He opened the door, and bright light shone into the alleyway, gilding the wet bricks. Over Lamech’s shoulder Unwin saw the impossible: a broad beach, the sea deep and boundless, and the sun, high and bright at the top of the sky. He followed Lamech out onto the sand. On this side, the door served as the entrance to a rickety beach house.
The heat was terrible. Unwin removed his hat and wiped his brow with his sleeve. He kept his umbrella over his head, shielding himself from the sun as they trudged toward the water.
Near the edge of the waves’ reach was a heap of smooth black rocks. A round woman in a ruffled blue bathing suit leaned against them, watching the sea. When she saw Lamech coming toward her, she turned and waved at him. She wore a string of imperfect-looking pearls around her neck, and a few strands of gray hair protruded from under her white bathing cap.
“Edward,” she said. “When are you coming home? I polished the silverware while I waited. Twice. You know how tired I get when I polish. Did you unplug your telephone again?”
Unwin remembered the cord left disconnected on Lamech’s desk. So it was the watcher himself who had been responsible for that. He had wanted to make sure nothing would wake him during the recording.
Lamech removed his hat and bent to kiss the woman on her cheek. “Working late tonight,” he said.
“Can’t you bring your work home?”
He shook his head. “I just came by to say good night.”
She looked at the sea, a trace of a scowl on her face. Her cheeks were red from the sun and the wind. “The strange thing is,” she said, “I don’t even know if this is the real Edward I’m speaking to. I wanted so badly to see you that I may very well have dreamed you up.”
“No, ladybug, it’s me. I have an appointment, that’s all.”
“Ladybug?” she said. “You haven’t called me that in years.”
Lamech looked at his feet and tapped his hat against his leg. “Well, I’ve been thinking a lot about the old times. You know, a couple of kids in the big city, working bad jobs, dancing to the radio at night, drinks at the corner bar. What was that place called? Larry’s? Harry’s?”
The woman fingered the roughly formed pearls of her necklace.
“Sarah,” he said, “there’s something else. I just want you to know—”
“Stop. We’ll talk about this in the morning.”
“Sarah.”
“I’ll see you in the morning,” she said, her voice firm.
Lamech frowned and took a deep breath through his nose. “All right,” he said.
The wind was picking up; it made the ruffles of Sarah’s bathing suit flutter and teased the gray curls at the edge of her cap. She was looking at the sea again. “This dream always ends the same way,” she said.
“How’s it end?” Lamech asked.
She was quiet for a while. “Edward, there are leftovers in the icebox. I have to go now.” She stood straight and ran her hands down her sides. Then, without looking back, she jogged away toward the water, her pearls swinging back and forth around her neck. Clouds had risen up over the edge of the horizon, and the sea appeared choppy and dark.
“Come on,” Lamech mumbled. He turned and starting walking back toward the beach house.
Unwin stayed where he was, watching as Sarah strode nimbly into the water. When she was in above her knees, she dove forward over a wave and began to swim.
“Come on,” Lamech said again, as though he had known that Unwin would stay.
Unwin folded his umbrella to keep the wind from taking it and hurried up the beach after Lamech. He could feel the softness of the sand beneath his feet, but his shoes left no impression.
Lamech’s raincoat billowed and snapped in the wind. He stuck his hands in his pockets and drew his coat close about him. His shoulders were hunched, his head down. He did not look back.
Unwin looked back. He could no longer see Sarah—she had vanished into the water. A great wave was forming on the horizon. It churned and swelled and boiled, gathering the sea to itself as it rolled toward the shore. Unwin quickened his pace, but he could not take his eyes off the wave. It was tall now as any building, its roaring louder than the traffic of citywide gridlock. Gulls flew over its crest and screamed. In the smooth window of its broad face Unwin could see animals swimming—fish, and starfish, and great heaving squid. They went about their business as though nothing strange were happening, as though they were still deep in the ocean instead of hurtling toward dry land. The wind was saturated with the stink of their briny world.
Lamech was at the faded blue door now. He opened it, and Unwin followed him back into the alleyway, opening his umbrella over his head. Lamech left the door open long enough to watch the wave’s shadow blanket the beach. Then he closed it.
“I try not to peer too often into her sleeping mind,” Lamech said. “It is an occupational hazard of ours, to learn too much about the people we love. But on those occasions when I have met my wife on her own territory, so to speak, I have always been amazed at the vastness of events under way there. I admit that it frightens me a little.”
He stuck his hat back on his head and walked off down the alley. Unwin went after him, fighting the urge to stop and shake the sand out of his shoes.
FOURTEEN
On Nemeses
There is no better way to understand your own
motives and dispositions than by finding
someone to act as your opposite.
T
heir route along the worn brick pathways of Lamech’s dreaming mind grew ever more strange and circuitous. They ducked beneath rusting fire escapes, passed through tunnels that smelled of algae and damp earth, hopped gutters brimming with filth. Twice they crossed deep ravines on makeshift bridges of steel grating. Down below, Unwin could see other alleyways, other tunnels, other gutters. The place was built in layers, one maze stacked upon another—a peculiar choice, Unwin thought, for an organizational system. Why not a house, or even an office building, if anything were indeed possible? If Lamech could use doors to travel from one dream to another, could he not also use file drawers?
But the watcher appeared perfectly at home here; he traversed the convoluted byways of his phantom city with a prowess that belied his age and his girth. How terrible that Unwin could not warn him of what was ahead. But even if he could speak to Lamech, even if he could bend time as these alleys bent space, he would not know what to say. The engine of the watcher’s destruction was still veiled to Unwin. Could a dream kill a man? Could it strangle him where he sat sleeping?
Ventilating fans churned over their heads, drawing air into edifices housing unknowable visions. Or knowable, Unwin reminded himself. To Lamech and his fellow watchers, these dreams were as rooms to be entered, books to be opened and perused.
As though Unwin’s own thoughts were before Lamech’s eyes, the watcher said, “Not all surveillance is as easily accomplished as what you just witnessed, Mr. Unwin. My wife desired my presence, so I was granted passage. But some of these doors are shut tight or locked. Others are too well hidden to be found. And the minds of a certain few are simply too dangerous to enter. We watchers wield some influence in the dreams of ordinary sleepers, but the visions of one practiced in the arts of dream detection are entirely his own. You could stumble into such a place and be driven mad by the monstrosities lurking there, summoned with perfect lucidity to taunt and cajole.
“You know, I’m sure, of whose methods I speak.”
Ahead, Unwin glimpsed a part of the landscape that was different from the rest: a patch of bright, sparkling light the size of several city blocks. The buildings nearby reflected its glow, and the entire thing swelled and flexed as though breathing. For a moment Unwin thought it was the sea—that the water had poured, still shining, straight from Sarah Lamech’s dream to flood this part of the city. But Unwin could hear the thing as well as see it, and it was not the crash of waves that reached his ear. A droning music emanated from the place: a haunting, repetitive tune.
It was a carnival, and Lamech was leading them toward it.
“In most cases,” the watcher went on, “the greatest challenge is to remain undetected by one’s subject. In order to exist in another’s dream—and that is different from observing a recording—one must be
part
of the dream. How, then, is the watcher to keep from revealing himself? The trick is to keep to the dreamer’s own shadow, to the darker places of his mind, to the nooks and crawl spaces into which he dare not cast his gaze. There are usually plenty of such places.”
In front of them, the alleyway split in two. Lamech stopped walking and peered down each passage. To Unwin they were perfect mirror images. His guide hesitated, then shrugged and chose the one on the left.
“But the watcher is limited in his investigations by what the suspect dreams,” Lamech continued. “A man may dream of a closet door, but unless he opens it, the watcher cannot see inside the closet. That is why we learn to nudge our suspects a little. ‘Don’t you want to see what’s in there?’ we might whisper. And the suspect does wonder, and opens the door, and lo, there is the memory of the murder he committed just last Tuesday.”
Unwin looked back the way they had come, troubled by the doubt Lamech had shown at the split in the alley. Until then the watcher had chosen his route without hesitation. If he was unfamiliar with a feature of his own creation, was he exposing himself to some risk? Could they have taken a wrong turn?
“Curiously,” Lamech said, “Miss Palsgrave’s device somehow pushes those boundaries a bit. When you review a recording, you can see outside the suspect’s immediate perspective: peer around corners, open books, search under beds. The machine seems to pick up low registers emanating from deep in the subconscious. It has a kind of peripheral vision and sees things neither the dreamer nor the watcher thinks he can see. Another advantage we have over Hoffmann.”
Unwin, still looking over his shoulder, saw something that astonished him. A door opened, and a woman slipped quietly into the alley. She followed after Lamech, keeping close to the walls, a shadow among shadows, quick as the rain. When a stray beam of moonlight caught her face, Unwin nearly startled awake. Back in the third archive, his legs twitched and his feet became tangled in the blanket.
It was Miss Greenwood’s daughter, her plaid coat belted around her waist, her hair pinned tightly beneath her gray cap.
Lamech failed to notice that his dream had been infiltrated. Unwin shouted at him, tugged at his coat, pointed at their pursuer, all to no effect. The woman in the plaid coat trailed only a few steps behind them. Unwin was invisible to her—she was part of the recording—but she watched Lamech intently, pausing only to adjust the gray cap over her hair. Unwin thought,
She is asleep, it is the night before last, and hours from now she will go to Central Terminal and drop her umbrella, and I will fail to pick it up.
They were drawing close to the carnival. The streets were suffused with hazy white light, and Unwin could hear the music clearly now—it was that of a hurdy-gurdy or a barrel organ. The watcher rounded a corner, wiping his eyes and blinking a little. Unwin followed him, and the woman in the plaid coat came after.
“For the first time since the Agency adopted dream detection as standard practice,” Lamech said, “unauthorized operatives have learned the truth of what we watchers do. If you are indeed seeing this, Mr. Unwin, then you are one of two. I’m sure you can guess who the other is.”
At the mention of Unwin’s name, the woman in the plaid coat narrowed her eyes and looked around. Seeing no one else, she continued on, but at a greater distance than before. So the daughter of Cleopatra Greenwood knew his name. Had she known who he was when she dropped her umbrella at Central Terminal? Somehow she had contrived to be hired as an underclerk and then promoted to Unwin’s own desk. But her talents were such that she could infiltrate even an experienced watcher’s dream. Cleo may have been concerned for her daughter’s well-being, but to Unwin she seemed able to take care of herself.
“A week ago,” Lamech said, “someone stole my copy of
The Manual of Detection
and gave it to Detective Sivart. He had seen the book before, of course, knew it front to back. But there was something different about this edition. It included an eighteenth chapter, detailing the technique termed oneiric detection by its author. Sivart was furious. Why had this technique been denied to him all these years? Why hadn’t someone told him? Why hadn’t
I
told him? That’s what he asked me when he stormed into my office first thing that morning.
“I had to tell him something. So I told him the truth. I told him oneiric detection was deemed too dangerous by the overseer to be included in editions beyond the first. Only watchers were to be trusted with its secrets. Detectives, while benefiting from its existence, would remain in the dark, if you will. Sivart didn’t like being in the dark. He told me he was going to win the war.
“ ‘What war?’ I asked him.
“ ‘The war against Enoch Hoffmann,’ he said.
“He thought that by breaking in to the sleeping mind of his enemy he could somehow learn his secrets. Forget that Hoffmann had been in hiding for years, kept always in check by our efforts. And forget that none of our finest operatives would risk half a minute in that man’s mind. Sivart felt there was something unfinished between them.
“I couldn’t stop him from going, so I helped him break some rules instead. First, I told him who his clerk was. He’s built up a lot of respect for you over the years, Mr. Unwin, and he thinks you’re the one to help him. He said you know things no one else knows about him—details from his reports that didn’t make it into the files because they weren’t relevant to the case. Things you would have cut, but which matter now. He wouldn’t tell me what they were, of course.