“May I?” he said, and pinched the Saint. He sighed. “I was afraid this was happening. When I put my arms around Dawn Winter in my dreams, she—”
“Please,” the Saint broke in. “Gentlemen don’t go into lurid detail after the lady has a name.”
“Oh, she’s only part of my dream.” The stranger stared into space, and an almost tangible aura of desire formed about him. “God!” he whispered. “I really dreamed up something in her.”
“We must swap reminiscences someday,” the Saint said. “But at the moment the pine-scented breeze is laden with threshings in the underbrush.”
“I’ve got to hide. Quick! Where can I get out of sight?”
The Saint waved expressively at the single room. In its four hundred square feet, one might hide a large bird if it were camouflaged as an atlas or something, but that would be about the limit.
The two bunk beds were made with hospital precision, and even a marble would have bulged under their tight covers. The deck chairs wouldn’t offer sanctuary for even an undernourished mouse, the table was high and wide open beneath the rough top, and the small bookcase was made to display its contents. “If we had time,” the Saint mused, “I could candy-stripe you — if I had some red paint — and put on a barber’s smock. Or... er... you say you’re dreaming all this?”
“That’s right.”
“Then why don’t you wake up — and vanish?”
The Saint’s visitor unhappily gnawed his full underlip.
“I always have before, when the going got tough, but — Oh, hell, I don’t know what’s going on, but I don’t want to die — even in my dream. Death is so... so...”
“Permanent?”
“Mmm, I guess. Listen, would you be a pal and try to steer these guys away? They’re after me.”
“Why should I?”
“Yeah,” the man said. “You don’t owe me a damn thing, but I’m trying to help Dawn. She—”
He broke off to fish an object out of his watch pocket. This was a small chamois bag, and out of it he took something that pulsed with incredible fires. He handed it to the Saint.
“That’s Dawn.”
The circular fire opal blazed with living beauty — blue, green, gold, cerise, chartreuse — and the Saint gasped with reverent wonder as he looked at the cameo head carved on the unbelievable gem.
There is beauty to which one can put a name. There is beauty that inspires awe, bravery, fear, lust, greed, passion. There is beauty that softens the savage blows of fate. There is beauty that drives to high adventure, to violence.
That stone, and above all the face cut eternally on its incandescent surface, was beauty beyond belief. No man could look on that face and ever know complete peace again.
She was the lily maid of Astolat, the lost loveliness that all men seek and never find, the nameless desire that haunts the ragged edge of sleep, that curls a lonely smile and sends vacant eyes searching far spaces.
Her face was made for — and of? the Saint asked himself — dreaming.
“Count me in, old boy.”
He went outside. Through the dusky stillness the far-off unseen feet pounded nearer.
The feet were four. The men, with mathematical logic, two. One might be a jockey, the other a weight lifter. They tore out of the forest and confronted the Saint.
“Did you see a kind of big dopey-lookin’ lug?” the jockey asked.
The Saint pointed to the other side of the clearing where the hill pitched down.
“He went that way — in a hell of a rush.”
“Thanks, pal.”
They were off, hot on the imaginary trail, and the sounds of their passage soon faded. The Saint went inside.
“They’ll be back,” he said. “But meanwhile we can clear up a few points. Could you down a brace of trout? They’ve probably cooled enough to eat.”
“What do you mean, they’ll be back?”
“It’s inevitable,” Simon pointed out as he put coffee on, set the table, and gathered cutlery. “They won’t find you. They want to find you. So they’ll be back with questions. Since those questions will be directed at me, I’d like to know what not to answer.”
“Who are you?”
“Who are you?” the Saint countered.
“I’m — oh, blast it to hell and goddam. The guy you’re looking at is Big Bill Holbrook. But he’s only something I dreamed up. I’m really Andrew Faulks, and I’m asleep in Glendale, California.”
“And I am the queen of Rumania.”
“Sure, I know. You don’t believe it. Who would? But since you’ve got me out of a tight spot for the time being, I’d like to tell you what I’ve never told anybody. But who am I telling?”
“I’m Simon Templar,” said the Saint, and waited for a reaction.
“No!” Holbrook-Faulks breathed. “The Saint! What beautiful, wonderful luck. And isn’t it just like a bank clerk to work the Saint into his dream?” He paused for breath. “The Robin Hood of Modern Crime, the twentieth century’s brightest buccaneer, the devil with dames, the headache of cops and crooks alike. What a sixteen-cylinder dream this is.”
“Your alliterative encomia,” the Saint murmured, “leave me as awed as your inference. Don’t you think you’d better give out with this — er — bedtime story? Before that unholy pair return with gun-lined question marks?”
The strange man rubbed his eyes in a dazed helpless way.
“I don’t know where to begin,” he said conventionally.
But after a while, haltingly, he tried.
Andrew Faulks, in the normal course of events, weathered the slingshots and arrows of outrageous playmates and grew up to be a man.
As men will, he fixed his heart and eyes on a girl and eventually married her. As woman will, she gave birth in due course to a boy, Andy Jr, and later a girl, Alexandria.
He became a bank clerk, and went to and from home on an immutable schedule. He got an occasional raise; he was bawled out at times by the head teller; he became a company man, a white-collar worker, and developed all the political ills that white-collared flesh is heir to. And he dreamed. Literally.
This was what Big Bill Holbrook told the Saint in the mountain cabin to which Simon had retired to await the blowing over of a rather embarrassing situation which involved items duly registered on police records.
“In the first dream, I was coming out of this hotel, see. And whammo! Bumping into her woke me — Oh, the hell with it. Whoever was dreaming woke up, but it was me bumped into her. And I was sorry as hell, because, brother, she was something.”
Some two weeks later, Big Bill said, he bumped into her again. The dream started exactly as its predecessor, progressed exactly to the point of collision.
“But I didn’t awaken this time. We each apologized all over the place and somehow we were walking along together. Just as I was about to ask her to have dinner, I woke up again.”
“Or Andy did,” the Saint supplied.
“Yeah. Whoever. Now this is what happened. Every ten days or two weeks, I’d be back in this dream, starting out of the hotel, crashing into her, walking along, having dinner, getting to know her better each dream. Each one started exactly the same, but each one went a little further into her life. It was like reading the same book over and over, always starting back at the beginning, but getting one chapter further every time. I got so used to it that I’d say to myself, ‘This is where I woke up last time,’ and then after the dream had gone on a bit further I’d begin to think, ‘Well, I guess this must be getting near the end of another installment,’ and sure enough, about that time I’d wake up again.”
The accidental encounter began to develop sinister ramifications, picked up unsavory characters, and put Big Bill Holbrook in the role of a Robin Hood.