Until She Sleeps

by Tim Lebbon

  Like the time when Jack’s own mother had passed away in her sleep. Andy had known about it hours before the phonecall came. Crying in his sleep, crying more when he woke up, he was unable to tell his parents what was wrong. But Jack had seen his son’s eyes as he sat him down to tell him that Nan was dead … seen the understanding there already.

  And now, today, he was making this up. He had to be. Craziness like that didn’t really happen, not really,

  (so why am I rushing home?)

  and maybe it was just a bit of fun Andy was having at the start of his summer holiday, a childish game created by him and Stig to wind up their parents with little or no thought as to the consequences of their lies.

  Maybe there’s someone here going around killing them, Andy had said, and Jack had known that he was lying. That’s not what he really believed, not at all. The rest of it …. Maybe he believed the rest of it.

  But that didn’t make it true. Even after what his wife had told him.

  It couldn’t.

  The first apple trees appeared beside the car, flashing by in sweeps of green. He’d be home in two minutes.

  Forever putting my own life on hold for Andy, he thought, hating himself but hating the truth in the statement as well. He remembered Andy as a baby, a toddler and now as he approached manhood, and he felt a mixture of pride and sadness. He liked to tell himself that the sadness came from his son growing up and losing his own childhood innocence … but in reality, he knew it derived from how he knew his own life to be trickling away.

  Forever …

  Jack shivered, so violently that the wheel jumped in his hands and bushes whispered and hissed along the side of the car. His eyes closed and he clenched his teeth, feeling his jaw muscles freeze, his back arch, belt pressing into his shoulder and stomach, legs stiffening and pressing the accelerator to the floor. He felt sick. Cold. Muscles locked and cramped, his balls shrivelled into his body, his hair stood on end as if he’d just passed between two house-sized conductors.

  The car engine screamed, angry at his inattention.

  A stone wall plucked a hubcap from the offside front wheel, sending it arcing into the air to disappear into the sun.

  For seconds, minutes, hours he was like this, every instant taking him closer to disaster. Images of the car smashed and burning with him inside did nothing to ease the seizure.

  The car hit a ridge in the road and bounced, jolting Jack up against the seatbelt so hard that he felt the skin on his shoulder bruise and break.

  And then it passed.

  He opened his eyes, lifted his foot from the accelerator and stood on the brake. The car’s nose dipped from seventy to forty, then down to twenty, drifting around the final bend and then into his driveway. The engine hissed and ticked, ticked off. He heard birds singing in the trees, leaves hushing against each other in the slight breeze that had arrived with mid-afternoon … even though sweat remained budded on his skin.

  “Mum, Dad’s home!” he heard Andy shout. Jack sat there shaking, wondering just what had happened, feeling his heart racing in his chest and dreading another fit, certain he’d had a heart attack, equally sure that his heartbeat beat was steady and strong.

  “Andy,” he said, but it was nothing past a whisper.

  He heard footsteps approaching from around the side of the house. His son. Andy had called him home because he was scared, and now here he sat, shaking and sweating and trying to find a reason for his attack instead of a cure. Still shaking. Still sweating.

  The footsteps came faster. And faster still. Andy must be sprinting.

  Jack looked up at the trees. The breeze didn’t feel that strong, yet the branches were flipping back and forth, the leaves mere smears in the air instead of singular patterns. His son appeared at the car window, reached out to touch him and fled again.

  Andy, he went to say, but now it was not ever a whimper.

  The birds were becoming frantic. Their songs combined, an aural battle fought across baked lawns and thirsty flower-beds, increasing in pitch and tone until one song was the next, and all songs became one, a long, high whistling in his ears. It faded to a hum, then nothing. The trees moved faster still until they too became only a smudge, one wall of pale green foliage.

  Jack tried to blink but his eyes were frozen open.

  Something happened, something momentous, and then it was night. The stars spun above him like a Katherine wheel, their trails across the heavens clearly visible like a time-lapse photograph, dozens of aircraft trails playing cosmic join-the-dots but telling him nothing.

  The house before him crumbled quickly, to be replaced by something taller and brighter. Then that too disappeared, his vision now filled with something black and white which may have been ash.

  Oh God, he thought, and continued to think, Oh God, oh God, oh God, even though he did not believe.

  His mind screamed out as time passed him by, dragging his blood, his heart, his life along with it.

  Soon, only too soon, everything would be over.

  Eight

  He heard the car pull into the driveway.

  Somehow he dragged himself from what he was reading, closed the book, tucked it under his arm, tiptoed from the bedroom and made it into the kitchen.

  Nightmares.

  “Mum, Dad’s home!” Andy shouted. He opened the back door without waiting for her response and ran around the side of the bungalow.

  Nightmares. The book was a book of Nightmares Asleep, that’s what it said on the first page, although some of the letters were strange and the script was meticulously hand-written, not printed as it should have been. It looked very old.

  Nightmares.

  It watched him from high up, one of the pages had read, always high up, never down at his level. He ran and screamed but could never rid himself of the watcher, even out in the open air, because the watcher was invisible. He paid well and said I could have his first lamb come springtime.

  It was worth it. Later when I looked, the watcher was scared of me. The things these folk call nightmares …

  Andy thought of the railway bridge and the terrible sense of foreboding they’d all experienced walking beneath it.

  The book was heavy under his arm, loaded with terrible truths and awful promises, perhaps made true themselves by time …

  Nightmares …..

  Andy rounded the corner and saw his father sitting in the car on the driveway. He was dead. Andy opened his mouth to scream but his body needed every breath he could spare to run. He whined, eyes wide, footsteps pounding and shaking his vision, rattling something in his ear, the tic that had always been there when he ran and which he’d once thought was his brain coming loose …

  A bird called out behind him, a cheerful warble that belied the truth of what Andy saw here. His dad was dead. He must be to look like that, no one could be that still and yet remain awake, alive, eyes open, mouth hanging slack as if about to complete an unfinished sentence. About to say my name, Andy thought. And he wondered which nightmare had come to take his father.

  He felt stupidly, awfully responsible. Not because he’d phoned his dad and begged him to come home, but because of what he had read, the book he carried now and what it contained. Because Andy was, as far as he could make out, a witch.

  “Dad!” he called at last, skidding to a halt beside the car. The engine was ticking and hissing as if it had been pushed hard. The air above the bonnet shimmered, trying to find which reality to settle into. “Oh Dad, wake up, wake up Dad!” Tears blurred his vision and he was glad, but he wiped them away anyway. He didn’t want his dad to see him crying.

  His father stared. His skin was almost completely white, as if something had come and taken his blood, eyes wide and dry, no glimmer there at all, no moisture protecting them from summer dust and the heat of the nightmares unleashed, running rampant, raging ….

  “Dad, I’m one of them! I’m sorry!” he shouted. “I’m a witch!”

  “Andy?” He heard his mother c
alling, and in her voice was a terrible admission. She’d heard what he’d said. She knew he’d seen the book, knew what he had read. She was not only calling him but instructing him, commanding him, admitting the truth in one word. It was the first time she’d ever truly spoken to him like an adult.

  Andy reached out to touch his father. His skin was cold and hard. Not just hard but as solid as rock, immovable, so there that it just could not have been. He pushed but his father did not move. There was no give in his flesh. It was like touching a statue that was firmly, irrevocably rooted to the spot.

  Caught in time.

  “Fuck off!” Andy shouted, because he didn’t know where the idea had sprung from. You pick up on things, his mother had told him again and again, and now that he knew why he hated her for it, for not telling him everything right at the start.

  The fact that he believed what he had read and its implications, every single word of it, merely added to the proof. The book was there, solid and real, beyond denial.

  “Jack!” His mother stood at the corner of the bungalow, hands held to her face in the cliched scream-queen pose. Her eyes flickered across from her husband to Andy, down to the book, back up to her son’s face. “Andy ...”

  Andy held out the book and opened it. “Pick a nightmare, any nightmare.” He’d always loved magic.

  “Oh Andy, it’s … all a load of rubbish.”

  Andy started to cry then, knowing that he should feel angry but unable to. She was his mum, and things were weird, and he was only thirteen years old. Thirteen fucking years old! He was still a kid and he wanted to stay like that for as long as he could, because in their darkest, most uninhibited moments his parents showed him just what it was like to be an adult. Sometimes it just didn’t look that hot.

  “What’s wrong with Dad?” Andy cried. “Look at him, I phoned him and he came and what’s wrong with him, Mum?” He backed away from the car and into his mother’s embrace, clasping the book to his chest behind folded arms. Caught in time, he thought again, and this time he tried to accept it.

  “Come inside with me,” his mum said. He could feel her tears dropping onto his scalp as she turned them both away from their father, leading him back to the house, hunkered down as if to avoid rain. “I never really believed….” she muttered, and although Andy knew he was meant to hear, he did not reply.

  Not now. Because even before she told him anything, he believed it all.

  Nightmare

  In life, Mengezah had courted death. In death, her hopes would be given life.

  Now, somewhere in between, her dreams and nightmares are one and the same. Release for some, pain for others. No balance. No real way to grieve or celebrate, rejoice or repent, because limbo is no sane place.

  For all that, she feels things happening. Fresh air kissing a corpse that has not been her for three centuries. A soft tongue of odours tickling senses long-since rotted away: the tang of cut grass; a breath of running water; something else, grimy and unclean. And voices … so many voices calling out in surprise or pain, often both, and behind them another voice, one too young to be true and yet it is speaking the Life, knowing it and feeling it and sensing that it is right.

  Mengezah would have been proud, were she still alive.

  But in here, in her own nightmare and hell, is someone and something else. Trapped with her, running in circles that shrink and shrink until the body risks tearing itself apart from chasing itself, a person with a name she once knew. It feels like her Nemesis. And although in limbo there is no memory still she feels a connection, some common truth that links them … and at last, after so long, she feels that release may soon be hers.

  Mengezah is crushed, contained, imprisoned.

  The new person is free and yet lost, coming closer, bearing a name she should know.

  She should know ….

  Unfinished business.

  Nine

  Andy listened for an hour and then ran.

  She bled nightmares, his mum had told him. Apparently.

  He couldn’t stay at home, not after what he’d heard, not with his father staring at the bungalow with no life in his eyes, just waiting ….

  She was accepted because she helped. Magician … witch … counsellor. She’d shaken her head. My mother told me about it, and her mother before her, and hers, and hers, and I never really believed. I’ve kept the book because it’s an heirloom, and sometimes I’ve thought it quite glamorous having a witch in the family. And I know things sometimes, and you pick upon things too, but … I’ve never really believed …

  And then a name, and a dreadful crime, and what was happening had started to make some sort of sense. To a thirteen year old boy, more sense than was possible to an adult. Because magic and wonder were still possible to a boy of Andy’s age, and he had grasped the truth and taken to it, claimed it for himself. His acceptance was nothing to do with what he seen, nothing to do with his father. It was not even because he was a descendant of Mengezah. A witch in the family held little power compared to a boy’s imagination and his willingness to believe.

  Sometimes, when he saw the worst side of his parents, he knew that it was because they had stopped believing.

  The last nightmare she couldn’t take, his mum had said, or so it’s said. A man called Francis. His affliction was too great even for Mengezah. It drove her into a trance and killed him. His family were furious. They demanded a witch’s trial, and even though the villagers had accepted her for so long – and lots of them had been treated by her, bled of their nightmares – their blood was up. There was no trial, no tests, no pricking or dipping in the pond, because they all knew the truth already. She never felt the need to hide what she was. She’d looked up at Andy and he’d seen tears in her eyes, as if it was her own wronged mother she was talking about. Even back then, discrimination was a way of life.

  How did they kill her? Andy had asked, childish fascination painting a dozen gruesome tableaus in his mind’s eye. The stake? Torture? Did they pin her to the ground, Mum?

  Francis, Francis, he should have caught the name straight away. Not Francis something, but something Francis, a surname, and Andy knew someone else with that name, someone who had gone missing.

  His mum had shrugged and shaken her head. It’s all legend, hearsay. The book’s Mengezah’s, but her last entry is the day before she was … killed. It’s said that they carried her in her trance and bricked her into the church crypt.

  Andy had remembered his mother’s expression as she’d stared at the church.

  And the dead workmen.

  They say she never woke up.

  Andy had taken the book from his mother and flipped the pages, each one containing a few lines in careful, beautiful script, the beauty belying the nightmarish horrors they described. A catalogue of bad dreams, each one swallowed by Mengezah simply because she could.

  She was only trying to help.

  Maybe she’s woken up now, Andy had said. And then the name had hit home – Francis – and he’d run from of the house.

  Andy ran. And because it was the height of summer and he was having an adventure he crashed through Stig’s gate and hammered at the front door, not stopping until he heard footsteps inside and saw Stig press his face against the frosted glass viewing panel.

  “I’ve got so much to tell you,” Andy shouted, “and we’ve got to find Rachel.”

  Stig opened the door. His eyes were red and swollen but the glint was still there, the childish twinkle that time and age would soon extinguish. “Rachel?”

  “Come with me, I’ll explain.”

  Stig noticed the old book he clasped under his arm. “Cool book,” he said. “Looks old.”

  Andy shook his head and smiled. “Just wait till I tell you.”

  Stig stood on the threshold for a few indecisive seconds. Behind him his mother sat in the living room, grown up and crying and certain that the world would return to its old order soon. Before him Andy held a book written by a witch, about to lau
nch himself headlong into a village plagued by resurrected nightmares of old. And as Stig stood there, time battled with him. Andy could see it in his friend’s eyes; good sense telling him to stay at home, excitement drawing him out, logic dictating that this was someone else’s problem, childish naiveté and a sense of wonder convincing him that he could and should make it his own.

  “Mum, I’m going out!” Stig shouted, slamming the door on her voice and running up the road with Andy.

  “What’s your worst nightmare?” Andy called over his shoulder.

  “Everyone turning to strawberry jam and I haven’t got any bread.”

  “Stupid pussy!”

  “Cock face!”

  “Eat my dick!”

  “Eat it yourself!”

  Shouting, laughing, caution banished by excitement, the two boys ran into the village.

  Bad dreams watched them go.

  Nightmare

  The humming had stopped, but she didn’t for a moment believe that she had escaped.

  Rachel guessed that she’d left the stream path in the village – the last place she’d actually recognised – over an hour ago. That made it mid-afternoon by her reckoning, the middle of a hot, sun-baked July day … and yet it was growing dark.

  She could still see the sun beaming down through a constant cloud haze, but even though it had barely moved its light was becoming weaker. It wasn’t that it had been obscured, just that it no longer seemed concerned with coming this far.

  Shadows crouched thick and heavy around the bases of walls, beneath bushes and trees and in dips in the ground, slopping like hot tar. She thought that if she slipped and fell into one of these shadows she would pollute herself. Perhaps she could haul herself out but by then she would have become a person of shadows, someone whose skin cannot be touched by sunlight, bright healthy pink turned monochrome in life, ready for death. She wondered what it would feel like to be turned into a negative of who she really was.

  She had finally stopped running because that was not getting her nowhere. In this strange afternoon twilight the village looked even stranger. Sometimes she thought she had slipped into the past: a ramshackle hay barn stood slanted by the road; the road itself was muddied and bubbled here and there with dung; the houses were uneven, all unique, the glass in their windows distorted, thatch ragged and shedding in clumps. But then she saw an old car, rusted away to little more than a shell, tyres flattened into the ground. It was almost subsumed beneath a wild growth of bramble and nettle, as if nature wished to keep it hidden. She found a stick and used it to haul some of the stinging things aside. It had once been a blue car and the ariel was still there, and protruding from a slot in the heat-cracked dashboard was something silver, home now to a spider and its extended web. It was a compact disc. Rachel thought that if she could get in closer she may be able to see the disc’s label, but she suddenly didn’t want to.