He awoke slowly, unwilling to leave the dream. But daylight was unrelenting, and soon his eyelids twitched open, revealing his body and the bed in which he lay.
They were both drenched with blood. The stench of it hung in the room like a thick cloud, and had drawn several flies inside through holes in screens and loose window fittings. He stared as one crawled across his stomach and settled in the red, wet pit of his navel, like a tiny starling in a birdbath of blood.
Bell lurched out of the bed, but before he reached the bathroom, brown bile mixed with blood (God! did I drink it, too?) gushed from his mouth, and he vomited everything onto the wooden boards of the hall. Everything except the fear. The taste of that remained long after toothpaste and mouthwash had removed the sour taste of vomit from his mouth.
He called in sick, then set to work cleaning up, scraping and wiping up the mess in the hall, stripping the bed and throwing the covers in a garbage bag, sponging the blood off the bed frame and the hardwood floor of the bedroom. The mattress, sodden with blood, was ruined.
And all the time he worked he thought about the night before and how he could relate it to anything he knew of humanity. He had enjoyed it, had actually derived pleasure from the torment of others. And not, perhaps, only torment. All the blood. Could a person lose so much blood and live? Had he killed in his dream?
Then memory came to him — a naked girl barely in her teens, forced by taut chains to stand spread-eagled, bleeding from a hundred tiny cuts… and he, a knife in his hand, coming up behind her for the last time, erection pointing toward the stones of the arching vault, the knife passing from his sight and the girl slumping in her chains with a terrible finality while he laughed and then he…
No!
He retched at the thought, and pummeled his temples to drive out the memory by force. His body fell onto the soaking mattress like a stone onto a sponge, and he babbled to himself in a high-pitched voice, "No, no, no, no, no, I didn't, I couldn't, no, no…" and started to cry.
Then from inside he heard another voice, still his, that soothed and calmed. It wasn't real, it said. It was a dream.
The blood! The blood was real!
You made the blood. You created it as you created the dream, and the people in it.
But I killed them!
You killed in a dream. You killed that which never existed.
But if I killed in a dream… I would kill in real life. If I enjoyed it then, I would enjoy it… in reality!
No. There is no punishment in a dream. No real pain, no real death. In reality, circumstances are different.
Circumstances?
There was no answer. Suddenly Bell felt very sad, very tired. He finished cleaning the bedroom, using scissors and a carving knife to cut the mattress into sections small enough to put into garbage bags. He could not have put it out intact with the trash. There would have been unpleasant questions about the blood.
It was late afternoon when he finished. After a supper of scrambled eggs and toast, he fell asleep on the couch and did not wake up until sunrise. He had no dreams.
Saturday
Lying there on the couch in the early morning, the horrors of two nights before seemed farther away. It was Saturday, he thought. No responsibilities, no appointments. A day to rest, to think.
When the shopping mall near his apartment opened, he went to a furniture store and ordered a new mattress to be delivered that afternoon. It felt good to get out. The past few days had stifled him, and the sensation of being among people again was intoxicating. He bought four new rock albums at Sam Goody's, a coffee table book on football at B. Dalton's, and two new sweaters. Around noon his stomach reminded him that he had had nothing since the eggs the night before, so he went into a quiet restaurant far from the mall's central hub.
Halfway through his burger, fries, and beer, Karen walked in, arms loaded with packages. She was a secretary in Sales, a divorcee with whom Bell had chatted once or twice at the coffee machine. One time he asked her out, but she had plans to go away for the weekend and asked for a rain check. He had not asked her out again.
But now he smiled and waved, beckoning her to his booth. He craved normality, someone to talk to. She smiled in response and joined him.
"Hi," she said, out of breath. "Wow, what a morning. What are you up to?"
"Same as you — shopping." It was nice to sit there with her, just talking and comparing purchases. She ordered a BLT and a beer, and as the conversation wound on, he felt himself happy to be with her. The dreams became just that — dreams. Nothing but harmless and unharmed phantoms, despite their physical manifestations. He almost forgot about the blood.
When the check came he picked it up despite her protests. "Look," he said, "one time you asked me for a rain check, so this is it, okay? In fact, let's go the whole way. How about a movie?"
She giggled like a schoolgirl. "Now?" He nodded. "I haven't been to a matinee in ages. Okay. What'll we see?"
There was a new Steve Martin comedy at one of the theaters in the mall's multiplex, and they just made the two o'clock show. They ate popcorn and laughed together, and before long his arm was around her shoulders and she was nestling contentedly into his warmth. He remembered the new mattress as they were walking out of the theater.
"Oh, Christ," he said. "I just remembered I've got a furniture delivery at my place."
She smiled. "That's a new excuse."
He took her hand and squeezed it. "No excuse. I'm serious. I'd better get over there before I miss them."
"Well," she said, "this was fun. Thank you."
It was fun, he thought He liked Karen and wanted to see her again. Soon. "What about dinner?"
"Tonight?"
"Tied up?"
She hesitated, then shook her head. "I'd like that. Want to pick me up?"
The truck was just pulling out of the parking lot as he drove in. He waved frantically at the driver, who stopped and backed up over the sidewalk to unload. When the mattress was safely on the box spring and the truck was gone, Bell showered, shaved, dressed, and tried to read a magazine until six-thirty came.
It was difficult. The smell of blood was still in the air, even though he had opened all the windows and turned on the exhaust fans in the kitchen and bathroom. The early autumn breeze blowing past the curtains chilled him, and in the oncoming darkness he thought once more about his ability, his power — his curse, as he was now beginning to think of it. And the more he thought, the more he knew that there was great danger in it, if not physically, then mentally.
Being with Karen had made him realize how much the past few days (rather, nights) had changed him. He had always been a loner, but on those nights when he had been Don Juan and Casanova, and yes, de Sade, too, sex was better than it had ever been before. That was what frightened him, for he knew those nights were only masturbatory fantasies that pulled him inward, toward the self, barring the rest of humanity from his life. And he knew that if it continued, it would be harder and harder to return, and ultimately he would want to stay in the dreams forever.
He would not let that happen. He would be with people, not dream-haunts, and when he dreamed, he would dream as other people did, of things that become dim shadows by daylight, and left no trace of their momentary and nebulous existence in his sleeping mind.
It would be easy, he thought. The dreams, those horrid and wonderful dreams that had crossed the line of reality, had not come unbidden. He had wanted them, and as they had come as subjects before a king, so he could banish them from his dreamland and awake in peace, without blood and guilt and reflections on the fragility of circumstance.