Stephen (ed.) - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18

My dreams? You want to know what sort of aberrant dreams I have lying in my great-grandfather’s johnboat in my great-grandmother’s canning cellar? What would any sane and cogent professional expect? They appal me, my dreams. They make the plush beneath my fingernails engorge and the flesh of my scrotum tighten. My languid heart accelerates, my flaccid lungs assume the groaning liveliness of bellows, my back arches, and my agitated body balances on the sensitive points of my shoulder blades, coccyx, and heels. A low-level galvanic current crisscrosses my chest and abdomen and streams discontinuously, maddeningly, from a shifting locus in my brain to my fingertips and toes. An onlooker would no doubt suppose me electrified: an epileptic suffering a fit at once disruptive and shackling. If only I could awaken.

Their substance? Relate the substance of these dreams? Specificity? Of course. You want from me only what I pride myself on providing: namely, facts: namely, details; namely, the distillation of the synaptic impulses informing my visions into words that narrate and evoke. Very well. How can I deny you? How can I transgress against the eminence who made me this way – and who sent me to you – by withholding that which, fully aired and processed, could perhaps end my torment? But, Dr Prida, I hesitate – out of conscience as well as shame – to subject you, a respectable professional woman, to the specifics, to the dreadful aberrance of these subterranean sleep-engendered imaginings. I hesitate to alarm, repel, violate, and, ultimately, estrange you. I cringe from disclosing the heinous constructs of my id, whose depravity only a god or a child could visit without life-altering damage.

You scoff? Well, go ahead. As young as you look, you claim to have practiced a decade and a half? You’ve heard – as confessions – the laments of anorexics, adulterers, pederasts, fools, bigots, self-mutilators, poltroons, traitors, murderers, and blasphemers? Nothing I can say – no shameful act I might reveal – could possibly dent your therapist’s armor, much less pierce it and render you, the queen of unshakable aplomb, a gibbering parody of your degree-bearing self? Very well, then, I’ll speak. Remember that I warned you. Remember that I hold in higher regard that kernel of innocence at your venerable core than you do yourself . . .

Three days ago, in my johnboat coffin amid the pseudo-foetuses of canned squash and tomatoes in their ill-shelved Mason jars, I had three devastatingly aberrant dreams in a row. That I survived even one of them – that I outlasted all three – even yet astonishes me, Dr Prida. The first alone would have unmanned nine-tenths of the diurnal sleepers of my unhappy persuasion – indeed, shocked them to utter insentience and left them the unresisting prey of brown recluses, camel crickets, and mice. Forgive what must sound like unmitigated boasting, but I know the Achilles’ heels of my colleagues, as well as my own, and that first dream let fly its pernicious arrow at that highly vulnerable portion of my psychic anatomy, and struck it square on.

The dream: get to the dream. I’ll recount it as starkly as it inflicted itself upon me: I awoke – not in reality, but in the washed-out opalescent landscape of my vision – and struggled out of bed into a chamber of undivided white: white ceiling, white floor, white walls, white bedstead, white clothes-tree, and, upon this clothes-tree, an assortment of white clothes for the ten-year-old boy that, in dreaming, I had become. I had to garb myself, for I had awakened naked and the stinging brightness of the chamber required an immediate adjustment on my part to prevent my going blind. Shuddering at the touch of each item, I donned a pair of schoolboy briefs, a ribbed white wife-beater undershirt, a pair of white-duck trousers, a starched white dress shirt, and a hooded white sweatshirt, whose hood allowed me some small shelter from the overweening brightness. Head down, I groped my way back to the bed, found a pair of white cotton sweat socks on the white feather pillow, and pulled one of these socks onto my pallid toes, over my albino’s instep, and up and over my leprous left ankle. The sock had no end. It covered my calf, knee, thigh, groin, and, by some inexplicable geometric convolution, my midriff, torso, and neck, so that I was finally imprisoned in a snowy full-body strait-stocking that clung to nearly every square inch of me, mercilessly. When I screamed, still sleeping, this first dream unraveled – without, however, releasing me to the dank but comforting reality of my great-grandmother’s canning cellar.

Ah, my recitation has left you speechless, Dr Prida. I understand. What could more reliably silence a psychiatrist than the indelible image of an ignorant child wrapped in a tenacious white strait-stocking? You smile – no doubt to solace me, to convey by a compassionate look that not even this horror estranges you, that I may speak freely, with no inhibiting fear of your outrage or censure. All right, then, my second dream, which followed the first after an interval of chaotic blankness and erupted into my apprehensive consciousness in the workaday vicinity of noon.

Not surprisingly, this daymare centered on eating.

As a young man of twenty-five or -six, I sat in a rustic Victorian kitchen before an immense porcelain tureen of potato soup. Beside this tureen resided a large white platter hosting a grilled sandwich of mozzarella or possibly provolone cheese, a hardboiled egg, and a scoop of macaroni pasta with almond slices, buttons of watercress, and shards of sun-bleached celery. From the table’s white Formica surface a tumbler of skin milk rose up like a small Doric pillar. Nauseated, I spooned soup, nibbled at the sandwich, bit off tatters of egg, sampled the pasta, and sipped the milk in a predictably ceaseless repeating sequence that my dream self had no power to halt. The peristaltic action of my throat continued without hindrance or interruption until white tears began falling into my soup and a muffling lambency-shot fog filled the kitchen, putting a gauzy clamp on both my esophagus and my second dream.

You smile again? More comfort for a troubled client? More compassion for a deviant dreamer? Of course, of course. What else do we pay you for, Dr Prida? Who else can we turn to? But you see now why shame mantles me and my conscience gnaws. But if I’ve gone this far, how may I refrain from unburdening myself of my final dream, my third and most ruthlessly aberrant horror show?

Listen, then, Dr Prida. Listen as you have listened to the others, and withhold your condemnation – your outrage and its inevitable articulation – until I have wholly purged myself of this psychic poison. Know, though, that it has a narrative arc absent from the first two dreams and an additional character: a story as opposed to the static imagery of those inchoate earlier visions. Know, too, that had my mentor not found me in the throes of an abreactive post-dream spasm and stepped in to help me, I might have died forever. The word forever , at least in this hypothetical projection, has more finality to it than I, or any of my anonymous half-, quarter-, or no-blood siblings, can fully bear.

Listen:

As a man of forty or so (my apparent age this evening, Dr Prida), I stand at an altar in a white tuxedo and exchange vows with a woman twelve years my junior clad in a traditional white bridal gown. She gazes upon me with a nonjudgmental gentleness as rare as midsummer sleet. After the wedding and a grand reception in a country Victorian house appointed ivory and cream – from interior dome to transoms to louvered shutters to wainscoting to balusters – we ride in a bone-hued limousine to a marble villa on the crest of a mountain of quartz and milky chalcedony. Here, in the last light of the afternoon in a high-windowed room overlooking a valley carpeted with white mums and pale gardenias, we consummate with neither bites nor strangle marks the promise of our vows and lie in each other’s arms until we move again in the same tender way and so traverse the entire self-negating night to the doorstep of morning . . . at which point my real body, the one in the pit, began to thrash in dread-stricken protest against the conventional harmoniousness of such a wholesome union. And, as I’ve already said, I might have died forever but for the timely intercession of Gregor, your undying father.