Sleepwalker

by Michael Laimo

  She nodded. “Yes, there is.”

  “So what is it? Tell me. Who the hell are you, and what are you doing to me?”

  “I’m not doing anything to you, Richard.”

  “Then who is?”

  She hesitated, then said, “Richard, if I tell you some things, then promise you’ll listen to me and do everything I tell you to do. Remember, because of me you’re still alive. And as long as you do what I say, you’ll continue to live. That man you killed in the woods isn’t the only one that wants you dead.”

  The man in black...

  Heart pounding, Richard thought about the man in black, his exact double, now dead in the woods and no longer able to invade his dreams with threats of death. But is that really true, Richard? a random voice in his head said. Is he really dead?

  “Who is he? Who is the man in black? My twin? My clone?”

  She shifted her body against the furniture. “I think it’s best if I start at the beginning. It’s the only way you’ll be able to understand.”

  Richard sat on the bed. “I’m all ears.”

  Office

  Perhaps it was the sunlight that brought a wave of intuition to Leonard, but instead of following the hunger in his gut across the road to the diner, he listened to the foreboding suspicion sending messages to his brain, and he walked along the row of units all the way to the manager’s office at the end of the strip, questionably eyeing each door. He stopped for a moment to scan the small parking lot, but that would be too obvious. Of course. Only a pickup. Three down from that, his cruiser. A old-model station-wagon two spaces further.

  Yeah, too obvious. He would’ve seen Earl’s cruiser right away. Still, something pulled at him. He reached the office and went inside, a small bell jingling overhead. The scene was nothing more than he expected, a small brown-paneled room with a desk, a fireplace, and a few crooked prints on the wall like the ones in his room. A stale-cigarette odor hung heavy in the air. A middle-aged man emerged from behind a curtained room. He was tall and round, owlish eyes with a beard that had toast crumbs in it. He didn’t smile, just raised an eyebrow in question.

  “Morning,” Leonard said.

  The man pursed his lips, as if nervous and hiding something. Ain’t no murderer hiding here, so you can just be on your way, officer. “Morning, officer. Your friend is staying in room twelve. Want me to ring ‘im?”

  “No, thank you,” he responded, realizing it was Reese he was referring to. Apparently Reese hadn’t told him there’d be anyone else in the room with him. “I was wondering if I could take a peek at your registry?” He pointed a finger towards the littered desk, the large memo book sitting atop a mountain of newspapers.

  The man turned, looked at the desk as if unsure of what Leonard was talking about, then said, “Ayuh, sure ya can.” He staggered over, grabbed the book with two hands and brought it to Leonard. Scribbled on the front were the words, Joe G., Manager. Leonard opened the book to the last page. “Not much ins and outs these past few weeks. Once the cool weather comes, all we get is a few afternoon ron-day-vooz, heh-heh, ya hear what I’m sayin’? Maybe two or three overnights a week, although last night was pretty decent, had three stayovers.”

  Leonard did his damnedest not to be distracted by the manager’s lack of brilliance--as if there was a whole lot of managing going on here anyway--and his breath, which reeked of bad chowder and smoke, nearly making him lose his appetite. He scanned the names written in the book, saw Reese, who was the last check-in of the night. Before him, someone named Gerard Addison scribbled his name in, as well as a woman by the name of Heather Barron. He flipped back to the previous three days, saw only four other names. Nothing of interest.

  “You know these folks?”

  “Huh?”

  He turned the book to face him. “Gerard Addison. Heather Barron.”

  Manager shook his head. “No sir, they both checked in last night, maybe an hour before your friends did.”

  “They show any I.D.?”

  The man searched the air with his eyes, as if his memories were circling his head like little birdies, then said, “I don’t usually ask for it, but the woman, she offered up a driver’s license.”

  “Out of town or local?”

  “Local.”

  “What’d she look like?”

  A mile-wide grin filled Joe-manager’s face, lips thin and wet and so many gaps in his mouth that Leonard wondered how he kept any food in. “Fine specimen, if ya’ ask me. Long brown hair, pretty eyes. Might find her type on the cover of one of them ladies’ magazines.”

  Leonard’s heart shifted into high gear. “Do you remember what she was wearing?”

  “Ayuh. Jeans. Plaid shirt.”

  Son of a bitch! “What room is she in?”

  Joe-manager started fumbling for words, and then for the keys set up in a wooden lock-box next to the desk. “Is she in some sort of trouble?”

  “We need to speak to her about something, is all.”

  Holding a key from its ring, he handed it to Leonard.

  “Room 2. Second from the end.”

  Start

  “Our meeting in the cafe that day was no accident.”

  Although Richard should have expected this revelation, it still seemed a shock that their flirtatious encounter four months ago had been a part of some pre-planned agenda to a mystery that was probably larger than life itself. A surge of emotions flogged him, not so much for the fact that Pam might have been playing an advised role in someone else’s premeditated scheme, but more so that her love for him might also be a piece of some feigned performance--a way for her to get exactly what she needed from him. And it’s working just fine, he thought with dismay.

  “Pam, I’m at an utter loss. Why? For what possible reason?”

  “My goals at the time were very different than they are now.” She stopped, stared at him right in the eyes, then added, “Richard, I was sent here to kill you.”

  Richard’s heart started pounding, and he moved to stand even though he really had no place to go. In the last twenty-four hours he’d been threatened, attacked, arrested, chased, shot at, stabbed, and yet this admission seemed to be the most real threat to his life, a clear-cut demise as opposed to everything else that coasted alongside a peculiar dream-like sensation.

  She shot him a serious stare and placed a forceful yet comforting hand on his shoulder. “Richard, listen to me...not for one moment did I intend to harm you. Please believe me. I decided that I wouldn’t at the cafe and stayed true to it all this time.” Her reassurance was not entirely convincing, but better than nothing, and he accepted her pledge by settling back down onto the bed. “After I came here I realized that having you eliminated would be entirely out of the question. Not only could I not kill you, but I very much wanted you to live. I wanted you in my life. It was at that time that I decided to stay, and try to help you.”

  “Help me do what?”

  “First, help you kill the one who was trying to kill you.”

  “You mean the man in black?”

  She nodded. “That is why I’d wanted to sleep over so badly. I knew it was the only way I could help you--if I could spend the night with you. But you never let me. If I’d been there when he first showed up, I could have helped you defeat him before he found a way through.”

  Confusion tightened the strings of Richard’s mind, refused to slacken one bit. “So all this time you knew about him? You knew that he wasn’t just a figment of my imagination.”

  She nodded silently, a touch of guilt pulling her facial features taut.

  He ran a hand through his hair, beads of sweat dappling his brow. “Pam, who is he? Why does he look just like me? Where does he come from? What the hell is this all about?”

  She gestured as if to answer him, then paused and said, “It’s best to take things one step at a time. We need to save all those questions for later, when you’re able to understand everything a little better. Nothing will make sense to you if I answer them
now.”

  He looked her in the eyes, which promptly closed in apprehension. Seeing her hesitation in getting the ball rolling, he contemplated his next question carefully in attempt to not get ahead of himself. “You said when you got here. So where are you from?”

  “I’m--I’m from another place...”

  Richard immediately thought of his mother and his daughter, each of them coming from ‘a better place’, as Julia used to say to him in his dreams. A place where they could be happy again, live together as a loving family. He cocked his head to one side, savoring the ghostly memory, then looked at Pam in a gesture of continuation. “Is this place you speak of the same place the man in black comes from?”

  “Well...not exactly.”

  “That’s not very specific.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  “So where is ‘not exactly’? Could that be the same place my dream-mother and daughter are from?” He said this in a slightly derisive manner, spreading his arms in question, frustration quickly getting the best of him; so far, he still had no answers.

  She grinned, understanding of his confusion. “Yes...sort of.” She paused as Richard shook his head and rubbed his eyes, then said, “Let’s just say it’s ‘not here’.”

  “And where exactly is here, Pam? Or is it Heather? Should I call you Heather from now on?”

  “No, you can call me Pam, if that’s what you’re comfortable with.”

  “I’m not comfortable with anything anymore, including all the roundabout answers you’re giving me. Frankly, I’m not sure I can believe anything you say. It seems that you’ve spent the entire time we’ve known each other putting on some wild charade, hiding all the truths behind my delusions and allowing me to think I was fucking loo-loo when in turn someone, you for all I know, has been playing some kind of bizarre game with me all this time.”

  “It’s no game, Richard.”

  “Shit, Pam, this has been going on for two years! Have you known about me this entire time? About my problem?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jesus Christ, so what am I supposed to do now?”

  “Richard, I fully understand your mistrust in me, and realize that it may be very difficult believing everything I say, but listen to this: from here on in you must accept everything I tell you as the truth, and you must do everything I tell you to do, no questions asked. The reason why I never told you anything in the past was because I couldn’t, because if I did I would be killed, simple as that. I’m telling you now because if we work through this together, there’s still a chance of us getting out of this alive. Honestly, I could very easily walk out the door right now and leave you here to fend for yourself. But I won’t do that. You know why? Because you’ll be dead in no time. And I care about you too much to let that happen.”

  Skeptical, Richard said, “I did all right without you.”

  “Are you certain, Richard? Can’t you see that the shit’s hitting the fan right now? Damn it, you don’t even know what the hell’s going on. You haven’t the slightest clue. So don’t tell me you can survive without me. I saved you from the cops. I took a bullet for you. And much more you don’t know about.”

  Richard stood, anger rising in his blood like lava from a volcano, his temper about to erupt. “How do you expect me to believe that? You broke into my fucking condo and attacked me yesterday!”

  She stared at him, quiet, presumably waiting for him to calm down. Once he caught his breath, he sat back down upon her silent command. She then said, “That wasn’t me, Richard.”

  Her outrageous claim seemed to echo in his head, like the reverberation of an announcement at a ballgame. His immediate thoughts were to shun the remark as another in a string of falsehoods, but his instincts told him otherwise. Would anyone believe that the man in black wasn’t you, Richard? Of course not. He was your spitting image. And he was real, not a figment of your imagination. Who’s to say Pamela doesn’t have a twin nemesistoo?

  He gazed at her, a picture of beauty even under all the pressure, the stress. The lies. Yet something told him that there might be some truth riding beneath the cloak of security she wore. He supposed she could’ve simply left him here in the middle of the night to battle the unknown by himself. But she didn’t. She stayed, showed him affection. But still, the coin could be flipped the other way, and she might be harboring some hidden agenda by keeping him close by. There is definitely some personal incentive on her part, he thought. So what is it? Money? Fame? No. Somehow, he doubted this, and was prepared to bequeath his trust.

  “So if it wasn’t you at the condo who attacked me, then who was it?”

  “Well, it was me, but it wasn’t.”

  More circles. “Like the man in black is to me?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Gee, I finally got one right. Pam, I’m done playing games, ‘fess up. You said we needed to get moving, and I’m ready to go, just give me the basics. What the hell is going on?”

  She bent down and picked up her bag. “I’ll talk as we move.”

  He grabbed her arm, just below her injury. She winced a bit, locking eyes with him. Strands of hair fell across her lips and stuck there, like wisps of silk.

  “One thing before we leave. Who sent you here to kill me?”

  She blew out a breath of exasperation, then said, “You did, Richard.”

  Knock

  Leonard stood before the door leading into room 2, an ear cocked and listening to the muffled voices of a man and woman engaged in heavy discussion. He couldn’t tell if the woman inside sounded anything like Pamela Bergin, he’d had only one conversation with her, but damn, if he hadn’t seen Richard Sparke’s dead body with his very own eyes, he’d bet a week’s pay that the man inside was Sparke himself. It sounded exactly like him. Briefly his thoughts went back to Delaney’s notes, how the doctor referred to Sparke’s ‘twin nemesis’ and its rather major role in his affliction. Whether the term held any true psychological denotation, or if it were simply a loose phrase describing Sparke’s possible split-personality disorder, he couldn’t say for sure. But he thought, what if this twin-nemesis was for real? A true twin brother perhaps, separated at birth only to be reunited in some crooked scheme. Or a clone? Weren’t geneticists duplicating monkeys now? Okay, Len, you’re getting carried away. You’ve read too many science fiction novels. Oh yeah? Then explain this: how is it that I heard, with my very own ears, the voice of a little girl on the tape of Sparke’s session? While he was under hypnosis, no less. Did he make that voice? Or was it the ghost of his dead daughter? Maybe it was the little girl from the movie Poltergeist?

  No single theory, no matter how rational or remote it seemed, held steadfastly true right now. Leonard was prepared to believe anything at this point, and was determined to find out.

  He sensed that all the answers to this mystery would be far from conventional, untouched upon and not even close to any of his educated guesses. If this were one of the classic science fiction novels I’m so familiar with, then I’d have plenty of save-the-day approaches to make towards this mystery. How about taking out my ray-gun and zapping the enemy?

  All he had right now, regardless of the situation, was his next step.

  Or do I? he thought.

  He raised his right fist, set to knock on the door, then stopped. He leaned and gazed across the strip of rooms, at their anonymous doors, and then at the lifeless parking lot looking much like it did minutes earlier. Nothing new here. A reprint snapshot from before.

  His mind wandered with guided purpose--his intuition seeking ideas and even calling upon the mysteries he’d encountered in some of H.G. Wells’ novels. What would one of Wells’ characters do in this type of situation? He thought about it for a quick, resourceful moment. Sparke, who claimed he didn’t drive, adeptly carjacked a vehicle moments after fleeing a scene where each departing suspect could have been Sparke himself,

  (twin nemesis)

  two sets of footprints at Samantha Sparke’s home, one matching th
ose at Delaney’s--these prints appearing to have belonged to Sparke, disputing Carol Nelson’s claim that Sparke calmly walked out the front door,

  (twin nemesis)

  Delaney’s notes,

  (twin nemesis)

  Delaney’s voice on the tape,

  (twin nemesis)

  Everywhere, every scene, the probability of a third person being involved, even two years ago, in Sparke’s very own bedroom. I’ll bet another week’s pay that if we’d scoured Sparke’s bedroom back then, we’d have found that same powdery blue residue all over the place.

  So instead of knocking on the door, Leonard quietly stepped away, realizing now that it might be prudent to have Reese and Kevin there for back-up. Regardless of how sweet and cordial Pamela Bergin acted yesterday afternoon, there would be no underestimating her unscrupulousness given all the tricks she’d pulled out of her hat--God only knew what kind of debauchery she had up her sleeves now. Their sleeves, whoever it was in the room with her.

  Twin nemesis?

  Instead of knocking on the door, he began walking back to his room when again his intuition crept up on him, this time with a more solid idea. Emulating the lead detective in H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man, he circled back, passed room two and made his way around to the rear of the motel. A rust-mottled dumpster hugged the side wall. A concrete path alongside ended abruptly, plunging into witch grass and wildflowers growing wildly in a haphazard patch. The field of weeds reached out like a stadium crowd, flowed lazily down a small embankment into a thinly wooded area. Beyond, ash trees and briny shrubs moved deep into a heavily shaded area.

  The ground here, mostly hidden from the sailing morning sun, held onto last night’s rain as if it were a treasure, the jelly-like mud grabbing the top of his heels and offering ugly fart-like sounds with each footfall. Thoughts of the beautiful Pamela Bergin flitted in and out of his mind as he scanned the swampy area. Unsuccessfully he tried to gather a motive for her cooperation in this puzzling crime, a crime where the demand to commit murder overruled the option to cease operations. It really made no sense, lawful or ethical. Yet still, with all the shadows and secrets and questions surrounding it, nothing would stop Leonard from unearthing the root of its cause--undoubtedly Pamela Bergin harbored similar inspirations in her quest to perpetuate a full roll-out of her scheme.