Bad Dreams
Authors: Kim Newman
Contents
Prologue: Lunacy in the Age of Reason
Part One: Out of the Animal Room
Epilogue: Reason in the Age of Lunacy
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Professor Moriarty: the Hound of the D’Urbervilles
Jago
The Quorum
Life’s Lottery
An English Ghost Story
COMING SOON
The Night Mayor
Bad Dreams
Print edition ISBN: 9781781165614
E-book edition ISBN: 9781781165621
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP
First edition: November 2014
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Kim Newman asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
Copyright © 1990, 2014 by Kim Newman. All rights reserved.
‘Bloody Students’ also previously published as ‘Orgy of the Bloody Parasites’.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
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For The Peace and Love Corporation, Plc.
‘First you dream, then you die.’
C
ORNELL
W
OOLRICH
THE MORNING BEFORE
J
udi dreamed she was waking up. Without moving, she got out of the double bed, pulled a rough towel robe over the things she was still wearing, and searched the mess on the carpeted floor for her Camels. She found most of her clothes, relatively unspoiled, mixed up with Coral’s. Also three empty Dom Pérignon bottles, a shredded Iris Murdoch paperback, some studded leather fripperies and a multi-coloured scattering of pills. Her head was an open wound, leaking steadily, and she had either vomited recently or would do so soon. She hauled her heavy black jacket out of the heap and patted its zippered pockets. No luck. She walked across the room, knees and ankles threatening to fail her, and became acutely aware of the sticky ache between her legs.
Sweet Jesus, did we get raped again?
Most of one wall was mirrored. On this side only, of course. The room beyond was dark. Even if she put her face close to the glass she couldn’t see through. It was probably empty this early in the morning. The show was over. She sat at the dressing table and scratched her scalp. The spiky perm was well into its decay. She pulled her handbag open and went through it. The Camels were there, but someone had snapped her disposable lighter in half.
Her money, credit cards, diary, hankies and address book were soaked. She stuck the least wet cigarette in her mouth, hoping she would not burn half her face off.
No matches. She would have to wake Coral.
The other girl was still in bed, comatose. She had been twisting and turning as if buried alive. A nylon sheet wound around her like a soiled blue boa constrictor. The bare mattress was missing several buttons, and patterned with old pee, blood and come stains. In the bruising on Coral’s back, bottom and legs, Judi could see designs. The yellow and blue smudges were handsome faces with red welts for eyes. The faces coalesced, making a Japanese dragon with heaving shoulderblades for wings and penny-sized scales of ragged flesh.
The little green scorpion tattooed on Coral’s wrist scuttled out from under her digital watch and took refuge in her armpit. Judi was back in the bed now, sinking into the mattress, soothing the ruffled dragon with practised massage. She had given up on Coral’s matches, and spat the Camel out onto the pillow. The bed hugged her. The duvet slithered up over her bare legs. Judi’s eyes turned inward, focusing on a white hot point three inches behind the bridge of her nose. The pain went away.
She was not dreaming she was awake any more. She opened her eyes and saw the skylight. The dingy grey looked about ready to fall. She had always thought Chicken Licken had a better grasp of cosmology than Galileo.
Really awake, she sat up in bed, wearily ready to go through it all again.
That was when she realized she was handcuffed to a severed arm.
T
he old, old man watched, his own reflection faintly superimposed on the dusty one-way glass. In his current condition, he was glad not to be looking at the silvered side of the mirror. He had lost a lot of weight recently. He did not like to be reminded of his flesh. It was turning into greasy lumps that shifted and shrank beneath his slackening skin. The fabric of his quilted dressing gown hung heavily on his arm as he raised a hand to the cold glass. His fingers were dead, the knuckles swollen with ersatz arthritis.
He was unaroused by the spectacle. Judi was thrashing around the room, unsuccessfully trying to rid herself of the dead weight hanging from her wrist. She was screaming, but he had chosen to switch off the intercom. He could still just hear the racket, but these Victorian walls had been built for privacy. Already, the girl was beginning to wear herself down. Already, he was beginning to feel the warmth.
He knew his face was filling out, settling comfortably again onto his skull. His hands grew fatter. The skin crept back over the half-moons of his fingernails. His fingers bent, knuckles cracking, he made a comfortable vice-grip fist. He felt himself expanding to fit his clothes. His dry mouth filled again with water. His teeth swelled, and sharpened, changing the shape of his jaw, making him grin.
Now, he was ready for Judi.
He used the connecting door. It had never been locked, but there was no handle on her side. Judi had finished with her hysterics, and was back in the bed. She was coiled in a foetal ball, with Coral’s arm sticking out in place of an umbilical cord. The little green scorpion was resting. It had been neatly done. There was almost no blood. The room smelled musty. He caught the residues of spent lusts in his nostrils, and drew them into himself, tasting them as they went down.
The things he had watched last night were replayed inside his head. He smiled, new skin tight over his cheekbones. Judi, he remembered. And Coral. The clients. Pain and pleasure, locked together. And the almost pathetic pettiness of it all. It had barely been an appetizer for what he would do now. Coral, a pretty but dull girl, would have been a less substantial delight than Judi. Barely a morsel. But still, it was a shame she had been wasted. Her death had given him little sustenance.
He climbed into bed and cuddled Judi. He touched her fractured mind, feeling for the spots that would give first, sinking black fingers into her confusion. She was delicious. He stroked her side, his nails turned to bony scalpels. He opened her at the hip, and scraped the bone. She convulsed like an electroshock patient. He clamped a passionless kiss over her shriek. He swallowed air, and her cries echoed inside, him.
He fed off her for hours, until her heart burst.
DAYTIME
A
nne was waiting for The Call.
Every couple of days, she would telephone the old family home, and talk with Dad’s nurse. She had never met the woman, and at the echoing end of the transatlantic line, she sounded like a little girl a long way away. Her father had had his second stroke back in September, and all the doctors were expecting the third soon. If not before the end of the year, then early in January. The first stroke, three years earlier, had just slowed him down and slurred his words. The second had put him in a chair and made talking a supreme effort. The third would kill him.
She had the Radio 4 early morning current affairs show on in the tiny kitchen, and the Channel 4 breakfast television service on in her front room, and was dividing her attention between them, following several stories as they broke. It was mostly international activity, in Central America and Eastern Europe, but there were a few local, London-based, items she was keeping an ear to. She had already done her two days in the newsroom this week, but she was scheduled to turn in a couple of pieces by Friday, to meet the deadline for the Christmas double issue. The Aziz inquest would be turning in a verdict in the next few days, and, depending on the degree of officially admitted police involvement in the youth’s death, that would affect the conclusions she would draw in the last of her articles on racist attacks.
The old boiler rattled, and Anne checked the heating. The flame was going full inside, but the flat was not getting any warmer. She really ought to start looking for a new place in the New Year. When her father died, there would be some money from the estate. She shivered with the thought, and tried to unthink it, forcing it back into the blacks of her mind. She shivered again, only with the cold, and pulled her robe tighter over her nightie. It would be warmer when she had her clothes on.
There were tanks moving through rubble-strewn streets on television, and a foreign correspondent on the radio was making a report with the whoosh of anti-tank rockets in the background. Anne was not sure whether the coverages were of the same crisis. Usually, news wound down for Christmas; this year, events were speeding up as the holiday approached. Some governments were probably planning to spring nasty surprises over the Christmas break, purely to avoid publicity. TV programmers had already overloaded the airwaves with blockbuster movies, light entertainment specials and quiz-of-the-year features, and there was no room at the inn for states of emergency, covert activities or the odd execution.
She had a morning at home due, and the notes for her pieces were neatly piled by the word processor in the front room. That meant, since she did not have to struggle through the rush hour to get to Clerkenwell, she could take some care over breakfast. ‘The most important meal of the day,’ her British friends would tell her as her stomach somersaulted at the sight of grease-grilled bacon, runny eggs and a horror they called fried bread. In the kitchen, a cheerful vicar on ‘Thought for the Day’ was trying to draw some Biblical parallel between current events and those in Nazareth at the time of the Nativity. While her old-fashioned percolator dripped thick coffee, she mixed St Michael’s ‘Thick and Creamy’ strawberry and mango yoghurt with Neal’s Yard muesli, and added just a little milk. Two croissants were gently warming in the depths of the oven.