The Long Sleep

by Dean R. Koontz

  Joel already knew what was coming. It was as inevitable as the tide. It was so pat, so neat. “And I volunteered to be a human subject?”

  “Insisted on it,” Galing said.

  “I tried to talk you out of it,” Allison said. “But you were determined.”

  Galing rocked slowly back and forth in his chair. “From what we knew about the drug, there were too many contra-indications to make it easy to find human subjects.” Contra-indications were the situations in which a drug could not be administered. “It could not be given to anyone with the slightest eye impairment, nor to anyone with hypertension, penicillin or suphur drug allergies, not to pregnant women or to women past the change of life, not to anyone with any family history of heart disease— the list goes on. In the end you proved not to embody any of the contra-indications, and you were interested in Sy-46, terribly interested, and you insisted on being the first guinea pig.”

  “What happened?”

  Galing leaned forward on his chair and smiled. “That's what we want you to tell us.”

  “Was it really awful?” Allison asked.

  “It wasn't pleasant.” To Galing, Joel said: “How long have I been under the drug's influence?”

  “Eighteen hours,” Galing said.

  “We were afraid that you'd been given an overdose, despite the controls,” Allison said.

  “What's the name of your company?” Joel asked.

  The old man raised his eyebrows. “What's that have to do—”

  “Galing Research?”

  “Of course.”

  “And you're involved in the commercial applications of paranormal phenomena?”

  “In what!” Galing asked, incredulous.

  “That's not right?”

  “We're a drug firm,” Galing said.

  “You don't know any faceless man?”

  “Darling, are you feeling all right?” Allison asked. “You do understand all these things — this faceless man — must have been part of the drug's work?”

  “We'll want to know everything about your hallucinations,” Galing said eagerly.

  “They didn't seem like hallucinations,” Joel said doubtfully. “They seemed real.”

  “Wait,” Galing said. He stood up. “I'll get Richard to fetch the tape recorder.”

  “And the electric prod?” Joel asked.

  “The what?”

  “Never mind.”

  Galing started toward the door.

  “Uncle Henry,” Allison said, “perhaps Joel ought to rest, first. He's been through so much.”

  “Of course he has,” Galing said rather impatiently. “I would be the last to deny it. But you see how fit he's feeling. Aren't you feeling fit, Joel?”

  “Just wonderful,” Joel said.

  “I still think he should rest,” Allison said.

  “Nonsense,” the old man said. Then he was gone through the door, shouting for Richard.

  “I was so frightened,” she said.

  “I'm back now.”

  “I'm glad.” She bent over and kissed him. Her heavy breasts were flattened against his chest. Her breath was cool and sweet as mints. Her tongue played briefly, deliciously between his lips: A promise.

  He felt desire swell in him, and he wondered how in the hell he could react so quickly, easily, and totally to her when he was plagued with so much confusion, doubt, and fear. But even the ordeal he'd been through could not argue convincingly for detumescence. She affected him with the inevitable, unavoidable power of a fierce electric shock.

  “Please, don't ever volunteer again for an experiment like that,” she said.

  “I wouldn't.”

  She nibbled at the comer of his mouth. “I never want to go through another eighteen hours like these last eighteen. You kicked and twisted, whimpered, cried, screamed… It was terrible.”

  He ran his fingers through her rich hair, massaged the nape of her neck. “It's over now.”

  She kissed him again; more tongue, moving, searching. Then, sitting up straight again on the edge of the bed, she said, “Was it as awful as you made it sound — faceless men and everything?”

  “Worse.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I don't want to have to say it twice,” he said. “Let's wait for Henry.”

  Leaning down again, she let him put his arms around her, and she gave him another kiss. In a soft whisper, she told him what she would do to make him better.

  “Sounds like excellent medicine,” he said. He touched the curve of her full breasts. He did not want her to vanish as Anita and Annabelle had done.

  Henry Galing returned with the tape recorder and placed it on the nightstand beside the bed. He plugged it in, tested it to see if it was working. His own voice boomed back at him. “Good enough,” he said. “You ready?”

  “As I'll ever be,” Joel said.

  “Now I know it's difficult to establish any time sense in a long series of hallucinations,” Galing said “But it would help a great deal if you would try to order the illusions. It's possible that the effects of the drug vary over a long period of time — like your eighteen hours.”

  “No problem,” Joel said. “The hallucinations were very neatly ordered. Perfectly linear. I know precisely where the beginning was.”

  “I've never heard of linear hallucinations,” Galing said.

  Joel told him all about them, except for one thing: he could not remember what he had seen through that gray view-window in the unlighted, steel-walled room beyond the pressure hatch. He tried hard to recall that vision, for it had been the most terrifying of them all. But it was lost to him.

  “Perhaps it's best you don't remember,” Allison said, shuddering.

  He shuddered too.

  XIV

  He slept only two hours that night, and he dreamed that the faceless man was pursuing him down a dark corridor toward a huge gray window. Frightened awake, he was filled with a desolate, bitter, and altogether inexplicable sense of loss. He lay in the dark bedroom, hands folded behind his head, and listened to the quiet house. He was aware that something of incalculable value had been taken away from him — although he could not begin to understand what it was.

  He tried to go back to sleep, but he was afraid that when he woke up the next time he would be in another illusion, different from this one, uglier than his one. But wasn't this the true world? He was at the end of the illusions, wasn't he? He wanted to think that he was, but he had no proof of it. Consciousness was his only defense against the quicksilver reordering of reality.

  Beside him, Allison slept peacefully. He wanted to pull the sheets away from her and caress her, lazily explore the contours of her body, arouse her, and be with her once more. That insatiable need for her was even sharper now than it had been this afternoon. But he was sticky with perspiration, and his breath was foul. He didn't want to go to her like that, therefore he let her sleep.

  Carefully sliding from beneath the covers, he got up and went to the window and stared at the clear night sky. The moon was like a ball of mouse-scarred cheese, just as the cliche had it; no clouds obscured it. As he lowered his gaze he saw that there was no highway at the edge of the property as there had been in the illusion. Otherwise, the view was the same: a large well tended lawn that rolled gracefully away to a forest.

  It looked quite real. No flaws that he could see. Of course, that was because it was real. Dammit, this was truth. It couldn't be anything else. He was no longer caught up in a paranoid fantasy. Yet…

  Guiltily, he opened the window. He glanced back to be sure that Allison was sound asleep, then reach out and felt for the hologram screen.

  He found nothing false. Indeed, the night air was cooler on his skin than the air in the room, and a few fat droplets of rain spattered on his fingers and darkened his pajama sleeve. When he listened closely, he could hear frogs croaking and crickets rasping out their brittle music.

  He closed the window, still not satisfied. For a while he stared at his own v
ague reflection in the glass, then decided that he wouldn't hurt anyone by checking on a few more of the details. It was a sign of distrust, perhaps madness… But if anyone learned what he was doing, how could he be blamed? After a dose of sybocylacose-46, anyone would need a few reassurances that the world was genuine, solid, unchanging.

  He went quietly to the bedroom door, opened it, glanced back at Allison, stepped into the second floor hall, and softly closed the door behind. The corridor was silent. He had a sense of deja vu, and he remembered that other night when he had crept secretly — or so he'd thought — through the house, the night he had listened to Galing and the faceless man plotting against him in the study, the night that—

  But that was illusion.

  Wasn't it?

  This was reality. He had to get that straight, had to believe that if he were ever to be happy again.

  Without any guidance other than that provided by the pearly moonlight that beamed through the windows, he made his way downstairs, pausing on every other riser to listen for the sound of footsteps behind him. But there were no footsteps. That he could hear.

  Stop it! he thought, angry with himself. For God's sake give it a chance. Let it prove itself!

  He went back to the main floor hall to Henry's study, gently closed that door, and sat in the big leather chair behind the desk. The wan moonlight revealed very little of the room: the dark shapes of chairs, monolithic bookshelves braced against the walls, a huge globe and its wrought iron stand, the desk blotter, a silver letter opener, and a gleaming crystal paperweight. He switched on the desk lamp; the fluorescent tube flickered darkly, suddenly blinked brightly and drove back the shadows.

  After only the briefest of second thoughts, he opened the center desk drawer. The contents were neatly ordered: a box of paperclips, a stapler, a magnifying glass, a roll of stamps, two rulers, a wad of rubber bands, pencils, pens, envelopes, writing paper, and a thick sheaf of other papers. He almost closed the drawer straightaway, for he found it hard to believe that Galing would have provided this minutiae for a stage setting. Yet, now that he had come this far… He took the papers out of the drawer and put them on the blotter, slid the drawer shut.

  Most of the stuff was correspondence and bills, all of little interest to him. The single thing of value was a full color brochure that touted what Galing Research had to sell. A quick look at the twelve-page, glossy booklet told him that the company was indeed a pharmaceutical concern. It was not involved in anything so fantastic as paranormal research.

  It was strange, the thought, how his subconscious, under the influence of sybocylacose-46, had used bits and pieces of the truth to weave its illusions. He had borrowed from reality, then had twisted the truth into something eerie.

  He put the correspondence back in the center drawer and searched the rest of the desk. In another drawer he found a folder that had one word stenciled on it: sybocylacose. It contained forty flimsies which were covered with closely typed paragraphs full of technical data. He skimmed them, but he didn't read them carefully; he could see that they only confirmed what Henry Galing had told him earlier.

  With nothing more interesting to show for the search, he was reaching for the light switch when he saw for the first time the photograph on the desktop. It was in color, glossy, framed in heavy antique gold: Allison and him, on their wedding day, the two of them at the top of the church steps, squinting in bright sunlight.

  Somehow, more than anything else he had found, the photograph reassured him. He had seen nothing like it in any of the illusions. In those fantasies, the only proof of his past was the testimony of Galing and the others; and as duplicitous as they'd been, that was no proof at all. But here was a photograph, a connection, evidence of a sort.

  He finished reaching for the switch, turned out the desk lamp. For a moment he was completely blind. Gradually, his eyes adjusted to the darkness enough for him to get up and find his way out of the den. In the kitchen, he poured himself a glass of milk, drank it in two long gulps, rinsed the glass in the sink.

  He had about given up the idea of checking the lawn to see if it were real, when he saw the partially opened door at the far end of the kitchen. He didn't know where it led, but if it opened onto the lawn, it had best be closed and locked. He crossed to it, pulled it open, and found that it was the cellar door. Concrete steps led down into a vague, bluish light.

  Close it, he thought. Just for God's sake close it.

  “Anyone down there?” he asked.

  No one answered.

  “Uncle Henry?”

  Blue light.

  Nothing else.

  Go to bed.

  While the wide steps were concrete, the walls on both sides were white, enameled tile. He was reminded of the pod chamber in his hallucinations.

  Hallucinations?

  He quickly closed the door. He turned away from it and walked back across the kitchen. His legs bent under him, and he had to sit down at the table in the middle of the room.

  Hallucinations? Yes. Dammit, yes, they'd only been hallucinations. The white walls in that stairwell were just something else he had appropriated and used in the illusions.

  Go back to bed; make love to Allison.

  He had to be certain. Reluctantly, he got up and weht back to the door, opened it, and started down the steps. Running his fingers along the walls, he saw that they were filmed with gray dust.

  Stop right here.

  He reached the bottom of the steps, hesitated almost a minute, then turned into a room where overhead lightstrips glimmered uncertainly.

  That was the instant when it all broke apart like good stemware dropped on a brick floor.

  See what you've done!

  He couldn't move. He was more frightened than he had ever been. This time, he had really thought it was okay. He had thought it was over. What a joke.

  Maybe it would never be over.

  In front of him, floating in ten glass-walled nutrient tanks, wired to robotic machinery which dangled overhead, were ten human bodies, both men and women. In the nearest tank, directly before him, the faceless man lay on the jelly-like nutrient, staring sightlessly at the ceiling.

  XV

  He wanted to wake Allison at once and spirit her out of the house. He found it difficult if not impossible to believe that she was a willing conspirator. They had a hold of her. That was the only explanation. He recalled Galing and the faceless man speaking of her in one of those other illusory realities; the old man had said that she was drugged to insure her cooperation. If that were the case, he had to take her with him, now.

  Nevertheless, he was also aware that the cellar door had been let ajar to get his attention. Henry Galing wanted him to discover the bodies in the glass tanks. This time, the illusion had been shattered on purpose. The old bastard would be expecting him to go back for Allison.

  Therefore, the thing to do was to go outside and explore the lawn, the woods, and whatever lay beyond. When he had a better idea of what they were up against, he could come back for her with more of a chance of gaining their freedom.

  Still in his pajamas, he left the house through the kitchen door. He stood on the dark lawn, drawing deep lungfuls of chilly air. The stars were bright. The moon was huge. And the grass was damp from the sprinkling the meager formation of clouds had given it ten minutes ago. This had to be real.

  It wasn't.

  Although the lawn appeared to be hundreds of feet deep, Joel crossed the whole of it in twelve long steps, just as he had done when he and Allison had made their first escape, before they'd been trapped in the wrecked shuttle.

  The woods were filled with night sounds: the squeaky telegraphy of crickets, small animals shuffling through the underbrush, leaves rustled by the breeze. The air was redolent of leaf mulch, various pollens, and the odor of wet bark.

  Yet it was as fake as the immense lawn. He crossed it in a moment and came onto the sidewalk on that street full of neat houses and willow trees. It was all calm and precise a
nd middle-class and reassuring. It was meant to be; a damned good stage designer had made it that way.

  Walking as if the pavement were made of eggs, as if it would crack beneath him and plunge him into an abyss within the shell, he crossed the two lanes of the highway, stepped up on the other sidewalk. He opened the gate in the fence which encircled the nearest house, and he went up the walk to the porch.

  The porch was well furnished. It held a swing, two lawn chairs, and two wrought iron tables with ceramic tops. Two whiskey glasses were set on each table. The place looked lived-in, homey.

  “Very nice, Mr. Galing,” he said.

  The small window in the center of the front door was curtained with filmy white lace sewn on a dark blue cotton. Between the two lengths of fabric, a cracked paper shade was drawn all the way down to the sill.

  He knocked, politely.

  The sound reverberated loudly in the night, but no one came to open the door. The house remained dark and still as a sepulchre.

  Although he suspected that it was a useless gesture, he knocked again, louder this time, kept on knocking until he thought that the glass would break.

  The house was deserted.

  “Good enough,” he said. He felt better when he talked aloud to himself.

  He went over to the nearest wrought iron table and took the whiskey glasses from it. He put the glasses on the floor, out of the way. When he found the ceramic top was detachable, he detached it and put it down beside the glasses. He hefted the iron base, took it back to the front door, and smashed in the window. He cleared away the jagged shards, reached inside, pushed the lacy curtains out of his way, felt for the lock, threw it open, and opened the door.

  “Won't you come in, Mr. Amslow?” he asked himself.

  “Why, thank you,” he told himself. “I will.”

  Three feet inside the front door, the house ended in a blank, cement wall. The room in which he stood extended only three feet on either side, hardly large enough for him to turn around in; the whole damn house contained eighteen square feet of living space. He did manage to turn, however, and he looked up at the timbers, beams, and braces that held the false front of the house in place. He could not see much of the construction details in this dim light, but he saw more than enough to be convinced that the entire street was probably a fake, an enormous stage setting in the most fundamental sense.