Sleepwalker (14 page)

“Or was let in by someone.”

“Bingo. That’s what I was shooting for. But
Sparke
, he never changed his story. Simply insisted that he was sleeping when his wife acquired her injuries. Once Samantha dropped the charges against him, we had no choice but to let him go.”

“What about the skin samples Morris took?”

“I’m fairly certain tests were done.
Sparke
had volunteered his blood. That and the skin samples were sent to the City Crime Lab. But by that point it didn’t matter because Samantha refused to indict her husband.”

“So you never saw the results of the tests?”

Leonard turned right on Culver Place. “No.”

“Weren’t you the least bit curious?”

“Sure, but to be honest Kevin, I didn’t want to know. You see, it wasn’t going to make a difference. Regardless of the outcome,
Sparke
was off the hook.”

Kevin shifted in his seat, faced Leonard. He seemed genuinely spirited with the story. “Len, it seems obvious to me. Someone else definitely attacked her.”

“You may be right,
Kev
. But if we’d pursued the case at that point--against the will of the victim, no less--it would’ve made us look unprofessional, and like failures since we had nothing more to go on. All of our efforts would’ve gone to exonerating
Sparke
, and it didn’t matter at that point anyway.”

Kevin blew out a deep breath, looking befuddled. “You’re right,
Sparke
does have quite a checkered past.”

Leonard pulled up in front of a three-story brick-faced building and parallel parked between an SUV and a Buick. Four similar structures made up the Presidential Studio Apartment Complex, each edifice aptly named after former leaders of the United States. They waited in front of the Washington building, watching the entrance, a plain white door whose upper half consisted of rectangular cut-outs for windows. Azalea bushes ran along the face of the building, pink and white flowers wilting away from a recent full bloom. Above, rows of windows looked out over the street into the parking lot of a Rite-Way drugstore.

“Yes, he does. And frankly, as honest as he appeared--still does appear--he can’t be trusted...not until we get to the bottom of what’s going on.”

“And how do we do that?”

“We start with Pamela Bergin.” Leonard looked at his watch. “We still have about forty minutes before
Sparke’s
session is up. Let’s see if his girlfriend’s at home. I’m real curious to see what she has to say about her visit with
Sparke
this morning.”

Richard knew exactly what was happening: he lay fully clothed on a couch in the office of the man he had come to know quite well, the good psychologist Dr Marcus Delaney. He was in a condition deeper than sleep, deeper than coma, perhaps. At the mentioning of the number ‘one’, he could feel his heartbeat slowing, the very blood in his veins in no hurry to course back to its source of pulse. His breathing was shallow, intermittent, reduced to six long breaths per minute. He sensed that if he were to continue luxuriating in such a suspended phase, his heartbeat might stop completely, and then his being might float indefinitely in a state similar to being in suspended animation. And all the while, he somehow knew, his mental strength would renew itself, its cells gathering the energy to recall and remember his past, to enable him to press on in life with no worries other than to enjoy its modest offerings. Just as he always wanted.

He felt as if some magic were taking over, allowing him to heal at quite a relaxed rate, as if hours and hours were passing and all he could do was remain in stasis and accept its approach with relaxation and compliance. He felt as if he could see his mind opening up, making room for the curative power that Delaney bequeathed from his cognizant hand of existence. Beneath the shadows of his mind’s wounds there grew a light, a healing white light that rose from the chemicals of his brain, the cool serotonin seeping forth and suppressing the evil adrenaline from staggering his thoughts, enabling him to think positively. There was no pain; yet, no pleasure. There was only a feeling of pressure in his head, a numbness surrounding his brain and scalp as if his nerve endings had been subjected to the prod and poke of a dentist’s Novocain-filled needle. He could sense his body somehow responding methodically to the unheard suggestions Delaney promptly imparted upon his listening subconscious. He could also feel his physical condition improving, his muscles growing stronger, his tendons tightening, his heart’s heavy-handed beating expanding in his chest. He thoroughly felt as if he might come out of hypnosis fully recovered, mentally healed and perhaps physically improved.

The white light expanded, now raining down over his brain into his field of vision. He sought the comfort of his conscience, but was unable to fully communicate, its voice calling to Richard from a distant point beyond the scope of intercepting light.

I am here, Richard. Are you aware of what’s happening?

Richard wanted to answer, to say,
No, I don’t completely understand exactly what’s happening to me, but it feels wonderful, and I want it to last
, but he could not find the voice to channel at his conscience, his thoughts firing chaotically about his mind like frantic birds in a cage.

There was a silence, then another distant shout of his conscience calling to him. This time he could not make out its message. He didn’t care. The light grew and grew, and he accepted its pleasurable radiance with open arms, regardless if it seemed to be piloting his thoughts.

Here he realized how he’d been utterly misguided by his conscience all during his regularly conscious state, that his thoughts had run totally amok
while awake
, his responding actions following a truly foolish course of action. That even though his heart and blood and muscles had run their normal routine, his mental awareness had been seldom, if ever, attentive. That he’d been dismally functioning in a robot-like state, much of his perception stewed in phases of complete psychological disorder.

He thought he heard a voice, not the chide of his conscience, but one of an unfamiliar tone. The white light flickered. Was this the voice of Delaney perhaps, digging into his deep level of consciousness? Then the voice faded, and the white light grew larger still, taking up nearly all of his hypnotic vista. What remained, the preceding blackness, turned to images. He saw snippets of himself in situations he could not recall, parts of many past-life experiences that until now had remained buried in the irrevocable blackness of his subconscious. He saw himself as a young man attending college, surrounded by his peers, accepting an award of scientific excellence. He saw himself driving a car, cruising the highways, something he retained no ability of. The next image showed him as a family man, Samantha, Debra, his mother, all of them alive and happy and sitting around a kitchen table, serving dinner as he returned from a hard day’s work. Next, as the third grade schoolteacher he vaguely recalled himself as, now seated before a classroom filled with children, presenting a lesson plan to weary faces and raised hands. Were these indeed memories from his past? The years of his life he could never remember, even when Delaney had tried to extract them from Richard’s restrained mind? Perhaps these visions were a sign of hypnotic success? Was Delaney finally getting through?

Soon these images faded, and then he saw himself as a poor teenager, hiding in the back of a dark alley, sprawled alongside a dumpster amidst a sea of refuse. He was trembling, eyes wild, teeth clenched. He was desperate, strung out, the sharp point of a needle penetrating a vein bulging from the tight grasp of a thick rubber band at his pocked and bruised bicep.

Richard’s heart began to pound. The memory scared him. He turned his head in attempt to flee from it, and the alarming image faded.

He heard the voice again, foreign, fleeting, unintelligible.

Next he saw himself in another unbelievable situation, and at once experienced a fear like never before, an inconceivable terror more intense than the dread he felt when the man in black entered his dream for the first time and tried to extinguish his life. Here, Richard
Sparke
had seemingly traded places with the dream-man in black. No...he had
become
the mysterious dream-intruder that was a perfect double of himself, committing the ultimate sin. He, Richard
Sparke
, was now killing another human being.

It was a person he did not know, the fear-filled face of a stranger drowned in tears, pleading with him for mercy as he hovered over the victim, lost in shadows, knife in hand, raised high...then coming
down
...then up again...then
down
, repeatedly slashing the undulating throat of the target. Blood spraying everywhere, spouting from the exposed jugular, staining his hands, his shirt, warm droplets on his face. He slashed again, tearing flesh, waves of immense and indescribable pleasure speeding through his veins as he plunged the blade again and again into the stranger’s neck until the body slowed, trembled, fell limp to the floor, the handle of the knife sticking straight up from the throbbing wounds in the neck like a monument, blood spilling out onto the floor, a growing shadow of life meeting the dark soles of his feet. Richard, suddenly crying, hid his eyes, shrunk away from the horrendous memory, tried desperately to convince himself that it wasn’t a memory at all but just a wicked fantasy, another crazy dream that held no verity.
Just a crazy, mixed-up dream
. It
had
to be. Richard was wholly incapable of committing such a heinous act. Wasn’t he?

And then like magic the dead body and the blood were gone, swallowed by the growing white light which now encompassed most of the world around him.

Richard...
The voice again. Definitely not that of his conscience. It was closer, vaguely familiar now...

He swam away from it and in his free-floating hypnotic state closed his eyes in effort to concentrate. For a moment he escaped the fearful surreality encompassing him, and drummed up a sense of relative lucidity. Within the moment of calm he told himself that the illusions of his own self in other capacities resulted from overactive brainwave activity, misfiring synapses, electrical impulses going haywire within the suggestion-implanted portions of his mind, thank you, Dr Delaney. He also told himself that these images frightened him because, above all else, he knew that deep inside he was a smart man whose potential had been held back by an overactive mind constantly alerting the fear center in his brain, hence
overstimulating
his central nervous system. So then, he told himself, his mind would heal, that all dreadful illusions would be gone, and even though he had the right to be afraid of all the illusions, both past and present, they would soon dissipate and then disappear altogether, allowing him to continue life as if nothing out of the ordinary had ever happened. He called for his conscience, instead heard the strange voice again, but it was once again too far away for him to hear anything. He wondered for a moment if his sudden intellectual understanding of the situation was a direct result of the doctor’s infiltration of suggestion into his subconscious.
It has to be. I’m not this smart...

Yes, Richard. You’re not that smart
. His conscience, barely a whisper. A pained whisper. Then it said,
It still doesn’t change anything
.

Where have you been?

Trying to get away...

Away? From what?

From...you...

And then there was a scream inside his head, his conscience feeling all the collective pains of Richard’s life, including those
 
he did not remember. The cries of a man under the knife of a murderer, feeling his life slip away along with the screams that would not come as powerfully as they did just moments earlier, fading as the life quickly drained out.

And then, as sudden as the screams came, the voice of his long time companion vanished.

Conscience? Are you there? Are you?

Richard called out for the comfort of the voice in his head. All he found was empty space and the ruling white light, now filling every inch of his hypnotic vista. The foreign voice from earlier had returned, now clear and close, a deep gentle laugh, a selfish revel of victory, a perfunctory exclamation:
He’s gone, Richard. It’s just you and me now.

Before Richard could find the strength within to respond, the all-encompassing white light began throbbing like a heart, slowly at first, then to a rate consistent with a strobe. It blinded Richard, and he cupped a palm around his brow to mask the painful glare. A high whistling noise ensued, radiating sharp tones deep inside his ear. He closed his eyes, pressed his hands against the sides of his head as if trying to keep the pain from imploding his skull. His skin stung. Every hair on his body stood on end, electrically charged. His nerves teased every pore on his skin. He lost all feeling in his legs, and he collapsed to the floor.

Then something incredible happened.

Like a flower opening, the white light split down the center, first a crack, then wider. From within, a blackness seeped out, swallowing the edges of the white, a sunburst in negative. It glimmered for a moment, then changed.

Then, riding the cushion of black, he saw
it
. A stunning blue light, emerging from the white light.

The blue light.