Miss Tandy was screwing a handkerchief around and around in her fingers. Her voice was soft and light, but it carried a prickly kind of conviction that made me distinctly uneasy. I watched her as she spoke, and she seemed to believe that whatever she had dreamed about was something that had actually happened to her.
I took off my Green Bay Packers hat. It was a little incongruous, under the circumstances.
"Miss Tandy, that's a very odd dream. It is always the same — in every detail?"
"Exactly. It's always the same. There is always this fear of what is coming out of the ship."
"Hmm. And you say it's a sailing ship? Like a yacht, something like that?"
She shook her head. "It's not a yacht. It's more like a galleon — one of those old-time galleons. You know, three masts and lots of rigging."
I pulled my nose some more and thought hard. "Is there anything about this ship which gives you a clue to what it is? Is there a name on it?"
"It's too far away. It's too dark."
"Does it fly any flags?"
"There is a flag, but I couldn't describe it."
I stood up and went over to my bookcase of occult paperbacks. I pulled out Ten Thousand Dreams Interpreted and a couple of others. I laid them out on the green baize table and looked up one or two references about islands and ships. They weren't helpful. Occult textbooks are almost invariably unhelpful, and often they're downright confusing. But that doesn't stop me from drawing a few dark and mysterious conclusions about my clients' nocturnal flights of fancy.
"Ships are usually connected with some kind of travel, or the arrival of news. In your case, the ship is dark, and frightening, which suggests to me that the news may not be good news. The island represents your feelings of isolation and fear, in fact the island represents yourself. Whatever this news may be, it is a direct threat to you, as a person."
Karen Tandy nodded. I don't know why, but I felt really guilty handing her out all this bullshit. There was something genuinely defenseless and tense about her, and there she was with her dark brown bobbed hair and her pale impish face, so serious and lost, and I began to wonder if her dreams were really real.
"Miss Tandy," I said, "May I call you Karen?"
"Of course."
"I'm Harry. My grandmother calls me Henry, but no one else does."
"It's a nice name."
"Thank you. Look, listen, Karen, I'm going to be frank with you. I don't know why, but there's something about your case that doesn't strike the same kind of bells as the usual stuff I get. You know, old ladies trying to get in touch with their Pekinese dogs in the happy kennels in the sky, that kind of garbage. There's something about your dream that's — I don't know, authentic."
This didn't reassure her at all. The last thing that people want to be told is that their fears are actually well founded. Even intelligent, educated people like to be comforted with the thought that their night-time visitations are all a cozy kind of bunkum. I mean, Jesus, if half the nightmares that people had were actually real, they'd go straight off their heads. Part of my job was soothing over my clients' terror, and telling them that the things they dream about were never going to happen.
"What do you mean, authentic?"
I handed her another cigarette. This time, when she lit it, her hands weren't quite so trembly.
"It's like this, Karen. Some people even though they're not aware of it, have the potential power to be mediums. In other words, they're very receptive to all the occult buzzfuzz that's flying about in the atmosphere. A medium is like a radio, or a television set. Because of the way he or she is made, she's capable of picking up signals that other people can't, and she can interpret them into sound or pictures."
"What signals?" she frowned. "I don't understand."
"There are all kinds of signals," I said. "You can't see a television signal, can you? Yet it's around you, all the time. This whole room is crowded with images and ghosts, pictures of David Brinkley and advertisements for Kellogg's Cornflakes. All you have to do to pick them up is have the right kind of receiver."
Karen Tandy puffed smoke. "You mean that my dream is a signal? But what kind of a signal? And where could it come from? And why does it pick on me?"
I shook my head. "I don't know why it's picked on you, and I don't know where it's from. It could have come from anywhere. There are authenticated reports of people in America having dreams that have given them detailed information about people in other countries far away. There was a farmer in Iowa who dreamed that he was drowning in a flood in Pakistan, and the same night there was a monsoon rain in Pakistan that killed four hundred people. The only way you can account for stuff like this is by thinking of thought waves as signals. The farmer picked up the signal, through his subconscious mind, from a Pakistani guy who was drowning. It's weird, I know, but it has happened."
Karen Tandy looked at me appealingly. "So how can I ever find out what my dream is really all about? Supposing it's a signal from someone, somewhere in the world, who needs help, and I can't find out who it is?"
"Well, if you're really interested in finding out, there's one way to do it," I told her.
"Please — just tell me what to do. I really do want to know. I mean, I'm sure it's something to do with this — tumor thing, and I want to know what it is."
I nodded. "Okay, Karen, then this is what you do. Tonight, I want you to go to sleep as usual, and if you have the same dream over again, I want you to try and remember as many details — factual details — as you can. Look around the island and see if you can spot any landmarks. When you go down to the river, try and map out as much of the coastline as you can. If there's a bay or something, try and remember the shape of it. If there's anything across the river, any mountain or harbor or anything like that, fix it in your mind. Now there's one other thing that's very important; try and get a look at the flag on the sailing ship. Memorize it. Then, the moment you wake up, note everything down in as much detail as you can, and make as many pictorial sketches as you can of everything you've seen. Then bring it to me."
She stubbed out her cigarette. "I have to be at the hospital by eight tomorrow morning."
"Which hospital?"
"Sisters of Jerusalem."
"Well, look, because it's obviously important, I'll drop by the hospital and you can leave the notes for me in an envelope. How's that?"
"Mr. Erskine — Harry, that's terrific. At last I really feel I'm getting down to something."
I came over and took her hand in mine. She was cute, in her pixie kind of way, and if I hadn't been utterly professional and detached from my clients, and if she hadn't been going into hospital the next day, I think I would definitely have taken her for dinner, a friendly ride in my Cougar, and back to Erskine's occult emporium for a night of earthy activity.
"How much do I owe you?" she said, breaking the spell.
"Pay me next week," I replied. It's always boosted the morale of people who were going into hospital if you asked them to pay you after their operation. It suddenly made them think that perhaps they were going to live, after all.
"Okay, Harry, thank you," she said softly, and stood up to leave.
"You don't mind finding your own way out, do you?" I asked. I flapped my green gown around by way of explanation. "The neighbors, you know. They think I'm a transvestite or something."