A Corpse's Nightmare

by Phillip DePoy

  It was a strange theory, but one that fit all the facts, I thought. It did, however, create almost as many questions as it answered. It didn’t explain why he had stolen the box. How had he even known of its existence? Why had he been so bent on killing me? Who was he?

  It was clear, at last, that the box was his only prize. He had not stolen the clock. Skid, the deputies, even Lucinda hadn’t noticed it—which seemed natural, really. Why would they? I’d gone on and on about the box, not the clock. And how were they to know that the clock ticking in my room was supposed to have been on the mantel downstairs? But nothing explained why the clock was ticking. Who had wound it?

  That thought prompted a much more disturbing fear, and it took hold of me. I suddenly realized that the killer had come back into the house. Maybe that’s what Truevine and her dog had seen. Or maybe the killer was even in my house that night as we all slept. Maybe he’d come in, wound the clock, and put it on the nightstand beside my bed. He was waiting somewhere. Maybe in the shadows in my room, maybe on the stairs, maybe down in the kitchen.

  Just then, to confirm my terror, there was a soft scraping downstairs, the sound a kitchen chair would make.

  Just as I was about to wake Lucinda, a worse possibility reared its scaly head: what if this were another one of my nightmares, my truer-than-life dreams? I began to doubt that I was awake. I felt awake, but I had felt quite conscious in a dozen recent dreams. I had seen Nurse Chambers naked, and watched Bix Beiderbecke play his cornet.

  There was another noise, something on the table, a heavy piece of metal, perhaps a gun. I thought better of waking Lucinda. If this were a dream, it wouldn’t matter, and in any other reality, I wouldn’t want to endanger her.

  I stood silently. The cold wooden floor stung my bare feet. I made my way quickly toward the door with as little sound as possible. On the back of the door I found more than saw my old bathrobe. The room, the hall, the stairs were all pitch-black. I slipped into my robe. It smelled musty. I instantly thought about sneezing. Still, robe wrapped tightly around me, I glided over the icy floor toward the wooden stairs, clutching the banister.

  I could hear the killer clear his throat softly. There were more metallic sounds. He was loading or perhaps even cleaning his gun. He had a gun. But I had several advantages. The light switch in the kitchen was close to the last stair step, so I could turn off the light without his seeing me. My eyes were more used to the dark. I also kept a burled walking stick, solid as a baseball bat, in a stand at the bottom of the stairs. And if those two elements were not enough to exaggerate my courage, I could rely on the increasing, giddy feeling that I was not awake at all, that I was dreaming.

  Slowly down the stairs, avoiding the steps and places that creaked, keeping to the inside edge, I made my way to the final step. My hand floated out toward the stand on the floor, and I felt the heavy wooden walking stick. I took firm hold, but didn’t move it yet. It would certainly make a sound when I pulled it out of the holder and alert the monster in the kitchen.

  Then, he sighed and belched.

  I used the moment to lurch forward, grabbing the stick and flailing out at the light switch. The kitchen was plunged into darkness. The man cried out. I jumped into the kitchen, swinging the stick in front of me like a rabid blind man, making involuntary noises that sounded like a wounded animal.

  “Jesus Christ!” the killer yelled. He had an English accent.

  He shoved a chair in my direction. It hit my stick and then my leg. I cursed, raised the stick high and lumbered forward, growling.

  “Fever?” the killer said in a very familiar tone.

  Two seconds later, I realized that I was about to bludgeon Andrews to death. I could see his startled face quite clearly in the moonlight.

  “What the hell?” Andrews whined, staring at the very large stick that was poised over his head. He was dressed in a sweatshirt and pants, and holding a fork in front of him, his only defense.

  “What are you doing down here?” I asked, still unwilling to lower my weapon.

  “I’m eating! Damn.” He relaxed a little. “What are you doing?”

  “Um,” I let go my breath. “I’m defending my life. From my killer.”

  “I haven’t killed you,” Andrews mumbled. “Yet.”

  “No, but I mean…”

  “Put down that walking stick, all right?” He took his seat once more.

  He’d been eating some banana pudding from the pan, another of Girlinda’s superb culinary creations. I stared down at it.

  “That looks good,” I admitted.

  Andrews shook his head wearily. “Can I finish it in peace?”

  “You know that this is no packaged pudding, vanilla wafer concoction,” I told Andrews, lowering my weapon. “Girlinda starts by making a gram flour and brown sugar pastry. Then she makes a vanilla custard with egg yolks from her own chickens and cream from her own dairy cows. She’s sliced a half dozen organic bananas into wafer-thin discs and nestled them artfully in that custard. The egg whites were whipped with confectioner’s sugar until they turned into some kind of supernatural version of meringue. Baked until the topping was golden and the custard was still creamy, this is a holy confection. This is something to rival any great invention from the finest gustatory minds of France or Italy or anywhere else on the planet.”

  “I know,” he said, continuing to eat. “It’s Girlinda’s banana pudding.”

  I leaned my stick against the stove and sat down with him at the table. I realized then that my hands were shaking a little, and my hairline was wet.

  “Sorry,” I stammered, “I mean, about the whole bludgeoning thing.”

  “Any particular reason you wanted to kill me?”

  “No.” I longed for the pudding, but I heard the warning voice of Lucinda in my mind’s ear, telling me that my stomach wasn’t ready for it.

  So I contented myself with more vicarious pleasures. I took in the lovely aroma. I allowed myself to recall other puddings from other times. I finally had to ask the question of Andrews.

  “How does it taste?”

  “It is,” he managed to say with his mouth full, “beyond description. I’ve had world-class crème brûlée that wasn’t this good.”

  “I know,” I sighed.

  “Too bad you can’t have any,” he mocked. “So go on. Tell me what’s the matter. I don’t think you’ve ever tried to bash in my brains.”

  “Not that I haven’t thought about it,” I contended.

  “Of course,” he freely admitted.

  “But here is the trouble,” I continued. “I thought you were my assailant, the man who shot me, returned to finish the job.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “I woke up,” I told him, “and found the missing mantel clock—did we tell you about that?”

  “Skidmore told me that the only things missing from the house,” Andrews answered, “were a clock and a tin box. You found the clock?”

  “On my bedside table, ticking to beat the band. And then I heard a noise downstairs, and my sleepy, paranoid brain did the rest. I was absolutely convinced you were the killer.”

  “Well,” Andrews opined, “in the first place you understand that he didn’t actually kill you, and I thought you wanted to stop thinking of him that way. And in the second place, how would he know you weren’t dead? He was confident enough in his efforts the last time that he called 911 and reported your demise.”

  “He’s had three months to discover otherwise.”

  “Good point.” Andrews scooped up another forkful of Girlinda’s creation.

  “I can’t work out this clock business,” I went on. “Has it been there the whole time? Why is it on my bedside table? Did it just get there? Who’s been winding it for months?”

  “Why is this important?” Andrews asked, setting down his fork.

  “How much have you been told about the tin box?”

  “Only that you’re going on and on about it,” he answered, “and nob
ody can figure out what you’re talking about.”

  “Yes, I know everyone thinks I’m confused about it,” I said softly. “But there’s something very important about it.”

  “What is that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  There was a sudden commotion at the top of the stairs.

  “Fever?” Lucinda called.

  “Yes,” I answered. “I’m up. Andrews is eating banana pudding.”

  “You’re not having any of Girlinda’s heart-attack desserts!” Which warning was followed by rapid footfalls on the stairs and Lucinda’s sudden appearance in the kitchen.

  She was wrapped in a quilt and her eyes were sleepy. She looked fantastic.

  “No,” I assured her. “But I did think that Andrews was the murderer come back to my house wreaking mayhem.”

  “Whereas I am a simple academic,” Andrews inserted, indicating the banana pudding with his fork, “wreaking only dessert.”

  “Lord,” she sighed. She pulled up a chair at the table and stared at the banana pudding as if it might explain itself further.

  “I was just asking skinny, here,” Andrews said to Lucinda, inclining his head my way, “what was so important about this tin box with which he is so obviously obsessed.”

  “All right,” she responded, sitting back, “I could hear about that too.”

  I tried to clear my mind. I tried to separate the dreams from the fears from the genuine memories. I tried to understand the answers myself.

  “I saw an angel,” I blurted out.

  Andrews and Lucinda exchanged a glance.

  “When I was young,” I went on, avoiding their eyes. “Or I saw something. I saw my own reflection in the window, maybe, or a flight of geese. Wings were on my mind. Or flying was on my mind, at least.”

  “He really shouldn’t be out of the hospital,” Lucinda said to Andrews, as if I weren’t sitting at the table with them. It was her nurse’s voice, a tone and an approach I had often heard when she was talking about a patient who was unconscious, or barely cogent.

  “If you’ll just let me push through the weird images,” I protested, “I promise this will all assemble itself into something resembling coherence.”

  “Should we get him back into bed?” Andrews asked Lucinda, ignoring me.

  “I may have been dreaming,” I went on. I could hear the sound of my voice edging toward desperation. “The point is that I suddenly was aware of a tin box behind the clock on the mantel in the living room. I’d seen it a thousand times, I suppose, but it had been nothing more than an adult decoration, something that was just there. It had become almost invisible in its ever-presence, especially to a child’s eyes. The point is that, quite suddenly, I wanted to know what was inside it when I was eleven. My mother reacted so strangely to the request—I remember it to this day. I mean, she acted so strangely on most occasions that if this particular one stood out, it was significant in some way or other, wouldn’t you think? The point is—”

  “Stop saying ‘the point is,’” Andrews snapped. “No one at this table thinks you know what your point is.”

  “I saw things in that tin box that scared my mother, silenced my father, and baffled me.” I closed my eyes, trying to see the objects in question. “Letters, papers, documents; several photos. In a seemingly unrelated series of monologues, my mother subsequently attempted to explain things to me by telling me stories about strangers in Paris and Chicago after the First World War. Those stories are now consuming my dreams and many of my waking moments. Everything in my brain and body is trying to tell me that the contents of that box, and those stories, mean something. They mean enough to someone that I should be killed because of them.”

  I could hear that my voice had grown freakishly high-pitched and abnormally loud even for me. Andrews and Lucinda were staring at me as if I might suddenly leap up from the table and destroy the room.

  Then a remarkable thing happened. Andrews set down his fork and ignored his dessert. He leaned forward, clasped his hands, and turned into a university professor—right before my very eyes.

  “All right,” he said calmly. “Let’s examine that.”

  It wasn’t the reaction of an indulgent friend or a professional analyst. He was a colleague preparing to examine ideas and facts in order to arrive at a conclusion that would improve understanding.

  Lucinda saw it. “Oh, no,” she said firmly. “You two are not going to take this on. This is a police matter. Skidmore is very capable. And Fever’s in no condition to sit up let alone gad about.”

  “We’re not going to gad about,” I told her, staring at Andrews. “We’re going to sit right here in this kitchen and talk.”

  “What was the photograph?” Andrews asked, already playing the academic game.

  “It was—I think it was a picture of a woman. From the 1920s. She looked exactly like my mother. On the back the name Lisa was written. This Lisa, I believe, owned a nightclub in Paris.”

  “The resemblance to your mother was striking?” he assumed.

  “It was almost exact.”

  “But your mother didn’t say, ‘Oh, that’s my grandmother or great-grandmother,’ or something.”

  “No. Instead she avoided the photo in all her explanations.” I bit on my lower lip. “There was also some kind of letter. A letter that she gave me or showed me the very first time I looked at the contents of the box. I don’t remember it exactly at this moment, but I’ve dreamed about it too. It was anonymous and it admonished me to pursue something that seemed to upset or frighten my mother so much that she spent a good deal of time talking me out of it.”

  “Why haven’t you ever mentioned any of this to me before?” he asked.

  “Or me,” Lucinda chimed in.

  “I just—I never really thought much about it as an adult. I mean, it happened when I was so young. It was strange for a while, but there were so many more strange things about my parents—I let it go. My mother’s infidelities, my father’s increasingly strange behavior, the very odd life and livelihood they’d chosen: I hated my childhood. The last thing I wanted to do was dwell on it. I wanted to escape it. I left when I was barely sixteen. I had no intention of ever returning here. And by the time I did, so many other things were important to me, I just didn’t remember much about—and then, as you both know, things were fairly active for me when I first arrived. My old college professor tried to kill me, a witch brought me back from the dead, an itinerant minister and an albino dwarf menaced my home—”

  “Please.” Andrews held up his hand. “Let’s not reexamine old plots. We’ve got enough to deal with right here, right now.”

  “Except that all of the clues to this incident may very well lie in the past,” I insisted. “So ‘right now’ may not, in fact, be the most important time in my life, currently.”

  “All right.” He sighed in agreement. “What do we do?”

  “Nothing until morning,” Lucinda said instantly. “Andrews, eat your pudding. Fever, go to bed. I—will be up directly. I have a few things to say to young Dr. Andrews.”

  I heard her voice. There was no arguing with that voice. It was the Law—with a capital L.

  “Good night,” Andrews and I said at exactly the same time.

  I stood. I smiled at them both, and I felt they understood everything that was in my smile—the gratitude and affection, the kinship.

  Then, as I turned and headed toward the stairs, I tried not to dwell on a sudden uncomfortable realization. For a moment when I’d come downstairs with a club in my hands, I had genuinely not been able to separate my dreams and fears from my reality.

  And in that moment, I might have killed Andrews.

  13.

  Lucinda departed early the next morning for a long shift at the hospital. She left simple, stern instructions. I was to be watched at all times, never allowed out of the house, not given solid food.

  As luck would have it, she had given those directions to Andrews while he was still in a banana
pudding stupor. I’d seen something like it many times before. He appeared to be perfectly awake. He even responded to easy questions. But Lucinda made the mistake that I had stopped making many years earlier: she believed that Andrews had heard her. She left my house secure in the knowledge that she had threatened and encouraged him in just the right amounts, and that I was in safe hands.

  Of course, nothing could have been further from the truth.

  I was making soft scrambled eggs when he stumbled into the kitchen sometime after nine. The sun was well up, and my day was several hours old already. I’d dressed in a new dark green turtleneck shirt—something that Lucinda had gotten me, apparently, for Christmas—and the typical black jeans. I’d slipped on some cheap slippers with thick wool socks, intending to get boots a little later.

  “Mmm,” Andrews murmured. “Smells good.” He sat at the table. He was still in his baggy T-shirt and dirty sweatpants.

  “These eggs aren’t for you,” I said. “They’re fairly plain, I’m afraid. No salt, a little runny. Closest thing to liquid food I can get and still eat something that doesn’t go ‘glug.’”

  “Okay.” He was staring at the espresso machine.

  He’d passed my first test: no acknowledgement of the notion that I could only have liquid food.

  “Would you like some espresso?” I asked.

  “More than life itself.” He nodded, but did not otherwise move.

  “I’ll just get it then, shall I?”

  He rubbed his eyes. “Did you really try to beat me to death with a walking stick last night,” he yawned, “or was that just another one of my seven hundred nightmares last night?”

  “You had nightmares?” I turned off the fire under the eggs and stepped up to the espresso machine. I’d already had five cups, and the machine was well warmed.

  “I dreamed that I was a blackbird in a cherry pie.”

  “‘Four and twenty blackbirds,’” I quoted, “‘baked in a pie.’ From your banana pudding experience last night?”

  “God only knows,” he said.

  I slid a small cup under the nozzle of the espresso machine and pressed the button. Steam hissed, aroma arose, and a fine beverage was made. I set the cup on the kitchen table and Andrews grabbed for it as if it were a lifeline to a drowning man.