Richard Matheson - What Dreams May Come

Albert! I thought in pleading anguish. Help me please!

Total blackness now. The deafening buzz of fly swarms in my ears, the sensation of their crawling, by the hundreds, in my mouth and throat, across my staring eyeballs.

Abruptly, then, I felt myself being plunged into icy liquid, shoved beneath its surface.

Instantly, it flooded down my throat and pressed against my face, an indescribable sensation-a combination of every vile taste and smell conceivable.

I felt the clawlike hands forcing me down into the liquid, my horror increasing even more-how was that possible?-as, below the surface, other hands began to clutch at me.

I tried to scream but only made a strangled, bubbling noise as hands kept pulling at me, passing me down from unseen grasp to unseen grasp, dragging me deeper and deeper into the noxious depths.

Bodies started clinging to me now, skeletal, with streamers of rotting flesh. My eyes were tightly closed but I could see their faces nonetheless. The faces of the living dead regarding me with gleeful, burning eyes as I went down and down and down.

Ann! I thought. My consciousness began to fade. I’ve failed you!

I sat up with a shocked cry.

Albert held his hand on my shoulder as I stared at him.

At last, I looked around.

We were sitting on a barren plain, all gray, its sky the color of muddy slate. A cold wind moaned across its stark, unending flatness.

Yet, I tell you Robert that, compared to where I’d been, that plain was paradise.

“How did you get me?” I asked. That I was with him seemed beyond my comprehension.

“You were only in their grasp a few moments,” he told me.

“A few moments?” I knew I was gaping. “But they knocked me down and dragged me to a pool and pushed me underneath the surface where-”

He shook his head, smiling grimly. “You were in my sight the entire time, no more than several feet away. They touched you only with their minds .”

“God,” I shivered uncontrollably. “That has to be Hell: It has to be.”

“One of them,” he answered.

“One!” I stared at him, appalled.

“Chris,” he told me, “there are Hells within Hells within Hells.”

WE WALKED ACROSS THE WIDE, GRAY PLAIN, SANDALS SCUFFING at the hard soil.

“There’s no one place called Hell,” Albert was telling me. “What men have called Hell is a vacuum in which undeveloped souls find themselves after death. A level of existence which they cannot rise above because they are unable to think abstractly but can only dwell on temporal matters.”

“Why did we have to go there then?” I asked. “Surely Ann-”

“I can only say, Chris, that the signals, if you will, led through there,” Albert said. “And, thank God, out of there.”

“Are we still following them?” I asked anxiously.

He nodded. “I believe we’re getting close now.”

I looked in all directions, seeing nothing but the lifeless plain. “How can we be?” I asked.

“Be patient,” he told me. “A little while longer.”

We walked in silence for a while. Then, thinking of him, I said, “That man who tricked me.”

“A tragic figure,” Albert said. “He spent the greater part of his life inflicting physical and mental torture on others. His crimes, turned back on him, have kept him prisoner in that place for centuries. The pity is that, in spite of the fact that the memory of each unspeakable act he ever committed is printed indelibly on his mind, he does not, to this moment, repent or regret his actions in the least.”

“Why do you call him tragic?” I asked, remembering the man’s vicious, feral expression.

“Because,” Albert answered, “in ancient Rome, he did not live the life of a criminal but that of an Administrator of Justice.”

I could only shake my head.

“Of course the justice he administered was nothing but a travesty,” Albert said. “And, now, he suffers the pain of true justice-an eye for an eye.”

He stopped abruptly, looking to our right. I turned my gaze in that direction and saw, to my surprise, a range of low hills in the distance.

“She’s over there,” Albert said.

I looked at him with sudden joy.

His expression did not encourage joy. “Don’t feel happiness,” he said. “It isn’t cause for celebration. Now the hardest part begins.”

Strange that, after all I had experienced in the crater, I should feel a greater sense of foreboding at the sight before me even though it should have been a reassuringly familiar one-the hill which led to our home.

I looked at Albert in disturbed confusion. Why had we gone so far afield if she’d never left home? “She’s here ?” I asked.

“Here?” he replied.

“In our home,” I said. But, even as I spoke, I knew why he had turned my question back on me.

This was not the home I’d known even though, from where I stood, it looked virtually identical.

“What is it then?” I asked.

“You’ll see if you go up there,” he answered.

“If?” I looked at him, astounded.

“I’d rather you left,” he said. “Yes, even here, where you’re only steps away from her.”

I shook my head.

“Chris.” He took my arm and held it firmly; how thick and- earthlike , I suppose the word would be-my flesh now felt. “What happened to you in the crater only happened in your mind-and only your mind suffered. What happens here could affect your soul.”

I knew he spoke the truth. Still, I shook my head again. “I have to see her, Albert,” I told him.

He smiled but it was no more than a sad, accepting smile. “Remember then,” he said, “resist, at all times, the despair you’ll feel. Your astral body must enshroud itself even more so Ann can see and hear you. In doing so, it makes you vulnerable to everything to which she’s vulnerable. You understand that?”

“Yes,” I nodded.

“If you feel yourself being-how shall I put it?- drawn in ,” Albert said, “oppose it with all your strength. I’ll try to help you but-”

I broke in. “Help me?”

“Do what I can to assist you while-”

My expression must have stopped him. He looked at me in alarm. “Chris, no,” he said. “You mustn’t.”

“Yes.” I looked up at the house, the roof of which was just visible on the hilltop. “I don’t know what’s up there or what’s going to happen. But I have to help her by myself. I feel it,” I said, not letting him speak.

He gazed at me in deep distress.

“I feel it,” I repeated. “I can’t explain it but I know it’s so.”

He stared at me in silence for a long while, obviously wondering whether he should try to argue with me.

Finally, without a word, he stepped forward and embraced me slowly. He held me for a long while, then stepped back, hands still on my shoulders, and managed a smile.

“Remember you are loved,” he said. “There is a home for you and people who care.”

He let his hands drop from my shoulders. “Don’t let us lose you,” he said.

I had no reply. There was no way of my knowing what I’d face on the hill. I could only nod and try to return his smile before he turned away and started walking from me.

I watched until he’d disappeared from sight, then turned and started up the driveway toward the house. A sudden thought occurred. Driveway? Did she have a car? And, if she did, where could she drive it?