The Long Sleep (8 page)

Behind Galing and Richard, Allison appeared in the doorway. She paused for a moment as if she knew what a stunning picture she made even in silhouette, then stepped to her uncle's side. Her long hair was drawn back from her face and tied in a bun. She was wearing a white uniform and a peaked nurse's cap. Even in the stark institutional dress she was curvacious, sensuous.

“Ah, Annabelle, my dear,” Galing said. He gave her a fatherly kiss on the cheek. “I want you to watch me with Mr. Amslow so that you've some experience in the handling of this sort of patient.”

“Yes, doctor,” she said, glancing quickly at Joel as if he were a curious insect.

“He's unusual. We get very few like him,” Galing said.

She said, “I'm always anxious to learn, doctor.”

Galing looked at Joel again, and he was no longer smiling. “Cooperate, and you won't be hurt,”

he said.

Joel frowned. “Her name isn't Annabelle,”

Galing nodded sagely, the holy doctor probing at the twisted mind of the patient. “Why do you say that?”

“Her name's Allison.”

“It is?”

“And she's my wife!”

The woman sucked in her breath, put one hand over her breasts. Her eyes were round with fright.

“My
wife,”
Joel insisted, taking a step toward her.

Richard touched him with the tip of the prod.

He jerked as the electric charge slammed through him like an ice pick in the spine. His knees turned to jelly, quivered. He managed to stay on his feet only because he couldn't bear to have Allison—Annabelle see him fall.

“Sit down,” Galing said.

“No.”

“Be reasonable,” Galing said.

“Stuff it,” Joel said. He spoke through clenched teeth.

Richard used the prod again.

Staggering backwards, gasping for breath, Joel collided with the wall, leaned against it for support. Fireworks had gone off behind his eyes; the afterglow slowly faded. The pain faded. He did not sit down.

Galing hunkered down himself. “You'll only be shocked again if you stay on your feet.”

Reluctantly, Joel sat down.

“You have to be firm with his sort,” Galing told Allison-Annabelle. “You have to keep the upper hand at all times.”

Although Joel was now down where Galing wanted him, Richard remained standing, the prod ready. He just couldn't wait to use it again.

The woman stood near the door, wonderfully erotic in the caress of the red and orange candlelight. Her eyes were still wide. She was frightened of him.

Drugs, Joel thought. They've used drugs on her. She hasn't really turned against you. She isn't one of them.

Galing said, “You think she's your wife?”

“I don't
think
she is. I know it.”

“How long have you been married?”

“For at least . . .”

“Yes?” Galing smiled.

But Joel couldn't remember how long it had been. This damned amnesia, or whatever it was . . .

“Well? How long?”

“I can't remember.”

Nodding solemnly, Galing said, “Do you have children?”

He wasn't sure. He wiped his sweat-slicked face with both hands, wiped his hands on his trousers. “Look here. I don't remember all of that. I had an accident, a head injury. I've had amnesia ever since.”

Galing sighed, shook his head sadly. “This is going to hurt you, Joel. You won't like what I've got to say, but you must meet it and face the truth. You must stop fleeing into fantasies like this one.”

“Fantasies . . .”

“You're very ill, Joel.” Galing was terribly concerned. “You have been incarcerated in the Fleming Institute for more than a year now. Do you understand?”

“I—”

“You have severe psychological problems,” Galing said. “Until you can grasp that, until you can finally face up to your illness, you are beyond my help. Annabelle isn't your wife. Indeed, this afternoon is only the second time you've ever seen her.

“That's a lie!”

“No.”

“I've slept with her!”

“I'm afraid you've never slept with her,” Galling said as if he were offended by Joel's obscene fantasies.

Richard chuckled softly and looked over his shoulder at the woman.

Joel thought that she winked at Richard and smiled, but he could not see her well enough to be certain. “I don't know what the game is, Galing. But -”

“No game, Joel. I just want to cure you.”

“Bullshit!” He started to get up, sat down again when he saw Richard move in with the prod.

“You're no doctor. You're Allison's uncle. I don't know why you keep using your own name from one illusion to the next while she changes hers. And I don't know why she goes along with this—

even if she is drugged as you once said she was. She's my wife. And that man's your household servant and cook. He's no hospital orderly. And this is for goddamned sure no hospital, no psychiatric ward! It's a cell!”

“He's worse than usual,” Galing told the woman.

Richard nodded.

Joel looked at the woman. “
Allison!
Don't you recognize me? Can't you get your head clear long enough to see what they're doing to me?”

Allison drew back and stood on the threshold of the room as if she would bolt and run if he were to make the slightest move in her direction.

Frustrated beyond endurance, Joel stood up and grabbed for Galing. He wanted to kill the bastard. Choke him to death and fling him aside, and some way, any way, get the truth. He caught the older man's lapels as Allison screamed, and he slammed Galing against the cell wall.

Then Richard's prod caught him on the hip. This time, the ice pick twisted in his spine, gouged and tore sensitive nerves. He jumped, dropped Galing, and was flung against the wall. He sagged, grabbed at the stones, kept his feet beneath him.

Richard prodded him again.

He sagged, clutching his invisible wound. Through sweat and tears, he saw the manservant's wide smile, and he was suddenly charged with hatred. Only half recovered from the electric shock, he launched himself at Richard.

The orderly backstepped and jammed the blunt head of the prod into Joel's gut.

He was thrown backwards as if he'd been struck by a sledgehammer. Richard had apparently turned up the current. The blow was brutal, irresistible. He fell to the floor.

“Thank God!” Allison said. “Thank God!”

Is she relieved that it's all over for me, that there's no more suffering for me?
Joel wondered.

“I was so scared,” she said breathlessly.

Or is she just relieved that I didn't get a chance to push in Richard's pretty face?

He stared at the damp floor in front of his face until it no longer whirled around in tight little circles.

“It's over now,” Galing said to the woman.

Gagging, sobbing, Joel tried to get up. But Richard delivered another shock to his hip, knocking him flat. “Rotten . . . bastards . . .” he gasped. He felt as if his pelvis had been torn loose. His stomach and groin were on fire. Pain played like schools of silverfish, swam up his spine and darted this way and that in the pool of his brain. As the tide of agony swelled over him, the prod touched his face and brought a rainbow of light, color, shimmering bubbles of heat and pain. Darkness . . .

In the dream, he was in a dark bedroom, lying in bed with Allison. She was naked, cuddled against him, moving against him, kissing and touching him. Her thighs opened to him, guided him, received him. They moved together with ecstatic rhythm, two warm bubbles settling through gelatin

. . . And then the light came on, and he was looking at an Allison who had no face: no eyes, nose, mouth, nothing but a smooth plasticity from ear to ear . . .

He woke, screaming.

When he had recovered from the nightmare, he found that Galing and the others had gone. The door was closed, the room was lighted only by the flickering candle; he was alone.

He heard a lone rat scampering beneath the grill which covered the floor drain.

He wept. That was unmanly, he supposed, a sign of weakness. But he didn't hate himself for it.

He was alone, Terribly, awfully alone in a world he'd never made. No one would listen—or believe him even if they did listen. Not even Allison. Crying was called for. Tears were a sign of compassion; and his tears were the only compassion he would get.

X

Later, he wondered if they might be telling the truth. As difficult and disheartening to accept as it might be—wasn't it just possible that he was stark raving mad? Out of his mind? Beyond the fringe?

That would explain so much. He had seen impossible things, after all. He had seen a faceless man . .

.

But if he were mad rather than the victim of some incredible plot, why couldn't he remember anything at all about his life beyond that moment when he woke up on the pod couch in the white-walled room? Didn't madmen recall the past? In brief moments of lucidity, didn't the insane remember family, friends, past achievements and disasters? Surely they didn't remember only their fantasies. If he were mad, then the pod chamber was a delusion. It would seem real to him, of course.

But surely his memory would consist of more than the fevers of his sick mind.

On the other hand, who was to say that this cell was real? It could be another illusion, as gaseous as all the others that had come before it. And if it were illusory, so was all the Gating, in the guise of a psychiatrist, had told him about himself just a few minutes ago.

What was he to believe, then?

Illusion?

Madness?

Or was it something else altogether, something much more complicated—and dangerous?

He paced from one end of the cell to the other, trying to work out a solution. His footsteps echoed off the stone walls like hammer blows from an anvil. In the end, it came down to one question: Is the paranoid man really insane when he believes that people are plotting against him—

and people really
are
plotting against him?

He stopped near the leaping flame of the candle, knelt, and examined his hands. They were filthy. His fingernails were cracked and chipped. One of them was half torn from the flesh beneath, and blood was caked under all of them. His knuckles were skinned and dirty; the blood had dried in those abrasions.

Paranoia? Reality?

Cautiously, he massaged his stomach and his right hip, cursed the electric prod that had left him with such tenderness. Hell, this was no illusion. No delusion. If he pinched himself, he would be hurt. This was painfully real.

And this was no mental hospital. Only in the Dark Ages could a mental patient be confined to a dungeon. A modern institution had clean beds, nurses, electric lights, medicines, curious specialists and sympathetic doctors.

None of this did him any good. He was no closer to the truth. If insanity wasn't the answer to those strange events, what was?

He recalled Allison's alleged ability to shape illusions from the air itself. A form of telepathy, she'd said. Was that what these weird adventures were: merely fragments of his lover's imagination?

No. Impossible. If she were creating illusions, she would not build elaborate castles of pain and confusion; the experience would be pleasant. This ordeal was not the work of a friend or a lover.

Besides, she had told him about her peculiar ESP talents in the middle of one of these illusions.

Wasn't that an unlikely thing to do? Wouldn't she have been afraid of shattering the illusion—if illusion it was? Therefore, when she'd told him about her talent, he had not been dreaming. It was that simple. Furthermore, he
knew,
on an instinctive level, that everything he had been through in the last couple of days was genuine; as bizarre, as inexplicable as it might be, it contained not a single shred of fantasy.

But if it were real, why was Allison cooperating with the others? Was any drug effective enough to turn her into a malleable zombie that Galing could use as he wished?

That was a difficult question, but it was one that would have to wait for an answer. He had no time for it now.

For the time being only one thing should interest him: escape. The only hope he had of regaining his perspective was to be free of them, out of their control. Free, he could explore this place, find out if he was still in the same building with the pods, and come to some understanding of the nature of the game.

At the cell door once more, he looked in both directions along the corridor. It was deserted and quiet. The only movement out there was the fluttering of candle flames; the only sound was a steady
drip-drip-drip
of water.

He tested the door and found it locked. He hadn't expected anything else—yet, as he applied his weight the hinges groaned even though the door did not move. And when he relaxed, they rattled and grated noisily on their fittings. Examining them closely he saw that all three of the hinges were loose at one edge. The bolts that held the wide hinge flanges to the stone wall were all badly turned; they wiggled in their bores.