Memory by Donald E. Westlake

Author:Donald E. Westlake [Westlake, Donald E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: hard-boiled, mystery, suspense
ISBN: 9780857683458
Google: fTG4YgEACAAJ
Amazon: B005O0ZU7E
Publisher: Titan Books
Published: 2011-04-15T01:28:27.579000+00:00

18

The voice said, “Look at this. This is your life.”

Hands were holding out to him a square of shiny metal, very thin and about a foot square. He said, “I never saw it before,” but in his heart he knew he had seen it somewhere.

The voice said, “You must remember, or you will die.”

“But I can’t remember,” he said. The square of metal began to grow, getting larger and larger but never any thicker, always staying just as thin, getting larger and larger till it was a mammoth wall, stretching away on either side to infinity and looming up into incredible heights of darkness over his head.

The voice said, “If you don’t remember, you’ll never get on the other side.”

As the huge square of metal began very slowly to topple over on him, he cowered, and then he turned and tried to run away, but the slab of metal was too huge, it was miles long and toppling so slowly over onto him, he couldn’t even run halfway to safety before it would land on him. He ran and screamed, and ran and screamed, and the slab of metal lowered with a grinding rushing noise like horses’ hoofs.

He sat up in bed, terrified, gasping for breath. The sheets and blankets were twined around his legs, imprisoning him. He kicked himself free, as though life itself depended on his speed now, and lunged up onto hands and knees on the disheveled bed, looking wildly around. But even as he was doing all this, the terror was fading, and the dream was fading with it.

When he lifted his hands to rub his face, he saw that they were shaking. He looked around, disoriented for a second, and then found the night table, containing his cigarettes. He crawled across the bed, got a harsh-tasting cigarette going, and then, too late, tried to remember the dream. He frowned, furrowing his forehead, but couldn’t remember a single image of it, though he had the feeling one of the characters in it had been the girl back in that town. After a minute the name came to him: Edna. He thought Edna had had something to do with the dream.

“What am I dreaming about her for?” He said it with a kind of impatient irritation, not only because of the fact, but because he was talking to himself out loud again, a habit he was trying with no success to break.

He sat up in bed, frowning and smoking, trying to ignore the uneasiness that still remained with him even though the details of the dream had vanished, and trying also to keep from vocalizing his thoughts. The electric clock he’d bought the day before yesterday—forgetting to read all the notes strewn around the room before going to bed at night, he would also forget to wind the clock—read twenty minutes past ten, which meant he had slept too long. His head was thick, and his nerves stayed jumpy from the terror with which he’d awakened.

Hunger pangs forced him to put out the half-smoked cigarette and get up from the bed.

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