The Night Companion
by Jeffrey Greene
Two months out of college and undecided on a career, Tom Hanauer answers an ad in the classifieds seeking a “night companion.” He discovers to his pleasant surprise that he will be more of a hired conversationalist and chess opponent than a caregiver and that his employer stays up all night and sleeps during the day.
As Tom adjusts to this nocturnal existence, he finds that his employer, the lady of the house, is in a kind of cold war with her estranged husband, a disgraced mycologist who, as a result of his ongoing experiments, has forced his wife and children to devise individual strategies to protect themselves. Tom gradually learns the reasons for the strange behavior of the Morhan family.
Chapter 5: Roland's Warning
part 1
The next day, after a restless sleep, I reread those fragments of the dream I’d been able to remember. Taken together, they seemed no more than typically strange. That the professor had appeared in the key scenes of both dreams, however, strained coincidence. I had perused Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, but couldn’t accept the theory that all dreams are the fulfillment of wishes.
Some dreams are simply image debris from the recent past, musings in darkness of the mind freed from the body’s space-time restrictions. Others, like the worst nightmares, seem to erupt out of the unconscious with the force of a volcano or thunderstorm, and are just as beyond the dreamer’s control, to which the body reacts as it would to a frightening external event.
But most dreams feel like random occurrences, haphazard chains of association instantly transmuted into situations by a neural process of unimaginable complexity. In my own experience, the subject matter of dreams is closed to conscious choice. I never once dreamed about my girlfriend until she left me. Then she became almost a stock character, the Regretted and Avoided One in a dismaying number of dreamed encounters. But that seemed a simple case of cause and effect, her character recurrent because my dreaming mind still brooded over her abandonment long after my waking self had given her up.
Why was the professor appearing, and not peripherally but as a central character, speaking both directly and indirectly to me? I wasn’t ready to accept what Roland’s and Carla’s behavior suggested: that the professor’s domestic terrorism extended to their dream lives and, now, through a kind of osmosis, to mine as well.
Was it possible that the penumbra of his unseen presence, which hung so heavily about the house, was subtly impinging on me, finding expression in obliquely threatening dreams? It seemed far more likely that the dreams were a reflection of anxiety stemming from my uncertain footing in the house, where my chaste but intimate relationship with Carla might easily be resented by her husband, however much he neglected her.
I was looking forward to my conversation with Roland but, in the meantime, I had to think of a pretext for visiting him. I decided to buy a book and tell Carla I’d brought it at Roland’s request. The guilt I felt at deceiving her was mitigated both by my deepening curiosity and resentment at being excluded from her full confidence.
I drove to Langlund’s Book Haven and found a title that seemed a plausible subject for Roland’s interest: the vile and gruesome Hollywood Babylon, then chose one of my four regular restaurants and found an empty booth near the back.
While looking over the menu, I noticed a couple seated three booths up from me. The woman’s back was to me, but I recognized the young man: it was Catherine Morhan’s boyfriend. The woman was Catherine herself. Even from a distance, I could see that the boy’s eyes were circled with dark smudges of fatigue, their expression one of suffering dulled by exhaustion. I saw her extend her hand and the boy grasp it convulsively and hold it against his cheek, then her head leaned forward and blocked my view.
The waitress came and I ordered my usual. When I looked up again, the boy had begun to cry. He was sobbing openly now, attracting the attention of the other diners. He got up and lunged toward the restrooms, several heads turning to stare.
I didn’t want Catherine to see me. She would almost certainly accuse me, not unjustly, of spying on her. When my dinner came, I held the open book in front of my face as I ate, keeping furtive watch.
She paid the bill, and when, after many minutes, the boy returned and stood miserably beside the booth, his eyes red and hair wet from washing his face, she rose quickly, took him by the elbow and walked him out, the beauty of her pale, preoccupied face affecting me with unsettling force and making every other woman in the restaurant seem drab in comparison.
At a few minutes before eleven, I knocked on Carla’s door. She asked me to come in. I opened the door but didn’t enter. “You’re early,” she said, putting down the book she was reading and peering at me curiously, her hand shading her eyes from the lamp’s glare.
I held up the book. “Roland asked me to get this for him. I’ll just take it to him now, okay?”
“So, he’s already got you running errands for him? That’s a bad sign.”
“I’ll make sure it doesn’t get out of hand,” I replied, and she waved me away in mock disgust. I went down the hall and knocked on Roland’s door. The high-pitched voice asked me to identify myself, then invited me in. I remembered Roland’s habit of photographing his guests just as the flashbulb blinded me. “Ah, yes,” I said, blinking. “No wonder you don’t get many visitors.”
“Close your eyes next time,” Roland said with a complete lack of concern that I found oddly endearing. He tore off the print and watched it develop. “What did you bring me?”
I handed him the book. “This was just an excuse to visit, but you might like it.”
“Thanks.” Barely glancing at the book, he set it down on the dresser and began writing on the border of the picture. He was barefooted and wearing the same white t-shirt and jeans as the night before. “So, you’ve started lying to her?” he asked without looking up.
“You could put it that way.” Roland glanced up sharply, and I quickly corrected myself: “Yes, I lied to her.”
He filed away the picture and turned to face me. “What else did you bring?”
“I got away from her last night — with another lie — and slept for twenty-five minutes on the living room couch. These were the dreams I could remember.”
“Sit,” said Roland, gesturing at the one chair. “Tell them to me.” Only once did he interrupt. When I got to the scene in the upstairs room of the mansion, Roland, who’d moved over to the ferret cages and was cradling one in his arms, turned and asked: “You’re sure about that? The doctor said, ‘This is only the first stage?’”
“Yes. And I had the definite sense that it was your father and he was talking to me, even though his back was turned.”
Roland did a little dance step of rage, his face twisted with hate. “Sonuvabitch!” he spat out.
“What’s the matter?”
Just as suddenly calm again, he said with a wave of his hand, “Nothing. Tell me the rest.”
I finished reading, then got up and moved among the boxes. “You hate his guts, don’t you?”
“I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of knowing I cared enough to hate him.” He walked over to a box containing the artifacts of childhood sports and picked up a half-sized baseball bat. “But if he tried to get in here, I’d smash his goddamned head in. And he knows it.” He feinted, then slashed the air with the bat. “It really eats him up.”
“How do you mean?”
“Not to be able to get at me anymore.”
“Get at you how?”
Roland shot me a look of contempt. “You’re not real swift, are you? Get at me the same way he’s getting at you, or anyone else within his sphere of influence. Through your dreams.”
It was my turn to be contemptuous. “You don’t really believe he has the power to enter other people’s dreams?”
He took a step closer and fixed me with an intense, unblinking stare. “Listen, Hanauer, for once in your life, listen: I dreamt about my father every night for eight years. Eight years. Do you think I care whether you believe that or not? I was his guinea pig. We all were. He as good as killed my brother.
“In the beginning, he was just a voyeur, but as time went on, he learned how to shift and alter the dream currents, open doors into places the dreamer himself never remembers. What he said to you in your dream: ‘This is only the first stage’: that was a statement of his intentions. The sick lizard man is you, in the first stages of whatever it is he’s doing these days.”
“The sick lizard man is me,” I repeated, trying not to smile. “Okay. Was he born with this ability?”
“No. It started after he came back from Brazil in 1966. He’d collected samples of several new species of psychoactive fungi. One of them must have given him the faculty, a kind of dream telepathy. But only so long as he keeps eating the mushrooms. He grows them in the bomb shelter. I’ve seen Hettie going out there at night.”
“Then whose dream was it? Mine or his?”
“Good question. I’d say mostly yours, since the characters and situations were drawn from your own past. What I’m not sure of is how his presence affects the content or the direction the dream takes. I don’t think he has a choice anymore. He’s got to be in somebody’s head every night. Could be he’s addicted to the mushrooms.”
“Carla said your ‘defense’ was the ferrets. Is he afraid of them?”
“Not physically, no. It’s their dreams he can’t tolerate. I’m not sure why. Maybe ferret dreams are too sharp and bloody for him. Maybe they jam the frequency in some way. All I know is that since they’ve been here, my dreams and nightmares about him have been rare, and they’ve been my own, untainted by his presence.
“Before the ferrets... well, I’ll try to describe the difference. In dreams you always accept everything because in the back of your mind you know you’re dreaming. Nothing in the dream can really hurt you because it’s all you. But when I was nine, I had the first of a long series of nightmares about my father.
“It was very simple: I ‘woke up’ and saw my father’s head on the dresser. I didn’t know whether it was just his head with no body or if the rest of him was inside the dresser. Either way, it scared me. He was looking at me with those snake eyes of his, about to say something, and I didn’t want him to, because I knew it would hurt me somehow. I woke up to get away from what he was about to say.
“I think now that what scared me so much was an instinctive feeling that he wasn’t just a piece of myself, that he really was my father, and I couldn’t control him in my dreams any more than I could in real life. You don’t realize how important the privacy of dreams is until someone invades them.
“As I got older, he got better, more subtle at finding his way into them, but always with the same intention: to extend and perfect his control. He had to control all of us, to know exactly where we were and what we were doing at all times, awake or asleep. This was his kingdom and we were his subjects, and he wasn’t a benevolent king. He made my mother a drunk and drove my brother to suicide. He ruined Cathy and he tried to ruin me. Only he failed. I stayed right here under his own roof and got away from him. He can’t touch me now.”
As I listened, breathing the foul, chilly air and hemmed in by the piled lumber of Roland’s past, I felt a claustrophobic tightness in my chest, oppressed by the feeling that within these four walls the truth was being bent and twisted out of shape by the crushing gravity of my host’s reclusion. Here, in this house, this room, at this hour, the impossible things he was saying made a seductive kind of sense, even explained the self-lacerating behavior of the Morhans. But tomorrow, in the daylight of my own apartment, I would know they couldn’t be true.
“I realize you don’t need my belief,” I said. “But you have to see that everything you’ve told me could be explained less... fantastically. You might simply hate your father — with good reason, apparently — and like ferrets. Carla’s sleep schedule could be a result of insomnia and hatred of her husband. And Catherine... Carla said she brings men home as gifts. What does that mean?”
Roland shook his head decisively. “You’ll have to ask her. We stay out of each other’s business.”
I moved toward the door, sensing that the conversation was over. “I saw her this evening at a restaurant. She didn’t see me. The boyfriend was with her. He looked upset, like he was getting dumped.”
“Mother said something about it earlier,” Roland said indifferently. “That Catherine was taking him to the bus station. Under duress. Which could mean a couple of things: that she’s growing a conscience, or” — he smiled slyly — “you’re the next one.”
Copyright © 2021 by Jeffrey Greene
