“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. How crazy is that, right? I smiled back.
“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 there is. I started constructing it in my mind. I had this sense of the place, you know. There were days I’d go into work, and instead of doing anything, I’d just draw this vision in my head over and over. Trying to get it right.”
“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.”
“Here’s the thing,” I said. “You’re not crazy. Neither was your grandfather. The place you’re drawing? It’s Grace Memorial Hospital. Your uncle . . . sorry, your grandfather redesigned the place back in the forties. And there really is something weird and powerful that’s buried there. And it’s alive.”
David sighed.
“No,” he said. “Thank you, but no. That won’t work.”
“I can get you pictures of Grace Memorial,” I said. “Or don’t trust me. Google Maps is going to have a street view. Go look for yourself.”
“What if it is? What does that prove? That as my brain started breaking down, it grabbed anything related to Grandpa Del. Including some building of his I’d seen and half forgotten.”
“You’re pretty rational for someone in the throes of a schizophrenic break,” Aubrey said.
“I think I am,” David said. “But I would, wouldn’t I?”
I leaned back in my chair, coffee mug in both hands. The movement sent little sparkles of pain through my back and shoulder. I ignored them.
I’d been where David was now. I knew what it felt like to fall down the rabbit hole. Only I’d been lucky. Aubrey had been there to help me, and through him Ex and Chogyi Jake. There’d also been a truly ugly vampire named Midian Clark whose company I still missed. He was one of the bad guys, but we’d still been friends, just for a while.
David, though, hadn’t had anyone. The weird hidden world had washed into him, and he’d made the only sense of it he could. He saw what he was prepared to see: a slow, creeping madness. And over months, he’d turned in on himself and made it almost true. I couldn’t help wondering what I would have done in his place. Proving to myself that riders existed had almost gotten me killed, and I’d had guides and allies. If I’d been on my own, I might have come to the truth. Or else my doubts and disbelief might have gone septic too.
“We can agree that you haven’t told anyone else about what’s been going on? At least not in specifics?”
He nodded.
“Cool. Hang here,” I said, and put the coffee mug on the table with a thump.
Stepping outside, I was astonished by how late it was. The sky was already crawling toward a steel blue twilight. The air smelled damp, like it had rained when I wasn’t watching. The conversational barker had gone away or been put in a house, and the distant throb of outsized car speakers rose and fell in its place. I went to the car, popped open the passenger-side door, and took out my laptop carrier. I opened the computer as I walked back through David’s house, stepping carefully over the scattered papers and the fragments of coffee table. I had the file pulled up and ready to play when I got to the kitchen.
I didn’t talk or explain. I just put the laptop on the table in front of him, scooted the cursor over to the play button, and clicked. Oonishi’s dream sequence played out in silence, and I wasn’t watching it. David started off guarded, maybe even amused. And then his face went bloodless, and he sat forward. I could see the pulse pushing the bandage on his neck. When the recording was done, he played it again. And again. By the fourth time through, silent tears were running down his face.
“That’s it,” he said, his voice soft and choked. “That’s the thing in my dream.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Other people have seen it too.”
“Oh,” he said. “Oh, thank God.”
TWELVE
“Well, you two look smug,” Kim said as Aubrey and I came in. “What’s with the new shirt?”
“Bled all over the old one,” I said.
“Where’s Ex?”
“We just got him to take a nap,” Chogyi Jake said, coming in from the kitchen. “I told him I’d get him up as soon as the lasagna was ready.”
The condo had changed in our absence. The night pressing in at the windows was the same, but the smell of dust had been replaced by the reassuring scents of garlic and hot butter. And instead of a ragged hole in the wall, fresh pale wood made a clean, unpainted door frame. The iron security door was gone too. The scum of white that had covered everything had been cleaned up, and a squat red shop vacuum lurked in the corner beside the couch. Aubrey put the box of Declan Souder’s belongings borrowed from David’s attic on the coffee table, and I told the story. Kim and Chogyi Jake sat, listening to the whole thing.
Kim picked up the Der Körper und der Geist, paging through it with a frown. Chogyi Jake looked through the other contents of the box—a couple of books on architects named Speer and Troost whom I’d never heard of, a notebook of sketches, and a moth-eaten blue suit. In return for it, I’d left David my number, an offer to call him if I found out anything important, and stern instructions to start carrying his cell phone instead of leaving it at the office. If I’d asked for his car, I think he’d have given it to me.
“Poor bastard,” Kim said. “He must have been in pretty bad shape.”
“Worse than Kelly after his gels went bad,” Aubrey said in a tone of agreement. “This guy’s been trying not to sleep for months.”
“Kelly?” I said.
“Sorry,” Aubrey said. “Guy we used to know. I just meant that David was messed up. I did a couple small cantrips to lessen influences and help him sleep. Hopefully, they’ll give him a little cover. At least until we can get whatever this is resolved.”