Falling Doom
by
Gordon Linzner
“Barton! Thank god you’ve come!”
I’d barely had time to brush the snow from my overcoat when I felt the garment whisked off me, and I was physically pushed into the living room of my friend’s apartment. At least, the floor plan of the building probably called it a living room. I doubt that Ed called it anything at all, using it as den, office, guest room, or anything else he happened to need it for.
A cheap but functional desk stood in one corner of this flexible front room. Balanced precariously atop it was a battered typewriter in need of a good cleaning, and ream after ream of disorganized papers. Notes, outlines, and perhaps even finished manuscripts for a score of different stories would be found in those piles, along with unpaid bills, unanswered mail, and grocery lists. In spite of the mess, Ed knew exactly where everything was. Somehow.
Bookshelves lined two walls, showing gaps where volumes had been removed for reference. More books were piled, helter-skelter, atop the shelves. Here and there, on the floor or a chair or an end table, were still more papers. Ed entered the room behind me, after hanging my coat in the foyer. He hurriedly removed a batch of these pages from a comfortable old reading chair.
“Have a seat,” he invited.
I sat. Ed perched himself on the edge of the studio couch, elbows on knees, nervously squeezing his clasped hands together. I could honestly say he never looked worse in his life. His eyes were red with bloodshot and had deep, dark bags beneath them. His hair was completely disarrayed, and his face sprouted a good week’s growth of coarse, stubbly beard. He spoke quickly, too quickly for a man used to weighing every word before he opened his mouth.
“Let’s get right down to it, Ed,” I said. “What’s troubling you so badly you had to ask me up here all the way from New York? Do you need an advance?”
“No, it’s not money,” Ed replied.
“Well, then, what?”
Before I could get an answer, the phone rang. Ed leapt at it like a restless tiger, tearing open the desk drawer he kept it in so it would be ‘out of his way.’ He said “hello” even before the receiver reached his lips, and had to repeat the greeting for the caller’s benefit.
“Yes, Mr. Obreivsky,” he muttered. “Yes, I know... I’m sorry. Look, I’m not doing it on purpose. Of course I’ve seen a doctor! Yes, he gave me something... well, obviously it didn’t work. I don’t enjoy this any more than the other tenants, you know. I’m doing my best. Yes, sir. I’m sorry.”
He cradled the receiver and turned to me.
“That was the agent for the owner of this apartment building. The neighbors are complaining about horrible screaming and thumpings in the middle of the night. It’s not the first time.”
“You?” I asked.
“Me.”
Ed had had trouble in other apartments because of his tendency to work in the early hours of the morning, disturbing neighbors with his typing. Other than that, however, he was a very quiet person. I could not picture any sane man screaming to himself at those hours, especially not Ed.
“Want to tell me about it?” I offered superfluously. Of course, this was the reason he had asked me up to Boston.
“I told you about the dreams in my letter, didn’t I?”
I laughed gently. “You write letters like you outline stories. Nobody can figure them out but you. There was some mention of nightmares, as I recall, but it wasn’t clear if it was connected to your urgent request to see me.”
“Yeah, well, it was.” Ed had taken his place on the couch right after the phone call, but now he stood up and began pacing. “Have you ever dreamt you were falling?”
“Many times. Everybody does, at one time or another.”
“Not me. You know me, Barton, I’m one of those few people with near total recall of my dreams. That’s where I draw most of my ideas from. But up until two weeks ago I had never had a falling dream.”
“That’s kind of hard to swallow,” I replied. “Dreams of that type are even more basic than those which involve being naked in a public place or racing for something without ever reaching it. Maybe in your subconscious...”
“Screw the subconscious!” he swore. “I tell you, I have never dreamt of falling before. Never. Because I’d have remembered the sensation.” Ed rubbed the palms of his hands together, trying to remove imaginary perspiration.
“All right,” I soothed. “All right, so it’s been suppressed. No wonder you’re so uptight. Talk it out with a professional, a psychiatrist.”
“Thirty bucks an hour, to hear myself talk? Forget that crap! Besides,” his voice lowered, “I’ve tried that already.”
“And?”
“I’m still having nightmares. Barton, this is going to sound weird, but hear me out. You want to know why I’m scared? Because I am scared, you know. I’m half out of my mind with fright.”
“Please,” I encouraged.
“Because you’re my editor, and the only person who really knows me, maybe you can explain it to me. Most falling dreams, as I understand them, work like this: dreamer finds himself falling, hits bottom, wakes up. It doesn’t matter whether he feels the impact or not, but he always hits bottom before he wakes up. In fact, it’s the signal for the body to awake.
“Well, Barton, I just don’t hit bottom. Ever. I fall and fall, with nothing but blackness around me, and then I wake up. It’s like a clip from a reel of film. Except that every night the clip gets longer and longer. Every time I dream, I come just a little closer to the bottom. And when I finally do touch bottom, I’m not going to wake up. It won’t be a signal, for me. I’m going to die.”
His tone was frighteningly calm. One thing an editor learns quickly is tact, but I just didn’t know how to reply to this confession. How could I sympathize, reassure him, and not sound mocking or patronizing?
But Ed took care of the problem himself. “I don’t expect you to believe me,” he said. “I wouldn’t myself, but I’m living it. All I ask is that you stay here overnight. If you hear me scream or make any strange noises, wake me at once. I’m hoping that your being here will give me a firmer sense of reality and help me beat this feeling of doom.”
“Is that what the psychiatrist advised you?”
“It’s one of his ideas. I hope it’s better than the others were.”
“Well, I did have a luncheon appointment with that new author, Langhart, tomorrow. But...”
“But?” Ed snatched at the word like a drowning man at a piece of driftwood.
I laughed to reassure him. “But Langhart’s a miserable bore. I’ll phone my assistant to take care of it. Besides, I’m overdue for a vacation.”
After a lobster dinner at an excellent seafood restaurant only two blocks away, Ed seemed much more at ease. His nervous fidgeting had cooled to an infrequent muscle spasm. He handed me a pillow and blankets from the closet and shifted papers off the couch to a nearby chair.
“Excuse me if I’m less than the perfect host,” he said, in a tone more reminiscent of the Ed Reynolds I knew. “I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep in a fortnight.”
Bedclothes in arms, I picked my way through the obstacle course to the studio couch. “I understand,” I said. “Editors sometimes sleep, too.”
“Really?” Ed rejoined. “I thought you stayed up all night picking nits.” And he disappeared into the bedroom.
I really was tired after the train ride up from New York, and no sooner did I have the blanket wrapped around me than I was quite asleep.
The sound had started off loud enough to penetrate my slumber, but it was fading while I rubbed sleep from my eyes, so I didn’t realize what it was at first. Then it came again, and I recognized it as screaming: the scream of a man falling from a great height. In seconds, I was up and opening the door to Ed’s bedroom, dressed in only my shorts. I rushed to his side and shook him vigorously, and I did not cease until the fear in his half-opened eyes included a glint of recognition.
“Barton!” he gasped. “It was the bottom! I saw it clearly! A vast expanse of rocky ground, so close I could’ve counted the pebbles. I was just falling through empty air, not into a pit or off a cliff. It was as if I’d fallen out of an airplane, but there was no plane, I was just there, falling, falling, onto this sinister, barren stretch of land. Oh, my god!”
Ed sat up in bed now, cradling his head in his hands, shaking like a leaf. I placed a hand on his shoulder to calm him, but said nothing. What could I say?
After a few minutes, he stopped trembling. His breathing was almost regular again. He looked up at me and smiled weakly.
“I’m all right now,” he said. “Thanks, Barton. You know, all of a sudden I have the strangest feeling that, after tonight, that dream isn’t going to bother me any more.”
“That’s the ticket, Ed,” I answered. “Can I get you a drink?”
“No, no thanks. I just want to lay back and rest. You go back to sleep. And... thanks again.”
“If you’re sure,” I said.
He nodded. I closed the door to his room quietly behind me and groped my way back to my own sleeping place.
I must have laid there, awake, for about half an hour, reconstructing my thoughts and preparing my mind for sleep once more. I was warm with that special glow of helping a fellow human being, a feeling that is all too rare in a New Yorker’s lifetime.
I was just dropping off when I heard Ed scream again.
I was on my feet in an instant, cracking my shin on an unsuspected end table. I drew a sharp breath at the pain. Ed’s shouting stopped at that moment, as suddenly as it had begun, and there was a sound of a sickening thud. I rushed to his room for the second time that night, but a weak feeling in my stomach told me there was no need for haste.
As I swung open the bedroom door, I heard a pounding on the far wall. Muffled curses came from beyond that.
You bastards, I swore mentally at Ed’s neighbors. All you ever did was complain. Did it never occur to you that the man might have needed your help?
Ed lay unmoving in the center of his bed. At least, what was left of him lay there. I reeled back out of the room, violently sick.
The walls of the bedroom were splattered with blood and bits of flesh. The sheets were drenched in gore which dripped to form pools on the hardwood floor.
And in the center of a soft and yielding mattress lay the crushed and mangled remains of Ed Reynolds, flattened as if by a heavy weight... or a fall from a great height.
Gordon Linzner is founder and former editor of Space and Time Magazine, author of five published novels and scores of short stories appearing in F&SF, Twilight Zone, Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, and numerous other magazines and anthologies. He is a full member of the Horror Writers Association and a lifetime member of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association.