Jack Ketchum - Sleep Disorder

Of course not. The neighbors were all dead, like her.

"So what do you mean, 'not necessarily?'"

She shrugged a smooth bare shoulder. "Whether you live or die depends on you."

My stare told her I didn't get it.

"I see assholes like you every day. We're not even people anymore, to you we're not even human. We're nothing more than a bunch of animals."

"That's not true. Yes, there are tons of bigots out there. But I've been trying to tell you all night long. I'm not one of them."

I was pleading for my life, not my principles. And she knew it.

"Sure you are. You're no different. Liberal Democrat, my ass. The proof is the fact that you're here in the first place. You goddamn guys, you all think it would be a riot to have sex with the dead. Something to laugh about, something you can brag about to your buddies. Well guess what? Here's your big chance."

She ran her finger down the gun barrel.

"And if you do a real good job, I won't kill you."

It was crazy. It made no sense. It was what we'd come here to do in the first place and now she was turning it into some kind of weird life-and-death challenge. But could I believe her?

What choice did I have?

Strangest thing was, I knew I could do it. Even with the gun in her hand. Even with John dead on the floor. I could put the blocks to her then and there. I looked from her mouth to her breasts and was I hard already. Maybe death and fear are aphrodisiacs.

I took off my shirt and dropped it to the floor. I slid off my belt and dropped that too. "All right," I said quietly and took a step toward her. She started to laugh.

"You should be so lucky!"

Now I really was lost.

"Not with me, you jackass." She reached for a door back near the drapes that opened to a block of darkness. "Mom? Billy? Come on out." Their stench preceded them. I could barely breathe.

"Mom burned up in a car accident," she said. "My brother Billy drowned in the Hudson. But they both came back. I take care of them now."

They shuffled across the room, knelt awkwardly at John's body. The woman had no face at all, just char. Her body looked like a skeleton covered with blackened bacon. The boy's flesh was mostly green and hung slack now that he'd lost his floaters' bloat over a naked ribcage that seemed stuffed with meatloaf. Two eyes gleamed from a mottled blood-pudding face. And what we'd heard about the dead — that they were sometimes far more powerful than they'd been in life — was true. Effortlessly these two palsied-ruined creatures opened John's gut and pulled things out of him and then for a while there were nothing but munching noises until she broke the silence.

"Mom likes it hard and fast," she said. "But not too hard. You know, pieces could fall off. You've got to be careful."

The faceless thing looked up at me through black clotted eyes and did something with its mouth that might have been a smile. I could see the crisped breasts, the scorched sex between its stick legs.

"And Billy's gay. Try to get him off with your mouth, otherwise he's gonna put the whole thing up your ass. Ouch!"

Already its cock was getting hard. The glans looked like a spoiled green tomato.

They both began to crawl in my direction.

"You're the one who wanted to have sex with the dead," she said. The gun was cocked and pointed at me. "So get to it."

She kept her promise — she obviously didn't kill me. So I guess I got it right. They keep me in the back room now with Mom and Billy, shackled.

I hear her bring in other guys all the time. None of them last long. I hear a pop and that's the end of them. So far I'm their favorite. I figure she must have singled me out after all that evening at the bar. And the sex? It's horrible, sure, it's hideous. But it's better than being their next meal. You'd be surprised what you can do if it means staying alive just one more day.

But their appetites are…awful, tremendous.

My only hope is that Neal's out there somewhere looking for me. Looking for his buddies, John and me. That he's got the cops onto it, maybe. That somehow, against all odds he'll find me. That maybe one of these days she'll slip up, make a mistake — she'll go by the World Cafe again and Neal will be On Point that day at the big plate glass window watching the ladies go by in their short summer skirts and tees and tank tops and see one who looks just like Daryl Hannah.

Eyes left.

Meantime it's winter now. The City's cold in winter. And it's very cold in here.

Bill Dumont never dreamed.

Hadn't for as long as he could remember. The popular wisdom was that you simply had to dream or you'd go crazy — you'd maybe already be crazy — so he assumed he did, really. He just couldn't recall a thing. Not a single image. Practically speaking that was as good as not dreaming at all. Which was fine with him because he doubted that his dreams were going to enlighten him much.

Bill Dumont was a Grade-A, All-American bastard and he damn well knew it. His father had been before him and probably his father before that. He got to live the life every day. He didn't need to dream about it too.

But there had to be dreams. Or elsewhere would all this talking come from?

He talked in his sleep.

Pretty much every night if you were to believe Annie, his current live-in girlfriend. Or Laura, his soon-to-be-ex wife. Or any of the squeeze he got on the side. And he guessed it had started way back in college because he remembered he'd sure scared the hell out of Harry, his last roommate, the second night in their apartment together by sitting bolt upright in bed and saying, "I have come to you through space and time — but not through New Jersey." And then going back to sleep again.

Harry was kind of leery of him for the next week or so. Couldn't blame him.

New Jersey for god's sake.

"What you dream," he'd said, "is how you see others, seeing you."

Well, Harry was a psych major so what could you expect? He could talk some mean Freudian, Jungian or Reichian dynamics but Bill was less interested in Harry's analysis than in his wallet back in those penny-pinching college days. Harry was a rich kid. Harry also had a crush on the proverbial tall, dark and handsome Bill Dumont — and Bill didn't want to fork out all that tuition money if he didn't have to. And as the saying went, it was all pink on the inside.

Bill feigned a fervent affection for the entire senior year, secretly boffing cheerleaders and business majors on the side, taking them to nice expensive restaurants on Harry's cash. Between the tuition and party money, Bill took the poor chump for a small fortune. When Harry got the gist, he blew his head off — day after graduation. Too bad. But hey, Harry's mental problems weren't Bill's problem.

This dreaming business, though. From age thirty on, everybody complained about Bill's talking in his sleep. Laura had even bought earplugs. Which he thought was pretty damn rude. But at least the bitch never really complained much after that, except occasionally about the earplugs bothering her. "Go sleep on the couch if you don't like the damn things," he'd suggested once but she never did. Laura was insecure and Bill was — well, proverbially tall, dark, and handsome. He loved to think about other women when he was putting the blocks to her, pretty fair lay though she had been.

But as for the talking, Bill supposedly spoke in a clear, conversational voice and everything he said evidently made perfect sense — or would have, if you could find a context for it.

But you couldn't. At least he couldn't. Because the context was the dreams.

And he never remembered his dreams.

The talking was a minor annoyance as far as he was concerned. It didn't disturb his sleep. Annie even seemed to find it funny at first.