The Pan Book of Horror Stories

NIGHTMARE Alan Wykes

Before I met Dr Frazer my life was a long nightmare of persecution. I was a naturally timid man, and from childhood onward people edged on to this not uncommon sensitivity and took a delight in seeing me build up my secret fears. That element of derisive cruelty is common too. Quite ordinarily pleasant people indulge in it, though they’d be horrified if you accused them of it and would certainly deny it. But I know. I’ve experienced it. There’s no mistaking the breath of malevolence; it becomes audible and visible as you grow older, and there comes a time when you perceive it as an aura. Someone at a party will turn from a conversation, and you will believe that the sneer on his lips is for you; or you will hear your name spoken by total strangers in a theatre foyer; a footstep will sound in the night below your bedroom window, a curtain will twitch as you pass the house of supposed friends; and a hand, surreptitious beneath the table, will prepare a few grains to be slipped into your drink.

You see, it builds up. The intent of malice lies everywhere. One’s nearest and dearest are most culpable because of course they know one’s fears thoroughly; and they always have the advantage of being able to be quite convincing about acting for your own good. They have explanations on hand for everything; but after a time you see that each is more suspect than the last. And in the end they become curiously misted as physical figures, and their voices drone on in unrecognizable terms that have only the connotations of evil. They have merged into a nightmare backcloth, and only the aura of malevolence is recognizable. Voices, shadows, sniggering laughter, pursuit—these are the elements of persecution. And all you have to balance them is a bitter longing for revenge on your persecutors—a revenge which you are quite unable to implement because of your natural timidity.

That, then, was how it was with me. I was slowly edging forward over the borderline of insanity. I dared not go out; but it came to the point where it was not sufficient to lock my door; they would get in . . . somehow. Barricades were useless—indeed, they proved so, for, finally, I was taken, cringing in a corner of the room that was my last retreat from the world.

Of that actual day I remember nothing clearly. No doubt the details were unpleasant—they could hardly be otherwise. But they are unimportant. What is important is that I then met Dr Frazer.

We understood each other. “You’re absolutely safe here,” he said quietly; and although it was the same phrase many others had falsely used to me, I knew that this time it was true. There was no need even for him to demonstrate security by leaving the door open or giving me carte blanche to investigate the room for hidden contrivances. True, I crept furtively about, touching the bare walls and turning sharply to surprise the shadow that I had come to expect to be creeping up on me. But there were no shadows, and I smiled a bit shamefacedly at Dr Frazer as he sat at his desk.

“All right?”

He stood up and shook hands with me. It was a gesture of friendship, not a greeting or farewell. We were much of a height—both tall and lean, though at that time my constant fears had given a twist to my neck and shoulders that had stamped me with the slightly obscene horror of all those who believe they are hunted, while Dr Frazer was tranquil, aquiline, and dignified. But I felt none of the customary inferiority even when he looked down at my hand held briefly in his own, and saw the swollen and ragged cuticles where for years I had picked and bitten at them in an habitual reaction to my fears.

“Such finely shaped hands,” he murmured gently. “We must make them better.”

He was with me, you see. From the first he understood all my difficulties; and although at that first meeting he didn’t even begin the work of release, he gained my confidence.

Of course I had my own quarters in the Home—and a very comfortable suite it was. And I was absolutely free to come and go as I wished. But I preferred not to go beyond the walls surrounding the grounds. For some time I just wanted to enjoy my new-found safety, and in any case it would have seemed ungrateful to want to go beyond the walls that contained the pleasant and extensive park—almost as if I wanted to escape from escape.

As for the cure, I can tell you little of that. Every morning Dr Frazer and I used to talk—that was the heart of it. I would tell him things—almost whatever he asked. Sometimes not. Then he would say, “We’ll enjoy a light sleep”; and after that it would seem as if I’d told him what he wanted to know, even though I couldn’t actually remember doing so. You see? It was as easy as that. Just lie down on that perfectly comfortable sofa and answer Dr Frazer’s questions—which were always put in such a way that they scarcely seemed like questions at all, but more like ordinary to-and-fro conversation really. He never seemed to be prying, he was just interested, man to man.

Then peace. Gradually but certainly all my anguish disappeared. I had no fears of any kind. “Look at yourself in the glass,” Dr Frazer said; and when I looked I saw that my shoulders had become noticeably less hunched because now I was no longer constantly looking behind me; and my eyes no longer had the terrible shiftiness of eyes trying to follow the movements of ubiquitous enemies. My hands, too, bad begun to heal up. At first I sat on them while Dr Frazer and were talking; but after a time he made me look at them steadily, and I found I could do so without revulsion. As he said, it was a matter of facing up to things. “That you can now do,” he added. “But stay a few weeks longer. Go out and about, get used to things in your own time. Many a cure’s been spoilt by too sudden a transition.”

“I really am cured?” I asked. I just wanted the security of hearing it again.

“You really are,” he said.

You can imagine my delight on entering my new life. Free of enmitous whispering and disjointed implications of torture, I went about with what must have appeared to be a very childlike gaiety; though in that place innocence and experience were frighteningly and terribly combined. But since, cured or not, all of us there looked inward upon ourselves rather than outward at our companions no one remarked as extraordinary my new-found happiness.

Happiness. I speak of it as that. And you would think that for one just released from the persecution of a world of enemies, able to seek love instead of enmity in people, there would be unlimited vistas of joy. But in my case it was not like that.

Indeed no.

The first time I realized this was on the third day after Dr Frazer had given me my pass into a world free of enemies. I felt as I can only suppose any normal man would feel if he had just recovered from a long illness and been granted a new lease of life. All the colours, sounds, and smells of the world were intense and clear. People were just people—I could talk with them if I wished, enjoy the normal intercourse of civilization.

I walked down the hill to the village. Faintly astonished by my new-found daring, I went straight into the public bar of an inn, reminding myself that before I met Dr Frazer nothing would have driven me into a room where people were gathered. I would have distorted them into vicious enemies, their derision misting the air and their secret laughter droning like voices heard in a sick sleep.

In the pub I nodded cheerfully but not too deliberately to the company and ordered a ginger-beer shandy. The buzz of conversation stopped for a moment. I crossed one ankle over the other and leant against the bar. My drink came and, as I paid, I heard a man who was sitting at one of the small tables say to his woman companion:

“He may be skinny, but ’e’s a devil for strong drink.”

It was an unfunny remark and meant only to impress the woman that the speaker was ‘a lad’. I accepted it as such. There wasn’t a flicker of resentment in me, even when I heard the woman respond with a stifled snigger.

No resentment; no horror. I had been momentarily in the presence of real, not imagined, derision, and it had left me unmoved, perhaps even a little disappointed. Frazer had almost, one might have said, given me a completely new personality.

Calmly I left the pub, my nod of farewell including the man who had mocked me, and walked back up the hill, seeing myself in my mind’s eye as the poor hunted creature I had been. I smiled with easy self-contempt as I imagined myself running, running, my breath gasping, pursued wherever I went by that baleful evil with which all my tormentors had been invested. It was amusing to consider that for so long I had, in a way, been sustained, as a cancer is sustained, by the malignant accumulation of a malevolence I had created for myself. Now there were no shadows, no baleful voices.

Lasting happiness, one would have thought. But strangely, in a little while I found that, lacking the sustaining power of torment, I was, so to speak, starved. I needed the torture of persecution to feed me. Now I had nothing—nothing.

This realization was built up over many weeks. I began to seek persecution with the same intensity I had fled from it. I dressed and acted eccentrically in the village, wearing an old-fashioned Inverness cape, laughing and talking to myself and in general inviting comment. But I realized all too clearly that the surreptitious remarks people made about me were impelled by humour and compassion rather than derision. There was no malice in them.

Dr Frazer was of course delighted with my progress. He saw that now I ventured into every lion’s den. I didn’t tell him that my venturings had become desperate searches for the sustenance of torment. I had begun to feel stirrings of resentment towards him, for it was he who had brought about my growing despair; but being in many ways a weak man and in every way a timid one, I couldn’t find the kind of courage that was needed to tell him of my resentment. Such courage as I possessed was needed to face the emptiness of my tranquil life.

Then, at the end of autumn, a thin, bitter malice once more attacked and persecuted me.

This time it was in the form of a nightmare.

In the dream there was an intense heat and light surrounding me—the kind of sunshine in which you’re forced to screw up the eyes to avoid being blinded. But in the centre of all that light was an oasis of shadows, columns.

And among the shadows a figure stood, cloaked and still, watching me.

Watching, I say. But that isn’t quite accurate. For when the figure moved a little, a turn only, I knew that it had no face.

It wasn’t, I hasten to say, a Gothic facelessness, a ghastly impression of shredded flesh or glaring eyesockets or mangled bone. I might have felt my scalp prickle, I might have been faintly amused or disgusted by such a dream vision. But this was a subtle refinement of facelessness, a void that, hooded though it was by shadow, turned and watched. And this watching, even though it was expressed by neither eye nor mouth, was nonetheless clearly malevolent, the malevolence of asps was hooded there. It seemed, in fact, the very void from which malice might have been created.

In the dream I felt, very clearly, that my search for the sustenance of torment was over.

I screamed of course. But the scream was at once aborted in that special dream atmosphere of fungoid oppressiveness, and escape was equally impossible.

Then, waking at last from this nightmare, I felt quite certain that it was no single visitation of horror. It would recur again and again, like a new lease of torment. Awake, I screamed.

I proved myself right in my apprehension: it was a recurring nightmare. Night after night I found myself within the confines of that sunlit purlieu with its heart of darkness; night after night the faceless figure turned all the intensity of its darkly burning malice upon me.

I say ‘night after night’, but that isn’t strictly true. Even I, with so many years of persecution behind me, could not have borne that. The nightmare was frequent though, and it was, in a curious way, progressive. I mean that the blinding, stifling light and heat that formed its atmosphere, and in which I found myself trapped, oppressed, immobile, diminished somewhat in intensity with each recurrence. I wasn’t aware of this until I had dreamed the nightmare many times; but at last I realized that there seemed also to be an increasing clarity about my cloaked and hooded tormentor, almost a promise of revelation. Still no eyes looked out, and not even the thinnest of lips were folded back from the vicious breath of malice—in fact, my familiar’s malevolence remained bitterly inscrutable, even though I gained, as you shall see, a hint of his identity. But nonetheless there was a definite feeling of progression—whether towards revelation of my tormentor’s identity, or disaster, or both, I could not be sure. But a gathering excitement attended my recurrent visits to the benighted Asphodel of my nightmare.

Outwardly, the effect on me was appalling. I was rapidly falling back to the state that had brought me to Dr Frazer.

He, naturally, was puzzled. “This will never do,” he said jovially. “You must tell me what has happened. I can’t have a triumph turning into a failure.”

I cowered back in my chair, biting at the skin round my fingernails. I would say nothing. He rose from his desk and came towards me. I whimpered, backing away into the corner.

“Please,” he said. “We’re friends.” He seemed to be standing amid columns and shadows, a lean figure, watching me. I must have cried out, for he said quickly: “Ah, an hallucination.” This conclusion seemed to satisfy him, and he sat down again behind his desk. “It’s a dream you’ve been having. You must tell me about it.”

“No!” I shouted, I could feel my mouth quivering with fear and frustration. With all my heart I wanted to reveal my nightmare to him; yet to me the loss of its defilement would be like the draining away of life. I had already experienced the emptiness of tranquillity.

I had enough cunning to be careful. I calmed myself.

“Stop that giggling,” Dr Frazer said harshly.

I hadn’t realized I was laughing. I felt humiliation burning through me like fire.

“Now,” he said kindly again, “you have only to tell me your dream. You know you can trust me. Didn’t I exorcize your fears before? I can again—even in a dream.”

“No,” I said. I was putting on the brave front I used to put on, pretending. “I don’t dream, ever.”

“Then you’re the only man in the world who doesn’t,” he answered dryly. “Some dreams are remembered, some not; that’s all.”

“I don’t remember, then.”

He shrugged. “All right. Today you won’t remember. Tomorrow perhaps. Shall we see? I can assure you I’ll have your dream from you sooner or later. Sleep now. You’d like a little something to help?”

“No!” I shouted again. The thought of the malevolent persecutor of my dream was more than I could bear.

Yet I moved onwards through time towards night and sleep with a fascination combining horror and lust. If my assignation with my familiar was cancelled out by a dreamless slumber, I endured the interval between that night and the next with a relief which, paradoxically, I found almost unendurable. The persecution that was destroying me had become a necessity.

For several days Dr Frazer tried to prise my nightmare from me by gentle encouragement. But his persistence was unavailing. I had too much to lose. He had robbed me of one source of existence; I didn’t intend that he should steal the other from me. My resentment towards him grew. I longed for revenge upon him for cornering me as he had, for, after all, whom else could I blame? But, as I have hinted before, I am not the sort to plan or execute overt reckonings.

Secret, introverted vindictiveness, though, is another matter.

One morning he said with weary patience: “Well, if I can’t take your nightmare from you by request, I shall have to have it by extortion.” Then I recalled that when I had first come under his care he had overcome my reluctance to reveal the details of my earlier tormented life by putting me into an hypnotic trance.

“Tomorrow morning,” he said softly, “we will try a little sleep.”

I wanted to shout out in frenzied rage, but I covered my trembling mouth with my hand.

“Quiet, now,” he said. “Quiet.”

I could feel his eyes burning into my back as he had me led back to my room.

That was yesterday.

Last night I dreamed again, but with a subtle difference.

The blinding light and scorching heat had diminished and had been replaced by a thin sweating chill, and it was into this that I entered the nightmare. My familiar watched me, shadowed, anonymous, hooded, and ubiquitous in the sense that when I forced myself to shut out his sinister faceless malevolence I found the cloaked silent figure still watching me, full of a malicious surprise that I should have been so naïve as to seek escape by a mere closing of the eyes. For the nightmare went endlessly tunnelling inwards through countless reflections of eyes reflected in eyes.

And this time I experienced also a strange duality. I seemed to have been drawn into a dreadful impersonation of my watching tormentor, so that I was myself looking outwards facelessly from the shadowed hood, and observing with immense glee the surprised horror of the tall, lean figure which chokingly screamed and closed its eyes in a ridiculously abortive effort to escape the malignant evil I embraced him with. The recognition of myself as a creature eaten by malevolent persecution, yet at the same time triumphantly and vindictively projecting malevolence outwards, should have been more than I was capable of bearing.

But I regret to say that I knew a wholly lustful orgasm of satisfaction in that moment of recognition. Vindictiveness of a secret kind is, as I have said, easier than overt revenge.

When I awoke I felt as if I had experienced some strange metamorphosis. I looked at myself in the glass. No change there: my head was still hunched on my shoulders in the familiar attitude of the persecuted, my eyes were shifty with fear. Yet I felt calm—not calm in the way I had felt when Dr Frazer had released my previous fears from me, but, rather, calm with the satisfaction of achievement.

I chuckled to myself and rubbed my hands pleasurably together. They sounded unusually dry and papery.

When I knocked at Dr Frazer’s door there was no answer. I knew he was inside, though. I pushed the door silently open and stood there, watching.

Dr Frazer was at his desk. The room was filled with sunshine—the cold pale sunshine of a winter morning. The thin nightmare chill was with us.

Dr Frazer looked up. Beads of sweat glistened on his forehead. He, too, had suffered a metamorphosis. He was not, as yet, a creature completely derided by terror; but the silent erosion of fear and malice within his skull had begun. The horror of this realization was clearly upon him. His lips and fingers trembled. His eyes looked wearily out from beneath his fine brows, and in them I could see my own, warily hooded, watching him, and his in mine, endlessly reflected back and forth.

“For God’s sake, what is going to happen now?” he whispered.

I did not answer him. I was very well aware that he sought the comfort of my assurance: Why, surely you’re going to exorcize my dream, Doctor? Isn’t that what I’m here for? But it was no longer necessary for him to discover my dream: he already knew it. Nor was it necessary for him to tell me that last night he had experienced the first long nightmare of persecution, in which the lean cloaked faceless figure stood watching him—just as I watched him now, malevolent and sinister, his familiar always.