“Why don’t you believe it?”
“Please go on.”
“Why do you work for a killer?”
“I just have my job to do.”
“Being handmaiden to a murderer shouldn’t appeal to you.”
She smiled.
“Do I strike you as being insane?” he demanded.
“I can’t talk to you about that,” she said. “I know you have dreams—nightmares. The dreams are good, the nightmares—I’ll help you to forget them, help you to sleep without them. It’s only temporary, as a result of the strain. Don’t worry about them. Just tell me about them. That’s all I want you to do. You won’t shock me. I’ve heard so many strange stories and helped so many people. Just tell me about the worst of them. Please.”
What did they want to do? Make him think that he was crazy?
CHAPTER VI
HE could hear the moaning. . . .
And he could see the girl with the battered face and the white blouse and her hand lying over the side of the bed.
The nightmare gripped him with a feverish intensity, and went on and on, but was always exactly the same— the girl, the moaning, clearer, louder, clearer, louder. He wanted to shout, and opened his lips and screamed; but no sound came.
Then, he was awake.
The nightmare was no longer real, just vivid memory. He lay in the darkness. He felt the hot sweat bathing him, and his arms, legs and face twitching. He peered up at the darkness of the ceiling, and felt afraid. He didn’t try to move. He had only to stretch out his hand and switch on the light, but he didn’t want to. He had to overcome this new terror—a terror of the dark.
This was the third night of these nightmares.
It was always dark when he woke; and he knew that if he submitted to the terror and gave himself light, then he would have lost a battle.
He heard no movement, but suddenly it was no longer pitch dark. He opened his eyes. A small light burned by the door, which Marion was closing gently behind her. She wore a dressing-gown, her hair was in a net, and she was smiling reassurance. She came straight to him, and her hand was cool and gentle when she pressed it against his forehead. She went to the basin and damped a sponge, came back and sponged his face and hands; he wanted her to go on doing it.
“You’ll be all right, when you’ve told me about them,” she said. “If you’ll only tell me, there’s nothing more to worry about.”
She’d said that a dozen times in the past three days, but always in daylight. She hadn’t come in just after he had recovered from a dream before. He lay looking at her fresh, wholesome attractiveness, and felt that he hated her. She was the only human being he had spoken to, except the waiter, since he had first come round. She was always the same, and nothing he could say would make her change her attitude—he was ill, she was there to help him. He’d tormented himself, trying to fight against it; just as submission to the fear of darkness would mean a lost battle, so would the narration of his dream to her.
They could make him dream; they had.
“You’ll feel better soon,” she said softly.
He sat up.
“Water, please.”
She went and got him a glass of water. He sipped it, looking at her all the time.
She was like Janet.
It wasn’t just her hands; she was like Janet. If Janet were here, he would feel better. Being away from her was agony in itself. Knowing that she was worried, frightened because he was missing, was perhaps the worst thing of all, except that insistent question—why?
He hadn’t seen a newspaper or heard the radio, he had no idea what was happening outside in the world. Whenever Marion came in, there was always a male guard at the door, and he had no doubt that the man was armed.
“Tell me what it was about?” she whispered, and leaned over him.
He mustn’t lose the battle.
“I’m too hot.”
“I’ll take off the eiderdown.” She stood up, and folded the eiderdown back, took off one blanket, folded it and laid it across an easy-chair. “Lie down,” she said, and when he obeyed, she lay on the bed beside him. She was cool and impersonal; it wasn’t as if a girl were lying there, but someone unreal and unhuman; unhuman, not inhuman. “Just tell me about it.”
That quiet, insistent demand was always the same.
“You’ll feel much better.”
