Nick ran his fingers through his hair and over the back of his neck, the reality of the dream almost too much for him. It wasn’t an ordinary nightmare where he would be running, with a huge monster panting in pursuit. This was frightening. Like a memory. Like some damned fantastic memory.
He stood up and patted her shoulder. “Go back to sleep, Beth,” he told her gently. “I’m going downstairs.”
“Shall I turn on a light?”
[p45]
“No. It might cause the neighbors to wonder.” He walked to the door of the bedroom. “The moon is bright enough.”
He walked into the hall, feeling his way in the dark places, and down the stairs into the living room. As he sat in the chair near the window, he thought about the dream. It bothered him, because it was unlike a dream; it had the weird consistency and logic of a memory, yet seemed almost supernatural ... Hell, what kind of thing had huge, yellow eyes and stood nine feet tall? What sort of a world had a violet sky and grey-green rocks? The whole damned thing had the scent of a Walt Disney movie, the colors vivid and sharp, the landscape seemingly done by a watercolor brush.
Thista.
Apparently it was some kind of planet and he hoped that Beth was right. Would it be possible for a man to get so confused via a crack on the head, that he believed he had lived through the literature he’d once read? What would he dream about next? Macbeth? Treasure Island? Christ, what a world!
If he could get to a doctor, a headshrinker, it might all be ironed out. They would get things squared away in a short while, but hell ... suppose I’m Public Enemy Number One, or something. Thirteen months! In thirteen months kings have been broken, dynasties crushed ... What had happened to him in the thirteen months that he had been out of touch? One thing he was sure of; he hadn’t been laying around. In a stretch of time like that, he had worked, eaten, slept, loved ... Maybe he had married again! An almost comical thought, compared to the possibility that he could be a killer, a bank robber; there were a million [p46] things he could have done.
A psychologist? Nope. That was out of the question, until he knew more about Nicholas Danson. And learning more about himself would be a real problem. The cabin that Beth had spoken of would probably show him nothing. After a period of a year, there would be damned little trail left to hunt along. There would be almost nothing. Whatever had been there, would have probably been sifted through by the guy, the detective, Nolan Brice. Brice! Of all the friends for him to have, he had to be saddled to Brice! He’d have to be real careful where that character was concerned because the slightest slip would set the cop on his trail like a blood hound.
The crackup? Now there was something. He would always be stuck with the question of how he had managed to get out of that mangled mass of metal with merely cuts and bruises. But he could chalk that up to dumb luck, or something. The thing that worried him was had he left a clue that could trace him here? He had burned the flying suit ... he had tried to cover it up to Andy ... A lot of things about the smashed aircraft bothered him. Things like the flying suit; it had been made of strange material; but hell, he’d burned that thing. There would be no problem with that.