The Ninth Nightmare Read online

  ‘Hi,’ said Lincoln.

  ‘Did I hear you say to your friend that you had been suffering from nightmares?’

  ‘Right now, everythin’s a nightmare. Am I going to stay paralysed like this for the rest of my life?’

  ‘Of course that is the very first thing you will be wanting to know, sir. What has happened is that you have fallen with considerable impact, fracturing your T10 thoracic vertebra in the middle of your back. I will be able to show you your injury very clearly on your MRI and CT scans.’

  Lincoln waited while Doctor Dhawan frowned at his notes again and tugged at his moustache. Eventually, he said, ‘What has happened is that a broken fragment of bone is pressing on your spinal cord. You must remember that the spinal cord is very soft, with a consistency like toothpaste, and so it is very susceptible to pressure of this nature.

  ‘At the moment, although you may not be able to feel it, your back is held immobile by a brace. I have also put you on steroids to prevent as much swelling of the spinal column as possible. I will be doing more tests in the coming days, but from what I have seen of your injury so far, I should be able to perform a surgical operation which we call “decompression” and this will be removing the offending fragment of bone.’

  ‘Then I’ll be able to sit up, and walk?’

  ‘Eventually, sir, we are very much hoping so. It will take some time, and much therapy. But I believe the prognosis is good.’

  Relieved, Lincoln lowered his head back on to his pillow. Nurse Fairbrother wheeled up a blood pressure monitor, picked up his right arm and wrapped the sleeve around it.

  ‘You’re that record promoter, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘The Jive Machine? Skootah and the Gang? I really love that music.’

  Lincoln gave her half a smile. He was preoccupied by what Doctor Dhawan had told him about his chances of recovery; but also by the feeling that Springer had given him that his life was on the verge of changing for ever.

  ‘Millie D, too,’ Nurse Fairbrother was saying, as she checked his heart rate. ‘“I’m going to dream about you, lover, even when I’m wide awake.” I really love that song.’

  ‘Yeah, cool,’ said Lincoln. ‘Next time Millie D’s in town, I’ll make sure you get some front-row tickets.’

  ‘You know what you are?’ said Nurse Fairbrother. ‘You’re an angel.’

  An angel? thought Lincoln. Not just yet, thanks, if it’s all the same to you.

  Twenty minutes after Nurse Fairbrother had set him up with a new steroid drip and left him alone, he began to feel sleepy. Grace hadn’t arrived at the hospital yet. According to the local news, severe electric storms over Lake Erie had delayed flights into Hopkins International by up to an hour. He watched Everybody Hates Chris for a while but his eyes kept closing.

  He was right on the edge of dropping off when his left hand slid under the pillow and he found the piece of paper that Springer had given him. He took it out and unfolded it. He didn’t really know why, but he began to read the handwritten words on it out loud.

  ‘“Now, when the face of the world is hidden in darkness, let us be conveyed to the place of our meeting, armed and armored; and let us be nourished by the power that is dedicated to the cleaving of darkness, the settling of all black matters, and the dissipation of all evil. So be it.”’

  He folded it up again and pushed it back under his pillow. Night Warriors, he thought. That Eulalie must have been playing some kind of sick joke on him. She had probably been visiting Cleveland on business or seeing some relatives or some such, and heard that he was here in the hospital. He was a celebrity, after all, and they had probably run a bulletin about it on WBNX. But Night Warriors, for Christ’s sake. She and her friends were probably wetting themselves with laughter right this minute. The coolest record producer in the country, cooler than Puff Daddy even, and he falls out of a first-story hotel window and winds up with a broken back. Never mind, I fooled him into thinking that he was going to be some kind of superhero. And who was he supposed to be? The Arrow-Storm? You got to believe it.

  Lincoln closed his eyes. He wasn’t asleep yet, but his mind was crowded with jerky, nightmarish pictures. He kept seeing the gray-faced man with the grinning green lips, stepping out of the shower stall with his handsaw. Then he saw the Hispanic woman with the wavy black hair, pleading with him not to leave her. El prestidigitator, she whispered. You don’t know what he’s done to me. Then he saw her bed exploding into flames.

  This time, however, she didn’t lie there motionless, as she had before, like a dead woman on a funeral pyre. This time she sat bolt upright and stared at him, and her hair was a crown of orange fire. This time she stretched her mouth wide open and let out an ululating howl of agony that went on and on.

  ‘Stop!’ Lincoln begged her. ‘I can’t save you! I can’t even move! Please stop screamin’!’

  But the woman continued to scream even though flames were licking out of her blankets and her nightdress was curling up into blackened rags.

  ‘Stop!’ Lincoln shouted at her. ‘For Christ’s sake, stop!’

  Her screaming became fainter and fainter, until all that Lincoln could hear was the crackling of the flames. Gradually the woman herself began to fade, like a sepia photograph that has been exposed to the sun for too many years. He thought he could smell smoke, but then that faded too. He lay with his hand on his chest, panting.

  ‘What’s happenin’ to you, bro?’ he whispered. ‘You losin’ your sanity, or what?’ He thought of his batty old grandmother, always hooking her hand around between her shoulder blades and complaining that cats were jumping on her back. He thought of Old Mister Jeffreys who used to sit on a sack of dog food in the corner of the Clay Market on Clay Street, shouting about the Polacks, and how the Polacks were the enemies of the black folks. ‘Never used to be so much goddamned sausage around, not till the Polacks took over!’

  Exhausted, bruised, his mind fogged by pain suppressants, Lincoln fell asleep.

  NINE

  Call to Arms

  In his previous life, John Dauphin had been a restaurant inspector down in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, which was a job that probably would have killed him before he was fifty. Unlike many of his fellow inspectors, he judged restaurants not only on their ambience and their standards of hygiene and the quality of their cooking, but on how generously they could pile up his plate.

  Of course he always expected his pepper-jack shrimp at Boutin’s to be crisp and crunchy and spicy on the outside and firm and white and sweet on the inside, but he also expected to be given more than a measly five shrimp per portion. As far as John was concerned, a chef might cook equally as well as Paul Prudhomme or Emeril Lagasse but that didn’t entitle him to be a tight-ass.

  John had lost his restaurant-inspecting job after some political jiggery-pokery in the East Baton Rouge catering community, apart from reaching the point where he tipped the bathroom scales at 289 pounds, and his BMI was only two more cheeseburgers away from fifty. Last year, with little else to do, he had driven over two thousand seven hundred miles north-east to attend the funeral of his old Army buddy Dean Brunswick III in Presque Isle, Maine, but on the way back his beloved ’71 Mercury Marquis had given up on him, dropping its engine on the highway like a cow giving birth, and ever since then he had been trying to earn enough money to limp home to Baton Rouge.

  He had chosen taxi-driving as a means of making a living because it meant that he could sit down all day, and eat and drink whenever he felt like it, and he also got to meet a never-ending variety of people. Most of his passengers were quirky and interesting, although some of them were dull beyond all human endurance, especially the business types he picked up at the airport, who sat in the back texting the whole time, or talking on their cellphones. John always thought, can’t you stop communicating for twenty minutes out of your life, and just look around and breathe the exhaust fumes? OK, Cleveland is a world-class dump, but it does have some redeeming features, like the Cleveland Grays Armory building
, which pre-dates the Civil War, and the West Side Market, and the Lake View cemetery, where John D. Rockefeller was planted, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

  The job he detested the most was cleaning out his cab at the end of his shift. Apart from the usual contributions of chewing gum and used Trojans and folded paper napkins filled with spat-out chicken-skin, he had also found an expensive red alligator purse filled with lumpy beige vomit, an upper set of false teeth, a long-dead turtle in a Burger King box, and a white angora scarf that its owner had obviously used to wipe his rear end.

  It never surprised him, how disgusting people could be. Before he had taken up taxi-driving, he had already known that people were disgusting, because he had worked in the restaurant trade. What did surprise him, endlessly, was how they never seemed to think straight. Instead of saying, “Pardon me, driver, I really need a leak, would you mind pulling over?” they would rather pee into their open briefcase, and walk into the airport with it dripping behind them.

  Another reason he detested cleaning out his cab was because the space was so confined and he was so generously built. He had to force his way in through the rear doors and bend down to look underneath the seats, in case anybody had dropped anything valuable or revolting, and this always made him feel as if he were free diving in ninety fathoms under water and he was just about to run out of oxygen.

  Today the back of his taxi was reasonably clean, except for a gristly piece of half-chewed sausage that somebody had forced into the ashtray in the armrest. He switched on his Vac’n’Go and gave the seats a quick once-over, and he was about to do the same for the carpets when he saw something sparkling underneath the front passenger seat. He rolled up his left sleeve and pushed his arm into the space beneath the seat, and after two minutes of grunting and scrabbling he managed to hook out whatever it was.

  He gripped the door handle and hauled himself, panting, on to his feet. It was a gloomy morning here on Gooding Avenue, in Glenville – so gloomy that he could hardly make out what the sparkly thing was. He squinted at it more closely, and then he realized it was an earring – one of the hoopy, loopy earrings that Rhodajane Berry had been wearing. It was made up of three overlapping gold crescents, each of them studded with zircons. The long curved wire that went through her pierced ear-lobe had bent askew, and that was probably why it had fallen off.

  He turned the earring over and over. It was a sign, he was sure of it. He even sniffed it, and it still smelled of Boss Intense.

  John believed in signs. He didn’t believe that you could see Jesus in the scorch patterns on a slice of burned toast, or that three knocks on the door meant that somebody had died; but he did believe that some things were meant to be, and that if people couldn’t find a way to get together, or didn’t realize that they ought to be together, the natural world would conspire to make sure that they did, like the rabbits and bluebirds in a Disney picture.

  He looked around. Gooding Avenue was a short, flat suburban street with small brick-and-clapboard houses set well back from the road. The clouds hung over it like dark gray quilts. There was no other living being in sight apart from a brindled dog trotting from one house to the next, sniffing at the trash cans. If John hadn’t been able to hear the traffic from East 105th Street and Lakeview Road, he would have thought that the world had come to an end.

  ‘If this isn’t a sign,’ he told himself, ‘then I’m due for a hefty tax rebate.’

  He went into the pale-green-painted house where he rented an upstairs room at the back. His landlady Mrs Gizmo had gone shopping, or to one of her bridge mornings. Her real name was Ada Weiss, but John had called her Mrs Gizmo right from the start. Ada Weiss = A Device = Gizmo.

  His room was small and brown and plain, with a sloping ceiling on the right-hand side. He had only one poster on the wall, a hand-colored picture of the ferry landing at Baton Rouge, sometime in the 1890s. He had carried it around with him for so long that it was falling apart at the folds. His bedcovers were all scrumpled up and his trash basket was crammed with empty take-out boxes. He always had to have a late-night sub from Quizno’s, usually honey bourbon chicken, so that he didn’t wake up at three in the morning feeling ravenous.

  He pulled off his brown leather windbreaker and wrestled his way out of his raspberry-colored polo shirt. In his closet he found a pale blue button-down shirt that didn’t look too creased, and his tan linen coat. There was a three-inch split in the back of his coat, but if he made sure that he always kept his face toward whoever he was talking to, then nobody would notice.

  He washed his teeth and brushed up his thinning dyed-black pompadour and splashed his cheeks with American Crew aftershave. Then he grimaced at his face in the mirror over the washbasin and said, ‘Mister Eee-resistible, that’s you!’

  He knocked on the door of Room 309 and waited. There was no reply at first but he was sure that he could hear voices inside, and they didn’t sound like some daytime television show. He knocked again, and then cleared his throat loudly. Still no reply.

  Eventually he pressed his ear against the door. He could hear a woman talking, and he was pretty certain it was Rhodajane; he would recognize the drawn-out vowels of that Brunstucky accent anywhere. The other voice was so soft and growly that it was impossible for John to make out what he was saying, but it was definitely a man.

  Oh well, he thought. Maybe the sign wasn’t telling me what I thought it was telling me. Or maybe I just got my timing wrong. I should go eat, and come back later.

  He had just started walking back along the corridor, however, when the door opened and he heard Rhodajane whistle and call out, ‘Taxi!’

  He stopped as abruptly as if he had been hit on the back of the head by a flying baseball, and slowly turned around. He hoped that she hadn’t seen the split in the back of his coat. She was standing in the open doorway with her arms folded so that her breasts were pressed so tightly together that he couldn’t have slipped a credit card between them. She was wearing a purple silk headscarf, a very tight purple velour top, and narrow-leg jeans, and another pair of her impossible shoes – in silver this time, with buckles. Her pose was jaunty, and she was smiling – even if it was one of those smiles that said here we go, I was expecting this.

  ‘Dead on time, JD,’ she told him.

  He waddled back toward her with his arms held up in surrender. ‘Hey – it’s not what you think, believe me.’

  ‘How do you know what I think?’

  ‘Sorry, but it’s pretty obvious. You think I’m hitting on you. You think I’m some kind of stalker. Whereas that is absolutely not the case.’

  ‘“That is absolutely not the case,” huh?’

  ‘Absolutely one hundred thirteen percent.’

  Rhodajane thought for a moment, with her lips pursed. Then she said, ‘You want to know what I’m really thinking?’

  ‘OK. What are you really thinking?’

  ‘I’m thinking that you found my earring in the back of your taxi and you came here to return it to me. You’re hoping that I’m going to be so–o–o grateful that I’ll agree to have dinner with you and maybe one thing will lead to another. Or that at the very least I’ll give you a sawski by way of a tip.’

  John held out the earring in the palm of his hand. ‘Here – look – take it. I’m not looking for a tip and I’m not expecting you to come out to dinner with me and I’m not expecting one thing to lead to another, although I acknowledge that it can sometimes happen, you know – one thing leading to another – especially after the cream-cheese pierogis at Sokolowski’s. They’re almost worth learning Polish for.

  He paused, and frowned, and then he said, ‘Wait up a goddamned minute. How the hell did you know I came here to return your earring?’

  Rhodajane kept smiling. ‘Your friend told me. He said that you’d show up in exactly twenty-one minutes, and sure enough here you are.’

  John leaned sideways, trying to see over her shoulder into Room 309. ‘Excuse me? Who – what – which friend is
that, exactly?’

  ‘Come on in and meet him,’ said Rhodajane. ‘He’s been telling some real interesting stuff. Weird, I’ll grant you, but interesting.’

  She stepped aside so that John could enter the room, but he didn’t want to go in first because of the split in his coat. He took hold of her elbow and gently pushed her ahead of him, and closed the door behind him.

  ‘I could sew that for you,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t think it, but I’m pretty good with a needle and twist.’

  John was about to ask her how the hell she knew about that, too, but then he saw the figure standing in the bay window with his back to him. He was silhouetted against the gray, subdued daylight, his hands deep in his pockets, his coat collar turned up, his shoulders slightly hunched, but John recognized him immediately. He felt as if he had forgotten how to breathe.

  ‘Deano,’ he said. ‘Deano, is that you?’

  The man turned around. The hotel room was so dark that it was difficult for John to see his face, but there was no question that he was smiling.

  ‘Hallo, John. How’s it hanging?’

  ‘Deano! I know you’re not Deano, so don’t try to give me that “how’s it hanging” bullshit.’

  Rhodajane went over and switched on the bedside lamps. Now John could see that Deano was very much younger than the last time he had seen him. He had died of chronic alcoholism at the age of forty-two, with blotchy skin and rheumy red eyes and a mass of white tangled curls, like a half-starved Santa Claus. But here today, in Room 309 at the Griffin House Hotel, he looked as young as he was when John first met him at Fort Polk, over twenty-one years ago, when they had joined the Army together. Handsome, in a rakish way, with a broken nose like Owen Wilson and piercing blue eyes and short-cropped blond hair. He held out his hand but John ignored it. This wasn’t Deano. Deano had been cremated on a gray day up in Presque Isle, Maine, with only four people to sing Amazing Grace and one of them had throat cancer.