The Long Sleep

“The lab animals seemed to sink into, well, it wasn't a trance exactly. Call it a semi-trance. They stared about as if they were seeing things for the first time, numbed by the sight, awe-stricken. They reacted to stimuli in a confused manner. Some of them even seemed to welcome pain as if it were pleasure; and others reacted to a tickling finger as if it were a honed blade. Mice ran repeatedly into walls when we put them to maze tests. All in all, we felt these indices pointed to the discovery of a new hallucinogen.”

Joel already knew what was coming. It was as inevitable as the tide. It was so pat, so neat. “And I volunteered to be a human subject?”

“Insisted on it,” Galing said.

“I tried to talk you out of it,” Allison said. “But you were determined.”

Galing rocked slowly back and forth in his chair. “From what we knew about the drug, there were too many contra-indications to make it easy to find human subjects.” Contra-indications were the situations in which a drug could not be administered. “It could not be given to anyone with the slightest eye impairment, nor to anyone with hypertension, penicillin or suphur drug allergies, not to pregnant women or to women past the change of life, not to anyone with any family history of heart disease— the list goes on. In the end you proved not to embody any of the contra-indications, and you were interested in Sy-46, terribly interested, and you insisted on being the first guinea pig.”

“What happened?”

Galing leaned forward on his chair and smiled. “That's what we want you to tell us.”

“Was it really awful?” Allison asked.

“It wasn't pleasant.” To Galing, Joel said: “How long have I been under the drug's influence?”

“Eighteen hours,” Galing said.

“We were afraid that you'd been given an overdose, despite the controls,” Allison said.

“What's the name of your company?” Joel asked.

The old man raised his eyebrows. “What's that have to do—”

“Galing Research?”

“Of course.”

“And you're involved in the commercial applications of paranormal phenomena?”

“In what!” Galing asked, incredulous.

“That's not right?”

“We're a drug firm,” Galing said.

“You don't know any faceless man?”

“Darling, are you feeling all right?” Allison asked. “You do understand all these things — this faceless man — must have been part of the drug's work?”

“We'll want to know everything about your hallucinations,” Galing said eagerly.

“They didn't seem like hallucinations,” Joel said doubtfully. “They seemed real.”

“Wait,” Galing said. He stood up. “I'll get Richard to fetch the tape recorder.”

“And the electric prod?” Joel asked.

“The what?”

“Never mind.”

Galing started toward the door.

“Uncle Henry,” Allison said, “perhaps Joel ought to rest, first. He's been through so much.”

“Of course he has,” Galing said rather impatiently. “I would be the last to deny it. But you see how fit he's feeling. Aren't you feeling fit, Joel?”

“Just wonderful,” Joel said.

“I still think he should rest,” Allison said.

“Nonsense,” the old man said. Then he was gone through the door, shouting for Richard.

“I was so frightened,” she said.

“I'm back now.”

“I'm glad.” She bent over and kissed him. Her heavy breasts were flattened against his chest. Her breath was cool and sweet as mints. Her tongue played briefly, deliciously between his lips: A promise.

He felt desire swell in him, and he wondered how in the hell he could react so quickly, easily, and totally to her when he was plagued with so much confusion, doubt, and fear. But even the ordeal he'd been through could not argue convincingly for detumescence. She affected him with the inevitable, unavoidable power of a fierce electric shock.

“Please, don't ever volunteer again for an experiment like that,” she said.

“I wouldn't.”

She nibbled at the comer of his mouth. “I never want to go through another eighteen hours like these last eighteen. You kicked and twisted, whimpered, cried, screamed… It was terrible.”

He ran his fingers through her rich hair, massaged the nape of her neck. “It's over now.”

She kissed him again; more tongue, moving, searching. Then, sitting up straight again on the edge of the bed, she said, “Was it as awful as you made it sound — faceless men and everything?”

“Worse.”

“Tell me.”

“I don't want to have to say it twice,” he said. “Let's wait for Henry.”

Leaning down again, she let him put his arms around her, and she gave him another kiss. In a soft whisper, she told him what she would do to make him better.

“Sounds like excellent medicine,” he said. He touched the curve of her full breasts. He did not want her to vanish as Anita and Annabelle had done.

Henry Galing returned with the tape recorder and placed it on the nightstand beside the bed. He plugged it in, tested it to see if it was working. His own voice boomed back at him. “Good enough,” he said. “You ready?”

“As I'll ever be,” Joel said.

“Now I know it's difficult to establish any time sense in a long series of hallucinations,” Galing said “But it would help a great deal if you would try to order the illusions. It's possible that the effects of the drug vary over a long period of time — like your eighteen hours.”

“No problem,” Joel said. “The hallucinations were very neatly ordered. Perfectly linear. I know precisely where the beginning was.”

“I've never heard of linear hallucinations,” Galing said.

Joel told him all about them, except for one thing: he could not remember what he had seen through that gray view-window in the unlighted, steel-walled room beyond the pressure hatch. He tried hard to recall that vision, for it had been the most terrifying of them all. But it was lost to him.

“Perhaps it's best you don't remember,” Allison said, shuddering.

He shuddered too.

XIV

He slept only two hours that night, and he dreamed that the faceless man was pursuing him down a dark corridor toward a huge gray window. Frightened awake, he was filled with a desolate, bitter, and altogether inexplicable sense of loss. He lay in the dark bedroom, hands folded behind his head, and listened to the quiet house. He was aware that something of incalculable value had been taken away from him — although he could not begin to understand what it was.

He tried to go back to sleep, but he was afraid that when he woke up the next time he would be in another illusion, different from this one, uglier than his one. But wasn't this the true world? He was at the end of the illusions, wasn't he? He wanted to think that he was, but he had no proof of it. Consciousness was his only defense against the quicksilver reordering of reality.

Beside him, Allison slept peacefully. He wanted to pull the sheets away from her and caress her, lazily explore the contours of her body, arouse her, and be with her once more. That insatiable need for her was even