The Nightmare Factory Read Online Free PDF Page A

where anything could happen as long as it approached the hideous. Morbidity had never been among her strong points, and she loathed its intrusion on her character. And for all his ready reassurance about the able security of the prison, David also seemed to be profoundly uneasy. He was sitting very still now, holding his drink between his knees and appearing to listen for something.
    “What’s wrong, David?” asked Leslie.
    “I thought I heard…a sound.”
    “A sound like what?”
    “Can’t describe it exactly. A faraway noise.”
    He stood up and looked around, as if to see whether the sound had left some tell-tale clue in the surrounding stillness of the house, perhaps a smeary sonic print somewhere.
    “I’m going to check on Norleen,” he said, setting his glass down rather abruptly on the table beside his chair and splashing the drink around. He walked across the living room, down the front hallway, up the three segments of the stairway, and then down the upstairs hall. Peeking into his daughter’s room he saw her tiny figure resting comfortably, a sleepy embrace wrapped about the form of a stuffed Bambi. She still occasionally slept with an inanimate companion, even though she was getting a little old for this. But her psychologist father was careful not to question her right to this childish comfort. Before leaving the room Dr. Munck lowered the window which was partially open on that warm spring evening.
    When he returned to the living room he delivered the wonderfully routine message that Norleen was peacefully asleep. In a gesture containing faint overnotes of celebratory relief, Leslie made them two fresh drinks, after which she said:
    “David, you said you had an ‘overlong chat’ with that John Doe. Not that I’m morbidly curious or anything, but did you ever get him to reveal very much about himself?”
    “Sure,” Dr. Munck replied, rolling an ice cube around in his mouth. His voice was now more relaxed.
    “He told me everything about himself, and on the surface all of it was nonsense. I asked him in a casually interested sort of way where he was from.
    “‘No place,’ he replied like a psychotic simpleton.
    “‘No place?’ I probed.
    “‘Yes, precisely there, Herr Doktor.’
    “‘Where were you born?’ I asked in another brilliant alternate form of the question.
    “‘Which time do you mean, you meany?’ he said back to me, and so forth. I could go on with this dialogue—”
    “You do a pretty good John Doe imitation, I must say.”
    “Thank you, but I couldn’t keep it up for very long. It wouldn’t be easy to imitate all his different voices and levels of articulateness. He may be something akin to a multiple personality, I’m not sure. I’d have to go over the tape of the interview to see if any patterns of coherency turn up, possibly something the detectives could use to establish the man’s identity, if he has one left. The tragic part is that this is all, of course, totally useless information as far as the victims of Doe’s crimes are concerned…and as far as I’m concerned it really is too. I’m no aesthete of pathology. It’s never been my ambition to study disease merely for its own sake, without effecting some kind of improvement, trying to help someone who would just as soon see me dead, or worse. I used to believe in rehabilitation, maybe with too much naiveté and idealism. But those people, those things at the prison are only an ugly stain on existence. The hell with them,” he concluded, draining his glass until the ice cubes rattled.
    “Want another?” Leslie asked with a smooth therapeutic tone to her voice.
    David smiled now, the previous outburst having purged him somewhat. “Let’s get drunk, shall we?”
    Leslie collected his glass for a refill. Now there was reason to celebrate, she thought. Her husband was not giving up his work from a sense of ineffectual failure but from anger. The anger would turn to resignation, the resignation to