The Last Dream by Gordon R. Dickson
There was the squeak of a chair from the darkness and the heavy, creaking steps of a large man; a thick form loomed up out of the cubbyhole to stand with belly pressed against the worn inner edge of the counter. Barin looked into a wide face, the face of a man past middle age, heavy-lipped and broad-nosed, above a thick, coarse body loosened only slightly from a younger strength.
“For how long?” The hoarse voice was now directed at Barin.
“A couple of days—maybe three.” Again Barin thought he caught the trailing wisp of a sigh from the man behind him. He added quickly, to forestall questions, “I’m a photographer. A writer. I’m doing a piece on the woods up here. I’d like to explore a bit—for a day or two.”
“Sign.” One thick hand swiveled the guest book toward him. Another passed him the stub of a pencil on the end of a string. He took it and signed. He laid it down and looked up into the face of the man behind the desk.
“I’ll be eating my meals in town,” he said. “Any idea where—” He left the question hanging, but the man behind the desk did not take it up and a long silence drew itself out between them.
“Certainly you—Rosach—” The voice of the tall man again.
“We can take care of you,” said Rosach, abruptly. “Not now. Too late. Breakfast.”
“Oh,” said Barin; and he tried to sound disappointed, although he did not feel hungry. “Any place else in town?”
“No.” Rosach reached under the counter and produced a key.
“Up there,” he said, jerking a thumb to his left. “Second door on the right.”
Barin turned and looked, seeing what he had not noticed before, a narrow stairway that led up and back from beside the desk.
“Thank you,” he said, taking the cold metal of the key into the palm of his hand. He picked up the suitcase he had brought in with him and started up. At the turn of the stairs, he hesitated for a second and looked back. He could see the two faces, the heavy and the sad, upturned to him, caught in the patch of light from the desk and watching after him.
He went on up the stairs, emerging at the top into a long, narrow corridor, lit at the far end by a window which still gave on the fading sky. He moved down it, his shoes giving off no sound against the hall carpet. And, as he went, a girl emerged from one of the rooms farther down the hall and came toward him.
She was dressed in a simple, loose dress of some dark color and the blackness of her hair was gathered together in a bun at the back of her head. Although she could not avoid seeing him, she gave no sign of it and came toward him, looking through and past him, carrying some towels over her arm.
He reached his door before he met her; and turned to insert the key in the lock. It was his intention to stop her as she passed, to ask her some small question about the bedsheets or the location of the bathroom. But her indifference to his presence made him hesitate; and he stepped back out of her way, as her dress passed him.
In the light of the distant window her face stood out sharp and clear. It was unadorned and serious, the pale, white skin thinly stretched over the delicate bones of the face, the lips soft and straight and with two slight shadows under the narrow protrusion of her cheekbones.
He saw her in profile as she went by; and his breath caught, because for a second the shadow below the near cheekbone was gone, the graceful line of the narrow jaw, the smooth, high forehead, outlined against the dark wall opposite—and it was as if he gazed at his secret cameo.
He woke to lethargy, and gazed dully about the dingy room, wondering at himself and his whereabouts in that little uncertainty that always followed his wakening.
He must have gone to bed immediately on entering his room the evening before, because all he could remember were the wild fantasies of his dreams—his dreams about the girl who resembled exactly that cameo about which no one in the world had known, but himself.
It was a cameo he had stolen from a house locked up for the summer, back when he had been a boy. He had kept it secretly to himself and woven about it dark dreams of a strange love of the flesh. He still had it, locked in his safety deposit box, back in the city. Not even Ellen knew about it—Ellen, whom he had now decided to marry, just before he had slipped away on this final trip. It belonged to that dark side of him that he intended to bury forever.
Now there was no thought of Ellen, or the magazine article he had come up here to do. A sullen fire burned in him. Before it, the life he had envisioned with Ellen, and his work, were darkly shadowed. He had come up here on a hint, a breath of rumor from the country about this village. The people outside it considered it to be haunted in some strange way—haunted, in this day and age!
He had laughed. But it had attracted him. A good chance, he had thought, for a humorous article on back-country superstitions. Now, he was no longer interested. It was the girl that demanded all his attention, the girl in the corridor.
He washed and shaved himself quickly in the veined washbowl of the bathroom down the hall, dressed and went downstairs. Behind the desk, the unchanging darkness seemed vacant of all life. He hunted by himself for the dining room and found it at the end of the passageway he had noticed when he had first stepped in. A small room with three square tables and a row of windows along one wall.
He sat down and rang the little bell that stood with its dull silver gleaming the center of the white and threadbare tablecloth. The tiny tinkle sounded in the room and echoed away through the half-open door that led beyond, he surmised, to the kitchen. He lit a cigarette, and waited.
It would, he thought, looking out the window, be another hot day. The haze was already stirring the air above the street; and the hot glare of the sun, reaching him through the glass, was no aid in rousing him from the lethargy with which he had awakened, but reached into him with smouldering sullenness and stirred something thick and hot within the animal part of him. He felt at once dull and eager, with the feverish urge to concupiscence induced by sickness and being long in bed. The smoke from his cigarette went nowhere, but coiled about him, hanging in the still air; and he waited impatiently for his service.
Paced footsteps sounded at last from beyond the door. The girl of the corridor came through its opening and up to his table. Now, in the strong sunlight from the windows, he could see that her dress was grey, but her hair was as black as ever.
“What would you like?” she said.
Now that the question was asked, he found that no more than on the preceding evening had he any desire for food. But he was committed to the ritual of eating breakfast by his demands of yesterday; and moreover, he wanted to prolong his contact with this girl.
“What’s your name?” he asked, smiling up at her.
“Dineen,” she said without change of expression. “What would you like?”
As she stood there, attendant and silent, her perfect passivity touched sudden flame from the heat within him, like spontaneous combustion in a compost heap. So sharp was the chemical change that he felt his face cool with the shock; and to cover it up, spoke quickly.
“Bacon and eggs. Anything.”
She turned and went out, the click of her footsteps fading away behind the door. He sank back into the smouldering of his lethargy.
It was some minutes later when she returned; and he looked at the platter in her hands, startled to remember what he had been waiting for. Picking up his fork, he felt a slight twinge of revulsion from the food. She turned to go.
“Dineen,” he said.
She turned, calm and unsurprised. He searched for the color of her eyes; but even in the light from the window, this escaped him.
“Yes?”she said.
“I don’t know this town of yours,” he said with his lips, still watching her. “How do I get out into the woods?”
“Take any road,” she said.
“Any road?”
“Yes.” She waited a second further, but the sound of her voice went flying away and away into nothingness in his head, as if it would echo into eternity; and h
He sat, wrung with a desire to follow her that was countered by a feverish inertia like that of the weakly sick. After a little while he turned to his plate and ate automatically, not tasting the food, but feeling it soft and slab-like upon his tongue. It was nothing, but it woke him up. He finished his cold coffee and got up.
He went out; down the dark passageway, through the front door and out into the sunlight. Its glare seized him, blinding and baffling him, and he realized with a start that the morning was already gone. It was high noon. He walked off through the streets at random…
He stood in the hills surrounding the town and looked down on the hot gleam of its rooftops. The air was motionless and under the glare of light, the dancing heatwaves seemed to cause the whole conglomeration of buildings to seethe and boil. The forest about it stood like a protecting rampart. Its coolness held him. It smelled cleanly of natural scents, like his Ellen. And he was reminded of her again and he felt the urge to give up the notion of work here, to pack and drive, and so slip back into the protection of the outside world.
But the impulse was like the distant twinge of a nerve, the prick of a dentist’s needle in an area where the novocain has already gone to work. For, superimposed on Ellen’s image came the face of his cameo, the face of Dineen. And the wish to break through the invisible barrier of reticence he felt in the girl, returned to him again and again, like the pounding of a drum, until he could feel the feverish thump and plunge of his heart, beating in unison with it.
It was the town, he thought. The town guarded her. The unanimity of its conclave of dusty streets, through which he had walked on his way just now to these hills, its solitary figures, just out of hailing distance, its still houses with their blank and eyeless windows, these walled him off from Dineen. He had felt the alien spirit of this place from the first. He had recognized it at the hotel desk and when she had spoken in the hotel dining room. He had felt it on his way to here, passing the houses. Whole and alive, they had stood, lining either side of his way, their windows unbroken and the half-glimpsed hint of a limp curtain here and there behind a glassy edge. But silent, silent—in tenanted silence. He had tried vainly to see women and children peeping from those dead glass eyes.
It was the town, he thought, climbing higher on a little knoll for a better view. It was not Dineen that held him at a distance, but the town. Once within its walls of suspicion and distrust—they were small-town, country people and they undoubtedly knew how the rest of the countryside spoke of them—he would find himself the stronger of the two of them. He could break through to her core, inside.
He struck his right fist suddenly into the palm of his left hand. Of course! The town distrusted him because he was an outsider. They thought he had come in an evening, and would leave in a morning. As long as they believed this, their reticence would hold. But undermine that—and the wall of their defenses would come tumbling down. He would be one of them, not one against many, but one against the one that was Dineen; and in that contest he felt sure he would be superior. That was the answer, to announce that he was staying, that he would be among them henceforward and that there was no point in their standing aloof, for he was in their midst and of them.
So, thinking this, the old emotion of the cameo came upon him, and in the still glow of the sun and the silent wood a haze seemed to form about him so that he felt himself a dream moving in a world of dreams; and near and far off, past, present and future, were all no more than things and shadows of his mind. And, turning, he went back down the slope and once more into the village.
The streets closed once again about him. He drifted on down their dusty sidewalks, past the soundless houses and dead stores. They seemed not so remote now. The figures of townspeople swam in and out of his sight, half a block and a block away. He wandered at random, half-expecting at any moment to come upon Dineen; until, turning around a corner no different from the rest, he came suddenly upon a small blind alley, at the far end of which a tiny old woman, bent and wrinkled, hunched and spat at the sight of him.
“Go away!” she screamed in a cracked voice that struck distantly upon his ears. “Get away from here!”
He looked at her dreamily as she crouched against the wall of the alley’s far end. He thought of the answer that should reassure her.
“No, no,” he said. “I’m a new neighbor. Just moved in. You should get to know me.”
He stepped forward and reached out his hand to her; but she cowered away from him still, and went on screaming, “Get away! Get away!” in her thin, ancient voice.
“Is that any way to treat the citizens?” he said, smiling at her. “A fellow citizen?”
“Get away!” she cried. “Help!”
“But I’m settling down here,” he said, walking toward her. “I’ll buy a house—pay taxes, you know? I’ll be settling down with one of your local girls. When Dineen and I—” he hesitated suddenly at the word married, as if the crazy old woman would pounce on it and twist it into something mocking or obscene.
“—settle things,” he finished, lamely.
She screamed more loudly, a long and piercing wail. He stood right in front of her now, his hands outstretched. And suddenly he was conscious of movement behind him and Mikkelson, the tall, sad man, pushed past his shoulder to take the old woman by her monkey hands and lead her past him and away to a door in one wall of the alley that opened on blackness and took her in.
The door closed and Mikkelson turned back to face Barin.
“She’s old,” he said in his tired voice, “and not quite right, sometimes.”
“I guessed something like that,” said Barin. “You know, I was only trying to be friendly. I’ve just been thinking of staying. Settling down here—” He thought he saw the shadow of a frown beginning to form on the tall man’s face. “—Of course, you’re right, she’s not quite—”
He hesitated. Mikkelson turned and began to lead the way out of the alley. Barin followed, feeling a sudden spurt of anger.
“She ought to be in an institution!” he said.
“Some of our people here,” Mikkelson turned his head as he walked, “have ideas brought over from the old country. They don’t believe in sending away relatives. They keep them to themselves, in some dark room.”
The words struck Barin with an odd ring; but they were back out on the street now and he saw a chance to show his agreement with the spirit of the local people.
“And why not?” he said. “Probably the best way, when you come right down to it. Are there many around here like her?”
“A few,” said Mikkelson. “Some. Maybe more than you’d think—by outside standards.”
“Oh, not me,” said Barin. He made an open gesture with his hand. “It’s like the stories about this place. I’ll be honest with you. The rest of the country around here seems to think you people are haunted. In fact, that’s the article I actually came up here to do. Quaint country superstitions, you know. Well, very possibly it’s this practice with the old and senile that’s given them that notion about you. After all, it’s all relative. Who can tell? Who can set the standards of sanity or insanity? Looked at from one point of view everyone is a little insane. Or everyone is sane.”
Mikkelson turned his large eyes upon him.
“That’s true,” said the tall man. “I suppose you lost your way?”
“Why, yes. That’s what happened,” said Barin. “Your streets—and I was so busy thinking I didn’t notice where I was going.” He smiled at Mikkelson. “It was quite easy.”
“Very easy,” said Mikkelson, “even in a small town like this.” He pointed up the street. “There’s your hotel, now. I have to turn off here.”
Barin looked up and saw the porch and sign of the hotel half a block away. He turned to thank Mikkelson, but the tall man had already turned and was striding off down a street to Barin’s right.
Barin went on to the hotel.
In the dining room that evening, he caught Dineen by the wrist after she had brought him his dinner coffee and held her.
“Sit down,” he begged.
She looked from his face to his hand, his long fingers enclosing her slim wrist with the white hand limp beyond it. She looked back with no expression on her face and sat down. When he released her arm she drew it to her and out of reach below the edge of the tabletop.
“I love you,” he said.
“No,” she said, and shook her head.
“You don’t understand,” he said, leaning toward her. “You think it’s impossible, the sort of thing that happens in movies, that I could come in from nowhere and see you once and fall in love. But it is possible. It is!”
She shook her head again.
“Listen,” he said, putting his face close to hers. “If love is something different to you, it can happen this way. You think I’m just talking—that I’ll be going away again. But I won’t. I’ve been looking for a place to settle; and I like it here. You think about that.” He put his hands under her elbows and lifted, so that she got to her feet. He pushed her toward the kitchen door. “Go on, think about it.”
She went off, turning about like a sleepwalker. He watched her go.
The next morning, the waters of sleep were turgid and heavier, harder to brush from him. He woke to a feeling of heavy dullness and indifference so deep it seemed to hold his body in near paralysis.
He rose and dressed with great effort. Nor, this morning, could he bring himself to make the effort of shaving and washing. Dully, he went out of his room and downstairs.
The front door of the hotel opened under the pressure of the palms of his hands and he stepped out again into the sunlight. He went down the three steps to the sidewalk; and, turning right, began to walk aimlessly through the town.