Лоуренс Блок - Ariel

She was holding a rose.

Roberta stared at her, heart pounding, throat dry. The woman’s image shimmered, swayed in the darkened room, the pale face glowing as if illuminated from inside. Roberta tried to avert her eyes but the woman’s gaze held them.

“Jeff!” she called out. The name echoed in the room and she realized she had made a mistake. “David... I meant David!”

There was no response. She tried to cry out again but the two names fought one another and no sound escaped her lips. Roberta looked at the woman’s eyes, dropped her own eyes to the rose clasped in her hands. Its petals were red as blood, and drops of blood hung from its thorns.

Again Roberta tried to call out and could not. With an effort she turned her eyes from the woman and looked across at the other twin bed, one hand extended to rouse her sleeping husband. But there was something wrong with the other bed. Roberta couldn’t touch the body lying on it because there were rails in the way, as if it were not a bed at all but an oversize crib.

And who was it who lay on top of the bed? David? Jeff?

No, it was a skeleton. Bare bleached bones lying uncovered on the bed, and she wanted to scream, and she looked at the woman and saw the pale face grow larger and more vivid, remaining where it was but seeming to come closer, so close that Roberta could see brushstrokes on the forehead and the sides of the face...

Brushstrokes?

Crib rails on her husband’s bed?

With a great effort she hurled herself up out of sleep. It had been a dream. Sleeping, she had dreamed an awakening but had emerged only into the dream itself. Now she sat up in bed and of course there was no apparition in the room, no rails on David’s bed. He was deeply asleep, his body giving off its familiar night-sweat scent of alcohol, his breathing slow and regular. He had not awakened because she had not made a sound. A dream, all a dream.

She wanted to get up. Drink a glass of water, smoke a cigarette. But the dream had been exhausting and the relief at having escaped from it had a profoundly sedative effect. She heaved a sigh, lay back for a moment, closed her eyes for a moment, and was instantly asleep again.

When she awakened hours later at her usual time, she did not remember the dream. Perhaps she repressed the memory; perhaps she had been so briefly awake and had fallen asleep again so quickly that the dream had had little opportunity to impress itself upon her conscious mind. In any event, she went downstairs and had breakfast and set about the business of the day without any thought of the terror that had interrupted her sleep.

Then, shortly before noon, it came back to her in a flood. She remembered what she had experienced and how it had felt, and her chest and throat constricted at the recollection. She could close her eyes and picture the woman, standing just as she had stood in the dream, her features clear as they had never been during her three appearances immediately before Caleb’s death. Then she had been wispy and insubstantial, like the ghost Roberta had assumed her to be. In the dream she looked as though she’d been painted.

Painted!

The brushstrokes she’d seen just before wrenching herself up out of the dream. And the rose she held in her clasped hands.

She ran to Ariel’s room, barely aware of the furious creaking of the stairs beneath her feet....

Moments later she was on the phone to Jeff. They had spent the previous afternoon at a motel, an enervating and ultimately unfulfilling afternoon, and had not planned to meet today. But she was insistent. He had to come to the house. Not to pick her up, but to come inside.

When he arrived she sat him down in the front room and told him about the dream. When she had finished he didn’t bother to mask his irritation.

“So it was just a dream,” he said. “I broke an appointment to get here, Bobbie. I’m sure it was a scary dream, but I can’t rush over and hold your hand every time you have a bad night.”

“Come upstairs.”

“I don’t see—”

“Just come with me.”

She led him up the stairs and the length of the hall to Ariel’s room, then pointed to the picture. The woman’s eyes glowed, catching the light in the room, throwing it back at them. “There,” she said. “That’s her.”

“It’s who?”

“It’s the woman I saw last night. It’s the same face, the same pose.”

“Her shoulders are bare. What happened to the shawl?”

“What difference does it make? It’s the same woman. She’s holding a rose. She held one in the dream.”

“With blood on the thorns.”

“Yes.”

“Maybe it’s colder in your room. Maybe that’s why she needed the shawl.”

“Damn it, Jeff—”

He approached the picture, examined it closely. ”Where did this come from, Bobbie?”

“Ariel found it in the attic. It may have been there for a century or more. David hung it for her the other day.”

“And you saw it then?”

“I barely glanced at it.”

“But you had a look at it before last night.”

“Yes, but—”

He spread his hands. “The defense rests. It’s simple enough. If you dreamed a particular face, red rose and all, and then subsequently you saw a portrait for the first time and it was the same face, then you might well have something that indicated something. You wouldn’t have evidence of anything, certainly, but you’d have food for thought. But you saw the portrait first.”

“So?”

“So you remembered it and it sparked your dream. You said yourself that the woman you saw when Caleb died was vague and insubstantial. She probably didn’t look like anything in particular. And when you saw the portrait the other night you didn’t make any connection because there was no connection to be made. But perhaps there was a superficial resemblance, enough for you to link something up unconsciously, and last night you expressed your perceptions in a dream. You dreamed of the woman you saw earlier, but you fleshed out the apparition by giving her the features you saw in the portrait.”

She resisted what he was suggesting. But he went over the argument a second time, and she found herself nodding, allowing the logic of what he was saying.

“I just glanced at her, Jeff.”

“The brain takes very vivid pictures even when we don’t think it registers anything at all. I could show you a photograph for a couple of seconds and you’d swear you barely saw it and didn’t remember anything but the most general impressions. Then, if you were to be hypnotized, you might very well be able to describe that photo as if you were still looking at it. The same sort of thing can happen in a dream.”

“I suppose so...”

“The portrait’s very likely of someone who lived in this house, or of a member of the family, at least. Now if there’s such a thing as ghosts... let’s pretend, for the sake of argument... and if that’s what you saw when Caleb died, it’s not inconceivable that the ghost was a relative of the woman in the portrait. Perhaps you sensed a family resemblance between the two and that was enough to set you up for the dream—”

“I think it was the same woman.”

“All right, suppose it was. She lived here and died here and every once in a while her ghost plays a command performance in the bedroom. Maybe you caused her to appear, Bobbie.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“You loved Caleb, you were close to him. That special closeness of a mother for her child. Maybe you had a premonition without even identifying it as such. You sensed that something was wrong with Caleb, that he was in danger, and maybe your unconscious fear conjured up the woman, or whatever, that you saw in the bedroom.”

“You’re saying I imagined her.”