Free The Deep Sea Diver's Syndrome by Serge Brussolo Page A

works on offer. This taste for art kept her from saving up any money, but she made no complaint. That first night, taking David by the hand, she’d led him through every room, showing him the dreams heaped on shelves and hutches like tchotchkes. The ectoplasms, each on their numbered pedestal as required by law, looked somewhat sappy amid her furnishings, a flowering of lace, placemats, and pink lampshades with pom-poms.
    “This one’s yours too!” Antonine trumpeted, twirling around.“And this one!” David was embarrassed. For a moment he felt like a prodigal husband watching his wife parade before him a string of children he was no longer able to recognize as really his own.
    “This one’s yours.” Yes—it was like she was picking and choosing from a litter. “This one’s yours, but that one’s from the postman …” She flaunted her infidelities with a tiny apologetic smile.
    “See,” she murmured at the end of the tour, “you could almost say I’m a fan.” David stammered something incomprehensible. He could recall with perfect clarity the circumstances surrounding the capture of each and every dream on display. The one over there on the mantle, by the little porcelain shepherdess mollycoddling a sheep in a pink bow—now that had been hard-won. Nadia had been wounded in the thigh by a guard who’d come charging from the back of the shop, and David had had to carry her on his shoulders while Jorgo covered their retreat, showering the front window with buckshot. Yes, the horrific din of explosions still rocked his ears. He saw the great yellow cartridges the breechblock ejected bouncing off the body of the car. And that other one over there, nestled by a seashell-covered box some laborious brush had inscribed with the legend
Souvenir de Sainte-Amine …
he’d had to extract that one from a booby-trapped safe that spat gouts of acid. The image of Nadia’s jacket sizzling at the bite of the corrosive liquid had stayed with him …
    “I don’t keep track of how much I spend,” Antonine explained. “At first, I was scared to raise my hand at the auctions. I felt like everyone was looking at me. Now I don’t think twice.I feel so good now that they’re there on my shelves, like little soldiers watching over me. I can’t tell you, the nightmares I used to have, the insomnia, how often I woke up screaming. And the knot here, between my breasts, like a fist squeezing the breath out of me. No matter what I did, I couldn’t get any sleep, couldn’t have nice dreams anymore, like I had when I was a girl. I was even afraid of going to bed at night. I’d pace around the bed, inventing a thousand excuses to postpone ever having to slip between the sheets.”
    She told him about the death of her husband, the baker, which had terrified her so. The victim of a stroke, he’d fallen face first into a tub of dough, and it had suffocated him. They’d never really managed to clean it all off afterwards, and he had to be buried that way, eyebrows and mustache thick with dough. It made him look like a clown who’d done a bad job taking off his makeup. Antonina hadn’t cried too much; he was an old man with bad kidneys who’d asked her to marry him when she was going through a rough patch—in fact, she’d just broken her wrist during a wrestling bout, and … Two weeks after the funeral she began to be plagued by horrible nightmares. She would see a big fat boule on the table. A huge, fat boule of bread making a curious nibbling noise. When, after lengthy hesitation, she’d cut it in two, she found the head of her late husband inside, busily devouring the crumb. Then she’d wake up screaming, and stay sitting upright all night long, unable to sleep.
    The situation couldn’t go on without hurting her business. Wary at first, she bought a dream on a neighbor’s advice. It was ahandsome object, a trifle of a bauble, on a pretty pedestal … but what was it supposed to mean? The abstract aspect of the