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Four months ago...
The dreamer followed the burning footprints through endless halls of fire. He knew his quarry was there, hiding in the shadows of the flames. From time to time he came across ghostly traces of Quinton Zane, faint clues that assured him he was not hallucinating.
The dreamer was ever vigilant. He followed every seething print, every trace of Zane, no matter how faint.
Tonight was not his first trip into the maze. He came this way often and not always in pursuit of Zane. He frequently hunted other killers in the same maze. On those occasions he was almost always successful. He was, after all, very good at what he did. But the calm he experienced in the aftermath of a successful search for a killer other than Zane never lasted long.
There would be no rest until he found Quinton Zane.
The dreamer was not oblivious to the risks he took in the fire maze. He was well aware that he paid a high price for his refusal to turn back from the hunt. But he could not abandon the search even though he feared that with each journey into the nightmare the probability of getting lost in the halls of flames increased.
The sense that time was running out drove him. He could not stop now, even though he was grimly aware that one night he would go too far...
The dream ended when the screaming started.
That was pretty much the story of his life, at least when it came to his relationships with women, Jack thought. But this time things were supposed to have a different ending. Then again, he'd hoped for a different ending last time, too. They said that the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
“Dr. Lancaster. Jack , wake up. Wake up. I'll have to call security if you don't wake up right now. Please, you must wake up.”
Jack pulled himself out of the dream with a monumental effort of will. The urge to plunge back into the fiery maze had grown markedly stronger in recent months. It was getting harder to wake up.
But Dr. Margaret Burke was staring at him with the same expression of shock and poorly veiled fear that he'd seen on the faces of other women. The difference this time was that Margaret was not sharing his bed. She was the director of the sleep clinic that had provided him with the bed he had been occupying tonight.
He groaned when he realized he was no longer in the bed in question; no longer attached to the beeping, buzzing monitors. He was standing on the far side of the small room.
To buy himself a little time he went to the table and picked up his eyeglass case. He opened the case with great precision, removed the steel-framed glasses and put them on with both hands.
When he was ready he took a deep, steadying breath and risked a quick glance at the mirror on the wall.
One look was enough to confirm what he had already suspected. He was a very scary sight.
His hair was sticking out at wild angles. The shapeless hospital gown he had worn to bed had come undone, exposing way too much skin. Electrical leads that had connected him to an array of instruments and monitors dangled from the various places on his body where they were still attached with sticky tape.
Even if he ignored his eyes, he had to admit that he looked a lot like a modern-day version of Frankenstein's monster. Make that Jack of the walking dead.
He was never sure which frightened others the most—the sleepwalking or the weirdness in his gaze when he woke up. He had been informed by more than one bed partner that he looked flat-out crazy when he surfaced from the fire maze dream. Evidently he emerged with the vibe of a man who saw visions.
The modern world did not have a lot of room for people who hallucinated, let alone for those who could do it on demand.
It took a minute to regain what he knew Margaret would consider a normal expression. The glasses helped mute some of the effect. That was why he had taken the time to put them on even before he secured the hospital gown.
Margaret was at the door, one hand wrapped around the knob, ready to bolt to safety. She clutched her small computer as though it were a Kevlar vest.
After extensive research he had selected her clinic primarily because Burke had impressed him with her published papers on sleep disorders and her stated interest in exploring the phenomenon of lucid dreaming.
“Sorry,” he said. He raised a hand to wipe the sweat off his forehead and came away with two electrical leads. Annoyed with himself and the whole damned situation, he tossed the leads aside and looked at Margaret. “I told you that if I dreamed the fire maze dream I might not be able to control it or the sleepwalking. You said you could help me.”
Margaret made a valiant effort to regain her professional composure, but she maintained her white-knuckled grip on the doorknob.
“I thought I could deal with your unusual problem,” she said.
“You mean you thought it would be interesting to run some experiments on me. That's what this is all about, isn't it?” He swept out a hand to indicate the sleep clinic. “I was just a lab rat as far as you were concerned. You were probably planning to write up my case for some journal.”
“That's not true. Your dreams are unique, Dr. Lancaster. I've never met anyone who experiences lucid dreaming the way you do. But that nightmare you just had—”
“I told you, it's not a normal nightmare—assuming there is such a thing. It's a lucid dream that I constructed from scratch. I use it to do my work. But the maze keeps getting bigger. More convoluted. I'm losing control of it. I need to find the center.”
“Do you even realize just how crazy that sounds?” Margaret's voice rose. “You're an academic, Jack. You've taught college-level classes on the subject of the criminal mind. You wrote a couple of books. Surely you understand that what you're describing is some sort of bizarre obsession. With fire, no less. I'm afraid it will only get worse, and if that happens you may become—”
She stopped very suddenly.
“May become what?” he asked quietly. “Dangerous? Paranoid? Mentally unstable? Is that what you were going to say?”
“Look, I really wish I could help you, but you need another kind of doctor. This is way out of my league. The truth is that the scientific study of dreams has not advanced very far. There is still so much we don't know. I would strongly suggest that you consult a psychiatrist, someone who will have a better idea of what kind of meds might help you.”
“Been there.”
He risked another glance in the mirror. He thought his eyes looked normal now. He hoped they looked normal. But they were his eyes, he reminded himself, so it followed that, naturally, they would look okay to him. The question was, what did Burke see?
She frowned. “You've tried medication therapy? You didn't mention that when you consulted me.”
“Because it didn't work.” He ripped off a couple more stray leads and went to the small closet that held his clothes. “Looks like we both wasted our time. I'll get out of your lab.”
“Dr. Lancaster. Jack. I'm sorry. I really hoped that I could diagnose your sleep disorder and help you overcome it.”
He opened the closet and took out the white button-down shirt he had hung there earlier that evening. It was one of a dozen white button-down shirts he owned. He only bought white shirts. That way he did not waste time figuring out which shirt to wear. White worked with both of his dark blue business suits and it worked with any of the six pairs of khaki trousers that constituted most of the rest of his wardrobe. He also owned four ties.
He found life complicated enough as it was. He tried to simplify wherever possible.
“I told you, I'm not looking for a diagnosis,” he said. “I'm looking for a way to get better control of the damned dream. I can't make it work the way I need it to work anymore.”
“I realize that when you go into a lucid dreaming state you are aware that you're dreaming,” Margaret said. “I also understand that you feel as if you are manipulating some aspects of the dream.”
“I don't feel as if I'm manipulating elements of the dream, I do manipulate them.”
“A lot of people experience that sensation from time to time,” Margaret said. “That's the definition of a lucid dream. The experience usually occurs when an individual is just starting to wake up. There is a very short period of time during which you realize that you are still dreaming. But what you're describing—this fire maze—that's more in the nature of a... uh—”
She broke off, flushing a dull red.
“More in the nature of a hallucination?” he finished. “A vision? I'm aware of that, Dr. Burke. I'm going to get dressed now. If you want to stand there and watch, that's up to you.”
Margaret opened her mouth but evidently thought better of whatever it was she had intended to say. Without another word, she jerked open the door and hurried out into the hall.
Jack waited until the door closed.
“Shit,” he said.
He ripped another lead off his chest and tossed the hospital gown aside.
Margaret Burke wasn't the first woman to flee a bedroom that happened to have him in it. Going forward he would resume his long-standing policy: Always sleep alone.
He found his precisely folded white undershirt on a shelf in the closet. He unfolded it and pulled it on over his head. All of his undershirts were white. They worked well with the twelve white button-down shirts.