Sleepwalker (20 page)

Of course the Man would come back. Of course he would. Where would he go in this entire world but where he had been? He had no imagination. He could only return. Isn't that what the dead do? Return—if they do anything at all?

Stop it. Stop it, you're being childish. You're scaring yourself. There is nothing here, and you know it.

Davis switched off the computer, and put the software back in its plastic case. He locked this in its drawer. He surveyed the lab, his notebooks under his arm. Everything is fine, he said to himself. Nothing missing, nothing out of place.

He was stalling. He didn't want to ascend the dark stairs.

He tried to hum a happy tune, because he had always believed in music. He couldn't think of a single tune. His mind was empty. Gradually, little demitunes came back to him, jingles for hair lotion and car dealerships, hardly the sort of music to combat the fear he had now.

It wasn't fear. Fear is a feeling. This was a heaviness in his chest, and a thickness in his throat. The colors of the room were too bright. He was cold, and he wanted to hurl himself into the wall, and through it, into the earth, anywhere, as long as it wasn't here.

The frogmen were searching, even now, stretching forth their hands.

It wasn't a simple matter of imagination. Alf had really died. Of course, there were those dreams, but anything could happen in a dream—absolutely anything. This was not a dream. He was awake, and this was the world.

He could not move. There was a sound, somewhere. Not in the lab, somewhere out there, in the dark.

He swore at himself, and marched himself across the room, and turned out the light. If he stood frozen in imaginative horror like a little boy, there was no telling where his thoughts would lead. True, some bad things had happened. But a forthright attitude, and a good ladling of common sense, was the best way to deal with this sort of situation. Everyone else was afraid. Didn't he have a certain amount of pride?

The stairs were dark. But it was only dark. There was no icy breath at his cheek, no hand on his arm.

Only a long series of stairs, and doors to be locked, and at last the night and the wet grass, and the last key turned, the walk home.

Bushes, trees. A distant streetlight. The bare trembling of a rose bush, all thorns. The night smelled of the soil, and growing things, grass and old leaves becoming earth. It was a lovely smell.

Something moved.

There, between the trees. There was the sound again, the sound of something dragging, limply. And another sound, too, a determined growl, like the wheeze of a man with bad lungs pulling himself along.

With very bad lungs, and the thing was coming closer. He could see the shape of the head rising, and lurching, and lifting again.

Davis ran. He flung himself over a wall, and retrieved the notebook that fluttered to the concrete.

When he looked back there was nothing. He forced himself to look hard, between the trees and the bushes, in the black rectangle of each building. A tree lifted, full of wind for a moment. That was the sound he had heard, the wind in the bony trees.

There was nothing else.

He made a little, unconvinced laugh, a noise like a pebble hitting a stone. Running away from nothing.

He walked up Gillygate, past the black shop windows. The broken fragment of wall that marked the beginning of Bootham was as pale as a wall made of lunar stone.

He trudged by the newsagent. The streetlights made it easy to see that he was not being followed, and besides, what would be following him in the midst of a city like this? There were other people out, even at this hour.

Except, when he looked hard, they were only shadows. He was alone. There were no people. There were no living, and no dead. Only naked trees.

24

He stretched out in his tiny sitting room. Among his notebooks was his small Panasonic, and he listened to himself conduct the postmortem, delighted at the way Irene interrupted him. He rewound parts of it to hear her voice again.

He made himself some toast, and he smeared blackberry jam on the slices of wholewheat. This was bread he ordinarily liked. He had bought it at the whole-food store, where they baked it themselves. But he was too tired to eat. It was a pity he didn't have a telephone. He wished he could talk to her.

Alf exploded, black snakes running out of his nose.

He could not close his eyes without seeing Alf's body twisting against the straps. The doctors had been inept to let that happen. Surely they could have done better than that. Langton's attitude toward doctors and police were that they did not do a very good job. Langton was right. They did a terrible job.

There was a step on the stair. There, just now.

He was too tired to be frightened. He dragged himself to the bedroom, and fell across the bed. Must get up, he told himself. Must turn out the lights. There was a little electric meter behind the kitchen door. If he didn't feed it fifty-pence coins all the electricity would run out.

It would run out, he told himself, and then what would happen? He would put some money into the slot, turn the little handle, and then he would have electricity again. The hot water would be lukewarm, but that only meant he wouldn't take a bath right away. But the curtains were open and this meant the morning light would stream in on him from the east. This would be a problem.

Don't get up. There were no problems, he reassured himself. There was only sleep.

This time in the dream it was night. The water trembled beneath his feet. He walked across the surface of the lake, and the moonlight shuddered on the water. But the lake was too wide now. It was a sea. It was so vast that he could barely see her. She was a tiny dab of light far, far away.

He did not want to call her this time. There was something wrong, but he did not know that. She called him, her voice like a strand of spiderweb in the dark.

Davis. Come to me.

No, thought Davis, and he stopped walking, and the water sagged under him like a cloth, but supported him, rising and falling.

Something wrong. No, I don't want to see you anymore. I can't see you anymore, I have to turn back.

I have to leave. There's something—

Wrong.

He woke. He lay across the bed, shivering. It was over, and he was thankful for that. The dream had been more threatening than ever before. There had been something tainted about it from the beginning, some presence in the dream that had ground against him.

Then he knew what it was.

It was that noise, the same sound that he had heard outside the lab. A low wheezing sound, a sound like very bad lungs working against a great weight. Rising and falling, the grinding noise, this ancient asthmatic wheeze, dragging air in, and pushing it out.

It was a part of the dream, thought Davis. He was still asleep. He sat up. He touched his lips with his fingers. I'm still asleep. He bit a knuckle, just hard enough, and put a hand out to the wall.

Awake.

He was awake, and there was still that noise, and the noise was growing louder. It was still not loud—it was not the sort of noise that would ever be very loud. It was insistent, like the hiss of a step, of someone dragging across the floor. And yet, not like a hiss, either, and it was growing more and more clear.

It was coming closer. Because there really was a sound; there was no question about that now. The sound was real, and he was awake. He wanted to ask: Who's there? He wanted to speak, but to speak would be to admit that something was wrong, and to keep silent would be to say that there wasn't anything wrong at all, just something that didn't make sense.

In the next room. And then not in the next room. In the hall. Something just outside the door, and yet the bedroom door was open. This proved that there was nothing there. If there was something there he would see it by now, because that insistent, relentless step was just there.

Right there.

Now.

The head hunched into the doorway. The light from the kitchen was bright, and gleamed on the ebony leather of its skin, and the clotted textile of its rags. One hand was outstretched, the gilding of the light spilling along it.

Davis could not make a sound. He fought to draw a breath, but he made only a choking noise, and he backed away, crawling backward, and fell off the bed, dragging the bedding with him.

He crawled to his feet, unable to see anything but that lurching figure. He pulled himself along the wall, and the figure followed him. The arm stretched toward him, nearly touching him.

There was another sound, not only the rise and fall of the steps, but an animal, savage cry.

No!

My own voice, thought Davis, and the cry would not stop.

Over and over calling out against what he saw.

The dark fingers touched Davis's lips, and the ancient face was before him, closing on Davis, the sad features, the eyes closed, but not closed he saw, opening, coming closer, nearly on him, the cold breath stale with the flavor of the leathered lungs.

Davis smashed the window with his elbow, and leaped, slicing the backs of his thighs on the glass, smashing through the rest of the window with his head, rolling down the slate roof, still calling that none of this was real. He slipped down the cold slate.

He fell.

And hung on. The drain edge cut into his fingers, but it supported his weight. He gasped, struggling to swing himself back onto the slope of the roof. He knew he could do it. There was the slate, and here was his body, and all he had to do was swing himself up.

The figure stood there at the window, watching.

The drain groaned, and fell away, and he held onto it as it dangled downward, weakening, and yet still suspending him. A trickle of water spattered his face. Then, without a sound, the drain broke free, and he fell.

This time, nothing stopped him.

It took a long time. He had time to remember the black spear-fences that lanced upward everywhere in York. He remembered brick walls with their sharp, unyielding straight edges. But mostly he remembered to steady himself as he fell, wheeling his arms, taking a deep breath as though to scream, wondering with a shock worse than anything he had ever experienced, how long it took to die.

Part Three

25

Langton could not sleep. He was, he supposed, exhausted, but that did not matter. He did not even undress. His wife heated some milk, and the warm milk was quite delicious, but did nothing to encourage him toward bed. There was simply too much happening.

He had always had an overly advanced sense of responsibility. He was responsible for at least some of what had happened. Or, at least, he felt responsible. He should not, for example, have let Higg stay overnight with that ancient leathered mummy. He wished the ancient bag of trouble had never been found. Langton didn't care for dead things anyway, and while he knew such old bog men enthralled the scientists, and won over the hearts and pocketbooks of the public, he had to admit that Irene had, perhaps, the more civilized attitude. He had cringed when he had heard it. Irene was a charming girl, but had this terrible propensity for untimely straightforwardness. But she was right, in her way.

There was something obscene about this love of dead bodies, mummies, and such. He wondered what the Church of England felt about cremation. A good idea, that. A bad few minutes, and then you are so much dust. God will love you just as much if you are a handful of dust. What does He care?

Metaphysics. He was sitting in his favorite chair, mulling metaphysics, and it was—he craned his neck to see the clock—two in the morning. He had rung the nurse—Higg was still alive. Still alive, but still the same, which was to say nearly dead.

He asked Harry, the border collie, if he wanted to go for a walk, and of course the dog indicated that he would.

His wife was half asleep, and murmured something like surprise. “A walk. At this hour?”

“Can't sleep, can I, and who could blame me?”

No one. The last twenty-four hours had been hellish.

The dog was not surprised. Langton was given to fits of sleeplessness. Hardly insomnia, nothing deserving a serious name. Simply a sense of responsibility. A monthly report might keep Langton awake for three consecutive nights. He was, by profession, a worrier.

Langton was not a scientist. He was, at heart, a man who kept things organized. He admired the men and women he worked with, but sometimes felt that he had a point of view somewhat more objective. The romance of ancient things did not wear long with him.

The dog wet this and wet that, trees, gateposts. The two of them strolled to Clifton Green. Cold, naturally. But not so cold. The dog sniffed and snuffled in the grass.

As his wife had heated the milk, Sainsbury's Virtually Fat-Free, she had mentioned something, and it was this small bit of news, in passing, that had killed Langton's sleep more than anything else.

“Someone's done it again,” she had said, tilting the milk pan into the cup.

This was an annoying rhetorical device. She knew that Langton lived in perfect ignorance of most of the things that happened in her life, including the vicissitudes of “Neighbours,” and all the other fictional crises on television.

“Someone's done it again, and the police haven't a clue.”

“The police,” he had said, interested in more news of police bungling. “I wonder if they ever do anything right.”

“Someone got the big gray tom over on West Parade. Belongs to Mrs. Phillips, who did the Christian Aid last year. Whose house was hit by a thunderbolt that storm we had last year, that bad one?”

“That killed the pigeons in the Museum Gardens?”

“That storm; it was different lightning.”

The milk was too hot. Langton told her that he knew who Mrs. Phillips was, and yet knew nothing about her cat.

“Of course, you not liking cats.”

“I don't, really. Of course I have nothing against them. Take care of themselves quite well, as a rule.”