The Dream Operator Read online

  The Dream Operator

  Mike O’Driscoll

  Also by Mike O’Driscoll

  Unbecoming

  Eyepennies

  This is for Glyn, who loved life, cowboys and soda pop,

  and for Yvonne, always.

  The Dream Operator, © 2017 Mike O’Driscoll

  Cover Artwork (Trade) © 2017 Carolina Rodriguez Fuenmayor

  Cover Artwork (Hardcover) © 2017 Vince Haig

  Interior design, layout, and typesetting by Courtney Kelly

  Proofreader: Carolyn Macdonell-Kelly

  Publication History

  “Beasts of Season”, “Lost Highway”, and “The Dream Operator” are original to this collection.

  “And Zero At The Bone” originally appeared in Subtle Edens, Allen Ashley ed., 2008.

  “The Entire City” originally appeared in Albedo One #36, 2009.

  “Summerhouse” originally appeared in Where The Heart Is, Gary Fry, ed. 2010.

  “The Spaceman” originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction #683, June/July 2009.

  “One Last Wild Waltz” originally appeared in Black Static #16, 2010.

  “The Facts In The Case of Mr. P–” originally appeared in Ecletica Webzine, July/August 2003.

  “The Rediscovery of Death” originally appeared in The Horror Anthologies of Horror Anthologies, D.F. Lewis, ed., 2011

  “13 O’Clock” originally appeared in Inferno, Ellen Datlow, ed., 2008.

  First Edition

  All Rights Reserved

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Undertow Publications

  Pickering, ON Canada

  [email protected] / www.undertowbooks.com

  CONTENTS

  And Zero at the Bone

  The Entire City

  Summerhouse

  Beasts of Season

  The Spaceman

  One Last Wild Waltz

  The Facts in the Case of Mr. P –

  The Rediscovery of Death

  Lost Highway

  13 O’Clock

  The Dream Operator

  About the Author

  And zero at the bone

  Open your eyes, the email said, reminding me of something Julia had asked me not too long before: had I ever seen things that weren’t real? The question had caught me off guard. I had always considered myself a pragmatist, someone who saw and accepted things as they were. I hadn’t really known how to respond, other than to make light of it. It was my default response to things I perceived as of no consequence

  I had just completed my investigation into a young Sudanese woman who had killed her husband. Having collated all the collateral, circumstantial and indirect evidence, I’d synthesised a report that would allow my superiors to decide what action to take. After sending it to the chief, I noticed the email. I was struck not just by the message but by the absence of the sender’s address. I scanned the large, open-plan office, perturbed by an odd sense of distortion, of slowness, in the air. It was late and only three of the twelve other workstations were occupied. Nothing seemed out of place. I deleted the message and left for the night.

  By the time I got home, I’d already forgotten it. Banjo yapped at my feet as I spooned food into his bowl. A white Jack Russell pup with black markings around the eyes, I’d bought him for Nettie’s birthday. She and Julia were away again, off on one of those jaunts that seemed, just lately, to have become more frequent. Though I hadn’t yet broached the subject with Julia, I’d sensed a distance between us that I couldn’t explain. My feelings were as strong as they had always been but could I really be sure about hers? As I lay in bed that night, unable to sleep, I remembered the email and though I had no desire to, I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about what it meant.

  *

  The bureau recommended the Sudanese woman be charged with murder. It would be a mistake for any undue consideration to be paid to mitigating circumstances, they believed. It would send out the wrong message, suggesting the imposition of social norms that were not, in this case, applicable. Reading the directive I felt a small but insistent pressure behind my eyes. I ignored it and scanned those cases still awaiting initial assessment. Although we made no prior assumptions, the fact that a case was referred to the Bureau of Reification implied that a prosecution was in the public interest. A city councillor had spoken out against the IAD law, calling In Absentia Detention unconstitutional; a solicitor acting on behalf of a victim of identity theft was using the freedom of information act to access restricted information about her client; a Sunday newspaper had published a report exposing the misogynist and homophobic rhetoric coming out of an Islamic centre funded to promote racial and religious tolerance. I rarely let myself be guided by cursory readings but I sensed that all three cases contained the seeds for successful reifications.

  Throughout the morning I became aware of a peculiar slackness to the air. There was something odd too about my colleagues, an enervation that seemed to retard their movements. The dust of listlessness began to creep over me, dulling my thoughts. The ping of a new email brought me back to myself. As before it lacked a source address. Opening it I saw a star-shaped icon with a short diagonal line running from its centre down to the left. When I clicked on it the screen darkened, then an oval formed around a blue circle, like a disembodied. unblinking eye. I heard a distant booming noise, the amplified ticking of a Grandfather clock sounding in an empty room. As I reached forward to shut the programme down, the eye seemed to vanish then reappear. I rose and backed away from the desk. The iris floated upwards, as if following me. The eye blinked again and continued to stare.

  *

  To escape the unnerving eye, I ate my lunch in the small park two hundred yards down the road. I sat on a bench beneath a stand of wind-stripped trees and called Julia. She didn’t answer her phone. The park seemed unnaturally quiet, as if the city were miles away instead of twenty yards or so. I thought about the last time we’d talked, the things she’d said, and all the things she didn’t say. There were probably signs but somehow I’d missed them.

  A small bird settled in a tree across the path. Nettie asked me once why she didn’t have wings. She was a bright, inquisitive child and not easily deterred by platitudes. I told her that since we had no need to fly, wings were unnecessary. She’d laughed and said I didn’t know what I was talking about.

  The afternoon was overcast and the park’s seeming isolation unsettled me. As I stood up to leave, a young boy came running along the path and almost collided with me. He stopped, breathless, and gasped, “How far is it to here?” Before I could say anything he took off towards the trees.

  Back at the Bureau I was summoned to the chief’s office. “Take a seat, Cloud,” he said as I entered. He was a large, imposing man who, in the company of subordinates, affected an air of disinterest. “I want you to handle this case.”

  He gestured to the slim file on his desk. “New intelligence reports, indicating a potential security threat.” He stared at me for a moment then nodded to himself, as if to confirm a private thought about which there had been some doubt. “Someone’s been taking an unusual interest in the Bureau, trying to infiltrate our systems.”

  I nodded, conscious of the thinness of the file. “Do we know the nature of the threat?”

  “That’s what I want you to identify. The data is inconclusive, somewhat incoherent.” He frowned, drumming his fingers on his desk. “It may be that you have to, ah, speculate, more than you’re used to.”

  “That will affect the reliability of any reification.”

  “I realise that, Cloud. Nevertheless, interrogate the data, se
e what patterns emerge.”

  Back at my workstation I studied the file. Usually, by the time a case is passed to the Bureau, it has already accreted a mass of content to itself. All that’s missing are names. This anonymity is not to protect potential suspects, victims or witnesses; it’s to assist investigators, to allow us to examine cases without prejudice. Every scrap of content—whether circumstantial or hard, physical evidence—is scrutinised. Nothing is ignored no matter how insignificant, and nothing is prioritised. It is a process of synthesis in which everything, however tenuous its link to the case, is rearranged until a pattern begins to emerge. There will be gaps—there always are—but these lacunae are for others to fill, guided of course, by the overall picture an investigator has reified from the tonnage of conflicting data.

  What I had seemed hardly enough to constitute a case. If the scant information hinted at an identity, then he or she was, as yet, more an abstract idea than an actual person. Data from a number of feeds had been corrupted or lost. Subsequently, a priority target the Bureau had been tracking for months had gone missing, and a supposedly watertight case against a former government official charged with corruption had collapsed on the very day the trial was to begin. Coded messages had been sent to particular listening stations but the content each time had proved nonsensical, the purpose indeterminate. All that connected these events was their random and disruptive nature. Caution suggested that I proceed on the basis that the Bureau had already been compromised.

  I notified the chief and went through the file again, looking in vain for a pattern that wasn’t there. My head began to hurt and soon I could barely focus on the data. Before I left for the evening the chief had replied, authorising me to initiate discreet, in-house investigations.

  *

  On the metro I felt certain that I was being watched. I studied my fellow passengers discreetly but all that caught my attention was a question scribbled in the dust on the window opposite. A frisson of unease ran through me as I read: What is happening to the air in the hour?

  At the apartment, I fed Banjo while heating a meal of couscous, sun-dried tomatoes and peppers, with spiced chicken breast. It was, apparently, a healthy option. I’d never enjoyed cooking and whenever Julia was away I resorted to microwave meals. Unsure when she would be returning, I’d stocked up on a range of exotic sounding dishes of the kind that I imagined she would create from scratch.

  I ate while watching the evening news. A junior minister outlined a new government initiative on public wellbeing. I pushed the food around my plate as he tried to play down claims of a mass deterioration in mental health. These were based on exaggerated reports of sightings of unusual phenomena, he said. He cited a recent study that concluded that in the vast majority of cases, the sightings emanated from a small minority of malcontents intent on undermining public confidence in the government. “What needs to be established,” he said, blandly, “is the question to the answer.”

  As he spoke I felt a vague sense of disquiet. The sound of the phone came as a relief. When I picked up a light, almost childish voice spoke. “There are things you need to know that nobody’s telling you.”

  “Who is this?” I said.

  “You don’t want to hear them,” the speaker continued. “But what choice do you have?”

  “What don’t I want to hear?”

  “The questions nobody is asking. You’ve seen them.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Go to the park across the street. I’ll be waiting.” The line went dead. Confused, I looked out the window, confirming what I already knew: there was no park across the street. Springhill was at least half a mile away.

  Nevertheless, I pulled on a coat and took the elevator down to the lobby. It was bitterly cold outside, the car windscreens already frosted over. I headed north. In less than two minutes the cold iron gates of Springhill Park loomed up before me. I peered through the rails, seeing the outlines of benches and carefully pruned winter shrubs. Starlight glistened on the still surface of the pond and the trees were spiky silhouettes against the silvered, sparkling grass. I entered but lingered near the gate at the edge of a pool of light. After five minutes, stamping my feet, blowing into my hands, I gave up and left the park.

  I hurried home, troubled by the sensation of scrutiny. In the lobby I stared out through the glass door, watching the street that remained empty and still.

  “Everything okay, Mr Cloud?” It was Norman, the concierge.

  “Have you seen anything unusual tonight?”

  He shook his head. “Not a dicky bird,” he said, returning to his desk. “Not a soul all night apart from yourself.”

  Back in my apartment I found someone waiting for me, a tall, figure silhouetted against the dim streetlight bleeding through the window. “How did you get in?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” The voice was soft and oddly sexless, I thought, but compelling too. “You want to talk, Connor, about what you’re starting to see.”

  I turned on the light but he wasn’t where I’d expected him to be. Somehow, he’d moved across the room and was now standing much closer to me, holding Banjo in one arm. He was tall and thin, like a sapling, with long, straw-coloured hair and a face pale as the frost outside. “What do you want?”

  “To help you ask the right questions.” He gestured towards the window. “To show you the way.”

  “What questions? You have information for me?”

  “Of course,” he said, his voice breaking, becoming more substantial with the light. “Why else would I be here?”

  I moved past him and looked out the window. The street below was empty. “So? I’m listening.

  He nodded and sat down, cradling Banjo on his lap. “What if I told you to see things in a different way? To stop looking for patterns in material things; that would be hard for you, like losing part of what you’re made of.”

  “I’d tell you I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  He stroked Banjo’s head, tickled him under the jaw. “He’s a good dog—knows what’s real and what isn’t. You can’t fool a dog into seeing stuff that isn’t there.”

  My head was fuzzy, perhaps clouded by fatigue. “I must be missing something,” I said. “What isn’t there?”

  “You know what’s missing. The world is made out of more than words. Any fool can show you the emptiness you’re already feeling, Connor. The rest of it, the stuff you need to make it real, you have to see for yourself.”

  “How?”

  He set Banjo down on the floor, got up and moved to the doorway. “You ask questions: what’s time made of? How do you see it? How do you know how much air is left in an hour? Why is it bigger on the inside?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, bewildered by his questions. “Who are you?’

  “Robin,” he said, and then he was gone.

  *

  A week passed. New information filtered in but nothing coalesced. I began examining the files of my colleagues, looking for links to my own case. There were certain overlaps, an instance of behaviour in one investigation that seemed to mirror that in another but really, there was nothing sinister to these echoes other than that we were all creatures of habit.

  As the investigation faltered I thought more about Julia, anticipating her return. She worked for the Department of Social Wellbeing, analysing social trends. She took a year off after Nettie was born but she always intended to return to work. Nettie hadn’t suffered. She was an extremely well-adjusted and independent little girl, even though she was only eight. She was curious about everything and so beautiful it broke my heart. She’d leave paintings laying around for me when I got home from work. They were full of colour, detail and invention. Her books were always scattered all over the apartment, dog-eared copies of At the Back of the North Wind, Mopsa the Fairy and the like. Sometimes I’d look at the pictures in these books, trying to imagine what Nettie felt when she read the stories, trying to fill the gaping hole their continued absence
left in my life.

  As the days passed I found myself becoming more guarded around my colleagues, unwilling to engage in the usual departmental banter. I’d catch myself looking at them in ways I’d never done before: as though there was something lacking in them, some absence of…substance. As I grew increasingly detached, the atmosphere in the office became oppressive, almost claustrophobic. My nerves began to fray. All that kept me sane was thinking about Julia and Nettie, wondering how things would be when they returned.

  Shortly before lunch on Friday I felt suddenly languid, my breathing too shallow. My colleagues seemed afflicted with the same inexplicable symptoms. A woman at the next workstation was slumped in her seat, beads of sweat standing out on her forehead as she struggled for breath. I tried to reassure her but could hardly get the words out. There seemed to be a temporal slippage in the office, a slowing of time.

  On my desktop a tiny figure was moving. When it reached the centre it began to grow, as if moving towards me. I recognised Robin’s face. He spoke but I heard nothing. He winked and skipped across the screen to the email folder, grabbed it in both hands and tore it open to reveal a new message. Meet me now in the park.

  *

  “You’re not asking the right questions,” Robin said, smoking a cigarette with an enthusiasm that suggested the practice was new to him. The sun shone bright and the sky was a perfect cloudless blue. We sat on a bench in the park across the street from the Bureau. Staring up at a window on the eighth floor where I worked, I realised that I’d never been able to see the park from there.