Lurid Dreams

by Charles L. Harness

Genres: Science Fiction; Hard Science Fiction; Space Opera

Synopsis

Out of body, out of time... Though basically a skeptic, William Reynolds had known out-of-body experiences in the past. But never before had he floated past the boundaries of Baltimore . . . and across the borders of time. And now, with the fires of Civil War looming on the horizon, the astonished graduate student was hobnobbing with none other than the dark poet Edgar Allan Poe. But their meeting of minds was to have chilling consequences. For a desperate Confederacy planned to use them both to remold the world - and to change history...for the worse.

Release date: September 24, 2013

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 187

Sample

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.

—ALBERT EINSTEIN

IT WAS A STANDARD TART ROOM, BASICALLY THE SAME design as used by Charles Tart in his work with “Miss Z” at the University of California.

I lay on a cot in the dim light. Tiny conductors attached to my eyelids and forehead monitored my REMs and brain waves. Other electrodes measured respiration, heartbeat, perspiration, skin resistance, and a few other things—the usual polygraph spectrum. I had added a couple of features: a device for weighing the bed with me on it, closed-circuit TV, and holo cameras.

Across from the cot is the one-way window. I sense that observers stick their noses against the glass from time to time. I wonder if they—or the camera—will see anything significant.

Above my head, about six and a half feet off the floor, is a shelf. A piece of paper lies on the shelf. On the piece of paper is a number. Just above the shelf is a wall clock. I can’t see it from where I lie, because the shelf hides it.

Here’s the procedure. If I have an OB (“out-of-body experience” pronounced Oh-Be), I float up, read the number on the paper, check the time on the clock, then return to my mortal coil and wake up.

No big deal. I decided ahead of time how to do it.

So I lie there a couple of hours to make it look good, breathing slowing and regularly, as if in normal sleep, twisting a little (within the limits of the wires attached to me), and then finally lying flat on my back and willing the change. Click—I’m out, and floating. I look down at the scrawny creature on the cot. Yes, that’s me. I need a haircut. Alix made me promise, but then I forgot. Also, I was broke (and still am). I am grateful the light institutional pajamas cover most of my very unbeautiful body.

I am attached to that other self by a pulsing ray of light, the so-called silver cord of Ecclesiastes. It runs from the back of my head down to his forehead. All standard procedure. So far. But now, forget my earthly corse. On with the experiment! Up! Up!

As I reach the shelf, I look for the paper. It’s there, but it’s facedown. I turn it up, and I read “13.” Who thought that one up? The original Tart work used five-digit numbers taken from a book of random numbers. Oh well, Loesser was certainly entitled to do it differently. Time check. I look at the clock. Three-fifteen A.M. The big red second hand is barely moving. I decide to take a run out over the city, so for the moment it’s best to stop the flow of time. The second hand halts its leisurely orbit.

I float up and through the wall into the adjoining observation room. Ah, there’s Barton Loesser, my adviser, watching through the window. Did he see me turning the coded paper over? Probably not. Not within his immediate angle of view. Did the cameras catch it? The answers will have to wait a bit.

And there’s Alix, of course. She’s brought her little pillow, and she’s dozing on the sofa. She’s doing a thesis on Poe. Poe and Freud, actually. She calls it Freudian Symbols Used by Edgar Allan Poe. Poe is a very big deal with her.

Anybody else in the room? Yes, a weird character sits in one of the plush chairs. He’s dressed in some sort of gray military uniform. No army I recognize. And he’s the original Blackbeard: that foliage covers his face and chin and flows down on his chest like an inky waterfall. The front of his jacket carries vertical rows of gilt buttons. Three stars are embroidered on each side of the stiff collar. Gold braid plasters the jacket sleeves. Gray trousers with yellow stripes disappear into enormous gleaming black knee boots. A shapeless brown felt hat rests in his lap; a big black feather is stuck in the band and hangs loosely over the back of the brim. A yellow silk sash drapes his waist.

I can hardly take my eyes off him. But I must, because I note that a second weirdo is sitting by the soldier: a man about forty, rather slight build, dark hair, gray eyes. This chap’s dress is equally odd. He wears a high lace collar, dark cravat, jacket, and blue velvet topcoat, all reminiscent of the first half of the nineteenth century. Is this a costume ball? The place was filling up like Union Station! Well, none of my business. The rulers of the Graduate School and the Psychology Department ran the show, and they could and would invite whom they darn well pleased.

So. Everybody seemed to be here except the guest of honor, Dr. J. Theophilus Garten, Dean of the Graduate School, and source of all misdirection and all bounty, our original skeptic, infidel, and nonbeliever. Dean Garten, where the hell are you?

Over at the side wall, under glass, are the recording instruments. I take a look. Sure enough at three-fifteen the three kymographs for alpha, beta, and gamma brain waves almost went off the paper. And the bed and contents showed a weight loss of two ounces. Is that all? Somehow I thought my astral body would show a bit more solidity.

I have to be on my way. I move through walls and ceilings and out of the Research Wing. I rise high over the city, circling like a homing pigeon getting its bearings. The lighted grid of streets drops away below. I soar, farther and higher. The tiny lights sparkling far below emphasize the darkness that envelopes me. I love this. All my senses tingle. I look down on the city with euphoric affection.

At ten thousand feet I can see the entire Eastern megalopolis, from Norfolk to New York City, and ships at sea two hundred miles out. All of which is very fine, but of no immediate interest. I look down into my smug, complacent hometown of Baltimore.

Bollamer (no local calls it Bal-ti-more) is not a city. It is a village, a bit bloated, but otherwise without worry or concern for me or you or it. It is content. It likes its status quo. It will accept anything so long as it doesn’t have to. Ancient and modern lie down together: the U.S.S. Constellation floats at a twenty-first-century waterfront. The village fathers take pride in their broadmindedness. The houses of both H. L. Mencken and Babe Ruth are maintained as memorials.

Is this a Northern or a Southern town? Outsiders might argue about it. Baltimoreans could care less. Like Yahweh (“I am that I am”) and Popeye, they are what they are.

I stop circling and look down. I find Mulberry Street, then Monroe, and I move off toward Larch Place, and the row house where I was born. Pa’s drink, gambling, and insane beatings killed Ma when I was three. I might have been next except along about then Pa discovered I had card-psi. With me sitting on a little stool behind him, he couldn’t lose at poker. His marks eventually caught on, though. He blamed me. He beat me up and knocked me unconscious. That was my first OB. I was in a coma for three days. I heard beautiful music, I saw Ma. It was wonderful. I wanted to stay, but it was all premature. I woke up in Children’s Hospital. Pa got a prison stretch, his first of several. After that, I saw him just once more. Recently he died in an alcoholic ward in Dallas.

Since that first time, I have been out-of-body many times. Generally it’s like taking a long, lonely walk. I like to go far far away. Night is best. I move over the time-bound Earth, and cities sleep below me, their street lights twinkling in magic patterns. Distant farmlands show an occasional sparkle. During all this, I know a luminous filament links me to my distant physical body, lying out of sight in some grubby framework of brick and wood and glass. As long as that link is intact, I can always return. Once in a while, when times are very bad, I think how simple it would be to loose that silver cord and soar outward forever and ever, and never again give a damn whether I made Ph.D. or Dog Catcher.

But enough of that.

Save for Sigrid Sundstrom, a distant ancestress, who lived and died in a village of colonial America, my family tree has nondescript roots. The Reynoldses trace their psi back to her, and I imagine she got it from fierce ancestors who followed retreating glaciers into Scandinavia, millennia earlier. Mother Sundstrom was accused of witchcraft, found guilty, and burnt, all in one day. The judge was competing with tribunals at Salem and felt that what he lacked in numbers, he could make up in speed. His portrait hangs today in a county courthouse in upper Delaware. It shows a smiling man, happy in his work, and satisfied with his contributions to religion, law, and civilization. President Grant appointed one of his descendants (this is easily verified in the genealogical records) to the United States Supreme Court. He begat a line that is presently crowned by none other than that august arbiter of truth, keeper of the keys, defender of the faith, our most excellent and worthy Dean of the Graduate School, J. Theophilus Garten.

Most of this history I got from Aunt Erda. She too had the gift, or (depending on the point of view) the curse. She died during my first year at college. Aunt Erda was but one of an intricate vertical and horizontal network of women, in and out of the clan, who held the family together and tried (hopelessly, yet eternally hopeful) to make something useful of the backsliding males. These women were like a firm, adamantine, remorseless, and continuous mortar within whose framework the Reynolds men-bricks were the oretically held in place. In the fullness of time my lady Alix would probably join this union of matriarchal masons. Poor Alix.

But now to retrace the glowing umbilicus, and return to the University, and the Research Wing, and the Tart Room, and my indifferent, insensate coil, which doesn’t really care whether I reenter it or not. Query (as they say in judicial opinions)—is my physical body thinking and dreaming while I am gone, or is it a total blank, to be reactivated only by my return? Interesting question. I just don’t know the answer. Nor does there seem to be anything on it in the literature. Loesser once proposed a subsidiary experiment where somebody would wake me up while I am “out” and put the question to me. But I know ahead of time that that wouldn’t work. If the physical body is disturbed, the astral form instantly returns.

As I return, I hover briefly over Clip Street, thinking about a lot of things. I live down there, in a very tiny rumpled room, just off campus.

But back to work. As I float on toward the University, still suspended in time and space, I listen to the music. Sometimes I hear music on an OB, sometimes I don’t. This time, I hear it. And this music is very strange. It is moody, eerie, otherworldly. I’ve never heard it before, and I can’t figure out what it means. Or, indeed, whether it means anything.

I think of other things. Will the Dean approve my doctoral topic (OBs—History and Techniques)?

Doctor William Reynolds. That would go a long way toward helping me forget Pa and an excruciating series of foster homes before Aunt Erda found me. Loesser has promised to help get the topic approved. Everything depends on a good showing with a Tart Program.

The events of this early morning are crucial; and how they are viewed and assessed by Barton Loesser and Milord J. Theophilus mean life and death to my Ph.D.

Loesser should be no problem. He is a decent man; decent but driven. He is not an optimist. Like Schopenhauer, he sees black wherever he looks. He thinks the world is hopeless. “It’s like (he once explained to me) a horse screaming with a broken leg. God ought to shoot it, put it out of its misery.” I think, does he really mean that? He continues, rhetorically, “Can it be saved, Bill?” (As though I had the answer, and was keeping it from him all this time.) He goes on, “If we are to save it, we’ve got to do it with Oh-Be, or something like Oh-Be. Plain routine normality isn’t good enough anymore. We’ve got to think paranormal.”

No, the problem wouldn’t be Loesser. The problem was, is, and will be the Dean.

These are the things I am thinking as I float back, through walls and ceilings of the Research Wing. As I pass through the Observation Room, I note that Loesser, Alix, and the uniformed man are still there. The blue-cloaked man is gone. And so, on into the adjoining Tart Room. I note from the clock it’s still three-fifteen. I hover over my body. I wait a moment, making sure everything is in place. Then I merge, and I say in a somewhat gargly voice, “I’m awake.”

Whoa there. I recall the procedure, the piece of paper on the shelf overhead. Nobody comes in until I state what I think the secret number is, and the time on the clock. “The number is thirteen,” I said, “time, three-fifteen.”

Loesser enters immediately. He tries to look noncommittal, but I can see he’s disappointed.

“What’s wrong?” I whispered.

“You got the damn number wrong,” he hissed.

This was scary. My Ph.D. down the drain, because I misread a number? No! No! Impossible! And horrible. “It was thirteen!” I insisted. I sat up on the edge of the cot and scratched my head. I remembered the shape and size of the two digits, the 1 and the 3. Not in block print, as I had expected. More like flowing, handwritten script.

“You did get the time right,” he said. “Lots of polygraph activity at three-fifteen.” He reached up over the shelf, felt around, and pulled the paper down. I looked up as he studied it, and I saw his face turn white. Watching blood drain from a man’s face is a fascinating spectacle. In the first place, there’s an initial phase when blood rushes into the face, flooding especially the ears and cheeks. Then it rushes out again, like a wave receding from shore. But nothing comes in to take its place. The face is left a bluish white. The blue tint is from arterial capillaries. The syndrome is involuntary, of course—a reflexive, self-preserving reaction of the autonomic nervous system. Your blood simply retreats inward, so in case you are wounded, you won’t lose as much.

I pulled Loesser down on the cot beside me, on the theory he’d feel safer. I didn’t need to look at the paper. I knew how it read. So—I had been right all along. But I wasn’t sure that helped matters. Somewhere, somehow, there had been a colossal foul-up.

“I didn’t do it,” I said.

“I know,” he said quietly. “The procedure was absolutely foolproof.”

“How do you explain it, then?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t know.” He folded the paper up and put it in his shirt pocket.

Probably he, too, was thinking, what happened to the real paper?

I considered the two oddballs out in the Observation Room. “Nobody entered here?”

“No. Absolutely not!”

I was still feeling suspicious. “Who was the guy in the funny soldier uniform?”

He shrugged. “His name is Birch. Garten let him watch.”

Loesser didn’t try to explain any more. I let it ride. “And the other guy?”

“Other guy?”

“You know. In the blue cloak.”

“There was nobody else, Bill.”

“I saw him.”

“No. I was there all the time. Just me, Alix, and Birch.”

He was giving it to me straight, at least as he understood the facts.

One of those two—Birch or the stranger—had switched the secret paper. I knew it, even if Loesser didn’t. “Somebody want. . .