Midnight Voices
Authors: John Saul
MIDNIGHT
VOICES
JOHN SAUL
BALLANTINE BOOKS • NEW YORK
Table of Contents
For Andy Cohen—
Who makes me laugh,
Is always a good friend,
And always keeps on trying.
(How spicy you want it?)
PROLOGUE
There’s nothing going on.
Nobody’s watching me.
Nobody’s following me.
The words had become a mantra, one he repeated silently over and over again, as if by simple repetition he could make the phrases true.
The thing was, he wasn’t absolutely certain they weren’t true. If something really was going on, he had no idea what it might be, or why. Sure, he was a lawyer, and everybody supposedly hated lawyers, but that was really mostly a joke. Besides, all he’d ever practiced was real estate law, and even that had been limited to little more than signing off on contracts of sale, and putting together some boilerplate for leases. As far as he knew, no one involved in any of the deals he’d put his initials on had even been unhappy, let alone developed a grudge against him.
Nor had he caught anyone watching him. Or at least he hadn’t caught anyone watching him any more than anybody watched anybody else. Like right now, while he was running in Central Park. He watched the other runners, and they watched him. Well, maybe it wasn’t really watching—more like keeping an eye out to make sure he didn’t run into anybody else, or get run over by a biker or a skater, or some other jerk who was on the wrong path. No, it was more like just a feeling he got sometimes. Not all the time.
Just some of the time.
On the sidewalk sometimes.
Mostly in the park.
Which was really stupid, now that he thought about it. That was one of the main reasons people went to the park, wasn’t it? People-watching? Half the benches in it were filled with people who didn’t seem to have anything better to do than feed the pigeons and the squirrels and watch other people minding their own business. One day a couple of weeks ago his son had asked him who they were.
“Who are who?” he’d countered, not sure what the boy was talking about.
“The people on the benches,” the ten-year-old boy had asked. “The ones who are always watching us.”
The little boy’s sister, two years older than her brother, had rolled her eyes. “They’re not watching us. They’re just feeding the squirrels.”
Up until that day, he’d never really thought about it at all. Never really noticed it. But after that, it had started to seem like maybe his son was right. It seemed like there was always someone watching whatever he and the kids were doing.
Some old man in a suit that looked out of date.
An old lady wearing a hat and gloves no matter what the time or day.
A nanny letting her eyes drift from her charges for a moment.
Just the normal people who drifted in and out of the park. Sometimes they smiled and nodded, but they seemed to smile and nod at anyone who passed, at anyone who paid them the slightest bit of attention.
They were just people, spending a few hours sitting in the park and watching life passing them by. Certainly, it was nothing personal.
But somehow they seemed to be everywhere. He’d told himself it was just that he’d become conscious of them. When he hadn’t thought about them, he’d hardly noticed them at all, but now that his son had pointed them out, he was thinking about them all the time.
Within a week, it had spread beyond the park. He was starting to see them everywhere he went. When he took his son to the barbershop, or the whole family went out for dinner.
“You’re imagining things,” his wife had told him just a couple of days ago. “It’s just an old woman eating by herself. Of course she’s going to look around at whoever’s in the restaurant. Don’t you, when you’re eating alone?”
She was right, and he knew she was right, but it hadn’t done any good. In fact, every day it had gotten worse, until he’d gotten to the point where no matter where he was, or what he was doing, he felt eyes watching him.
More and more, he’d get that tingly feeling, and know that someone behind him was watching him. He’d try to ignore it, try to resist the urge to look back over his shoulder, but eventually the hair on the back of his neck would stand up, and the tingling would turn into a chill, and finally he’d turn around.
And nobody would be there.
Except that of course there would always be someone there; this was the middle of Manhattan, for God’s sake. There was always at least one person there, no matter where he was: on the sidewalk, in the subway, at work, in a restaurant, in the park.
Then it went beyond the feeling of being watched. A couple of days ago he’d started feeling as if he were being followed.
He’d stopped trying to resist the urge to turn around, and by today it seemed as if he was glancing over his shoulder every few seconds.
When he’d walked home from work this afternoon, he’d kept looking into store windows, but it wasn’t the merchandise he was looking at; it was the reflections in the glass.
The reflections of people swirling around him, some of them almost bumping into him, some of them excusing themselves as they pushed past, some of them just looking annoyed.
But no one was following him.
He was sure of it.
Except that he wasn’t sure of it at all, and when he’d gotten home he’d been so jumpy he’d had a drink, which he practically never did. A glass of wine with dinner was about all he ever allowed himself. Finally he’d decided to go for a run—it wouldn’t be dark for another half hour, and maybe if he got some exercise—some real exercise—he would finally shake the paranoia that seemed to be tightening its grip every day.
“Now?” his wife had asked. “It’s almost dark!”
“I’ll be fine,” he’d insisted.
And he was. He’d entered the park at 77th, and headed north until he came to the Bank Rock Bridge. He’d headed east across the bridge, then started jogging through the maze of paths from which the Ramble had gotten its name. The area was all but deserted, and as he started working his way south toward the Bow Bridge he finally began to feel the paranoia lift.
There was no one watching him.
No one following him.
Nothing was going on at all.
As the tension began draining out of his body, his pace slowed to an easy jog. Late afternoon was turning into dusk, and the benches were empty of people. Even the few runners that were still out were picking up their pace, anxious to get out of the park before darkness overtook them. Behind him, he could hear another runner pounding along the path, and he eased over to the right to make it easy for the other to pass. But then, just when the other runner should have flashed by him, the pounding footsteps suddenly slowed.
And the feeling of paranoia came rushing back.
What had happened?
Why had the other runner slowed?
Why hadn’t he gone on past?
Something was wrong. He started to twist around to glance back over his shoulder.
Too late.
An arm snaked around his neck, an arm covered with some kind of dark material. Before he could even react to it, the arm tightened. His hands came up to pull the arm free, his fingers sinking into the sleeve that covered it, but then he felt a hand on his head.
A hand that was pushing his head to the left, deep into the crook of his assailant’s elbow.
The arm tightened; the pressure increased.
He gathered his strength, raised his arm to jam his elbows back into his attacker’s abdomen and—
With a quick jerk, the man behind him snapped his neck, and as his spine broke every muscle in his body went limp.
A second later his wallet and watch—along with his attacker—were gone, and his corpse lay still in the rapidly gathering darkness.
PART I
THE FIRST NIGHTMARE
The girl lay in bed, determined not to go to sleep.
That was when it all happened, when she was asleep.
That was when the dreams came—the terrible dreams from which she could never awaken—so if she didn’t want the dreams to come, she had to stay awake.
But it was so hard to stay awake. She’d tried everything she could think of, tried them so many times she couldn’t even remember.
Tried sitting up, just sitting in the darkness, her back against the hard headboard so she wouldn’t be too comfortable, gazing at the lights playing on the window blind. Sometimes she’d left the blinds up, thinking the brighter light would help her stay awake.
But it had never worked.
She’d tried sitting in her chair, too. The one by the window, where she could look out. In the daytime it was one of her favorite places to sit, because she could watch everything that was happening outside. But at night sitting in the chair didn’t work any better than sitting up in bed.
She’d tried reading under the covers, using the flashlight she kept in the nightstand next to the bed, but she’d known the first time she tried it that it wouldn’t work: she was way too comfortable, and the batteries in the flashlight started to give out after she’d read only a few pages.
Besides, it was even harder to breathe under the covers than it was in the dream.
Part of the trouble was that the dreams didn’t come every night. Some nights she just drifted into sleep, sometimes in her bed, and sometimes in the chair, and woke up to find the sun shining on the window shade. Those were the good mornings, when she didn’t wake up in the grip of the terrors of the dreams, her breath coming in gasps, her body so tired and weak that it felt as if she’d been running all night.
Running from the terrible things that happened to her in the night.
She looked at the clock, but its glowing green hands had barely moved at all.
Get up, she told herself. Get up and walk around. Walk around all night, until the sun comes up. But the bed was soft and comfortable, and as she pulled the covers snug around her and closed her eyes, another voice spoke.
Maybe the dreams won’t come tonight. They didn’t come last night—maybe they won’t come tonight, either.
She let herself relax—just a little—just enough so the bed seemed to cradle her.
And then she heard it.
A moan—so soft she wasn’t certain she’d heard it at all.
She froze, holding her breath, straining to hear. But she couldn’t have heard anything—couldn’t have! She only heard the moans in the dreams, and she wasn’t asleep yet.
Was she?
She opened her eyes to search the darkness.
The clock was still there, its hands glowing green and pointing straight up. Across the room was the window, with the lights from below casting shadows on the shade.
But the frame around the window was indistinct, as if she were looking at it through fog.
The fog of the dream!
But how could it be? She was awake! She hadn’t fallen asleep—she knew she hadn’t!
She looked at the clock again. No more than a minute had gone by.
But now its hands were as indistinct as the frame of the window.
“No,” she whispered. “Please, no . . .”
Her voice trailed off into silence, but the silence was quickly broken by the sounds of the dream.
The distant moans, the voices of the night.
The creaking of doors.
Footsteps coming close.
No, she tried to tell herself. I’m still awake. I stayed awake. I’m not asleep. I’m not!
She tried to cry out, tried to give voice to the terror that had suddenly seized her, but her throat had constricted, and her chest felt as if it were bound with steel bands—bound so tight she could barely breathe at all.
The footsteps came closer.
The fog grew denser, swirling around her, making her feel dizzy, blurring her vision until even the hands of the clock disappeared.
Arms reached out of the mist.
A gnarled finger moved toward her face.
Another finger, bent and swollen, touched her skin, its ragged nail leaving a burning sensation as it traced the curve of her cheek.
She tried to shrink away, but knew there was no escape.
The twisted finger dropped away from her face and closed on the covers she still clutched about her neck. She tried to fight, tried to hold on to the quilt, but her muscles had gone weak and her hands fell away.
The covers vanished into the mists.
The voices began. She lay perfectly still, trying to close her eyes and ears, trying to tell herself that none of it was real, that she would wake up and it would all be gone.
The voices grew louder, and more fingers came out of the mist, fingers that prodded at her.
“Yes,” one of the voices whispered. “Perfect . . . perfect . . .”
Her vision began to play tricks on her, and suddenly everything around her seemed to be a vast distance away. She could still hear the voices, but they, too, seemed to be coming from the very edges of her consciousness. Yet even though the voices and the shapes had retreated into the distance, something else, something she could neither see nor feel nor hear was closing in on her.
Run!
She had to run, had to escape before the unseen force held her in its grip, before the whispering beings came back.
Too late! She was paralyzed now, unable to move her legs or her arms, unable even to sit up. She was held tight by bonds she could neither see nor feel, but that held her immobile and helpless against the forces around her.
Now the beings were back, swirling around her, whispering amongst themselves.
Suddenly a stabbing pain shot through her chest, as if a needle had been jabbed directly into her heart.
Then another stab of pain, this time in her stomach.
She opened her mouth to scream, but no sound came out. She tried to strike out at her tormentors, but not one of her muscles obeyed her commands.
The stabs came faster, jabbing her belly and her side, her groin, her neck.
The whisper of voices grew to an incoherent babble, then faded away until all she could hear was a strange sucking sound, like a cat lapping milk from a bowl.