An Evil Guest by Gene Wolfe Read Free Book Online

must explain is how badly you need sleep. Tonight you’ll have to take your part in the final performance of
The Red Spot
, and yours must be the greatest performance of your life. You’ve had very little sleep, and I’m sure you must be exhausted. I want you to sleep in the car as we drive home. You should sleep all morning, if you can. I know you must be very, very tired. . . .” Behind him: great, dark wings.
    The moonlight, Cassie reflected, streamed down upon this barren mountaintop as upon no place else on Earth.
    C ASSIE woke in her own bed, in her apartment. For a time that seemed terribly short, that fact did not trouble her in the least. She had returned from the theater, gone to bed, and had a strange dream.
    Sometimes she had strange dreams. Didn’t everybody?
    Dreams, in her experience, faded quickly. They became less real, less and less compelling, as she thought about them. This one seemed to solidify, like a jinni coalescing from lamp smoke. Before she finished brushing her teeth, her hands were trembling.
    Her door was closed and locked, bolted and chained. Her windows were locked as well. The alarm was on. The dress she had worn home from the theater hung neatly in her closet. The warmer dress she had put on for the short walk to Baskin-Robbins hung neatly beside it. Its loden wool held a sweet and smoky aroma, with a bitter undercurrent.
    Her white bra was in the clothes hamper. So, somewhat oddly, was a pair of taupe panty hose she recognized as her own; oddly because the feet hung in shreds.
    The pictures! Suddenly, vividly, she remembered that the dark slender figure in her dream had handed her two photographs. She had peered at them in a bad light for a second or two, and put them in her purse.
    They were there. She lay them on her coffee table: image-onlys of a middle-aged, clean-shaven man who wore glasses only in the full-length shot. “Soft face,” Cassie murmured. “Hard eyes. Big shoulders? Thick neck.”
    She turned one over; someone had written on the back.
    6′ 2″ About 240. Jogs. Often wears sports clothes, sunglasses. Watch is a cell phone. Former builder, diplomat. Blackmail, espionage, murder, alchemy???
    Walks unseen
.
    On the back of the other:
    Up to something big. Find out what it is, Miss Casey. Be very careful
.
    She tapped Reis’s image, but heard only silence.
    Sharon might be anywhere now, and was most likely out of the office on some assignment. Cassie dialed her cell phone.
    “You have Sharon Bench.”
    “It’s Cassie, Sharon. Can you talk?”
    “Absolutely! How was Dr. Chase?”
    Cassie paused, wrestling her uncertainty. “Weird. Much weirder than I expected. Sexy, and I hadn’t expected that either.”
    “Did you . . . ?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Come on, Cassie. Come clean. I won’t print it.”
    “I don’t know. There’s a—a vacancy, I mean. A blank spot. Things must have happened last night that I don’t remember. I thought it was all a dream at first.”
    “Is this really Cassie? You don’t quite sound like her. Your voice is . . . I don’t know. Maybe you’re getting a cold.”
    “Maybe I talked a lot last night and don’t remember it.”
    “Like that, huh? Booze?”
    “No. I had nothing to drink. Nothing to eat, either. I—I stuck a little pink plastic spoon in some sherbet once. I remember that. But it never made it to my mouth. Right now I’m hungry enough to bite off my own fingers.”
    “Well, fix yourself something.”
    “I’m going to Walker’s as soon as we hang up. I’m going to order everything.”
    “Not the apple thing. It would feed an army.”
    “Dessert,” Cassie said firmly. She licked her lips. “Listen, Sharon. Can you meet me there? I’ll buy your lunch.”
    “Maybe. When?”
    “I’ll need forty minutes to get dressed and get there. Get a table if you get there first?”
    “Maybe. Listen, Cassie. Do you remember my mother? You met her when she flew up from Florida.”
    “Sure.”
    “What’s her