Twelve O'Clock Tales

by Felice Picano

  “That’s right, Bay,” Jim Elbert continued. “Semi-comatose but sleeping. Dreaming. Everything that you believe has happened to you, and it must have been a humdinger, given how your EKG and EECs reacted, all that actually happened while you were asleep and dreaming.”

  “We realize that it’s not an ordinary dream.” Joralemon put his two cents in. “That’s how this new drug works. It doesn’t attempt to approximate reality with silly symbols and inane inaccuracies the way most dreams work. Its effect is to make it seem real, intensely, unbearably real.”

  “You must realize, Bay,” Jim Elbert now said in the defensive tone of voice that Bay knew so well, “that this was a desperation measure, Bay. At first I was against using it. But your increasing catatonia, your growing lack of any affect at all…well, I let Dr. Joralemon persuade me to accept that it was the only route left for us.”

  “Do you understand us, Bay?” Joralemon asked.

  Understand what, Bay thought, total folly? A stupid joke in bad taste?

  “Bay?” Elbert was talking again. “Can you still hear us?”

  He half nodded.

  “I know this may be difficult to believe,” Joralemon said, “because it was so concentrated in its effect, so every aspect of it, every detailed impression seemed completely real and accurate to life.”

  “In effect,” Elbert said. “It was another, a parallel, reality.”

  “An alternate parallel reality,” Joralemon corrected. “Do you understand?”

  Bay didn’t, no. Whoever these jokers were, they were clearly off their rockers. He looked up to see if there was a helicopter chasing him. Looked out the windows. No. Nothing there. But how did they stay in contact with him? How could they be tracking him? The radio alone wasn’t the answer. By satellite? Maybe the combo. Maybe if he shut off the radio. Maybe that had a tracking device in it that allowed their satellite beam to locate him.

  “Fine,” Joralemon said, all hale and hearty. “We’re guessing that it’s a pretty horrible alternate reality you’re experiencing there, Bay. But everything is going to be all right now. You don’t have to fear, you don’t have to run anymore. You’ve experienced a catastrophic alternate reality. You’ve faced up to the very worst that you believe you ever could have faced—and you’ve survived, haven’t you? Yes, Bay, that was the most extreme, the furthest that you could possibly go in the direction that you’ve been headed in all these past months. But now you’re going to come back and you’re going to be all right.”

  “We’re going to help you come back,” Elbert put in.

  “Right,” Joralemon said, with that smug, arrogant edge back in his voice. “Because you see, Bay, you don’t really have that much of a choice. Do you? If you don’t come back with us, then you’ll have to continue living in that nightmare reality you’ve constructed. True, you’re over the worst, the climax has come and gone, but given that, what can you truly expect to follow: a catalogue of horrors one worse than another. That’s the logical extrapolation of the monumental trauma you’ve just gone though.”

  “Now, Bay,” Elbert put in, “to get you out of that alternate reality and back with us, all you really need do is break through the sleep paralysis the drug has induced. To do that, all you have to do is move your right hand. It’s not going to be easy, but you’ve got to do it, Bay.”

  Bay drove lefty. His right hand lay idle by his side.

  “Okay, Bay,” Elbert was at his most professional now. “Move your right hand so it lifts up.”

  Who were these guys anyway? Bay wondered. And why were they trying to stop him from going north? Could they be the enemy? The same people who’d planted the bombs? Destroyed so much? Killed so many? Almost killed him?

  Bay decided to string them along for a while. He had to be getting close to the Canadian border. He’d been driving so long. He moved his hand off the car seat.

  “Great, Bay! Now move your hand over to where your heart is. Can you do that?’

  I can, quite easily, Bay thought and did so.

  “Terrific! Now you ought to be touching a pocket. Can you feel it there?”

  Of course, there was a pocket in his flannel shirt. Big deal.

  “There’s something very important in that pocket, Bay. We’d like you to reach inside and take it out of the pocket. Can you do that?”

  Bay reached into the pocket, felt around, and touched something small, smooth, and flat. He pulled it out. A Plasticine packet of something. How did that get there? What in hell was that stuff in the packet?

  The road he was driving on suddenly began to angle downward, dipping now and again, but clearly descending out of the mountains he’d been driving through for so long. This might be the last stretch before he reached the border.

  “Open up that packet, Bay!” Elbert commanded.

  He did. Inside were two small pellets, shaped like pink barrels.

  “Good,” Elbert said. “We want you to take those pills.”

  “At first,” Joralemon came on now, “after you’ve taken the pills, you’ll appear to fall asleep. But that’s only to you, where you are now. What will really happen is that you will wake up. Do you understand that, Bay?”

  Sure, sure, Bay thought, and black is white. Whatever these pellets were, how had they gotten into his pocket? He hadn’t put them there. Had somebody else? While he was sleeping last time, maybe? And if the pellets actually were exactly what this guy who sounded like his buddy Jim said they were, what would that really mean? That he was asleep in some hospital? Some asylum? Follow the logic, Bay. That’s what he was telling you. In some nut house, probably strapped down. No sir.

  “Can you understand, Bay?”

  He nodded.

  “Fine. So just pop those pills into your mouth. Both at once.”

  Bay rolled the pellets in his fingers.

  “Is there some problem, Bay?” Joralemon asked.

  “It’s going to be all right, Bay,” the guy who sounded like Jim Elbert said.

  Bay kept rolling them in the fingers of one hand.

  “Is it,” the Jim-one asked, “that you aren’t in a position to take them in your alternate reality?”

  Bingo. He nodded.

  “Let’s see. You’re walking or driving or something? Is that it?”

  Double bingo.

  “And you’re afraid to take them and go to sleep while you’re engaged in that particular activity?”

  What do you think, mister?

  “Because then you’ll go sleep and fall or crash or something?”

  They could be poison, right? Arsenic? Cyanide? Planted by those guys with the quiet cars without wheels, the faceless guys? While he slept?

  “I’m assuring you, Bay,” the Joralemon-one went on, sounding terrifically sincere, “that it’s going to be fine. Pull to the side of the road, or go sit down if you need to. Then take the pills.”

  “I’m also assuring you, Bay,” the Elbert-faker added. God, he was good. “In a day or two you’ll be well enough to get up and walk around, maybe leave the facility a day later. You’ll be proud of yourself. You won’t be afraid anymore, Bay. Think of that. Not afraid of anything!”

  Afraid? He wasn’t afraid.

  Afraid? And far-away rooms. Walls painted odd shades of green and blue and canary yellow. Walls converging, tilting at odd angles, then falling in on him. And no matter how much he screamed, no one ever came to help him. No one, except for sometimes a quick glance, lying words, another syringe-full. Murmurs of soft crying all about him, insistent, constant, interminable. Maybe even his own sobs and groans, heard as though rooms away, through locked doors and very far away.

  “Now, Bay,” Joralemon was being a Dutch uncle, “we’ve got great confidence in you. Great faith in you. That’s why you were selected for the procedure over other possibilities, other patients who…”

  “Is there a reason you can’t take the pills?” Elbert’s pretender asked.

  Bay nodded. Of course there was a reason. He had to
reach Canada. He’d be at the border any minute now. He’d just passed a small sign saying, “Customs and Immigration—Slow Down Now. Stop Ahead.” Of course, there might be other cars and trucks there already, before him. He vaguely remembered several roads converging on this spot. So there would be others ahead of him, others closer to safety than he was. There might even be a longish wait. The road dropped more sharply now. He must be close.

  “Whatever the reason is that you can’t take the pills, whatever it is that you may be doing,” one of the two was saying now, trying not to sound panicky, “you have to stop, Bay. Stop and take the pills! These pellets are the antidote to the pill he gave you. Do you understand?”

  “Bay? No one wants to hurt you!”

  Pastel rooms and medical smells. Shadows squatting and burbling. Grotesqueries in the guise of humans burbling and muttering and occasionally the ear-hurting screams cutting through it all. Shadows vomiting, screaming, colliding. And always, the distant sobbing and moaning.

  “Please, Bay. I’m begging you now. Take the pills and wake up!”

  “You have to take the pills, Bay!”

  But Bay wasn’t nodding or anything like it. Ahead, along the road, he could see the highway rise slightly, and two other roads converged, and their center was a kind of wooden log cabin, with windows and dormers, belonging to the Canadian Mounted Police.

  “Bay! Bay! We’re going to have to come in and get you if you don’t take the pills.”

  “I don’t know, Elbert. I’ve never injected the antidote before. We simply don’t have any idea what that will do. Or where exactly it will leave him.”

  “You mean it won’t bring him out of this?”

  “I don’t know. It’s never been used. We’ve never had anyone opt for the alternate reality before.”

  “Inject it!”

  “I’m going to need authorization for that.”

  “I’m giving you authorization. Inject it! Do it!”

  No, you don’t, Bay thought. As the van coasted down the road to the border crossing, he lifted his right foot off the gas pedal and kicked the radio as hard as he could, so hard, it crumpled in the middle, the voices jumbled then turned to static, then died completely.

  There weren’t any cars there. Just a Mountie waving at Bay, urging him on.

  Bay waved back out the window, laughing out loud. In his hand were the pink pellets. He threw them out the car window, clear into the woods. Then he slowed down at the station, stopping inches from the big, healthy-looking Mountie.

  “Welcome!” the Mountie said, smiling at Bay.

  He would be safe in Canada.

  The Perfect Setting

  After having lived more than half a century I am certain of the value of very little in this world. But of one thing I am quite certain: We cannot easily sustain the loss of a gifted artist. Especially one as beautiful and charming as Ottilie Chase.

  Perhaps that will explain why I could not rest after her death, and why I felt constrained despite what seemed impossible circumstances to investigate the events leading to her death. And, further, to learn enough to be able to expose the motive behind her death. This search was to take me to some odd places indeed, and to one spot in particular which lingers in my thoughts, refusing to settle into oblivion. Even more disturbing was what I learned about Ottilie Chase herself: that special talent which infused her later work, almost determined its content, through a process I still cannot explain, and which I believe must fall into the realm of the inexplicable. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  *

  I hadn’t heard from Ottilie in five years when I received the postcard inviting me to the opening of an exhibition of her new paintings. Ever since the purchase of two of her works by the Cleveland Art Museum not long ago, Ottilie—always something of a perfectionist—had become an even more exacting artist.

  Her choice of medium somewhat dictated that. She had abandoned oils, experimented briefly with acrylics, flirted with printmaking. But her final decade’s work—the paintings of hers that will be collected long in the future—were in the difficult art of egg-tempera. Of necessity, her work was slow, but the possibilities of atmospheric expression were that much more heightened. Her sulky, often eerie, landscapes seemed the work of some still unknown late nineteenth-century Luminist master.

  But there was something else beyond her technique—extraordinary as that was. Each painting added an enigmatic, new, yet also familiar locale to viewers’ own store of memorized places. As though you had lived there a month during some astonishingly uneventful and thus poorly recalled vacation. Sections of vast granite escarpments fronted by solid green; utterly vacant meadows; blistering, bereft, sunlit shorelines; littered giant boulders, as though tossed by a titan’s hand; deep twisting forest paths through shadowed pine-needled carpets—you’d been there before somehow, and you stood in front of each painting racking your memory for where, when exactly.

  None of these places were identified on the canvas, which made their amazingly detailed, utterly faithful rendering even more bizarre. However, invariably, a date and time were painted in over Ottilie’s signature: usually a very precise time. Not the date it had been painted. Not the date it was hung to be viewed. Nor, in fact, any date that made any immediate sense. Many of the times listed predated Ottilie herself, having taken place months and years before she was even born. And more than half of them predated the period during which she painted. Adding to the mystification, Ottilie never once attempted to explain those dates. She did say that they came to her as she worked. I naturally always assumed that Ottilie insisted upon this so she might add a sense of mystery, because otherwise she was the least mysterious of beautiful women I’d ever known. But that theory still didn’t account for the distinct sense of discomfort, uneasiness I felt looking at her landscapes. Nor was I the only person with that reaction.

  An art gallery opening of a new exhibit is a bright, noisy affair. So many people chatting, re-encountering, so many ice cubes clinking in glasses, one scarcely sees the works on display. Ottilie Chase’s own vernissages were more sober affairs. People gathered to look and whispered in small groups. Other viewers stood a long time musing before a single canvas, often with a slight frown on their brows. Others paced, almost as though avoiding the actual display of work, then would suddenly stop to catch a peripheral glance at one painting before moving restlessly on.

  I always understood why. I wouldn’t have been at all amazed to stumble upon a landscape by Ottilie that I would utterly recognize, completely recall. And I was certain it would be the recognition of some place I never again wanted to see, a memory I wanted obliterated.

  This might help explain why I waited until the last moment to go to the exhibition, titled, by the way, “Imaginary Landscapes, Series Three.” Having put off contacting Ottilie until the day of the vernissage, when I did call her, it was to ask if she minded terribly that I would arrive late, probably not until the closing minutes of the evening. She didn’t at all mind, she said, so brightly that to assuage my own guilt, I asked her to join me for dinner afterward. To my surprise, she accepted.

  Even so, I dithered that evening over details of dress even more than usual. Then I couldn’t find a taxi on Riverside Drive for another fifteen minutes. I didn’t arrive at the gallery at nine twenty, as I’d promised Ottilie, but after ten. It was still lighted up, although I suppose that entire area of upper Madison Avenue filled with galleries and high-end boutiques remains lighted up till midnight, open or not.

  The downstairs glass door led directly up a flight of dimly lighted industrially carpeted stairs. At the first-floor landing I found the gallery door locked. Or at least I assumed it was locked when I first tried the handle. One thing was clear, the opening event was already long over.

  Ottilie might still be inside. Alone, at night, with the downstairs door unlocked, she had no doubt sensibly locked herself in the gallery to wait for me. I knocked on the door twice. No response. I thought of going back
down and outside to find a pay phone to tell her that it was me knocking. Then I knocked again, and in irritation called out my name and wrestled with the door handle, this time with some effort. It seemed to suddenly click and fall open. Indistinct azure light filtered through what looked to be otherwise darkened rooms. My immediate thought was that it might have actually been locked, if poorly, or faultily so, and that Ottilie had not waited for me.

  Even so, I called out her name. Then I recalled a cigarette lighter I’d held for a friend on an earlier occasion which had ended up still inside one pocket of the coat I’d put on that night. I flicked it and it worked. I located the wall light switch. Both the lights and the ventilation went on as one, blinding me and deafening me for an instant. I stood in the first of three rooms and could partly see into the other two, which were totally bare save for the hung paintings. Then I noticed something completely out of place: In the most distant room, a pair of legs stretched out on the carpet, one high heel snapped off.

  I remember gasping out some partial sentence before rushing forward to fully see what I already feared—Ottilie Chase’s body, twisted into a half-sitting, half-sprawled position. Her face was a mottled blue, contorted almost beyond identification by the spasmodic fatal pain of the Prussic acid that spilled out of the a wineglass fallen from her hand onto the carpet several feet away. Black stains on the skin of her lower lip, one bared shoulder, and her left wrist were as though charcoal burned paths where the poisoned drink had splashed, probably in the instant she’d discovered its perfidy and too late flung it away.

  More frightening, however, were the reddened whites of her open eyes, angled up at a landscape she had grasped in a futile attempt at steadying her collapse. Or as though in those last moments before her vision had been burned away along with her existence, she must once more gaze upon her work.

  *