anne tried to catch the girl, hoping to embrace her from behind and pin her arms, but missed getting a sure hold on her. She was slammed into a wall by Nina's weight and momentum, and felt the shock of the impact in her teeth. Knots of pain throbbed in her spine.

  Nina was still screeching. It was an inhuman, continuous sound, containing hatred, rage and triumph beyond expression in words. It was a horrible sound. Anne remembered her brother's premiere. Cam's concert should have started by now.

  She reached for the back of Nina's ripped jacket, but only managed to get a handful of hair. Nina stood up, and the hair was pulled through Anne's fist. It was as if a steel rope had been scraped across her palm.

  She looked up at Nina and could see that the girl did not recognise her. She was completely feral, a tie-dye splash of blood across her front, her fingers bent into claws. She turned away, and ducked into the darkness. Out of the light, she shut up. Anne heard rapid, birdlike footsteps. Then nothing.

  She looked across the passage at Clive. He was half-sitting, half-slumped against the wall, vainly trying to move.

  Nina had stabbed him with the syringe. It hung unpleasantly from his ruined throat, broken. The glass was cracked, the handle loose, and the needle bent. It had been emptied, but was more than half full now. With blood. Clive's jacket and shirt were stained, and little squirts rose and fell from his wound with each heartbeat.

  Anne guessed that he had a severed artery. She got up, steadying herself against the wall, and took a few experimental steps. Her back did not ache that much. She had not been damaged.

  Clive rolled his eyes, and tried to speak. Blood leaked out of his mouth, but nothing else.

  It had happened too quickly to be absorbed. Anne knew that Nina had stabbed Clive, but she was not sure whether she had doped him as well.

  He was an ugly mess, and he was still alive, but Anne could find no emotion to feel for him. She had seen her sister ancient and dead on a stretcher this morning, probably because of Clive or someone like him. She did not even have any squeamishness left over.

  He moved feebly, trying to lift a hand to probe his wound.

  She felt uncomfortable, watching him die and unable to care about him. She did not know what, if anything, to do for him. So she left, and went after Nina.

  She did not want to think about him any more.

  EIGHT

  IT DID NOT hurt, so he knew it must be serious.

  He saw Anne look away from him and leave his field of vision. He could not turn his head. A light came on, banishing the darkness around the corner. She was following Nina, the stupid…

  Everything was clear. He was trapped in his body, as surely as a crashed motorist could be held in a wrecked car by a locked seat belt. Unless he got himself free soon, he would die…

  He concentrated on trying to stand up. There was some feeling, not much, in his knees and upper thighs. He pulled, and managed to bend forwards at the waist like an oarsman. He could touch his toes. He got hold of the polished tip of one of his shoes, and tried to pull himself away from the wall. His head was between his knees and he could smell the blood. The wetness was pooling in his lap.

  Then, for a moment, his back and shoulders were working properly. He achieved some sort of upright position, although his treacherous legs deserted him immediately. He staggered through the open doorway, into the painted freezer, feeling his knees giving out with each inept step. To steady himself, he hugged a sculptured torso. An arm came loose and fell off, revealing scrunched up newsprint where there should have been ligament, bone and muscle. He knew he was bleeding all over the work of art.

  Someone else came into the room and sat down on a plain wooden chair to watch him struggle. It was Mr Skinner, calm and hungry. The man's face gave nothing away. He was neutral. He was not going to help Clive out of his crumpled BMW, but he was not going to kick the bent door shut on him either.

  He knew Nina had poisoned him as well. He had never had heroin before, but he knew enough junkies to recognise the effects. Although the pins and needles in his legs could perhaps have been from loss of blood. Purple lines floated on the surfaces of his eyes, coming briefly into focus, then retreating into vague smudges.

  Purple haze, he thought.

  Finally, the pain came.

  First it hit him where Nina had, just below his jaw. From this nucleus, it swiftly spread throughout his head and trunk, leaving only his limbs in an unfeeling limbo. He almost passed out, but his eyes would not close. He kept on fighting…

  Fighting for what?

  … kept on fighting to stay upright. The lumpy statue in his arms was crumbling. Large chunks fell around his feet. Something gave way like the bottom of a carrier bag, and the bulk of the papier mache was squeezed out. He realised that in the centre of the soft fake torso was a hard real butcher's hook. The remains of the sculpture slipped through his arms, and he sank onto the sharp iron prong.

  It went into his upper belly, and caught under his ribcage. He felt himself pulled out of shape, his innards adopting new alignments.

  The hook was a curved icicle. It was uncomfortable rather than agonising. The ice spread through his chest, forming around his beating heart.

  His hand and arms were free, but his knees and ankles had long since given out. He could feel nothing at all below the hook's point of entry. He jerked downwards, his entire weight on the hook and chain. It held. He did not fall.

  He swung his left arm up in a reverse backstroke, and grasped the chain. He felt the links pressing into his palm. He hauled, taking some of the weight off the hook, but not enough.

  Then he felt for the pain in his neck. His hand seemed like a flesh mitten, fingerless and clumsy. He wrapped it around the syringe, ignoring the jagged glass which tore his skin.

  Mr Skinner had come closer. Now, his face was only inches away from Clive's own. He was as near as a lover or a parent could ever come. Clive felt delicate feelers worming through his mind, draining his pain, his fear. It was a great relief. He felt arms around him, lifting his body up, easing him off the hook.

  He pulled the syringe out, and weakly flung it away. The bottom half of Mr Skinner's face was suddenly reddened. Clive heard the fountain, and knew that he had torn something important. He saw an arc of blood, and knew that it came from his own neck. It was oddly like going cross-eyed and seeing the bridge of your nose. Then, the blood got in his eyes.

  Clive shook his head, and cleared his vision. Mr Skinner was smiling an impossibly wide smile. Fifty or sixty perfect, pointed teeth gleamed between his parted lips. Then his face faded until, at last, only his smile was left behind.

  NINE

  'NINA!'

  The girl had darted into a dark stretch of the corridor, and could not be found easily. Anne trailed her fingers along the wall at shoulder height, but there were no switches or dangling cords. She could still see, dimly, which meant that there must be a light source somewhere near. Somewhere.

  'Nina!'

  She went forwards, step
by step. The floor proved untrustworthy. She had already found a few unexpected steps, up or down, and slammed a toe against a new level. It was all fairly pointless, like the needless ha-has of a carnival funhouse.

  She stopped and listened. The house was silent. It was as if the whole place were deserted and derelict.

  What were Amelia and her guests doing? She hoped that they had not dispersed from their downstairs room. Could they be playing some Sadeian variation on hide and seek? Could they be in the dark, waiting for her?

  'Nina, it's me. Anne.'

  The girl must have calmed down. She must be within earshot, but she was keeping quiet. She had been hysterical, now she was probably close to catatonia. Anne thought Nina had found a hiding place and was lying low. She could imagine the girl curled up in a cupboard, trying to breathe noiselessly, willing her heartbeat to be less loud.

  God, the house was quiet! Admittedly, this was a placid residential district, but there should be some exterior noise: occasional traffic, water dripping from the eaves, distant carol singers, murmuring electrical appliances. There was nothing. The walls must be ten feet thick.

  She found the light. It came from a tributary passage that lead off from the main corridor at a curious angle. The rooms must be not quite square. A funnel of light fell from a circular ceiling hole, drawing attention to the skeleton of an ornate spiral staircase. It was a rickety old piece of work; presumably intended for servants banished from the regular stairs. It could not have been easy to hump awkward loads up and down the wobbly death trap. There were grinning gnomes worked into the iron filigree, running downwards helter-skelter.

  Nina would have been drawn to the light, just as Anne had been. She must have gone upstairs. Anne started upwards on the shaking staircase, but had to stop abruptly. The hole extended a foot or so above the level of the ceiling, and then ended. There was a dim fluorescent tube in the recess. She could not go up, only down. The floors below were dark, Carefully, she descended into an unknown, unlit room.

  She stepped off the bottom stair onto a carpeted floor. The light above her was remote and useless, blocked off by the triangular edges of the staircase. In the dark, she took little steps, her hands out before her. She found a wall, and hugged it. She edged sideways, clockwise. After getting into and out of three corners between stretches of flat wall, she found a door. And by it there was a switch. She turned on the light.

  The room was bare, except for the staircase, and a pair of indifferent watercolours of dead flowers that hung on the wall opposite the door. The paintings were at eye level, Why had she not jostled them while feeling her way around?

  It did not make sense, so she gave up thinking about it.

  The door was not locked. The passage outside was unlike the ones on the floor above. It was as wide as a small room, but there were bulky pieces of old furniture against the walls between the doors, and Anne was forced to squeeze through a narrow and irregular middle path. Hard wooden angles pressed into her.

  'Nina.'

  On the floor, she found a scattering of porcelain shards. Several ornaments from a displayed collection of unpleasant little figurines had been swept off a small table. The girl had come this way, she was sure. Again, Anne started looking into every room for Nina. All the doors were unlocked. The rooms beyond were filled with more forgotten furniture. This must be where Amelia shifted everything when she was having building done. A few of the pieces were properly stored, with dustsheets and numbered tags, but most of the stuff was just crammed in every which way.

  Progress was slower than it had been upstairs. Welsh dressers and tallboys kept getting in her way. And she was alone.

  Would Clive die? Could she have helped him?

  This was not much of a party. Anne knew she had to expose Amelia and her friends. The magazine would not go for it; they could not afford the lawsuits. But she had friends on the tabloids, the News of the World, the Daily Mirror. Pop stars and society hostesses in S and M games that led to death. Deaths? She could keep Judi out of it, but ruin a good few careers, businesses and marriages. There would probably be multiple prosecutions. The Global Peace Whatever would lose a lot of credibility, she reflected. Maybe not: those far right moralists had plenty of ways of surviving nasty revelations and expelling offenders from their ranks. She now believed that her sister had died, if not through the direct actions of the people downstairs, then at least through her unhealthy associations with them. What she had seen done to Nina would have wrecked anybody.

  Scum. Scum. Scum.

  The rooms were like the passage, packed with antiques. Most of them were in states of disrepair. Crippled chairs with missing feet and tufts of stuffing coming through the cracks; dead, useless grandfather clocks with faces but no hands; embroidered hangings eaten with mould patches that made hunt scenes resemble maps of unknown worlds. But there was no dust, no dirt, no cobwebs. All this was looked after, preserved in its current state of decay.

  She opened a door, and found herself in the Bacon room.

  … but surely that was upstairs. No, she must have invisibly ascended through those upwards-sloping corridors and irritating little steps, and come down again on the spiral staircase. For the last few minutes, she had been travelling in parallel to her previous route. The junk rooms alternated with the gallery chambers like the opposing teeth of a zip-fastener. Only the Bacon room interconnected both strata of the house. It had two doors. Clive would be beyond the other. Dead?

  Despite everything, she had to see him. She could not immediately do anything for Nina. Perhaps she would be able to stop the bleeding. Maybe even save his life. Save him for the Old Bailey and whichever penal dustbin they locked dope peddlers in.

  Anne had once written a piece about prison conditions. After a tour and a few interviews with convicts, she was in favour of sweeping reforms. But she wanted Clive to get dumped into a grand guignol Devil's Island with whip-wielding guards, running filth in the cells and neanderthal yard bosses. She hoped he would be gang-raped in the showers every night. A liberal, she remembered someone saying, is just a reactionary who has not been mugged yet. Tomorrow, she realised, she would be socially conscious again. Tonight, she would have elected Dirty Harry as chief of police. Shit, she wanted out of this mess.

  She opened the other door…

  'Clive?'

  … and found herself in a part of the house she had never seen before. It was either a passage or a long, thin room, a stone-walled storage space lined with gunpowder plot-style wooden barrels. It was more like some sort of cellar than an upstairs room.

  Obviously, there was more than one Bacon room.

  She looked around, carefully this time. One of the dummies was fully dressed. She should have noticed it earlier. It was not at all like the others in the room, like all the ones in the other room. They were all dismembered portions, with exposed ribs and piglike pink hides.

  It was the figure of an old, dead man. She was reminded of Dorian Gray at the end of the book, unrecognisably decrepit, identifiable only by the rings sunk into the fleshy fingers. This statue was shrivelled inside its suit, hanging from a hook in its chest.

  She did not want to touch it, but she had to.

  She had expected it to be weighted, to feel cold and heavy. But it was an obvious fake, papier-mache light. The wrinkled skin, while rubberised to lend some semblance of naturalism, was dry and fragile.

  It was a repulsive piece of work, but paradoxical. The concept was violently unpleasant, extravagantly horrible. But there was a bland expression worked into the prune-like face. It was like a sentimental 19th century vision of peaceful repose after protracted suffering, the miserable on Earth rewarded in Heaven.

  Of course, the statue was in modern dress. A suspiciously stained smart dark suit, just like Clive's. In fact, the costume was exactly like Clive's, down to the horrible shirt and expensive shoes. It was another of Amelia's bad taste jokes. And now the effort would be wasted, since its subject was in no condition to be eit
her offended or amused.

  Anne was tired, and fed up. It could only be about eight o'clock - her old-fashioned watch, unwound this morning, had stopped - but she felt as if she had been up all night, working to meet an insane deadline. All she wanted was to get this whole thing over with, so she could go home to Kentish Town and sleep in her own bed.

  It would be cold though. There was no one in the apartment to turn on the electric blanket.

  Downstairs. She would go downstairs and tell Amelia what had happened to Clive. She knew what would happen. Skinner would take over. The guests would disperse. Ambulances and doctors would be called, the right people would all be bribed, and the sordid mess would be efficiently covered up. She would never be able to prove a thing. Whatever. She did not care.

  Leaving the Bacon room, she made her way through the junkyard corridor. She thought the spiral staircase would lead her down to the party.

  … but she could not find the room. It had been distinct from the others. It was comparatively empty. She turned corners she was sure she had never encountered before. Had she taken the wrong route? Every room she looked into was the same. She came full circle around the house, and opened a door to find herself looking up again at the dangling corpse statue.

  Now, she could see that it even looked like Clive. Or rather, as Clive would look if he were to live to the age of one hundred and fifty and then die. It really was a wretched thing.

  She tried to picture the door of the room with the stairs. Had it been disguised to blend into the wall? Could she have missed it by mistaking it for one of the panelled wardrobes? Did it have an exterior handle? She could remember nothing.

  Anne felt an urge to throw the kind of temper tantrum she had been able to get away with when she was six years old. She wanted to whimper in frustration and break something. But there was no one around to be made uncomfortable, or be coerced into helping her out. She was on her own. Anyway, her father and Cam had invariably known when she was faking. The Nielsons had always been a family of know-it-alls.