Wake Up and Dream (43 page)

“There’s a market for
that
?”

“You’d be amazed.”

“Not sure I would. But if you’re a budding journalist, Roger, you should be studying—learning how to write copy.”

“Less of the budding, buddy.” He gave his camera a final six-shooter flip, then tucked it back into his suit coat pocket. “The written word’s no longer ze main method of communication for ze human species…” He was putting on his German college professor accent now. “Everything is about—how you say?—ze
image
… Still, maybe I might put in a few hours at the library. Gotta know how to read them contracts so’s I don’t get skinned. It’s a bad old world out there, so I hear.”

“Yeah. So I hear, as well. But something tells me you’re going to do just fine in it.” Clark smiled. He’d have ruffled the kid’s hair, but he didn’t want to get his hands mussed with grease.

A
S HE DROVE BACK DOWN
through the city, he saw, along with news hoardings about Australia refusing entry to fleeing Dutch Jews and all the usual No Blacks signs and racist scrawlings, posters on the walls for the Liberty League guy who’d still be standing to replace Herbert Kisberg as Governor, and others for a new biopic of the Richard Wagner. Peg was right. They’d barely won a battle against whatever they’d been fighting—the guys in Europe with their uniforms and parades, or the ones over here who hid behind big business and Ivy League educations. Roosevelt had just lost another vote to support Churchill in Congress, and the Japanese were pushing out across the Pacific. Even if you could work out who the good guys actually were, they never actually won. That only happened in the feelies.

The usual crowds were outside Saint Vincent’s Hospital. Their vigil had been going on night and day since the guy they still thought of as Lars Bechmeir had been rushed there after his onstage collapse at the Biltmore. If anything, their adulation for their hero had increased after his tale of deception and suffering. And as for his name—after all, why would the Bechmeir field be called after him if he hadn’t played a crucial role in its invention? Whatever Daniel Lamotte was planning on writing in his latest version of
Wake Up and Dream
, it would have to be at least as clever a mixture of truth and myth as any of the previous versions if the world was to believe it.

Clark had to park a way off West 3rd, and then push his way through praying and weeping sightseers, souvenir hawkers, and various representatives of the media, to reach the hospital entrance.

The atmosphere inside was closer to normal. Life went on, after all. Death, as well. Nuns clustered in their white cassocks. He passed a civilian nurse pushing a mewling newborn baby in a wheeled crib whilst an aged couple sat weeping on a side bench. There were also a fair number of police about. He’d liked to have looked in on old Otto but the
LA Times
had an exclusive deal and security around what both the state and federal authorities regarded as a material witness was intense. It sounded like the poor guy was dying in any case.

He asked for other directions instead, and got a strange look from the orderly who sent him down a seemingly little-used corridor, then up a back flight of stairs. A nun bustled up to block his progress at the far end of an ill-lit corridor. She looked solemn even before her surprise registered at his request.

“Are you sure you want to see her?”

“Well, I guess…”

“No one else has been. Well, I mean no one from the real world. Just the police, although they seem more bothered with our famous friend down in east wing. Did you know her? You’d think she’d have some friends somewhere, wouldn’t you—even if…”

“No, I’m not a friend. I guess you could say our paths just happened to cross.”

“You’re not from the press or anything, are you?”

“I’m not from anybody but me. I’m just this guy. My name’s Clark Gable. Like I say, we barely met…”

She looked him in the eyes for a long moment before she nodded. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone who I’d thought was a hopeless case,” she said as they walked along the corridor. “There’s always
something
we can do. But the priests talk of possession. The technicians talk of plasmic disturbance. The doctors talk of self-sustaining wound trauma. And the psychiatrists talk of madness.”

“What do you believe?”

She glanced back at him. The face of a pretty young woman framed beneath that black and white wimple was deeply troubled. “I’m a woman of faith, Mr Gable, and I believe in God. But I also believe in the Devil.”

This was some part of the hospital which had been marked for improvement or demolition, and there was little else in all the rooms he glimpsed but dust and emptiness. Little light, as well. He glanced up at the lights along the corridor ceiling. Despite the blotchy gloom, they all blazed.

“She’s here.” The nun’s hand trembled as she gestured. “I think I should come in with you—unless you want me to send for someone else?”

“No. I guess we’ll be okay.”

Clark had no idea what he’d find as he stepped through the doorway, but at first glance he was standing in a fairly ordinary, if rather ill-lit and old, hospital ward. The ceiling was high, and the windows were small and seemed to look out on nothing but another wall, and there was an intense smell of iodine. One metal-frame bed was set in the center of a linoleum space which could have housed a dozen, and on that bed, but somehow not quite
in
it, was the room’s—this whole wing’s—sole patient.

As he walked over, the stupid thought crossed his mind that he should have brought some grapes, maybe a couple of trashy magazines—all the crap he’d heard you normally gave to people you visited in hospital—but then, as he saw more clearly, he understood something of the nurse’s quiet horror, and the pointlessness of his visit.

The reason Doctor Penny Losovic didn’t quite seem to be in the bed was that, through the trussing of a steel spider’s web of wire and frame, she was hanging over it. What he saw made him think at first of trapped flies, and then of a scarecrow he’d once seen in a field as a kid back in Ohio. The farmers burned the fields come fall, and for some reason a scarecrow had been left. The thing had come back to him in his dreams, standing amid the charcoal with its blackened arms smoking, yet still outstretched as if reaching to grasp another’s invisible hand. It came back to him again now. From where he was standing, there wasn’t one inch of Doctor Penny Losovic’s body which the fire hadn’t seared.

“The suspension system is to try to minimize contact and encourage healing,” the nun murmured. “We try to leave the flesh to the air, and use a tincture of iodine. Normally, the doctors would try to put skin grafts on the very worst areas, only there’s no undamaged skin left to graft with. I’ve never seen such extensive burns—not on anyone living. She shouldn’t have got as far as this hospital… Let alone still be…”

Clark took a further step forward, and the dimensions of the room seemed to twist. As if he’d turned an invisible corner, he was suddenly conscious of a ticking and creaking as what remained of Penny Losovic stirred. The pulleys moved. The metal rods strained. Glimpses of caked and weeping flesh glittered and parted.

“She must be in the most intense pain.” The nurse’s voice now came from another world. “Of course, we give her doses of morphine. The strongest possible, and then more. Enough to… But she won’t die…”

With the creaking sound came the most extraordinary stench. A mixture of things rotted and roasted borne on a sense of unendurable yet continuing pain, it blocked his mouth and coated his tongue. If Hell had an aroma, this was it.

“Can you hear me?” He was surprised he’d spoken—his voice seemed to come from someone else—but the thing in its cocoon of wires seemed to twist. A head, or something which had once been a head, turned toward him with a sound of unpeeling flesh. The mouth was a ruined gape, and one of the eyes was a weeping crater, but the other stared across at him. With it came the murmur of a thousand voices.

What are you?

He knew he didn’t need to speak for the thing to understand. But he also knew, as he met that blood-threaded gaze, that there was no answer to his question—or not one that would allow him to leave this room sane.

He stepped back through the polluting layers of stench and pain, and found that he was standing once again in the odd dullness of a near-deserted ward.

Leaving the hospital, he drove out through Los Angeles. Soon, he was passing stretches of farmland between gray-blue glimpses of the Pacific, and the usual sense of relief came washing over him as he caught a last glimpse in the rearview of the grubby letters of that sign. The latest plan he’d heard about didn’t involve getting rid of the thing, or even cleaning it up and removing the Land part so that it simply said Hollywood. Some entrepreneur with more money than sense was talking of replacing the long-dead lamps with a newer kind of illumination. Fresh fencing and a large construction project would see those famous letters spelling themselves out across the city in the shimmering, ever-changing veils of a Bechmeir field. Then, as he passed the Culver City Kennel Club and the King’s Tropical Inn, he realized that something else had happened. For everything else he’d experienced by going into that hospital, the feel and smell of the actual place itself hadn’t bothered him.

The terrors and flashbacks he’d been having were also fading. Something which had been binding him to the past had snapped on the night of Penny Losovic’s weird experiment in Soundstage 1A, although he still didn’t know exactly what. But if there was anything that still bothered Clark, it was why the Thrasis entity had chosen to follow him, and then why his presence had trigged such a huge response from the thing within the cage. For he was nobody—right—and always had been? Or nearly always. That was how things were, and—and this to him was perhaps the best and most important part—the thought no longer hurt as much as it once had. So maybe that was how life in this new decade went. You waved goodbye to one set of ghosts, and said hello to the next.

The air improved as he headed away from the smog and bustle. He caught cow dung and the sweet aroma of orange groves. Then he hit the seafront Speedway and was met by Venice Beach’s sharper odors. Vanilla and candy and frying onions competed with ocean salt and all the sunwarmed bodies which crowded the main boardwalk. The Ferris wheel was turning and the gulls were screeching and boys were cruising in their cars and the girls were preening in their summer dresses. Then another, sourer smell hit him. He was just thinking that the reek of hydrogen sulphide from the oilfields was especially strong when he realized what had happened. He’d spent so much time away lately that his sense of smell was returning. Ice cream and dog mess. Sea wrack and sun cream. Oil burnoff and bar-room beer. To everyone who didn’t live here, this was exactly how Venice always smelled on a warm afternoon.

He found a space for his Ford a few yards further up from the Doge’s Apartments, and pushed through the swing doors out of the sun, and headed quickly for the stairs.

“Hey, hey…” It was already too late. Glory had spotted him, and was lumbering out of her cubbyhole with what was, for her, a fair impression of haste.

“Hi there, Glory.” He had to smile to see her, for all the news of the latest visit from the repo men she was likely to be bearing. “You’ve done a great job holding the fort lately—have I told you that? You really have…”

“I just take the phone.” She was frowning the way she always did as she held out her latest scrap of paper. “Like some bleedy fool when it
ring ring ring
.”

Her frown didn’t change noticeably when he took the paper and read it. Just a phone number, although it did look vaguely familiar. “Thanks, Glory. Is there, er, any kind of message to go with this?”

She let out an impressive huff and looked imploringly up at the flies which circled the ceiling. “Same message I get always, and from this same poor lady. She keep say she no trust her husband—he do things she not like.” Glory shrugged. “She just not know what them things be.”

Clark nodded. Sure, he remembered. It sounded like pretty much every message she’d ever given him.

“Men… !” Glory was far too genteel to spit, but the way she said that word was close to it. “You ring her, or not?”

“Sure, sure, Glory. I’ll ring her.”

“Now?”

“Okay. Right now.”

She stood and watched, arms folded across her impressive bosom and slippered foot tapping ominously, as he crossed the hallway.

He checked the number again, then lifted the communal phone’s receiver and fed in what change he had in his pockets.

The operator put him straight through.

Ian R. MacLeod is the acclaimed writer of challenging and innovative speculative and fantastic fiction. His most recent novel,
Wake Up and Dream
, won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History, while his previous works have won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and the World Fantasy Award, and have been translated into many languages. His short story, “Snodgrass,” was developed for television in the United Kingdom as part of the Sky Arts series
Playhouse Presents
. MacLeod grew up in the West Midlands region of England, studied law, and spent time working and dreaming in the civil service before moving on to teaching and house-husbandry. He lives with his wife in the riverside town of Bewdley.