Bad Dreams Read Online Free PDF

that whispered inside her skull. He touched his head gently to hers and sadly tasted the emptiness within. Briefly, he thought there was something, but it was just a memory of the unending winds that forced this girl, and all like her, to and fro without regard.
    Strangely, he did not feed off her.

5
    T here were Monsters, Anne knew. It was a secret she shared with Judi. Their father had met a Monster, and lost, before they were born. Anne knew all about it. She had seen the kinescopes. She knew the face of the Monster, and that their family bogeyman had once had a name, Hugh Farnham, but that was the least of it. He went on forever, revealed only by a tone of voice, a strident attitude, an indestructible set of mind, a few whistled bars of an old film theme tune.
    ‘You have to stop thinking in absolutes,’ her journalism tutor had told her. ‘Life isn’t a movie, with good guys and bad guys, heroes and monsters.’
    She knew there were no heroes, but she could see the Monsters everywhere. Hugh Farnham was long gone, but there were others. PC Barry ‘The Batterer’ Erskine, the hate-consumed Ulster clergyman, the calf-faced girl on Page Three of
The Sun
, the presidential advisor, the Soviet chess grand master, the old hippie rock musician, the Middle Eastern mullah, the television quiz show MC, the political columnist in the downmarket Sunday paper, the science fiction writer hawking the fourth volume of his trilogy, and a thousand other, lesser, demons.
    ‘Annie, did you know they had your old man on film in the archives?’ Pat, her college roommate, had asked. ‘They’ve got his appearance before McCarthy.’
    Strictly speaking, it had not been McCarthy. He had gone down with the astonishing hearings in 1954, when he had been crucified in court for daring to graduate from the easy pickings of Hollywood to try to detect traces of Communist infiltration in President Eisenhower’s
Alma Mater
, the army. Father had been up before Hugh Farnham three years later, at the tail-end of the blacklist.
    She had resisted the temptation for weeks, but finally she gave in. She had to scratch the itch, even if it turned into an open sore. Frankly pleading her special interest to the head of the Modern American History department, she was given access. She had to thread the projector herself, and confront the Monster in a draughty basement screening room with uncomfortable seats and a strict no smoking rule. In those days, she had been a smoker. In those days, like everyone else, she had even played around with drugs.
    The kinescopes were not properly catalogued, so she had to watch until she found what she was looking for. Her father did not show up until the fourteenth of twenty half-hour reels, covering nearly ten years of different sessions, but she was still fascinated. It was Hugh Farnham, the Monster. Joe McCarthy had got all the contemporary press coverage and had an-ism named after him, and Richard Nixon had used the hearings as a springboard into grown-up politics. Even Roy Cohn, the legal
Eminence grise
who had died of AIDS a few years back, was comparatively well-remembered. But Farnham was Something Else. The others were in it for patriotism, self-advancement, megalomania, paranoid self-justification and financial gain. Half-way through his delicate dissection of Martin Ritt, Anne realized with a dizzying rush of vertigo that Farnham tormented people because it was his idea of fun. It met a need in him he could not slake any other way.
    His eyes were nothing in particular in black and white, certainly not burning coals of melodramatic malevolence. And his voice was like a Broadway actor’s in a Shakespeare play, unaccented but more British than American. He had always been something of a mystery man; in theory, Anne knew where he had come from and what he had done before the hearings, but, watching his smile, she found she had forgotten the precise details. His face was unforgettable, as if the skin of a pale