Screaming Science Fiction by Brian Lumley Page B

probes, but all automated, computer driven, and no astronauts worth the mention. We still have the manned, Lego-like, Earth-orbiting international space-station twirling and twinkling away up there, and the Moonbase that no one’s been back to for seven years since its dome was popped by a pea-sized Leonid meteorite, but that’s it, that’s your lot.
    No great future in astronautics, obviously.
    But with my grades I could at least theorize on space, the universe and like that, even if I wasn’t going to go out there. And with my aptitude for physics—of the more truly physical variety as opposed to, or hand in hand with, the theoretical—I certainly wasn’t going to miss out on a job in some research laboratory; just about any research facility, for that matter. But the dreams (in fact they were nightmares) came a long time before that, when I was eight or nine years old….
     

     
    They were sort of vague at first.
    I remember my father comforting me, sitting on my bed with his arm around me, holding me tight. “What was all that about?” he asked me, with a frown on a face that mine was the image of except for all the lines, that face which on waking I imagined had solidified right out of my nightmare, causing me to shrink back from him. “What was it, Davy? Some kind of bad dream?”
    And I remember telling him, “It was a face—I think it was your face, Dad—but the mouth was all twisted up and hurting, and the face was all blurred. You were shouting at me, I think. Telling me not to do it.” And I sat there shivering.
    “I was telling you not to do it? Hey, what’s all this, son? Are you feeling guilty about something?”
    Guilty? Me? But have you ever known a nine-year-old boy who didn’t feel guilty about something or other? Like his curiosity about girls and their differences? Or the stolen cigarette that made him sick behind the garden shed last Thursday? Or the ten-dollar bill he found in the road and didn’t tell the neighborhood cop about? Or the sparrow he killed with his BB gun before putting the weapon in its box and locking it, and shoving it to the back of a shelf where he couldn’t any longer see it; out of sight, out of mind sort of thing? Of course I felt guilty. But that’s not what the dream had been about. And so:
    “No,” I told him, still shivering in his arms. “It was just a dream—a bad dream, that’s all—but it’s gone now.” Which was true enough at the time, except I didn’t know then that it hadn’t gone very far. Or not far enough….
     

     
    It happened a good many times after that, too many times, while I was still a kid; but on every occasion it was dark and vague, just like the first time, like a bad memory that keeps floating to the surface but never enough that you recognize its origin or what it’s about. Guilt? Conscience? No. I don’t think so. I mean, I had never done anything that bad, had I? Apart from the usual troubles that kids get into my childhood had been pretty much idyllic. I had loved my Ma and Da, and in return had been much loved.
    Yet I must have been to blame for something. The dream, my nightmare, must surely be something out of my past, some badly scarred bit of mental baggage or other. Or so I supposed, as I quickly came to dread it without quite knowing why. For let’s face it: it wasn’t that much of a nightmare, now was it? What, a dark blurred face and an obscure warning?
    That was all it was, yes. Yet every time it came I would wake up in my clammy, tumbled bed, with those anxious, urgent, distant but insistent demands echoing over and over in my head even as they receded:
    “Don’t do it! Don’t do it! Don’t make it happen! For God’ sake, don’t…do…it!”
     

     
    There were periods, weeks and months at a time, when I slept deep and peacefully and my dreams were nothing much out of the ordinary. And at times like that I tended to forget about the vague visage and its meaningless warning. Or rather I tried to