The Long Sleep

Easy now…

He took the last two steps to the window and pressed his forehead to the cool glass, squinting to see through the dense, shifting smog.

He knew there was more out there than smoke. He was sure that he had seen the — other thing, whatever it was, but he could not recall the nature of it.

Then the smoke parted.

He closed his eyes. “No,” he said. When he opened them again, the smoke was still drawn back.

It's just another illusion, he thought.

But he knew it was not. He choked and staggered backwards as if he'd been struck.

How could he have forgotten this? No man could ever forget that inhuman, maniacal spectacle. He was unable to look away; he was mesmerized by horror.

Finally, as if the evil had filled him up and overflowed from him, he swam forward into darkness, finding peace for at least a few brief minutes.

XIII

When he woke, Allison was sitting in a rocking chair beside the bed. She was wearing tight red slacks, a pearl gray blouse, and a red choker at her neck. Her black hair fell over her shoulders and curled around the undersides of her heavy breasts. She was prettier than he remembered. She smiled and leaned toward him, and she said, “How do you feel?”

He tried to speak, but his mouth was dry. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth.

“Water?” she asked.

He nodded.

She went to the dresser and filled a crystal glass from a silver carafe. When she brought it to him, she held his head up while he swallowed. He finished the entire glass. “Well,” she asked again, “how do you feel?”

He looked around and saw that he was in the guest bedroom of Henry Galing's house where he had first met Allison after waking with amnesia. “As if I'm going mad,” he said.

Sitting on the bed, she leaned down and kissed him once, chastely. “Darling, it's all over now!”

“It is?” He didn't believe her.

“You're out of it!” she said. “You've come back.”

“Out of what? Back from where?” Joel asked warily.

Instead of answering him, she went to the bedroom door and stepped into the upstairs hall. “Uncle Henry! Come quick! He's awake, and he knows where he is!” Then she returned to the bed, smiling.

He didn't smile back at her.

Henry Galing entered the room a moment later. He looked the same as before: tall, broad-shouldered, authoritarian, with that mane of white hair. At least their physical appearances were not mutable. Otherwise, though, Henry Galing had changed: he was downright pleasant. He hurried over and stood by Joel's bed and grabbed his shoulder and beamed down at him. “My God, we've been so worried about you! We didn't know if you'd ever come out of it!”

“You didn't?”

Galing squeezed his shoulder affectionately. “How are you feeling?”

“Okay, I guess.”

“Dr. Harttle's on his way up,” Galing said.

“With dust in his hair?”

Allison and Galing exchanged a quick look of concern. “What do you mean?” Galing asked.

Joel sighed. “Nothing.”

“Dust?”

“Nothing, Henry.”

To Allison, Gating said: “He's lost that terrible yellow color — and his eyes aren't bloodshot anymore.”

“I can't remember what I'm doing here,” Joel said. “What's going on?” He had decided against leveling charges and demanding explanations, apologies… He didn't know if this were another act or whether it was reality, at last.

“You don't know where you are?” Galing asked.

“No,” Joel said. “Well… This is your house. Somewhere in New England. Allison's my wife. But beyond that…”

“Amnesia?” Galing asked.

“I guess so.”

“That's a side-effect we hadn't foreseen.” The old man looked frightened, as if he wondered what else they hadn't foreseen.

“Side-effect?” Joel asked. He felt like the straight man in an old-time comedy act — although this scene seemed more real than those which had preceded it. He could smell pork roasting in the downstairs kitchen. A telephone sounded in another part of the house and was answered on the fourth ring. The wind sighed against the bedroom window, and outside a bird called, strident but cheerful.

“Do you remember sybocylacose-46?” Galing asked.

“That horrible stuff,” Allison said, shivering, taking Joel's right hand.

“It doesn't sound familiar,” Joel said.

“We dubbed it Sy,” Galing said by way of prodding his memory.

“It's a blank,” Joel said.

Allison patted Joel's hand. The expression on her usually animated face was so sober that she might have been in shock. “It's a drug,” she said. “A particularly nasty drug.”

“Tell me more.” He sat up now, surprised that he should feel as clear-headed and healthy as he did. When he had awakened from all of the other illusions, he'd been dizzy and exhausted.

“A very special drug,” Henry Galing said. “Originally it was intended for use as an inhibitor of cardiac arrhythmias and to stimulate the myocardium to increase contractility. But it simply didn't develop as we intended it to. The chemists could make a batch of it in third-stage complexity and watch it mutate into something else again. Inside of twenty minutes, it was an entirely new compound, quite different than what they'd made.”

“Chemical compounds can't mutate,” Joel said.

“This one did,” Galing said.

“It's our own little Frankenstein monster,” Allison said. She wasn't trying to be light; she meant it.

“Allison thinks it's sinister,” Galing said. “Actually, it's just something new, interesting. It's no more dangerous than—”

“It almost killed Joel,” she said.

Galing stopped smiling, nodded gravely. “Sybocylacose-46 is like a living organism evolving with blinding speed. At a certain point in the research we were unable to develop a mean-strain. So… We just let a batch of it go to see what would happen. It went through forty-five temporary states before settling into its finalized form.”

“I don't remember,” Joel said. “Anyway, it sounds senseless.”

“It does, doesn't it?” Galing said. “We racked our brains, I'll tell you. We thought of everything: that we'd created a living cell in the new compound and that was changing the nature of the compound itself; that we had created a whole living creature, more than just a cell, a liquid being the likes of which the earth had never seen; that a strain of bacteria had contaminated the drug each time we made a batch, and the bacteria was what was mutating. But none of these checked out.”

“Then?” Joel asked. If this were another act, it was quite an interesting one. He hadn't made up his mind yet.

“Then,” Galing said, “we began testing Sy-46 on lab animals — with odd results.”

Allison traced the line of Joel's jaw with her fingertips. “You don't remember any of this, darling?”

“None of it,” he said. “I'm sorry to bore you, but I'd like it all repeated.”

Galing sat down in the rocking chair and crossed his legs, as if he were settling in to tell a long ghost story.