by Jack Ketchum
Pretty much every night if you were to believe Annie. Or Laura, his wife. And he guessed it had started way back in college because he remembered he'd sure scared the hell out of Harry, his first roommate, their second night in the dorm together by sitting bolt upright in bed and saying, "I have come to you through space and time—but not through New Jersey."
And then going back to sleep again.
Harry was kind of leery of him for a week or two.
What you dream, he said, was how you see others seeing you.
Well, Harry was a psych major and a little too cute for his own good.
But from thirty on everybody complained about the talking. Laura had even bought earplugs. Which he thought was pretty rude.
He talked in a clear, conversational voice and everything he said made sense, or would have, if you could find a context for it.
But you couldn't. Because the context was dreams.
And he never remembered dreams.
The talking was a minor annoyance. Annie even seemed to find it funny at first.
"Who's Millie?" he remembered her saying one morning. There was a scratch on one of his knuckles, a little dried blood there, and he was looking at that trying to figure out how it had got there in his sleep when she said, who's Millie.
"Huh?"
"Who's Millie? You talked about last." She laughed. "Tell Millie not to buy until the divorce comes through. It's going to get very messy.—
He laughed too. "Sounds like I was trading," he said. He worked the floor of the Stock Exchange. He guessed he was dreaming about that.
Though he had no idea what a divorce would have to do with it. And he didn't know any Millie.
Annie shook her head. "You're really something," she said. "It was mostly as clear as a bell. 'Tell Millie not to buy.'"
"Hope she took my advice," he said.
Some nights it was funny and some nights—when Annie needed her sleep and he'd wake her shouting "Mail it!"—it was annoying. But nothing more than that.
What was really annoying was the snoring.
The first time she elbowed him in bed he was mortified.
"You were snoring," she said.
"I was not."
He glanced at himself in the mirror. His eyes looked puffy, saggy. Usually he got up feeling pretty good.
"I was not."
He couldn't believe it—wouldn't believe it. Snoring was something old people do. It was impossible. He was forty.
His father had snored and you could hear it through every room in the house. There was nothing at all funny about that. It was repulsive. It was so...
...out of control.
If there was one thing Bill Dumont couldn't stand it was lack of control. That was exactly why he'd left Laura—and his son Philip too for that matter. Without looking back, without a twinge of guilt.
They hadn't the foggiest notion of control.
Laura, chronically late, forgetting appointments, forgetting to put gas in the car for godsakes, scattered.
Philip constantly losing things at school—his lunchbox, his gloves, his new down jacket. So what if he was only five years old? That's what Laura kept telling him: "Bill, he's only five!" So what? Did that mean you automatically had to yell for a glass of milk every time the Jets were on the five-yard line?
Everybody had excuses. Laura's mother had cancer. It was on her mind. Of course it was. He knew that. And Philip, according to the counselors at school, had a mild learning disability which he would eventually learn to cope with quite nicely. Eventually.
In his book none of that mattered. You either had control of things—of yourself—or you didn't.
He'd stood it for five years. Then he dumped them. Three months later he found Annie sitting on a barstool in the Allstate. You could do that if you were in control. Make your life over on a dime.
He was living proof.
That was two months ago now and he'd managed to talk Annie into moving in with him and everything was fine.
But now this...
...indignity.
Snoring.
He tried everything. Sleeping on his back. On his left side, on his right, on his belly.
Finally Annie bought earplugs too.
And every morning he'd wake up angry. Because he knew what he'd done the night before. There were nights he even woke himself—it was that loud.
Snoring. Like an old man. Like an old sick man who was failing, losing control. He was starting to look lousy mornings too. Tired. Slack. There was too much hair coming out on his comb.
Next I'll be wetting the bed, he thought.
It didn't work out that way exactly.
Next he woke on the street in front of his apartment in pyjamas and a raincoat, and he was kicking some old man's poodle and the poodle was trying to bite him through the pyjama bottoms and doing a pretty good job of it and the old man was shouting.
He went to work with a tic in his upper lip that just wouldn't quit. His eyes red-rimmed and swollen.
~ * ~
And next morning woke up with his hands around Annie's throat.
Squeezing.
It was a bright sunny morning, breeze wafting through his twenty-third-floor window, everything perfectly normal except that he was on top of her, choking her, so far into it she was already way beyond screaming. His eyes flashed open and he felt her fingernails claw his cheek, looked down into a face already turning blue with the tongue like brown meat, protruding like a fat, wriggling slug and heard himself bellowing, roaring, glanced up into the dresser mirror across from their bed and saw another face that was not any face he knew exactly red-eyed and gloating over her, gloating over his kill-to-be.
Then the phone rang.
He let go.
And for a moment just stared down at her shocked disbelieving eyes while she tried to fill her lungs again, her right hand fluttering to the deep red imprints on her neck.
He rolled off and answered it.
His voice sounded thick, strange, bubbling up through a film of mucus.
"Hello?"
"It's final," said Laura, icy calm on the other end. "As of Friday. They'll be serving you the papers. You're a free man. I just wanted you to know."
"How much."
"What?"
"What's it costing me?"
She sighed. "You really are slime, you know that? Are you at all aware that you missed Philip's birthday three days ago?"
"How much."
Click.
Not even a How You Doing, he thought.
Well, he wasn't doing too well anyway.
But then neither was she.
She didn't know it yet but he'd taken out a $500,000 loan six months ago, a second mortgage on the house, neatly forging her name. Now that the divorce was final the house was hers. And according to New York State law so was half the debt. Collection time was going to break her and the kid completely. Surprise, surprise.
Annie was in the bathroom. He could hear the water running. He could hear her coughing. Deep. Lung-coughing.
He looked at himself in the mirror again. Same old face, all right—but there was something gone soft about it, a slight, almost imperceptible jowling effect at the edges of the chin, a puffiness to the cheeks. If you hadn't shaved it every morning for twenty-five years you'd never have noticed. But he did.
He didn't like it.
It scared him.
It had happened overnight.
By the time Annie came out of the bathroom in her robe and slippers he'd started to shake.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I don't know what the hell..."
"I'm packing," said Annie.
"Come on."
She turned on him, angry.
"Look, I don't know what that was about and I don't want to know. You could have killed me. You're crazy or something. The things you say...”
“What. What do I say?"
She looked at him.
"God, Bill, don't you know?"
"How the
hell could I know!"
And then she wouldn't speak to him hardly at all. He tried to convince her to stay, to give him another chance. But she wasn't buying any. "You talk, you snore, you moan, you get up and take a walk..."
"I moan?"
"...and now you try to strangle me. Get some help, Bill. You're falling apart."
And then she slammed the door.
Too bad. Annie wasn't much in the brains department but she wasn't half bad otherwise and he liked her poulet gumbo.
He stayed home from work.
Why not? He could afford to. If you didn't get caught, insider trading was still extremely profitable.
Between financial reports on CNN he got up and checked his mirror. His face still looked rotten but at least it hadn't gotten worse. From what he could see it hadn't changed at all.
The things you say.
The phrase kept haunting him.
So what did he say?
Around four in the afternoon he showered and went out. He took a cab to 47th Street Photo, where a bearded young Hassidic Jew sold him a Realistic Micro-25 Voice-Actuated Microcassette Recorder at half price. He cabbed home. He set it up and taped it to the headboard of his bed. He switched it on.
And fell asleep halfway through Nightline.
His phone rang.
Not his real phone this time but the building's intercom. What time is it? he thought. He got up in the dark and groped his way along the hall to the kitchen and picked up the receiver, aware of how wet his hands felt, sweaty, almost all the way up to the elbow.
"Yes?" And his voice was really wrong again. Like he was coming down with a cold or something. Almost a full octave lower than he was used to.
"You're gonna have to stop the hammering, Mr. Dumont. We're getting complaints down here. I'm sorry."
"Hammering?"
"Yes. I'm sorry."
"That's...yes. That's okay."
He cradled the receiver and switched on the hall light, thinking okay, now we'll see and walked back into the bedroom, switched on the light there too and pressed rewind on the recorder.
And for the first time saw his hands, his forearms.
Covered with blood. Not sweat. Blood. Some of it crusted over already and some of it fresh, especially across the knuckles, and then he looked at the headboard where the tape hissed its way through the recorder and saw the smeared stains, the bruised wood and gouges.
There was no pain. Not even under his long, split, newly manicured fingernails where splinters of wood protruded. He couldn't feel a thing.
He ran to the bathroom and turned on the water. The right hand was worse so he scrubbed it with his left.
The flesh felt soft. Like touching a burn. Like pus rising just beneath the surface.
He looked up into the mirror. The face that peered back at him through swollen eyelids looked bruised and sore. He opened his mouth and saw graying teeth, milk-white pustules lining his gums and palate.
The base of his tongue was black.
And now he was sweating.
He stripped off his pyjama top. The rash looked almost like a gleaming red t-shirt spread all across his back and upper body.
He felt the urge to scream, to run raging through the room smashing things.
What was it? AIDS? Cancer?
How dare this happen to him?
Overnight.
He pulled out a fistful of hair. The scalp was so soft he hardly felt it.
All right, he thought. Control. You're awake now. Take control.
He went to the phone, flipped through the Rolodex until he found his doctor's name and dialed. He told the answering service it was an emergency but that, no, he was not about to go to the hospital thank you very much, just have him call the minute he gets in. And yes, he knew it was four in the morning. I pay him for four in the morning, he said. Just have him call.
Then he turned on the recorder.
Playback.
At first there was only snoring.
Lots of it. Deep, sonorous breathing sounds that repelled him, disgusted him.
And then there were moans—my god! he did moan. As though something or someone in his sleep were squeezing him, hurting him, making him sound old and weak and whiny. It was nearly as bad as the snoring.
And then some kind of bubbling sound. Breathing, he thought. It must be. It's loathsome.
Finally he started talking.
"I heard you got it all figured out," he said. And then something that was much too soft to hear or for the recorder to pick up, unintelligible. Then he said, "You should have seen it coming."
The tape only rolled when he spoke or when there was noise in the room so it was impossible to tell what the interval was.
"You should have heard the Grateful Dead," he said, "they played that Peter-and-the-Wolf song. You know the one. ’All I said was come on in.’" It made no sense at all.
Then suddenly he started howling, bellowing, slamming at the headboard so loud he had to turn the level down. Bits of words and phrases came flying though like shrapnel.
"Ahhhhh!...you don't not to me you don't...dammit! Dammit! ...frrrrragggh!...break him!...break him up!...get even!...mmmmmmmmm...break him utterly!..."
And then he had to turn it up again. Because what he was saying was so much softer than the rest of it—he had to hit rewind twice to hear it all. "Tell Millie not to die until the divorce comes through. It's going to get messy."
Not buy. Die. Annie'd got it wrong.
He wasn't trading.
It hardly even sounded like his own voice. He listened again. Something too...musical about it. In the tones. He couldn't say what.
Almost like a woman's voice. It was low and hard to hear. He decided to go on. But the rest of the tape was just more roaring. More pounding. No wonder the neighbors complained.
He went back to that line and listened again. "Tell Millie not to die until the divorce comes through. It's going to get very messy."
He took a stiff shot of scotch from the bottle on the sideboard and then another and another. Where the hell was that doctor?
He curled up in the bed, shivering, the recorder held in both hands like some sort of shiny metallic teddy bear. Except that it wasn't very comforting. He played the tape over and over—and just before he drifted off to sleep again he thought it's not Millie it's Willie, and Willie was what Laura called him sometimes.
Laura. Who'd just got her divorce.
Tell Willie not to die before the divorce comes through. It's going to get very messy.
And for the first time in memory remembered what he dreamed. In the dream he was glutinizing.
He was lying on the bed and it was as though he were on a spit or a bed of stoked hot coals or something instead of a Sealy Posturepedic because his flesh was melting, fat running streaming down his body, staining the sheets yellow, brown, then red—and finally black as charred skin broke and slid across his chest, his thighs, his belly, all of it pooling underneath him like some foul overflowing stew, dripping off the sides of his bed and pooling there too. Messy. Horribly messy.
But there wasn't any pain. Only a sick, dreadful sensation in his stomach that he'd really gone and done it this time, he'd lost control in the worst possible way and that this was what, disgustingly, it all came down to, no boiled down to ha ha ha, flesh and fat breaking up and sliding, falling, dripping on the Persian rug.
"It's going to get very messy," he heard himself say and then there was good old Harry standing at a psych podium saying, "what you dream is how you see other people seeing you," and then Laura stood over him watching. "You really are slime, you know?" she said. And this time he had to agree.
He really was.
As he woke—as his left eye oozed down over his cheek to join the right eye already melting on his chest—he saw he really was.
FIRST DRAFT
I Would Do Anything For You
By Edward Lee
This story is the basis for the Ketchum/Lee collaboration I
'D GIVE ANYTHING FOR YOU
I Would Do Anything For You
By Edward Lee
"Please, please don't do this to us, Clare!" Roderic pleaded from the flagstone steps of the great house. It was his mother's house, for God's sake. He's thirty years old, Clare thought, and he still lives with his mother. Forlorn, nasal-voiced, Roderic attested: "I would do anything for you!"
How many times had he said that in the last nine months? Big deal! Clare wanted to shout as she turned in the court. Can't you take a hint? "It's just not working," she said.
He splayed his hands, befuddled. "What do you mean it's not working? Things are great. You said you'd marry me!"
"Oh, Roderic, I did not," she lied. Early on, of course, she had responded very positively to his nuptial allusions. Clare, at thirty-three, wasn't getting any younger, and there were literally millions of reasons why a girl might want to be married to Roderic. But... Money isn't everything, she pondered. It got to the point where the relationship simply didn't suffice. "I'm sorry," she feebled. "But I just can't see you anymore."
Roderic's gape turned vapid. "Is it another guy?"
"Of course not!" she chose to spat. How dare he suspect her of sleeping around! Besides, Fudd was more than just another guy. He was everything Roderic wasn't: strong, handsome, assertive, and...well, he had a big penis. She opened the door to the 300ZX (which Roderic had bought her, by the way) and was about to get in.
"But what about the trip to Paris?" came his next idiotic query. "Don't you want to go?"
Paris might be fun, but there was a catch. Roderic's mother would be going too, along with Dallas, that ruffian manservant of hers. Fuck that shit, Clare articulated. Anyway, Fudd would be taking her to Cancun after his next score. "Roderic, I'm not going to Paris with you. Our relationship is over. Get it?"
Obviously, he didn't, but Dallas did. The sinister manservant, in his long leather jacket, glanced up blank-faced from the side of the house. He was stacking a cord of firewood, after dividing each round cut in one of those automatic log-splitters. The glint in his eyes just then...terrified her.
Worse, though, was the look of disdain on Roderic's mother's face, which could be seen now in the sitting-room window. The crinkled visage peered through the glass, causing tiny hairs on the back of Clare's neck to stand on end. Weirdoes! she thought.
