Gordon R Dickson - Sleepwalkers' World
“Police!” shouted a voice outside. “Open up, here!”
The door was already cracked from its top edge halfway down to the door handle, as if those outside had tried to break in without warning—before finding the additional lock of the closed bolt barring their way.
Rafe slid out of bed.
“Lucas,” he whispered. “They mustn’t know you’re in existence. Come on.” Lucas hesitated. “Didn’t Ab tell you to hide when the other men came?”
Lucas turned and followed Rafe as he ran to the bathroom at the back of the motel and stepped into it. The room had one window, high in a wall to the right of the washstand—a small window, but one Lucas might squeeze through.
“Out here, Lucas,” whispered Rafe, throwing the window open, the sound of its rising lost in the renewed hammering on the front door. He unhooked the screen and swung it wide.
Lucas made one leap to the washstand. Rafe caught and steadied the wolf’s surprisingly heavy body as Lucas’s claws slipped on the slick surface of the bowl.
“Stay hidden,” Rafe said. “Find us after dark. Then, do what you can. Now, go—”
He pushed, almost threw Lucas through the opening. The wolf vanished into daylight. Rafe hastily hooked the screen and ran back to open the front door just before it disintegrated under the pounding it was receiving.
“What’s this all about—”
“You’re under arrest,” said the first of several policemen to surround him. “Both of you.”
Rafe felt handcuffs closing on his wrists as his hands were pulled behind him. He was marched out to a police three-wheeler and pushed into its rear seat. A moment later Gaby, with a blanket wrapped around her and her overnight bag in her hand, was pushed in beside him. The motel owner stuck his head in the door of the police car.
“You thought I wouldn’t know?” the motel owner said. “Didn’t I say I’d seen people coming in after they’d been caught out on the road by the broadcast? After a night in the car they’d be half dead and stumbling around—”
“That’s all right,” said a policeman, shoving past him and sitting down in the back seat with Rafe and Gaby. “You did your duty and checked with us. Now, forget it.”
“Took you long enough to get here—” the motel operator began to the policeman, but the latter closed the car door in his face.
They drove off. It was, Rafe saw, late afternoon. He and Gaby must have slept like dead people. When they reached the jail they were separated, and Rafe found himself put in a room with no bars on the single, ground-floor window and with what looked like a hospital bed in one corner of the white-painted room.
“Strip,” said the policeman, who brought Rafe in, handing him a hospital gown. “Put this on.”
“What—” Rafe began.
“Just strip,” said the policeman. “Put on the gown.”
Rafe obeyed, and the policeman carried Rafe’s clothes out of the room. Outside the window, the day was waning fast.
Three more policemen entered, followed by a man wearing a white jacket. Without warning, the three threw themselves on Rafe and pinned him down on his back on the bed.
“What is this?” cried Rafe, caught by surprise, helpless in their grasp. The man in the white jacket approached him with a hypodermic syringe.
“His right arm, above the elbow, there,” said the man in white.
“Answer me! What’re you doing to me?”
“Standard treatment for zombies,” grunted one of the policemen as Rafe made a surge of effort to avoid the approaching needle. “You’re going to sleep through the night, brother, whether you want to or not—just like the rest of us normal folk.”
The needle went in. Into Rafe’s mind flashed the memory of what Gaby had reported Ab as saying—that there was danger to the individual’s brain-wave pattern in being normally asleep during the broadcasts, and serious danger in being involuntarily unconscious at that time.
But there was nothing he could do about it now. The needle went in and was withdrawn. Cautiously, the policemen let him go.
“That should hold him,” said the man in the white jaket, stepping away from the bed. “I gave him enough to hold him for twenty-four hours—easily enough to keep him under until the UN Marshal gets here.”
Already, Rafe could feel the drug taking hold, like a soft hand enfolding and stopping the machinery of his mind. His tongue was going numb.
* * *
7
As if at some great distance, he heard the door to his room closing behind the policemen and the white-suited man. With a massive effort he turned the great weight of his head with reluctant neck muscles so that he gazed toward the window. The light still filled the sky. He could not see the sun from where he was, but it could not be quite down. He had a few minutes, anyway—maybe more than a few minutes—to do whatever could be done before the broadcast came on to add its soporific influence to the effect of whatever sedative or narcotic they had given him.
But even as he thought this, the drug was taking hold and blurring his mind so that he could not think, pulling him under. In the end, he went down with it, into unconsciousness, or something like it . . . .
At first it was only like drowning. But a dry and stifled drowning in which his whole body was held paralyzed, so that he could not struggle or call out. After a while, however, this passed and he became conscious again, but conscious only to the point of being aware that he was dreaming or hallucinating.
It seemed to him that he was in something like a series of very dimly lit rooms or caverns so far underground that he would die of old age before he could ever reach the surface, even if he could find his way out. The rooms were full of discarded, destroyed, and broken things and with an oppressive atmosphere that transmitted the emotional, rather than the physical, feeling of his being at the center of all possible pressures.
It was as if he were buried at the center of a universe. A different universe, he thought—but all the things around him rustled and whispered and hurried to assure him that this was the universe he had always known, but now being seen in its true appearance, stripped of all its decorations and paddings of illusory superstitions down to a stark hopelessness of truth.
The broken and discarded things came clustering around him, whispering at him to give up and agree, and he reached out for some sort of club or stick to beat them off. But everything he picked up broke or crumbled in his hand and was useless. Finally he ran, and for a little while he outdistanced them.
But he was conscious of the continuing pressure of something inimical—whatever it was that had been behind the things when they had tried to make him give up. He felt it somewhere nearby, and he found himself searching through the underground rooms for it. So he came after a while into a series of rooms where people were drinking, talking, and dancing, as if at a party; but all their talk was in whispers together, and stopped when he came up. Something within him told him that it would be useless to ask them questions—for he heard them sniggering behind his back once he had gone by, as if they knew what he searched for but were sure he could never find it.
Then, gradually, he became aware that they were all hollow, these people. Men and women alike, they had been scooped out from behind so that merely the front three-quarters of their skin and hair and clothes were left—just enough so that viewed from straight on they appeared to be in the round.
Gradually as he moved among them—and in spite of the fact that they were mostly very clever at keeping their faces and fronts toward him—he began to catch glimpses of the emptiness behind what was left, like the emptiness of a rock lobster tail once the meat had been taken out of it. Their whispering, heard all together like the sound of dry waves on a desiccated beach in utter darkness, was trying to tell him to give up, to abandon hope, just as had the broken things in the rooms he had passed through earlier.
Still, even as he ran from the corrosive chorus of their whispering, the illogical conviction formed in him that somewhere, even h
ere, there was a firm weapon that would not crumble when he tried to use it—if he could only find it. And with one firm weapon he could prove them all wrong and defeat their universe. He had escaped from the hollow people now. He was in a series of barely lit caverns—true caverns rather than rooms now—through which he had to grope his way, but which held neither things nor the facades of people nor anything else but rock floor and empty stone walls arching to some high point overhead.
Then he found his enemy, the inimical creature behind the broken things and the hollow people, all alone by himself, or herself or itself, in one huge cavern. It crouched against one wall, for all its size—and it was many times bigger than he was—guarding a throne it had sat on once but had long since outgrown, like a mouse guarding a crumb.
He did not see it clearly, for though the cavern was lighted, the lights were so dim and far overhead and the shadows were so thick and black by the wall where it crouched that seeing was barely possible. But without seeing it clearly he understood it suddenly. Once it had been as human as himself, but now it had gradually increased to a gargantuan, abnormal size, like the swollen body of an old queen wasp among the smaller figures of the normal hive denizens.
Only in this case the growth had come about by the addition of body on top of over-body, shell upon shell, each one a rustling envelope of a dead year lived and lost to no purpose. Self-trapped at the core was what had once been a human being, but it was lost now and buried, not only in the dry and rustling years and years of its overbodies, but in its own belief that it was as monstrous as those overbodies made it. And in that belief it had constructed this universe where everything pressed inward to the center and that center was filled with broken things and hollow people.
He saw then that he should kill it—not only in his own self-defense, but in pity to release it from that existence which it had deluded itself was not a torment but a dark joy. He looked around and found nothing but a large and jagged stone; when he picked up the stone, it crumbled to dust in his hands.
“You see?” it that was imprisoned within its countless years husked at him with the rustlings of its dry overbodies—and the husked voice was like the whispering of the hollow people and the rustlings of the broken things, earlier. “Nothing here has any power to harm me. I am Satan.”
“No,” he said.
It rustled louder against the wall where it crouched, and moved as if to flow over him and stifle him in its dry envelopes of bodies.
“I am Satan!”
“Satan is nothing to me,” he said, and all the time he was looking around for another stone, a broken stalactite, a rusty ax or sword to use.
“Satan is something to everyone!” it rustled. “Satan is beyond all pain. Satan is behind pain, past the point of being able to be hurt any more. Satan is death in life that never ends—forever and forever and forever . . .”
Then, while it was still talking, he found in quick succession an ancient spear, a two-headed ax, and a rusty, ancient revolver. But the spear shattered into splinters when he threw it, and the head of the ax flew off when he swung it—flew off and shattered against the rocky wall—and the revolver snapped its hammer uselessly on empty cylinders and broke apart in mid-air when he tried to throw it at the creature that called itself Satan.
“Give up,” it said now. “Give up, give up, give up . . .”
Against his will, then, he felt his hope fading, his courage going. He tried desperately to remember an instance of hope. He did his best to summon up an image of courage, but nothing came.
“Come join yourself to me,” rustled Satan. “Come live forever in death-in-life, adding your overbodies to mine. There is no more use trying, no more use searching, no more—”
And then, without warning, it came to him—the image of a real and solid knife with a leather handle and a blade of blue steel—and it sparked off inspiration.
“Lucas!” he called.
The rustling of the Satan rose to a roar, to a sound like a dry hurricane, as it tried to drown him out.
“No!” it rustled. And all its black hopelessness poured out upon him, trying to drown him before he could call again.
“Lucas!” He shouted desperately. “LUCAS!”
And Lucas came.
He came not as his ordinary self, but as a great, gaunt ghost-wolf, larger than an elephant—almost as large as the thing that called itself Satan—flickering all over with tiny blue flames that illumined him and lit up his yellow eyes. He came bounding, leaping into the cavern like a puppy at play, bearing in his mouth a tiny-looking knife with a black leather handle and a blue steel blade.
“Give me the knife, Lucas!”
Lucas crouched and howled, and the knife dropped tinkling on the rock at Rafe’s feet. Then Lucas howled again and went back to leaping and playing with the rustling Satan-creature that backed and reared like some huge, papery slug, and spread itself against the ceiling until it was enormous enough to fall upon and bury both man and wolf.
And Rafe took up the knife by the point and threw it into the overhanging Satan-thing. It flew from his fingers like stone from a slingshot, straight into the huge, rustling body above them.
Satan screamed.
Snatching up Rafe in his jaws like a toy mouse in the jaws of a dog, Lucas sprang upward, brushing aside the falling body of Satan, springing right through the solid rock overhead as if it were mist. Up and up he sprang—but his jaws slipped, and Rafe went tumbling away from the wolf, back through the mist-rock, losing himself.
The rock began to solidify around him, closing in on him again, threatening to squeeze the life out of his body. It was like a great weight coming at him from all sides, but fury boiled up in him at the thought of being beaten, now, after what he had done. He batted the rock away from his face with a superhuman effort . . . .
And sat up. A moonlit room was around him. On a small, white-painted cabinet by his bed was a metal basin holding an empty hypodermic needle. Thrusting aside drug and broadcast effect together, he grabbed up the basin and threw it.
It shattered the window and disappeared into the night outside.
“Lucas!” he shouted hoarsely to that night behind the broken window, and fell back on the bed, the shadows closing in around him, shadows that were hardening into rock. And he was once more lost in the . ..
Lucas’s jaws closed upon him. Carrying him once more. Lucas sprang upward. Up and up through the rock, until they burst at last through sea bottom into the depths of an ocean, and the wetness poured over Rafe, filling his mouth and nose and eyes, stinging like liquid fire . . .
He pulled himself upright, choking, wiping at his eyes. He was soaked about the face and shoulders. After a moment he got his watering eyes clear enough to see the shaggy wolf head beside the bed on which he lay and a dark whiskey bottle lying spilled on the blanket that had covered him.
Clumsily he grabbed up the bottle. It was about a third full.
“Nice work, Lucas,” he said thickly. “But we’ll save it for later. Right now they’ve got as much inside me as I can take.”
He scrambled out of bed, fighting the inertia of his leaden body, but buoyed up by a blazing exultation inside him.
“Keep me out for twenty-four hours, he said,” Rafe muttered, hearing his own words thick in his ear. “Didn’t know the kind of dosage I can take . . . you heard me calling, did you, Lucas?”
“I heard you,” said Lucas. “Now—Gabrielle.”
Impatiently, the wolf moved toward the door of the room. Rafe went after him. His eyes and mouth were more comfortable now, but the inside of his nose still felt aflame from the spilled whisky Lucas had evidently tried to get inside him by any means. The door was not even locked. Man and wolf together, they stepped out into a pitch-dark corridor.
Rafe reached down and took hold of the thick fur at Lucas’s neck.
“No light switch here,” he said. “You guide me, Lucas—along the wall.”
With Lucas leading, Rafe stumbled al
ong the wall in the darkness, running his hand and forearm over it at switch-plate height until he felt something bump and jar against his wrist as the wrist passed over it.
“Hold up. Back,” he said to Lucas. He stopped, reached back at arm’s length, and found the switch plate again. His fingers moved the stud—and light was all around them.
They stood in a long corridor leading to what was clearly the door for this wing or section of the building. They went forward, opened the door, and Rafe found another light switch. Beyond was plainly an office, with several doors opening off it.
“Where’ll they have Gaby?” muttered Rafe to himself.
“I’ll find her,” Lucas said.
He went directly to one of the doors, rose on his hind legs, and turned the knob with his jaws. The door pushed open. Beyond was darkness. Rafe, following close behind the wolf, reached out and found another light switch, and a second later they were looking down a corridor just like the one onto which Rafe’s room had opened.
Lucas ran to one of the doors, rose on his hind legs, and opened it. By the time Rafe followed and found the light switch, Lucas was already up with his front legs on the bed, licking the unmoving face of an unconscious Gaby and whining softly. Her tubelike vehicle stood at the foot of the bed.
“They doped her up, too,” said Rafe thickly. “And even if I knew what they used, I wouldn’t dare monkey around with an antidote, the way people seem to react unnaturally under the broadcast influence. Let’s just get her out of here and as far away as possible, Lucas.”
It was nearly impossible for Rafe to lift Gaby into the vehicle, still fighting against the double influence of the drug and the broadcast as he was. But finally he got her into it, wedged her overnight bag in with her, activated the cylinder’s controls, and floated her out to the office section.