Bad Dreams

by Kim Newman

  He was doling his words out carefully now, putting an actorish emphasis on them. If a politician talked to her like this, she would campaign vigorously against him.

  Skinner trailed off, his face a mask of wistful resignation. He reached below the horizon of the desktop, and she heard a drawer being pulled open. He dipped a hand into it like a smooth gangster reaching for a concealed gun. He held up a purple lizard, gripping its tail in his fingers but letting it settle in his palm. The little reptile looked around, blinking spirally.

  'Pretty, isn't he?'

  'Oh sure, he's adorable.'

  He held the lizard up to his eyeline, and examined it. He kissed it on its minutely horned snout, then bit its head off. He dropped the cleanly decapitated thing on the desk blotter. It bled very little, but twisted and thrashed like a loose power cable. Skinner chewed for a few seconds, then spat over his shoulder. Anne heard the pulped skull plop into an 1880s barbershop spittoon.

  Skinner produced another lizard, smaller and greener, with a frilly collar.

  'Want one?'

  'No thanks.'

  'I thought not.'

  He bit again, spat again. Anne sat, hands idle in her lap, coffee abandoned, watching this polite Monster indulge his vice. Kicking bodies wound down like clockwork toys on the blotter.

  'Well, Anne, here we are…'

  'So?'

  'So what are you going to do about it?'

  'You tell me.'

  'Urn, well, the natural course of things would involve me pinning you down - and you know I could do that - and feeding off you. Everything up till now had just been an entertainment, like silly Amelia's party games. Feeding is serious. You don't understand what that means, but you must have some idea by now.'

  'And if you feed off me?'

  'You'll be with Judi. You'll be just like Judi, in fact. Not that that is entirely a bad thing, but I think it might be wasteful…'

  He leaned forwards, shading his kills, supporting his head on a bridge of his interlaced fingers. He had mismatched cufflinks.

  'You have qualities, Anne. I could make you like me.'

  She was annoyed. 'You could never make me like you.'

  'No, not like, like. You could be one of the Kind.'

  'You mean I could live forever, see the world, torture people and bite the heads off lizards? That's an awfully tempting offer, but…'

  He raised a little finger and silenced her.

  'Yes,' he said, 'you have qualities. You're not actually that witty, but very few people would even try to make jokes in a situation like this. Irony is a much underrated attitude.'

  'And how do people get to be like you, Skinner?'

  'I've always been one of the Kind. You can never have that, of course, but I can teach you things, do things for you. It's not common, but it's not unprecedented either…'

  'Would I be right in assuming that there aren't any lady monsters running around these years?'

  He paused after that one, thinking carefully. He was slower than he used to be.

  'You are very perceptive,' he said, finally. 'To answer your implied rather than your actual question, yes. I would welcome the company of an equal. Not that you could be my equal without a substantial investment of time and effort. As for whether there are others of the Kind left… well… as far as I know, there are not…'

  Suddenly, with a squirt of creepy excitement, Anne realised Skinner was lying.

  'I am the last,' he said.

  'There ought to be a protection order out on you. You don't want to wind up like the dodo or the passenger pigeon.'

  She was shaking now, not with fear but with rage. She wanted to take him apart. She tried not to explode. Skinner was crazy but calm.

  'Passenger pigeons,' he mused. 'I saw them, you know. You've heard how they used to flock. They could blot out the sun for hours. Your country was a marvel until recently, and you covered it in concrete…'

  'Me personally?'

  'Yes, you. And Judi. And people just like you.'

  'So we paved paradise and put up a parking lot?'

  'Ha! I hate America very much, Anne. More, even, than Egypt. I can't even go there any more. I was at Antietam, you know, in your War Between the States…'

  'I got through high school, thank you very much.'

  'I'm sorry. During the ten years of your country's ill-advised involvement in Indochina, some 50,000 Americans were killed in action. At the Battle of Antietam, 40,000 fell in one afternoon.'

  'And those were the good old days?'

  There was something weird in his eyes now. '1862 isn't my old days, Anne. It's not even my yesterday. It's my this morning.'

  'What put you off the States then?'

  He shrugged, a ribbon of skin peeling from his cheek as his grin relaxed. 'Shall we say, a loss of vision?'

  'So, if I marry you, we can't go visit with Mom and Dad?'

  'I don't want to marry you.'

  'What kind of a girl do you think I am?'

  'A stupider one than you seem. Like your sister…'

  His left eye had drooped shut, covered with dead skin. Skinner was tired, sleepy, worn out. He was still arguing, but she could sense that his heart was not in it any more.

  She knew that she could get out of this.

  'By the way,' he said spitefully, 'you'll never visit your father again. I heard on the world service news just now that…'

  With a Bruce Lee yell, she burst out of her chair and threw herself against his desk. It turned on its side, and she grabbed hold of the two upper legs. Skinner's chair rolled backwards against the featureless wall. Her knees were bruised, and she was not really strong enough to heft the whole piece of furniture, but she pushed with her entire body. A drawer came free and crunched up like a matchbox. Lizards scampered beneath her feet, dispersing with unbelievable speed.

  All she could see of Skinner was one pale hand, gripping the top edge of the desk, and his weakly kicking, grey-trousered legs. She slammed the desk against the wall. A desk leg came off. She drew back, and slammed again. Skinner grunted and ruptured. There was a burp of foul air. Inside Skinner, a gurgling started and stopped.

  She heaved the desk aside. A partition fell over. Skinner was hunched up, arms over his head. She kicked him viciously about the shins, and battered his head and torso with the broken leg. She pried his arms apart, and smashed in his face. It dented easily. His hair came off in one piece like a wig. His chest fell in.

  She stopped hitting him, and stepped back. There was no noise now, except the whir of a concealed extractor fan. She bent over Skinner and picked up his face. It was like a crumpled linen handkerchief. It tore and she had to wipe her hand on the wall to get the cobwebby scum off her fingers.

  All that was left was an empty skin.

  TWELVE

  NAKED, HE woke up. His long body had a reddish tinge, and he was tender all over. Even the soles of his feet were soft. His skin was young and tight, unshrivelled. He felt his face. The nose was a little flat, but the flesh was firm. The change had been relatively painless, and he thought he would be satisfied with the results.

  Still a little light-headed, he stood up. There was a kimono hung on a hook nearby. He clothed himself. He rubbed the clear gum away from his eyes. He had not bled anywhere.

  Anne was standing at the other side of the office, holding bits of his old skin. He was between her and the door.

  He was not sorry she had turned him down, but, newly reborn, he was not ready to feed on her yet. He was still overnourished from his pre-change gluttony, and he had to reestablish control over the ghosts he already had before he could take on another one. Especially a ghost who was liable to be doing a lot of struggling.

  'Anne,' he shouted, 'over here.' His voice had an unfamiliar, boyish sound in his ears. He liked it.

  She turned to look at him, the bitch.

  He grinned. His teeth were sharper now. With simian agility, he leaped on a desk. While he was in this state, he wanted to stretc
h himself a little. His backbone was elongating, making use of his extra ribs. His fingers developed an extra knuckle apiece. His toes turned to fingers. He flattened his hair to his almost oval skull, slicking it down with natural juices. He wanted to sing.

  She was scared. Perhaps for the first time, she was really scared. He could taste it, and he was aroused.

  'Keep young and beautiful,' he crooned to her, 'if you want to be loved…'

  She came for him, for the door. He twisted on himself, gripping the desk with his handclaws, and flipped his lower body around. He took a semi-orgasmic pleasure from his own muscle strength.

  He was going to let her go again; for a while. She could not get far. There was only the Dream out there. He had his lines into her head. He could reel her in and land her any time he wanted. First, he had to give her a few more jolts, tire her out, take the fight out of her…

  He reared up on his hind legs, and sprang in front of the door. Her way was barred. He shrilled one of the old songs, in the language he never got to use these days. In the song, he boasted of his ghosts.

  Then he stepped aside, opened the door, and mimed an 'after you'.

  She was past him faster than one of the lizards and in the hallway. She looked at the lift doors and - clever girl! - decided to take the stairs.

  Pausing in the stairwell, she turned to look back at him. Was that supposed to be a come-on? Was she enjoying the chase. In any case, he was not ready to follow yet.

  She stuck her middle finger up in the empty air, and said 'suck on that salamander!'

  Then she was gone.

  THIRTEEN

  THE BUSINESS OF getting out of the building was straightforward. She had been expecting everdescending stairs, windowless walls and doorless lobbies. Exposure to Skinner's worldview had led her to assume his office would be the only inhabitable portion of a skyscraping concrete coffin.

  She was wrong. They had not even been more than five or six storeys above the street. And, on every floor, the stairwell was outfitted with a picture window. The eternity lighting made dark mirrors of the plateglass oblongs, but she could make out the outlines of a world beyond. There were points of light out in the night, and dark shapes, moving things, people, ghosts…

  All of which worried her; it meant that he was saving up for something special. 'Snake-hearted bastard!' she spat.

  The lobby was spacious, flavourlessly modernist and empty. The stand-up ashtrays were empty, and the continent-shaped patches of fading damp on the tiled floor testified to the fairly recent presence of the after-hours cleaners. There was a revolving door cylinder, but Anne chose to push against one of the sets of con ventional swing doors. That seemed less risky. She stepped outside. The swing doors swished shut behind her, sucking back the bubble of warmth that had been protecting her.

  Back in the night, it was bloody cold. Her breath frosted around her in a cloud, and she pushed her ungloved hands into her coat pockets before the chill bit into her fingers. She was on a flat expanse of concrete twenty feet off the ground. Wide, apparently free-floating slabs stepped downward from either end of the terrace. Beneath her was a shallow, well-lit pond. The dirty blue bottom was covered by yard-round scallops of coconut glace. Ice hung off the tricorn fountains like drapes of frozen tripe.

  She knew exactly where she was, for the first time since… Since when? New York, New Orleans, Sam's Bar-B-Q and Grill, the tube train, the station, Soho, Amelia Dorf's house, the taxi, Soho again, Nina's flat, the Club Des Esseintes, the Nellie Dean, Cam's hotel, the hospital, her flat, her bed? When this was over, where would she be? In bed, waiting to be woken up by Inspector Hollis' phone call? Or in Skinner, waiting to be conjured back into some kind of half-life?

  Right now, she was on the plaza outside Centre Point. The reinforced concrete and glass erection stabbing the empty sky above her was at the intersection of Charing Cross Road, Oxford Street, Tottenham Court Road and New Oxford Street. From where she was, she could see the large yellow flag outside Foyle's, the famous bookshop where she had always found it impossible to find anything. The view was all very detailed and realistic.

  She had heard that most of Centre Point was untenanted, because London W1 rents were too high for even the wealthiest businesses. There was, or perhaps had been, a hostel for the homeless on one of the floors. For her, the white elephant was one of the city's best investments. When she had first come to London, it was the first useful landmark to impress itself upon her - unlike most touristy places, it was in the middle of the area where most of her business meetings had to take place - and she still used it often as a point of reference when in the centre of town. Furthermore, it was perched on top of the tube station she had to use most often, and the 134 bus, which went right past her flat, terminated underneath it.

  The familiarity was not comforting, although she knew that she had something to do with the selection and recreation of this particular plot as part of the Dream. It must be about four o'clock in the morning, after the departure of the latest of the late night people and before the arrival of the earliest of the early morning men. A single car circled the building and vanished into a side street, carefully negotiating a one-way system designed to cope with the heaviest traffic in the country even though it made incredibly complicated the process of making a simple right turn.

  Everything was given a pale blue illumination by the street lighting. A few Christmas displays winked. It all looked real, but Anne knew better by now.

  She looked up at the building, trying to read an expression on its long tall face. She thought she could make out a gameshow host grin, barracuda-toothed and insincere. Skinner's eyes were somewhere up there. She smiled herself as she backed away, realising the mistake. Somehow, Centre Point had wound up with the Empire State Building's dirigible mooring mast.

  'When does the gorilla show up, old man?'

  A venomous frost had spread like lichen across many of the upper windows. A sheet of ice the size of a large Vermeer detached itself and slid free. Anne's heart clutched like a fist as the glassy mass shattered ten feet away from her. Cracked ice spread towards her shoes like a flood of marbles. Skinner was reminding her to keep running.

  She hit the steps and got off the plaza. The usually impossible intersection was easy to cross against the lights. The car, a boxy '30s model, had gone. There were no people at all in sight, which proved she was still in Skinner's wonderland. Even in the deadest of the dead hours, this place was populated. Not as thickly as nearby Soho or the West End clubland, perhaps, but these were still 24-hour streets.

  So, what next?

  Running had done her no good so far, but she was getting the idea that it was expected of her. Putting up a stiff resistance might not help her win, but it got her a few bonus points. However, she also knew that nothing was going to persuade Skinner to let her off the forfeits. She even got the feeling that the more she inconvenienced him in the short term, the more he would get out of feeding off her in the end.

  Feeding off her? What exactly did that mean? Doubtless, something unbelievably nasty.

  Of the four main avenues, she chose Oxford Street. She started to walk towards Marble Arch, then turned left, heading back into Soho. The place seemed to be in the middle of this business. It was like Skinner's secret lair. Somewhere in the vice heart of town, the Monster was waiting for her.

  She had no crucifix or wooden stake or pistol-load of silver bullets or flaming torch or hammer and sickle or bell, book and candle. That stuff would have comforted her less than an M-16, or one of those skeleton-handled Uzi sub-machine guns, or an anti-personnel rocket launcher. Preferably, she would like the Air Force to lay down some pretty heavy napalm around Skinner, then send in the Green Berets led by John Wayne, Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Incredible Hulk and Godzilla. After that, and only after that, she would ask the President to fall back on their country's thermonuclear resources. Even then, she figured her chances at about twenty-eighty against. All she was going
into Hell with was her mind. Christ, that had better be enough…

  Gradually, she became aware of the ghosts. Not used to them, exactly, but alert to their presence. She had them pegged as a sideshow, and did not want to expend any energy worrying about that sort of thing. She would need everything for the Main Event. They were in shadows, behind shop windows, in pedestrian subways, congregated in car parks. She did not want to look too closely, half-aware that concentrating on them would give them more substance. Then, they might get in her way. So far, they were not bothering her like the things on the train had, but they could easily be provoked.

  In a lamp halo, standing at a shelterless bus stop, she found a man from the past, dressed in a white tropical suit and panama hat out of A Night in Casablanca. He had spats, and a wing collar, knife-edge trouser pleats, and no face. The cigarette in his holder was burning to ash without any help from him. He had no mouth, so there was no point to his habit. Otherwise, he was placid and unfrightening.

  Likewise, the gaggle of gypsies in Soho Square, huddled under the eaves of the gardener's hut, nursing their wind-whipped fires, quaking with superstitious fear. Their horses whinnied and shifted between the shafts of their gingerbread-decorated caravans. They made signs at her like Transylvanian peasants in a Dracula movie, warning her not to go to Borgo Pass on Walpurgis Night. Were they trying to help her? Grandfather Nastase, dead long before her birth, had been from the Carpathians. Or was she being misled? She waved to them, trying to be jaunty, and kept on walking.

  The next apparitions, which she encountered in a passage between Dean Street and Wardour Street, were a little more hostile. She was only a few doors away from the place where Nina's flat had been when two men in vaguely piratical costumes stepped out. Had they been visiting Tina - Teenage Model One Flight Up - or just waiting to ambush her? They had headscarves, baggy pants and cutlasses. One of them touched a cigarette lighter's flame to the oiled and pleated ends of his beard and moustache, setting them to burn slowly. They snarled and showed their claws like threatened cats, but stayed away from her.