The Night Companion

by Jeffrey Greene

Table of Contents

Chapter 8: The Judas Goat

There is someone who hates me with such intensity that it is turning him into a monster. I try to hide from him, but the force of his hatred cuts through the darkness like a searchlight and finds me. From a mile away I hear his triumphant roar. It gets closer, louder, rising to such a pitch of murderous, inhuman passion that I—

I woke up in a sweat. Hard rain was beating on the roof. I squinted at the clock: 2:10. Appalled by this product of my own depths, I sat on the edge of the bed. What was happening to me? I’d been sleeping with Catherine for the last four nights, and the frequency of the nightmares had steadily increased. I got up and drank some water. Taking a pad beside the bed, I wrote down what I remembered, then crawled in and tried to get back to sleep.

In a residential neighborhood of my home town, I sit in the backseat of a car driven by a thin, gray-haired man. Catherine is beside me, and my long-deceased aunt is in the front seat.

The gray-haired man stops the car. Holding up a glass of water, he dissolves a bar of silver metal into it, then takes a sip and passes it around. Catherine hands it to me, and I drain the glass. “It tastes like magnets,” I say. She points at something behind me. I turn to see a little girl standing beside the car in what I assume is her own front yard. All at once the bright day turns as black as midnight, and the child’s face transforms with the speed of the change in light into the face of a demon...

Was I coming down with something? I felt weak, almost feverish. That might explain the bad dreams. I got up and turned on the bathroom light. A poster of Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights” hung, warped and curled, on the wall behind the toilet. I opened the medicine chest and found a bottle of aspirin, took two, and went back to bed.

I wander through empty, ill-lit rooms of a strange house, acutely conscious of the number of big spiders on the walls and in corners, each in its poised stillness a mandala of fear. I walk through the back door and out into the daylight. There is a gray-haired man in bathing trunks, t-shirt and sunglasses sitting in a lawn chair beside a swimming pool. An enormous shark swims in cramped circles in the murky, stagnant water.

“As per your request,” the man says, holding out a small first-aid kit.

I take it and hold it with both hands, feeling a slowly mounting uneasiness while the man watches me, his thin lips drawn in a tight line, swinging a pale skinny leg over his knee.

I look down: what I’m holding has changed into a gallon jar containing a dense cluster of walking-stick-like insects. Disgusted, I drop it into the water. There is an ominous swirl in the green algae floating on the surface...

Now I’m looking at a vine growing on the bathroom window, the flower of which is the head of a secretary bird. I reach out and pull the vine off the glass, but the head stays on, screeching like nails on a blackboard...

Catherine was standing over the bed, looking down at me with an expression of remote, almost impersonal sadness.

“I’m sick,” I said through chattering teeth.

She took a blanket down from the closet and threw it over me. It was musty and smelled of mothballs. She went into the bathroom and came back with two aspirin and a glass of water. I was knocked flat by whatever this was, and it was all I could do to sit up and take the pills from her hand.

She felt my forehead. “You’d better stay here today,” she said.

“What about your mother?”

“She’ll be asleep all day.” I tried to see something in her face — pity, conflict, love, but it was closed, unreadable.

“It’s freezing in here,” I said, shivering under the blanket.

“I’ll turn down the air conditioner. Try to sleep. I’ll make you some hot tea when you wake up.”

“I’m afraid to sleep. Every time I go to sleep, I have a nightmare.” I was shuddering so much I could hardly talk.

She stripped off her shirt and panties and crawled into bed, wrapping herself around me. My body slowly warmed, and as the aspirin kicked in, I relaxed and became drowsy. “You’ll be all right,” she murmured, her warm breath on my neck.

At a rundown farmhouse in the depths of the country, I am visiting a young woman whose husband mysteriously disappeared some years before. We are standing in the kitchen, talking about him, when she notices a fungus-like growth under the refrigerator. I get down on the floor for a closer look and feel a shudder of revulsion: the furry fungoid mass is her husband. He never left at all. For years he’s been transforming into this loathsome thing. “I’m not jealous,” it says. “Don’t wake up.”

I sat up and turned on the bedside lamp. The covers were on the floor, the air conditioner turned off. I was burning up. It was four o’clock in the morning, and Catherine was gone. I tried to get out of bed, but the effort made me dizzy. I knew now that Roland and Carla had told the truth. There was no longer any possibility of coincidence — Patrick Morhan was there waiting for me every time I went to sleep. He seemed to be forcing me to reveal, through a series of nightmares, all my fears and weaknesses, as if he were cataloguing them.

I felt a profoundly intimate shame, not only at being stripped naked from the inside, but at my own stupidity. The more I thought about it, the angrier I became, and my rage fed the fever. When I was strong enough, I would pay a call on the professor, break down the door if I had to. Apparently his radius of influence was limited. I would be safe in my own apartment but, until then, I mustn’t fall asleep.

What they’d said about Catherine must also be true: I was nothing more to her than a gift to her father, her agenda being to provide him with a steady supply of minds to ransack. She was whoring for him, using her own body as bait to bring him specimens. How many years had this been going on? How many men before me? I tried to hate her, and found that thinking of her only made me sicker.

“Bitch,” I said aloud, my voice sounding very thin and small in the dense silence. “Rotten, lying bitch.” The silence seemed to expand outward from the bed, the exact center of an eternal desert of silence, and I began to wish aloud that she would come back.

Minutes dilated into eons, and formless terror broke over me in a black wave. I struggled out of bed, determined to reach my car, and as soon as I stood up, the dizziness turned to nausea, and I barely made it to the toilet in time.

When I got off the floor and washed out my mouth, I felt better. I knew it wouldn’t last, but while I had my strength I was going to make use of it. I got dressed and put on my shoes, then opened the door and went out. The rain had stopped, and the air in the garage was cool and damp.

I went to the professor’s door and tried the knob. It was unlocked. I turned it and went in. The stairs were completely dark, but there was a railing to which I clung tightly. The door at the top of the stairs was ajar. I pushed it open and entered a tiny living room and kitchenette, dimly-lit by a nightlight stuck in a wall socket next to a threadbare couch, on which Hettie lay sleeping, fully dressed and uncovered by a sheet, her hands pillowing her head, her breathing deep and regular.

Opposite the door in front of which I still stood, breathless and light-headed, was another door. I moved toward it, and had crossed half the distance when it opened and Catherine emerged, wearing a bathrobe and slippers. Her head was down and her hair hung across her face and, when she looked up, I saw that she was crying.

For a moment, neither of us moved. She glanced at Hettie, then at the door behind me, as if seeking an avenue of escape. I moved toward her, and she made as if to brush past me. I grabbed her arm, as much to keep myself from falling as to stop her. She twisted out of my grip and took my weight, sitting me down in a kitchen chair.

“You wouldn’t be crying over me,” I said, and she shushed me and pointed to Hettie. “Who, then?” I whispered.

“You should be in bed,” she whispered, holding onto my sleeve with one hand and wiping tears away with the other.

I disengaged her hand. “Does he pay you?”

She flinched as if I’d slapped her, and took a step backward. She nodded. “Yes, he pays me.” I stared at her, shaking my head in amazed disgust. “He promised me... that if I brought men to the house and could keep them here for a while, he’d leave me alone.” She closed her eyes and encased her forehead in the heels of her hands. “Stay out of my head.” Then, as if forcing herself, she looked into my eyes. “A bargain’s a bargain.”

“They warned me,” I said. “But one look at you...”

She didn’t answer.

“But it doesn’t make sense. You could have left home years ago, or at least found some other way of coping with him, like Roland, like Carla. Why didn’t you?”

She sat down beside me, slumping with her arms on the table, and began to speak in a low voice. “For years I told myself it was because I believed in him. In his genius, in the work he was doing. But maybe I always knew he wasn’t, that his only genius was in making excuses for himself.

“On the day Patrick was buried, I told him I’d never forgive him, that as far as I was concerned he was a murderer. He waited until I was finished screaming at him, and then he began to talk, very calmly and reasonably, and I left his room convinced that Patrick had died a martyr’s death. For Science: can you believe that? No matter that he’d made his own son a laboratory rat, or that when Patrick’s heart stopped it was just a formality, because he’d already been killed dead from the inside out.

“He had me believing that Patrick had been his willing assistant, and now it was up to me to carry on the great work. But I couldn’t. You know why, don’t you? I couldn’t stand it. It was like being raped every time I went to sleep. And I couldn’t leave home because my brother was still here, some part of him still in his room, the smell of him lingering on his clothes, his pillow. At least he was more there than anywhere else. I’d leave, go places, but wherever it was — Paris, London, Istanbul — I’d think: ‘I have to get home, where Patrick’s things are, or I’ll lose him, the memory of him.’

“But my father was here too, not always, because he traveled a lot himself, carrying his vial of dried mushrooms, sleeping in a different hotel every night, but enough so that I had to grit my teeth to come back. He and Mother had been quits for years before Patrick’s death, but after that she stopped talking to him. None of us can get away from this house. It’s Patrick who keeps us here.

“It was just an affair the first time, a boy I met in the club car of a train from Chicago to Florida. My father had been gone but he came back the second night. The boy began to have nightmares, in which he kept seeing a certain man and, when he described him, I knew. I made some excuse about my mother disapproving of him being here with me and sent him home.

“That’s when my father made his proposition. He’d support me, and leave me alone, if I’d bring him... how did he put it? ‘Non-consenting subjects.’ I didn’t agree, not right away. I just left and came back a few weeks later with another man. I tried to make this man feel good. When he’d wake up after a nightmare, I would hold him. He stayed for two weeks, and was a wreck when he left.

“My father gave me some money, telling me that he’d gotten all sorts of earth-shaking research accomplished. The subject, he assured me, was undamaged, unless, he added with a smile, I’d broken his heart, because for that there was no remedy. I took the money, and kept taking it, even when I knew that after the first few months it wasn’t science anymore. He’d become an addict, first to the dreams, then to the drug itself, something he hadn’t foreseen. The drug has destroyed his own capacity to dream. He has to keep taking it, just as he has to have dreaming minds near him to keep from going insane.”

“Insane? Why?”

“Ask him yourself. I’m through with him.” She got up to go.

I held her sleeve. “Why were you crying?”

Looking past me to the closed door, she said: “He wanted me to give the drug to you, in your tea. The next phase of the grand experiment: two-way dream telepathy. I refused. That took him by surprise. Nobody ever refuses him.” She smiled bitterly. “He called me a whore. As if he thought it was an insult, as if I didn’t know I was his whore, pimp, and pusher all rolled into one.”

“Why did you refuse? I’m no different from the rest.”

“I told you. You remind me of Patrick. Now please come back to bed.”

I shook my head stubbornly. “I’ve got to see him.”

“You shouldn’t; not until you’re well.” She helped me stand up. I was very weak, but the fever had waned for the moment and my head was clear. “I’m going to.”

She put my arm around her shoulder and walked me to the door. Opening it, she steadied me, then whispered in my ear: “He can’t stand light — a side effect of the drug. There’s a chair to the left as you go in.” She propelled me gently forward, then shut the door.

I put my hands out and groped into the room. The feeble light under the door made it possible to discern the outlines of a desk and chair, but the darkness to the left was like a wall of tar. There was a damp, mildewy smell in the room, an odor of wet towels, unwashed bodies. I could hear the regular breathing of a sleeper somewhere to the left, and moved blindly toward the chair, swaying dizzily in the blackness, little jolts of panic whipping through my body like waves through a rope. I bumped against a big vinyl easy chair, which gave out a loud pneumatic sigh when I sat down. I listened again: the regular breathing had stopped.

Proceed to Chapter 9...

Copyright © 2021 by Jeffrey Greene