Evil Dreams (11 page)

When she reached the apartment, she found Howie half drunk. “Next week had better be more productive or you’ve had it,” he said bitterly thumbing through the pages she had brought him. “It’s your fault, Tory. This was your lousy idea and so far it hasn’t worked for doodly crap.” He stormed out of the room, returning after a while with two twelve-packs of beer.

The rest of the weekend, they alternately drank and slept. When awake, Howie refused to speak to her. Sunday evening, after sleeping all day, he awoke hung over but unyielding in his resolve to make their efforts pay.

“This week had better be a good one, Tory,” he mumbled, holding his head in both hands.

Studying him, she commiserated with Howie and his rotten hangover. But hadn’t he broken his own rule about keeping a clear head? Maybe it
was
her fault nothing worthwhile had come across her desk. She wasn’t certain of anything anymore. The beer had taken its toll on her as well. When they had money, they wouldn’t have to drink beer or smoke pot for good times. The joints they had made the week before had been gone since Wednesday and Howie’s dejection over the apparent failure of their scheme continued growing. She would simply have to try harder, become more selective in her choice of possible victims. They would have to be in the early stages of analysis, or middle at best, when they told everything.

Bits and pieces of different patient histories zig-zagged through her head. One man didn’t work. His wife supported him. She had inherited a lot of money or something. Who was he? Suddenly the name blasted in her mind. Jon Ward. Wasn’t he coming in for his second appointment the next day? She remembered seeing his name in the appointment book along with Carol Nelumbo and Sterling Tilden. She would bypass the other appointments holding no promise of success where she and Howie were concerned.

Howie fell back on the bed. “You’d better come home with something excellent this week —or else,” he growled, his voice muffled by the pillow half covering his face.

Tory smiled confidently. This week would be good. She just knew it.

CHAPTER 6

“If you’ll be seated, the doctor will only be a moment,” Tory said, smiling broadly to herself after Jon had entered the office.

Easing himself into the only comfortable appearing chair in the waiting room, Jon picked up an old
Time.
Absently thumbing through it, he wondered what would happen when and if the doctor hypnotized him. The whole of the situation suddenly marched before his mind’s eye. He had passed the point of being agitated and seemed to contemplate only the end of his dream, the end of his appointments with doctors, and the beginning of an existence with Trina without the nightmare. For years he’d distrusted the medical profession and everyone in it, hating every doctor, nurse and hospital. But, because of Trina, he had been hobnobbing with them, telling medical people who wanted to listen, everything about his medical history. More than once since his first appointment with Doctor Dayton, he had thought of his visits with the psychiatrist as going to confession. A good parallel. He had agreed to tell everything he’d ever done that might trigger a stupid nightmare. In the confessional, one was supposed to tell the priest everything that had been done that might be construed as a sin or wrongdoing.

Confess. He recalled the last time he had gone to confession right before leaving for Christmas vacation his second year at Morris College. He had felt if his sins were confessed before the break began, he would not have to worry about doing it once he reached his home and could devote his full attention to his bedridden mother.

Squirming in the chair, Jon remembered the incident as having been awkward. He had made love with one of the girls from Clearmont, a college for women, a few miles from Morris. For several days he had wrestled with the problem of confessing the “sin” and still had no idea how to say it to a priest in the confines of a confessional.

“Bless me, Father. I fucked a girl who is not my wife. No, I’m not married.”

“Bless me, Father. I screwed a girl—”

“Bless me, Father. I was intimate with a young lady.”

He had decided on the last choice and promptly wondered about the priest’s intentions when he asked Jon to go into a detailed account of the incident. What difference? It had been the last time he had gone to confession.

But now, he would be going to confession again. Except this time it would not be to a priest but to a doctor—while he was hypnotized —without control over what he would say in an open room. Could he go through with it? He would for Trina, if for no other reason.

“Doctor Dayton will see you now, Mr. Ward,” Tory said, breaking into his thoughts.

He stood, limping across the room toward the door that led to Dayton’s office. Despite his ruminations, he felt no apprehension about meeting with the psychiatrist.

Standing to meet his patient, Sam approached Jon, extending his hand. After exchanging greetings, each took the same chair they had occupied during their initial appointment.

“What did you do to your leg?” Sam asked, once they were seated.

“My leg? Why, nothing,” Jon said, surprised by the irrelevant question. “Why?”

The doctor’s face skewed into a puzzled frown for a moment. “I thought I detected a limp.”

“A limp? Me? I don’t think so, Doctor,” Jon said, frowning when he saw him make a note on his pad. How could the doctor’s mistake, the same one Trina had made the weekend before Jon entered the hospital for the second angiogram, be pertinent to his analysis?

Sam looked up. “As you know, the results of the second test revealed nothing. Consequently, I feel we can safely rule out anything mechanically wrong at this point. There is one thing that does bother me, though.”

Jon waited.

“The blood your wife claims to have seen. Do you have any ideas about that?”

He shrugged. He had not really thought much about Trina’s raving that blood had been gushing from his head when she opened the door. There had been no stains or evidence to support her seemingly impossible story. Still, Jon had felt she would have sworn to the fact, had anyone suggested she take a vow as to the veracity of her statement.

“I guess I more or less just dismissed it. Maybe I shouldn’t have. Is it, what Trina says she saw, possible?”

“Physically, I don’t think so. But, in Trina’s mind, I’m certain it was as real as anything she’s ever seen in her life. Perhaps, during your analysis, evidence will surface that can explain or at least substantiate the reason for such a phenomenon as she claims to have witnessed.”

Jon nodded slowly. Could his dream, his nightmare be contagious? No, that was ridiculous. “You don’t think Trina’s flipping out, do you Doctor?”

“Of course not. It’s not uncommon for someone to overreact to a situation wherein a loved one is placed in peril. I’m sure you’ve heard of people performing super herculean feats of strength in moments of emotional stress. I feel that Trina’s situation would more than likely fall into that category. Let’s not worry about it for the time being. I met and spoke with her at the hospital and I believe she’s perfectly normal.”

Jon relaxed, first realizing that he had tensed greatly while discussing Trina and what she had seen that Monday.

“Since I last saw you, have you had problems of any kind? Has the dream recurred? Sam asked.

None whatsoever,” Jon said confidently, “and no it hasn’t.”

“Are you and Trina getting along all right?”

“Absolutely.” He wondered why the doctor had asked that question. What did that relationship have to do with understanding his twenty-eight year old dream?

“No small differences of any type?” Sam persisted.

“Well, just one little flap, but that was of no consequence.”

“Will you tell me about it?” Sam asked, sitting forward. “Let me turn on the recorder first.” He pressed a button on his desk, activating the machine hidden behind louvered doors. Nodding, he indicated Jon should begin.

“I don’t think you’ll like this, Doctor,” he began, smiling impishly.

“Why?”

“It concerns you in a way.”

“Go ahead. I have a remarkably strong constitution.”

“It happened only a couple of days ago—ah, last Friday, when she returned home from school. I told her I felt like cancelling today’s appointment.” He hoped he wouldn’t embarrass the doctor or himself.

“Why?”

“I felt, and I still feel to a certain extent, I’m wasting my time and Trina’s money. I’ve had the dream off and on for a long time and so far nothing adverse has happened to me. I haven’t had the nightmare since April 30th, when I went into the hospital.”

He stopped, recalling the continuation of the dream he had had while the angiogram was being administered. Trina knew nothing of it and he was damned certain Doctor Dayton was not going to be told. Now he found it odd that he hadn’t given more thought to that strange experience. Mentally promising himself to dwell on it when he had time alone, he suddenly sensed the psychiatrist staring at him.

“Jon?” Sam asked. “Did anything else cause you to think like this?”

“That wasn’t the cause of the disagreement, if that’s what you want to call it. Trina suggested I should cooperate, that maybe I need a rest of sorts. All right. I’m here cooperating and if you think I should slow down and rest or take it easy for a while, I’m willing to go along with the idea. But the evening after my first appointment with you, she suggested a vacation.”

“What’s so unusual about that?”

“Well, I asked her where she’d like to go and she said California. But then, she intimated that it was my idea.”

“Was it?”

“I remember talking about it but I think she suggested it.”

“What happened next?” Sam asked calmly.

“We played ping pong with the idea over the weekend—you did … I didn’t … until she suddenly stopped. I thought I had won. But when I asked if she was angry about it she said, ‘I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Let’s just drop it.’ “

“Well,” Sam said when he had finished jotting a note, “I don’t think we should spend too much time on it now. I thought we would talk a little about dreams before attempting to hypnotize you.”

Jon slowly nodded. In a way, he was looking forward to being put in a trance but he still held one or two slight reservations.

“The state of sleep is most intriguing and is currently being studied more than it ever has been in the past,” Sam began. “Sort of surprising when you consider man has been going to sleep every day or night since he’s been on earth. When we sleep, we actually awaken to another form of existence. We dream. Sometimes as the hero, sometimes as the villain, we create stories against backgrounds of beauty or horror. Regardless of the role we elect to play, we’re the authors of our dreams. We call up from our memory banks persons and events we haven’t thought of for years. Still, despite all the odd facets of dreams, they are completely real to us while they are being experienced.

“A poet once posed the ambiguity of dreams when he said: ‘I dreamt last night I was a butterfly and now I don’t know whether I am a man who dreamt he was a butterfly, or perhaps a butterfly who dreams now that he is a man.”

His expression reflecting the enigmatic puzzle, Jon remained silent.

“Dreams can be either a reflection of past events or a sounding board of things to come,” the doctor continued, “but in either case, they will usually be disguised as some meaningless, yet puzzling symbol. One job of a psychiatrist is to help unmask the symbols and reveal their meaning. In dreams, we tend to make ourselves more or less than we actually are in waking life.

“I want you to understand, Jon, simply because your dream is a recurrent one, that it is not particularly unusual.”

“It’s not?” he asked, surprised. “I thought I was unique. At least I gathered as much from your attitude.”

“Let me say this—the fact that you’re my patient makes the situation unique. You see, I’ve never had a patient who’s had this problem. Nevertheless, there are many similar cases recorded. Such a dream is usually centered around the main theme in a person’s life. More often than not, this theme is the key to understanding the dreamer’s neurosis or his personality’s most important aspect.”

“Which am I?” Jon asked. “A neurotic or a fascinating personality?”

Dayton failed to suppress a smile, sobering immediately. “We don’t know yet. And don’t let the word neurosis throw you. It simply means a functional nervous disorder. Let me give you an example. A teenage boy with a record of three suicide attempts because of alcoholic parents who fought constantly and beat him a lot; extramarital affairs by both parents; no food; inappropriate clothing; filthy living conditions and so forth, had the following frequent dream from as early an age as he could recall:

“He dreamed he was on a down escalator but trying to walk up to the next floor. He tried valiantly to make progress and found the only way he could, was to run up faster than the steps moved down. Just as he neared the top and success seemed imminent, someone, he was never certain who, would kick him in the chest and the boy would fall. Before he could regain his balance, he’d find himself at the bottom once more and the process would be repeated over and over.”

“Hell,” Jon said, “I’m no psychiatrist but I can figure that one out.”

“It’s painfully obvious when you know the boy’s background. His dream remained constant until his problem was solved. Sometimes, in cases like this, there will be subtle changes, making the solution more difficult to attain. Your dream however, seems to be unchanging. I admit I find the symbolic content more than just a bit intriguing. Admittedly, there are complexities and the symbols themselves appear at this time to be highly sophisticated.”

“Well,” Jon quipped, “if you’re going to have one, it may as well be the best available.” He felt the doctor was laying the groundwork for a long period of sessions and wondered how much time and money would ultimately be involved. As long as he did not feel emotionally dependent on the psychiatrist, he’d be able to call a stop to the meetings any time he wanted. For now, he would go along with the idea since he suddenly found his repetitious dream as fascinating as did the doctor.