Jaguar (31 page)

“Have you ever dreamed inside my brain?” Mark asked.

Eddie shook his head.

“No,” he said, and his face looked very sad for a moment. “Didn’t you hear me? We try not to do it with friends. It’s . . . prying. And it’s dangerous.” He thought for a moment, then added, “But if I do, I’ll leave you a sign so you’ll know.”

So far, Mark had found no sign.

Eddie’s notebooks included a warning: “Good thing I didn’t dream many people on this side. It just gives the Jaguar a way in, a way to track us down.”

Mark didn’t find this important at the time. He pursued what he perceived to be Eddie’s paranoid fantasy and sent him home with another prescription to help suppress the dreams. Mark felt uneasy even then. What he’d wanted to do was explore the dreams, establish clinical controls, study Eddie and, later, Maryellen. He’d kicked himself many a time for not fighting for an EEG on her while she was in the hospital, in the dream-state. Her parents had refused, and since he was more concerned with Eddie he let it pass.

Damn!

He’d always taken on too many patients. Each fragment that he’d gleaned from their lives loomed larger and larger. He’d let things slip through his grip that suddenly crystallized in his mind as crucial: the EEG on Maryellen, the mystery patient at the Soldiers’ Home whose EEG matched Eddie’s, attempts to induce the dream-state in both kids instead of suppressing it with his drug therapy. . . .

That line of thinking wasn’t productive now. Mark concentrated on what Eddie had told him about dreams.

Just at the threshold of dream, according to Eddie, we are in the skin between worlds. Our time there is a fraction of a second, but for that time the dreamer passes through a fabric shot through with dreams and the paths that dreams take.

“If you meet somebody else’s dream head-on,” Eddie told him, “then you get that quick twitch that wakes you up and knocks you back into your own skull. Like trying to put the same ends of two magnets together. I don’t know why it’s so different for us.”

Magnets.

Mark had felt Sara twitch beside him just a short while ago, and he wondered where she had almost gone. He resisted the temptation to snuggle up closer. He didn’t see any reason for her to lose sleep just because he was restless and too lazy to get up.

“What happens to you?” Mark had asked.

“Blue light flickers very fast, but it’s not the light going fast, it’s me, somehow. I just dissolve inside and follow it home,” Eddie said. “I don’t know how else to describe it.”

“Is it like TV? Do you just watch the other person’s dream or can you change it?”

Eddie shrugged.

“It depends. At first I didn’t know I could
do
anything. It was like watching a movie, a 3-d movie, dreaming in somebody else’s head. Usually I don’t even know who it is.”

“You mean, you’re inside somebody’s brain and you don’t get a name, an image . . . ?”

“Well,” Eddie sighed a trying-to-be-patient-with-ignorance sigh, “it’s awfully
big
in there, like coming to earth in a spaceship and expecting to find the name ‘Earth’ written everywhere. Have you ever dreamed your own face?”

Mark suppressed a snicker at the memory. Here was a little boy setting him straight on the landscape of dreams. Ten years since they’d had this conversation, and Mark had to admit that he had not yet met himself face-to-face in a dream.

“The first time I tried exploring I got my times tables for school,” Eddie said. “I had to get out of the dream area and into another place, like wandering through a warehouse that goes as far as you can see. I just sort of ride around, take whatever turns look like they’ll take me to what I want to see. You know whose dream it is if you recognize people they know.”

“Is it like a highway?”

“Not exactly, but that’s why I call it the ‘dreamway.’ I see bits of everything, hear things, smell things . . . it can be pretty awful but I stay away from the awful parts. Like for the times tables, I found that one stored with rhymes.”

“This was a schoolmate of yours?”

“Yeah. I found his times tables. But everything inside a dream is made up of puzzle parts. When I get back to myself, I look around inside me for the puzzle parts in my head that match the ones I saw in his. When I get them together, then I know the times tables just like I’d memorized them myself.”

Maybe because he was in the twilight between waking and sleep, Mark visualized for the first time what Eddie had been talking about. Then he realized what it could mean.

Molecules,
he thought.
He puts together a molecule that encodes the information.

Viruses did that, why not people?

The blood series that he’d done on both Eddie and Maryellen indicated some very peculiar hormonal variations, and in Eddie they coincided with his EEG aberrations. Both kids had a high hemoglobin, which didn’t seem important. Until now.

Hemoglobin . . . iron . . . magnets.

Mark sat upright in bed and leaned back against his headboard.

If they’ve learned how to encode memory chemically. . . .

The possibility, like many that involved the kids, seemed so great as to be impossible, preposterous.

But it’s worth testing.

“Yet you stopped doing that, didn’t you?” Mark had asked Eddie. “At some point you quit doing your homework the easy way. Why?”

Several students in Eddie’s classes became behavioral problems, and worse. At first Eddie was grateful not to be the center of attention. Then he realized that only people he dreamed in had these problems. Eddie took stopped that kind of learning when the talk in school centered around Eddie as a “bad influence.” Investigation proved that the two students most affected had no contact with Eddie whatsoever. When this was mentioned at a monthly meeting of the valley’s mental health professionals, Mark became curious. Eddie was in seventh grade then, and seeing Mark regularly. That was when Mark had asked him about it pointblank. Eddie smiled, obviously relieved.

“Then you
do
believe me!”

“I didn’t say that,” Mark said. “I just asked . . . well, if you do get into someone’s head, do they know it? What does it do to them?”

“I don’t think they know it,” Eddie said. “But it’s funny, I always thought I’d know if someone was inside mine. I’ve felt some nudges, you know, like from the other side. But nothing inside.”

Eddie stopped, chewed his lower lip and took a deep breath.

“And?” Mark urged.

“And what?”

“Does it do something to them?”

Eddie squirmed on Mark’s office bench and chewed his lip again.

“I’m not sure . . . I mean, yeah, something happens.”

“Like with Lester and Philip?”

Eddie’s face paled at first, then reddened. His eyes kept staring at some point on the floor.

“Yeah.”

“Does it happen with Maryellen, too?”

Eddie’s gaze snapped to meet Mark’s. His lip and tone became sullen and he hunched over bitten fingernails.

“You’ll have to ask her that.”

“I did.”

“And what did she say?”

“She said I’d have to ask you.”

A grin broke through the grim line that had been Eddie’s mouth. He coughed, squirmed some more.

“Yeah,” he said, at last, “it happens with her, too.”

“And you two discovered it on your own, and stopped poking about in other students’ brains?”

“That’s about it.”

“What about each other?”

“We’ve never done that!” Eddie snapped. “It’s not right. But we’ve been inside the same people. That’s because anytime you go inside the dreamways, you leave a door open, or a marker that makes getting inside easier. Someone else can use it to backtrack to you, too.”

“Someone from the other side?”

“Or from this one,” Eddie said.

“How far . . . except for the ‘other side,’ what’s the range of your dreamways?”

“I don’t know,” Eddie said. “I’ve seen some pretty strange things. It’s hard to know whether I’ve been somewhere or if I’m inside the memory of someone who’s been there. I think we can go anywhere in the world, skipping from person to person. But the easy dreams are always close by.”

“What about language? Do you get inside somebody and find that you don’t understand the language?”

“No,” Eddie shook his head. “Dreams don’t operate that way. But I can learn a language on the dreamways, the way I learned times tables. But that’s different. The dreams themselves . . . they’re always in my language. Dreams are different than poking around, but the dreams get you inside to do the poking.”

Mark watched Sara’s sleeping face in the green glow of their bedside clock. Her full lips pursed slightly, as though she expected a kiss. Her eyes flicked back and forth under their lids, and he wondered what it would be like to meet her in the dream that possessed her now, that took her far from their bed. He felt so close to her body but so far from whatever was
her.
Sometimes he felt closer to her when she was working in some other country than when she slept right next to him.

And that was the last thing he remembered until Sara woke him in the morning with her soft, stroking hands.

“You were restless last night,” she said. “Is something bothering you?”

“Sorry.”

He reached an arm around her hips and pulled her close, trapping her curious hand between them. “Yes, it’s the kids. I’m worried . . . I don’t know what worries me, exactly. Their situation, I guess. I keep thinking that there’s a key somewhere that I’ve misplaced, and I’m going to find it right in my pocket.”

Her playful fingers had aroused him, and she kissed him a long, hot kiss.

“You can look in my pocket,” she whispered. “Maybe you’ll find it there.”

They made love that Friday morning as they often did when the world left the two of them alone—slowly, very wet and for a good, long time.

“Well,” she said, later, “did you find your key?”

“No,” he sighed, “but it was sure fun looking.”

They lay still, cradling one another, listening to the percussion of rain on the roof and windows.

The phone rang, and Sara answered it. She listened for a few moments, then put her hand over the receiver and gave it to Mark. She looked pale.

“What is it?”

“They’re gone,” she said. “Eddie’s left the hospital, and Maryellen’s disappeared from her home. They say they found a lot of those Disneyland pamphlets in both rooms. The wicked stepmother would like to speak with you.”

When Mark hung up the phone he shuffled to the closet.

“I wish she’d learn to call me
before
she calls the police,” Mark grumbled. He struggled for balance with one leg in his pants.

“So,” Sara said, “they’re off to Fantasyland, after all.”

“I don’t think so,” Mark said, “and neither does the furious Mrs. Thompkins. It’s too pat, too soon. It’s what they wanted us to think.”

“Are you mad?”

“I’m a little angry, yeah,” he said. He pulled his t-shirt on backwards and had to reverse it. “It’s a holiday, I’d rather spend it with you than tracking down the kids.”

“That’s not it.”

Sara slipped her arms around him from behind and kissed his neck.

“You’re mad because he lied to you. You’re mad because you trusted him, you were starting to believe him, and now that he’s lied to you you don’t know what to think.”

“Oh, yeah?”

Mark turned in her arms and hugged her.

“How do you know all that stuff?”

“I live with a shrink,” she said, “genius rubs off. But I know Eddie pretty well, too. Kids open up for writing teachers, it’s like being a cross between the confessional and Switzerland—neutral ground, and all that. He idolizes you, and so does Maryellen. Eddie must have a good reason for this; he knows what Mel Thompkins can do. He must think it’s important, very important.”

“Life or death,” Mark said. “Because that’s what he’s up against if Mel finds him before the cops do.”

“Then Thompkins is out looking?”

“Absolutely. And she says he took his rifle.”

Sara muttered something under her breath and let Mark finish getting dressed. She sat in her flannel nightie at the dilapidated desk next to her dressing-table and tapped a forefinger against her pursed lips.

“So where are you going, Lone Ranger?” she asked. “Not chasing a madman with a rifle, I hope.”

“I’ll be chasing a madman, all right,” Mark said, “but not that one. You’ve seen what the kids wrote about the Jaguar?”

“Yes,” she said. “He’s the bad guy who’s destroying the fabric between our universe and another, right? The one who never has a face in Maryellen’s drawings?”

“That’s right,” Mark said. “And Eddie’s been convinced that he’s on this side, nearby, and that he’s in trouble. Dammit! I’ve spent all this time looking for the symbology behind all this. . . .”

“What else is there?”

Mark looked her in the eyes but couldn’t bring himself to answer.

“You think it’s true?” she asked. “How could it possibly be true?”

“I’m thinking backwards, now,” Mark said. He sat on the edge of the bed and took her hands. “I’m just going to throw out a bunch of ‘what-ifs’ and you stop me if my logic goes bad.”

“Ok, masked man. Shoot.”

“First of all, assume they’re right. A Jaguar persona somewhere near here crosses to the other side and causes mayhem with the butterfly kiss in brains and genetics and what all. Eddie says he must be like them, so he must go through terrible pain when he wakes up. His influence on the other side is nearly constant, so he must be asleep or hurting most of the time. Where can he get the physical care he needs under those circumstances?”

“A hospital?”

“Right. A hospital, maybe some kind of full-time home care if he’s wealthy. He probably doesn’t like life here all that much, he’d prefer to stay in the dreamworld all the time. Eddie said something else recently that bothers me.”

“This whole thing bothers me. Do you realize how far-out this sounds?” She toyed with a basket of empty film canisters.

“Of course,” Mark said, and laughed. “It’s my job to realize how far-out this sounds, and my job to make the patient comfortable enough to keep talking. I’ve been going at this all wrong, and now I’m trying to remember everything . . . ten years of everything.”