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  1

  Blood-red.

  Why was her daughter dreaming of a blood-red wolf?

  Laney had no taste for predatory beasts. A shy girl, still close enough to childhood to enjoy its playful fictions, her dream habits ran to gentle creatures. Household pets. Songbirds. Barnyard friends and teddy bear toys.

  Instinctively, Deirdre moved to dissolve her daughter’s dream, then stopped, waiting to see if the danger would deepen.

  Magically, a moonlit forest formed about her. Gnarled trees, a traveling ground mist. Through the eerie haze the wolf stalked, coming closer, showing fangs. Its color was the crimson of a fresh kill. Would Laney turn and run, letting the dream slide into a nightmare?

  No.

  Instead, she dreamed a clearing in the wood and placed herself at its center to confront the beast. Brave girl. The wolf, gliding forward for the attack, reshaped itself, became two-legged. A man. The image was unmistakable. The black cloak, the slicked-back hair, the paste-white face. Count Dracula had entered Laney’s dream, the classic movie image. Lord of the Undead, who could be wolf, bat, cloud of smoke. The Vampire King advanced, arms raised to menace Laney. The eyes flared like live coals, the fingers tightened into talons.

  Deirdre stepped forward to defend, then stopped short again, hearing her daughter burst into giggles. Looking once more, Deirdre caught the comedy of the situation. Yes, it was a ludicrous display, not frightening at all. No one took this old Hollywood harum-scarum seriously anymore. Kids least of all. She relaxed and drew off, letting the dream continue.

  Then Alma, Laney’s cousin, was there, taking charge, ordering the vampire to step forward.

  “Come here, you sucker!” Alma commanded. The fearless voice of authority.

  Obsequiously, the now-chastened monster emerged from the shadowed wood, looking more crumpled and comic by the moment. His clothes sagged. He whimpered and fell to his knees, once more becoming the scarlet wolf but no longer fierce. A Mother Goose wolf. Laughing, Alma reached to fasten something around its neck. What was it? A leash to tie the brute? Together the two girls, tittering brightly, inspected Alma’s handiwork. Looking more closely, Deirdre saw. It was not a leash but a belt of another kind, one whose use Laney had learned from her cousin only last month.

  “Sure it rubs,” Alma was explaining self-importantly as she cinched the belt tighter. “But otherwise he’ll go leaving a trail of blood. Yuk!”

  Deirdre backed farther off. The dream was safe. It was only a playful menstrual fantasy. Laney’s pubescent body was coaxing her toward womanhood, filling the picture palace of her sleeping mind with funny-fearful images of the mothering blood. Deirdre thought, How nicely dreams can deal with the little daily terrors of life. Last month, she recalled, her daughter had also dreamed of a dangerous crimson. A gory operation. A mad doctor probing the incision with menacing instruments. But that dream too had turned comic-benign. The hideous wound had become—hey, presto!—an ice cream drum and the maniac surgeon became the boy behind the counter at Baskin-Robbins, scooping up drooly gobs of the month’s special flavor: Cherry Curse.

  There were more girls now in Laney’s dream, friends joining in the game. Dracula, riotously shape-shifting—sometimes a bat, sometimes a disheveled Bela Lugosi caricature—frolicked among them, then divided and divided again into two... three... four of his kind. A punk quartet. Four pelvis-pumping mock-Draculas, corpse-faced, with gaping, black-slashed mouths, each member armed with a wolf-howling guitar. A neon marquee blazed overhead. The Undead.

  At a signal from Alma (timid Laney often delegated the mischief of her dreams to her older cousin), the girls ganged up on the lead singer, who had become a cadaverous David Bowie look-alike, and roughly stripped him of his leather pants. Carrying on unperturbed, he pranced proudly before his admiring schoolgirl audience, playing the ithyphallic clown. Then a wailing climax in the music and, inhaling mightily to the depths of his pelvis, the Bowie ghoul miraculously sucked the dangling penis inward with a luscious slurp. A vaginal cleft, oversized and brightly engorged, took its place. Laney, pointing and giggling, passed a whispered remark to Alma that sent her cousin into a small convulsion of laughter. The wordplay of dreams had found a more suitable title for the Lord of Menstrual Blood.

  “It’s Cunt Dracula,” Alma squealed and all the girls chorused the pun. It flashed in neon overhead. The music soared.

  Deirdre, watching, felt a faint flush of guilt, thinking how unfair it was for her to eavesdrop on her daughter’s uncensored dreamlife. Forgive me, baby, she thought. Time to leave and restore Laney’s privacy.

  Turning with a wide-awake part of her mind to the outside, Deirdre noted that the morning was near. She could withdraw now and let the dream run toward diffusion. But before she surrendered her vigil, she made one last deep probe, hunting for what she never wanted to find. Not an image or a word. Not a thing, but Nothing.

  The Nothing.

  The emptiness where the black dreams happened.

  The devouring void that had captured Peter’s sleep and sucked away his mind.

  In the two years she had spent on her secret sentinel duty in Laney’s dreams, there had been no sign of that danger. Still, she could not free herself of the fear: that the black dreams would come for her daughter as they had come for her husband, an inherited cancer of the soul, visited father upon child. She searched for the Nothing until she was sure it would not appear. The horizons of Laney’s dream were clear.

  She had guarded her daughter through another night and now she could rest.

  2

  From where she sat, Deirdre Vale could see the Pacific spread before her like a shield of blue steel flaring beneath the afternoon sun. The longer she gazed into the water’s glare, the more human bits and pieces she gleaned from the shimmering surface. Flecks of black that were distant fishing trollers. Sticks on the horizon that were oil rigs toiling many miles across the Santa Barbara Channel. Where the coast swerved away south toward Los Angeles, she could just make out the surfers floating on the rippling skin of the sea like water flies, lazily waiting for the wave that would grant them a giddy ride to the distant shore.

  She sat alone in the quiet office, absorbing the ocean’s long tranquil swell into herself. Dr. Devane allowed her this moment of meditative calm before their sessions began. She needed it. She was a tautly strung woman, the nerves pressed close to the flesh, the flesh stretched tight to the bone. Lately haggard, she had thinned beyond lean to gaunt. Even relaxed, she kept her narrow shoulders thrust forward like defending arrows. Her essential, fine-crafted beauty might be apparent to a second look, but not to a first. The first would see the lingering fragility of recent illness: a pallor that even generous doses of sunshine and open air had not succeeded in coloring over; a brilliance about her wide, dark eyes that was more feverish than vivacious. She was in her second year at the Clinic, but still not far enough along in her recovery to care about her looks. She wore no makeup; her hair, whipped back and carelessly ribboned, fell across her shoulders more tangled than curled. She was free to wear her own clothes—Dr. Devane encouraged it—but she preferred the baggy gray tunic and string-tied slacks that the Clinic assigned to its new patients: an emblem of dependence she was not yet prepared to surrender.

  His usual ten minutes late, Dr. Devane entered briskly. He gave her shoulder a paternal squeeze, then sank into his wheezy leather chair, notebook in hand, ready at once to talk about the dreams. But first—she hoped—he would ask about Laney. He did. “Have you been spending much time with her?”

  Yes, she answered. Every night since their last session. She told him apologetically because Laney was not her assignment. The attention she gave her daughter’s dreams distracted from the patients he expected her to monitor. It also tired her and blunted her perception. But she knew he would not scold her. He understood her concern and even shared it. Dr. Devane cared for Laney as much as he cared for Deirdre.

  “Anything we should be concerned about?” he asked.

  “At first there was something that worried me. She’s been dreaming about vampires.”

  “Sounds scary.”

  “Her dreams have a lot to do with blood. She’s anxious about her period. It’s so new for her.”

  Dr. Devane smiled. “If a twelve-year-old girl weren’t a little apprehensive about her period, that might be something to worry about. I’d say what you’re finding in Laney’s dreams is quite normal.”

  His voice was low and comforting. It wrapped around her like a warm blanket. She drew the warmth about herself and let her body soften. If Deirdre had ever been asked to design a father, he would have looked—and sounded and acted—like Dr. Devane. He would have been large, wi th a large, balding head and a heavy mustache. He would have had soft, sad eyes and a strong, slightly gruff voice. He would have been patient, protective, gently domineering. Her own father had been nothing like that. From the little she could remember of him before her parents divorced, he had been remote, unconcerned, perhaps uncaring. And she had needed his care so much, more than he had ever realized.

  Once, two months after she had become Dr. Devane’s patient, Deirdre had told him, “My father wasn’t what a father should be.”

  “What should a father be?” he had asked.

  The thought had leaped into her mind: He should be like you. But she did not speak the words, fearing they might offend him. Another two months passed before she found the courage to say, “I wish my father had been like you.” By then, she knew he would not mind. He could be trusted with her thoughts. She had learned that psychiatrists were willing to be the fantasy fathers, mothers, lovers, friends of all their patients. Still, it had thrilled Deirdre to tell him: a small, discreet confession of love.

  He had asked, “Why do you think your father should have been like me?”

  “Because if he were a doctor like you, he would have known what to do about the dreams. I could have told him and he would have shown me what to do. Maybe he would have made them stop and go away.”

  “Why go away?”

  “They’re such a trouble. I’d rather have my own dreams—all to myself. Everybody’s dreams should be private.”

  As often as she dared, Deirdre found ways to remind him how it burdened her to monitor dreams. It was a recurring theme in their sessions, less frequent now than a year ago, or the year before that, but always there, the timid lament that said, “Make this power go away; make me like other people.” By now, she knew he could not do that. The power was woven into the texture of her mind, as deeply ingrained as the gift of speech. When she asked, it was only in order to hear his consoling answer, which was always the same.

  “But if we stopped the dreams, we wouldn’t be able to help people the way we do. Don’t you want to use your powers to help people?”

  And yes was Deirdre’s answer—but not the whole answer. It was really Dr. Devane she wanted to help. He was a famous and important man. People came from all parts of the world to be treated by him. And when they came, Deirdre was his eyes inside their minds. To begin with, she had been one of those troubled people herself. She was still Dr. Devane’s patient, a resident of the Clinic, wearing its uniform, following its routines, rarely leaving the grounds. But now she was also his “research assistant.” That was how he introduced her to the Clinic’s many visitors—though he did not mention the dreamwatching. That was their secret, not to be revealed until Dr. Devane was ready to publish the results of their work. Until she came to the Clinic, Deirdre had spent most of her life bewildered and embarrassed by her uncanny power. “I suppose I’m a sort of freak,” she had once told Dr. Devane. That was how she had thought of herself for years: mentally deformed, abnormal, repulsive. “Nonsense,” he had insisted. “You must never think of yourself like that. You have a gift.” And he had shown her how to make that gift useful. He had let her share his responsibility for healing people.

  The dreams let her do that; they were her special way to serve and please him. They allowed her to come to his office two afternoons each week, to be with him alone in the quiet room that stood high and lonely above the ocean like a lighthouse. The dreams made her part of his work. She knew there were other watchers at the Clinic. But they were mere beginners. Those she had met since her arrival were only children, mostly autistic and none of them emotionally stable enough to be of any reliable use. She was different. She was the best watcher Dr. Devane had ever discovered. He had told her that many times. She had taken to the training marvelously and her powers were growing sharper all the time. He had great plans for her that would keep them together for many years to come.

  By now, after nearly two years at the Clinic, Deirdre was perceptive enough to recognize how Dr. Devane used the promise of his companionship as an enticement for her services. She did not object to his bribery. She understood that he wanted her to exercise and expand her strange talent until she became as excited with it as he was. For all she was worth, Deirdre wanted that too. And she could feel it happening little by little each time they worked together, though she could not always tell if the excitement she experienced arose from the pride she took in her watching or from her deepening love for Dr. Devane.

  “Now suppose we get down to work,” he said with a wink of encouragement. Deirdre drew herself up in her chair. Very alert, very professional. Waiting.

  They monitored patients in groups of five or six, each group for two months at a time. Every night Deirdre went hunting in the dark reaches of the sleeping mind, filling her memory with the dreamlives of others. If Dr. Devane wished it, she could report what each patient dreamed in minute detail. Every image, every word. She was that good. She kept no notes. She did not have to. All she needed to do was settle her mind and let it fill with the sense of friendship or concern she felt for those she monitored. Then, as if she were watching a film running before her eyes, she could recall their dreams and describe them exactly. Many times, Dr. Devane marveled at her powers of observation and retention. In their early days together, when he was still gauging her capacities, he had often invited her total recall. Now he rarely did that. Their work was taking on the rigor and economy of a mature clinical technique. No excess, no time wasted. For each patient, there was a special set of objects—people, words, events—that Dr. Devane wanted to have monitored. “A shopping list,” he called it. Deirdre was to watch for just those things. Or, at his direction, she was to insinuate them into the dreams she monitored, then observe the results.

  She did not always understand why Dr. Devane chose the items he did. Why was she to look for staircases and turning wheels in Jean O’Malley’s dreams? Why burning buildings in John Sturdevant’s dreams? What were the tiny, shiny, red circles that fell like snowflakes in little Jimmy Fuller’s nightmares? Sometimes it was not the objects themselves that mattered, but their size or color. Sometimes it was not what was said in the dream that Deirdre was to remember, but the tone of voice or the number of times it was repeated. Above all, there was the factor Dr. Devane called “depth.” Depth was a special difficulty for Deirdre. It meant the distance the dream happened from the control of the waking mind. Dr. Devane insisted that there had to be an exact way to measure depth because the deeper the dream, the more uncontrolled and therefore the more uncensored. Deirdre was trying hard to develop a reliable sense of depth, but she was still a long way from the precision Dr. Devane wanted. “Pay attention to the light in the dream and the sharpness of the pictures,” he insisted. “Evaluate the clarity of the background images.” He wanted her to assign numbers to these judgments. “Try to think of yourself as the light meter on a camera,” he advised. But that was extremely difficult for her. It was not her way of watching. Instead, she always got distracted by the stories and the feelings she saw before her.

  Dr. Devane had a theory about dreams that Deirdre did not fully grasp. He did not seem to want her to. As he put it, he wanted her to be nothing more than a neutral recording device. Eyes and ears without a mind. That was not easy, Deirdre had discovered. It meant stifling her curiosity and sometimes her strong feelings of concern or fear or revulsion. Still, she did understand that by tracing the role the items on the shopping list played in the dream stories people created for themselves, she was helping Dr. Devane chart the progress of his patients. He could tell what preoccupied their minds, what frightened them or soothed them. People never remembered these things as clearly as Deirdre could. Or if they did, they were apt to lie or exaggerate. Now, through Deirdre, Dr. Devane had found a way to read the secrets his patients would not admit to him, sometimes not to themselves. It was like having a microscope of the mind. For the first time, a doctor could see the psychic germs that made his patients sick.

  Eager as she was to please Dr. Devane, Deirdre was embarrassed at how little she was offering him today. Meager, blurred reports that gave him little to work with. She could see that he was taking no notes on their session. She had spent too much of her time with Laney during the past several nights. She had not come to her assignments fresh and alert. She knew this was disappointing to him, but she also knew he would not complain. He never complained, but greeted even her failures with good humor. As if to say, “We’ll try a little harder next time.” And she always vowed to herself that she would.

 

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