"Sometimes," Stu said, thinking of Elder, and how Elder lurched after him in his nightmares, and of the corridors that never ended but only switched back on themselves, lit by cold fluorescents and filled with echoes.
"Then you know. When I was a teenager, I had the regular quota of sexy dreams, both wet and dry, but these were sometimes interspersed with dreams in which the girl I was with would change into a toad, or a snake, or even a decaying corpse. As I grew older I had dreams of failure, dreams of degradation, dreams of suicide, dreams of horrible accidental death. The most recurrent was one where I was slowly being crushed to death under a gas station lift. All simple permutations of the troll-dream, I suppose. I really believe that such dreams are a simple psychological emetic, and the people who have them are more blessed than cursed."
"If you get rid of it, it doesn't pile up."
"Exactly. There are all sorts of dream interpretations, Freud's being the most notorious, but I have always believed they served a simple eliminatory function, and not much more-that dreams are the psyche's way of taking a good dump every now and then. And that people who don't dream-or don't dream in away they can often remember when they wake up-are mentally constipated in some way. After all, the only practical compensation for having a nightmare is waking up and realizing it was all just a dream."
Stu smiled.
"But lately, I've had an extremely bad dream. It recurs, like my dream of being crushed to death under the lift, but it makes that one look like a pussycat in comparison. It's like no other dream I've ever had, but somehow it's like all of them. As if … as if it were the sum of all bad dreams. And I wake up feeling bad, as if it wasn't a dream at all, but a vision. I know how crazy that must sound."
"What is it?"
"It's a man," Bateman said quietly. "At least, I think it's a man. He's standing on the roof of a high building, or maybe it's a cliff that he's on. Whatever it is, it's so high that it sheers away into mist thousands of feet below. It's near sunset, but he's looking the other way, east. Sometimes he seems to be wearing bluejeans and a denim jacket, but more often he's in a robe with a cowl. I can never see his face, but I can see his eyes. He has red eyes. And I have a feeling that he's looking for me -and that sooner or later he will find me or I will be forced to go to him … and that will be the death of me. So I try to scream, and … " He trailed off with an embarrassed little shrug.
"That's when you wake up?"
"Yes." They watched Kojak come trotting back, and Bateman patted him while Kojak nosed in the aluminum dish and cleaned up the last of the poundcake.
"Well, it's just a dream, I suppose," Bateman said. He stood up, wincing as his knees popped. "If I were being psychoanalyzed, I suppose the shrink would say the dream expresses my unconscious fear of some leader or leaders who will start the whole thing going again. Maybe a fear of technology in general. Because I do believe that all the new societies which arise, at least in the Western world, will have technology as their cornerstone. It's a pity, and it needn't be, but it will be, because we are hooked. They won't remember-or won't choose to remember-the corner we had painted ourselves into. The dirty rivers, the hole in the ozone layer, the atomic bomb, the atmospheric pollution. All they'll remember is that once upon a time they could keep warm at night without expending much effort to do it. I'm a Luddite on top of my other failings, you see. But this dream … it preys on me, Stu."
Stu said nothing.
"Well, I want to get back," Bateman said briskly. "I'm halfway drunk already, and I believe there will be thundershowers this afternoon." He walked to the back of the clearing and rummaged there. A few moments later he came back with a wheelbarrow. He screwed the piano stool down to its lowest elevation, put it in, added his palette, the picnic cooler, and balanced precariously on top of everything else, his mediocre painting.
"You wheeled that all the way out here?" Stu asked.
"I wheeled it until I saw something I wanted to paint. I go different ways on different days. It's good exercise. If you're going east, why don't you come back to Woodsville and spend the night at my house? We can take turns wheeling the barrow, and I've got yet another six-pack of beer cooling in yonder stream. That ought to get us home in style."
"I accept," Stu said.
"Good man. I'll probably talk all the way home. You are in the arms of the Garrulous Professor, East Texas. When I bore you, just tell me to shut up. I won't be offended."
"I like to listen," Stu said.
"Then you are one of God's chosen. Let's go."
So they walked on down 302, one of them wheeling the barrow while the other drank a beer. No matter which was which, Bateman talked, an endless monologue that jumped from topic to topic with hardly a pause. Kojak bounced alongside. Stu would listen for a while, then his thoughts would trail off for a while, following their own tangents, and then his mind would come back. He was disquieted by Bateman's picture of a hundred little enclaves of people, some of them militaristic, living in a country where thousands of doomsday weapons had been left around like a child's set of blocks. But oddly, the thing his mind kept returning to was Glen Bateman's dream, the man with no face on top of the high building-or the cliff-edge-the man with the red eyes, his back to the setting sun, looking restlessly to the east.
He woke up sometime before midnight, bathed in sweat, afraid he had screamed. But in the next room, Glen Bateman's breathing was slow and regular, undisturbed, and in the hallway he could see Kojak sleeping with his head on his paws. Everything was picked out in moonlight so bright it was surreal.
When he woke, Stu had been up on his elbows, and now he lowered himself back to the damp sheet and put an arm over his eyes, not wanting to remember the dream but helpless to avoid it.
He had been in Stovington again. Elder was dead. Everyone was dead. The place was an echoing tomb. He was the only one alive, and he couldn't find the way out. At first he tried to control his panic. Walk, don't run, he told himself over and over, but soon he would have to run. His stride was becoming quicker and quicker, and the urge to look back over his shoulder and make sure that it was only the echoes behind him was becoming insuperable.
He walked past closed office doors with names written in black on milky frosted glass. Past an overturned gurney. Past the body of a nurse with her white skirt rucked up to her thighs, her blackened, grimacing face staring at the cold white inverted icecube trays that were the ceiling fluorescents.
At last he began to run.
Faster, faster, the doors slipping by him and gone, his feet pounding on the linoleum. Orange arrows oozing on white cinderblock. Signs. At first they seemed right: RADIOLOGY and CORRIDOR B To LABS and DO NOT PROCEED BEYOND THIS POINT WITHOUT VALID PASS. And then he was in another part of the installation, a part he had never seen and had never been meant to see. The paint on these walls had begun to peel and flake. Some of the fluorescents were out; others buzzed like flies caught in a screen. Some of the frosted glass office windows were shattered, and through the stellated holes he had been able to see wreckage and bodies in terrible positions of pain. There was blood. These people had not died of the flu. These people had been murdered. Their bodies had sustained punctures and gunshot wounds and the grisly traumas which could only have been inflicted by blunt instruments. Their eyes bulged and stared.
He plunged down a stopped escalator and into a long dark tunnel lined with tile. At the other end there were more offices, but now the doors were painted dead black. The arrows were bright red. The fluorescents buzzed and flickered. The signs read THIS WAY TO COBALT URNS and LASER ARMORY and SIDEWINDER MISSILES and PLAGUE ROOM. Then, sobbing with relief, he saw an arrow pointing around a right-angled turn, and the single blessed word above it: EXIT.
He went around the corner and the door was standing open. Beyond it was the sweet, fragrant night. He plunged toward the door and then, stepping into it, blocking his way, was a man in jeans and a denim jacket. Stu skidded to a stop, a scream locked in his throat like rusty iron. As the man stepped into the glow of the flickering fluorescents, Stu saw that there was only a cold black shadow where his face should have been, a blackness punched by two soulless red eyes. No soul, but a sense of humor. There was that; a kind of dancing, lunatic glee.
The dark man put out his hands, and Stu saw that they were dripping blood.
"Heaven and earth," the dark man whispered from that empty hole where his face should have been. "All of heaven and earth."
Stu had awakened.
Now Kojak moaned and growled softly in the hall. His paws twitched in his sleep, and Stu supposed that even dogs dreamed. It was a perfectly natural thing, dreaming, even an occasional nightmare.
But it was a long time before he could get back to sleep.
Chapter 38
As the superflu epidemic wound down, there was a second epidemic that lasted roughly two weeks. This epidemic was most common in technological societies such as the United States, least common in underdeveloped countries such as Peru or Senegal. In the United States the second epidemic took about 16 percent of the superflu survivors. In places like Peru and Senegal, no more than 3 percent. The second epidemic had no name because the symptoms differed wildly from case to case. A sociologist like Glen Bateman might have called this second epidemic "natural death" or "those ole emergency room blues." In a strictly Darwinian sense, it was the final cut-the unkindest cut of all, some might have said.