"I especially don't like snake-headed men," Farley said as the bottle came back to him.
"The worst," Ron agreed. "They're the fucking worst."
Rick spent the evening at Stella's, bored out of his mind as they watched some made-for-TV movie that even the actors didn't seem to care about. About its only saving grace was the way that woman— what was her name? She was on Dallas or one of those shows— looked in a bikini. It made you want to get her out under some palm trees somewhere and hump the brains out of her.
He sighed as they sat through the news. The National. The Prime Minister was leading Joe Clark in the Gallup Polls. Big deal. The Local. Some church burned down. Who cared? Did people even go to church anymore?
Tonight was his big effort at "getting along"— especially important because he wasn't going to be around until late tomorrow night, and he sure didn't want Stella tagging along. Not with Bill's secretary coming. But until he had Bill's money in his hands… Yeah. Well, all that was going to save tonight was when they finally turned off the boob tube and hit the sack.
Stella might have her faults, but she sure had all the right moves when it came down to the skin game. He might get a little on the side— hell, he might get a lot, who was counting?— but what made those affairs so sweet was knowing he could always have Stella as a sort of icing on the cake. Who said you couldn't have your cake and eat it too?
By eleven Cat and Peter were sitting on a couch on Peter's balcony. It had cooled down somewhat over the evening and Cat was snuggled in an old sweater of Peter's, feeling drained of words again, but in a pleasant way. She didn't think she'd talked this much, especially about herself, to anyone before. They'd been enjoying a companionable silence over the past fifteen minutes, broken only by the traffic on Bank Street, a few houses away.
"The dreams are the key," Peter said suddenly.
Cat started at the sound of his voice. She'd been just drifting along, not really thinking of anything.
"You believe me?" she asked.
That in itself was hard to believe. She'd found herself telling him everything, from how she felt about cats and people when she was a teenager, to her night visits in the Otherworld; how she felt she was living a lie, that her ghosts should share as much of a byline as she did.
"What's to believe or disbelieve?" he asked. "I just think you're luckier than most, that's all. I wish I could remember a quarter of my dreams, much less have them be one connecting narrative. You're certainly not the first artist to be inspired by dreams and visions either. Just think of William Blake. What we have to figure out is how to get you to remember them again."
"But they don't just come to me in my dreams," Cat said.
Peter shook his head. "Uh-uh. I can't buy that. You said yourself that it was only a feeling. You thought you felt presences. You never actually saw them. I can see where that would happen. I mean, your dreams were like having a whole other life. It stands to reason that you'd feel those people— your 'ghosts'— around you in the day. They were so much a part of you, how could they go away? Are you with me so far?"
Cat was willing to go along with that for now, no matter what she privately believed. "Okay."
"Well, from the little I know about dreams and dreaming," Peter continued, "we go through two different kinds of sleep in a night. REM sleep— that stands for Rapid Eye Movement— and non-REM sleep. It's during REM sleep that we're supposed to dream. When you wake up and remember what you dreamed, remember it clearly, that means you woke up during one of your REM cycles. I figure what's happened to you is, somehow you shifted into waking up during your non-REM cycles."
"It's that simple?"
"I'm not sure," he admitted. "I don't know a whole lot about it, and I've never heard-of anyone who dreams the way you do."
Cat thought about it all for a moment. What he said sounded very rational and plausible, but something didn't sit right. She told him as much.
"I'm just not dreaming period" she added.
"You mean you're not remembering your dreams."
"It doesn't feel like that."
"But that's what it's got to be. Otherwise…"
"Otherwise what?"
"Otherwise I really don't know."
"So how can I wake up in the right cycle?" Cat asked. "How do I know when I'm in one or the other?"
"You don't. In sleep laboratories they've got all kinds of equipment that let the researchers know when you're in one and when you're in the other. They hook you up to an EEG to measure your brain activity. They've got gizmos to measure everything. I wouldn't be surprised if they haven't already figured out a way to actually record dreams by now."
"I don't want to go into a laboratory."
"I don't blame you," Peter said. "But you do want to remember your dreams, don't you?"
Cat nodded.
"What I'd do," Peter said, "is stay with a friend and have them wake you up every half hour or so. Trial by error, you know?"
"But I don't know anyone who—"
"Or you could use an alarm clock."
Loneliness, he realized, was as much the problem as her insecurities about her writing. And while he was willing to believe that she dreamed what she did, he couldn't accept that her dreams wrote her stories for her. Only how was he supposed to go about convincing her of that?
"Do you really think that would work?" Cat asked.
It took Peter a moment to realize that she was responding to what he'd said earlier, not to what he'd been thinking. "It can't hurt to try," he said.
"I suppose not."
They fell silent again. Cat knew she should be getting home, but she still couldn't face the empty house. Nor the possibility of the watcher returning.
She wished she could just stay where she was. But although Peter had been sweet, and she was grateful for his taking the time he had with her tonight, she didn't feel it was fair to ask him if she could stay. It would be imposing, for one thing. And he might take it the wrong way. Romance was all very fine, but she was more interested in just having a friend right now. What few romantic relationships she'd had in the past had never been exactly ideal. The last one had been a year or so ago. Tom Sinclair. Sensitive. A graphic artist. But he'd left her because she was "too flaky."
She felt good about Peter right now and realized that he could be a real honest-to-goodness friend. Not a big deal for most people, but for her, outside of the Otherworld… She didn't want to spoil it.
"Penny for your thoughts."
"Mmm?"
"I guess, what with inflation, it should really be a quarter, but somehow it doesn't have the same ring."
Cat smiled. "I was thinking of going home," she said, "but…"
"But?"
There was nothing underlying the word— no come on, just curiosity because she'd let the sentence trail off. Emboldened, Cat went on.
"But I don't want to be alone. I don't want to give you the wrong impression or anything…."
There. She'd said it.
Peter regarded her for a moment, then understood her hesitation. "You can stay here if you like," he said. "No strings attached. The couch folds out into a bed— not this one, but the ratty one in the living room. Will that be okay?"
Cat nodded gratefully.
"Just one condition though," Peter added.
"What's that?"
"I absolutely refuse to wake you every half hour."
Cat started to giggle.
Cat was a real sweetheart, Peter thought as he lay in bed. Mixed up as hell, but a sweetheart. He heard the couch springs squeak as she changed positions. But it was weird the way she'd convinced herself that she had these ghostly collaborators. He supposed that so long as it worked out, so long as she was producing, it didn't really matter. But what about now? How could she be persuaded that she could write just as well without her dreams?
He knew a few writers— that came with the territory when you had a bookstore— and they were all touchy about one thing or another. Gary F
elding could only write when he sat in a certain chair— didn't matter where the chair was. Eloise Peltier needed a Dixon HB pencil and yellow, unlined foolscap before she could produce a single coherent sentence. Pat Kozakiewicz wrote the endings to his stories first, while going home from work on the bus. He couldn't write the endings at home, and if he didn't have an ending, he couldn't write a story.
Cat needed her night visitors.
He supposed they were all habits that for one reason or another had developed into iron-clad rules. They certainly added to the mystique of a writer's idiosyncrasies. But then you had someone like Harlan Ellison, who could write anything, anywhere. Of course, he needed his trusty Olympia— so there you were. Still, none of that helped solve Cat's problem.
What she really needed was to get out more and meet some people. She obviously had a lot of smarts— that came out both in her writing and talking to her on a one-to-one basis— so it was hard to figure out how she could live so cut off from the rest of the world.
Because she had an Otherworld. And Otherworldly friends.
Right.
His thoughts turned to Ben, and he wondered what Ben would say when he found out that Cat had spent the night over. On second thought, scratch that. He'd better not tell him. Ben was more than a little jealous of the fact that Peter spent time talking to her in the store as it was.
He wondered what kept Ben vacillating between wanting to know Cat "like a friend, you know, Peter?" and being afraid to exchange two words with her. Maybe he was afraid that when he met her, she wouldn't match up to the fantasy image he had of her. Maybe he really was too shy. Just like Cat seemed to be.
Peter smiled in the dark. And just maybe he could do something about both of their problems.
Lysistratus took in an opera at the National Arts Centre that night. After the performance he managed to include himself in a reception that was being given for the performers. The soprano intrigued him— her waking thoughts gave off the promise of rich dreams— but there was too great a crowd around her. Instead he let one of the company's young men take him up to his hotel room. He was easy to bring to climax, but his dreaming was shallow, leaving Lysistratus in a discontented mood as he walked home by way of the canal.
He paused twice to skim dreams from sleeping victims whose houses and bedrooms he entered like a ghost. But there was nothing magical about his manner of gaining entry. After years of necessity, especially in the present age when locks were so prevalent, there were certain skills that he'd had no choice but to acquire. There were few commonly used locks that he could not bypass in a few moments.
He was in a better mood as he continued on his way, humming an aria from the evening's performance, but his good humor drained away as he stood in front of Cat's empty house. In the three months that she had fed him with her dreams, she had not spent one night away from the house. Why now? Because she had spied him last night?
He dismissed the thought as unlikely and drifted across the street from his usual vantage point to step through the gap in the hedge that the walkway made. There he stood, merging with the shadows. He saw an orange cat sleeping on one windowsill. Another brown-and-gray tabby dozed on the worn leather seat of the buggy. But the house was empty.
He moved closer, onto the porch, up to the door. The cats, startled by his sudden and silent appearance, fled. For a long while Lysistratus stared at the door, then slowly he bent over the lock. He inserted two slender metal rods, working them until the lock made a soft snicking sound. Then he was inside.
He walked slowly through the rooms, tasting her presence with every step he took. Her absence woke an indefinable ache inside him— that familiar hunger for her essence, combined with something else that he could put no name to.
There was no sign of packing, nor of a hurried departure. He unfolded one or two balled-up scraps of paper by her wastepaper basket, then let them fall to the floor after he'd read their awkward phrases. Where had she gone? He sat down in the corduroy easy chair that fronted the window of her study and viewed the street.
This was where she had been sitting when she spotted him last night. He wondered what it would feel like to be inside her, how much different, how much stronger the essence he would gain from her orgasm would be compared to what he stole from her sleeping dreams.
If she was still in the city, if she was sleeping somewhere within its environs, he could find her. Asleep, dreaming, she was unique. Awake, the pattern of her psyche, while differing from those who didn't dream so true, was not quite so singular. But if she slept…
He closed his eyes and let his mind range into the streets, sifting the dreams that spilled from the minds of more common dreamers, searching.
This was the first time that Cat hadn't slept in her own bed for a very long time. It was a strange feeling. It was nice to know that there was someone else just a call away, to know there could be no crazed prowler— imagined or not— standing across the street, planning who knew what terrors to inflict upon her. But the very things that made her feel safe, made it hard to get to sleep. The couch squeaked every time she moved, so that she ended up lying very still so as not to wake Peter. And then there were the shadows in the room. They were all so different from the familiar ones in her own bedroom.
She thought about Peter's explanation of REM and non-REM cycles and wondered if he was right. It all made sense in its own reasonable way. The trouble was that she called her night visits dreams simply for want of a better description. They weren't really dreams per se. Not by any standard definition. Nor visions either. It was like being awake— only in a different place. She went somewhere else when she slept. Or at least she used to.
Lying there in Peter's living room, with the sense of him all around her, she began to have second thoughts about having confided so much to him this evening. What must he think? Bad enough that she'd ended up telling him about her writer's block without laying her whole life story on him as well. Had he been understanding, or subtly condescending? He'd seemed to understand more than she'd thought anybody could— only how much of that had been his humoring her?
She was being unfair and she knew it. She was putting a taint on the whole evening, but she couldn't help it. Her forehead was damp and an emptiness had settled in her stomach. What if she had been deluding herself for all these years— talking to shadows, making phantoms real. They had places for people who couldn't relate to the real world, who couldn't see beyond their own delusions. Mostly it was the dangerous ones that they put away— the ones who might hurt themselves or others. But who was to say that she wouldn't become dangerous herself? Lord knows she was walking on the edge these days.
That uncertainty was always present— more so now than usually, because the dreams themselves were gone. The dichotomy— sane, insane— was what got in the way whenever she tried to have a normal relationship with someone. Thank God she didn't blather away to her correspondents, though even her letter-writing had tapered off these past few months.
It was easier to put something into writing, to relate to a person who was made up of words on a page that showed up in her post office box, than it was meeting people face to face. But since she'd lost her dreams, since the ghosts had gone, she'd felt too empty to write even a postcard. There was a tottering pile of unanswered letters sitting on her desk at the moment.
She turned over and the couch springs squeaked. There was too much going around in her brain, and it never changed. She was so tired of it all. She closed her eyes, fiercely willing herself to sleep. As wound up as she was, she was sure it would elude her, but surprisingly, sleep came quickly. And with it a dream.
She knew immediate relief. Peter had been wrong with his REM/non-REM nonsense. This was her dreaming. And when she got up from his couch in the morning, she knew she'd recall it as clearly as though she was remembering the previous day's events. If it meant she was crazy, fine. Better this than the empty ache inside, the emptiness that nothing in her waking state could fill, except f
or her writing.
A breeze lifted her hair. She could taste the salt tang in it, and drew a deep breath. She was standing on Redcap Hill, with its three dancing longstones for company and the twisty-branched fairy thorn on its lower slope; the hill that housed Tiddy Mun's gnomish kin. Kothlen's moors unfolded before her into the northern horizon. The gray seas were to the west; behind her, Mynfel's oak and apple wood.
The moon was bright above, washing the hill with its cool light. For a moment Cat was so happy she couldn't breathe. She was home. She could walk Kothlen's moor, or sit here on the hill amongst the standing stones. She could travel to the wattle and daub huts of the marsh folk, or make her way to the craggy foothills of the mountains where Mynfel's wolves ranged. But then she became aware of a difference in the Otherworld, an emptiness that stole the heart from the land, and her happiness dissolved.
A vague dread stole over her— shapeless because she couldn't put her finger on its source. There was a wrongness in the air, a feeling of being watched— from a great distance, but being watched all the same. It was as though the night itself was searching for her.
Where were her friends? Why was the hill under her feet silent, where the gnomes usually held their nightly revels in its hollowed chambers? She was in the Otherworld, but it didn't seem to be the Otherworld that she knew. She was alone in its mysterious reaches— alone except for whatever it was that was searching for her.
She shivered. The night wasn't cold, but fear had its own way of sapping strength. Goose bumps started up and down her arms.
I don't want to be here, she thought. I don't want to be found by whatever it is that's looking for me.
But she didn't seem to have a choice. The dream shifted into a nightmare as she turned in a slow circle, trying to watch all directions at once, seeing the familiar landscape of the Otherworld alter as she perceived it through fear rather than wonder. Everything familiar seemed strange. Haunted. The night held menace in every inch of its darkness.
Something stirred, down by the fairy thorn, and she spun to face that direction, her breath catching in her throat. She saw a shape rise up from amongst the tree's roots, the moonlight reflecting catlike in large eyes. She wanted to bolt, but fear rooted her legs to the ground. Then the apparition spoke, called her by her secret name, and she sank to her knees with relief.