The Long Sleep

XIV

He slept only two hours that night, and he dreamed that the faceless man was pursuing him down a dark corridor toward a huge gray window. Frightened awake, he was filled with a desolate, bitter, and altogether inexplicable sense of loss. He lay in the dark bedroom, hands folded behind his head, and listened to the quiet house. He was aware that something of incalculable value had been taken away from him — although he could not begin to understand what it was.

He tried to go back to sleep, but he was afraid that when he woke up the next time he would be in another illusion, different from this one, uglier than his one. But wasn't this the true world? He was at the end of the illusions, wasn't he? He wanted to think that he was, but he had no proof of it. Consciousness was his only defense against the quicksilver reordering of reality.

Beside him, Allison slept peacefully. He wanted to pull the sheets away from her and caress her, lazily explore the contours of her body, arouse her, and be with her once more. That insatiable need for her was even sharper now than it had been this afternoon. But he was sticky with perspiration, and his breath was foul. He didn't want to go to her like that, therefore he let her sleep.

Carefully sliding from beneath the covers, he got up and went to the window and stared at the clear night sky. The moon was like a ball of mouse-scarred cheese, just as the cliche had it; no clouds obscured it. As he lowered his gaze he saw that there was no highway at the edge of the property as there had been in the illusion. Otherwise, the view was the same: a large well tended lawn that rolled gracefully away to a forest.

It looked quite real. No flaws that he could see. Of course, that was because it was real. Dammit, this was truth. It couldn't be anything else. He was no longer caught up in a paranoid fantasy. Yet…

Guiltily, he opened the window. He glanced back to be sure that Allison was sound asleep, then reach out and felt for the hologram screen.

He found nothing false. Indeed, the night air was cooler on his skin than the air in the room, and a few fat droplets of rain spattered on his fingers and darkened his pajama sleeve. When he listened closely, he could hear frogs croaking and crickets rasping out their brittle music.

He closed the window, still not satisfied. For a while he stared at his own vague reflection in the glass, then decided that he wouldn't hurt anyone by checking on a few more of the details. It was a sign of distrust, perhaps madness… But if anyone learned what he was doing, how could he be blamed? After a dose of sybocylacose-46, anyone would need a few reassurances that the world was genuine, solid, unchanging.

He went quietly to the bedroom door, opened it, glanced back at Allison, stepped into the second floor hall, and softly closed the door behind. The corridor was silent. He had a sense of deja vu, and he remembered that other night when he had crept secretly — or so he'd thought — through the house, the night he had listened to Galing and the faceless man plotting against him in the study, the night that—

But that was illusion.

Wasn't it?

This was reality. He had to get that straight, had to believe that if he were ever to be happy again.

Without any guidance other than that provided by the pearly moonlight that beamed through the windows, he made his way downstairs, pausing on every other riser to listen for the sound of footsteps behind him. But there were no footsteps. That he could hear.

Stop it! he thought, angry with himself. For God's sake give it a chance. Let it prove itself!

He went back to the main floor hall to Henry's study, gently closed that door, and sat in the big leather chair behind the desk. The wan moonlight revealed very little of the room: the dark shapes of chairs, monolithic bookshelves braced against the walls, a huge globe and its wrought iron stand, the desk blotter, a silver letter opener, and a gleaming crystal paperweight. He switched on the desk lamp; the fluorescent tube flickered darkly, suddenly blinked brightly and drove back the shadows.

After only the briefest of second thoughts, he opened the center desk drawer. The contents were neatly ordered: a box of paperclips, a stapler, a magnifying glass, a roll of stamps, two rulers, a wad of rubber bands, pencils, pens, envelopes, writing paper, and a thick sheaf of other papers. He almost closed the drawer straightaway, for he found it hard to believe that Galing would have provided this minutiae for a stage setting. Yet, now that he had come this far… He took the papers out of the drawer and put them on the blotter, slid the drawer shut.

Most of the stuff was correspondence and bills, all of little interest to him. The single thing of value was a full color brochure that touted what Galing Research had to sell. A quick look at the twelve-page, glossy booklet told him that the company was indeed a pharmaceutical concern. It was not involved in anything so fantastic as paranormal research.

It was strange, the thought, how his subconscious, under the influence of sybocylacose-46, had used bits and pieces of the truth to weave its illusions. He had borrowed from reality, then had twisted the truth into something eerie.

He put the correspondence back in the center drawer and searched the rest of the desk. In another drawer he found a folder that had one word stenciled on it: sybocylacose. It contained forty flimsies which were covered with closely typed paragraphs full of technical data. He skimmed them, but he didn't read them carefully; he could see that they only confirmed what Henry Galing had told him earlier.

With nothing more interesting to show for the search, he was reaching for the light switch when he saw for the first time the photograph on the desktop. It was in color, glossy, framed in heavy antique gold: Allison and him, on their wedding day, the two of them at the top of the church steps, squinting in bright sunlight.

Somehow, more than anything else he had found, the photograph reassured him. He had seen nothing like it in any of the illusions. In those fantasies, the only proof of his past was the testimony of Galing and the others; and as duplicitous as they'd been, that was no proof at all. But here was a photograph, a connection, evidence of a sort.

He finished reaching for the switch, turned out the desk lamp. For a moment he was completely blind. Gradually, his eyes adjusted to the darkness enough for him to get up and find his way out of the den. In the kitchen, he poured himself a glass of milk, drank it in two long gulps, rinsed the glass in the sink.

He had about given up the idea of checking the lawn to see if it were real, when he saw the partially opened door at the far end of the kitchen. He didn't know where it led, but if it opened onto the lawn, it had best be closed and locked. He crossed to it, pulled it open, and found that it was the cellar door. Concrete steps led down into a vague, bluish light.

Close it, he thought. Just for God's sake close it.

“Anyone down there?” he asked.

No one answered.

“Uncle Henry?”

Blue light.

Nothing else.

Go to bed.

While the wide steps were concrete, the walls on both sides were white, enameled tile. He was reminded of the pod chamber in his hallucinations.

Hallucinations?

He quickly closed the door. He turned away from it and walked back across the kitchen. His legs bent under him, and he had to sit down at the table in the middle of the room.

Hallucinations? Yes. Dammit, yes, they'd only been hallucinations. The white walls in that stairwell were just something else he had appropriated and used in the illusions.

Go back to bed; make love to Allison.

He had to be certain. Reluctantly, he got up and weht back to the door, opened it, and started down the steps. Running his fingers along the walls, he saw that they were filmed with gray dust.

Stop right here.

He reached the bottom of the steps, hesitated almost a minute, then turned into a room where overhead lightstrips glimmered uncertainly.

That was the instant when it all broke apart like good stemware dropped on a brick floor.

See what you've done!

He couldn't move. He was more frightened than he had ever been. This time, he had really thought it was okay. He had thought it was over. What a joke.

Maybe it would never be over.

In front of him, floating in ten glass-walled nutrient tanks, wired to robotic machinery which dangled overhead, were ten human bodies, both men and women. In the nearest tank, directly before him, the faceless man lay on the jelly-like nutrient, staring sightlessly at the ceiling.