The Veil of Reality - part one

I had felt his eyes on me already before the ceremony had started, and now as I’m searching through the crowd I am reminded of the eerie feeling I get whenever he is close.

   The ceremony had been so filled with love and joy, the pinnacle of success of the festival; people dancing everywhere, children laughing, all the people filling me with excitement and true happiness.

   There is a young girl who is about to break out in a fit of laughter at one of the singers from this morning; he has just fallen head first into a pit of mud. Before I even see her I know she is there, her laughter comes at me and fills my chest with bubbles that overflows and pours out of me and I can’t stop my own giggles. The bride, hair in a wreath of autumn leaves, is kissing her groom with such passion I cannot help but to fall in love.

   There it is again, that intense feeling of nothingness. He must be watching me for never have I felt so aware of a man, never have a man made my heartbeat slow down to an almost halt, shutting out all other people, all other feelings.

   There is something with his eyes. I first noticed them last night when he was playing with the band of folk singers. The bow danced over his violin with such tenacity and fire, he had the whole crowd on their feet, yet his eyes remained calm, fixed on mine and I could swear there were shadows around them for I could not see a thing but his eyes.

   Some children are splashing water at each other as they play by the lake and I’m brought back from the spell. The eerie feeling I had moments ago has abandoned me and I’m suddenly very aware of the cold autumn breeze, the vivid colours of red, yellow and orange that made the festival even more glorious suddenly don’t feel as bright.

   The sun is setting and the crowd is drawing to the tents for the wedding feast as someone lays their hands on my shoulders and turns me around. Even though I already know who it is my heart skips a beat, I gasp and tell him how he has frightened me!

   It‘s strange, I didn’t sense him walk up to me. His presence has dumbfounded me the entire weekend. His hands are large yet delicate and just as pale as his face. His hold on my shoulders is quite tight and he’s looking me deep in the eyes. If only I could tell what he’s feeling.

   We start to walk away from the festival grounds, he’s taken my hand in his and he’s leading me into the woods, there’s an enchanted glade there where he must be taking me.

   I do wonder if this is what it’s like to fall in love. It’s a sense of peace, a quietness I’ve never heard before. I can feel it all through my body, I have ever since I first saw him and I’ve not been able to think of much else. Even my sense of time is askew, how did it get so late? The stars have come out and I have to stop and light my lantern.

   He has brought me to the edge of the glade, I can still hear the festivities, the music is loud and cheerful and I can’t help but smile at the stranger in front of me.

   His face is stoic and does not reveal a thought, not even as he’s grabbing for something under his overcoat. The eerie feeling is back and I take a step backwards and through the light of the lantern I see something glimmer in his hand as he pulls out a dagger. For a second I’m mesmerised by the strange looking thing. I’m frozen in disbelief and I’m just about to simply ask what is going on as he thrust for me.

   I push him, both hands right in the chest, and I run. It’s dark and I cannot see, but I can hear the music. I run, but don’t know where. I scream, and I choke on my tears. I don’t know where he is, I cannot see.

   I listen for the music, my breathing, my crying, and my gasping is all I hear. I have to be silent. I have to hear where I should go. I hide behind a tree, the moss is cold and wet.

   I hear the music and I can see some light from the moon through the leaves. I run. My heart is in my throat and the woods are spinning. I think I hear him. We didn’t walk this far, it has to be here. Why didn’t I stay on the path?

   I run for the light; it’s the edge of the woods. I think I see lights from the tents, I scream. I scream and I run, the dress has tangled my feet. I’m running and I’m trapped, I’m screaming but I cannot hear my screams. Where am I? Someone please help!

   He’s behind me! I turn but he’s not there. There’s a flash and I’m on the ground. He has my lantern, I see his face and I scream. He’s standing above me and now he’s smiling, the glare from his eyes is all I see. I’m kicking empty air, I pull and punch and tare and kick, I try to get up.

   He plunges the dagger into my chest and my heart explodes. I am trapped. I cannot breathe. He plunges again, and again. He plunges the dagger into my gut and I cannot feel a thing,

I wake up from my own screams. I am screaming, and coughing, I have to gasp for air. I can breathe. My heart is racing, my limbs are shaking, I am weeping, but I can breathe. I take several deep breaths. From the moonlight I can see my own hand cramping and holding my now partially torn sheets.

   Slowly I realise where I am, who I am, and what has just happened. I am beginning to breathe normally again, I can let go of the sheets, and on shaky legs I manage to get out of the bed. I am soaking wet.

   What in the name of all the deities was that? I was at a wedding, no a festival! A queer looking man, a very intense man, murdered me and to make the whole situation queerer still, I was a woman. Never have I had such a queer dream.

   I stagger through the room and fumble for my cigarette case, I can scarcely make it out by the pale moonlight. It is still early, not even midnight yet, I only got two or three hours sleep. As I light a cigarette and begin to analyse what had just happened I can only be sure of one thing, I will not be getting anymore sleep tonight. And with that realisation I put on a pot of coffee and I think to myself that I do not have to be down at the newspaper until tomorrow afternoon, I am just picking up a couple of pay checks anyway, I might just skip it all together and wait a few days.

A few dozen old newspaper articles, half a thick war novel (of which I do not recall a thing) and several pots of coffee later, I still cannot let go of that dream. I decide to head down to the office after all.

   I grab my hat and my scarf and the heavy overcoat; this October has been really cold (as most Octobers are) and shut the door to the apartment and hopefully the dream behind me.

   My trusted and rusty bicycle is still leaning against the brownstone as I get out on the street. No one would want to steal an old and rusty thing like that I tell myself for the hundredth time.

   I get to the newspaper a little after one o’clock. The other reporters are just coming back from lunch and the first one I see is “Fat Eddie” Hamlin, a man of many words and few I find of interest, a middle age man who like to drink too much and recent everyone’s successes except his own, should he ever have any. I hurry my way through all the buzzing, trying to avoid them all but Eddie in particular, and as I shut the door to the Boss’ office I scarcely hear him murmur something about the “boy wonder”.

   The Boss is sucking on a fat cigar, as he always is, shouting at people over the telephone with his booming voice that commands authority and tell the tale of a man who has done this job for a very long time.

   After he has slammed the receiver and voiced his wonder for why I am at the office on one of the few days I have off he hand me my pay checks and expresses his gratitude. Well earned money he tells me, more than he could say for the rest of the sorry group of misfits. He calls me Parker. He is the only one who has ever called me by my surname. Ever since I started working for him I have seen it as a sign of respect. All my life I have only ever been called Billy, or William by my late mother and by my professors.

    We have a rather lengthy conversation about the last couple of articles I wrote. He was amazed how I managed to out-scoop all the other papers in the city several times in the last few months, something I have wondered myself. Recently I seem to stumble across evidence and find witnesses and other people who would like to talk without making the effort one would think it takes, it is almost as though I know where to go even before it comes to mind.

   I feel uneasy about it all and I change the conversation to work, new work and I ask him for a new assignment; something to keep my mind off last nights dream. I can tell he is hesitant to give me something, instead he gives me a speech on how nothing is really happening except for the situation in Europe, how war is hell and we are selling papers on how people are fleeing for their lives. The only tip he has gotten all day from any of the informers down at the police station is not all that reliable. The informant is a semi-corrupt cop named Thompson who sells stories to feed his gambling habit. Finally he tells me that there supposedly was a murder last night, a woman was stabbed to death at a wedding down at the Garden Festival.

   Needless to say I was utterly dazed, I felt all the colour drain from my face, for a moment it was as though time slowed down to a halt and I must have looked whiter than a ghost.

   I must not have spoke for what seemed as several minutes. The Boss looked upon me with a inquisitive face and proceeded to tell me that he was sending Hamlin down there to investigate. All I could bring myself to do was to protest and demand that I be put on the case. I could tell the Boss did not entirely believe me when I told him that I simply needed a distraction and that this story might be good for a crime novel I was writing. I had to agree to take Eddie with me and let him take charge on this.

   After I found Eddie, slumped over his desk drinking Scotch from a paper cup pretending it was coffee, I explained the situation. I could tell he was not happy about it as he shoved me into the back of a cab, but then again; neither was I.

Thompson was waiting for us when we arrived at the downtown police station, the Boss must have phoned ahead. Looking at his rat-like face, with pinpricks where eyes should be, I am not sure if I managed to hide my detest for the man during our questioning.

   The body of a young woman was found early this morning on a field close to the festival tents. The killer had not bothered hiding the body and they believe she was murdered right on the spot where she was found. She had been found by a couple of wedding guests who had returned in the morning to collect some personal belongings they had left behind.

   As Thompson told the tale I just stood there and could not get the image of the glaring man standing over me in the field, with a twisted smile and a tortured face he stabbed me in the chest. As I think of it now I can still feel her pain, the jagged blade cutting through my flesh and scraping my bones. I’ve got a very queer feeling about all of this, but who can I tell that would not think me mad?

   Her name was Madeline Stuart, a girl from a wealthy family that own and operates the rubber factory and half a dozen other businesses in town. The police have tried to contact her father but he is out of the country. Her brother, Patrick, is up at the sanatorium where he has apparently been a patient for years. They have sent officers there but Robert refuses to talk to any of them, he is tied to a bed and has been for years. He’s a “nut-job” as Thompson so delicately described it, but he cannot have killed her or witnessed any of it.

   Eddie decided to go to the coroner’s office for the final report. I have to admit I was glad Eddie took it upon himself, I am not sure I could face Madeline’s dead body just now. Eddie also thought I was wasting time for wanting to go and see this brother of her's. Robert could not have killed her or seen who did, Eddie told me, something I need not be told since I did see who the murderer was, but this queer feeling of mine tells me there is something more going on here, something terribly foul and something I believe Robert will know.

  

The rain fell heavy when I got back out on the street, I waved down a cab and the driver gave me a queer look as I told him to take me to the sanatorium, the asylum as the people in the city always called it. I could not be sure whether the driver thought me to be a patient or a doctor, either way I could tell he had preferred another route.

   The Bellevue Sanatorium is housed within a mid-century neo-classical building. The façade is quite magnificent, frightfully so with its tall columns and large windows; all barred to keep people from attempting escapes. The private cemetery within the tall stone fence did not take away from the overall intimidating and jarring feeling I got when I walked up the steps to the massive iron-barred doors.

   Originally I had planned to introduce myself as the worldly newspaper reporter I believe myself to be, but I quickly decided that I would have a greater chance to get to see Robert if I instead pretended to be an old friend of his. A fool-proof plan I believed until the nurse who greeted me looked upon me with great scepticism. In the end she did send an orderly to find out whether or not Mr Stuart would see me. Now the plan hung on the thread of hope that Robert was either a man in desperate need of company, and just so happened to carry a greater than the average person’s grudge against the police (who he had refused to see), or that he was mentally disabled enough to believe I was indeed an old friend of his. Surely I would not be so fortunate that he actually had a friend by the fictitious name I gave the nurse.

   Walking through the corridors the thought struck me that this is not a good place to regain one’s sanity. I could not decide whether the walls were a dark green or dirty-grey colour, the grit and grime in the crevices played their part in the illusion.

   Robert Stuart is a very thin man. Exceptionally tall (his legs and feet did not fit entirely in the bed!) and very thin with hollowed out cheeks, a razor sharp chin, grey sickly skin and greasy hair. Bathing the patients did not seem to be a high priority, the room reeked of sickness and filth, human filth.

   I told the orderly who had brought me to Robert’s room to leave us to ourselves. Once he had shut the door I introduced myself as a reporter investigating the death of his sister.

   At first Robert had remained very calm, a man of few words I thought, either that or he was heavily medicated which would better explain the restraints that tied his arms and legs to the bed, but he soon got agitated when I began my inquiry into who could possibly have wanted to hurt Madeline.

   “Wicked men everywhere, after us all, no one else could see. Only Madeline could feel them. They are there; everywhere. Always looking, always plotting. Behind you, behind you!” Robert shrieked.

   Possibly it was my imagination getting the better of me; I felt a chill on my neck but when I turned around there was nothing there.

   Had it not been for my dream last night I would have written off these words as the feverish ramblings of a man cursed with delirium.

   I was hesitant to ask, by now I was plainly aware that the answers I would get would create even more confusion, but I had to know who these men were, where they are and why they wanted to kill Madeline.

   “Not men. Not anymore. They are everywhere, they are keeping me here. The screams! The screams from the others! Always screaming, Madeline could feel them, that is why she is dead. She only told me and dr. Bailey.”

   Bailey? I recognised the name. A further inquiry into Roberts mind confirmed what I had suspected.

   Dr. Arthur Bailey was a disgraced anthropology professor and archaeologist who had been shunned from the university after many years for “baseless results, fabricated evidence, threatening witnesses,“ among other allegations. He had once been the expert in his field but everything had come into questioning at the hearing where he lost his seat at the university, the lawsuit against a former colleague and the respect of the entire academic world.

   It would seem the rather peculiar coincidence that I happened to come across this very article in the newspaper this morning.

   Robert on the other hand did not describe dr. Bailey in any manner or form; he had only confirmed Bailey as a doctor from the university, someone who had seen Madeline regularly. Unfortunately Bailey had never been to see Robert, that much I gather for he could not tell me what Bailey and Madeline had discussed.

   Robert was slipping in and out of consciousness, continuing on in incoherent ramblings. Every now and then he would seize-up, let out a shriek and curse the demons for keeping him here.

   I scarcely wanted to believe it but no matter how much I tried to convince myself that these were all just coincidences, that this husk of a man was simply insane, I could not. The murder of Madeline, which I had experienced in a dream, was too frightful to ignore. I have to find Bailey.