Bad Dreams

by Kim Newman

  Her husband, former homosexual or not, was as flawless a part of her world as a robot designed to act like Rossano Brazzi or Gregory Feck. He accorded her all the reverence due to a Victorian angel in the kitchen, and never disapproved of her need to have compartments of her life separate from him. Her career was important to her, and she had kept it going after the marriage. And yet, it did seem strange that doodles which came out of her unconscious when her mind was at its emptiest magically turned into unimaginable amounts of money.

  In her sunken marble bath - a marvellously stupid luxury she was almost ashamed of - she thought about the symmetries of her life. She was entering middle-age with the body she had had as a 20-year-old. Her financial security was assured for a lifetime. Their doctor saw no reason why they could not have children if they did not put it off too long, and she was tempted by the prospect of motherhood. She was never alone, except when she wanted to be; she was never bored, except when she wanted to be.

  … and who could ask for anything more.

  Later that summer, they started going to the movies like teenagers. The film that made the most impression on her was North by Northwest, a chocolate box-coloured romantic thriller with Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint. She had found other Alfred Hitchcock films boring and cynical, but this was, on the whole, lovely. Grant was charming, but she was also attracted to James Mason, who was a civilised villain and had many of the qualities she liked in Didier. In one scene, she had a delightful buzz of recognition, realising that she had designed one of the scarves worn by Saint. But there was a snake in Eden, a disturbing presence among the thrills and comedy. One actor - the man who played the villain's male secretary (and former lover?), the man who trod on Grant's hand as he dangled off the faces of Mount Rushmore in the climax - frightened her more than any monster in any horror movie she had ever seen.

  If there was a cast list at the end of the film, the projectionist closed the theatre curtains over it, and so Angela did not get the actor's name. Didier, a film addict who often sneaked out of his business in the afternoons to catch matinees of war films and Westerns she did not want to see, could not remember the name of the actor who played the secretary, but thought he had been in Pork Chop Hill, playing a soldier in Korea.

  Korea. Of course. That was who the actor reminded her of. Johnny. He was older, smoother, less explosive, but the wide, sneering lips and scarily glowing eyes were the same.

  Oddly, unnervingly, the actor turned up again within a week. On a summer re-run of the The Twilight Zone. Angela did not really like the Serling show, but found it affected her, unlike a lot of the network pap television had been churning out since the industry switched from live television in New York to filmed series from Hollywood. The episode was a weird Western, 'Mr Denton on Doomsday', with Dan Duryea as a drunk given miraculous gunslinging abilities by a travelling salesman. The scary actor loitered around the cramped studio barroom in sinister black leather outfits, sadistically tormenting Duryea. In the inevitable shoot-out, the man who frightened her was shot in the hand by the suddenly superskilled Duryea, but she could not watch any more and had Didier turn off their receiver. While he was brushing his teeth, she got out the TV Guide and found out the actor's name.

  It was Martin Landau, and that did not mean anything to her.

  There was another face that bothered her whenever it turned up on TV or in the newspapers. Hugh Farnham's. But half America was frightened of Hugh Farnham. She had signed a few petitions against HUAC once, at the prompting of Maish Johnson, but had not really followed the hearings. However, like everyone else, she had been shocked when the stories about Farnham came out. The papers called him 'The Modern Bluebeard' and were loudly asking why the FBI had not tracked him down yet. The scandal sheets reckoned he was in South America with all the Nazis. The father of one of his young victims had become something of a celebrity by devoting huge sums to the search for Hugh Farnham. Even President Stevenson had spoken out against his former opponent, and made an unprecedented top level intervention in law enforcement to hurry up the capture of this vicious killer. Farnham was a Monster, everyone agreed.

  Martin Landau, Hugh Farnham, and Johnny. They all had something to do with her somehow.

  That night, while Didier slept, she thought of that evening in Sam's Bar-B-Q and Grill. The evening that Johnny shot Maish, the evening that her father died. It was the most vivid memory she had. Sometimes, she thought it was the only evening she had ever truly lived through. Since then, she had been only half the woman she used to be. Perhaps less than half.

  As summer turned into fall, she started to remember her dreams. Johnny was in them, and Maish, and her father. And her sister. But Angela did not have a sister, much less a sister with clothes and hair like an alien princess from a cheap science fiction film. She dreamed of London, a city she could recognise but had never been to. And there was a man in her dreams who frightened her more than Martin Landau, Hugh Farnham and Johnny rolled into one. He had scaled skin, and a lizard's tongue. Inside, he was a dragon and she had to kill him before he consumed her.

  Suddenly, she dropped her design career. She decided it was flimsy and insubstantial. She found herself talking less and less, even to Didier. Her husband remained attentive, and even left her alone when she was in a terminally uncommunicative mood. Sometimes, she tried to annoy him, to hurt him. But he could not be moved. He was too perfect.

  One morning, alone in the mansion, she decided that living the shadow of a life was not enough. She was well into the second bottle of pills, washing them down with tasteless vodka, before sleep enveloped her.

  She had not bothered to leave a note, realising that there was really no one left behind to read it.

  It had been a nice dream, but only that…

  TEN

  ANGELA DREAMED. Even exhausted next to Johnny in the sick-smelling bed in the sick-smelling walk-up she could only think of as her purgatory, Angela dreamed. In the morning, she could never remember where her night thoughts had taken her. She only knew that she woke up as worn-out and tired as when she went to sleep. But she knew that she did dream, of Something, of Somewhere, of Someone…

  When she got out of bed, Angela felt like something the cat had sicked up. As usual after the graveyard shift, she had slept well into the afternoon. Last night had been a bad one; another bad one. She had a waitress' ache lodged permanently in the small of her back, and a couple of its children were budding under her shoulder blades. According to Betty, who delighted in everybody's afflictions, her knees and ankles would be next. She hated working all night, but the extra twelve cents an hour helped her keep treading water. It was less immediately strenuous than the three-to-ten shift, but a good deal more soul-eroding. Nobody happy eats after midnight.

  Johnny was sleeping too, in front of the tiny television set, his ruined feet up on their special stool. She saw that he had been punishing himself again, and bled in his bandages. Orange and brown discolourations marred the linen that had been pristine white when she left for work. On the mantel over the bricked-up fireplace was the jam jar in which he kept his pickled toes. He still claimed that had been an accident. In her tatty robe, she tidied up around him, emptying ashtrays, clearing up glasses.

  He had had his friend the cop over last night. They had bitched and griped and watched television together. Johnny liked to threaten her with Barry Erskine. 'Angel,' he would say, 'if you leave, I'll have Erskine shoot you down just like I shot down your boyfriend.' The cop had tried to feel her ass a couple of times, but he did not have the balls to do anything with Johnny around. After all, everybody remembered who was the killer in this apartment.

  The TV was still on, a news show. Hugh Farnham sat in a studio talking about Cuba with a fawning woman. Johnny still had a letter from his desk. When Pat McCarran stepped down and Nixon moved up, Farnham would be in line for the Vice-Presidential ticket. Nixon and Farnham. Angela did not think she would bother to vote. There was film of Havana, with US Marines on the
streets, peasants in the fields and Battista waving on a balcony. The commentator talked about the hanging of Ernesto Guevara, and the trial of Fidel Castro.

  'Yeah,' grunted Johnny, waking up, 'stick it to the Reds!'

  After the piece on Cuba, Farnham talked about the new HUAC hearings, under the chairmanship of virgin Congressman Cohn. He would not be taking part this time, but he was lending his full support to 'those who would help our nation purify itself'. Johnny opened a bottle of beer with his teeth, and cheered as the froth bubbled over. 'Oughta be hung like dogs,' he snarled, 'goddamn pinkos!' The commentator read out a list of actors, soldiers, directors, writers, state officials and sportsmen who would be subpoenaed. One of them was Marlon Brando, whom Angela had always liked.

  'Lousy commies! Oughta line 'em up outside the Kremlin an' open up on 'em with tommy guns. Lousy Ivans oughta be put down like roaches!'

  Angela felt woozy, and nauseous. She backed away from Johnny and wrestled with the bathroom door.

  'Whassamatter, Angel?'

  Johnny never used to call her 'Angel'. It had been 'Angie' once. She thought of herself as 'Angela', but nobody ever called her that.

  'I feel…'

  How did she feel? Sick, but not quite. She cramped into the closet-sized bathroom, and crouched by the bath. Clothes hung around her from ropes stretched across the room. She had spasms in her stomach.

  There was a Frankenstein Monster clumping about outside. Johnny had got up, and was moving around the room. Things fell over. Johnny swore.

  Angela pushed aside a curtain of drying nylon hose and was sick in the bath. She heaved up what looked like orange frogspawn. It was like spitting a cloud of tiny pebbles that rattled on the backs of her teeth on the way out. They were pills. She could read an unfamiliar brand name on the less-dissolved ones.

  For a moment, she thought she was going crazy. Then, she realised it was the other way around. Crazy was going Her. Her crazy was going. It was coming together in her head.

  'Angel,' shouted Johnny, banging on the door with a crutch. Everything shook. 'Lemme in!'

  She did not ache any more. Despite her recent vomiting spell, she did not feel empty any more.

  Looking in the freckled mirror, she found herself changed. She was not younger or healthier or better-looking, but she was at least herself again.

  'Angel, you wanna keep some teeth? Open up!'

  The apartment was not next to the elevated railway, but it shook as if a train were going by. Bottles fell out of the cabinet over the sink. Talcum powder rose from a smashed jar like tear-gas from a cannister. Damp clothes flopped on the floor. The bathroom, always small, appeared to shrink to the size of a coffin.

  She stood up and wiped her face on a towel.

  'Angel?' Johnny was whining now, pathetic rather than threatening. She knew she could take him.

  'Angela!' His voice was changing. It was darker, deeper, nastier.

  'In a minute,' she said.

  She found her clothes on a chair. Her real clothes. She got dressed. Johnny had stopped banging.

  There was a frosted glass window in the bathroom. If you opened it, you could see the vacant lot next door and the building beyond it. Now, she knew, there was none of that there.

  'Angela!' He was seriously annoyed.

  She opened the bathroom door.

  'Angela?'

  'That's not my name.'

  'Of course,' he said, straightening up, 'and Johnny is not mine.'

  Skinner did not need the crutches.

  ELEVEN

  THERE WERE still leftover bits and pieces of the walk-up apartment dotted about the place, but it was a strip-lit open-plan office now. On Skinner's desk was a presentation case containing Johnny's Korean medals, and one of the GI issue Mickey Spillane paperbacks he had got his kicks out of. Perched on the central heating unit, Anne saw the jar with Johnny's three missing toes floating in it, and a framed picture of Sam and his daughter outside the Bar-B-Q and Grill. The photograph was fading fast, like an Instamatic snapshot in reverse. The faces had already gone. Behind her, there was no bathroom, just a rank of filing cabinets.

  The office had no windows, and the only door was fifty yards away on the other side of the room. To reach it, she would have to negotiate a maze of partitioned-off desks, potted plants and photocopiers. A few of the magazines she did work for had places like this, and she tried to avoid spending time in them. Apart from the Monster and her, the office was empty. There were Christmas cards hanging on a clothesline on the wall, and a few perishing balloons huddled in a corner.

  The desk was between her and Skinner, but he was tall enough to step over it. He looked no more dangerous than a typical editor.

  'You know what they say about werewolves,' she said, 'there's always a tree between you and it, but never a tree between it and you.'

  'I'm not a werewolf.'

  'No, but you are a Monster, right?'

  'I suppose so.' He smiled with his mouth, just faintly. His face was anaesthetised. He could have been wearing a tissue paper death mask. It was like the old Mission: Impossible show; she expected him to peel off his face to reveal Martin Landau underneath.

  'Anne,' he said, 'may I call you by your first name?'

  'Sure.'

  'Angela?'

  The name was like a slap in the face. But she rolled with it, and came back, still sure of who she was.

  'No, not Angela. A nice try, though.'

  'You mustn't hold it against me.' He sat down in a swivel chair, and pushed himself back from the desk. He knitted his fingers behind his neck, and looked up at her. He was totally relaxed, which she knew was supposed to make her nervous. She looked down at him, not flinching.

  'Don't you feel bad about Angela?'

  'How do you mean?'

  'Well, in a very real sense, you are responsible for wasting her. You took the pills.'

  'Oh, that Angela. Well, it wasn't real.'

  'I doubt if that argument would go down very well with her. She had a great deal of self-determination, you know. She was independent of you.'

  'What about the other Angela?'

  'Just the same. A little less aware, perhaps, but just as valid a personality. Incidentally, what makes you think that were only two Angelas?'

  'Skinner, there wasn't even one. We both know that. My Dad made her up. And he didn't give her that much. A big scene in the first act, a walk-on in the second, and getting shot in the end. She's supposed to be having this big affair with Maish, but they're only on stage together when she's being killed. All the rest comes from you…'

  'And you. Don't underestimate yourself. I've never been to New Orleans.'

  'Okay, and me too. A bit of Dad, a bit of you, a bit of me, a bit of Kim Hunter, a bit of Therese Colt, a bit of Angela Pleasence. That doesn't make a real person.'

  'Why not?'

  'Because they don't, that's why. They should have kept Kim Hunter for the movie, though. But she was blacklisted by then.'

  'What's that got to do with anything?'

  'You're the blacklist expert aren't you?'

  The skin around his eyes crinkled, and set in little folds. She knew he had not expected her to figure it out.

  'You don't change that much, Skinner.'

  'You're sharp.'

  'And you were Hugh Farnham?'

  'Once.'

  'Before that?'

  'Oh, you don't really want to know. Lots of names. I can't be expected to remember all of them.'

  'Any famous ones?'

  'A few.'

  'Going back a long way?'

  'That's right.'

  'You're a vampire?'

  'No,' he chuckled to himself. 'Well, not very often.'

  She was fed up with hanging around exchanging small talk with an inhuman mass murderer. But Skinner was enjoying himself.

  'Do sit down,' he said. 'Would you like some coffee?'

  'Sure. If there's any going.'

  She sat in a chair and wheeled it
up to the desk. It was not really comfortable, and she experimented, sitting with her legs crossed, uncrossed, sprawled apart. The backrest and the arms were too low. She settled for a relatively painless perching position.

  'Black with sugar?'

  'Do you know everything?'

  'Not everything. Just enough to get by. Judi has a good memory. She knows how you drink your coffee.'

  'She did. I've cut out sugar for the last two years.'

  'Okay, so I look like an idiot. I won't try that kind of Win Friends and Influence People trick again.'

  He pressed a buzzer on his desk, leaned forwards, and said something in an unrecognisable, sibilant language into the intercom. Seconds later, a bell like a microwave oven went off behind Anne. She turned in her seat, and saw a blinking red light above a cupboard door.

  'It's a dumb waiter.'

  She opened the door, and reached in to bring out a paper cup of coffee. It was instant, but hot and tasty. The first swallow scalded her tongue, and she was careful after that.

  'It's been a long time, Anne. A long time since I came across anyone as self-possessed as you are. You've held out much longer than I expected.'

  'Thank you.'

  'I don't pay compliments, I make statements of fact. You are a most capable young woman.'

  'I know how to fix a plug.'

  'I don't doubt it. Judi was good too. Not as good as you, but way above average. Still, in the long run, she wasn't good enough. Which is why she is where she is today.'

  'Which is, exactly, where?'

  'That's a good question. She's with me. Always.'

  'All of her?'

  'No, not all. But enough of her, Anne. Enough.'

  'You bastard.'

  'Judi wasn't good enough to walk away from me. And you aren't good enough, Anne. Don't feel insulted. Maybe once, twice in a thousand years does someone like that turn up. I'm old. Maybe I'll never meet anyone that good again. You have no idea how depressing I find that thought, how boring my life can get…'