The Long Sleep

tide of agony swelled over him, the prod touched his face and brought a rainbow of light, color, shimmering bubbles of heat and pain. Darkness…

In the dream, he was in a dark bedroom, lying in bed with Allison. She was naked, cuddled against him, moving against him, kissing and touching him. Her thighs opened to him, guided him, received him. They moved together with ecstatic rhythm, two warm bubbles settling through gelatin… And then the light came on, and he was looking at an Allison who had no face: no eyes, nose, mouth, nothing but a smooth plasticity from ear to ear…

He woke, screaming.

When he had recovered from the nightmare, he found that Galing and the others had gone. The door was closed, the room was lighted only by the flickering candle; he was alone.

He heard a lone rat scampering beneath the grill which covered the floor drain.

He wept. That was unmanly, he supposed, a sign of weakness. But he didn't hate himself for it. He was alone, Terribly, awfully alone in a world he'd never made. No one would listen — or believe him even if they did listen. Not even Allison. Crying was called for. Tears were a sign of compassion; and his tears were the only compassion he would get.

X

Later, he wondered if they might be telling the truth. As difficult and disheartening to accept as it might be — wasn't it just possible that he was stark raving mad? Out of his mind? Beyond the fringe? That would explain so much. He had seen impossible things, after all. He had seen a faceless man…

But if he were mad rather than the victim of some incredible plot, why couldn't he remember anything at all about his life beyond that moment when he woke up on the pod couch in the white-walled room? Didn't madmen recall the past? In brief moments of lucidity, didn't the insane remember family, friends, past achievements and disasters? Surely they didn't remember only their fantasies. If he were mad, then the pod chamber was a delusion. It would seem real to him, of course. But surely his memory would consist of more than the fevers of his sick mind.

On the other hand, who was to say that this cell was real? It could be another illusion, as gaseous as all the others that had come before it. And if it were illusory, so was all the Gating, in the guise of a psychiatrist, had told him about himself just a few minutes ago.

What was he to believe, then?

Illusion?

Madness?

Or was it something else altogether, something much more complicated — and dangerous?

He paced from one end of the cell to the other, trying to work out a solution. His footsteps echoed off the stone walls like hammer blows from an anvil. In the end, it came down to one question: Is the paranoid man really insane when he believes that people are plotting against him — and people really are plotting against him?

He stopped near the leaping flame of the candle, knelt, and examined his hands. They were filthy. His fingernails were cracked and chipped. One of them was half torn from the flesh beneath, and blood was caked under all of them. His knuckles were skinned and dirty; the blood had dried in those abrasions.

Paranoia? Reality?

Cautiously, he massaged his stomach and his right hip, cursed the electric prod that had left him with such tenderness. Hell, this was no illusion. No delusion. If he pinched himself, he would be hurt. This was painfully real.

And this was no mental hospital. Only in the Dark Ages could a mental patient be confined to a dungeon. A modern institution had clean beds, nurses, electric lights, medicines, curious specialists and sympathetic doctors.

None of this did him any good. He was no closer to the truth. If insanity wasn't the answer to those strange events, what was?

He recalled Allison's alleged ability to shape illusions from the air itself. A form of telepathy, she'd said. Was that what these weird adventures were: merely fragments of his lover's imagination?

No. Impossible. If she were creating illusions, she would not build elaborate castles of pain and confusion; the experience would be pleasant. This ordeal was not the work of a friend or a lover. Besides, she had told him about her peculiar ESP talents in the middle of one of these illusions. Wasn't that an unlikely thing to do? Wouldn't she have been afraid of shattering the illusion — if illusion it was? Therefore, when she'd told him about her talent, he had not been dreaming. It was that simple. Furthermore, he knew, on an instinctive level, that everything he had been through in the last couple of days was genuine; as bizarre, as inexplicable as it might be, it contained not a single shred of fantasy.

But if it were real, why was Allison cooperating with the others? Was any drug effective enough to turn her into a malleable zombie that Galing could use as he wished?

That was a difficult question, but it was one that would have to wait for an answer. He had no time for it now.

For the time being only one thing should interest him: escape. The only hope he had of regaining his perspective was to be free of them, out of their control. Free, he could explore this place, find out if he was still in the same building with the pods, and come to some understanding of the nature of the game.

At the cell door once more, he looked in both directions along the corridor. It was deserted and quiet. The only movement out there was the fluttering of candle flames; the only sound was a steady drip-drip- drip of water.

He tested the door and found it locked. He hadn't expected anything else — yet, as he applied his weight the hinges groaned even though the door did not move. And when he relaxed, they rattled and grated noisily on their fittings. Examining them closely he saw that all three of the hinges were loose at one edge. The bolts that held the wide hinge flanges to the stone wall were all badly turned; they wiggled in their bores.

Returning to the tiny barred window in the door, he studied the hall again. Silence. Dripping water. Candlelight. No one had heard the hinges rattling.

He knelt and began to work with the bottom bolt on the lowest of the three hinge plates. He twisted and tugged at it, jammed it back and forth in its hole in the stone. Powdered granite puffed out, dusted his fingers. Inch by grudging inch, the bolt came free, until he held it in his hand. He took the second bolt out of the flange, then the third. For a moment he was thrilled, flushed with success. If he were diligent — and quiet enough not to draw their attention — within an hour he would have the other six bolts free. Then he could lift the oak door out of its frame, set it against the wall, and—

— that was wrong. All wrong.

You stupid ass, he thought.

It was a trap.

The hinge bolts had not been loose earlier. When he had first regained consciousness in this place, after he had frightened off the rat, he had tried the door. He'd shaken it pretty hard. Nothing had rattled. It had been as solid and immovable as the entrance to a bank vault. Nor had the door made any unusual noise when Henry Galing paid his little visit. And if the bolts were loose then, they would have squeaked like hell as the door was pulled all they way open. So… Figure it… If the bolts were less secure now than they had been, there was only one explanation: Galing and Richard had loosened them for him.

Very neat.

He couldn't figure how they'd done it, for he hadn't seen any of them touch the hinges. Had Allison-Annabelle pried them out of place while his attention was diverted to Galing and Richard? No. She'd always been in the doorway, standing, stiff and scared. When the prod had been shoved into his face — could he have passed out long enough for the job to be done? He thought he'd been unconscious for only a few seconds. But it might have been minutes. Christ, it might have been hours! However they'd managed it, here was a boldly offered escape route.

Obviously, if they wanted him to go out this way, he must not oblige them.