Warren Murphy: Sweet Dreams

She started to wail and Remo let her down gently and told Smith: "Wait here until I see what's happening."

He ran off between the trees. He heard loud shouting ahead of him now.

Chiun cradled the girl in his arms and touched her on the neck, then rubbed the back of her head. He looked up at Smith.

"She will forget now," he said.

On the other side of the stand of trees, Remo ran past stunned, stumbling students until he found the exit doors that led into Fayerweather Hall's main lecture auditorium.

He stood beside the blackboard staring at the huge pool of blood with the broken-headed corpse in the middle.

He recognized Wooley at once; the body of Lee (Woody) Woodward meant nothing to him.

The red sea of blood reached across both exit doors and was building up slightly in the small declivity formed by the blackboard wall and the incline of the first row of seats.

Remo saw the blood circle around a pair of shoes. The shoes had feet in them, feet that led up to a boy, sitting in a seat, doing an excellent impersonation of advanced catatonia.

He was staring straight ahead and gently touching dried brown bloodstains on his face.

Teachers and students from other classes began to gather around the pool of blood. They stood staring at the corpses of Wooley and Woodward. Several threw up. Some moved around to get a better look, then all started talking at once.

"Did anyone call the police?"

"Yeah. No. I don't know."

"Who did it?"

"Some madman. Woodward tried to shoot old Wooley and this lunatic took off both their heads with that mace."

"Who was he?"

"Dunno. Army jacket, steel-rimmed glasses. Looked like us."

Remo moved outside, walking past huddled moaning shapes. One had thrown up and was trying not to again. Another youth, who couldn't take his eyes off the exit doors, was trying to comfort a girl who was weeping hysterically.

This wasn't a dream. The students who had seen the murders would never forget it; they wouldn't have to strap their heads to a television set to conjure up a fantasy of blood and death. They had seen it, had it dumped into their laps.

Remo walked back through the pine trees. Chiun and Smith were still crouching over the girl.

Before Smith could say anything, Rerno said: "Wooley's dead, Smitty."

"Who did it?"

"I don't know, but I'm going to find him. You can forget the house for awhile," Remo said. "This one's a freebie. Will she be all right?"

Chiun nodded.

"Then leave her and let's go. We've got work to do. So long, Smitty."

Leen Forth Wooley felt something pull at her. She took off her stereo headphones and tried to dig on the new vibrations.

But it was only someone banging on the front door of her house. Usually, she would ignore it because Wooley wasn't home, but the knocking seemed more insistent, faster, than one of her father's usual visitors.

She drifted slowly toward the door, remembering Wooley's injunction to be cautious.

"Who is it?" she said.

"Leen Forth," came a student's young sounding voice. "Your father's been killed."

"Oh, my god," Leen Forth cried and fell backward into the living room. She took a deep breath, then rose and went to the door.

"How did it happen?" she coolly asked the student there, an eighteen-year-old boy with a complexion like pizza and the insecurity of an unfed kitten.

"Murdered. Some maniac at Fayerweather Hall," the student said unfeelingly, then stopped when he saw the effect of his words on Leen Forth.

"Thank you," she said and slammed the door.

So they had gotten to him. All those people with their greed and their promises and their threats, and someone had gotten to William Westhead Wooley because the world was afraid of his genius and wanted to silence it.

Never. Not if she could help it.

She fished in the pocket of her jeans and found the scrap of paper, and dialed the telephone number.

"Yes, Mr. Massello, dead. Murdered. Yes, I know where it is. Yes, I'll be right there. Of course, I'll bring the machine."

Then Leen Forth Wooley hung up the phone and ran from her house toward safety. Toward the houseboat of her father's friend.

Don Salvatore Massello.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Remo and Chiun seemed hardly to be walking, yet they were covering ground as if on the dead run toward Professor Wooley's cottage.

"First we'll make sure that the girl is all right," Remo said. "Then we'll see if we can get the dream machine. I'll need your help."

"Why?" said Chiun.

"She's… well, Oriental."

"She is Vietnamese," Chiun said. "You know what I have told you about Vietnamese."

"Yeah, but she might trust you."

"Why? Because we look alike?" Chiun said.

"Well, some Orientals all do look alike," Remo said lamely.

"All you pigs' ears look alike and I would not trust any of you," Chiun said.

"Do it for the country then," Remo said.

"What country?"

"America."

"What has this country done for me?" Chiun said.

"Ask not what this country can do for you," Remo said. "Ask what you can do for this country."

"Did you just make that up?" Chiun asked.

"No. President Kennedy did."

"And where's he now?"

"I don't want to talk to you anymore," Remo said. "I'll handle it myself. Just like I do everything else."

"Good," Chiun said. "It is almost time."

"Almost time for what?" Remo asked.

"It is almost one o'clock. It is almost time for The Gathering Clouds to begin."

"Good luck," Remo said, as he dashed into Wooley's house, with Chiun close behind him.

Remo searched the house for Leen Forth while Chiun inspected the television set, broken by a gangster's head the night before, and determined that it was indeed broken beyond repair.

"She's not here," Remo said when he came back to the living room.

"This set is broken," Chiun said. "If it hadn't been for you… If I hadn't had to protect you, this would not have happened… this set would not be broken." He was working himself up from annoyance, through anger, to outrage.

"Too bad," Remo said.

"Heartless you are. Heartless."

"You find your stupid television set. That poor girl may be with that looney that killed her father. I've got to find them."

"Follow your nose," Chiun said. "Vietnamese smell funny."

Chiun went out on the porch and sat on the top step sadly, watching Remo race off across the well-watered grass of the campus.

It had been more than eight hours since Arthur Grassione had heard from the two men he had sent to Doctor Wooley's house to get the Dreamocizer and to dispose of Wooley.

Finally, he had sent Edward Leung there to see what had happened, and Leung had come back to report that the two men's bodies had been stuffed into garbage pails in the back of Wooley's house.

Leung's heart-shaped yellow face looked sad as he delivered the news.

"They were broken up badly," he said, and his tone of voice sent a chill through Grassione.

"Yeah, what happened to them?" he asked.

"One shot with his own gun. His skull blown away. The other one, no marks. As if he died of fright."

"Just like the others," Grassione said.

"What's others?" said big Vince Marino, standing by the window of the second-floor apartment, looking out into the curved drive below.

"All those people we been losing. All over the country. Just like that. Shooting themselves. Scared to death. There's somebody doing something to us." He looked up and caught a hint of a smile on Edward Leung's mouth.

"What are you smirking about, you goddam fisheating fortune-telling freak?"

"Nothing, sir," Leung said.

"You'd better talk, coolie."

Leung took a deep breath before speaking. Slowly he said, "I warned you of this. All of life ends in death and dreams."