It was just after twilight when I got in to my office. It's always twilight in the City of Dreams, but what the hell, it's as good a place to start as any.
To some people, the dreaming world is nothing but a fantasy, a distorted reflection of reality containing all its cast-off hopes and fears, but to me, it's where I do my job. I am shadowed by other periods of time. Usually, I am tailed by the middle twentieth-century where I become embroiled in seemingly pointless detective scenarios . . .
I had just finished a strange case working for this guy who thought somebody else was having his dreams while he was awake. He had this one favorite dream where he was Ricky Ricardo and Lucy would tie him up and beat him savagely while playing his bongo-drums in front of a live studio audience. Well, one night Lucy came home, only it turned out to be Fred wearing Lucy's underwear and the guy began to get suspicious. It finally turned out that this was somebody else's dream entirely and his dream had gotten stuck in traffic that night. A simple case of mistaken identity. Lots of people have similar dreams.
So anyway, I was sitting in my office in the late nineteen-thirties. Rain beat hard against the windows. I was trying to arrange empty Bacardi bottles to catch the leaks in the roof when I heard the knock. The lights were off and I wasn't expecting anybody, so I figured I'd sit this one out, but whoever it was just kept on knocking. Finally, my curiosity got to me. I turned on my desk lamp and opened the door.
She wore a belted suede rain-coat, still dripping from the storm. You could see the neon sign outside the window in the slick patches. She was tall and her eyes were wide set in an intelligent face you'd want to remember. Their color was emerald green and her hair was dusky red, like a fire under control but still dangerous. I offered her the chair in front of the secretary's desk. I hadn't had a secretary since the shogguth got Allisson during the Pabodie case, but I kept my empty bottles in the file drawer.
She seemed upset, so I asked her if she wanted a drink. She did, so I got out a couple of glasses and a bottle of scotch. She took a sip, lit a cigarette, and got right to the point.
"I need your help. I don't know who I am." I didn't say anything, so she continued. "You see, I've always remembered bits and pieces of dreams after I woke up, but I usually didn't know when I was dreaming. Isn't that how it works, Mr. . . ?"
"Tehuti. Dick Tehuti. Well, that's not how it works for me, but I know what you mean." Yeah, I knew. We call them sleep-wakers. The city's full of them. Just normal people, involved in their own little fantasies, blissfully unaware that they're dreaming away somewhere back on Earth. But what was this one doing in my office?
"So you're not a native. How'd you find out?" She took a long sip of the scotch and looked down at the floor.
"I don't know. All I can remember is this man in a black robe. The robe is covered with symbols, but I can't really see them. He's doing something, but I can't tell what it is. I just see his face, thin, dark, and cold looking, with black eyes just as cold. He keeps saying over and over, 'I leave this in your hands.' Then, I'm awake, I mean, in my dreams. Here." Her voice trailed away and she took another drink.
"So you want me to find out what it's all about?"
"I don't care what it's all about. I just want to wake up. I just want to wake up!" She sounded sincere, but I didn't drop off the Tree of Life yesterday. A lot still didn't add up.
"Now listen, kid, maybe you're making too much out of this. The dream world's kind of strange. Maybe you're about to wake up in your own bed and you don't even know it."
"But I've been wandering around the city for . . . I don't know how long. It seems like a long time, but I remember all of it, and I don't remember anything else! Finally, I saw the your sign outside and thought you could help. Oh, don't you believe me?"
"Yeah, I believe you, but I should know your name if you're going to hire me."
"It's Cassandra . . . I think. That's all I remember. Do you know how it feels not to even know your own name?"
"Well, kid, I'm a lot older than you. I've had so many names come and go I don't even think about it anymore, but I'll see what I can find out." She gave me a look that could melt a dream from the ice age and said thanks.
I put her in a cab over to the Waldorf Astral and told her to stay put, then I went back up to my office to think things through.
Cassandra had just left when the Archons of Yesod tried to hire me. They walked into my office with their enforcers, a mob of fallen angels and their infernal flunkies, blighted by graveyard smiles and an air of age-old self-importance. The largest one stepped forward and offered a gloved hand. He was dressed in a grey silk suit and a fez, and I'd say he looked Egyptian, but most Egyptians only have two eyes. His bald head and thick face gave him the look of a predatory mushroom. "Permit me to introduce myself, Mr. Tehuti. I am Dumah, currently serving as Chairman of the Board for Oneiro-Corp."
"What happened to Yalda Bahut?"
Dumah gestured for a chair and sat down with a heavy, creaking sound. "His management style was outmoded. A vote of the stockholders caused him to take . . . early retirement." The Archon's demon guards ground their teeth as they stood against the walls in their cheap, shiny suits.
"So, what can I do for you gentlemen?" I lit up a Lucky Strike and looked them over. I recognized Iachadiel, the "controller of phantoms in the night," but I had never seen the other Archons before. None of them looked very happy.
"Ah! Very direct." Dumah chuckled unpleasantly. "We would like to hire you to recover some financial records discovered missing during our last audit."
"Financial records, huh? Doesn't the Financier of Dreams usually handle that stuff?"
"Yes, but in this instance, we are acting in his behalf. He has been . . . ill. Perhaps you had heard that he has been consulting Dr. Traum."
"I see. I'm sorry, Dumah, but I'm already on a case. Besides, I don't usually work for any of the Powers." The air in my office seemed suddenly hot and very stale. Not all the smoke was coming from my cigarette; some of it streamed off Dumah.
"Is that so?" Dumah smiled like a pit of scythes opening wide. "Well, that's all right. You finish your case and we'll talk again. We've got all the time in the world."
"At least 'till the end of days. Eh, Dumah?"
"Don't get smart, Tehuti. You just keep us in mind." One of the demons opened the door, leaving claw marks on the knob. The Archons filed out of the office and I followed them downstairs. They got into a silver Rolls-Royce as the guards watched the street, looking hungrily for signs of trouble. Dumah rolled down the rear window and fixed me with his thousand eyes. "We'll be in touch."
I watched sourly as the sedan pulled away from the curb and disappeared down the avenue with a distant wail. I didn't like it. The Archons were always scheming for something, it was part of their nature, but the Financier of Dreams was one of the real powers in the City of Dreams. The City of Dreams, Morpheopolis, where the fantasies of a million species, races, and cultures collide in the market-place and surreptitiously attempt to pick each other's pockets in the confusion. It is the archetypal, eternal city, of which all other cities are but dimensional suburbs. Differences in race or species are treated pragmatically here. There isn't room for prejudice. Anything that can pass the gate of dreams and can handle money is considered a person. Yeah, even here, especially here, dreams have to be paid for, and the Financier of Dreams was the one who kept track of the tab.
Dream money is kind of a reflection of cash on Earth, since it's dug or discovered in dreams of treasure lost in the material world. The contents of each sunken galleon and walled-up pile of loot passes into dreams where it's eventually found and recorded in the ledger of the Financier of Dreams. If it's turned up on Earth, it passes over again, and is out of circulation. That's why it's always the oldest, deepest buried cash that's most often used in Morpheopolis. Of course, people have stamped coins and carved gems for so many centuries, there's never any shortage. Still, it's common to hear some stiff say after finding that he's broke, "An archeologist must have picked my pocket."
Back in my office, I poured myself another shot of scotch as I thought about the Financier of Dreams. I could see him in his embroidered robes, his thin, lined face scowling as he tallied up the ledger, surrounded by his priests, the Night-Accountants. Nobody knew much about him, but everybody knew of him, knew what he looked like. Almost everybody. Cassandra's description of the guy she saw fit him to a tee. A suspicious coincidence? Yeah, but then synchronicity, like cash, is part of the stuff that dreams are made of. I didn't know what the Black Economist could have to do with an unknown commuter from the waking world, but it looked like I needed to find out. I was going to have to go downtown to see Dr. Traum.
Downtown, the city is very modern, a cluster of sleek sky-scrapers from future utopias that will never be. Only the wealthy and powerful live there, and Dr. Traum qualified. Dr. Traum was an astral psychotherapist renowned for work with lucid waking and the interpretation of symbols in reality.
I hopped a cab over to Crowley Towers and rode the elevator up to the thirteenth floor. That might be unusual in the material world, but in the City of Dreams, most buildings have a thirteenth floor. It comes in handy.
I walked into Traum's office and his receptionist looked me over from behind a massive silver-trimmed marble desk. She was Chinese, dressed in a red and black silk robe, Mandarin style, and looked like she came from one of the older districts. "Do you have an appointment?"
I pretended to examine an ornate suit of Reichian armor which stood against the wall on a pedestal of dark wood. "No. I just need to talk to Dr. Traum for a couple of minutes."
"The doctor's time is very valuable. It may be quite some time before he can see you."
"I'll wait." I sat down on a plush, art deco sofa and began to leaf through a coffee-table edition of The Necronomicon. The Necronomicon came from the haunted imagination of the writer, H. P. Lovecraft. It was a book that didn't really exist in the waking world, but the City of Dreams was lousy with copies. The receptionist was still trying to decide how to get rid of me when the doctor walked out. "I am Dr. Traum. What can I do for you?" He was a thin, older man, with greying hair, short-trimmed beard, and piercing pale-blue eyes. We shook hands.
"I'm Dick Tehuti, a private investigator. There's something you might be able to help me with." Dr. Traum gripped the lapels of his white coat and gazed evenly at me.
"I understand completely. I have frequently found that events in the real world are reflections of the anxieties of the dreamer. For example, if one undergoes birth from the womb while awake, it may be an indication of the desire to dream of being inside a breathing coffin."
"That's real interesting, doc, but it's not exactly what I came to talk about."
"Oh? You are not having some problem with the material world?"
"No. No, my real world's fine. I just need to ask you some questions about your association with the Financier of Dreams." He looked startled and I could see him wondering as our professional roles reversed.
"Yes, I see. Please come this way." Ms. Mandarin gave me the nasty eye as we walked into the consulting room. Not very subtle, of course. She was reaching for the phone before the doctor even got the door closed.
"You understand, Mr. Tehuti, that I cannot reveal anything disclosed to me by a patient." Traum stood behind a large rosewood desk, his back to a doctoral diploma from the Nux Institute of Spiritual Pathology.
"Sure, I understand, but let me ask you a question. You were providing services against your debt to the ledger, right?" "Yes, but I don't see what that has to do with anything. Everyone is debited against the ledger."
"Yeah. Everybody owes the ledger. Well, understand this, doc. I don't think you'll be seeing your patient again, in or out of dreams. And while you're chewing on that, think about what would happen if the ledger fell into someone else's hands, like one of the Archons, for instance."
Traum's face made a nice match with his greying hair. "I'm not sure I believe you."
"Well, you'd better make up your mind fast. Do you think I'd stick my nose in the Financier's business if I thought he was going to pop up to settle accounts?"
"No, I don't suppose you would." Traum sat slowly down in a plush green and stared at the ruby blotter on his desk. The doc looked shaken and I could understand why. "All right, Mr. Tehuti, what do you need to know."
"Why was he seeing you?" I pulled a copy of Gray's Soul Anatomy from one of the shelves and stared absently at the diagrams while we talked.
"Well, the north-American savings and loan crisis had been affecting his emotional balance, but mostly he just wanted to discuss materiognosis, methods of accessing the contents of the material world. He was anxious about something, though, something he wouldn't talk about. I suppose, now, he was worried about the Archons."
"It seems like a safe bet. When was the last time you saw him?"
"Yesterday, subjectively speaking. Hrmmph. It was very strange. He changed clothes while he was here and put on a grey business-suit. He said he was going to have a drink at the Nyctalope Cafe and he didn't want to be recognized."
"Thanks, doc. You've been a lot of help. I guess I should tell you that your secretary's working for the Archons."
He looked sadly at me for moment. "Yes, I know. If you are not successful, Mr. Tehuti, we shall all soon be working for the Archons."
The secretary stared oriental daggers at me as I left. It didn't bother me, but I decided to take the back stairs instead of the elevator as I headed down to the street.
The rain was coming down in the last words of the Financier of Dreams, but each drop had been sworn to silence. I turned down the brim of my fedora and pulled my collar up on the sides. A dark metal canopy braced itself against the storm, the soot-stained surface showing a sickly reflection of the braziers lighting the street. The name Nyctalope Cafe was barely visible on the side, just above the scarred fringe. The canopy had been deeply gouged by crystal spikes from the sky. They'd been falling in the Pyramid district in increasing numbers lately. No one knew why.
I stepped over the gaudy form of the doorman, a pale radiance seeping from his body. It looked like he had been crushed by expanding world-views. I shrugged and walked inside, streams of water etching hieroglyphs on the carpet as I moved. A pretty brunette who looked like the priestess of a cult of outer-garment worshippers was working the cloakroom. She said it was a lousy night out and I agreed. She didn't know the half of it. Several transparent reflections of me walked in and faded away while we were talking. I felt thin and insubstantial, as if I were being concatenated.
I grabbed a jinn and tonic at the bar and sat down with my back to a carved pillar while I cased the joint. The place was big. The top of the column was hidden by distance and shadow. A rhumba that had lurked in Xavier Cugat's least favorite nightmares flowed together with the kitchen noises. It created an impenetrable jazz totally unrelated to the motions of the dancers in front of the bandstand.
It looked like I was on the right track. There were reflections of Cassandra mixed all through the crowd. Some of them were dancing, some were sitting at tables, a couple of them seemed to be working as waitresses. I flagged one down by the bandstand. She walked over to take my order, wearing a blue silk cocktail dress and carrying a small silver tray.
"What'll it be, mister?"
"Another jinn and tonic." I handed her a gold sovereign. "Keep the change."
She smiled. "Thanks."
"Say, doll, what's your name?"
"Cassandra Harris." She looked blank for a second, then blew away in translucent wisps. Reflections don't have much to them. Her name was probably all she knew.
I found another Cassandra at one of the tables and offered to buy her a drink. "Where you from, sweetheart?"
"Dream House Acres, Colorado. Why, what's it to you?" She vanished before I could answer her. Nobody paid much attention. It wasn't that uncommon to see a few doubles walking around, but I knew that something important had happened here, something that made a lot of ripples. More of my own reflections were walking in all the time, though most of them dissolved before they could order a drink. It made me edgy.
I had worked my way through five Cassandras when I spotted Louie the Lip. He was sitting in a circle of colored sand at a table near a shrine to one of the club deities. He was staring into a brass tripod filled with faces of green fire, darting and grimacing in front of him. His face had a thick, glistening pallor that made a stark contrast with his black, greased-back hair. He looked like he hadn't been out of the club for a long time, maybe ever. Louie was a "regular" here. Nobody ever dreamed about him being anywhere else.
I spoke a word of passage and sat down across from him, a pale, colorless aura flaring around us as I crossed his circle. Then he saw me.
"Hello, Louie." He gave me a long vacant look, like a stare from a zombie fish, then his face came alive with a kind of feeble malice.
"Who are you?" Louie's brazier went dark, pouring out oily black smoke. He began an artistic series of twitches as he struggled to refill the bowl with a foul-smelling mix of herbs and powders.
"I'd like to ask you a few questions about what happened here last night." Louie dropped the brazier and tried to shift to somebody else's dream, but his circle held him with a bright violet glow. He was a cooked goose in glass bottle. "All these preparations, Louie. You'd think you were nervous about something."
"I don't wanna talk to you," he slurred. Sweat stood out on his greasy forehead.
"Too bad, Louie." I patted the bulge under my jacket. "You'll talk, or this machine burns away standards of identity." The jinn in my drink snickered, fizzing slightly. Louie worked his mouth soundlessly, like the howling of a buried dog. I could see him thinking about breaking for the side door, but I already had a handful of his suit. Finally, he shrugged and pointed towards the far end of the room. I ordered two more drinks and we sat down at a booth in a baroque artificial grotto in the back.
"A guy came in here last night. Thin guy, lined face, dressed in a grey business suit. Something happened to him, and I think you saw it. You see everything else in this joint."
"You some kinda phantom heat?" Louie scanned the nearby tables with an insect intensity. A greenish glow spread over him like a phosphorescent gel.
"I'm Dick Tehuti, private eye."
"Yeah, I've heard of you. Well, you're gonna get us both dropped into the abyss with plutonium booties, you crummy gumshoe. You don't mess with the Archons." Shadows writhed amid the ceramic cherubs dotting the grotto.
I grabbed Louie's lapels and drew him up hard into the table. "Look, Louie, I know who was in here last night and you know what happened to him. I'm through playing around!" Louie's eyes were bulging and a drop of spittle had worked its way from the corner of his mouth. His aura seemed to be peeling away, spinning off in shrieking silver droplets as dark corners sprouted around us.
"Listen and listen good. You can tell me if the Financier got out of here, and you'd better do it. Dumah's hell-boys'll be down here for you if I spread it you've been talking to me." Maybe I shouldn't have said the name. There was the sound of grinding metal and Louie started disintegrating, his edges peeling like burning film. I spoke a word to stabilize his image, but it wasn't very pretty.
"Talk! You've still got time!" Mutilated reflections fell out of his body. Louie was fading, like a symbol translated once too often.
"Hold together, you lousy snitch!" His lapels decayed, tearing away from my hands, and what was left of Louie just fell apart. I tried to grab onto his memories, but they shattered into writhing fragments and scuttled across the dance floor. There was a small glowing rune on Louie's back, right above the kidneys. It disappeared even as I looked at it.
I hadn't seen anyone, but the killer had to have come from the dressing rooms behind the bandstand. I nudged my .45 in the holster and left a handful of silver denarii on the table as I headed for the stage door.
A single bulb hung by a wire down in the stairway, like a sickly thread of moonlight running into the catacombs beneath the pyramid district. The stairs emptied into a long passage lit only by a red exit sign over a carved stone gate at the far end. The doorways lining the hall were just steles of deeper darkness. All except one. Hideous images, barely visible as phosphorescent glyphs on the stone walls, glared at me as I moved, like nazi rat-dogs from a future hell. I didn't like it one bit. The killer might be in any of the nooks to each side, but I had to check the lit chamber up ahead.
I was groping my way forward. There was a sweet, almost sickening incense being burned nearby. I could hear some sort of ceremony up ahead, like Enric Madriguera's orchestra being tortured during high mass. I could have walked away. I should have walked away, but the sucker instinct got the better of me. I drew my .45 and knelt to look through the key-hole of that one lit room, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the light. There were shreds of a black robe embroidered with monetary symbols, floating in a dank, luminous mist. Shrouded in the mist, hooded figures gestured. As if from a distance, like the echo of a whisper, I heard the words, "I leave this in your hands." Then, the images broke into motes of light and dissolved into the darkness. I shrugged and turned away. Nothing but unreal property beyond; the last bits of information were fading into the background noise.
Suddenly, I knew that things were going to get very bad. I sensed a movement behind me beginning to remove intrinsic pattern. A glance over the shoulder revealed the unthinkable. I whirled around and sent two slugs forged from the dust of crumbled planets screaming down the corridor. Then I saw him, snarling up at me in the light of the gun-flash. It was Bennu the Bump with a psychotronic blackjack! My shots would have hit anyone else in the chest, but Bennu didn't have any form since he had his "freudian slip" a few years back and suffered a complete semiotic breakdown. Bennu and I knew each other from the old days when he worked the "soul-switch" con for Boss Set and there was no love lost between us. I heard the wheels of his karma, then he slammed into me like the midnight express. I tried to fire again, but he was moving backwards through time. I guess the end burned away the beginning. The bill arrived, payable through the nose, and I fell away from him into the future. My only satisfaction is that I must have dispersed him as I fell, but it didn't seem much help at the time. The floor swallowed me whole and the lights came on.
When you're in the dream world to begin with, you don't go unconscious if somebody puts the sap on you. If you're not simply snuffed, you go somewhere else. In this case, I was lodged in the subconscious of an insomniac dentist in Sleepy Eye, Minnesota. An archetype existing below the threshold of his awareness, I was helpless as the dentist sat through endless games of solitaire and taped re-runs of Gilligan's Island. Unable to do more than influence an occasional choice of cards, I swore over and over that somebody would pay for this. Finally, just after the Skipper was hit by the coconuts for the seventh time, the dentist dozed off.
When I came to, all I could think of was the smell. I was laying in a pile of garbage and empty bottles behind the Nyctalope Cafe. I tried to get up, but didn't make it, so I fell against a wall and spewed my guts out instead. My body felt like an over-tenderized steak.
A couple of minutes went by before I could remember what had happened. It had been close, but I must have nailed Bennu or he would have finished me off. I guessed that the cafe help must have dumped me in the alley, minus my .45 and wallet, of course. I had been lucky, but I was running out of time. The Archons had plenty of stooges besides Bennu, and some of them were a lot more effective. Still, I had all the pieces and I knew what I had to do.
I had some Persian darics hidden in my left shoe, so I took the subway to Oneiroville and got out by the old cemetery. Unkempt and overgrown with nycantanthes and night-shade, the Oneiroville Necropolis was one of oldest places in the city. It was where they buried dreams when nobody anywhere dreamed them anymore.
The ancient Hebrews slept in tombs to obtain prophetic dreams. Only a few of the old-timers knew, but you could pull the trick from the dream side. The Financier of Dreams must have known, for all the good it did him.
I found the tomb of a dream that was so old that even in Morpheopolis no one knew its name. The crude signs scratched into the rock had long since worn away. Maybe it had been a neanderthal dream. Maybe it was a phantasm of the dreamers before humanity. I didn't know. When I pried open the stone slab in front, there was nothing but a thick layer of iridescent dust. Whatever had been here had gone to wherever dead dreams go. I didn't have to worry about being disturbed. Not even nightmares liked this place.
I crawled in and lay down on the floor and began to concentrate. Material projection isn't hard. After the first few in-the-body experiences, you never forget the knack. You just have to be able to go to sleep in your dreams.
The first thing I saw after I got over the disorientation was the moon. It was full, and high in the summer night sky. A warm breeze swept over the little town of Dream House Acres, Colorado.
I looked up Cassandra's address in the phone-book at a service-station and got directions from the attendant. It was a beautiful clear night, so I took the long way, whistling old show-tunes and reveling in my freedom from the cares and anxieties of the dream world.
Cassandra lived in the top floor of an apartment house on the west side of town. It only took a few seconds to let myself in, but then, I've been doing this for a long, long time. As I opened the door, I could see Cassandra on the couch in her living room, sleeping restlessly, arms folded over the ornate cover of a massive book.
I had never seen the Ledger of Dreams, but the dragons and chimeras moving amid the silver filigree on the cover could have decorated nothing else. I gently took the book from her hands and opened it, revealing entries in a thousand forgotten languages. There were statements of accounts filled with gold angels, bonds payable in silver drachmas, promissory notes for bronze spearheads, and interest figures on loans of cowrie shells. All the currencies of dream were totaled in the columns before me.
I could feel the agony and rage of the Archons as I thumbed through the ledger's pages, but they were beyond the wall of sleep and couldn't touch me. Nearer than the closing of an eyelid, yet further than the devil's parole, they could only watch as I laid the Ledger of Dreams in Cassandra's fireplace and struck a match. The book caught quickly, flaring blue and orange, shot with silver sparks. It flamed with every color of the moon and night. Page after page, even the jeweled and inlaid covers, curled to black and burned down to the finest ash. The ashes shifted into fevered shapes. They rose as griffins, mermaids, unicorns, and centaurs, twisting into every phantasmal form and drifting apart again. Then the phantoms merged in a plume of moon-blue smoke, and with a sigh, like a child turning in its sleep, the book was gone.
I let myself out and locked the door behind me, fading away as dawn lit the waking world. It was all over now. Cassandra would wake refreshed, remembering a dream now and then, but never again awakening in her dreams. I hoped she would send me a check in her sleep sometime. A new Financier of Dreams would coalesce from the sere slumbers of economists and accountants. The Archons of the Astral Planes would return to their conspiracies, oppressing the fantasies of humanity and pretending to themselves that they truly ruled the world. They probably didn't like me much right now, but then, they never did. I wasn't going to lose any sleep over it. Besides, I had a feeling that the next time I saw the Archons, there would be a different Chairman of the Board. And me . . . I would go back to sitting in my office in the nineteen-thirties of the imagination, endlessly waiting for another clue to that one big case, the Creation Caper, the ultimate who-dunnit.
There are countless stories here in the City of Dreams. This one is like all the rest, just moonlight mirrored on an ancient lake as the ripples flow outward.
