The Long Sleep

XIII

When he woke, Allison was sitting in a rocking chair beside the bed. She was wearing tight red slacks, a pearl gray blouse, and a red choker at her neck. Her black hair fell over her shoulders and curled around the undersides of her heavy breasts. She was prettier than he remembered. She smiled and leaned toward him, and she said, “How do you feel?”

He tried to speak, but his mouth was dry. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth.

“Water?” she asked.

He nodded.

She went to the dresser and filled a crystal glass from a silver carafe. When she brought it to him, she held his head up while he swallowed. He finished the entire glass. “Well,” she asked again, “how do you feel?”

He looked around and saw that he was in the guest bedroom of Henry Galing's house where he had first met Allison after waking with amnesia. “As if I'm going mad,” he said.

Sitting on the bed, she leaned down and kissed him once, chastely. “Darling, it's all over now!”

“It is?” He didn't believe her.

“You're out of it!” she said. “You've come back.”

“Out of what? Back from where?” Joel asked warily.

Instead of answering him, she went to the bedroom door and stepped into the upstairs hall. “Uncle Henry! Come quick! He's awake, and he knows where he is!” Then she returned to the bed, smiling.

He didn't smile back at her.

Henry Galing entered the room a moment later. He looked the same as before: tall, broad-shouldered, authoritarian, with that mane of white hair. At least their physical appearances were not mutable. Otherwise, though, Henry Galing had changed: he was downright pleasant. He hurried over and stood by Joel's bed and grabbed his shoulder and beamed down at him. “My God, we've been so worried about you! We didn't know if you'd ever come out of it!”

“You didn't?”

Galing squeezed his shoulder affectionately. “How are you feeling?”

“Okay, I guess.”

“Dr. Harttle's on his way up,” Galing said.

“With dust in his hair?”

Allison and Galing exchanged a quick look of concern. “What do you mean?” Galing asked.

Joel sighed. “Nothing.”

“Dust?”

“Nothing, Henry.”

To Allison, Gating said: “He's lost that terrible yellow color — and his eyes aren't bloodshot anymore.”

“I can't remember what I'm doing here,” Joel said. “What's going on?” He had decided against leveling charges and demanding explanations, apologies… He didn't know if this were another act or whether it was reality, at last.

“You don't know where you are?” Galing asked.

“No,” Joel said. “Well… This is your house. Somewhere in New England. Allison's my wife. But beyond that…”

“Amnesia?” Galing asked.

“I guess so.”

“That's a side-effect we hadn't foreseen.” The old man looked frightened, as if he wondered what else they hadn't foreseen.

“Side-effect?” Joel asked. He felt like the straight man in an old-time comedy act — although this scene seemed more real than those which had preceded it. He could smell pork roasting in the downstairs kitchen. A telephone sounded in another part of the house and was answered on the fourth ring. The wind sighed against the bedroom window, and outside a bird called, strident but cheerful.

“Do you remember sybocylacose-46?” Galing asked.

“That horrible stuff,” Allison said, shivering, taking Joel's right hand.

“It doesn't sound familiar,” Joel said.

“We dubbed it Sy,” Galing said by way of prodding his memory.

“It's a blank,” Joel said.

Allison patted Joel's hand. The expression on her usually animated face was so sober that she might have been in shock. “It's a drug,” she said. “A particularly nasty drug.”

“Tell me more.” He sat up now, surprised that he should feel as clear-headed and healthy as he did. When he had awakened from all of the other illusions, he'd been dizzy and exhausted.

“A very special drug,” Henry Galing said. “Originally it was intended for use as an inhibitor of cardiac arrhythmias and to stimulate the myocardium to increase contractility. But it simply didn't develop as we intended it to. The chemists could make a batch of it in third-stage complexity and watch it mutate into something else again. Inside of twenty minutes, it was an entirely new compound, quite different than what they'd made.”

“Chemical compounds can't mutate,” Joel said.

“This one did,” Galing said.

“It's our own little Frankenstein monster,” Allison said. She wasn't trying to be light; she meant it.

“Allison thinks it's sinister,” Galing said. “Actually, it's just something new, interesting. It's no more dangerous than—”

“It almost killed Joel,” she said.

Galing stopped smiling, nodded gravely. “Sybocylacose-46 is like a living organism evolving with blinding speed. At a certain point in the research we were unable to develop a mean-strain. So… We just let a batch of it go to see what would happen. It went through forty-five temporary states before settling into its finalized form.”

“I don't remember,” Joel said. “Anyway, it sounds senseless.”

“It does, doesn't it?” Galing said. “We racked our brains, I'll tell you. We thought of everything: that we'd created a living cell in the new compound and that was changing the nature of the compound itself; that we had created a whole living creature, more than just a cell, a liquid being the likes of which the earth had never seen; that a strain of bacteria had contaminated the drug each time we made a batch, and the bacteria was what was mutating. But none of these checked out.”

“Then?” Joel asked. If this were another act, it was quite an interesting one. He hadn't made up his mind yet.

“Then,” Galing said, “we began testing Sy-46 on lab animals — with odd results.”

Allison traced the line of Joel's jaw with her fingertips. “You don't remember any of this, darling?”

“None of it,” he said. “I'm sorry to bore you, but I'd like it all repeated.”

Galing sat down in the rocking chair and crossed his legs, as if he were settling in to tell a long ghost story. “The lab animals seemed to sink into, well, it wasn't a trance exactly. Call it a semi-trance. They stared about as if they were seeing things for the first time, numbed by the sight, awe-stricken. They reacted to stimuli in a confused manner. Some of them even seemed to welcome pain as if it were pleasure; and others reacted to a tickling finger as if it were a honed blade. Mice ran repeatedly into walls when we put them to maze tests. All in all, we felt these indices pointed to the discovery of a new hallucinogen.”

Joel already knew what was coming. It was as inevitable as the tide. It was so pat, so neat. “And I volunteered to be a human subject?”

“Insisted on it,” Galing said.

“I tried to talk you out of it,” Allison said. “But you were determined.”

Galing rocked slowly back and forth in his chair. “From what we knew about the drug, there were too many contra-indications to make it easy to find human subjects.” Contra-indications were the situations in which a drug could not be administered. “It could not be given to anyone with the slightest eye impairment, nor to anyone with hypertension, penicillin or suphur drug allergies, not to pregnant women or to women past the change of life, not to anyone with any family history of heart disease— the list goes on. In the end you proved not to embody any of the contra-indications, and you were interested in Sy-46, terribly interested, and you insisted on being the first guinea pig.”

“What happened?”

Galing leaned forward on his chair and smiled. “That's what we want you to tell us.”

“Was it really awful?” Allison asked.

“It wasn't pleasant.” To Galing, Joel said: “How long have I been under the drug's influence?”

“Eighteen hours,” Galing said.

“We were afraid that you'd been given an overdose, despite the controls,” Allison said.

“What's the name of your company?” Joel asked.

The old man raised his eyebrows. “What's that have to do—”

“Galing Research?”

“Of course.”

“And you're involved in the commercial applications of paranormal phenomena?”

“In what!” Galing asked, incredulous.

“That's not right?”

“We're a drug firm,” Galing said.

“You don't know any faceless man?”

“Darling, are you feeling all right?” Allison asked. “You do understand all these things — this faceless man — must have been part of the drug's work?”

“We'll want to know everything about your hallucinations,” Galing said eagerly.

“They didn't seem like hallucinations,” Joel said doubtfully. “They seemed real.”

“Wait,” Galing said. He stood up. “I'll get Richard to fetch the tape recorder.”

“And the electric prod?” Joel asked.

“The what?”

“Never mind.”

Galing started toward the door.

“Uncle Henry,” Allison said, “perhaps Joel ought to rest, first. He's been through so much.”

“Of course he has,” Galing said rather impatiently. “I would be the last to deny it. But you see how fit he's feeling. Aren't you feeling fit, Joel?”

“Just wonderful,” Joel said.

“I still think he should rest,” Allison said.

“Nonsense,” the old man said. Then he was gone through the door, shouting for Richard.

“I was so frightened,” she said.

“I'm back now.”

“I'm glad.” She bent over and kissed him. Her heavy breasts were flattened against his chest. Her breath was cool and sweet as mints. Her tongue played briefly, deliciously between his lips: A promise.

He felt desire swell in him, and he wondered how in the hell he could react so quickly, easily, and totally to her when he was plagued with so much confusion, doubt, and fear. But even the ordeal he'd been through could not argue convincingly for detumescence. She affected him with the inevitable, unavoidable power of a fierce electric shock.

“Please, don't ever volunteer again for an experiment like that,” she said.

“I wouldn't.”

She nibbled at the comer of his mouth. “I never want to go through another eighteen hours like these last eighteen. You kicked and twisted, whimpered, cried, screamed… It was terrible.”

He ran his fingers through her rich hair, massaged the nape of her neck. “It's over now.”

She kissed him again; more tongue, moving, searching. Then, sitting up straight again on the edge of the bed, she said, “Was it as awful as you made it sound — faceless men and everything?”

“Worse.”

“Tell me.”

“I don't want to have to say it twice,” he said. “Let's wait for Henry.”

Leaning down again, she let him put his arms around her, and she gave him another kiss. In a soft whisper, she told him what she would do to make him better.

“Sounds like excellent medicine,” he said. He touched the curve of her full breasts. He did not want her to vanish as Anita and Annabelle had done.

Henry Galing returned with the tape recorder and placed it on the nightstand beside the bed. He plugged it in, tested it to see if it was working. His own voice boomed back at him. “Good enough,” he said. “You ready?”

“As I'll ever be,” Joel said.

“Now I know it's difficult to establish any time sense in a long series of hallucinations,” Galing said “But it would help a great deal if you would try to order the illusions. It's possible that the effects of the drug vary over a long period of time — like your eighteen hours.”

“No problem,” Joel said. “The hallucinations were very neatly ordered. Perfectly linear. I know precisely where the beginning was.”

“I've never heard of linear hallucinations,” Galing said.

Joel told him all about them, except for one thing: he could not remember what he had seen through that gray view-window in the unlighted, steel-walled room beyond the pressure hatch. He tried hard to recall that vision, for it had been the most terrifying of them all. But it was lost to him.

“Perhaps it's best you don't remember,” Allison said, shuddering.

He shuddered too.