Frank aimed at the old man’s shoulder, then pulled the trigger—
—and right at the same moment, Pope cried out at the top of lungs one word: “SLEEP!”
The unexpected shock wave slammed into Frank’s brain, throwing off his aim, and the blast went wide, the concussion erupting magnesium-bright in the darkness, chewing through the curtain and part of the plaster door frame behind Pope, sending fragments and debris flying.
A firebomb exploded in Frank’s brain.
He doubled over, cringing in agony, the pain shooting up his spine like a Roman candle. A rushing sound ignited above him, behind him, all around him like a giant turbine fan sparking to life. Shadows were coalescing in the darkened theater, something awakening. Or was it all in his brain? It was impossible to tell anymore.
Frank blinked away the pain, straightening up and glimpsing the apparitions.
They were emerging from the screen like wax figures in a vacu-form, congealing magically, absolutely immense. First their mammoth arms, then their torsos, then their legs. Gigantic, monolithic policemen with huge, broad shoulders, birthing themselves from the amniotic fluid of the tattered movie screen, the womb of dark dreams. One by one, they lurched into Frank’s three-dimensional space.
“NOT REAL!!” Frank bellowed at the ghosts coming at him.
They shook the floor as they approached, their massive boots marching in unison down the aisles. There were dozens of them. Their heads rose up thirty feet high, enormous, blocky shadows under the bills of their hats. They had no souls, no hearts, no humanity.
They were coming to put Frankie Janus down for an endless nap.
“NOT REAL!”
Frank fired at the phantoms, his gun roaring hellfire in the darkness.
The bullets chewed through the nothing, pinging and banging and flickering off the far gilded columns. The theater awakened in showers of sparks. Frank’s scream was drowned by the noise.
All at once an alarm shrieked in Frank’s brain: Pope!
Frank wheeled around toward the door and saw that the doctor was gone.
Frank fired at the doorway.
Sparks bloomed in the darkness, the blast gobbling the curtain, ripping another ragged hole in the fabric but missing the doctor completely, and Frank kept on pulling the trigger, again and again and again—click!-click!-click!-click!-click!—firing at the empty doorway. “You old fuck, I told you!” he howled in a cracked voice, struggling to his feet. “It won’t work anymore! POPE?! DO YOU HEAR ME?!”
Frank started lumbering toward the doorway, still firing the empty pistol: click!-click!-click!-click! “I’m overriding the program!” he hollered at the darkness.
He pushed the curtain open, and the light assaulted his eyes, the smell of wet winds permeating the room. Heart chugging, adrenaline pumping, he quickly scanned the vestibule, the breeze tossing litter across the wasted cement. The meshed door on the opposite wall was partially ajar, rapping against the jamb in the wind.
Pope must have just slipped out.
Frank hurried across the vestibule and plunged outside.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Yellow daylight stabbed at Frank’s eyes, blurring his vision as he emerged from the building. The wind whipped at his uniform and sirens keened in the distance. He bounded up the steps and hurried across the kiosk, madly searching the street, looking for the old man.
The rain had settled into a dirty mist, and the warehouse district was fairly slow today, a few delivery trucks parked along the rows of loading docks, a handful of teamsters and stevedores unloading crates up and down Franklin. They must have heard the shots but their faces remained stoic under the hoods of their raincoats.
Frank heard sudden noises—metal rattling, footsteps splashing through a puddle.
He raced across the street, then peered down the alley between two warehouses. He saw a stooped gray figure at the end of the alley, dressed in jeans, slippers and a pajama top, striding along in a kind of half-hobble, half-gallop. The figure was moving pretty swiftly for an old man.
Don’t let that fucking monster get away, Frankie. You know what you have to do.
Frank started down the alley in a dead run, clawing at his belt for the second speed-loader—he had three cylinders altogether, a total of eighteen rounds. He would use every last one of them if he had to, but he would have to be judicious now that he was on the street. He would have to make every round count. Thankfully, he was still dressed in his patrol uniform, so most bystanders would get out of the way and figure he was simply chasing a bad guy.
In the distance, the psychiatrist had already vanished around a corner.
Frank reached the end of the alley and punched the speed loader into the Diamondback. He was breathing hard, and he was trying to get the bullets into his gun and see through the haze at the same time. To the south, the street terminated at a sprawling train switchyard full of abandoned freight cars and rusty, weed-clogged storage tanks. To the north, the street intersected with a busy commercial avenue.
Pope was approaching this intersection, trying to flag down a passing truck.
“HOLD IT!” Frank called out over the wind, struggling with the gun. He finally got the rounds into the Colt, tossed the empty loader over his shoulder, and ran as fast as he could toward the intersection.
Pope was fifty yards ahead of him, limping out into the path of an oncoming truck, waving his arms wildly. The truck’s air breaks hissed. Its horn yammered.
“HALT! CHICAGO POLICE!” Frank cried, approaching at a full sprint.
The truck swerved, barely missing Pope. The doctor slipped on a puddle and went sprawling to the pavement. Another car lurched around him, its horn blaring. Pope struggled to his feet. Frank was thirty yards away now and closing, gun raised, sights set on a graffiti-stained newspaper dispenser only inches away from the doctor.
Frank fired at the dispenser.
The gun barked, and the slug slammed through the back of the dispenser twenty-five yards away, shattering the Plexiglas front. Pope ducked into a panicky crouch. Frank approached at a dead run. Twenty yards, fifteen, ten...
Pope turned and faced Frank, a strange sort of calm on the old man’s grizzled face. Frank approached with gun ready. The doctor pointed an accusatory finger at Frank like a school teacher about the discipline a child, then hollered at the top of his voice, “HOT!”
Orange flame spurted from the psychiatrist’s fingertips like luminous ribbons—the same flame that had sputtered off an old oil lamp that had overturned in a blood-spattered barn, the same flame that had flickered and reflected off the marbled eyes of a rabid dog—and it happened so abruptly that Frank had no time to duck or get out of the way or even slow down. He ran directly into the non-existent fire, gasping at the sudden heat raging in his face.
The shock made him stumble, and he careened to the ground, hitting the cracked sidewalk hard, knocking the air out of his traumatized lungs. He managed to hold onto his gun as he caught his breath, shaking off the feeling of being scorched in napalm. He looked down at his hands. They felt burned to a crisp but looked normal. He swallowed. His throat was as sore as if he had inhaled pure flame.
In one terrible instant Frank knew exactly what had happened: All the secretive imprinting on his psyche in Pope’s office—all the verbal implants, all the posthypnotic suggestions that had been buried in his subconscious—it was all being used against him now like an arsenal. There was a minefield in his head, and Pope knew how to detonate each and every bomb. And even though Frank knew intellectually that he wasn’t burned, his body told him otherwise. His brain cells—his neuropeptides, the place where the pain lives—were as good as toast.
He scrambled back to his feet.
Pope was already halfway down the street, waving and calling out for help.
Frank hurried after the old man.
By this point, dock workers and secretaries were coming out of their offices, peering through open windows and around the edges of doorway
s at the commotion. Frank was convinced that as long as the citizenry saw a cop chasing a suspicious man in pajamas—and nobody recognized Frank—there shouldn’t be any interference. But if another squad car or emergency vehicle came upon them, Frank was dead.
There were sirens approaching in the distance, probably responding to the gunshots at the Bijou. Of course, Frank had more immediate problems to deal with—such as the posthypnotic booby traps that Pope was throwing in Frank’s path.
Half a city block ahead of Frank, through the veils of mist, Frank could see Pope trundling toward a subway kiosk. The weathered gray sign over the kiosk said Chicago Transit Authority—Red, Brown, and Purple Lines. Frank picked up the pace. He didn’t want to lose the doctor in the dark labyrinth of the subway where it was dark and full of nooks and corners in which an old man could hide.
Ahead of Frank, the psychiatrist shot a glance over his shoulder, then turned toward the subway entrance.
“DON’T DO IT, POPE!” Frank called out, racing across the street directly in front of a truck. Air horns blasted in his ears. Frank ignored it. He sped straight for the filthy Plexiglas entrance.
Pope was already inside the kiosk, already descending the greasy subway steps. In the shadows, his pasty face seemed to float there for a moment as he glanced back at Frank, who was approaching fast.
Frank reached the kiosk just as the sound of Pope’s mucousy voice bellowed over the winds: “COLD!”
It was too late.
Frank just had time to glance down at the imaginary black ice coating the steps—which was the same black ice that had covered a lonely central Illinois highway on a winter’s night years ago, the same black ice over which ghostly footsteps had pursued a frightened young Frankie Janus through the dark—and all at once Frank’s feet slipped out from under him, and he went careening down the stairs.
He landed on the edge of an icebound subway platform, sliding several feet, then smacking into a row of turnstiles. Goosebumps crawled over him as his lungs heaved for air in the sudden deep freeze. The smell of ammonia was sharp in his nostrils, and the sound of cracking glass resonated through his skull. He shivered violently as he struggled to sit up, to see around him, to find Pope through the arctic vapors.
The underground station had transformed into a glacial hallucination. The tunnel was a black, crystalline mine shaft carved through an iceberg, and the deserted platform was a shelf of ice. A clear, hard shellac rimed all the benches. Overhead, frozen cobwebs clung to the exposed plumbing like spun glass as the flickering fluorescent light shone down through stalactites of icicles.
Frank scooped up the .38 and buoyed himself to his feet on the unsteady floor. His fingers were stiff, maybe even frostbitten, and he had trouble just holding onto the gun. He shivered convulsively as he swept his gaze across the station, hunting for Pope.
At the far end of the platform, a hunched figure was squeezing through a narrow passage into the shadows beyond the station.
“POPE!”
Frank’s voice was strained to the breaking point as he started toward the far shadows, his breath showing in thin, white curls of smoke. He thumbed the hammer back on the Colt. His body was barely working now, his brain sending lies to all his senses. He heard the crunch of his boots as he trudged over a nonexistent crust of ice; he smelled the odors of dirty snow and salt; he felt the bitter cold on his face like a razor; he tasted the bite of a bitter frost on his tongue—
—and he saw Dr. Henry Pope fifty feet away, climbing down a quick-frozen ladder.
Don’t let that sick motherfucker get away, Frank. You’ve got to finish it.
Frank hurried toward the end of the platform, breathing hard and quick, the Diamondback locked on its target. He could see the psychiatrist descending the ladder.
“POPE! IT’S OVER!”
Frank’s cry echoed through the deep freeze, bouncing off distant ice floes.
The psychiatrist had vanished.
At the end of the platform, just beyond a frosted sign that said Caution: CTA Personnel Only Beyond This Point, Frank came upon the narrow iron ladder leading down into the tunnel. A single cage light hung in the near distance. Frank could see Pope’s shadow slithering away into the darkness like a tide going back out to sea.
As Frank hurried down the ladder, the hallucination began to decay around him like a faulty television signal. The cold sputtered away. The crackling sounds faded, and the ice glittered for a moment, then melded into billions of tiny bendai dots like a digital dream decomposing before Frank’s eyes. The sound of hissing steam rose up around him.
His foot touched the floor of the tunnel, and he was immersed suddenly in the dank warmth of the subway. He blinked. A noxious hot wind slammed into him, ripe with urine, hot iron and ancient mold. Frank wavered for a moment, gripping the bottom rung of the ladder.
The tunnel stretched before him, a narrow channel of filthy darkness broken only by the occasional green and red directional lights dangling over the track.
In the murky distance, a stone’s throw away, Frank could see the psychiatrist scuttling furiously into the depths of the tunnel. Frank aimed the Diamondback, and he lined up Pope in his sights, and he considered firing for a moment, then thought better of it. The doctor was too far out of range. Frank needed to get closer, and he had to do it quickly, before a train came and squashed both of them.
Frank plunged headlong into the tunnel.
He ran down the center of the rails, boots splashing through stagnant pools of brackish water, his heart like a kettledrum in this chest.
And even in the throes of the chase, the mixture of fear and rage a potent cocktail in Frank’s veins, he knew he was probably making a big mistake.
He knew he was probably stumbling directly into another trap.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Pope was hurting, hurting badly.
The last time he had run this hard, he was in his forties and working with the kids down at the Catholic Charities, putting them through their paces on the police academy obstacle course. Back then Henry had run the entire gauntlet right alongside those kids, hardly breaking a sweat. But that was back when he had been working out on a daily basis at the Y, and had been watching his diet.
Now he was an old geezer with high triglycerides, fallen arches and early-stage arthritis, running through a dark subway tunnel in a life-and-death battle with a man twenty years his junior. But it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter to Henry Pope because he was engaged in a holy war. If Frank Janus had to be a victim of the war, then so be it. Henry Pope would not allow the detective to interfere with God’s work.
Faint vibrations were rising off the rails beneath his feet as Pope scuttled along through the dark subway, making sure to avoid the electrified third rail. Was there a train coming? The doctor’s slippers were soaked through, and they felt as though they were led weights on the end of his spindly legs. His lungs ached, and his joints were full of ground glass. The detective was gaining on him. Pope could hear the younger man’s footsteps echoing behind him, drawing closer. But now all the doctor could think about was completing the process that he had initiated ten years ago...
(...in that little cinderblock cubicle down at Area Six, back when they didn’t even have a permanent Stress Management department, and that young detective from District Nineteen comes in after a nervous collapse at a crime scene.
Doctor and patient hit it off immediately, and they meet regularly in that little room, Frank on the settee by the window, reclining with a cold rag on his forehead, Pope in his swivel nearby, speaking so very softly, as the electronic metronome clicks rhythmically on the desk behind them.
“When I reach the count of one, and I snap my fingers, you will awaken with absolutely no knowledge of what we’ve discussed.”
“I understand.”
“Let me hear you say it.”
“I will awaken with absolutely no knowledge of what we’ve discussed.”
“And you will dream eve
ry night.”
“I will dream every night.”
“And what kind of dreams will you have?”
“Dreams that teach me things.”
“That’s good, Frank... that’s very good—)
—and now there were waves of vibrations intensifying with each passing moment.
Pope could feel them through the soles of his shoes, a rushing noise in the distance, a metal-on-metal sound like a knife being sharpened on a whetstone wheel. A train was coming. He was sure of it.
The detective was less than a city block behind him and gaining every second. Pope realized he would have to do something evasive very soon, or he would be crushed like a bug on the track. But right now he had to keep moving, and keep out of range of the detective’s gun.
It was astonishing to Pope that Frank Janus was still standing, let alone still pursuing the doctor. Perhaps something had gone wrong with the hypnotic programming. Pope was frantically searching his memory for a clue—
(—the detective lying on the divan, speaking very slowly, very deliberately, his eyes tightly shut, his arm raised and floating in midair. “I will carry out my duties as a detective without incident,” he says.
The doctor’s voice: “What if you get too close to solving the thumb sucker?”
“If I get too close to solving the thumb sucker, I will start to fail.”
“And what else?”
“I will have dreams of the other me.”
“And who is that?”
“The man who lives inside me, that man who doesn’t want the crime to be solved.”
“And what will this other Frank Janus do in order to stop the crime from being solved?”
“He’ll convince me it shouldn’t be solved.”
“How?”
“He’ll leave me notes.”
“And what else?”
“If that doesn’t work, he’ll try to sabotage the investigation.”)
—and now something was happening.
In the gloom ahead of Pope, there was a bend in the tunnel, a dull gleam of light on the moldering stone wall. The train was approaching. The whetstone noises were rising to incredible levels, like metal tearing apart, reverberating through the darkness.
The Sleep Police Page 21
