Warren Murphy: Sweet Dreams

"That's right, Uncle Pietro," Grassione said. "And it works for anybody. Whatever anybody wants, he can dream it on this machine."

"You be sure to bring this crazy machine home with you, Arthur," Scubisci said. "This I got to see. Me with hair, and feet that don't hurt." He laughed, a high tenor giggle.

"I will, Uncle, I will," said Grassione, but he hung up, not sure that his uncle had really grasped the significance of Professor Wooley's invention, the first major breakthrough in television since Grassione, as a boy, had first seen Felix the Cat at the 1939 World's Fair.

He remembered the demonstration that Wooley had given at the cafeteria. The little gook broad thinking about a Vietnam with no war.

Grassione had hooked up the Dreamocizer to the aerial connections of Don Massello's large-console, and then had attached the electrodes as he had seen it done, two to his forehead, two to his neck.

He sat back in the soft leather chair in the room and thought of what he wanted to dream about.

He knew.

He wanted to dream about that bastard who had been going around the country, tearing up some of the organization's best people.

But he had trouble. All he could think of was Edward Leung's warning to him: "All life ends in dreams and death."

He shook his head to clear it of those thoughts. He was Arthur Grassione. He was on the trail of the man who was attacking the organization. He was going to find him and kill him. Destroy him.

Slowly the fuzzy image on the television set cleared.

He had first heard of this character on a drug run in New Jersey a few years ago. Then the presence had been felt after the organization almost became involved in a union dispute. Before the syndicate could influence anyone, the dispute was no more. Neither were most of the disputers.

Then there was that election in Miami. The papers were crying about a governmental kill squad, but nothing seemed to stop whoever it was who was wiping out the organization's men.

And finally again, just a short time before, with a famous Mafia home movie. Few had seen it and most of them were dead. It showed one dark-haired young man wipe out two teams of assassins. With his hands and nothing else.

Grassione had not seen the movie. He had been told though that the man was thin, with dark hair but had thick wrists, and moved fast.

There were more places that Grassione had felt the unknown man's movements vibrating through the mob.

And so now for sport, for relaxation, for relief, he was going to kill the man with the thick wrists.

The Sony TV showed a bright landscape. There was a man running across a field. He was a thin, dark-haired man. He had thick wrists. Grassione had seen him before. He knew it. But where?

Right. He had seen him run across the campus at Edgewood University.

The man kept running. Running.

Grassione had seen him somewhere else, too. Where? On television. Once before. Running in the Boston Marathon.

The man was running faster and faster now, but the ground around him was covered with a growing shadow. And then the man took one last step and a giant foot came down and squashed him like a hard-backed bug. Juicy.

Grassione laughed and clapped his hands together.

The picture suddenly changed. It was a romantic, dimly lit apartment. The dark-haired young man was sitting at a small round table, raising a glass of wine to a dark-haired beauty across from him. She was small and delicate, with Oriental eyes. The door of the room burst open and Grassione appeared with a submachine gun and opened fire.

Grassione watched and sat smugly in his chair aboard Il Avvocato, smiling his pleasure with himself.

The picture began to jump again. But instead of a new shot, the colorful landscape returned. Grassione frowned. The giant foot was still there, but it was slowly rising.

Grassione sat up and looked closer as the foot rose.

The shadow under the foot receded until the dark-haired man, now looking gentler than Grassione had pictured him, had lifted the foot an arm's length above him.

Grassione thought about the foot pressing down, crashing down on this peacefully smiling man with the thick wrists. Except the foot didn't. It began to crack.

The harder Grassione thought, the more cracks appeared and the wider they grew. Suddenly, the foot, as if made of plaster, crumbled around the young man's hands.

Grassione cursed and thought about himself machine-gunning this man, and the picture shifted back to the dimly lit apartment. Grassione was still firing the machine gun but the bullets were hitting nothing. They crashed into the table and the walls. The girl wasn't even there.

Grassione saw a blue shadow alongside his image on the television screen, and then his own machine gun was in his mouth and the bullets were smashing off the back of his skull, blood, brain, and bone flying off to color the walls.

Grassione shouted in spite of himself, twisting in the leather chair. The picture lost the vertical, then the horizontal. Grassione tried to rise but could not.

A new scene came on the television. It was a devastated town street. A gray, dusty moonscape lined with craters and bullet holes. Sifting through the wreckage were dozens of Grassiones, all dressed in Nazi uniforms and carrying automatic rifles.

They would poke around a bit, then one would fire at a small animal, a rat, a shadow. They all seemed frightened.

The real Grassione sat sweating in his chair, riveted, wanting to rise but feeling unable to.

A wall fell down on the television screen atop several Grassiones. A human whirlwind hit the desolated town. The Nazi Grassiones started firing wildly. They succeeded in chipping wood and concrete as well as killing two more Grassiones, and then the blurry human form moved among the others, and where he moved, they died. Seemingly without touching them, he sent Grassiones flying all around him. His limbs were dark blurs and his head bobbed like a baloon in a cross current. He would seem trapped in the sights of a rifle, then the gun would be gone and his hand or foot would fill the television screen, then there would only be red.

Finally there was only one frightened Grassione left on the screen. He backed off slowly now from what finally had come into focus as a dark-haired young man with thick wrists. The television Grassione tried to run.

But the dark-haired man was on him, Grassione's head between his hand. With what looked like simple pressure, Grassione's head split open like a walnut shell.

Arthur Grassione screamed in his seat.

The picture wavered, then disappeared in a maze of vertical lines and a wash of red, then went black.

Grassione tried to get up. He tried to pull the electrodes off. But his hands couldn't reach his face. His head wouldn't move. He felt locked in the big soft leather chair.

Then a picture began to take shape before him. The dark television screen seemed to become a mirror. Grassione saw himself sitting in his chair with only one electrode on his temple and one on his neck. There were still four black wires coming from the Dreamocizer box on the back of the television set, but two of the wires were leading above him, over his chair.

Grassione concentrated on the screen. He bent a little so he could see better.

Standing behind the chair, arms crossed atop the back, was the thin, dark-haired man. He had thick wrists.

Grassione stared in wonder as the man reflected on the television set reached down to him.

He felt something on his chest.

He felt the pain.

He felt the air go out of him and his ribs crack and his heart pushed up against his spine. His blood vessels burst like popping corn, and his brain clouded, and he felt no more and saw and heard and did no more.

Remo let the two electrodes in his hand drop to Grassione's lap.