The Sleepless (13 page)

Even though his eyes were closed, and he couldn’t open them, he saw the faintest flicker of pinkish light. He saw it every time that Dr Rice took him under, but he still didn’t understand what it was. For a moment it flared like the aurora borealis, almost dazzling him, but then it died away again as it always did. 

After that, after that brilliant flare of light, he felt himself sinking downward. He sank gradually at first, like a man whose lungs are slowly filling with ink. But then he began to slide faster and faster into the endless dark of his subconscious – into that world where his own terror could talk to him, and his worst fears took on flesh. 

He heard Dr Rice saying, ‘Deeper – and deeper – and
deeper
asleep.’ He sounded like a man talking down a hundred-foot well. 

Michael knew where he was: sitting in Dr Rice’s office in Dr Rice’s canvas-and-chrome chair. Yet he was also back at home, standing in the kitchen drinking Folger’s Dark Roast coffee out of his Ross Perot For President mug, with the morning sun slanting across the table. Outside the window, red-and-white kites whirled in a tethered frenzy over New Seabury beach, and the window sash rattled – hesitated – rattled in the breeze. Jason was bent over his cereal bowl, his tousled hair shining, while Patsy was standing at the sink in her pink cotton robe, the one with the torn lace collar. 

‘Have you thought about it any more?’ Patsy was asking him, in a blurry voice.
It
meaning death.
It
meaning John O’Brien’s body.
It
meaning more people falling like heavy rainfall out of the sky, and a burned-out helicopter. Patsy turned around, and for some reason he couldn’t focus on her face, although he knew for sure that it was her. 

He nodded. ‘I’ve been thinking about it all night.’ 

Jason looked up, and Michael found it impossible to focus on
his
face, too. ‘Dad ... when you come back from Hyannis, can you fix my back brake? It keeps rubbing against the wheel.’ Then he lifted his head again and said, ‘ – rubbing against the wheel.’ Then he lifted his head yet again and said, ‘ – rubbing against the wheel.’ 

Michael thought
yes, I ought to keep Jason’s bicycle in good working order.
But before he could answer, Patsy said, ‘Have you thought about it any more?’ and he began to feel that he was trapped in a loop of memory that was playing and replaying with no way out. 

He was just about to say something to Patsy about Joe Garboden when he found that he wasn’t in the kitchen at all, but travelling to Hyannis along the Popponosset Beach road. He didn’t know why he was going this way. He should have driven directly to South Mashpee and onto Route 28. Going through Popponosset involved an unnecessary dogleg. All the same, he had a vague feeling that he was supposed to meet somebody at Popponosset, although he didn’t know who it could be. 

The odd thing was that he was standing up as he drove, as if he were still standing in the kitchen. The sunlit coastline of Popponosset Bay unravelled past him bright and two-dimensional, in bleached-out colours, like the special effects in a cheap 1960s movie. 

On the car radio, a faint, dry voice was saying, ‘ ... be meeting you later, yes. That’s quite correct. He said nothing else.’ 

He drove past the Popponosset Inn, with its tiled beach house and its verandah and its striped umbrellas nodding in the breeze. He thought he could see a tall man in a grey suit standing by the railings watching him, but when he turned his head around to look again, the man had vanished; and the only people on the verandah were a young couple in white polo shirts. 

But something had changed. Something was making him feel uneasy. Although he couldn’t understand how he had become aware of it, he knew for certain that the man in the grey suit had seen him, and was intent on pursuing him. He kept turning around and around, but he couldn’t see the man anywhere. All the same, the man was after him, and intended to do him serious harm. 

He began to feel alarmed. The sky over Popponosset Bay began to grow rapidly darker, and the white of the breakers began to shine in the gloom like the teeth of fierce, hungry dogs. The wind sprang up and he could actually feel it on his face, salty and warm and abrasive with flying sand. 

The man was waiting for him on the beach. Strangely, it didn’t look like Popponosset Beach any more, but somewhere else – somewhere that Michael was sure that he had seen before, but which he couldn’t quite place. There was a scrubby headland in the distance, and a row of green-painted saltbox houses, and a curve of rocks that reminded him very strongly of Popponosset. But there was a squat, whitewashed lighthouse here; and there was no such lighthouse at Popponosset, never had been. 

His car seemed to have melted away. He found himself walking across the dry, blowing sand in his Adidas training shoes. He could hear the sound of the surf quite distinctly, and the high-pitched whistling of a man calling his dog. ‘Be meeting you later,’ said a voice, very close to his ear; and he was too frightened to turn his head to see who it was. ‘Be meeting you later – rubbing against the wheel.’ 

Off to his right, the Atlantic sky was evilly black, and the wind was so strong now that the sand was whipping against his ankles like snakes. He could hear his heart beating, and his lungs rising and falling, and he could even hear the faint crackling of electricity in his nerve-endings. The tall grey man was still waiting for him at the end of the beach, and Michael was beginning to feel seriously frightened. This was only hypnotism, after all; this was only suggestive therapy. He knew it was only hypnotism, even though he was experiencing the seashore so vividly. He knew he was still sitting in Dr Rice’s office. 

But here stood this tall grey man, and he didn’t look like anyone that Michael had ever known, or anyone that Michael might have imagined. He had never appeared in any of Michael’s hypnotic dreams before. Yet his presence was so distinct that Michael could almost taste it. It was like copper and thunder and something else – the metallic taste of human blood. Michael had never seen him before. He was sure that he had never seen him before, even though he thought he recognized the squat white lighthouse and the deserted, grassy beach.
Be meeting you later.
 

What unnerved Michael more than anything else was the way in which he couldn’t stop himself from walking so swiftly to meet this man. His legs had an urgency of their own, an urgency he couldn’t control, hurrying him on, hurrying him on, even though his mind was filling up with absolute terror, like a bottle filling up with black blood. 

The man had bone-white hair, long and silky and swept back, although some of it was flying in the onshore wind. He had a long sculptured face, with a straight, narrow nose and distinctive cheekbones and dark, commanding eyes. He was, in fact, frighteningly handsome, the kind of man whose presence makes husbands take a protective hold on their wives’ arms. He wore a long expensive overcoat of light grey softly woven wool, which billowed and rumbled in the wind, and gave Michael the impression that he was floating just a few inches above the sand – an impression that was reinforced by the complete absence of footprints anywhere near him. Of course, Michael told himself, as he hurried nearer and nearer, the wind had blown his footprints away. But all the same the tall grey man still appeared to be floating. Not just floating, but
receding,
as if he were drawing Michael further and further along the beach, toward the dunes, and the rocks, and the squat white lighthouse on the clifftop. 

Michael clenched his teeth and strained his shoulder muscles, making a huge physical effort to stop himself from walking any further. He was aware that he was hurrying across the beach, but at the same time he was also aware that he was bending the arms of Dr Rice’s chair in his struggle to stay where he was. 

‘Come on, Michael,’ the man was saying. His voice was so soft that Michael was unsure whether he was really speaking to him, or whether it was nothing more than the seductive whispering of the surf. ‘You should join us, Michael. You should join us. We could ease your pain, Michael. We could give you forgetfulness. We could even grant you absolution.’ 

Michael grunted with the strain of trying to stop himself walking any further. His muscles were so rigidly tight that his back ached, and he felt as if his jaw would be locked for the rest of his life. 

But in spite of all of his efforts he half slid, half staggered right up close to the dune where the man was standing; and it was only when he was less than three feet away that he finally managed to stop himself. 

With very sharp fingernails, the man was peeling a lime. He stood watching Michael with a mixed expression on his face, partly curious, partly contemptuous, and partly sympathetic. Michael tried to back away, but he just couldn’t summon enough strength. The tall grey man wanted him there, and that was that. Michael opened and closed his mouth, and realized that he had never been so terrified of another human being in his life. This man scared him so much that he couldn’t even
breathe.
 

Whoever he was, whatever he wanted, this man was Death itself. And the most frightening part about it was that Michael knew with total certainty that he was Death. 

‘Do you want to live like half a man for the rest of your life?’ the man whispered, his voice sounding almost sad. ‘Do you want all of your dreams and all of your ambitions to sift through your fingers, like sand?’ 

He finished peeling his lime, and lifted the thin corkscrew of dark green peel so that it twisted in the breeze. Then he bit into the lime itself, deeply; and he didn’t even flinch. 

‘You should know me, Michael,’ the man told him, with juice running down his chin. ‘My name is –’ 

Michael clamped his hands over his ears. He didn’t want to hear the man’s name. If he heard the man’s name, then he would know for certain that he was real. And if he was real, he could come after him, not just in dreams and nightmares and hypnotic trances, but in cars and buses and along the sidewalk, until he reached his door and Michael opened it and there he stood, tall and grey and terrifying. 

Michael thought: he’s going to kill me. Somehow, somewhere, I’m going to meet this tall grey man, and when I do he’s going to kill me. He would probably kill me here and now if he could, on this beach, in this office, with the sea whispering and the traffic bustling outside the window. 

‘You don’t want to live like half a man, do you?’ the man whispered, with a smile. 

Then he said, ‘
Wake up.’
 

‘We can cleanse you of all of your guilt, you know.’ 

‘
Wake up, Michael. When I count to six I want you to open your eyes and look at me; and then you will be fully awake. You will recall everything that you have thought about, and you will tell me about it immediately.’
 

‘What?’ asked Michael. He didn’t understand. 

‘
Wake up,’
insisted Dr Rice, and it was then that Michael looked around him and understood which of his parallel existences was real. The sound of the sea died away, and the tall grey man faded away, and the very last thing that he was conscious of seeing was the squat white lighthouse, which remained as a dark triangular image on his retina for nearly ten seconds, before that faded away, too. 

Dr Rice looked concerned. ‘Michael? Are you okay?’ 

Michael blinked. Although the blinds were closed, the office still seemed uncomfortably bright. ‘Sure, yes ... I think so. That was one of the weirdest sessions I’ve ever had.’ 

‘You don’t have to tell me. Take a look at the arms of your chair.’ 

Michael cautiously lifted both hands and examined the arms. The right-hand one was twisted into an S-shape, where once it had been completely straight. The left-hand arm wasn’t quite as badly bent, but it still had a noticeable double kink in it. Part of the canvas seating was torn away, too. 

‘What’s happened?’ he asked, incredulously. ‘What did I do?’ 

Dr Rice said, ‘You pulled and you twisted and you shouted out, and you tried to turn my best Oggetti chair into a pretzel, that’s what you did.’ 

Michael took hold of one of the chair arms in both hands and tried to bend it back again, but he couldn’t. He looked up at Dr Rice in perplexity and embarrassment. 

Dr Rice shrugged. ‘I don’t think you’ll be able to straighten it out. Most people exhibit some degree of enhanced physical strength when they’re under deep hypnosis, but you really went off the scale. That chair is 6mm tube steel. Normally, you’d need a heavy-duty pipe wrench to bend those arms.’ 

‘I was trying to stop myself,’ Michael explained. ‘I was trying to stop myself from –
walking,
from walking toward this –’ He suddenly realized that the back of his shirt was soaked in sweat, in spite of the air-conditioning, and that he was shaking like a man who has just survived an auto wreck. 

The trouble was, he didn’t understand
why
his
trance had been so strenuous; or
why
it had been so traumatic. He had dreamed of meeting a tall grey bogyman on a beach, but that was all. He couldn’t even remember why the man had terrified him so much – although he was still very aware that he
had.
In fact he hoped he never dreamed about him again, ever.