Jack Ketchum - Sleep Disorder

She fell asleep…

…and dreamed again. The strange, milky-blue eyes peered querulously at her. She lay naked, procumbent now. The lamb before the slaughter?

No, this wasn't like that. Beyond the scape of sheer black, she heard muttering. It seemed echoic, sullen. Small, soft things entered her, not simply her orifices, but between her fingers, between her lacquered toes. Then, wet speckling. Cold. Hands, or things like hands, smoothed over her sleek back, down her thighs, the backs of her calves, the bottoms of her feet.

One climax after the next, subtle yet strangely powerful and so different. Her mind felt like a labyrinth now, an Eighth Century Chinese puzzle box only now beginning to open.

What had he said?

You'll be the first, then .

The climaxes seemed to be extracted from her, a long string of warm beads, little animals let loose…

And the black muttering drew on and on.

Later she wakened again, her face hot behind the mask. She didn't want to remove it though. She didn't know why. Stephen slept silently beside her. The candle had burned to a stub, its light diminished. She slid out of bed, padded barefoot past countless relics of countless times and out of the room.

Down the carpeted hall.

In the den stood a Federal-Period highboy, circa 1760. Over it hung a British "Brown Bess" musket and below that a blunderbuss whose hand-forged barrel must have been made a century before that.

She noted the Stradivari in its frame, complete with rosined bow. On the facing wall hung a crude iron mask of Xipe, the Aztec god of good fortune. And beside it, Quetzelcoatl.

Would these be the masks they wore next?

Or would there even be a next?

And why had she wondered that?

She parted the French doors, stepped out into the evening's sultry heat. A moon the color of jack cheese blundered above a reef of lit clouds. She stretched on the balcony, feeling her muscles loosen, offering her nakedness to the moon. The street below remained half-alive — only stragglers from parties and bars and whatever, the tired sad dregs of the city out at four in the morning — but up here?

No one could see her but the gods.

Her dark nipples stood erect. She rubbed her navel with her finger and flinched. An electric sensation. Then she touched herself lower and sighed.

In the pearlescent moonlight she let her hands open over the tight contours of her body. More electricity. Through the double-layered eyeholes of the mask, she gazed upward.

The moon shifted to a blur.

The sky turned black-pink.

A hundred dead cultures , she thought. A thousand. They've all looked at this same moon. A century ago or fifty centuries .

Her mind flowed; something gripped her. She knew she loved him. She had no idea exactly how or exactly why. Only that she loved him more than she'd ever loved anyone in her life. It wasn't just passion, it was all of it. His sheer unknowable depth, his grasp of life and the flow of time and cultures. Even his strangeness, crying in the dark. And she thought that perhaps the loves of her past weren't loves at all but just a long line of spoor leading to the point of time in which she now stood. Naked. Satiated. Giddy and exuberant.

Her vision shifted, gazing high into the dark. Not a dream this time, but a waking scape of abstraction. The black muttering kissed at her ears. She rose on her tiptoes when she sensed the tiny proddings. She felt so different now and she knew it was because of him, because of Stephen.

The man of her dreams? Nothing quite so trite. A man forged of the world, a man with sensations so far removed from the fodder of flesh that was her past.

A man to love, to be a part of.

She let the night's caress release her, then drifted back inside. The mask — thick carved wood plus the insert — should have felt heavy by now, but instead it felt like translucent skin. Her gaze roved the room.

From Troy to Knossos to Ninevah , she thought as her eyes strayed over his relics.

He's been everywhere. Everywhere on earth .

She stopped before a Shogun mirror with fabric inlays. Her image — her masked image — looked back.

She was beautiful, but…

The eyes.

Blue as the ocean, with a skein of milk.

Not her eyes at all.

Unsettled, she whisked the mask off. Tricks of candlelight and scintillant passions. Her senses, right now, couldn't be trusted.

The Asian carpet felt warm under her bare feet. She still felt too restless to return to bed. She wandered back to the highboy, opened the center drawer set with mother of pearl and flower petals of white pine.

A folder in there, atop a strange mound of clutter. She picked up a piece of the clutter and found it rigid, yet thin as newsprint. A curved I-beam the color of balsa wood that didn't even flex when she tried to bend it. What was this stuff?

And what was in the folder?

She set the wooden lamb's mask on top of the highboy's veneered mantle. Slid out the folder and opened it.

Yellowed sheets of paper, along with grainy black-and-white photographs.

Here was a picture of Stephen, in a military uniform, bending over a long piece of something in the desert. So he had been a soldier after all. The thing looked similar to the cryptic balsa beam she'd just handled. Another photo showed the I-beam up close, with markings, much like glyphs, embossed along its center.

She picked a sheet of paper out of the folder at random and read:

TOP SECRET, SPECIAL ACCESS REQUIRED. TEKNA, BYMAN 21 April 1972

Dear Mr. President:

Enclosed you will find our official analysis of the aforementioned incident concerning the vehicle tracked by NORAD on 18 April 1972. Crash perimeter verified, 198NE, 2017S, near the Nellis Military Reservation. All Army CIC and recovery personnel have been properly debriefed. Recovered material now in transit via INSCOM Technical Escort Unit, 61st Ordnance, to W-P AFB. Please advise in compliance with AFR 200-1.

Stephen D. Gannett, Major General 0–7 Commander, Air Force Aerial Intelligence Group Fort Belvoir, Virginia, MJ-12/Dept. 4

She stared at the sheet as though it were a skiving of human skin in her hands. Behind her the door clicked open.

"From Troy to Knossos to Ninevah," came his flowing voice. "From Galilee to Agincourt to the blood-fields of Carthage where Hannibal lost his dream."

The room seemed to hush beneath her stare.

He was wearing the mask again but she could still see his eyes, the eyes so blue, with veins of milk. He stepped forward once, twice. A third time. Measured, even steps. His hands opened out like a preceptor on an ancient mount standing before smoking crevices and plinths of obsidian and granite dolmens encrusted with the blood of the innocent.

"And from Kingman to San Angelo to Roswell," he said. And now his voice resembled a sound akin to crumbling rocks. "There is such truth in little things Christine, be they from here or from places we can't conceive. The little things, in a sense, are ghosts that haven't quite given up all their flesh."

His eyes moved toward the highboy and something in her nearly understood.

She snatched up her own mask from its top. Her fingers pressed against it. The wooden lamb mask stared up inert. But beneath it… The insert. The satin-covered lining.

She untied the insert from the mask's carved holes. The mask clunked to the floor — dead wood and nothing more.

The covered insert lay in her hands now like something stillborn. She untied its velvet strings, slipped the insert from its delicate lining. And withdrew…a second mask.

It shone silver, like metal, in the candlelight.

It had no weight at all.

"So much power in truth, and so much truth in culture, Christine." His milky-blue eyes stared hard at her through the face of the carven wolf. "All cultures, all relics. It's a symbology of life, isn't it? Mythology needn't belong exclusively to us. We'd be stupid to believe that."