Since she was now officially my employee, rather than the hospital’s, she brought coffee for herself on the breakfast tray and sat sipping it, chatting companionably, as I ate.
“You know what I’m going to do for you today, Mr. Rainstar? I mean, I will if you want me to.”
“All I want you to do,” I said, “is shoot me with a silver bullet. Only thus will my tortured heart be at rest.”
“Oh?” she said blankly. “I was going to say that I’d wash and tint your hair for you. If you wanted me to, that is.”
I grinned, then laughed out loud. Not at her, but myself. Because how could anyone have behaved as idiotically as I had? And with no real reason whatsoever. I had stepped on Jeff Claggett’s toes, making a commitment without first consulting him. He hadn’t liked that, naturally enough; I had already stretched his patience to the breaking point. So he had punished me — warned me against any further intrusions upon his authority — by expressing serious doubts about Kay Nolton. When I over-reacted to this, he had hastily backed-water, pointing out that he would not be leaving me in her care if he had had any reservations about her. But I was off and running by then, popping off every which way, carrying on like a damned nut, and getting wilder and wilder by the minute.
Kay was looking at me uncertainly, a lovely blush spreading over her face and neck and down into her cleavage. So I stopped laughing and said she must pay no attention to me, since I, sad to say, was a complete jackass.
“I’m sorry as hell about last night. I don’t know why I get that way, but if I do it again, give me an enema in the ear or something. Okay?”
“Now, you were perfectly all right, Mr. Rainstar,” she said stoutly. “I was pretty far out of line myself. I knew you were a highly nervous type, but I teased you and made jokes when I should have—”
“When you should have given me that enema,” I said. “How are you at ear enemas, anyway? The technique is practically the same as if you were doing it you-know-where. Just remember to start at the top instead of the bottom, and you’ll have it made.”
She had started giggling — rosy face glowing, eyes bright with mirth. I said I was giving her life tenure at the task of futzing with my hair. I said I would also give her a beating with a wet rope if she didn’t start calling me Britt instead of Mr. Rainstar.
“Now that we have that settled,” I said, “I want you to get up, back up, and bend over.”
“B-bend over — ah, ha, ha — w-why, Britt?”
“So that I can climb on your shoulders, of course. I assume you are carrying me out of this joint piggyback?”
She said, “Ooops!” and jumped up. “Be back in just a minute, Britt!”
She hurried out of the room, promptly hurrying back with a wheelchair. It was a rule, it seemed, that all patients, ambulatory or not, had to be wheeled out of the hospital. So I climbed into the conveyance, and Kay fastened the crossbar across my lap, locking me into it. Then she wheeled me down to and into the elevator and subsequently out of the elevator and into the lobby.
She parked me there at a point near the admitting desk, admitting also being the place where departing patients were checked out. While she crossed to the desk and conferred with the registrar — or unregistrar — I sat gazing out through the building’s main entrance, musing that the hospital’s charges could be reduced to a level the average patient could pay if so much money had not been spent on inexcusable nonsense.
A particularly execrable example of such nonsense was this so-called main entrance of the hospital, which was not so much an entrance — main or otherwise — as it was a purely decorative and downright silly part of the structure’s façade.
The interior consisted of four double doors, electronically activated. The exterior approach was via some thirty steep steps, each some forty feet in length, mounting to a gin-mill Gothic quadruple archway. (It looked like a series of half horseshoes doing a daisy chain.)
Hardly anyone used this multimillion-dollar monstrosity for entrance or egress. How the hell could they? People came and went by the completely plain, but absolutely utilitarian, side-entrance, which was flush with the abutting pavement and required neither stepping down from nor up to.
It was actually the only one the hospital needed. The other was not only extravagantly impractical, it also had a kind of vertigo-ish, acrophobic quality.
Staring out on its stupidly expensive expanse, one became a little dizzy, struck with the notion that one was being swept forward at a smoothly imperceptible, but swiftly increasing, speed. Even I, a levelheaded, unflappable guy like me, was beginning to feel that way.
I rubbed my eyes, looked away from the entrance toward Kay. But neither she nor the admitting desk were where I had left them. The desk was far, far behind me, and so was Kay. She was sprinting toward me as fast as her lovely, long legs could carry her, and yet she was receding, like a character in one of those old-timey silent movies.
I waved to her, exaggeratedly mouthing the words “What gives?”
She responded with a wild waving and flapping of both her arms, simultaneously up and down as though taken by a fit of hysterics.
Ah-ha! I thought shrewdly. Something exceeding strange is going on here!
There was a loud SWOOSH as one of the double doors launched open.
There was a loud “YIKE!” as I shot through it.
There were mingled moans and groans, yells and screams (also from me), as I sped across the terrazzo esplanade to the dizzying brink of those steep, seemingly endless stone steps.
I had the feeling that those steps were much higher than they looked and that they were even harder than they looked.
I had the feeling that I had no feeling.
Then I shot over the brink and went down the steps with the sound of a stuttering, off-key cannon — or a very large frog with laryngitis: BONK-BLONK-BRONK. And I rode the chair and the chair rode me, by turns.
About halfway down, one of the steps reared up, turned its sharp edge up, and whacked me unconscious. So only God knows whether I or the chair did the riding from then on.
H. R. F. Keating
And We in Dreams
H. R. F. Keating is the creator of Inspector Ghote of Bombay. His first Ghote novel, The Perfect Murder (1964), received the Gold Dagger of the British Crime Writers Association and the Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America; and The Murder of the Maharajah (1980) won his second Gold Dagger. He also received a special Edgar for his nonfiction work Sherlock Holmes, The Man and His World. “And We in Dreams” first appeared in Winter’s Crimes 15; this is the first publication in America. Mr. Keating, who reviewed crime fiction for the Times (London) for 15 years, lives in London.
Thomas Henniker nearly told his wife about the first dream as soon as he woke up. But then he didn’t.
Yet it had been so extraordinarily vivid that it had been only a last-second decision that had stopped him turning to his Mousie, Mousie lying on her back beside him as always, stiff and tall as a soldier, and, breaking the constraints of a lifetime, tapping her on the shoulder and telling her in full detail everything that had happened to him in the sleep world.
Thank goodness, he thought as he lay waiting for the alarm to go off. Thank goodness, I didn’t.
What would Mousie have thought, have said, if he had told her that, even in dream, he had coolly and deliberately begun to rob the firm? Thomas Henniker, with thirty-five years’ unswerving service to Maggesson’s Mail Order, systematically robbing them? Thomas, who as a boy had never so much as taken a sweet from the tin without permission, to have begun abstracting a huge sum from the firm that had been his employer all his working days.