Dreaming Again

by Jack Dann

  Ulmer snatched the packet from his partner. ‘Piss a lot less.’

  ‘Seriously, you could live in a nice place, up on Beacon Hill. You could save. You could get yourself a doll.’

  ‘I’m not buying a doll.’

  Jacobi laughed. ‘Explains the calluses.’

  ‘We’ve got work to do.’ Ulmer pulled the rabbit’s foot from his pocket. ‘Bean tried to warn me off this.’

  ‘And we’re still hunting?’ Jacobi raised his hands in exasperation. ‘Ulmer, we’re not here to solve crimes. We’re here to make sure that it all runs smoothly, that people don’t start making any more deals. Get what comfort you can from the small amount of suffering you might reduce, but realise it’s just a small amount of suffering, and that people are always making deals.’

  ‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ Ulmer said. ‘At least this time. You don’t get warned off unless it’s something big. Maybe something to do with this new Deal.’

  Jacobi shrugged. ‘All right, but if it is, not much we can do. Not exactly our purview.’

  ‘But we can find out.’

  ‘Maybe, but not today. We’ve got other things to attend to. Doll Factory today.’

  Mr Shabtee waited for them, at the gates to the Factory. He passed them both fat envelopes. Ulmer slid his into a jacket pocket; he looked up and down the street. ‘Let’s get this done,’ he said.

  Mr Shabtee’s eyes narrowed. ‘Why? You got something better to do?’

  Mr Shabtee waited a while. Ulmer said nothing. ‘Yeah, you got nothing better to do.’

  They passed through the gates. Factory wasn’t the right name for this place. The Dolls weren’t made here, just repaired; they came from the desert, unearthed by the winds. Shabtee’s men dragged them back here and cleaned them.

  Jacobi whistled. ‘Shit, that’s a lot of wood.’

  And there were; hundreds of dolls, twitching and hanging from their wires. Mr Shabtee nodded. ‘Winds have been blowing strong in the desert. Lots of dolls. Lots of nightmares too, our boys have been picking spiders from their flesh.’

  Ulmer and Jacobi looked over the bodies, checking they were kosher, that no human flesh was used. Not checking too close. Ulmer had heard that you had to have something human in the doll, something to activate them; an organ, a piece of brain. One of them bled from its painted nose.

  Mr Shabtee clucked and delicately wiped the blood away with a handkerchief. ‘Messy,’ he murmured.

  ‘Make sure it doesn’t happen again,’ Jacobi mock admonished.

  They signed his clearances.

  ‘Thank you, lads,’ he said, folding the paper away in a pocket, whistling for his workers to get back to work. ‘See you next month. Oh, one more thing.’

  Ulmer raised an eyebrow.

  Mr Shabtee coughed, looked a little embarrassed, like it wasn’t his job to ask for favours. ‘My lads say they saw a dead bloke on the edge of the desert road.’

  ‘And they didn’t bring him in?’

  ‘We don’t send you to get the dolls do we? He was out there, dead and not dead, if you know what I mean; all haruspicated.’

  Ulmer pulled out the photo. ‘This the guy?’

  Mr Shabtee squinted. ‘No.’ He grinned conspiratorially. ‘Buy that photo off you though. Know a lot of collectors who are into that shit.’

  Ulmer slipped the photo back into his jacket pocket.

  ‘Wouldn’t have taken you for one of them,’ Mr Shabtee said. ‘Nostalgia’s poison.’ Ulmer ignored him.

  ‘He isn’t,’ Jacobi said, though he gave Ulmer an odd look.

  Ulmer brought out the rabbit’s foot. ‘You know what this is?’

  Mr Shabtee gave a dry cough. ‘You get rid of that.’

  ‘Don’t make deals with Old Gods, eh?’

  Mr Shabtee blinked. ‘You’ve got better stuff to do, believe me.’

  ‘What kind of world do we live in?’ Ulmer asked, counting out his bribe, leaning against the bonnet of the car. It was all there. ‘Dead and not dead. All this shit.’

  Jacobi flicked a cigarette stub at a passing truck — cattle from down south for the slaughter yards. ‘You know what kind of world we live in.’ In one sweeping gesture he encompassed the snake-bound sky, the dusty road, the city. ‘It’s one we can live in. Before the Deal things were bad, not just what happened at the Poles. Darkness was coming, and it would have drowned all of us. When that thing happened in Perth, shit my best mate lived there. I saw the screaming earth, the Swan River nothing but a slick of blood. None of us could have lived with that. It was never going to be a good deal.’

  ‘I remember waking that first day,’ Ulmer said. ‘In a bed that was mine, but wasn’t, and I walked out, and there it was, the sky not blue, but ruddy with the belly of the snake. Ah, and that was the least of it.’

  Another truck rumbled by, lifting up dirt red as the sky.

  ‘Shit you’re maudlin today,’ Jacobi said. ‘You got that rabbit’s foot?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Ulmer handed it to him. Jacobi threw the rabbit foot after the cattle truck.

  ‘What you do that for?’

  ‘Shabtee wasn’t bullshitting. Christ, Ulmer, even Bean told you to drop it. I’m looking out for you.’

  ‘Bullshit, you’re scared.’

  ‘Not denying it.’

  ‘Well, it’s going to get scarier. I’m driving out to the Cold Desert. See if I can find that dead bloke.’

  ‘You can’t drive.’

  Ulmer looked Jacobi square in the eyes.

  The air smelt like cattle, and the shit of cattle, and dust. The air smelt old and sere and used up. But their lungs still took it, still sucked up each breath.

  ‘I don’t like you much right now,’ Jacobi said.

  More Bobby Darin. Ulmer supposed he deserved it, but it didn’t stop him grinding his teeth all the way to the edge of town. The road petered out a few minutes walk from the ridge that bordered the desert. There was a good path up the ridge, but it was steep, and both were panting by the time they reached the top. They paused and stared back over at Smoketown and the bleak black sea that washed against its eastern shore.

  ‘I hate that place.’ Jacobi said. ‘Hate the sea.’

  ‘Why?’ Ulmer put his back to the city and the sea. ‘You didn’t lose as much.’

  ‘Fuck you!’ Ulmer was surprised at the anger in Jacobi’s voice. ‘So I wasn’t married. Yeah I didn’t have kids, for them old bastards to deal away, but I lost my ma, I lost my sisters. I got on.’ Jacobi sighed. ‘You ever think that, maybe the Deal wasn’t to save us, but to save them?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ Ulmer said. He let it drop, neither of them believed it.

  The air clear enough that Ulmer could see Nehebekau’s belly occluding the sky, dark where it neared the horizon. People didn’t like to talk about the snake god, just like they didn’t like to talk about the sea. Sometimes a meteor or some other such thing might punch its way through Nehebekau’s flesh and a brief and bloody rain would ensue.

  The other side of the ridge faced the desert. One of the dead blokes, the one with glasses, sat there on the desert’s edge. It turned when they approached, then stood up; Ulmer could see the hole the haruspication had left, bones gleamed.

  ‘You don’t want me. I’ve not the teeth for it.’ The dead bloke’s voice came slow and soft.

  Ulmer frowned. He glanced over at Jacobi. His partner shrugged; neither one of them wanted to get much closer. Sometimes things hunted in the sand; dolls that had got a bit of life in them, and a lot of hunger.

  ‘Come over here.’ Ulmer took a deep breath, sidled up close, near enough to grab the dead bloke, if he was quick.

  The dead bloke opened his mouth, and Ulmer could see the cracks and stubs, barely had teeth at all.

  It stepped onto the sand.

  ‘No you don’t.’ Ulmer reached for him. Something beneath the sand got to the dead bloke first. The dead bloke went under. Ulmer caught a glimpse of a rolling doll’s eye and long smooth w
ooden limbs. Ulmer lost his balance, fell back on his arse, then scrambled back away from the sand.

  ‘Shit.’ Ulmer got to his feet. A hundred metres away, a doll’s head jutted from the sand, driftwood pale, a wooden hand poked out not too far west of it. Wooden fingers flexed then stilled.

  ‘You want to risk it?’ Jacobi’s voice had an edge, a tension Ulmer wasn’t used to hearing. Maybe Jacobi was starting to enjoy it a little.

  Ulmer laughed. ‘Not a chance. Let’s get back to the car.’

  Ulmer’s room possessed the aching tension of a thousand perfunctory wanks. It smelled of sweat and smoke and cheap wine. He got out the photo.

  Dad, arm around his wife, her dark hair luminous in the reflected light of the flash. The kids smiling. It wasn’t even a good photo, not very well framed, eyes all red. And yet he yearned for this moment captured. He thought of his own wife and kids. And that spiral of thought led only one way.

  Where were they?

  Smoketown was what you get when dry old men make deals. And they had given up the women and children. Ulmer was prepared to entertain the idea that it had been unintentional. Gods liked their irony, they liked complications. Desperation should not be something you bring to the table. But the world had been going to hell. He’d seen things in those days, before the Deal. Things that could make a man believe in demons and gods, and how they might just tear everything apart.

  Tears streamed down his face, but they gave no relief. He cried. He cried. He folded the photo away.

  He showered, but the water offered no comfort; hard and frustratingly unctuous, it didn’t lather but lingered. He went to bed, the sheets gritty as his skin, gritty with the leavings of his skin.

  He dreamt his wife called him across the dark. There was a rage there, an accusation of love unfulfilled. Deep down he knew he had let this happen. They all had. He’d never understood the Deal. But who really understood half of what was going on, what they agreed to? Still, he ran through all that night, ran towards the voice. Because there had to be a way he could turn it all back.

  Bean’s appearance was sudden, the dream shifting, like the Deal had shifted their world. ‘Enough there, chief. You’re making it personal and if we all did that we’d have a right mess on our hands.’ He lifted the chain with one hand. Ulmer could see where the metal fused with his flesh. ‘You want to be personal, you think about this chain. You think about what’s happening to Jacobi. Those things are intimate enough, those things hurt. He’s screaming, Ulmer. Do you think your wife screamed, do you think your kids howled out their pain?’

  Ulmer woke, eyes snapped open. The dead bloke’s face was in his window. The one with the teeth. The bastard grinned. Ulmer snatched his gun, but the bloke had gone. He got up, dressed, and called Jacobi.

  There was no answer. The phone rang out twice. He checked the time, two o’clock in the morning.

  Two blocks away, just two blocks to Jacobi’s apartment. He ran all the way.

  Ulmer’s shoulder hurt from battering down the door, slowed him down as he fumbled for his gun.

  The doll had wrapped itself around Jacobi; its hands buried to the wrists in his bowels, haruspicating something, lifting up organs for closer scrutiny. Its head snapped around towards him, big, unblinking eyes, bloody lips twisted in a smile.

  ‘Let him come first,’ the doll said in its wind up voice. ‘There are worse ways to die.’ It rose to its feet, and bits of Jacobi, tangles of bowel and gut, rose with it, and then fell away.

  Ulmer fired. His first shot smashed the mirror behind the doll’s head, and made it a crown of doll reflections.

  ‘Worse ways to die.’ It sounded almost remorseful, as it rushed towards him.

  Ulmer fired again. The bullet took off its head. He fired again, through the belly. The doll stumbled and fell, its bloody hands swinging, catching his legs. Ulmer kicked at its arms, then crushed its delicate joints beneath his boots. The wood was fleshy and hollow. It bled dark fluids. Ulmer kicked the doll away from him. He crouched over his partner and closed Jacobi’s eyes. In the cavity of his partner’s belly, Ulmer saw the rabbit’s foot. Jacobi had thrown it away yesterday. Ulmer fished it out.

  He could hear the sirens drawing near. He suddenly felt suffocated in that room, the air too hot. He loosened his tie, and got out.

  ‘I thought I would see you,’ Bean said.

  Ulmer slid the paper bag holding the burger and fries across the desk. Bean unfolded the bag, he plucked out a fry. His nose wrinkled, but he ate the fry anyway, gobbled it down, and the next, and the next.

  ‘I heard about Jacobi,’ Bean said between mouthfuls, the fries not crunching but cracking, and far louder than they ought in his mouth, little bony detonations. ‘I told you to leave this alone.’

  ‘I know you did.’ He pulled the rabbit’s foot from his pocket. ‘Jacobi threw this away, and it came back.’

  ‘Not so lucky for him, was it?’

  ‘So what do I do?’

  ‘Leave it alone.’

  ‘And if I can’t?’

  Bean unwrapped the burger, slid the whole thing in his mouth and swallowed. He wiped at his lips with a napkin. ‘When did you last go to the beach? Find me one of those dead blokes. If you can’t leave it alone. Find me one of them, and bring it back here. You do that and you’ll have your answer.’

  Ulmer lit a smoke. His hands shook.

  The black dunes of the beach steamed, the dark water crashed in. He sat just out of the water’s reach. Few came here, few cared to scrutinise the things that washed ashore, the implications of these fragments of past: invitations written on soft paper, ink bleeding from submersion; children’s toys; nappies and video cassettes that wouldn’t play, but had notes like ‘Wedding’, ‘Sharon’s first Birthday’ written on them. They were all, as Ulmer’s dream had been, accusatory.

  Ulmer came here precisely for that reason. He sought the pain.

  There was a storm building, and he stood, with his back to it, facing the water, the restless dark.

  Alone. Not quite. A figure stood, watching him, down the beach.

  ‘I know you,’ Ulmer said and walked over to him, touching his gun, periodically, for a modicum of comfort.

  The dead bloke smiled.

  ‘Where’s your mate?’ Ulmer asked. ‘Still in the desert?’

  The dead bloke shrugged.

  ‘I’ve got something for you.’ Ulmer passed him the photo. The dead bloke shook his head and passed it back. Ulmer folded the photo and put it in his jacket pocket.

  Ulmer considered cuffing him, then changed his mind, he didn’t want it attached to him. ‘You coming with me?’

  The dead bloke nodded.

  When they reached town, Ulmer bought a burger and fries, and a soft drink.

  ‘You can’t take him down there,’ Dorian said, looking up from the front desk.

  ‘I think I can.’

  Ulmer tapped his pistol. The desk sergeant was quick, but Ulmer was faster. He pumped two shots into Dorian’s chest. The big man grunted. Doing you a favour, Ulmer thought, as Dorian fell dead on his porn. He reached over and pulled the keys from Dorian’s pocket.

  There was a bell ringing somewhere. He didn’t have much time.

  He could feel Bean down there, waiting, like lungs waiting for the next breath, like a heart between beats. The dead bloke grinned. Like he was waiting to see how this played out.

  Ulmer could hear people running; someone shouted out his name. He fired a shot down the hallway.

  Ulmer took the dead bloke down to the basement, locking the doors behind him as be went.

  Ulmer put his offering on the desk. A few storeys above, someone kicked at a door, wood splintered.

  ‘You know what I am?’ Bean asked, his eyes weren’t on the food, but trained on the dead bloke at Ulmer’s side.

  Ulmer shook his head.

  ‘Nehebekau and me, we made a deal. I stay down here, and he stays up there.’

  ‘Sounds like a good deal.’<
br />
  Bean laughed. ‘You know that’s shit, Ulmer. The thing is you humans start making deals, and they diminish you. Bit by bit. Sure you wanted a better world, a safer world from that coming dark. You think this is a better world?

  ‘And that’s the way it’s always been. People are always making deals, Ulmer. A new deal’s been made, from above, and, like always, you little people you just play them out. Truth is you’re living in our world now, Old Deal, New Deal, it was only ever going to get worse. If you had been looking you might have seen it in those dead blokes’ guts, or Jacobi’s, you might have realised you were jumping hoops. It ain’t fair and I pity you, as much as I can with all this hunger.’

  Another door crashed from its hinges. People shouted.

  The dead bloke walked over to Bean. Ulmer shot the dead bloke in the leg. Slowed him, didn’t stop him. The dead bloke lifted the silver chain to his mouth. He opened his jaw, bit down. The silver links shattered.

  Bean filled the basement, all that released presence, though he still sat behind the desk. He smiled, and that grin widened, and widened and widened. He hadn’t touched the burger this time. He pushed it carefully, distastefully to one side.

  Ulmer fired at Bean’s head, once, and then again. The bullets just passed through him; Bean didn’t even blink.

  ‘I’m going to make you a deal,’ Bean said. And he didn’t move his lips. The words just slithered in Ulmer’s skull, like they were a garrulous parasite or an infection. ‘You’re not going to like it. But it’s the best you’re going to get. There’s no one batting for you now. I’m going to give you a few minutes to run. Hey, you might even get longer on account of what’s approaching.’

  The last door broke.

  The cops were coming for Bean, coming to contain the beast. But he knew they couldn’t any more. He knew that Bean was right, a new Deal had been struck, Bean’d suck their bones dry before he was done; and then he would be coming for him.

  Outside old Nehebekau would be gone. Gods liked their complications. No sheath of snake, just cold void, cruel and endless. And Bean.