Sleepwalker

Sleepwalker

A Novel of Terror

Michael Cadnum

for Sherina

As I did stand my watch upon the hill,

I look'd toward Birnam, and anon methought

The wood began to move.

—
Macbeth
, V.v

Prologue

She was walking on the water.

She was walking toward him across the surface of the lake, and even though he knew he couldn't do it he found himself stepping onto the water.

The wrinkling of the water beneath his feet was like pleasure, but all he could think was, She's dead.

She's dead—this can't be happening.

He struggled to wake, and he couldn't. She was drifting toward him, and getting closer, and he did not want to see her. The dream had him, a grip he could not escape.

Until at last he was awake, cold with sweat.

He was standing in the middle of the bedroom, trembling.

In my sleep, he thought. I got out of my bed in my sleep, and began walking toward her.

Perhaps, he wondered, this is how it begins. This is how it is, when you lose your mind.

In the nights that followed, he would wake and find himself standing in one of the darkened rooms of his apartment. He would find himself with a shirt half buttoned, his running shoes in his hand. Once he found himself in the suit he had bought in Paris, his tie in his hand, as though he had been attending a party and had been overcome by drink.

He would find books tugged from the shelf, and once found a kitchen drawer in the middle of the living room, napkins and plastic roll undisturbed.

He was afraid.

At first he could tolerate it. He was revising a series of lectures for an upcoming book. His articles continued to be published, and international telephone calls continued to congratulate him on one book or another. Colleagues continued to be kind, putting a hand on his shoulder, inviting him to the sort of party in which people talk more than drink. Dr. Wilson invited him into his office for that wink-and-only-we-will-know bourbon from time to time, and told him that if there was anything he could do.… And of course there never was.

But then the dream began to change.

One night she walked toward him across the blue water, the fragments of light reflected over her body, and he remembered how he loved her, and that he could never see her again. And then he saw, as she grew closer, that she was not alive, that her skin was gray and brittle as ash, and that as she smiled the flakes of skin fell away, fluttering like butterflies, and gradually exposed her charred skull.

He woke, gasping.

He stood under the eucalyptus trees. It was dark, and the freeway hissed in the distance. Headlights sliced past. The twelve-story condominium loomed, a strip of lights marking the elevators at the end of each hall. The wind lifted the leaves in the trees. The air was damp. It was nearly always damp here beside San Francisco Bay. He breathed fog, the faint tang of eucalyptus, and the faintest soil of car-air.

He was nearly glad to be there, eucalyptus seeds under his feet, those bell-shaped, molar-sized seeds, and then it was the feel of those seeds under his feet that made him wonder. His feet were too sensitive. Too aware of not only the seeds, but the dirt. One toe rested in a twig—he could feel it distinctly under his big toe.

He looked down.

He was naked. He fell to a crouch, huddling. Bare. He shivered, although it was not so cold. And not really so dark. There was too much light at night, he realized. San Francisco spilled a bronze glow into its low clouds, the Bay Bridge hulked, glittering, and a truck rumbled by on the freeway defined by the amber lights at its corners. Davis's shadow crouched before him.

Light, everywhere. And he was naked. Completely. Stark. He scurried to a tree, and then cringed. There was poison oak here on Albany Hill. A dose of poison oak would last for weeks. He was in trouble—in very bad trouble—and he sank to his knees in an effort to calm himself, and gave a jump as a pebble bit into his knee.

He laughed, a short cough. Davis Lowry, internationally respected for his intellect, and even, he had to admit, his looks—distinguished, much honored Professor Lowry—was naked behind a tree, and all the doors back to his apartment on the twelfth floor, including the doors to the lobby, were locked. The building was patrolled by phlegmatic but no doubt sleepless security guards. He found himself holding his breath and counting the floors—twelve of them before he could reach his apartment with the wonderful view, all the way at the top.

He scrabbled in the half dark and found a short claw of dead leaves he dangled before his most crucial nakedness, and he sidled a few steps. He could not guess what time it was. But if dawn began to barely glow, he was finished. He let the bunch of dead leaves fall. They would be useless.

Don't panic, he whispered to himself. Be still. You need a plan.

Fine, a plan. That would be easy. He would walk—stroll, saunter—all the way around the building, wave at the security guard, punch his code into the buttons at the traffic gate, and wander in, like a man just back from taking the night air.

He could wait at a side door, huddled behind the pot of azaleas, and hope that an early riser, or someone with a dachshund with a weak bladder, decided to go for a walk. Someone with a healthy heart, not one of the more trembly, blinky women who always looked up with anxiety even in normal times, even when he was waiting for an elevator, carrying his Florentine-leather briefcase. He felt sorry for them. There were dozens of timid older women. He was sure that the sight of him now would give them a stroke.

He could wait at the automatic gate, a shuddering metal cage that lifted, held itself open, and then fell. If a car engine died the gate would slowly fall onto the car while the driver cursed. The gate was deliberate and slow. That was what mattered now. Slow. He could dart in, like a very large, hairless cat. He was in fairly good shape—not that he wanted this much of his physique to be illuminated by the stumpy lights around the periphery of the junipers. He could run from where he was to the garage before the gate groaned shut. But as he crouched, chewing his thumbnail, it was plain that this was one night on which everyone was home, and no one was going for a drive. No one. Everyone was asleep.

It was a long wait for nothing. Time was being wasted. Day was coming. He could feel the earth rolling like a great stone eye, and hundreds of people in the very building before him were groaning awake beside chirping alarm clocks. He had no time. He had to do something—now.

He trotted to the chain-link fence, hooked his toes into it, scrambled over it, and fell to the other side. But it was good to be doing something. Wonderful to be taking some action.

A door opened, and light spilled. He froze, and scrambled, with more discomfort than he had anticipated, behind a black azalea bush.

A dog panted. A woman huddled in an overcoat was tugged along by a basset hound. The dog squatted beside a drain grid in the concrete, well trained or naturally considerate. The door shut halfway and paused, a wedge of light, and he nearly leaped for it, but then, just as he gathered himself, the door sighed and closed, except for a slit of yellow.

It clicked shut.

He prepared a statement in his mind. “Forgive me, but I have been—” What could he say? Taken by spirits? Undressed by supernatural forces? He said nothing. The woman and her dog continued out a gate and up the hill, and this was bad. This meant that it was not a midnight emergency. It was a predawn walk. Night was nearly done.

He ran, hunched over, feeling the way he thought a beast must feel, a furtive dog, a feral cat. Or worse—a werewolf, just returning from the slaughter and not yet fully human. He slid into the darkest shade, the canyon of night beside the wall, and thought, Perhaps I have done something. He spread his fingers before his eyes. He couldn't be sure. Perhaps there was blood.

But this was childish. Someday this would all be an amusing story. He would entertain his friends over port and Stilton. Yes, that funny time, he would laugh, when I was naked.

He crept, scrambled, hesitated. He peered around a corner, and then took several long, slow breaths. He padded down cold, stone slabs, rosemary bushes scratching his ankles.

The security guards' office, a cubicle of black glass, reflected his black silhouette. He cleared his throat, and shivered, because now it was cold in the wind from the Bay. And it was more than cold. Some day, he consoled himself again, he would look back at this. Some day he would tell it—a funny story. His mouth was glue. His pulse fluttered in his throat.

He tapped on the glass.

He tapped again.

The glass window slid open, and a jowly profile glanced out in the wrong direction.

“I'm here,” said Davis. “I'm naked,” he added, so the guard might be somewhat prepared, and also so the guard would know that Davis was not intoxicated or experimenting with drugs. “I walk in my sleep,” he offered.

The man vanished.

It had seemed like a good plan, thought Davis, gazing at the black glass of the guard booth. He had done the best he could.

The guard hurried from a door, and swept a woolly, pleasingly scratchy blanket around Davis's shoulders, around all of him.

He overdressed that day, wearing a sweater under his tweed jacket, and even sported a snap-brim hat he had bought years before, in an attempt to look like someone in a
Thin Man
movie. He was too hot, but he took nothing off.

He bought a pair of pajamas, and fastened them with safety pins that night. Surely he would prick a finger, he thought, if he tried to strip at two
A
.
M
. He propped chairs against his door and around his bed, so that he would have to climb over them to get out of bed at all. He put dictionaries and medical encyclopedias in awkward places, so that even fully awake, after brushing his teeth, he stubbed his toe and danced on one foot for a moment. This was a good sign. All would be well.

He ran four miles before dinner. He ate a lamb chop and steamed rice, boring, digestible. After dinner he drove to the track and walked another three miles. When he sat in the darkness, relaxing on the empty bleachers, he knew that on this night he would sleep well.

He yawned before the television, and drank one beer. He felt quiet inside, weary and complete. He took a long, hot shower. By then, his legs were stone and his eyes burned. He yawned great sleepy-lion yawns. He pinned himself into his pajamas and fumbled for the radio alarm, because, as sleepy as he was, he knew that he might sleep until noon the next day unless something woke him.

He pulled the blankets up to his chin.

And then he missed her. He missed her as he had missed her every night for the last six months. This time, though, it was especially bad. His grief was a physical pain. He reached to the empty place in the bed and, after a long time, he slept.

She walked toward him, again, across the lake.

He was in an amazing place. He knew, though, that it was not a dream. The wind was cool, and the radio tower across the black bay was a single prick of light that pulsed off and on. The Golden Gate Bridge was a necklace of light. There was the swimming pool far below, and the tennis courts. The wind smoothed back his hair, and he spread his arms.

This was where he lived, yet he had never seen it like this. An airplane, a tiny, blinking jewel, floated across the sky, and only then did he sense his bare feet. His feet gripped a narrow, hard shelf. A board, perhaps. Something like a board, certainly, firm under his arches. Very firm. Hard.

Then he knew.

He knew, and he could not move.

He was ice. But his knees melted, and he swung his arms to keep from falling.

He was on the very edge of his balcony, standing in the rim of the balcony wall, twelve stories up, and he swam in the air to save his life.

He struggled in the air, flailing, his body swaying back, and then leaning forward, pitching outward, the quaking aquamarine of the swimming pool shifting from one place to another as he fought.

He fell.

He twisted as he fell, and caught the wall of the balcony. His fingernails clawed concrete. The air was slammed from his body. But he fought hard, threw a leg over the wall and rocked there.

Don't look. He clenched his teeth. Do not look. He could not move, and he felt himself grow heavy. Heavier. Too heavy.

Whatever happens: don't look down.

He struggled back over the wall, and rolled onto the balcony floor. He shuddered, icy with sweat. He could not move. He thought only, I'm alive.

And then he realized a second, even more vivid truth: he had to change his life at once.

Or he would die.

Part One

1

Just before noon on Friday, the scaffolding snapped. The assembly of pipes and joints tumbled to the ground, and at first it was simply a mess. And then, in a heartbeat or two, the steel planks at the side fell in, the mud wall collapsed, and two men were buried.