Nicolbee's Nightmares

Nicolbee’s Nightmare

by John York Cabot

Treasure Trove in Time 

The Man the World Forgot  (John York Cabot)

Truth Is a Plague! 

The Softly Silken Wallet 

Painting of the Prophet 

The Spoilers of Lern  (Clee Garson)

Let's Give Away Mars!  (Clee Garson)

The Martian Cross  (Clee Garson)

By John York Cabot

“Look
," said Joe Nicolbee, point
ing his finger at his wife that 'Friday night after they had finished a mediocre meal, "why don't you go to the show alone?"

Agnes Nicolbee hesitated only an instant. She looked at the litter of dirty dishes lying about the kitchen table.

"What about these dinner dishes?" she asked.

"You go to the show," Joe Nicolbee repeated. "I'll do 'em."

Agnes smiled happily. This was just what she wanted.

"I'll call the girls," she said rising
,
"and see if they'll go with me."

She paused to pat Joe Nicolbee's head fondly before leaving him there in the kitchen. She still thought this gesture pleased him. "You don't mind staying home alone, honey?" she asked.

Joe Nicolbee sighed.

"No," he said. "I don't mind. You'd better hurry." And with faintly cynical amusement he watched his wife hurry out of the kitchen. He could hear her dialing a telephone rapidly in the hall off the living room.

A few seconds later her voice floated faintly to him, carefully muffled so that he couldn't make out any of the
conversation. But Joe Nicolbee didn't care to hear the conversation. He knew Agnes wasn't calling any of the "girls". He'd known it for over three years now. It didn't bother Joe Nicolbee because it had been longer than three years since he'd been silly enough to give a damn about Agnes.

It was Joe Nicolbee's silent prayer that Agnes would stop being a fool some day and divorce him. But no, she wasn't the type to be honest enough for that. Joe Nicolbee sighed and contemplated the litter of dirty dishes on the table.

They were a part of Joe Nicolbee's unpleasant existence. Just as much a part as Agnes, his dull job at the department store, his stupid, meddlesome neighbors, and the endless scrimping and saving that meant getting along. They were just as much a part of Joe's existence as the daily newspapers that screamed of horror and bloodshed and war and persecution. Just as much an integral part of Joe Nicolbee's life as breathing.

Agnes came back into the kitchen a little later to kiss Joe on the forehead and say good-bye. Joe watched her leave, a curious mixture of scorn and amusement on his features.

In his dream, Nicolbee saw the loveliest woman imagination had ever fashioned

"Have a good time with the girls," he called after her. It pleased him to say that. One of the small remaining pleasures was the realization that Agnes was so stupid she thought she was getting away with something.

He heard the door close, yawned, and stood up, mechanically arranging the dishes to pile them in the sink. He'd have a smoke after he finished these, and then pile into bed. Then he could get back to his dreams.

Joe Nicolbee
enjoyed dreaming. You might say he was good at it. For as far back as he could recall, Joe had never slept without dreams.

When he was a little kid, he used to dream that he was a knight in armor, riding a great horse and wearing a plumed helmet. He was the hero who rescued plenty of fair maidens. Later, when Joe was at school, he'd dream he was the campus hero, an All American halfback, or a brilliant Phi Beta Kappa scholar. But of course he was never really any of these.

Joe Nicolbee was unfortunately a pretty ordinary person. He was ordinary, that is, according to the shape and standards of worldly values. No one expected Joe Nicolbee to emerge into the limelight as a world beater, a Great Person. And lie never did.

As he went through life no one seemed surprised that he wasn't setting the world ablaze. No one seemed surprised to see him becoming more and more a microscopic nonentity in the scheme of things. Joe wasn't surprised either. He had long grown used to the fact that his dreams never approached reality.

"Hell," he told himself, "I'm just Joe Nicolbee."

When Joe had gotten his job at the department store he'd had dreams of some day ascending to great heights
in commerce. And about that time Joe was dreaming of a wonderful girl to make life blissfully complete.

Joe married Agnes, and for the first time thought he'd come pretty close to equaling in reality what
he'd had in his dream world. Bu
t even Agnes proved a dud. It had been just wishful thinking that made him think she was the girl he'd seen in his dream life. Once he had tried to tell Agnes about his dreams.

"Joe Nicolbee," she said, "no wonder you never amount to a darn. You spend all your time snoring, off in a never-never land. Wonderful dreams, bah! No wonder you toss all night. Probably indigestion. If you'd stop all that nonsense you'd have more time for practical things. Why don't you dream how to get a promotion?"

So Joe Nicolbee's expression had grown a little grim and he hadn't said anything to Agnes after that. But he didn't stop dreaming. Even after Joe got a pay cut instead of the promotion Agnes was always pushing him after, he kept on dreaming. Maybe he even spent more time at it.

For it seemed that the tougher the stark, unpleasant realities of life got for Joe Nicolbee the more he would dream himself away from them. He was that sort of a person.

Where some men came home nights and spent the after-dinner hours busily engaged in putting stamps in books or working over a birdhouse in a basement workshop, Joe Nicolbee got to bed just as fast as he could and dreamed. It was really his hobby.

The few acquaintances Joe Nicolbee had used to jokingly say that he spent all his waking hours away from work in sleep. Which finally got to be pretty much the truth of the matter.

Like this particular Friday night.

Joe finished drying the dishes and
smoked a couple of cigarettes in the living room, thanking God that he didn't have to put up with his wife's stupid chatter this evening. He even got a sort of savage delight in picturing Agnes boring the hell out of some other man.

And then, about eight o'clock, Joe Nicolbee combed his hair very carefully, brushed his teeth, put on his best pajamas, and went to bed. Joe always liked to look his best in his dreams, and took pains getting ready for them. Joe was no insomniac. Through long practice he had learned how to get right off to sleep. He was snoring in five minutes.

It was
a vast, incredibly beautiful forest in which Joe Nicolbee found himself. From the glorious rust and yellow colorings of the trees that surrounded him, and the crispness of the air and the leaves beneath his feet, Joe Nicolbee knew that this was autumn. He stood in the center of a great avenue of these trees, and they were slanted by smoky shafts of sunshine. Looking upward at the huge arch this made, Joe Nicolbee thought of a cathedral he'd seen once when he was a kid.

It was as silent, and as cool, and as peaceful as a cathedral. Joe stood there, drinking in the smoky sunshine, letting his eyes feast on the gorgeous colors and his body tingle to the crispness of the air.

There wasn't a sound save for the excited hammering of Joe Nicolbee's heart.

And then a voice spoke, close to his ear and momentarily startling.

"You are Joe Nicolbee?" the voice said.

Joe wheeled, the clear, low, liquid beauty of the voice still ringing in his ears. Joe wheeled, and saw the loveliest woman ever fashioned by the gods of glamour.

His mouth was open slightly, and he was almost choking on the pounding of his heart. The lovely creature was smiling at him, her hands extended. Her lips were the richly wonderful redness of rare coral, and her teeth were as white and perfect as the freshly split center of a ripe cocoanut. Her skin was tinted with the faintest tan, and her ash-blonde hair haloed a face face that beggared the beauty of the ages.

And again she said,
“
Joe Nicolbee. I have waited for you."

"But you," Joe Nicolbee stammered at last, "you, you are—"

"You don't recognize me, Joe Nicolbee?" she asked.

"I do," Joe Nicolbee said quickly, "I do, but yet I can't remember where, or when—"

"Where or when?" the girl smiled. "What does it matter where or when we have met before?"

Joe Nicolbee stood there silently, his heart hammering harder than before. The very beauty of the girl was stronger than drink, more magnificently intoxicating than nectar.

"Perhaps it was in another age," she said softly. "Or perhaps it was in a world you never had." Her voice was more than music.

"You are—" Joe Nicolbee began again.

"You can call me Naya," the girl said. "Names mean little." She moved closer to him.

Joe Nicolbee knew that his arms were around this girl, and that his lips were pressed to hers, and that he was shaken by the very thunder of his heart. The forest was swimming beneath his feet and the gloriously colored trees were whirling faster, faster—

A hand
gripped Joe's shoulder, long nails carelessly biting into his flesh. He pushed himself up on one elbow, groggily, and blinked into the harsh unpleasantness of the bedroom light.

Agnes stood over him. She took her hand from his shoulder. There was the reek of cheap alcohol on her breath. Her crazy dishpan hat was slightly askew on her head, and stringy locks of hair thrust out annoyingly from under the brim.

"All you do is sleep," she said. Joe noted that she spoke a trifle thickly. Her cheap lipstick was smeared at the corners of her red mouth.

"What time is it?" Joe Nicolbee asked automatically, his eyes still fixed distastefully on his wife.

"What difference does it make?" Agnes demanded. "All I did was stop on the way home from the show. I had a drink at Helen's place." She glared defensively at him.

Joe Nicolbee just looked at her, masking the emotions he felt. He sat up on the edge of the bed, rumpling his hand through his hair. It was clear to him that his wife's infidelity was beginning to wear on even her calloused conscience. This amused him slightly.

"Well?" his wife demanded harshly. "Why don'cha say something? Why don'cha yell at me? Go ahead. Yell at me!" Her voice rose shrilly.

“
You have to see the neighbors every day," Joe Nicolbee reminded her, "not me. Go on and scream. Give them something to whisper about."

This sobered his wife somewhat. She put her red-nailed hand to her forehead, and stood there swaying slightly.

"I feel kinda sick," Agnes observed.

Her husband regarded her unsympathetically.

"That's too bad."

She moved weakly to the doorway, turning there to glare venomously at him again.

"You sleep too damn much," she muttered. "You and your crazy dreams."

Joe Nicolbee watched her move out of sight. He heard the bathroom door slam. He fished for a cigarette on the scarred night table beside his bed, and lighting it noticed that his hands shook slightly. But he knew it wasn't due to Agnes. In the back of his mind there was the picture of the glorious creature who called herself Naya.

"Where or when?" Naya's liquidly cooling voice came to him again. "What does it matter where or when we have met before?"

Joe Nicolbee shook his head, and a sickening wave of despair and bitter resentment swept over him. Into this, the most utterly magnificent dream he'd ever had, wretched reality—in the form of Agnes—had stepped to shatter the glorious world completely. If Joe hadn't despised Agnes, he'd have throttled her then and there.

Even after Joe heard the door to Agnes' room slam and the key turn in the lock, he didn't get back to sleep. He couldn't, for the picture of Naya, and the beauty of the incredibly wonderful forest was still in his mind.