“Who put you up to this?” he asked. “Was it Alexis?”
“No one put us up to it,” I said. “We were looking at something else. It involves a building your grandfather designed right before he died. We had some reason to think you were involved, even if you didn’t directly know you were.”
David looked from me to Aubrey and then back. With his fear and anger gone, he looked much less dangerous. His bulk made him look like a young Winston Churchill. His eyes were puffy and red-rimmed, and the way he held himself spoke of a profound exhaustion. He brushed at his robe with a wide hand, as if he could erase the stains with his palm.
“You’re really not . . . I’m sorry. But I can’t believe this is really happening.”
“I know. It’s weird,” I said. “How long has it been since you slept?”
“Three days this time. I’ve made it four or five before, but I was just starting to fade when I heard the two of you talking. You really know what’s going on? What’s wrong with me?”
Aubrey looked at me, his expression a question.
“We’re putting it together,” I said. “How about you tell us a little about what’s been going on with you. Compare notes.”
“I can get you something to drink,” Aubrey said.
“I’ll make some coffee,” David said, hauling himself up. “You two take decaf?”
We both agreed it would be fine. He lumbered over to the stove and started a teakettle to boil, his brows knotted. He was silent for so long, I felt like I had to prompt him.
“It started about a year ago,” I said.
“Yeah. It did. It was about eight months after the last part of the divorce. Alexis moved down to Dallas. We didn’t have any kids, and I never really liked her dog. It had been a long time coming, and with her gone I thought it was just some kind of delayed stress thing. Bad stuff happens and you seem all right for a while, but then it comes back up? I did that a lot when I was a kid. I was half expecting it. So when I started having the nightmares, I didn’t really think much about it.”
His voice was calm enough, and steady, but I felt like he was leaving out bits and pieces. Dropping half- thoughts out through the cracks between words. I’d been that tired a few times, but only a few, and not for long.
“Somewhere August, September?” I said.
“I don’t know. Somewhere in there, yeah. It started off just being a sense of waking up trapped. Like the blankets were too heavy, and I couldn’t open my eyes. But I knew where I was. I knew who I was. I figured it was a kind of metaphor. You know, you feel trapped and smothered in a relationship, and so you dream about being trapped and smothered. Pretty straightforward.”
He opened one of the cabinets and took down two mugs. There were other dishes, but none of them clean. He picked up a third mug off the table and rinsed it out.
“I was just using this one,” he said. “It hasn’t been sitting here like the others.”
“Okay,” I said. His embarrassment was touching in a weird way. For someone who’d tried to kill me less than an hour before, he seemed vulnerable and more than a little lost.
“So,” he said. “Well, I figured it was a phase. I could tough it out. But they kept getting worse. Going on longer. Sometimes I’d wake up in the middle of the night screaming. I wasn’t just stuck in bed anymore. I was buried. Like something out of a Poe story. I was in a coffin and I could hear the dirt hitting the lid. The more I had the dreams, the less I could rest, and the less I could rest, the worse they seemed to get.”
“Did you hear any voices in the dreams? Words, maybe?”
“No,” David said. “Just this sense of being buried alive. But then it got worse. I wasn’t alone in the coffin anymore. There were other things. Bugs or spiders or something. I don’t know. And then I wasn’t me anymore.”
He stopped to rinse out a gravity funnel and stick a fresh filter cone in it. He put it on top of one of the mugs. Not his.
“I haven’t told anyone about this stuff,” he said. “I probably shouldn’t be telling you.”
“Do it anyway?” I asked, and I got a smile out of him.
“I knew what it meant when I started dreaming I was Grandpa Del,” he said, pouring fresh coffee grounds into the funnel. He sounded angry, but I knew better. I knew shame when I heard it. “There’s a . . . there’s a history of mental illness. In the family. Okay?”
“Mine too,” I said. It was mostly a lie, depending on how pious someone has to be before you start looking at them funny. But it was a small one, and David seemed to unwind a notch.
“Well, you know then,” he said. “Dad only talked about it when he was drunk. About keeping the great architect from letting it show. All the crazy things he did. Grandpa thought there were demons. Real demons. That they were always trying to get inside of you and make you do or think things. That they could make people into werewolves and vampires and all that. It wasn’t a metaphor for him. He really thought it was true.”
David shook his head and gave a little half-grin.
“When I started dreaming, I knew what my subconscious was trying to tell me,” he said. The smile was gone. His voice was gray as slate. “It was happening to me. I was going crazy too.”
“You never thought maybe your grandfather was right?” Aubrey asked.
“Sure I did. For hours at a time,” David said. “After a really bad dream, I’d think it was all stone-cold true for three, maybe four hours. That’s how I knew. That I was next. And the dreams were getting violent. The thing in the box with me wasn’t bugs anymore. It was some kind of . . . I don’t know. Something huge. And it was mad at me. I mean really mad.”
The kettle whistled, and we all jumped a little. David turned off the heat, picking up the kettle’s black handle with a fold of his robe. He poured a little water into the funnel, steam wafting up over his hands.
“I started missing work. There was this woman I was going out with, and I broke things off with her. I didn’t want her involved in this. Wasn’t fair to her.”
“Did you go to a doctor?” Aubrey asked.
“No. I felt like if I didn’t tell anyone, maybe it would all go away. Stupid, I know, but . . .”
He shrugged. The truth was doctors probably would have thought the same things he did.
“What happened next?” I asked.
David shrugged, then switched the funnel to the second cup, dribbling a small line of coffee across the table between them.
“It got worse,” he said. He wiped the spill with a sleeve. “I started getting this constant feeling that I should go . . . somewhere. Like I was being called. The thing in the coffin wanted me to go somewhere and do something. It didn’t seem angry anymore. Not exactly. More commanding. That’s normal with schizophrenia, you know. Command hallucinations. Something outside of you telling you what to do.”
He added more water to the top of the funnel and then handed me the first mug. When I took it, a little stab of pain went through my shoulder where the nail had been, but I tried not to show it. The coffee was surprisingly good, especially for decaf. Not at all bitter, and with a smoky undertone that caught my attention. He must have seen my reaction because he smiled a little.
“Do you know what it wanted you to do?” Aubrey asked.
“No. It was trying to tell me, I think, but mostly I just knew I was supposed to come. To be there, wherever
“And the book?” I said.
“Which book?”
“Your grandfather’s book. The one in German.”
A look of chagrin passed over David’s face as he switched the funnel to the last mug. He added more water. I had to think the coffee grounds were getting pretty much used up by now.
“I had this idea,” he said. “If I understood the way my grandfather went crazy, maybe I’d at least get a little insight into what was coming next. How it would all go. I had some boxes in the attic. That was in them. I don’t know any German, though, so it didn’t help.”
