Dead Man's Gift 03 - Today by Simon Kernick Read Free Book Online

running out of control. But it’s not just that.’ I took a moment to think hard, trying to take myself back into the dream. I pictured the blonde girl again. Her deep blue eyes, the gentle curve of her lips. And immediately I knew what it was. ‘Infatuation,’ I told him, a certainty in my words. ‘I’m in love with this woman. And not just in the dream. I’ve met her before. I know her.’ I emphasized the last three words, almost spat them out.
    ‘Try to think, Matt,’ said Bronson soothingly. ‘Where do you know her from?’
    Once again I concentrated, summoning up every ounce of willpower as I tried to squeeze out anything important that might be drifting on the misty edges of my subconscious. But nothing happened, and the effort tired me. I shook my head, picked up the glass of water on the table next to me and took a big gulp. ‘Right now, that’s all I can tell you.’
    ‘We often find with amnesiacs that dreams take on a very realistic quality precisely because real memories are so scarce,’ said Dr Bronson.
    ‘It felt real.’
    ‘Were there any differences between the two dreams? Any details that were in one but not in the other? You see, Matt, it’s very rare to have exactly the same dream twice.’
    ‘It was exactly the same one,’ I said emphatically. ‘Down to the last detail. I told you, I’ve never had a recurring dream before and I don’t even dream that much. I mean, what is there to dream about? My subconscious is a pretty empty space so it’s not like I’ve got a great deal of available material. But this was different. Very different.’
    ‘Well, we know that at some point before your accident you were a police officer in London,’ Dr Bronson ventured. ‘Could the dream have something to do with anything you worked on?’
    ‘I really don’t know,’ I said, because I didn’t. I had no memory at all of being a police officer. According to Jane, my sister, on whom I relied for most of my information about my past, I worked in uniform in London for approximately five years, having had a career change from being a teacher. I was unmarried, had no steady girlfriend, and no one knew where I was going, where I’d just been, or why I was carrying no ID when the car I was driving careered off the road on that fateful night five months earlier.
    Wiping out everything I’d ever known.
    ‘This is where the hypnotherapy really helps us,’ said Dr Bronson, leaning forward. ‘Let’s put you under and see if we can extract some more from this dream. See where it leads us.’
    Part of the way through each of our sessions, Dr Bronson engaged in hypnotherapy with me. In other words, he put me into a trance. I never remembered anything about this part of the session; it remained a blank space, like my memory. I knew it was meant to be a way of pulling up memories from deep in my subconscious because Dr Bronson always told me so. Except he’d turned up nothing, other than some images from my childhood that were so vague I wasn’t even sure they were real.
    Part of me wanted to cooperate, to find out what this dream related to, but I was scared of where it might lead. Because if it was based on real events, then I was somehow involved – either directly or indirectly – in a murder. But my caution ran deeper than that. I was feeling less and less comfortable allowing Dr Bronson to put me in a position where I was completely vulnerable.
    ‘I’m sorry, Doc, I don’t think I can handle it today,’ I said, suppressing a fake yawn. ‘I don’t feel too good, to be honest. I could do with lying down.’
    ‘It would really help if you could stay awake for the next half an hour, Matt. This is all for your own good.’
    He was eyeing me with suspicion now. I didn’t want to upset him because it was possible I was wrong, and right then he was still the best hope of getting my old life back.
    ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a real opportunity here, and you know one of the things I like