Songs of Dreaming Gods

by Meikle, William

  The old wood floor in the hall was scuffed and dented from years of use, but felt solid enough and his footsteps echoed as he walked, emphasizing yet again how quiet it was; how alone he was. There was a hint in the air of coffee and bread, but it didn’t smell fresh; old odors in an old house.

  He tried the left-hand door. It had been slathered in cheap green paint at least twenty years ago and there was a tarnished copper number one screwed on slightly askew at eye level. The heavy brass handle turned in his hand but it felt too loose and showed no sign of being connected to the lock mechanism. He put his shoulder into the door, again to no avail beyond leaving him feeling as if he’d taken a punch in the arm.

  This is getting me nowhere.

  The right-hand door, red instead of green but much the same, although at least the number two was screwed on straight, similarly refused to yield to his attempts to open it.

  To one side of the staircase, underneath it, there was a smaller door that John took to be a storage closet. He was surprised when it opened to reveal a set of stone steps leading down into the darkness of what was probably a basement. There was a cord for a light switch but when he pulled it nothing happened. He remembered that the power seemed to be off all over the building.

  And the box to get it on again is probably down there. I could go down and look but that’s not going to happen.

  Blundering around in the dark after all the strangeness that had happened already would be a bloody stupid thing to do, and if there was one thing his recent wounding had taught him, it was that death was always waiting to take advantage if you let your guard drop. He stood at the closet door for several seconds, listening, but the basement was as quiet, quieter if that was possible, as the rest of the building. He closed the door gently. He’d investigate that later, but only if he had to, and only if he found a flashlight.

  He went back out into the hallway and looked up the stairs, then back at the front door. Going up would feel like admitting defeat, admitting that he didn’t have a single clue as to what was happening. He was starting to wonder whether the sight of the crime scene hadn’t perhaps unhinged him completely, a post-traumatic stress episode sending him off to hide in a place where he could feel safe. The doctors had warned him that something might feel off mentally, and had even offered him counseling. At the time he’d declined, preferring to trust to his inherent cynicism and cop instincts.

  But he couldn’t bring himself to believe that he’d fallen into that particular deep end. This was no tortured dream. He’d had them after the stabbing, both in the hospital and later while lying in what he’d thought was the safety of his own bed. While they had been vivid and full of blood and violence, terror and pain, those dreams hadn’t had the heft and weight of reality like he felt in this building, this hallway.

  This is real, and I’d better start figuring out what the fuck to do about it.

  As John saw it, he only had the two choices. He could stand and wait and hope that Janis, someone, anyone, would eventually open the door and let him out, or he could go back upstairs and retrace his steps, hoping there was a way to reverse out of the maze in which he found himself. Given that he was already feeling twitchy and ready to start climbing the walls, there was no real choice at all.

  He turned for the stairs and headed up.

  The doors off the second-floor landing, blue and yellow respectively, were as firmly closed against him as the ones in the entrance hallway, and the paint seemed equally as old and flaking. The door on the left side had another copper number, three, but the door opposite just had a bare patch on the paint where the “four” had been. There was a third door here at the top of the stairs, the top half of which was frosted glass. This one opened for him when he turned the handle, but only to reveal a small lavatory, and a grimy one at that. It smelled slightly, the way lavatories often do, and everything looked to be covered in a thin layer of oily dust. He stepped inside, taking care not to touch anything or let any muck get near his clothes.

  The small window high above the cistern showed only more swirling fog outside. John stepped up onto the toilet bowl, gingerly, for fear of breaking it and sending himself tumbling, and tried for a better look out the window. There was just the fog, thick, almost solid, and swirling as if driven by a soft breeze.

  It was useless. He seemed to be trapped in this empty house, inside a bubble of fog that sucked all other noise away into silence. Rationally he knew that the real world was just there, the thickness of the glass away, but he had no way to reach it short of breaking a window, and he wasn’t at the stage of resorting to vandalism.

  Not yet.

  He stepped back out onto the landing and closed the door, shutting the smell back inside. He took a deep breath, preparing to go up, taking a second to inure himself against the sights he knew were still up there waiting for him at the murder scene.

  It wasn’t quite as dim here as it had been downstairs. Looking up he saw fog swirl in the skylight he’d noted earlier, far too high above to be reached. As he looked, he caught a glimpse of something flickering on the top floor, blue and gray, like a shorted electrical connection although he couldn’t hear any sparking. The air seemed to shift, as if a large object, or person, had just moved overhead.

  “Hello?” John said, dismayed to hear the tremor in his voice. He was all too aware that he was alone at a multiple murder scene without any backup. He put a hand on his pistol.

  “Armed police,” he said. “Come out where I can see you and nobody will get hurt here.”

  There was no repeat of the movement, but the flickering got more insistent, and the sound of music kicked in. John realized that somebody had just switched on the television in the apartment above.

  The power’s back on? When did that happen?

  The music got louder. It was an old blues tune, one John thought he might recognize give time, a deep throated male voice and a single slide guitar. Leadbelly was his first thought, but given the sound quality maybe it was Elmore James. But this sounded too basic, too earthy, and the guitar was acoustic rather than amplified. Despite the lack of obvious amplification, the rhythm boomed around him and vibrated through the soles of his feet as he started up the stairs, the voice carrying above everything, as if speaking directly to him.

  He sleeps in the deep with the fish far below,

  He sleeps in the weeds in the dark,

  He dreams as he sleeps in the deep, in the cold,

  And the Sleeping God is dreaming where he lies.

  Where he lies, where he lies, where he lies, where he lies,

  The Dreaming God is singing where he lies.

  John wasn’t thinking about the murder scene now. His mind was full of the old stories surrounding the house, tales of missing fishermen and darkness, drowning and despair as he reached the top landing.

  Across the landing the orange door of number five was firmly shut. There was more peeling paint, and another copper number, this one a couple of inches off center, as if deliberately challenging someone to fix it. But the crime scene door, its copper number a centrally placed, straight six and the old paint job white and peeling, lay wide open. John tried to remember whether they’d closed it behind them on the way down, by rights it should have a taped warning across the entrance to prevent the curious from disturbing the scene. Then he had another thought: maybe there was another way in he hadn’t spotted yet. Maybe the Forensics lads had arrived that way and were already at work inside.

  “It’s John Green,” he said loudly, still keeping a hand on the grip of his pistol. “I’m coming in.”

  Nobody replied.

  The blues tune continued through a complex chugging instrumental middle eight on the slide guitar as John stepped through the doorway. As soon as his foot crossed the threshold the guitar cut off as if a needle had been lifted from vinyl, and the room fell suddenly still. Fog still swirled and danced just outside the window but John scarcely noticed. He was looking around the main room of the apartment in
amazement.

  There was no sign of any bodies, no blood, but more than that, beyond it being obviously the same four walls, it seemed to be a different room entirely; one from an earlier period of the building’s existence. The television was indeed switched on and flickering, showing colorless static from a 1960’s style clunky box with heavy dark wood, battered control knobs, and rabbit ears enhanced by crumpled strips of tin foil wrapped around the wire sitting off center on top. The room’s sofa, it had been long, sleek and leather, was replaced by a single battered recliner that had clearly seen better days. Ticking escaped from gaps in the upholstery and the seat looked deep and sunken, as if a heavy person had slumped there over a long length of time. A small table sat on the left side, containing a bottle of scotch: J&B, a glass, an ashtray overflowing with stubs, an old Zippo lighter, and a packet of twenty Camels with only two missing. One of the stubs, the one resting on the edge of the ashtray, was still glowing at the end, trailing a thin straight stream of smoke up toward a motionless ceiling fan.

  Somebody was just here. Where the fuck are they now?

  John did another three-sixty turn, both to make sure he was alone, and to check he was indeed in the same room as earlier.

  What the fuck is going on here?

  He heard a clink, glass against glass, from the kitchen area.

  Found you.

  “Look, I don’t know what’s going on here, but I mean to find out. Armed police. Get the fuck out here where I can see you. I won’t tell you twice.”

  Once again, he got no response and, anger beginning to build, he stepped through into the kitchen. He was thinking about that alleyway, the snow, and the quiet body that he’d been told was dead. His hands shook as he tried to take his weapon from its holster at his hip. It took him two tries to unfasten the catch and another before he got the pistol in his hand. Even then the barrel trembled alarmingly as he raised it and took sight before scanning the room.

  There was no sign of the party of the night before. A clean gingham tablecloth lay, slightly askew, on the table, with a single vase containing only a solitary wilted flower in the center.

  He went to the window, hoping to look out and see the old familiar sight of the church, steadfast and dependable above the town, but there was only more of the same swirling fog.

  There was nothing to show that this was the same place he’d stood earlier, nothing apart from the same fixtures and fittings, and the multi-colored poster with the painted black and red star that still hung over the stove.

  He did a second quick scan of the room. There was still no sign of an occupant and the place was quiet. The poster waved in a breeze that John couldn’t feel, then he heard the singing again, distant and far off.

  Where he lies, where he lies, where he lies, where he lies.

  The Dreaming God is singing where he lies.

  The poster above the stove rippled, as if the surface was somehow alive. John backed out into the main room. His heartbeat thudded in his ears and a throb of pain came from the not-quite healed wound in his gut. He felt nauseous and light headed, unhinged from anything he knew as reality. The dizziness threatened to overwhelm him, so he sat down, hard, in the armchair.

  The room spun. He put the pistol in his lap, where it would be in easy reach if he needed it, and closed his eyes only to open them immediately, it had only made the spinning worse. He slumped back in the chair. The wound in his belly complained again until he found a comfortable position.

  His left hand came to rest on top of the pack of smokes and it seemed like the most natural thing in the world to take one out and light it. He hadn’t smoked for more than ten years, not since Cissie died and not even after his near-death experience, but it felt like coming home. He savored the pleasure of the moment.

  The blues song kicked in again, coming from inside the hissing, dancing, static on the television screen.

  He dreams where he rests in the deep far below.

  And the Sleeping God is dreaming where he lies.

  Where he lies, where he lies, where he lies, where he lies

  The Sleeping God is dreaming where he lies.

  4

  Janis stood on the doorstep on Church Street, wondering if she was doing the right thing. She’d gone with Wiggins to the inspector’s house at the foot of Signal Hill but there had been no answer, and on looking through the windows she was pretty sure nobody was home. She tried his phone again, leaving another message on his Voicemail, but held out little hope for any reply. Technology wasn’t the boss’ strong suit.

  “He’ll have gone for a drink down Water Street,” Wiggins said. “You know what he’s like with his beer.”

  Janis nodded in reply, but she wasn’t about to give up on the boss yet.

  “I’ll see you back in Church Street in an hour,” she said. “I need to go to the bank, and I’ll grab some lunch Downtown.”

  Wiggins smiled.

  “Check the Dolphin first. You know that’s his port of call of choice in the afternoon. I’ll come with if you want the company?”

  “No, thanks anyway. He’ll talk to me easier if I’m on my own. See you in an hour, one way or another.”

  She waved Wiggins off as he drove away from outside the house.

  But instead of heading down to the boss’ favorite bar, she found herself drawn straight back to the crime scene, her every instinct telling her that the inspector hadn’t made it home, that he’d stayed inside instead of venturing out into the fog.

  But why didn’t he answer my call?

  She hesitated before going in. The Forensics truck was parked in the street outside, so the upstairs apartment would be out of bounds for a while until they were done. The tech team didn’t like C.I.D. cops stomping around when they were doing delicate work.

  But maybe he’s in there already, waiting, or hurting? It wouldn’t take a minute to look.

  When she entered the hallway the silence all around her was somewhat unnerving—if the Forensics crew were here, they were being bloody quiet about it. The only sound was of her footsteps echoing away up the stairwell as she walked through the hall. Even that was too loud and felt somehow intrusive.

  “Sergeant Lodge here,” she shouted. “Anybody at home?”

  She got no answer. She had just turned back to the door when she saw thick fog swirl beyond it, and felt a chill in her bones and the hair at the nape of her neck rise. There was trouble here, and a good cop could sense it coming. She walked toward the door, but didn’t reach it. As if caught in a sudden breeze, or pulled by a giant hand, the door slammed shut before she was even halfway back to it, closing with a bang that shook the whole hallway.

  “Bugger,” Janis said, then fell quiet as the echoes whispered around her.

  The window above the door showed only fog outside, and it had gone silent, all traffic noise muffled completely. She turned the handle and pulled. The door didn’t budge, and there was no mechanism for her to use on the inside to open it, just a keyhole with no key in it.

  She tugged again, harder. There was no give on the door at all, and when she put her hand on the wood it felt warm to the touch, almost as if it were alive.

  That thought made her take her hand away again quickly. She looked up at the small window, remembering the fog in which she’d first lost the boss.

  There’s something screwy going on here.

  After one further unsuccessful tug at the door she turned and headed for the stairs.

  Maybe one of the Forensics guys has the key.

  Once more she was aware of just how empty the house felt. The doors to the two apartments on either side weren’t just shut—it felt like they were blocked to entry, actively pushing her away if she got close. She knew it was all in her mind, but that didn’t make it seem any less oppressive. And on top of that, there was still no sound from above as she climbed the stairs.

  Okay. There’s quiet, and there’s downright creepy. I don’t like this.

  She shouted out—more to hea
r a noise, any sound at all, rather than from any great hope that she’d be answered.

  “Boss? Are you there?”

  The quiet seemed to thicken, the air getting heavier and making it harder for her to breathe. The sense of oppression, that something didn’t want her here, grew stronger still and she had to push, hard, to make any headway on the way up.

  After just the first set of stairs she had to stop, panting for breath as if she’d been running hard. She rested, leaning on the handrail where it turned the corner at the first landing, needing to let her heart rate settle before continuing. She knew she wasn’t out of shape—morning runs around the lake and squash matches with Todd Wiggins saw to that. A dozen or so stairs shouldn’t be making her out of breath, but she felt too hot, sweaty even, and was panting as if she’d just run a fast mile.

  Besides there being two more apartments on this floor, also resolutely shut, a closet door faced her at the top of the stairs, the top half of which was of thick frosted glass, a crack running diagonally from top left to bottom right. A bulky shadow moved on the other side of the door.

  “Boss? Is that you?”

  The shadow moved again, and there was a screech, as of something heavy being dragged across a wet, tiled floor.

  “Boss, is that you? You okay?”

  Now Janis was thinking of when she’d found him on his bathroom floor, too weak to lift himself, too drunk to care. She hoped he hadn’t let himself get into that state again—not here, not at a crime scene.

  The chief would have his badge. And there’d be no argument about it.

  She tried the door handle. Once again there was no give in it, although the brass knob turned easily enough. Janis rapped on the glass with her knuckles, not too hard for the crack looked like a bad one and she was afraid she might knock the window out completely.

  “Boss? Come on, open up. It’s me.”

  She got a groan in reply. It sounded like someone in pain. It came again, louder this time, and accompanied by the faintest of smells, the unmistakable odor of piss and shit. Then another groan, and this time it was more like a moan, and definitely an indication of pain. Then there was a thud, as if somebody had just slumped, or fallen, on the other side. That got her thinking again of finding the boss on his bathroom floor.