Dreams Underfoot

Her voice trailed off, rheumy eyes going sad. The monster merely regarded her.

“It was hardest when Julie died,” she went on after a moment. There was a hitch in her voice as she spoke her daughter’s name. “It’s not right that parents should outlive their children.” Her gaze settled on the monster’s face. “But then you’ll never know that particular pain, will you?”

The monster threw back his head and a soundless howl tore from his throat.

As Harriet ran back into the room where she’d left Flora, she saw that the old woman was gone. Her candles, the crates and stove remained. The tin can half full of tea sat warming on the edge of the stove, not quite on the lit burner.

Harried looked back down the hall where Frank’s shambling bulk stumbled towards her.

She had to get out of this place. Never mind the storm still howling outside the building, never mind the confusing maze of abandoned buildings and refusechoked streets of the Tombs. She just had to

“There you are,” a voice said from directly behind her.

Harriet heart skipped a beat. A sharp, small inadvertent squeak escaped her lips as she flung herself to one side and then backed quickly away from the shadows by the door from which the voice had come. When she realized it was only the old woman, she kept right on backing up. Whoever, whatever, Flora was, Harriet knew she wasn’t a friend.

Frank shambled into the foyer then, the queer lopsided set of his gaze fixed hungrily upon her.

Harriet’s heartbeat kicked into doubletime. Her throat went dry. The muscles of her chest tightened, squeezing her lungs so that she found it hard to breathe.

Oh god, she thought. Get out of here while you can.

But she couldn’t seem to move. Her limbs were deadened weights and she was starting to feel faint again.

“Now, now,” the old woman said. “Don’t carry on so, Samson, or you’ll frighten her to death.”

The monster obediently stopped in the doorway, but his hungry gaze never left Harriet.

“Samsamson?” Harriet asked in a weak voice.

“Oh, there’s all sorts of bits and pieces of people inside that poor ugly head,” Flora replied. “Comes from traumas he suffered as a child. He suffers from—what was it that Dr. Adams called him?

Dissociation. I think, before the accident, the doctor had documented seventeen people inside him.

Some are harmless, such as Frank and little Bessie. Others, like Samson, have an unfortunate capacity for violence when they can’t have their way.”

“Doctor?” Harriet asked. All she seemed capable of was catching a word from the woman’s explanation and repeating it as a question.

“Yes, he was institutionalized as a young boy. The odd thing is that he’s somewhat aware of all the different people living inside him. He thinks that when his father sewed him back together, he used parts of all sorts of different people to do so and those bits of alien skin and tissue took hold of his mind and borrowed parts of it for their own use.”

“That ...” Harriet cleared her throat. “That was the ... accident?”

“Oh, it wasn’t any accident,” Flora said. “And don’t let anyone try to tell you different. His father knew exactly what he was doing when he threw him through that plate glass window.”

“But ...”

“Of course, the father was too poor to be able to afford medical attention for the boy, so he patched him up on his own.”

Harriet stared at the monstrous figure with growing horror.

“This ... none of this can be true,” she finally managed.

“It’s all documented at the institution,” Flora told her. “His father made a full confession before they locked him away. Poor Frank, though. It was too late to do anything to help him by that point, so he ended up being put away as well, for all that his only crime was the misfortune of being born the son of a lunatic.”

Harriet tore her gaze from Frank’s scarred features and turned to the old woman.

“How do you know all of this?” she asked.

“Why, I lived there as well,” Flora said. “Didn’t I tell you?”

“No. No, you didn’t.”

Flora shrugged. “It’s old history. Mind you, when you get to be my age, everything’s old history.”

Harriet wanted to ask why Flora had been in the institution herself, but couldn’t find the courage to do so. She wasn’t even sure she wanted to know. But there was something she had no choice but to ask. She hugged her blanket closer around her, no longer even aware of its smell, but the chill that was in her bones didn’t come from the cold.

“What happens now?” she said.

“I’m not sure I understand the question,” Flora replied with a sly smile in her eyes that said she understood all too well.

Harriet pressed forward. “What happens to me?”

“Well, now,” Flora said. She shot the monster an affectionate look. “Frank wants to start a family.”

Harriet shook her head. “No,” she said, her voice sounding weak and ineffectual even to her own ears. “No way.”

“You don’t exactly have a say in the matter, dear. It’s not as though there’s anyone coming to rescue you— not in this storm. And even if someone did come searching, where would they look? People disappear in this city all of the time. It’s a sad, but unavoida—

ble fact in these trying times that we’ve brought upon ourselves.”

Harriet was still shaking her head.

“Oh, think of someone else for a change,” the old woman told her. “I know your type. You’re filled with your own selfimportance; the whole world revolves around you. It’s a party here, an evening of dancing there, theatre, clubs, cabaret, with never a thought for those less fortunate. What would it hurt you to give a bit of love and affection to a poor, lonely monster?”

I’ve gone all demented, Harriet thought. All of this—the monster, the lunatic calm of the old woman—none of it was real. None of it could be real.

“Do you think he likes being this way?” Flora demanded.

Her voice grew sharp and the monster shifted nervously at the tone of her anger, the way a dog might bristle, catching its master’s mood.

“It’s got nothing to do with me,” Harriet said, surprising herself that she could still find the courage to stand up for herself. “I’m not like you think I am and I had nothing to do with what happened to that—to Frank.”

“It’s got everything to do with you,” the old woman replied. “It’s got to do with caring and family and good Samaritanism and decency and long, lasting relationships.”

“You can’t force a person into something like that,” Harriet argued.

Flora sighed. “Sometimes, in these times, it’s the only way. There’s a sickness abroad in the world, child; your denial of what’s right and true is as much a cause as a symptom.”

“You’re the one that’s sick!” Harriet cried.

She bolted for the building’s front doors, praying they weren’t locked. The monster was too far away and moved too slowly to stop her. The old woman was closer and quicker, but in her panic, Harriet found the strength to fling her bodily away. She raced for the glass doors that led out of the foyer and into the storm.

The wind almost drove her back inside when she finally got a door open, but she pressed against it, through the door and out onto the street. The whirling snow, driven by the mad, capricious wind, soon stole away all sense of direction, but she didn’t dare stop. She plowed through drifts, blinded by the snow, head bent against the howling wind, determined to put as much distance between herself and what she fled.

Oh god, she thought at one point. My purse was back there. My ID. They know where I live. They can come and get me at home, or at work, anytime they want.

But mostly she fought the snow and wind. How long she fled through the blizzard, she had no way of knowing. It might have been an hour, it might have been the whole night. She was shaking with cold and fear when she stumbled to the ground one last time and couldn’t get up.

She lay there, a delicious sense of warmth enveloping her. All she had to do was let go, she realized.