Dreamsongs 2-Book Bundle

by George R. R. Martin

  The kettle began to scream.

  Randi tossed and turned for over an hour after she got home, but there was no way she could sleep. Every time she closed her eyes she would see her father’s face, or imagine poor Joan Sorenson, tied to that bed as the killer came closer, knife in hand. She kept coming back to Roy Helander, to Roy Helander and his secret refuge. In her mind, Roy was still the gawky adolescent she remembered, his blond hair lank and unwashed, his eyes frightened and confused as they made him tell the story over and over again. She wondered what had become of that secret place of his during all the years he’d been locked up and drugged in the state mental home, and she wondered if maybe sometimes he hadn’t dreamt of it as he lay there in his cell. She thought maybe he had. If Roy Helander had indeed come home, Randi figured she knew just where he was.

  Knowing about it and finding it were two different things, however. She and Willie had kicked it around without narrowing it down any. Randi tried to remember, but it had been so long ago, a whispered conversation in the schoolyard. A secret place in the woods, he’d said, a place where no one ever came that was his and his alone, hidden and full of magic. That could be anything, a cave by the river, a treehouse, even something as simple as a cardboard lean-to. But where were these woods? Outside the city were suburbs and industrial parks and farms; the nearest state forest was forty miles north along the river road. If this secret place was in one of the city parks, you’d think someone would have stumbled on it years ago. Without more to go on, Randi didn’t have a prayer of finding it. But her mind worried it like a pit bull with a small child.

  Finally her digital alarm clock read 2:13, and Randi gave up on sleep altogether. She got out of bed, turned on the light, and went back to the kitchen. The refrigerator was pretty dismal, but she found a couple of bottles of Pabst. Maybe a beer would help put her to sleep. She opened a bottle and carried it back to bed.

  Her bedroom furnishings were a hodgepodge. The carpet was a remnant, the blond chest-of-drawers was boring and functional, and the four-poster queen-sized bed was a replica, but she did own a few genuine antiques—the massive oak wardrobe, the full-length clawfoot dressing mirror in its ornate wooden frame, and the cedar chest at the foot of the bed. Her mother always used to call it a hope chest. Did little girls still keep hope chests? She didn’t think so, at least not around here. Maybe there were still places where hope didn’t seem so terribly unrealistic, but this city wasn’t one of them.

  Randi sat on the floor, put the beer on the carpet, and opened the chest.

  Hope chests were where you kept your future, all the little things that were part of the dreams they taught you to dream when you were a child. She hadn’t been a child since she was twelve, since the night her mother woke her with that terrible inhuman sound. Her chest was full of memories now.

  She took them out, one by one. Yearbooks from high school and college, bundles of love letters from old boyfriends and even that asshole she’d married, her school ring and her wedding ring, her diplomas, the letters she’d won in track and girls’ softball, a framed picture of her and her date at the senior prom.

  Way, way down at the bottom, buried under all the other layers of her life, was a police .38. Her father’s gun, the gun he emptied the night he died. Randi took it out and carefully put it aside. Beneath it was the book, an old three-ring binder with a blue cloth cover. She opened it across her lap.

  The yellowed Courier story on her father’s death was Scotch-taped to the first sheet of paper, and Randi stared at that familiar photograph for a long time before she flipped the page. There were other clippings: stories about the missing children that she’d torn furtively from Courier back issues in the public library, magazine articles about animal attacks, serial killers, and monsters, all sandwiched between the lined pages she’d filled with her meticulous twelve-year-old’s script. The handwriting grew broader and sloppier as she turned the pages; she’d kept up the book for years, until she’d gone away to college and tried to forget. She’d thought she’d done a pretty good job of that, but now, turning the pages, she knew that was a lie. You never forget. She only had to glance at the headlines, and it all came back to her in a sickening rush.

  Eileen Stanski, Jessie Helander, Diane Jones, Gregory Torio, Erwin Weiss. None of them had ever been found, not so much as a bone or a piece of clothing. The police said her father’s death was accidental, unrelated to the case he was working on. They’d all accepted that, the chief, the mayor, the newspaper, even her mother, who only wanted to get it all behind them and go on with their lives. Barry Schumacher and Joe Urquhart were the last to buy in, but in the end even they came around, and Randi was the only one left. Mere mention of the subject upset her mother so much that she finally stopped talking about it, but she didn’t forget. She just asked her questions quietly, kept up her binder, and hid it every night at the bottom of the hope chest.

  For all the good it had done.

  The last twenty-odd pages in the back of the binder were still blank, the blue lines on the paper faint with age. The pages were stiff as she turned them. When she reached the final page, she hesitated. Maybe it wouldn’t be there, she thought. Maybe she had just imagined it. It made no sense anyway. He would have known about her father, yes, but their mail was censored, wasn’t it? They’d never let him send such a thing.

  Randi turned the last page. It was there, just as she’d known it would be.

  She’d been a junior in college when it arrived. She’d put it all behind her. Her father had been dead for seven years, and she hadn’t even looked at her binder for three. She was busy with her classes and her sorority and her boyfriends, and sometimes she had bad dreams but mostly it was okay, she’d grown up, she’d gotten real. If she thought about it at all, she thought that maybe the adults had been right all along, it had just been some kind of an animal.

  … some kind of animal …

  Then one day the letter had come. She’d opened it on the way to class, read it with her friends chattering beside her, laughed and made a joke and stuck it away, all very grown-up. But that night, when her roommate had gone to sleep, she took it out and turned on her Tensor to read it again, and felt sick. She was going to throw it away, she remembered. It was just trash, a twisted product of a sick mind.

  Instead she’d put it in the binder.

  The Scotch tape had turned yellow and brittle, but the envelope was still white, with the name of the institution printed neatly in the left-hand corner. Someone had probably smuggled it out for him. The letter itself was scrawled on a sheet of cheap typing paper in block letters. It wasn’t signed, but she’d known who it was from.

  Randi slid the letter out of the envelope, hesitated for a moment, and opened it.

  IT WAS A WEREWOLF

  She looked at it and looked at it and looked at it, and suddenly she didn’t feel very grown-up anymore. When the phone rang she nearly jumped a foot.

  Her heart was pounding in her chest. She folded up the letter and stared at the phone, feeling strangely guilty, as if she’d been caught doing something shameful. It was 2:53 in the morning. Who the hell would be calling now? If it was Roy Helander, she thought she might just scream. She let the phone ring.

  On the fourth ring, her machine cut in. “This is AAA-Wade Investigations, Randi Wade speaking. I can’t talk right now, but you can leave a message at the tone, and I’ll get back to you.”

  The tone sounded. “Uh, hello,” said a deep male voice that was definitely not Roy Helander.

  Randi put down the binder, snatched up the receiver. “Rogoff? Is that you?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Sorry if I woke you. Listen, this isn’t by the book and I can’t figure out a good excuse for why I’m calling you, except that I thought you ought to know.”

  Cold fingers crept down Randi’s spine. “Know what?”

  “We’ve got another one,” he said.

  Willie woke in a cold sweat.

  What was that?

 
; A noise, he thought. Somewhere down the hall.

  Or maybe just a dream? Willie sat up in bed and tried to get a grip on himself. The night was full of noises. It could have been a towboat on the river, a car passing by underneath his windows, anything. He still felt sheepish about the way he’d let his fear take over when he found his door open. He was just lucky he hadn’t stabbed Randi with those scissors. He couldn’t let his imagination eat him alive. He slid back down under the covers, rolled over on his stomach, closed his eyes.

  Down the hall, a door opened and closed.

  His eyes opened wide. He lay very still, listening. He’d locked all the locks, he told himself, he’d walked Randi to the door and locked all his locks, the springlock, the chain, the double deadbolt, he’d even lowered the police bar. No one could get in once the bar was in place, it could only be lifted from inside, the door was solid steel. And the back door might as well be welded shut, it was so corroded and unmovable. If they broke a window he would have heard the noise, there was no way, no way. He was just dreaming.

  The knob on his bedroom door turned slowly, clicked. There was a small metallic rattle as someone pushed at the door. The lock held. The second push was slightly harder, the noise louder.

  By then Willie was out of bed. It was a cold night, his jockey shorts and undershirt small protection against the chill, but Willie had other things on his mind. He could see the key still sticking out of the keyhole. An antique key for a hundred-year-old lock. The office keyholes were big enough to peek through. Willie kept the keys inside them, just to plug up the drafts, but he never turned them … except tonight. Tonight for some reason he’d turned that key before he went to bed and somehow felt a little more secure when he heard the tumblers click. And now that was all that stood between him and whatever was out there.

  He backed up against the window, glanced out at the cobbled alley behind the brewery. The shadows lay thick and black beneath him. He seemed to recall a big green metal dumpster down below, directly under the window, but it was too dark to make it out.

  Something hammered at the door. The room shook.

  Willie couldn’t breathe. His inhaler was on the dresser across the room, over by the door. He was caught in a giant’s fist and it was squeezing all the breath right out of him. He sucked at the air.

  The thing outside hit the door again. The wood began to splinter. Solid wood, a hundred years old, but it split like one of your cheap-ass hollow-core modern doors.

  Willie was starting to get dizzy. It was going to be real pissed off, he thought giddily, when it finally got in here and found that his asthma had already killed him. Willie peeled off his undershirt, dropped it to the floor, hooked a thumb in the elastic of his shorts.

  The door shook and shattered, falling half away from its hinges. The next blow snapped it in two. His head swam from lack of oxygen. Willie forgot all about his shorts and gave himself over to the change.

  Bones and flesh and muscles shrieked in the agony of transformation, but the oxygen rushed into his lungs, sweet and cold, and he could breathe again. Relief shuddered through him and he threw back his head and gave it voice. It was a sound to chill the blood, but the dark shape picking its way through the splinters of his door did not hesitate, and neither did Willie. He gathered his feet up under him, and leapt. Glass shattered all around him as he threw himself through the window, and the shards spun outward into the darkness. Willie missed the dumpster, landed on all fours, lost his footing, and slid three feet across the cobbles.

  When he looked up, he could see the shape above him, filling his window. Its hands moved, and he caught the terrible glint of silver, and that was all it took. Willie was on his feet again, running down the street faster than he had ever run before.

  The cab let her off two houses down. Police barricades had gone up all around the house, a dignified old Victorian manor badly in need of fresh paint. Curious neighbors, heavy coats thrown on over pajamas and bathrobes, lined Grandview, whispering to each other and glancing back at the house. The flashers on the police cars lent a morbid avidity to their faces.

  Randi walked past them briskly. A patrolman she didn’t know stopped her at the police barrier. “I’m Randi Wade,” she told him. “Rogoff asked me to come down.”

  “Oh,” he said. He jerked a thumb back at the house. “He’s inside, talking to the sister.”

  Randi found them in the living room. Rogoff saw her, nodded, waved her off, and went back to his questioning.

  The other cops looked at her curiously, but no one said anything. The sister was a young-looking forty, slender and dark, with pale skin and a wild mane of black hair that fell half down her back. She sat on the edge of a sectional in a white silk teddy that left little to the imagination, seemingly just as indifferent to the cold air coming through the open door as she was to the lingering glances of the policemen.

  One of the cops was taking some fingerprints off a shiny black grand piano in the corner of the room. Randi wandered over as he finished. The top of the piano was covered with framed photographs. One was a summer scene, taken somewhere along the river, two pretty girls in matching bikinis standing on either side of an intense young man. The girls were dappled with moisture, laughing for the photographer, long black hair hanging wetly down across wide smiles. The man, or boy, or whatever he was, was in a swimsuit, but you could tell he was bone dry. He was gaunt and sallow, and his blue eyes stared into the lens with a vacancy that was oddly disturbing. The girls could have been as young as eighteen or as old as twenty. One of them was the woman Rogoff was questioning, but Randi could not have told you which one. Twins. She glanced at the other photos, half-afraid she’d find a picture of Willie. Most of the faces she didn’t recognize, but she was still looking them over when Rogoff came up behind her.

  “Coroner’s upstairs with the body,” he said. “You can come up if you’ve got the stomach.”

  Randi turned away from the piano and nodded. “You learn anything from the sister?”

  “She had a nightmare,” he said. He started up the narrow staircase, Randi close behind him. “She says that as far back as she can remember, whenever she had bad dreams, she’d just cross the hall and crawl in bed with Zoe.” They reached the landing. Rogoff put his hand on a glass doorknob, then paused. “What she found when she crossed the hall this time is going to keep her in nightmares for years to come.”

  He opened the door. Randi followed him inside.

  The only light was a small bedside lamp, but the police photographer was moving around the room, snapping pictures of the red twisted thing on the bed. The light of his flash made the shadows leap and writhe, and Randi’s stomach writhed with them. The smell of blood was overwhelming. She remembered summers long ago, hot July days when the wind blew from the south and the stink of the slaughterhouse settled over the city. But this was a thousand times worse.

  The photographer was moving, flashing, moving, flashing. The world went from gray to red, then back to gray again. The coroner was bent over the corpse, her motions turned jerky and unreal by the strobing of the big flash gun. The white light blazed off the ceiling, and Randi looked up and saw the mirrors there. The dead woman’s mouth gaped open, round and wide in a silent scream. He’d cut off her lips with her skin, and the inside of her mouth was no redder than the outside. Her face was gone, nothing left but the glistening wet ropes of muscle and here and there the pale glint of bone, but he’d left her her eyes. Large dark eyes, pretty eyes, sensuous, like her sister’s downstairs. They were wide open, staring up in terror at the mirror on the ceiling. She’d been able to see every detail of what was being done to her. What had she found in the eyes of her reflection? Pain, terror, despair? A twin all her life, perhaps she’d found some strange comfort in her mirror image, even as her face and her flesh and her humanity had been cut away from her.

  The flash went off again, and Randi caught the glint of metal at wrist and ankle. She closed her eyes for a second, steadied her breathing, a
nd moved to the foot of the bed, where Rogoff was talking to the coroner.

  “Same kind of chains?” he asked.

  “You got it. And look at this.” Coroner Cooney took the unlit cigar out of her mouth and pointed.

  The chain looped tightly around the victim’s ankle. When the flash went off again, Randi saw the other circles, dark, black lines, scored across the raw flesh and exposed nerves. It made her hurt just to look.

  “She struggled,” Rogoff suggested. “The chain chafed against her flesh.”

  “Chafing leaves you raw and bloody,” Cooney replied. “What was done to her, you’d never notice chafing. That’s a burn, Rogoff, a third-degree burn. Both wrists, both ankles, wherever the metal touched her. Sorenson had the same burn marks. Like the killer heated the chains until they were white-hot. Only the metal is cold now. Go on, touch it.”

  “No thanks,” Rogoff said. “I’ll take your word for it.”

  “Wait a minute,” Randi said.

  The coroner seemed to notice her for the first time. “What’s she doing here?” she asked.

  “It’s a long story,” Rogoff replied. “Randi, this is official police business, you’d better keep—”

  Randi ignored him. “Joan Sorenson had the same kind of burn marks?” she asked Cooney. “At wrist and ankle, where the chains touched her skin?”

  “That’s right,” Cooney said. “So what?”

  “What are you trying to say?” Rogoff asked her.

  She looked at him. “Joan Sorenson was a cripple. She had no use of her legs, no sensation at all below the waist. So why bother to chain her ankles?”

  Rogoff stared at her for a long moment, then shook his head. He looked over to Cooney. The coroner shrugged. “Yeah. So. An interesting point, but what does it mean?”

  She had no answer for them. She looked away, back at the bed, at the skinned, twisted, mutilated thing that had once been a pretty woman.