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Dreaming the Dark (part 3)

"If I must die
I will encounter darkness as a bride
And hug it it my arms."
[William Shakespeare]

He found a bar eventually, and drank to fill the emptiness, but he couldn't get drunk enough to dispel the void at the heart of him. He needed someone who would understand, to walk that last long corridor with him before the end. In films it was a priest, but Ross did not know one, and besides, no priest could help against what waited.

Ross had never owned a mobile, but there was a public pay-phone on one wall of the bar. Miraculously it was working. He changed his last pound coin and dialled Clayton's number. It was a wasted effort, he knew, to try and tell the cop what was going down, but he needed to try - even if what he was really doing was hearing a normal human voice for the last time.

"Hello."

"Clayton? Ross."

"Ross? What time..?"

"It's vampires, Clayton. The murder. There'll be more."

"Wait a minute. Vampires? What the hell are you... Where are you..?"

"I'm in a bar. They're real, Clayton, and worse than anything you've ever known. They're all around us, stalking, feeding... They got Big Jackie. That was them. I've seen them. Christ! You wouldn't believe what they can do! I had to let you know, before... I called to say goodbye, Clayton."

"Ross! What am I, stupid? Vampires don't exist. You're shitting me...at four in the morning. That's it! Joke's over. Next time you get drunk just don't call me. I've had a bloody hard day! The hell with you, and your vampires!"

"You don't believe. That's why the wall is tumbling."

"Wall?"

"Spider said that we'd built a wall..."

"Who's Spider? A wall? That the hell does that mean?"

"It's a metaphor, Clayton. lt's a writer's thing. Hey, I'm on a roll, so give you a better one. You don't even know what a metaphor is but I'll give it you anyway. Civilisation - all the stuff that we think is so important, so real - is a fire; something we built to give us light, and warmth, and safety. To keep the night away; fooling ourselves... We built a good fire, while it lasted, and it kept the wild beasts at bay. But they've always been out there, prowling, waiting. Every now and then, even when the flames of the fire burned highest, perhaps the more so then, we saw their eyes gleam in the dark, and we knew. We called it superstition, and we laughed at it, took the piss, because it felt real enough to be scary, and we always laugh at what we fear. And after a while we forgot it was real. But it was. It was real! All this time. And now the fire's dying because no-one bothered to tend it. And the darkness is pressing back. And the beasts are hungry. We invited them! We let them in!"

"That's voodoo bullshit," said the voice on the other end of the phone at last. "You said it yourself, remember. Fantasy, not reality. Out of that bottle you've fallen into, and that sewer that passes for your mind. But I'll tell you something in return. You asked me once why people should want to identify with the monster. You said why shouldn't they want to be the monster's victims. Well I've been in this business a long time now. And I can sense victims. I can smell them. And you smell like a victim, Ross. You've always had that smell about you. Look, I've played along with you, shown you murders, accidents... Oh, you always said it was research, but I've wondered... Now you phone me up at Christ knows what hour in the morning and give me this. I don't know what you're into now, but I'd leave it alone. All that stuff about monsters walking the streets, that's crap; all in your mind. But just because the monsters are in your own head doesn't mean they can't get you anyway. You take care."

"That's it!" Ross yelled in desperation, not caring about the muffled laughter and curious stares of the other drinkers in the bar. "Don't you see, that's it! They're in our minds. They give us what we want and what we want is death! The human race has a death-wish, and they're going to fucking grant it!"

There was a pause at the other end of the line, as if Clayton was coning to some decision. Then there was a click and the dialling tone buzzed in Ross's ear. He kept on shouting to it until the barman, tiring of the joke, showed him the door.

Ross found his way back to his flat. He stared around it, making a goodbye of sorts, he supposed. There was no more to do. He unlocked the Drawer of Darkest Dreams and glanced through the contents, terrified and eager. These were just dreams, pale mockeries of what was coming. And it would come. He knew that, even wanted it, but feared its coming. He thought of destroying the Dreams but could not. Instead he scribbled a few words on a reporter's pad, tore out the page, and placed it at the bottom of the drawer. Let someone find it. He left the Drawer unlocked and went to bed, still dressed. He slept. Dimly, through his dreams, he thought he heard the phone ring urgently, but it belonged to life, and he no longer did.

He came awake with a cry of terror and a taste like ashes in his mouth. Cold sweat was trickling down his ribs. The girl was there, a pale flame in the dark. He stared at her, desperately.

"I can't...everywhere...nowhere's safe," he said. "The bogieman's out of the cupboard and there's no way out." He laughed, a high, strained laugh that cracked into hysteria. He heard it and knew that he was that much away from madness. "No-one believes," he said, almost weeping.

She came towards him and he collapsed into her arms, hugging her to himself as he had hugged no woman since his mother, with a child's fierce and desperate need of comfort, burrowing his face into her.

"Please..." he said. She loves too much...

She stroked his hair. "It's OK, Ross," she said. "It 's nearly over. No more time. You had to know. And now you do..."

She left the end of the sentence hanging and pulled him down on to the bed. She undressed him, and then herself. She was as thin and pale as death, her flesh the colour of bleached bone, her hair like frost, but when she pressed against him she was warm. White heat. She smelled of femaleness, of musk and recent sweat. She kissed him. He responded, knowing as he did it was no good as yet. The old, expected frustration crept through him. He wanted her, he truly did, but she alone was not enough, not without the other that she offered. He fumbled at her, trying to force his body to respond. He failed, and rolled away from her, inadequate.

"I'm sorry," he said miserably. "I want to... badly... but I can't. I can't without... I don't know."

"It's all right," she said, soothing him. "This time it will be all you ever dreamed."

She looked at him with pewter eyes. "Trust me," she said, and made a dreadful noise - a kind of harsh, rasping purr, as if sandpaper were being rubbed over something hollow and reverberant.

"You know," she said. "You've always known. And you knew me, subconsciously. I called you. I looked inside your head, Ross. We can do that too; sense everything you feel, your fears and your desires. You know what's missing, what you really want. It's in your head. And in the Drawer of Darkest Dreams. Your darkest dreams."

"You're..."

"Yes. We're dreams and nightmares, sex and death. And all this time you've needed something only I could give. I'm the girl of your dreams."

She shuddered slightly. Abruptly, cold silver fire spilled from her eyes like madness. She was growling deep in the back of her throat and saliva drooled slowly from her mouth. Ross cried out once, quietly, unbelieving, and all sanity fled screaming into the dark as she changed. Her growling rose to a high, whining shriek as her body spasmed, warping and twisting into a new, non-human shape. He caught a glimpse of fur and scales amidst the insanely shifting flesh, and gleaming knobs of bone, and red, raw meat, as if her body was everting. Sick grating sounds of bone on bone came from deep inside her. She rolled on top of him, and the last semblance of humanity slipped away as she smiled. The smile widened and widened beyond the capability of any human mouth. The flesh of the lips and lower part of her face puckered and folded, extruding tubes and valves and siphons, turning the mouth into a terrible baroque monstrosity that looked as if it belonged on some giant insect. Like some organic chinese puzzle, flaps and plates of cartilage slid apart, opening a wet red hole, and a barbed spike slid out, a drop of streaky viscous fluid gathering at its tip. Somehow she spoke, through what was no longer a mouth.

"Your dreams come true," she said.

"No." Ross whispered. "I didn't know... I don't. Not like this..."

"You do!" she said. "You want!"

Things exploded from her like fans, bursting through the soft woman-flesh; tubes and pipes, ridged and segmented like worms, webs of slick, glistening sinew spread between them, dripping mucous. Her fingers traced his features, cool and dry and infinitely tender. Then mouths opened like stigmata in her palms and fastened to his face. There was a pushing at the softness of his cheeks, something gave, and his mouth was full of blood and probing gristle that was not his own. Thick muscular cables wrapped themselves around him in a terrible ophidian embrace, constricting and pulsing in time with her heartbeats. Bone hooks erupted from her body suddenly, scything into the flesh of his sides and stomach, gripping him like knives. Pain lanced through him and was immediately countered by a suffocating ecstasy that made him shudder and gasp with pleasure. The air smelled of corruption and attar of roses, sweet and cloying, and Ross's senses swam. She lowered her face onto his and breathed into him, her breath seeming to solidify as it drifted through his lungs and out into all his body's secret places. He could feel her inside him as he hardened inside her, pushing, exploring, hungry, a physical merging, her substance conjoining with his, strengthening as his cells dissolved and bled into her. He opened his eyes and saw her face superimposed upon the moon outside the window, huge and pale, floating in a night sky as dark as an anaesthetic. He laughed a little at it. Then she sucked and everything but her and the moment greyed out and went away. She opened up to allow his hardness further into her, and he moaned slightly at the heat and urgency.

"Yes," he whispered in the midst of agonised, delirious eroticism. "Yes!" He abandoned himself to her and this time it was wonderful as it had never been before. He hardly noticed when, slowly and with infinite tenderness, she began to feed.

His orgasm and his death came both together and indistinguishable.

Clayton pushed open the door, shaking his head at the splintered lock. "Ross?" he said. There was no reply. Clayton came into the room, followed by a young uniformed policeman. "Ross? You OK? Dammit, Ross, if that phone call was a joke I'll kick your arse so far..."

The curtains of the room were closed, shutting out the early morning light. The computer was still powered up and only a dim, eerie light came from the monitor screen in the corner. Clayton frowned at the clinging smell that hung an the air of the room. Incense? He'd never figured Ross for the type to burn joss-sticks. Behind him the young policeman clicked on the light.

"Jesus!" Clayton stared in horror at the bed. Behind him the younger man gasped and as Clayton crossed the room he heard him throwing up in the corridor. Clayton stared down at what remained of Ross, sliced, emptied, and scattered, spread out across the crimson-stained sheets in shreds and tatters of torn flesh and splintered bone. Here, there was a different smell underlying the sweet stench in the air, the coppery smell of blood... and something else, subtle, evocative... Clayton's eyes widened as he recognised it; the smell of recent sex. He fastidiously pulled a blanket over the wreckage, his own stomach churning, as the young policeman approached him.

"Sorry, Sir," he said.

Clayton shrugged, trying to hide his own fight for composure. "It happens. Call in. Tell them we've got another. Forensic will just love me."

He looked around the room, his gaze pausing at the wall by the window. There was something drawn on the woodchip wallpaper there, a horizontal zig-zag, the outermost points longer than the others. It looked to have been drawn in blood. He shook his head, suddenly feeling very old.

"Seen enough now, Ross, you bastard!" he said. "Got enough material!" He swore suddenly, savagely and at great length, making the younger man look up from his radio in surprise. Clayton scowled at him.

He crossed to the desk, lifting the drawings and typescript with his pen, just in case of fingerprints. He read a few words. More horror crap, he though in disgust. 'Wolfdream'. Jesus! Look at these things. Werewolves. Vampires. Why would people buy this crap? What was it about monsters that made people want them so badly? On the computer’s monitor, flickering words spread across the screen. The cursor flashed at the end of the last sentence. Clayton read, 'The Wolfdream is an embracing of the dark; it lies within each individual's secret heart, a memory of moon and magic, night and shadows...'

The bottom drawer of the desk was open slightly. Clayton pulled it fully out and frowned. Forgetting the pen he pulled out the sheaf of papers it contained. They were drawings, in pencil, paint, pen and ink, some finished in incredible detail, others simply hurried sketches. All were well-thumbed, the edges creased and grimed with handling. The same theme was portrayed in every one. Monsters. But not werewolves and vampires, ghosts and bolt-necked dead men; nothing so safe. Clayton had once seen a book of Bosch's paintings, stared in fascination at the hybrid forms that lurked in every shadow, their twisted anatomies a grotesque mingling of human and beast thrown together as if in some hellish blender. These were worse. It seemed as if Ross had unerringly gone to the worst aspects of every creature that existed, every phobia known to man, and stitched them all together in a way that made the whole more horrible than even the sum of its parts. Then he had merged the result with human form. That was the worst, that all the monstrous distortions glaring off the page were recognisably human at their core, no matter how far from the human norm their shapes were twisted. Some were like insects, some like beasts of prey, some unrecognisable except on some subconscious primal level. And some were almost human, until you took a closer look and saw the expression in the eyes...and those were the worst of all. They swarmed over the paper, and every one held in its grasp a human figure, grotesquely mutilated, wrapped in suckered coils or pierced on spikes or torn between serrated teeth. And all of them were feeding.

Clayton swallowed hard and shook his head, endeavouring to understand the mind that had produced these images. Then he realised something else.

"Why shouldn't they want to be the victim," he whispered.

For there was one more thing that all the pictures had in common. The victim's face in every one was Ross's, agonised or terrified or, worse, filled with a strange and horrible exultation. There were dozens of them, an obsessive repetition, a hundred tiny, gruesome deaths.

Clayton looked each picture over, without speaking.

"This guy was a psycho," the young policeman said, staring at the pictures over his shoulder. He glanced back at the shrouded bed, at the dark stain that had already soaked its way through the blanket. "Looks like he got what he wanted," he said and made a noise that was meant to be a laugh but didn't make it.

Clayton grunted and relentlessly worked his way down to the bottom of the pile of papers. At the bottom of the drawer was a smaller sheet, torn from a reporter's notebook. There were five words scrawled on it in Ross's handwriting. Clayton read them and stared out of the window. A siren wailed out there, somewhere in the night. Very deliberately, Clayton crumpled the note into a small tight ball and put it in his pocket. He looked at the other man, a small muscle twitching in his jaw.

"What did it say?" The young constable was shaking with delayed reaction and he had the forced tone of someone trying to keep a tremble out of their voice.

"Didn't make sense. An old song, I think."

"What did it say?" For some reason the question seemed terribly important to the younger man.

"It said 'There's a bad moon rising'..."

Outside, somewhere quite close, something made a high, whining sound and both men flinched. For a moment they looked at each other with something almost like recognition in their eyes.

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