The Dreamfields Read online

  The rest divided into pairs and headed off in different directions along the dreamfield’s sidewalks. They all moved at the same unhurried pace.

  “Which way you want to go?” asked Stimmitz. It was the first time he had spoken to Ralph since that afternoon.

  “Whichever way looks good to you.” Ralph glanced at his watch; for some reason, he and Stimmitz were the only watchers he had ever seen with time-pieces. Eleven-fifteen, he noted, and sighed. Seven and three-quarters hours until the line came dangling down out of the sky again.

  They walked in silence past a small drugstore. Circular racks of sunglasses and the aisles of cosmetics and other merchandise could be seen through its window. The store, like the others on the block, was lit up inside but vacant—the dream sequences tended to show up farther away from wherever the watchers had been dropped by the line.

  Idly, Ralph pushed his fingers through the drugstore window. After an initial resistance, his hand went into the glass as though it were a body of water somehow made vertical. The nature of objects on the dreamfield was described alternately as “cheesy insubstantiality” and “evanescent jello.” The mental orientation that kept the watchers on top of the sidewalks instead of sinking slowly through them also gave a slight surface-tension effect to everything in the dreamfield’s illusion of a small town. The glass actually felt like water rippling around Ralph’s moving hand.

  He turned his head and looked behind. The other watchers were all out of sight. Beside him, Stimmitz slowly paced, silent and apparently lost in thought.

  They reached the end of the block and crossed the street. On the other side were the same stores as they had just passed, but reversed as if they had walked through a mirror. The entire field was made up of infinite repetitions and reflections of the same small area. If the two of them continued walking down the street, the neon sign that spelled out DRUGSTORE would become EROTSGURD and then DRUGSTORE again . . . again and again, for as far as they went on the field.

  The sound of voices broke the silence. They had come upon the first dream sequence of the night. “In there,” said Stimmitz, pointing to the restaurant in the middle of the block on the other side of the street. The voices grew louder as he and Ralph headed towards them. One voice, a child’s, cracked with emotion.

  Peering through the restaurant’s door, they watched the scene, already well under way. “The old puppy-on-a-platter pattern,” said Stimmitz.

  “Are they still doing this one?” Ralph shook his head in disgust. “I thought they had already gone through all the kids in Thronsen with it.”

  “Maybe the therapists have started reruns.”

  The dream continued through its sequence. The platter with the boy’s dead dog upon it had already been brought to the table. The boy, a pallid-faced teenager, had risen from his chair and, with tears coursing down his face, was shouting at the waiter. As Ralph and Stimmitz watched, the waiter’s face melted into that of a middle-aged woman, probably the boy’s mother. More shouting, a long, agonized scream from the boy, and he buried his face in his arms upon the table, sobbing beside the dog’s corpse. In a few seconds, the mother/waiter dissolved into nothing along with the dog, leaving the crying boy alone in the empty restaurant.

  “That’s always been one of my least favorite ones,” said Ralph as they walked away from the restaurant. “There’s something really tacky about it.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s what I was talking about before. You know?”

  Stimmitz gestured around them at the dreamfield. “Don’t you start to wonder if the therapists over at Thronsen really know what they’re doing? Or if they do know, do we?”

  “Aw, come on.” Ralph kicked at a pebble on the sidewalk, the toe of his shoe going right through it. “Don’t start mystery-mongering again. Give me a little more to go on this time, all right? If you know so much, come on, show and tell time.”

  Stimmitz glanced at him, then barely smiled. “Maybe what I know isn’t a mystery,” he said. “Maybe I just know the same things as you and everybody else, but I think about them differently.”

  Ralph stopped in front of another of the field’s drugstores and faced Stimmitz. “You know you know more than I do. You sneaked into Thronsen with Helga Warner.”

  “Think about that.” Stimmitz tilted his head to one side.

  “Think about what?” He was beginning to feel a little irritated.

  “Why’d I have to sneak into Thronsen.”

  “Because . . .” Because there’s something they don’t want us to see. The pieces fell together in Ralph’s mind, perfectly formed, like a smooth black stone. Because they’re hiding something. He felt the weight of Stimmitz’s eyes upon himself. “I never thought about that.”

  “Most people think nothing of everything.” Stimmitz turned and walked away.

  Ralph stood for a moment in thought, then started after him. “Maybe they have a good reason for not wanting us in there.”

  “Exactly,” said Stimmitz without bothering to even look around.

  “Well, what about the dreams?” said Ralph as they crossed the street and entered another repetition of the small town. “What’s so mysterious about them?”

  “Look. There aren’t any dreams here. These sequences they put these kids through every night aren’t dreams; they’re nightmares. That one we just saw—” Stimmitz jerked his thumb behind them, “—the dog-on-a-platter bit, the girlfriend-into-father-into-cop one, all of the ‘angry parent’ routines. Man, those are the worst kind of nightmares. Those are epics of humiliation and frustration and fear.”

  “Well—” started Ralph.

  “Shut up a minute. Now, when you were recruited for Operation Dreamwatch, how did they explain it to you? Therapy program, right? A hundred hard-core recidivist juvenile delinquents, already been through every correctional program in the state, and they’ve got ’em all over there at the Thronsen Home now. And the therapists in charge of the program put the kids into a common, shared dream state every night and that creates this dreamfield, right? The therapists control the setting, control everything that happens to the kids when they’re dreaming—all the different sequences, which are designed to get to the kids’ psychological problems when their psychic defenses are lowest, catharsize their traumas and everything. And over here at the base, the watchers—us—are projected onto the field through the line shack, so we can observe and report on the kids’ reactions to the dream sequences. Isn’t that how it was explained to you?”

  Ralph nodded. “Pretty much.”

  “Okay, do you still believe it, then?” Stimmitz’s face darkened. “Do you really think these dreams are helping these kids? Putting them through the same kind of crap they’ve probably gone through all their lives while they were awake, only worse, because here it’s intensified, cut right down to the symbols—this is therapy? The real-life counterparts to these dreams messed them up before, what are these doing to them now?”

  “How should I know?” Ralph shrugged, wilting under Stimmitz’s outburst. “I don’t know anything about psychology.”

  “Psychology, fake-ology.” Stimmitz thrust his hands into the pockets of his jumpsuit and continued walking. “There’s a point where psychology has to meet with what you know about the world already. And if this is therapy, then the people in charge have missed that point.”

  “Hey, maybe it’s not therapy—it’s anti-therapy.” Ralph laughed weakly. “They’re not changing delinquents into normal kids. They’re changing normals into delinquents.”

  Stimmitz said nothing, leaving Ralph to his own thoughts for the next couple of hours.

  “Look over there.” Ralph pointed ahead of them along the sidewalk. “It’s ol’ Slither.”

  “Really?” Stimmitz snorted. “I thought maybe they’d finally gotten rid of that thing.”

  “Wanna go see what it’s up to?”

  “Yeah, why not?” said Stimmitz, yawning. “That oughta kill a little time.”

  Ralph glanced
at his watch. Two more hours until the end of the shift when the line would come down out of the sky for all the watchers. He and Stimmitz had gone through a couple of dozen of the field’s endless segments of small town, and observed half that many dream sequences.

  Ralph used to jot them down in a little notebook, but all the patterns become too familiar for that to be necessary any longer. There were rarely any dreams to be seen in the last quarter of the shift. On most nights—it took an effort to remember it was still dark in the real world, crawling towards dawn—nothing broke the monotony of pacing the silent, empty streets and waiting for the line.

  Except for the slithergadee, thought Ralph. He and Stimmitz hurried toward the corner where they had seen its tail disappear. The psychologist who thought up that thing must have some imagination.

  They rounded the end of the block and saw the slithergadee squatting malevolently in the middle of the road. Its corroded-brass scales rattled as its flanks bellowed in and put with its breathing.

  Repulsed, Ralph watched the creature. He remembered the poem, one of the classic Shel Silverstein children’s-rhyme parodies that one of the watchers had come up with when the thing was first spotted.

  The Slithergadee has crawled out of the sea

  He may catch all the others, but he won’t catch me

  No, you won’t catch me, old Slithergadee

  You may catch all the others, but you wo—

  And it ended right there. The name had stuck to the dreamfield’s resident monstrosity.

  It saw them coming toward it and opened its mouth in a gaping hiss.

  Its retractable fangs slid out of their sockets, double rows of glistening-wet crescents. Of all the field’s illusions, it was the only one that seemed to be able to see the watchers. It was harmless, though, being as insubstantial as everything else.

  “You know,” said Stimmitz as they halted a few yards from the slithergadee’s brooding face, “if they really wanted Operation Dreamwatch to be a therapy program, they’d take those kids over in Thronsen, give ’em our jobs, and let ’em come out here to take a few swipes at this thing.

  “There’s really an enormous satisfaction in kicking this godawful thing and having your foot go right through it. It’s as if it were the embodiment of all the bogeymen that scared you when you were a child. And then you find out that it’s not even real; there never was really anything to be afraid of at all.”

  Ralph nodded. Whenever it was sighted, about once a week, the slithergadee always afforded a few moments of pleasure to the watchers who had come across it. Ralph stepped forward and brought his foot down upon the thick tip of its tail lying in front of them. The thing hissed through its saucer-wide nostrils and jerked its immaterial tail away.

  “Watch this.” A boyish excitement had brightened Stimmitz’s mood. Of all the watchers he seemed to most enjoy fooling around with the slithergadee. “I’m going to zip one right through its nose.” He walked up to its face, then arced his foot through a waist-high swinging kick. The slithergadee clattered its scales in seeming frustration at not being able to snatch the shoe going in and out of its face as though it were a cloud.

  “Hey,” said Ralph. “With all your snooping around, you didn’t happen to find out what this thing is for, did you?”

  “No.” Stimmitz stood back a few feet and gazed at its swollen bulk. “To be honest, I didn’t. I’m really beginning to think the therapists designed it into the field for some reason, and then forgot they had it here. It never does anything in any of the kids’ dreams—just lurks around the fringes every once in a while.”

  Ralph yawned and scratched the side of his face. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s leave the poor thing alone. Even if it is just an illusion.”

  “One more time.” Stimmitz pivoted on one foot and aimed another kick at its head. The slithergadee opened its mouth, its teeth sliding forward into place, and tore off Stimmitz’s leg.

  “Good Lord!” Ralph fell backwards onto the sidewalk as the slithergadee reared up in the air, its roar mingling with Stimmitz’s agonized cry. There was an enormous gust of wind that smelled like blood and decayed meat, and the sky darkened. The slithergadee plunged back down and sank its fangs into the now silent body of Stimmitz.

  Rolling onto his side, Ralph tried to pull his legs beneath him, but they refused to function. A glance over his shoulder revealed the slithergadee shredding the corpse pinned to the ground by its claws. His heart racing, Ralph pushed himself up against the building at the edge of the sidewalk.

  It resisted for a moment, then yielded and he fell through the wall.

  Suddenly, there were no sounds from out in the dream-field’s street.

  Ralph crouched on the building’s floor and listened. The slithergadee’s roaring had stopped.

  He waited a few seconds, then got to his knees. The building he had fallen into was one of the field’s restaurants. He crawled over to its front window and cautiously peered out.

  The slithergadee was gone. But a mangled pile of flesh and clothing remained, slowly reddening the street.

  Ralph stepped through the window glass and slowly walked towards the corpse. Every organ in his own body knotted in hysteria as he looked at what was left of Stimmitz. A small moan of fear slid from Ralph’s lips.

  “Hey,” he said, barely making a sound from his constricted throat.

  Then he shouted it. “Hey! Anybody! Come here! Quick!” His voice rang through the empty streets, and he kept shouting until the other watchers came.

  First was Goodell and his observation partner. “What’s all the shouting about?” said Goodell. He paled when he saw what Ralph was standing near.

  The rest came from all different directions. They listened to Ralph’s few words of explanation. Without speaking, they drew away and huddled together a few yards from the body, and waited for the shift to end. It seemed like a long time until the line dropped out of the sky for them.

  Chapter 3

  I am amazed at how fast my hands can move. Really amazed. Ralph clung to that thought desperately, knowing that if his mind wandered, he would see Stimmitz’s crumpled body again. His hands continued their work, rapidly extracting the clothing from his closet and filling the suitcase laid open on the bed.

  The last of the civilian shirts was wadded up and thrown in with the pants, underwear, and socks. The Opwatch base uniforms were left hanging or scattered on the floor where he had dropped them; he had been unbuttoning his shirt and pulling off the clothing as soon as he had made it inside the door of his apartment.

  His hands brought the suitcase lid down and his thumbs pressed the latches into place. Carrying the suitcase into the front room of the apartment, he set it by the door, then turned around, scanning the apartment for anything else he wanted to take with him. There wasn’t much. Objects had never seemed to accumulate around him here. Only trash remained—brown paper grocery bags in the kitchen and empty beer cans that had rolled too far under the bed to reach. After pausing for a few seconds, he went into the bathroom and slipped his toothbrush into his pants’ pocket.

  Is that it? he thought as he strode back into the front room. Somewhere he had a bus schedule, if he could find it. Greyhounds passed through Norden, the little town within walking distance of the base. He bent down to look through the old newspapers stacked beside the couch. When someone knocked at the door, his hand clenched, crumpling a page of outdated headlines.

  He stood up and stepped towards the door, then stopped as his hand touched the knob. “Who it is?” he said.

  “It’s me—Fred,” came Goodell’s voice.

  “What do you want?” Ralph still did not open the door.

  “What? Hey, are you okay?” Goodell rattled the knob.

  “Just tell me what you want.”

  “Hey, man, are you all right?”

  He snatched the door open. “What do you mean, all right?” he shouted into Goodell’s startled face. “You stupid schmuck, you saw what happened on th
e field. I’m supposed to be all right after that?”

  Goodell hastily backed up a few feet into the building’s hallway. “That’s what I came to tell you.” He spread his hands as though to fend off an attack. “The base commander wants to see you. Stiles told the rest of us something about what happened to Stimmitz.”

  “Yeah? Like what?” Ralph’s anger was simmering just below its peak.

  He felt as if his veins were taut with pressure after months of being half-empty.

  “Go get it from him,” said Goodell. “He’s the one who should tell you.”

  He turned and hurried down the hallway, glancing nervously over his shoulder at Ralph.

  Stiles wants to see me, thought Ralph as he closed the door and turned to face the silent room. What did he tell the others? His watch read seven-thirty. He had walked out of the line shack as soon as they were all back from the dream field, leaving the others to relate second-hand what had happened to Stimmitz. His own words, he had decided, were going to be saved for the police back in L.A., or the FBI or something.

  Outside his apartment window, the base and the desert beyond it were starting to wash gold with the morning light. Ralph picked up his suitcase, then dropped it and chewed the edge of his thumbnail. If I try to leave now, he thought, they’ll catch me. And then what? He took his hand away from his mouth and wiped his suddenly sweaty palms on his pants. Maybe Stiles told the other watchers that I killed Stimmitz. The conjecture took root in Ralph’s mind and blossomed like an explosion. Maybe that’s what he told them, and he’ll have me shot when I go to his office, and then tell everybody that I tried to escape. And that it’s okay because I was a homicidal maniac anyway.

  He sat down on the couch and leaned forward, concentrating. It seemed as if he had inherited Stimmitz’s universe upon the other’s death. Except, thought Ralph grimly, that he knew something about what was going on around here.

  Suddenly, another thought entered his head, like a ray of light. They might not kill me if they didn’t think they had to. If they thought I didn’t suspect anything. He stood up and paced the length of the small room. If Commander Stiles’s suspicions could be put off for a while, there might be a chance of getting away later—even today, possibly. It was just a matter of playing dumb for now.