33
Bayou City
Sleep came like an old, comfortable pair of pajamas one pulls on and encased him in a blanket of warm and seductive familiarity. There was the period of the body's surcease from labor, regeneration, and as he gave himself easily to it, his thoughts became a mosaic of assimilated memory. If he remembered the beginnings of the dream he would attribute it to a clumsy piece he'd been reading. The image of comfortable pajamas and the acronym for the Journal of the American Medical Association converged and pooled into a pa-JAMA shape, as the article on deanimation coagulants and neuro-suspension melted toward the fringe of a dream. It was a natural bridge to transfusion and discorporation techniques and his mind made the jump, then to the DNA breakthroughs of some decades later, placing the history around his own contributions.
Early in the morning he penetrated the inversion layer and a question rattled through the corridors of his sleeping consciousness. Does he see something? Is it shadow or bloodsplatter? He sees it above him.
Dreaming below a wall hanging that appears to depict acquatic Lentibulariaceae, alive with vesicular floats and hungry insect traps, he imagined his own eyeblink and pulse rapidity. The appalling grotesquerie under which he slumbered drooped, festooned, bulged obscenely, swagged in the center as the billowing middle of it loomed drippingly above his face. The chameleon's eye blinked and the bladderwort dripped into his snoring, open mouth. His shoulder burned, ached. Involuntarily, he swallowed.
How could he fail to recognize the unmistakably salty, metallic bloodtaste? Flanking the drippy Utricularia, the wall above his bed was splattered red with arterial fluid, veiny crimson, dark scarlet lifejuice. He knew full well that it was hers ... her blood, gore, and grue. He knew immediately he'd find her acephalous and dead beside him. His alert mind continued to catalog options, and map escape routes.
Sleep-cudgeled senses registered danger, intruder, violence. It shocked him out of his lethargy and he awakened and saw that it was only a wall hanging above him, that the splatter was naught but shadow, that the clutched object was a pillow not a child's torso with partial head, so for a second he thought it was all a dream. In the next eyeblink, in the next heartbeat, he remembered the details of the hag who recognized him and the Jew she sent to confront him. He knew which part was real now, and permitted himself to slide back down into the cradle of deep sleep.
He hoped he could conjure up the little girlchild, Marta, again. Pick up where he left off in a twisted fantasy, but stop it this time before the death scene. Linger with her, a fragment of delicious domination saved in his collection of monstrous artifacts, a small vignette of sadism he reinvented and played with over and over.
Emil Shtolz's self-protective urges and his pleasure-pain linkages made for restive bedfellows, however, and he could not fasten onto the pleasing parts of the dream. As he dropped back into sleep a corner of his sentient mind wondered who would come for him next. He supposed, incorrectly, it would be a policeman of some kind.