In fact, the one genuine thing had been my terror. The rest was just the result of tiredness and an overstimulated imagination. The entire scene had come from that workshop in the mind that begins its operations when the rational part shuts down for the night.
BACK IN MY BED once more, I thought about the significance of what had just happened. It hadn’t been a dream: I’d been wide awake when I tiptoed across the bedroom with a chopping axe at the ready. I really had been standing there in the clothes closet feeling like an idiot. That surely meant that for the very first time, the world of nightmare had intruded into my waking life. Long ago, Gordon Smith had told me he was glad he wasn’t a chronic dreamer because of this very possibility — and I’d laughed at the idea. But now I’d experienced it, and I didn’t like it. In fact, I was so worried by it that I lay there for the longest time, trying to keep myself awake. In the end, I did fall asleep and — of course — I did dream.
Dupont, complete with twin-pointed beard and bells, was showing me Griffin through iron bars. She was quite visible, sitting on her bed, her skin much greyer than before — a deathly grey. In her thin, grey arms, she was cradling a tiny baby and was leaning forward as though to kiss it. Then, not unexpectedly, the crunching sound began: she was devouring its tiny fingers. She held it out towards me, as if to share the hideous feast. Her eyes were silver slits and her face was grey. Her open mouth was a bloody cavern.
“What a tasty meal,” Dupont was saying, his little bells all a-jingle.
NOW, THE MORNING AFTER, I’m sitting here in the kitchen drinking my coffee beneath the photograph of Miriam I retrieved from Duncairn Manor. But neither its presence, nor the faint songs of birds through the window, the distant swish of cars and trucks— these reassuring, mundane sounds — have done much to put me at ease after a night such as I’ve just passed. Even though Griffin didn’t actually visit me, the aura of menace in the bedroom was so real it still makes me shudder. The dream that followed was equally powerful, and its horrific images are still prominent in my mind.
When I think about the two disquieting experiences in broad daylight, in a calm and objective way — as an engineer might consider them — it isn’t hard to figure out a rational explanation. Their genesis is really quite logical. During Sarah’s visit, Dupont’s name and his work at Institute 77 came up several times. Naturally, those conversations led me to think about Griffin. She, in turn, eventually became the centrepiece of my recent terror in the closet as well as in the subsequent dream.
Even that image of her feasting on the baby has a simple explanation. It’s just a skewed version of the incident in my reallife African journey with Dupont — when my fellow travellers ate the little tree monkeys on skewers. That grisly scene had been imprinted on my memory.
The point I’m making is that when I’m being calm and objective, I have no trouble whatsoever finding reasons for the state of mind that made me so susceptible last night. Indeed, I could add to them the fact that I’ve been under some stress — needlessly, as it turns out — over how Frank and Sarah would get along when they met. I could even include the traumatic news about the awful death of Macbane, a man with whom I have a unique connection, a man I’d come to consider, almost, as my closest friend. I suppose I really haven’t got over that yet.
The accumulation of all these things must have made me vulnerable.
SO MUCH FOR when I’m being calm and objective.
But when that state of mind passes, the catalogue of rational explanations appears to me desperate and empty. They’re nothing but self-deception, a way for me to avoid acknowledging the thing I’m really terrified of, so much so that I’m almost afraid to put it into words, in case the words become prophetic.
That dreadful truth is as follows.
I was indeed euphoric over the finding of my daughter, Sarah, and being able to witness her joyous coming together with Frank. But my happiness was moderated by a frightening notion that began lurking in a dark corner of my mind. It emerged from hiding, full-blown, last night.
What I’d been trying not to think about was this: the possibility that Griffin, too, might have had a child by me, as a result of our night together at Institute 77.
If that were the case, her primitive maternal urge to share her child might well drive her to come looking for me, its father. Then I’d have to acknowledge to the world — especially to my own children — my paternity of her baby. After that, would Frank want anything to do with this other half-sibling, with its half-human mother, or with me? And as for Sarah — when she found out what I’d done, would she be left with anything but contempt for the newly-discovered father she’d almost come to love?
On the other hand, there is yet another, simpler reason for my fear. That Griffin has no baby, but is searching for me because she craves me as her lover, one more time. And that afterwards, she will tear me to pieces.
AT THIS POINT, the sensible part of my mind again tries to assert itself.
“Harry Steen,” it says. “All of this is just speculation based on nothing more than an overripe imagination and a bad dream. You torment yourself for nothing.”
If only that were so.
For there is something more, something tangible. The fact is, when I eventually got up this morning, I saw that the curator’s letter wasn’t on the bedside table. Instead, the pages were lying on the floor beside the bed. Now it’s possible that I myself scattered them with all my paranoid exertions, but I can’t assume that.
So, though I fully intended to take the chopping axe back out to the garage today, I’ve decided now to leave it beside my bed, at least for the next few nights — just in case a situation arises. Wouldn’t any rational person do the same thing? Certainly, in view of what happened to him, I think Macbane would agree with my decision.
Not that I’ll be asking anyone for advice. Some things, I always feel, you’re better off keeping to yourself.
End