Nightmares and Dreamscapes, Page 70

  Confusion, confusion, nothing but confusion.

  Head down, I trudged into my office, closed the door behind me, and sat at the desk. Dimly, through the closed window, I could hear the traffic out on Sunset. I had an idea that, for the right person, it was still a spring morning so L.A.-perfect you expected to see that little trademark symbol stamped on it somewhere, but for me all the light had gone from the day . . . inside as well as out. I thought about the bottle of hooch in the bottom drawer, but all of a sudden even bending down to get it seemed like too much work. It seemed, in fact, a job akin to climbing Mount Everest in tennis shoes.

  The smell of fresh paint had penetrated all the way into my inner sanctum. It was a smell I ordinarily liked, but not then. At that moment it was the smell of everything that had gone wrong since the Demmicks hadn't come into their Hollywood bungalow bouncing wisecracks off each other like rubber balls and playing their records at top volume and throwing their Corgi into conniptions with their endless billing and cooing. It occurred to me with perfect clarity and simplicity--the way I'd always imagined great truths must occur to the people they occur to--that if some doctor could cut out the cancer that was killing the Fulwider Building's elevator operator, it would be white. Oyster white. And it would smell just like fresh Dutch Boy paint.

  This thought was so tiring that I had to put my head down with the heels of my palms pressed against my temples, holding it in place . . . or maybe just keeping what was inside from exploding out and making a mess on the walls. And when the door opened softly and footsteps entered the room, I didn't look up. It seemed like more of an effort than I was able to make at that particular moment.

  Besides, I had the strange idea that I already knew who it was. I couldn't put a name to my knowledge, but the step was somehow familiar. So was the cologne, although I knew I wouldn't be able to name it even if someone had put a gun to my head, and for a very simple reason: I'd never smelled it before in my life. How could I recognize a scent I'd never smelled before, you ask? I can't answer that one, bud, but I did.

  Nor was that the worst of it. The worst of it was this: I was scared nearly out of my mind. I've faced blazing guns in the hands of angry men, which is bad, and daggers in the hands of angry women, which is a thousand times worse; I was once tied to the wheel of a Packard automobile that had been parked on the tracks of a busy freight line; I have even been tossed out a third-story window. It's been an eventful life, all right, but nothing in it had ever scared me the way the smell of that cologne and that soft footstep scared me.

  My head seemed to weigh at least six hundred pounds.

  "Clyde," a voice said. A voice I'd never heard before, a voice I nevertheless knew as well as my own. Just that one word and the weight of my head went up to an even ton.

  "Get outta here, whoever you are," I said without looking up. "Joint's closed." And something made me add, "For renovations."

  "Bad day, Clyde?"

  Was there sympathy in that voice? I thought maybe there was, and somehow that made things worse. Whoever this mug was, I didn't want his sympathy. Something told me that his sympathy would be more dangerous than his hate.

  "Not so bad," I said, supporting my heavy, aching head with the palms of my hands and looking down at my desk-blotter for all I was worth. Written in the upper lefthand corner was Mavis Weld's number. I sent my eyes tracing over it again and again--BEverley 6-4214. Keeping my eyes on the blotter seemed like a good idea. I didn't know who my visitor was, but I knew I didn't want to see him. Right then it was the only thing I did know.

  "I think maybe you're being a little . . . disingenuous, shall we say?" the voice asked, and it was sympathy, all right; the sound of it made my stomach curl up into something that felt like a quivering fist soaked with acid. There was a creak as he dropped into the client's chair.

  "I don't exactly know what that word means, but by all means, let's say it," I agreed. "And now that we have, why don't you rise up righteous, Moggins, and shift on out of here. I'm thinking of taking a sick day. I can do that without much argument, you see, because I'm the boss. Neat, the way things work out sometimes, isn't it?"

  "I suppose so. Look at me, Clyde."

  My heart stuttered but my head stayed down and my eyes kept tracing over BEverley 6-4214. Part of me wondered if hell was hot enough for Mavis Weld. When I spoke, my voice came out steady. I was surprised but grateful. "In fact, I might take a whole year of sick days. In Carmel, maybe. Sit out on the deck with the American Mercury in my lap and watch the big ones come in from Hawaii."

  "Look at me."

  I didn't want to, but my head came up just the same. He was sitting in the client's chair where Mavis had once sat, and Ardis McGill, and Big Tom Hatfield. Even Vernon Klein had sat there once, when he got those pictures of his daughter wearing nothing but an opium grin and her birthday suit. Sitting there with the same patch of California sun slanting across his features--features I most certainly had seen before. The last time had been less than an hour ago, in my bathroom mirror. I'd been scraping a Gillette Blue Blade over them.

  The expression of sympathy in his eyes--in my eyes--was the most hideous thing I'd ever seen, and when he held out his hand--held out my hand--I felt a sudden urge to wheel around in my swivel chair, get to my feet, and go running straight out my seventh-floor office window. I think I might even have done it, if I hadn't been so confused, so totally lost. I've read the word unmanned plenty of times--it's a favorite of the pulpsmiths and sob-sisters--but this was the first time I'd ever actually felt that way.

  Suddenly the office darkened. The day had been perfectly clear, I would have sworn to that, but a cloud had crossed the sun just the same. The man on the other side of the desk was at least ten years older than I was, maybe fifteen, his hair almost completely white while mine was still almost all black, but that didn't change the simple fact--no matter what he was calling himself or how old he looked, he was me. Had I thought his voice sounded familiar? Sure. The way your own voice sounds familiar--although not quite the way it sounds inside your own head--when you hear it on a recording.

  He picked my limp hand up off the desk, shook it with the briskness of a real-estate agent on the make, then dropped it again. It hit the desk-blotter with a plop, landing on Mavis Weld's telephone number. When I raised my fingers, I saw that Mavis's number was gone. In fact, all the numbers I'd scratched on the blotter over the years were gone. It was as clear as . . . well, as clear as a hardshell Baptist's conscience.

  "Jesus," I croaked. "Jesus Christ."

  "Not at all," the older version of me sitting in the client's chair on the other side of the desk said. "Landry. Samuel D. Landry. At your service."

  V. An Interview with God.

  Even as rattled as I was, it only took me two or three seconds to place the name, probably because I'd heard it such a short time ago. According to Painter Number Two, Samuel Landry was the reason why the long dark hall leading to my office was soon going to be oyster white. Landry was the owner of the Fulwider Building.

  A crazy idea suddenly occurred to me, but its patent craziness did nothing to dim the sudden blaze of hope which accompanied it. They--whoever they are--say that everyone on the face of the earth has a double. Maybe Landry was mine. Maybe we were identical twins, unrelated doubles who had somehow been born to different parents and ten or fifteen years out of step in time with each other. The idea did nothing to explain the rest of the day's high weirdness, but it was something to hang onto, damn it.

  "What can I do for you, Mr. Landry?" I asked. I was trying like hell, but my voice was no longer quite steady. "If it's about the lease, you'll have to give me a day or two to get squared around. It seems my secretary just discovered she had pressing business back home in Armpit, Idaho."

  Landry paid absolutely no attention to this feeble effort on my part to shift the focus of the conversation. "Yes," he said in a musing tone of voice, "I imagine it's been the granddaddy of bad days . . . and it's my fault. I'm so
rry, Clyde--really. Meeting you in person has been . . . well, not what I expected. Not at all. For one thing, I like you quite a bit better than I expected to. But there's no going back now." And he fetched a deep sigh. I didn't like the sound of it very much.

  "What do you mean by that?" My voice was trembling worse than ever now, and the blaze of hope was dying. Lack of oxygen inside the cave-in site which had once been my brain seemed to be the cause.

  He didn't answer right away. He leaned over instead, and grasped the handle of the slim leather case leaning against the front leg of the client's chair. The initials stamped on it were S.D.L., and I deduced that my weird visitor had brought it in with him. I didn't win the Shamus of the Year Award in 1934 and '35 for nothing, you know.

  I had never seen a case quite like it in my life--it was too small and too slim to be a briefcase, and it was fastened not with buckles and straps but with a zipper. I'd never seen a zipper quite like this one, either, now that I thought about it. The teeth were extremely tiny, and they hardly looked like metal at all.

  But the oddities only began with Landry's luggage. Even setting aside his uncanny older-brother resemblance to me, Landry looked like no businessman I'd ever seen in my life, and certainly not one prosperous enough to own the Fulwider Building. It's not the Ritz, granted, but it is in downtown L.A., and my client (if that was what he was) looked like an Okie on a good day, one which had included a bath and a shave.

  He was wearing blue jeans pants, for one thing, and a pair of sneakers on his feet . . . except they didn't look like any sneakers I'd ever seen before. They were great big clumpy things. What they really looked like were the shoes Boris Karloff wears as part of his Frankenstein get-up, and if they were made of canvas, I'd eat my favorite Fedora. The word written up the sides in red script looked like the name of a dish on a Chinese carry-out menu: REEBOK.

  I looked down at the blotter which had once been covered with a tangle of telephone numbers, and suddenly realized that I could no longer remember Mavis Weld's, although I must have called it a billion times only this past winter. That feeling of dread intensified.

  "Mister," I said, "I wish you'd state your business and get out of here. Come to think of it, why don't you skip the talking and just go right to the getting-out part?"

  He smiled . . . tiredly, I thought. That was the other thing. The face above the plain open-collared white shirt looked terribly tired. Terribly sad, as well. It said the man who owned it had been through things I couldn't even dream of. I felt some sympathy for my visitor, but what I mostly felt was fear. And anger. Because it was my face, too, and the bastard had apparently gone a long way toward wearing it out.

  "Sorry, Clyde," he said. "No can do."

  He put his hand on that tiny, cunning zipper, and all at once Landry opening that case was the last thing in the world I wanted. To stop him I said, "Do you always go visiting your tenants dressed like a guy who makes his living following the cabbage crop? What are you, one of those eccentric millionaires?"

  "I'm eccentric, all right," he said. "And it won't do you any good to draw this business out, Clyde."

  "What gave you that ide--"

  Then he said the thing I'd been dreading, and put out the last tiny flicker of hope at the same time. "I know all your ideas, Clyde. After all, I'm you."

  I licked my lips and forced myself to speak; anything to keep him from yanking that zipper. Anything at all. My voice came out husky, but at least it did come out.

  "Yeah, I noticed the resemblance. I'm not familiar with the cologne, though. I'm an Old Spice man, myself."

  His thumb and finger remained pinched on the zipper, but he didn't pull it. At least not yet.

  "But you like this," he said with perfect assurance, "and you'd use it if you could get it down at the Rexall on the corner, wouldn't you? Unfortunately, you can't. It's Aramis, and it won't be invented for another forty years or so." He glanced down at his weird, ugly basketball shoes. "Like my sneakers."

  "The devil you say."

  "Well, yes, I suppose the devil might come into it somewhere," Landry said, and he didn't smile.

  "Where are you from?"

  "I thought you knew." Landry pulled the zipper, revealing a rectangular gadget made of some smooth plastic. It was the same color the seventh-floor hall was going to be by the time the sun went down. I'd never seen anything like it. There was no brand name on it, just something that must have been a serial number: T-1000. Landry lifted it out of its carrying case, thumbed the catches on the sides, and lifted the hinged top to reveal something that looked like the telescreen in a Buck Rogers movie. "I come from the future," Landry said. "Just like in a pulp magazine story."

  "You come from Sunnyland Sanitarium, more like it," I croaked.

  "But not exactly like a pulp science-fiction story," he went on, ignoring what I'd said. "No, not exactly." He pushed a button on the side of the plastic case. There was a faint whining sound from inside the gadget, followed by a brief, whistling beep. The thing sitting on his lap looked like some strange stenographer's machine . . . and I had an idea that that wasn't far from the truth.

  He looked up at me and said, "What was your father's name, Clyde?"

  I looked at him for a moment, resisting an urge to lick my lips again. The room was still dark, the sun still behind some cloud that hadn't even been in sight when I came in off the street. Landry's face seemed to float in the gloom like an old, shrivelled balloon.

  "What's that got to do with the price of cucumbers in Monrovia?" I asked.

  "You don't know, do you?"

  "Of course I do," I said, and I did. I just couldn't come up with it, that was all--it was stuck there on the tip of my tongue, like Mavis Weld's phone number, which had been BAyshore something-or-other.

  "How about your mother's?"

  "Quit playing games with me!"

  "Here's an easy one--what high school did you go to? Every red-blooded American man remembers what school he went to, right? Or the first girl he ever went all the way with. Or the town he grew up in. Was yours San Luis Obispo?"

  I opened my mouth, but this time nothing came out.

  "Carmel?"

  That sounded right . . . and then felt all wrong. My head was whirling.

  "Or maybe it was Dusty Bottom, New Mexico."

  "Cut the crap!" I shouted.

  "Do you know? Do you?"

  "Yes! It was--"

  He bent over. Rattled the keys of his strange steno machine.

  "San Diego! Born and raised!"

  He put the machine on my desk and turned it around so I could read the words floating in the window above the keyboard.

  "San Diego! Born and raised!"

  My eyes dropped from the window to the word stamped into the plastic frame surrounding it.

  "What's a Toshiba?" I asked. "Something that comes on the side when you order a Reebok dinner?"

  "It's a Japanese electronics company."

  I laughed dryly. "Who're you kidding, mister? The Japs can't even make wind-up toys without getting the springs in upside down."

  "Not now," he agreed, "and speaking of now, Clyde, when is now? What year is it?"

  "1938," I said, then raised a half-numb hand to my face and rubbed my lips. "Wait a minute--1939."

  "It might even be 1940. Am I right?"

  I said nothing, but I felt my face heating up.

  "Don't feel bad, Clyde; you don't know because I don't know. I always left it vague. The time-frame I was trying for was actually more of a feel . . . call it Chandler American Time, if you like. It worked like gangbusters for most of my readers, and it made things simpler from a copy-editing standpoint as well, because you can never exactly pinpoint the passage of time. Haven't you ever noticed how often you say things like 'for more years than I can remember' or 'longer ago than I like to think about' or 'since Hector was a pup'?"

  "Nope--can't say that I have." But now that he mentioned it, I did notice. And that made me think of the L.A. Times.
I read it every day, but exactly which days were they? You couldn't tell from the paper itself, because there was never a date on the masthead, only that slogan which reads "America's Fairest Newspaper in America's Fairest City."

  "You say those things because time doesn't really pass in this world. It is . . ." He paused, then smiled. It was a terrible thing to look at, that smile, full of yearning and strange greed. "It is one of its many charms," he finished.

  I was scared, but I've always been able to bite the bullet when I felt it really needed biting, and this was one of those times. "Tell me what the hell's going on here."

  "All right . . . but you're already beginning to know, Clyde. Aren't you?"

  "Maybe. I don't know my dad's name or my mom's name or the name of the first girl I ever went to bed with because you don't know them. Is that it?"

  He nodded, smiling the way a teacher would smile at a pupil who's made a leap of logic and come up with the right answer against all odds. But his eyes were still full of that terrible sympathy.

  "And when you wrote San Diego on your gadget there and it came into my head at the same time . . ."

  He nodded, encouraging me.

  "It isn't just the Fulwider Building you own, is it?" I swallowed, trying to get rid of a large blockage in my throat that had no intention of going anywhere. "You own everything."

  But Landry was shaking his head. "Not everything. Just Los Angeles and a few surrounding areas. This version of Los Angeles, that is, complete with the occasional continuity glitch or made-up addition."

  "Bull," I said, but I whispered the word.

  "See the picture on the wall to the left of the door, Clyde?"

  I glanced at it, but hardly had to; it was Washington crossing the Delaware, and it had been there since . . . well, since Hector was a pup.

  Landry had taken his plastic Buck Rogers steno machine back onto his lap, and was bending over it.

  "Don't do that!" I shouted, and tried to reach for him. I couldn't do it. My arms had no strength, it seemed, and I could summon no resolve. I felt lethargic, drained, as if I had lost about three pints of blood and was losing more all the time.