The Beekeeper's Apprentice - Laurie R. King [125]
To my surprise it was not brandy, but water, cool, sweet water, sweeter than honey wine. I put the empty glass on the table with hands that were almost steady, and shivered from the drying sweat.
“Thank you, Holmes. Sorry I woke you. Again. You can go back to bed now.”
“Pull the bedclothes over you, Russell; you’ll take cold. I’ll just sit for a moment, if you don’t mind.”
He brought a chair around to the head of my bed and sat down, crossed his pyjama-clad legs, and took out his pipe, and I curled up and listened to the old, familiar sounds of a pipe being filled and lit: the scrape and tap as he cleaned the bowl, the rustle of the tobacco pouch, the rattle of the matchbox, the quick scratch and flare of the match lighting, the suck of air drawing, and several quick puffs of his lips around the stem. The sharp smell of sulphur and the sweet wash of pipe tobacco filled the air, and Holmes sat and smoked, unobtrusively, undemandingly.
My wits gradually returned from the realm of Pan and, as they had a thousand times before, turned to the Dream. This upwelling of my subconscious had driven me to the works of Freud and Jung and the others of the European schools of psychoanalytic theory—countless hours of self-hypnosis, self-analysis, dream symbolism. I had analysed it, dissected it, thrown the full force of my mind against it. I even tried ignoring it. No matter what the approach, eventually there came an-other night when I was flung again into the hell and the agony of the thing.
The one thing I refused to try was telling someone about it. One morning my aunt had become too persistent in her questions about my “nightmares,” and I had hit her in the face and knocked her to the floor. My neighbours in lodgings had commented on my nocturnal dis-turbances, and I had passed it off as studying too hard. The thought of telling someone, and having to see their face afterward, had always clamped my mouth down on the words, but now, to my exquisite hor-ror and relief, I heard the words trickle from my mouth. Slowly at first, inexorably, they pushed themselves into the dim room.
“My brother—my brother was a genius. Reading by three, complex geometry by five. His potential was huge. He was nine when he died, five years younger than I. And I, I—killed him.” My harsh voice faded, leaving the low sound of engines and the burble of the pipe. No reac-tion from Holmes. I turned onto my back and put my arm across my eyes, as if the hall light hurt them, but in truth it was that I couldn’t bear to see his face as I told him this.
“I have this—this Dream. Only it’s not a dream, it’s a memory, every minute, tedious, horrible detail of it. We were in a car, you see, driving along the coast south of San Francisco. My father was going into the Army the following week. He had been rejected because of his bad leg, but finally he persuaded them to put him into—” I laughed bitterly. “You could guess this, I think—into Intelligence work. We were taking a last family weekend at our cabin in the woods, but I was—being difficult, as my mother put it. I was fourteen, and had wanted to go with some school friends to Yosemite, but had to go to the cabin instead. My brother was being particularly beastly, my mother was upset over Dad leaving, and Dad was distracted by busi-ness and the Army. A merry company, you see. Well, the road is bad there, and at several places it runs along the top of some cliffs over the Pacific. A drop of a couple hundred feet. To make a long story short, we were just coming up to one of these, with a blind corner to the left at the top of it, when I started screaming at my brother. My father turned around at the wheel to tell us to shut up, and the car drifted across the centre. There was another car coming around the corner, going very fast, and it hit us. Our car spun around, I was thrown out, and the last I saw was the outline of my brother’s head through the back window as the car went over the side. Dad had just filled the petrol tank. There was nothing left of them. Any of them. They scraped together enough