Nightmares, p.8
Nightmares, page 8
The girls murmured to each other. Five days! That’s a record! No one ever goes down in five days.
In the next ward there are Pretty Boys, but not so many of them. They are much quieter than the girls. They sit in their beds and close their eyes most of the day. The ward is thick, hushed. They don’t get many visitors and they don’t want me as their dentist. They didn’t like me to attend them. They bit at me as if I were trying to thrust my fingers down their throats to choke them.
Outside, Dan waited, staring in.
“Do you find those girls attractive?” I said.
“Of course not. They’re too skinny. They’re sick. I like healthy women. Strong women. That’s why I like you so much. You have the self-esteem to let me care for you. Not many women have that.”
“Is that true?”
“No. I really like helpless women,” he said. But he smiled.
He smelt good to me, clean, with a light flowery aftershave that could seem feminine on another man. He was tall and broad; strong. I watched him lift a car to retrieve a paper I’d rolled onto while parking.
“I could have moved the car,” I said, laughing at him.
“No fun in that,” he said. He picked me up and carried me indoors.
I quite enjoyed the sense of subjugation. I’d been strong all my life, sorting myself to school when my parents were too busy to care. I could not remember being carried by anyone, and the sensation was a comfort.
Dan introduced me to life outside. Before I met him, I rarely saw daylight; too busy for a frivolous thing like the sun. Home, transport, work, transport, home, all before dawn and after dusk. Dan forced me to go out into the open. He said, “Your skin glows outdoors. Your hair moves in the breeze. You couldn’t be more beautiful.” So we walked. I really didn’t like being out. It seemed like time wasting.
He picked me up from the surgery one sunny Friday and took my hand. “Come for a picnic,” he said. “It’s a beautiful day.”
In my doorway, a stick man was slumped.
“It’s the man who killed his wife,” I whispered.
The man raised his arm weakly. “Dentist,” he rattled. “Dentist, wait!”
“What happened to you? Are you sleepwalking now?” I asked.
“I can’t eat. Everything I bite into tastes of ash. I can’t eat. I’m starving.” He lisped, and I could see that many of his white teeth had fallen out.
“What did you do to me?” he whispered. He fell to his knees. Dan and I stepped around him and walked on. Dan took my hand, carrying a basket full of food between us. It banged against my legs, bruising my shins. We walked to a park and everywhere we went girls jumped at him. He kissed back, shrugging at me as if to say, “Who cares?” I watched them.
“Why do it? Just tell them to go away,” I said. They annoyed me, those silly little girls.
“I can’t help it. I try not to kiss them but the temptation is too strong. They’re always coming after me.”
I had seen this.
“Why? I know you’re a beautiful-looking man, but why do they forget any manners or pride to kiss you?”
I knew this was one of his secrets. One of the things he’d rather I didn’t know.
“I don’t know, my love. The way I smell? They like my smell.”
I looked at him sidelong. “Why did you kiss him? That murderer. Why?”
Dan said nothing. I thought about how well he understood me. The meals he cooked, the massages he gave. The way he didn’t flinch from the job I did.
So I didn’t confront him. I let his silence sit. But I knew his face at the Pretty Girls ward. I could still feel him fucking me in the car, pulling over into a car park and taking me, after we left the Pretty Girls.
“God, I want to kiss you,” he said.
I could smell him, the ash-fire warmth of him, and I could feel my stomach shrinking. I thought of my favourite cake, its colour leached out and its flavour making my eyes water.
“Kissing isn’t everything. We can live without kissing,” I said.
“Maybe you can,” he said, and he leant forward, his eyes wide, the white parts smudgy, grey. He grabbed my shoulders. I usually loved his strength, the size of him, but I pulled away.
“I don’t want to kiss you,” I said. I tucked my head under his arm and buried my face into his side. The warm fluffy wool of his jumper tickled my nose and I smothered a sneeze.
“Bless you,” he said. He held my chin and lifted my face up. He leant towards me.
He was insistent.
It was a shock, even though I’d expected it. His tongue was fat and seemed to fill my cheeks, the roof of my mouth. My stomach roiled and I tried to pull away but his strong hands held my shoulders till he was done with his kiss.
Then he let me go.
I fell backward, one step, my heels wobbling but keeping me standing. I wiped my mouth. He winked at me and leant forward. His breath smelt sweet, like pineapple juice. His eyes were blue, clear and honest. You’d trust him if you didn’t know.
The taste of ash filled my mouth.
Nothing else happened, though. I took a sip of water and it tasted fresh, clean. A look of disappointment flickered on his face before he concealed it. I thought, “You like it. You like turning women that way.”
I said, “Have you heard of the myth the Pretty Girls have? About the Ash Mouth Man?”
I could see him visibly lifting, growing. Feeling legendary. His cheeks reddened. His face was so expressive I knew what he meant without hearing a word. I couldn’t bear to lose him but I could not allow him to make any more Pretty Girls.
I waited till he was fast asleep that night, lying back, mouth open. I sat him forward so he wouldn’t choke, took up my scalpel, and with one perfect move I lifted his tongue and cut it out of his mouth.
Lisa Tuttle has been writing strange, weird stories nearly all her life, making her first professional sale in 1971. She has won the John W. Campbell Award, the British Science Fiction Award, and the International Horror Guild Award.
Her short stories have been widely published and reprinted, and gathered into five published collections to date. Her first novel, written in collaboration with George R. R. Martin, Windhaven, originally published in 1981, is still in print, and has been translated into many other languages. Her other novels include Lost Futures, The Mysteries, The Silver Bough, and, forthcoming in 2016, The Curious Affair of the Somnambulist and the Psychic Thief.
Born and raised in Texas, she now lives with her family in the Highlands of Scotland.
Closet Dreams
Lisa Tuttle
Something terrible happened to me when I was a little girl.
I don’t want to go into details. I had to do that far too often in the year after it happened, first telling the police everything I could remember in the (vain) hope it would help them catch the monster, then talking for hours and hours to all sorts of therapists, doctors, shrinks and specialists brought in to help me. Talking about it was supposed to help me understand what had happened, achieve closure, and move on.
I just wanted to forget—I thought that’s what “putting it behind me” meant—but they said to do that, first I had to remember. I thought I did remember—in fact, I was sure I did—but they wouldn’t believe what I told them. They said it was a fantasy, created to cover something I couldn’t bear to admit. For my own good (and also, to help the police catch that monster) I had to remember the truth.
So I racked my brain and forced myself to relive my darkest memories, giving them more and more specifics, suffering through every horrible moment a second, third and fourth time before belatedly realizing it wasn’t the stuff the monster had done to me that they could not believe. There was nothing at all impossible about a single detail of my abduction, imprisonment and abuse, not even the sick particulars of what he called “playing.” I had been an innocent; it was all new to me, but they were adults, professionals who had dealt with too many victims. It came as no surprise to them that there were monsters living among us, looking just like ordinary men, but really the worst kind of sexual predator.
The only thing they did not believe in was my escape. It could not have happened the way I said. Surely I must see that?
But it had. When I understood what they were questioning, it made me first tearful and then mad. I was not a liar. Impossible or not, it had happened, and my presence there, telling them about it, ought to be proof enough.
One of them—her name escapes me, but she was an older lady who always wore turtle-neck sweaters or big scarves, and who reminded me a little of my granny with her high cheekbones, narrow blue eyes and gentle voice—told me that she knew I wasn’t lying. What I had described was my own experience of the escape, and true on those terms—but all the same, I was a big girl now and I could surely understand that it could not have happened that way in actuality. She said I could think of it like a dream. The dream was my experience, what happened inside my brain while I was asleep, but something else was happening at the same time. Maybe, if we worked with the details of my dream, we might get some clues as to what that was.
She asked me to tell her something about my dreams. I told her there was only one. Ever since I’d escaped I’d had a recurring nightmare, night after night, unlike any dream I’d ever had before, twice as real and ten times more horrible.
It went like this: I’d come awake, in darkness too intense for seeing, my body aching, wooden floor hard beneath my naked body, the smell of dust and ancient varnish in my nose, and my legs would jerk, a spasm of shock, before I returned to lying motionless again, eyes tightly shut, trying desperately, against all hope, to fall back into the safe oblivion of sleep. Sometimes it was only a matter of seconds before I woke again in my own bedroom, where the light was always left on for just such moments, but sometimes I would seemingly remain in that prison for hours before I could wake. Nothing ever happened; I never saw him; there was just the closet, and that was bad enough. The true horror of the dream was that it didn’t seem like a dream, and so turned reality inside-out, stripping my illusory freedom from me.
When I was much younger I’d made the discovery that I guess most kids make, that if you can only manage to scream out loud when you’re dreaming—especially when you’ve started to realize that it is just a dream—you’ll wake yourself up.
But I never tried that in the closet dream; I didn’t dare. The monster had taught me not to scream. If I made any noise in the closet, any noise loud enough for him to hear from another room, he would tape my mouth shut, and tie my hands together behind my back.
I knew I was his prisoner. Before he did that, it wouldn’t have occurred to me that I still had some freedom.
So I didn’t scream.
I guess the closet dream didn’t offer much scope for analysis. She tried to get me to recall other dreams, but when I insisted I didn’t have any, she didn’t press. Instead, she told me that it wouldn’t always be that way, and taught me some relaxation techniques that would make it easier to slip into an undisturbed sleep.
It wasn’t only for my peace of mind that I kept having these sessions with psychiatrists. Anything I remembered might help the police.
Nobody but me knew what my abductor looked like. I’d done my best to describe him, but my descriptions, while detailed, were probably too personal, intimate and distorted by fear. I had no idea how an outsider would see him; I rarely even saw him dressed. I didn’t know what he did for a living or where he lived.
I was his prisoner for nearly four months, but I’d been unconscious when he took me into his house, and all I knew of it, all I was ever allowed to see, was one bedroom, bathroom and closet. Under careful questioning from the police, with help from an architect, a very vague and general picture emerged: it was a single-story house on a quiet residential street, in a neighborhood that probably dated back to the 1940s or even earlier. (Nobody had used bathroom tiles like that since the 1950s; the small size of the closet dated it, and so did the thickness of the internal doors.) There were no houses like that in my parents’ neighborhood, and all the newer subdivisions in the city could be ruled out, but that still left a lot of ground. It was even possible, since I had no idea how long I’d been unconscious in the back of his van after he grabbed me, that the monster lived and worked in another town entirely.
I wanted to help them catch him, of course. So although I hated thinking about it, and wanted only to absorb myself back into my own life with my parents, friends and school, I made myself return, in memory, to my prison and concentrated on details, but what was most vivid to me—the smell of dusty varnish or the pictures I thought I could make out in the grain of the wood floor; a crack in the ceiling, or the low roaring surf sound made by the central air conditioning at night—did not supply any useful clues to the police.
Five mornings a week the monster left the house and stayed away all day. He would let me out to use the bathroom before he left, and then lock me into the closet. He’d fixed a sliding bolt on the outside of the big, heavy closet door, and once the door was shut and he slid the bolt home, I was trapped. But that was not enough for him: he added a padlock, to which he carried the only key. As he told me, if he didn’t come home to let me out, I would die inside that closet, of hunger and thirst, so I had better pray nothing happened to him, because if it did, no one would ever find me.
That padlock wasn’t his last word in security, either. He also locked the bedroom door, and before he left the house I always heard an electronic bleeping sound I recognized as being part of a security system. He had a burglar alarm, as well as locks on everything that could be secured shut.
All he left me with in the closet was a plastic bottle full of water, a blanket and a child’s plastic potty that I couldn’t bear to use. There was a light-fixture in the ceiling, but he’d removed the light-bulb, and the switch was on the other side of the locked door. At first I thought his decision to deprive me of light was just more of his meaningless cruelty, but later it occurred to me that it was just another example—like the padlock and the burglar alarm—of his overly-cautious nature. He’d even removed the wooden hanging rod from the closet, presumably afraid that I might have been able to wrench it loose and use it as a weapon against him. I might have scratched him with a broken light-bulb; big deal. It wouldn’t have incapacitated him, but it might have hurt, and he wouldn’t risk even the tiniest of hurts. He wanted total control.
So, all those daylight hours when I was locked into the closet, I was in the dark except for the light which seeped in around the edges of the door; mainly from the approximately three-quarters of an inch that was left between the bottom of the door and the floor. That was my window on the world. I thought it was larger than the gap beneath our doors at home; the police architect said it might have been because the carpet it had been cut to accommodate had been removed; alternatively, my captor might have replaced the original door because he didn’t find it sturdy enough for the prison he had planned.
Whatever the reason, I was grateful that the gap was wide enough for me to look through. I would spend hours sometimes lying with my cheek flat against the floor, peering sideways into the bedroom, not because it was interesting, but simply for the light and space that it offered in comparison to the tiny closet.
When I was in the closet, I could use my fingernails to scrape the dirt and varnish from the floorboards, or make pictures out of the shadows all around me; there was nothing else to look at except the dirty cream walls, and the most interesting thing there—the only thing that caught my eye and made me think—was a square outlined in silvery duct tape.
I knew what it was, because there was something very similar on one wall of my closet at home, and my parents had explained to me that it was only an access-hatch, so a plumber could get at the bathroom plumbing, in case it ever needed to be fixed.
Once that had been explained, and I knew it wasn’t the entrance to a secret passage or a hidden room, it became uninteresting to me. In the monster’s closet, though, a plumbing access-hatch took on a whole new glamour.
I thought it might be my way out. Even though I knew there was no window in the bathroom, and the only door connected it to the bedroom—it was at least an escape from the closet. I wasn’t sure an adult could crawl through what looked like a square-foot opening, but I knew I could manage; I didn’t care if I left a little skin behind.
I peeled off the strips of tape, got my fingers into the gap and, with a little bit of effort, managed to pry out the square of painted Sheetrock. But I didn’t uncover a way out. There were pipes revealed in a space between the walls, but that was all. There was no opening into the bathroom, no space for a creature larger than a mouse to squeeze into. And I probably don’t need to say that I didn’t find anything useful left behind by a forgetful plumber; no tools or playthings or stale snacks.
I wept with disappointment, and then I sealed it up again—carefully enough, I hoped, that the monster would never notice what I’d done. After that, for the next thirteen weeks or so, I never touched it.
But I looked at it often, that small square that so resembled a secret hatchway, a closed-off window, a hidden opening to somewhere else. There was so little else to look at in the closet, and my longing, my need, for escape was so strong, that of course I was drawn back to it. For the first few days I kept my back to it, and flinched away even from the thought of it, because it had been such a let-down, but after a week or so I chose to forget what I knew about it, and pretended that it really was a way out of the closet, a secret that the monster didn’t know.
My favorite thing to think about, and the only thing that could comfort me enough to let me fall asleep, was home. Going home again. Being safely back at home with my parents and my little brother and Puzzle the cat, surrounded by all my own familiar things in my bedroom. It wasn’t like the relaxation techniques the psychiatrist suggested, thinking myself into a place I loved. That didn’t work. Just thinking about my home could make me cry, and bring me more rigidly awake on the hard floor in the dark narrow closet, too aware of all that I had lost, and how impossibly far away it was now. I had to do something else, I had to create a little routine, almost like a magic spell, a mental exercise that let me relax enough to sleep.
