Death Dream, page 1
Also by Graham Masterton
HORROR STANDALONES
Black Angel
Death Mask
Death Trance
Edgewise
Heirloom
Prey
Ritual
Spirit
Tengu
The Chosen Child
The Sphinx
Unspeakable
Walkers
Manitou Blood
Revenge of the Manitou
Famine
Ikon
Sacrifice
The House of a Hundred
Whispers
Plague
The Soul Stealer
Blind Panic
The House at Phantom Park
THE SCARLET WIDOW SERIES
Scarlet Widow
The Coven
THE KATIE MAGUIRE SERIES
White Bones
Broken Angels
Red Light
Taken for Dead
Blood Sisters
Buried
Living Death
Dead Girls Dancing
Dead Men Whistling
Begging to Die
The Last Drop of Blood
THE PATEL & PARDOE SERIES
Ghost Virus
The Children God Forgot
The Shadow People
What Hides in the Cellar
THE NIGHT WARRIORS
Night Warriors
Death Dream
Night Plague
Night Wars
The Ninth Nightmare
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS
Days of Utter Dread
DEATH DREAM
Graham Masterton
An Aries book
www.headofzeus.com
First published in the USA in 1988 by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.
First published in the UK in 1990 by Sphere Books
This edition first published in the UK in 2023 by Head of Zeus, part of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © Graham Masterton, 1988
The moral right of Graham Masterton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (PB): 9781035904006
ISBN (E): 9781035903993
Cover design: Matt Bray / Head of Zeus
Head of Zeus
First Floor East
5–8 Hardwick Street
London EC1R 4RG
WWW.HEADOFZEUS.COM
Contents
Welcome Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
About the Author
An Invitation from the Publisher
It was a thing out of a nightmare. While mankind slept it stalked the dream-world, driving men to madness and death. The demon’s bloodlust was terrible: its rage was unstoppable.
Decimating the realms of dreams was not enough — the creature hungered for the waking world. Hidden in a child’s nightmares, it emerged in a riot of slaughter. None could stand against it.
And then the Night Warriors arose, summoned by the demon’s evil. Powerless in our world, in dreams they are virtual gods. In dreams they will confront the demon — unless it finds and destroys their sleeping selves.
He reached for the doorknob. Jennifer said, ‘Vandalized and burgled, all in one week.’ He turned slowly to smile at her, a glutinous movement like a man wading through syrup.
And then the door was racketed open as if an express train were hurtling through it, and John was ripped across the chest by something that felt like red-hot wires, and was slammed against the bureau, hitting his head and falling to the floor.
Jennifer was screaming, too, high and piercing. And the huge black monstrosity raked her open from shoulders to thighs, blood bursting everywhere.
The huge black thing rushed away again. All John could do was lie on his side on the blood-sprayed carpet, whimpering with pain. When he opened his eyes, he saw his son’s bare feet, close to his face.
‘Lenny,’ he whispered. ‘For God’s sake, Lenny, save me.’
Chapter One
John discovered the scratches soon after Lenny had gone to sleep that night. Six deep parallel gouges in the corridor wall, a little above head-height, straight through the new floral wallpaper and right into the plaster, V-shaped and narrow, like marks made by a lino-cutter or a thin-bladed chisel.
‘Goddamn it,’ he swore, touching the torn wallpaper with his fingertips. The decorating had been finished only last Wednesday, and he had lectured Lenny for five minutes about treating the walls and the fresh white paintwork with respect. This house was their new beginning, the opening of a fresh and happy chapter in their lives. For Lenny to have defaced it so soon was just as upsetting as if he had said that he hated Jennifer, and that he hated their new life together.
This wasn’t childish carelessness. This wasn’t wear and tear. This was a gesture of hostility and rejection, and John felt more annoyed with Lenny than at any time in the past three years.
‘Goddamn it,’ he repeated. The scratches were too forceful to have been done by accident. Lenny hadn’t just run a toy car too enthusiastically along a flower-patterned racetrack; or smashed a Transformer robot too violently into a make-believe cliff. This was deliberate. Premeditated, tongue-between-teeth, and deliberate.
John took three deep breaths. Then he walked the length of the corridor to Lenny’s bedroom at the end. It was hot in there, and dark, and smelled of rubbery new carpet. Lenny’s bed stood against the far wall. Lenny himself was lying on his back with his mouth open, his cheeks flushed, one hand still holding the Gobot he had been playing with when he fell asleep.
John stood over the bed for a while, letting his eyes grow accustomed to the darkness. Lenny was nine – which meant that he was still young enough to do some really ridiculous things, but old enough to inflict some serious damage when he did them. He was curly-headed and blond and almost pretty, except for that wide, impish grin. He looked so much like his mother that John sometimes found the tears pricking the corners of his eyes even though he hadn’t been thinking about Virginia at all.
‘Lelly,’ Virginia had called him, because of the way he had tried to pronounce his own name when he was very small.
John had allowed Lenny to grieve openly for his mother, the same way that he had allowed himself to grieve openly for her. Some people (especially his own mother) had thought that he’d allowed Lenny to grieve too much. There had been a bad eighteen months of tantrums, wildness, uncontrollable violence. Once, after Lenny had thrown paint around at school, John had almost believed that he had lost his son altogether, that Lenny would spend the rest of his life screaming and kicking and refusing to understand that people die whether you want them to or not, and that can sometimes include your own mother.
However, he had tried to be patient with Lenny, and he had persuaded Lenny’s teachers and his friends to be patient, too. Gradually, Lenny’s behavior had improved; and John would never forget the day that Lenny had come home from school and put his arms around him and said nothing at all, and John had known that at last Lenny had come to terms with losing his mother.
These days, John didn’t allow Lenny to throw tantrums. He expected cooperation, and friendship, and trust. The memory would always be there, but the grieving had to be put behind them; life had to go on. Last May, John had found a new job as production manager for the Philadelphia News and had sold their old house in Newark; and late in October he had met Jennifer and soon asked her to marry him.
John wondered if Lenny might have resented all of this upheaval, without outwardly admitting it. Maybe Lenny felt that, by selling the house in which they had lived together, by changing his job, and by falling in love with Jennifer, John had somehow betrayed Virginia and tried to erase her memory. After all, they couldn’t visit the grave anymore, not regularly, not like they used to when they still lived in Newark.
Maybe that was what the scratches in the wall were all about: a dumb protest against his new life. A mark to show that even if John didn’t care about Virginia anymore. Lenny did.
Lenny began to snore a little. John was still angry with him, but he didn’t really want to wake him. Lenny’s eyes were shifting under his eyelids in REM sleep. He was dreaming, about something. Baseball? Star Trek? His mother? John didn’t want to wake him in the middle of a dream.
All right, young man, he thought. This can wait until morning. But don’t expect me to f eel any better about it then.
A shadow fell across the doorway. It was Jennifer, looking for him.
‘Is he all right?’ she whispered. ‘I wondered where you were.’
‘He’s okay.’ John tiptoed back out of the bedroom and closed the door. He kissed Jennifer on the forehead; he still loved the freshness of their marriage, the excitement of loving somebody new. The little tyke just scratched the wallpaper. ‘Did you see it? I’m going to flay him alive tomorrow. Forty-five dollars a roll, and he’s torn it.’
He led her back along the corridor and showed her the scratches.
Jennifer frowned at them. ‘Did Lenny do those?’
Jennifer reached up and touched them. ‘They look awfully high up for Lenny to have done them. And he must have used a terrific amount of strength, to dig in that deep.’
‘Who do you think you are – Sherlock Holmes?’
Jennifer smiled, and gave him a quick kiss. ‘Don’t be angry with him, John. I’m sure he didn’t mean to do it.’
‘He didn’t mean to dig half a dozen darn great grooves in the wall? It probably took him most of the evening!’
They went down the curving, white-banistered staircase. The corridor and the stairs were carpeted in pale apricot, and the walls were covered in green-and-apricot flowers.
‘It couldn’t have taken him any time at all,’ Jennifer remarked. ‘He was playing Trivial Pursuit with me for most of the evening. Then he had his bath, came down for his milk and cookies, and went straight to bed.’
‘Well, maybe he did it yesterday evening and I just didn’t notice it before,’ John grumbled. ‘Do you want a drink?’
Jennifer went through to the sitting room and sat down. ‘I’ll have a martini if you’re having one.’
John went across to the drinks table. A chilled glass jug was waiting on the tray. That was the only domestic service that Jennifer ever did for him: mix him a jug of martinis so that it would be ready when he came home from the office.
‘You have a spare roll of that wallpaper, don’t you?’ Jennifer asked. ‘I could get Mr. Kahn to come around to fix it tomorrow.’
John poured drinks. ‘Ah ... I don’t know. It’s not the actual damage so much. It’s the fact that Lenny felt like doing it.’
‘Maybe he didn’t do it.’
‘It sure as hell wasn’t you, and it sure as hell wasn’t me. So who else is there?’
‘Come on, don’t get upset,’ Jennifer said. ‘He’s only a boy, after all.’
John swallowed ice-cold gin and shrugged, then sat on the sofa beside her and kissed her. ‘Did I tell you that Arnie Walters is thinking of buying himself a Jeep?’ he told her. ‘He says he wants to drive around the country, answering the call of the wild.’
‘Arnie? In a Jeep? I can’t imagine it.’
‘Bill Chapman said Arnie can’t even answer a straight-forward question, let alone the call of the wild.’ He reached behind him and picked up the paper from the table in back of the couch. ‘It looks like they’re going to go ahead with that rebuilding at the Annenberg Center.’
Jennifer smiled and watched him as he took his half-glasses out of his shirt pocket. She didn’t mind the small rituals of his arrival home from work; in fact, she found them reassuring. He wasn’t the kind of man who allowed himself to live in a rut. He frequently took her out for unexpected dinners-for-two, or drove them out to the Brandywine Valley or the Poconos on the spur of the moment, so she quite happily allowed him the nightly procedure of pouring a martini, opening the paper that he spent all day producing but never had the time to look at, taking out his glasses, and sitting silently for a quarter of an hour, reading.
Although they had met only nine months ago, John and Jennifer were as comfortable and at peace with each other as if they had been rubbing along together for years. This was partly because they were both accustomed to living with somebody else: Jennifer had been divorced four years ago from her alcoholic husband, Pete. But they were well matched, too. Both were forty, both young-looking for their age, both interested in music and theater and food and art. When they were first going out together, they had practically lived in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
John was dark-haired and stockily built, with a largish nose and deeply cleft chin. He looked more like a carpenter or a tobacco farmer than a newspaper executive. There was a photograph on the bureau of him wearing a plaid shirt and a denim cap, and anybody could have been forgiven for mistaking him for the narrow-eyed man in the Camel advertisement who lights his cigarette with a burning twig.
Jennifer was ash-blond, very lean, with wide gray-green eyes and a mouth that – in John’s words – always looked as if it were kissing or gasping, or both. She had been working as a secretary at the Philadelphia News when John had first arrived there; now she ran a small perfumery store next to the Head House Inn on Society Hill.
She was smart in appearance, smart in behavior. It was she who had decorated the house in whites and peaches, filled it with antique furniture in figured walnut and palest oak. It always mystified John that she had stayed married for so long to a ranting, blustering loser like Pete Marcowicz. Well – not so much mystified him as made him jealous, although he wouldn’t have cared to admit it.
But they lived together now in this freshly remodeled three-storey colonial house on Third Street, feeling at last as if life had rewarded them with what they deserved. All that John admitted pining for now was a BMW 5-Series and a Corum wristwatch.
As the wall-clock in hall chimed eight, Jennifer finished her martini and said, ‘How about some dinner? It’s tuna salad, that’s all.’
‘Are you watching my waistline again?’
‘I’m thinking about your alimentary canal.’
‘If I eat any more tuna, my alimentary canal is going to start looking like a rerun of Flipper.’
Jennifer lifted his reading glasses off his nose. ‘Flipper was a dolphin, not a tuna.’
They sat down to supper in the Dutch-tiled kitchen. John opened a bottle of Chablis, and poured out two generous glassfuls.
Jennifer said, ‘I’m going to be selling products for men starting next month. It’s a new range, natural skin-care for the gentleman in your life.’
‘You’re looking at me as if you think I need natural skin-care,’ John protested.
‘Every man does,’ Jennifer said, smiling. ‘You wax your car, you polish your shoes, you creosote your fence – why don’t you lavish even a tenth of that kind of attention on your face?’
‘I just think I’d look kind of stupid with a creosoted face, that’s all.’
‘I’ll bring you some samples,’ Jennifer persisted. ‘There’s cucumber wrinkle cream; partridge-pea moisturizer; and some really fabulous preshave lotion made from evening lychnis.’
John was reaching across the table for the chopped onions when the ceiling was shaken by a thunderous banging, followed by the sound of smashing glass. The banging was so loud that he thought for one terrifying moment that the whole house was going to collapse on top of them.
‘What the hell was that?’ he shouted.
‘My God,’ said Jennifer, white-faced. ‘It sounds like the roof’s fallen in.’
John ran across the hallway and bounded up the stairs. When they’d remodeled the house, they had taken out three upstairs walls in order to create a home gym and an en-suite bathroom. He was convinced that he was going to find that the steel joists had given way, and that their bedroom complex was filled with rubble and open to the sky.
He pushed open the bedroom door, with Jennifer close behind him, then stopped and stared at the bedroom in total shock and bewilderment. He couldn’t even think of anything to say. He stepped over broken lamps and torn cushions and tipped-out drawers, and he found it almost impossible to believe what he was looking at.
The ceiling hadn’t collapsed. There was no structural damage. But this recently pristine, freshly decorated bedroom now looked as if it had been attacked by a gang of berserk hooligans. The white duck-down bedcover had been slashed open, again and again; the pillows had been ripped apart; every mirror had been smashed. Every picture had been torn out of its frame and crumpled up. The wallpaper had been torn down in long strips; the plaster was gouged.
Inside the closets, every single article of clothing – every dress, every shirt, every coat, every shoe – had been slashed or wrenched to pieces. John picked up a handkerchief. Even that had been ripped. He let it drop to the floor, and looked numbly around the rest of the room. In the broken mirror behind the bed, his reflection looked pale and peculiarly distorted, as if he were a hunchback.
