The Ninth Nightmare

EIGHTEEN The Sleepers Awake

Kiera opened her eyes to see Lois Schulz smiling at her.

‘At last you’re awake, my darling, Gott zu danken!’

Kiera blinked and looked around her. She was no longer in the fourth-floor room that Springer had booked for them at the Griffin House Hotel. Instead, she was lying in a hospital bed, in a sunlit room with pale green walls and framed prints of pink orchids all around. When she tried to turn over and sit up she realized that her left arm was connected to a vital signs monitor.

‘Lois? Where is this? What am I doing here?’

‘University Hospital, my darling. Kieran is here also.’

‘What am I doing in a hospital? I’m not sick!’

‘Oh, you’re not sick? Hah! You could have fooled me!’

‘Why, what happened?’

‘Who knows, already? Yesterday evening I came to your hotel room to take you and your brother to the concert and you were gone. I went crazy! My first thought was that you had been kidnapped! You know, for ransom or something like that! It was only by chance that one of the maids said that she had gone into another room on the fourth floor to take in some clean towels, and she had seen you both asleep, and recognized you. Otherwise, we would have had the police searching the whole of Cleveland! The whole of Ohio, even!’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Kiera. ‘We really didn’t mean to worry you.’

‘Worry me? Worry me? Even when we found you, we couldn’t wake you! Believe me, we tried! I shook you! I screamed in your ears, wake up, wake up! But you wouldn’t wake up, neither of you, so what did I do? I called nine-one-one of course. I thought maybe you’d both been taking that Georgia Home Boy or that Special K or whatever.’

Kiera said, ‘Lois, you know we never take party drugs. You know that.’

‘Well, of course. The doctors gave you a blood test and he said you were clean like whistles. He tested for everything and he couldn’t understand why you wouldn’t wake up. He thought maybe it was some kind of a coma.’

‘I don’t know. Maybe we were just exhausted.’

‘If you were so exhausted, why didn’t you tell me? Why did you sneak off and hide like that? Don’t you trust me to take care of you? I could have maybe rescheduled.’

‘Oh, get real, Lois. You think you really would have?’

‘Well, maybe not. But how exhausted do you have to be to sleep through a seven-and-a-half million-dollar concert? Do you know what the penalties are going to be? The refunds! Do you have any idea how much our insurance premiums are going to go up? You were exhausted? God made the whole world and He took only one day off!

She paused for breath and then she said, ‘At least your next concert isn’t until Saturday. I should have such luck.’

‘I’m sorry, Lois, truly I am. But there are some things which are much more important than money.’

‘Name one. Please. I’d love to know what it is.’

At that moment the door opened and Kieran appeared. His hair was sticking up as if he had just woken up and he was wearing yellow hospital pajamas. ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘You’re awake!’

‘Oh, great,’ Lois greeted him. ‘The other Comatose Kaiser. So how are you feeling?’

‘OK, I guess,’ Kieran told her. ‘Kind of bushed, but that’s all.’

‘How can you be bushed? You two, you’ve been sleeping all night like dead people!’

‘I’ve been telling Lois how sorry we are,’ said Kiera. ‘But I have tried to explain that money isn’t everything.’

‘Kiera’s right,’ said Kieran. ‘So we miss one concert. It isn’t the end of the world. Unlike the end of the world, which is the end of the world.’

‘I would just like to know what it is that means more to both of you than your careers.’

Kieran sat down on the end of the bed. ‘Our mom, Lois. Our mom is more important. And, like I say, the end of the world. That’s more important, too.’

Lois looked from one twin to the other. ‘Your mom. Your mom? You know how sorry I am, but your mom is long ago passed over.’

‘Passed over, yes,’ said Kieran. ‘But not passed away.’

‘I don’t know what that means, Kieran. I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about.’

‘If it comes to the end of the world, Lois, then believe me, you will.’

David shook Katie’s shoulder and said, ‘Wake up, sleepyhead. I have to be gone in an hour. I made you coffee.’

Katie sat up in bed and frowned at him. ‘What time is it?’

‘A quarter of eight. I thought I’d let you sleep a little longer.’

‘Urrgghh,’ said Katie, falling back and wrapping her head in the pillow. ‘I feel like I haven’t slept in a week.’

David pried the two sides of the pillow apart. His face was very serious. ‘That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. You were so restless last night. In fact “restless” is the understatement of the century. It was like you were having a full-scale fight with somebody. Flapping your arms and kicking your feet and twisting around and shouting.’

‘Shouting?’ said Katie, staring at him suspiciously. ‘What was I shouting?’

‘All kinds of stuff. Something about how stormy it was, and how you couldn’t lift somebody out through the roof. I mean, really weird things like that. You said you could see some circus, but it was too far away and you needed to gain more height. I swear to God you sounded like you thought you were flying.’

Katie reached up and touched his cheek with her fingertips. ‘It was only a nightmare, David. That’s all. Maybe I’ve been working too hard.’

‘All the same, when I get back from Denver you and I are going to go talk to Aaron. Or Miriam, if you’d prefer.’

‘David, I keep trying to tell you. I’m perfectly OK.’

‘No, you’re not. Something’s happened to you. You’ve changed.’

She looked at him for a long time without saying anything, trying to communicate with her eyes that she had changed, yes, but that her feelings for him were as strong as ever, maybe even stronger. How could she possibly tell him that she was An-Gryferai, and that she had flown in a rainstorm over a circus, and snatched a fire breather into the air, so that her fellow Night Warriors could blow him up?

How could she make him believe that she had fought against clowns and freaks and barely escaped from the most terrible nightmare that had ever threatened the human race?

‘I love you, David,’ she said, very softly.

‘I still want us to talk to Aaron. Will you do that for me?’

Katie nodded. ‘Of course I will. I have changed, I know that. But it’s not for the worse, and it doesn’t affect you and me. People grow up, that’s all. Even when they reach our age, they can discover really important things about themselves that they never knew before.’

‘So what have you discovered about yourself that’s so important?’

‘I think I’ve discovered that I’m much braver than I thought I was; and much more adventurous.’

‘Braver?’ David plainly couldn’t understand what she was trying to tell him. But he leaned forward and kissed her forehead and said, ‘OK. That’s good. We’ll talk about it some more when I get back. Just take care of yourself, you hear?’

John was woken up by a furtive tapping on his bedroom door. He opened his eyes and looked up the sloping ceiling above his bed. Then he turned his head to check what time it was. Ten after eight. Jesus. He felt as if he had been drinking tequila slammers all night.

More tapping. He knew who it was — Mrs Gizmo, his landlady. She always knocked like that, as if she was afraid to disturb him. ‘John?’ she called out, querulously. ‘John? Are you awake? I don’t hear you snoring!’

‘OK, Mrs Gizmo!’ he called out, in a clogged-up voice. ‘I hear you!’

He heaved himself off the bed and went to the door. Mrs Gizmo was standing outside on the landing, but when she saw that he was wearing only a droopy red sweatshirt she immediately turned her back to present him with her iron-gray braids and her narrow widow’s shoulders in her floral-print apron.

‘You have a visitor,’ she told him.

‘A visitor? At this time of the morning?’

‘He says he’s an old Army friend of yours.’

John puffed out his cheeks. He might have known it. Dean Brunswick III — Deano. The late Dean Brunswick III, aka Springer.

‘Do you think you could tell him to come back in maybe an hour?’ John asked Mrs Gizmo. ‘I seriously need some sustenance first. Like, some buckwheat pancakes would be good. Do you have any maple syrup left? That Coombs Family Farm stuff, I could pour that over everything. I could pour it over broccoli, even.’

But before Mrs Gizmo could reply, a familiar voice called out, ‘Hi — i–i, John! Good to see you again so soon! How’s it hanging? Well, I can see for myself!’

Dean Brunswick III came bounding up the stairs. The young Dean Brunswick III. He beamed flirtatiously at Mrs Gizmo as he passed her on the landing, and then he came up to John and gave him an affectionate back-slapping hug.

John said, ‘You’d better come in. Thanks a million, Mrs Gizmo.’

‘Quite all right, John,’ said Mrs Gizmo, and went downstairs without turning back.

John led Springer into his bedroom. ‘You’ll pardon me if I put on some pants.’

‘Oh, sure. Wow, it smells like mozzarella in here. That’s not your feet, is it?’

John was pulling on a pair of comfort-fit Levis. ‘Just because you can make yourself look like my old dead Army buddy, that doesn’t give you the license to talk to me the way he used to. That’s the leftovers from a pepperoni pizza, if you must know.’

Springer sniffed and said, ‘Mmm. Appetizing. Not.’

John sat down on the bed and rolled on a pair of bright green Argyle socks. ‘What happened last night, that was a fiasco. We could have gotten ourselves permanently trapped in that dream, like forever and ever, amen, and then what?’

‘I still can’t understand what went wrong,’ said Springer. ‘You had Brother Albrecht in your sights, didn’t you, at point-blank range? I’ve never known an Absence Gun to misfire before.’

‘I don’t think it did misfire,’ John told him. ‘Only a short time afterward, I zapped that meat-packing plant, didn’t I? And the gun worked perfect.’

Springer went to the window and looked out over Mrs Gizmo’s scruffy back yard, with her washing hanging sadly on the line. ‘Maybe it wasn’t a weapons failure at all,’ he suggested. ‘Maybe Brother Albrecht has some way of protecting himself.’

‘Oh, you mean like a force field, from Star Trek?’

‘No, nothing like that. Nothing technical. Whenever you Night Warriors enter other people’s dreams, you may be trespassing inside their minds, so to speak, but there’s nothing they can do to shield themselves against your weapons, any more than you can shield yourselves against their weapons, if they happen to have any.’

‘All the same, the Absence Gun didn’t work on Brother Albrecht, did it?’ said John. ‘It was his dream, right? Maybe he simply dreamed that it wouldn’t work.’

‘He couldn’t have done that,’ Springer told him. ‘The whole carnival set-up — the clowns and the freaks and the acrobats — yes, those are all Brother Albrecht’s creation. But being Dom Magator is your dream, and in your dream your Absence Gun never misfires, and there is absolutely nothing that Brother Albrecht could have done to jam it or deflect it.

He pressed the palms of his hands together, as if he were praying. ‘I’m talking about some other kind of protection. I don’t really know what. Maybe something more spiritual.’

John dragged a Kleenex out of a battered box, and noisily blew his nose. ‘The Absence Gun works on a wave function, right?’

‘That’s right.’

‘OK, then — supposing for the sake of argument Brother Albrecht doesn’t exist on the same wavelength as anybody else? Supposing he’s visible, but not quite there? Like supposing he exists a nanosecond ahead of us, or a nanosecond behind? Or a micromillimeter off to the left, or micromillimeter off to the right?’

‘What are you saying?’

‘I’m saying that if you fire an Absence Gun at somebody like that, it wouldn’t have any effect, would it? If somebody wasn’t actually there, you couldn’t make them cease to exist, could you?’

Springer turned away from the window. ‘It’s a theory, I suppose,’ he said, doubtfully. ‘I don’t know what Einstein would make of it.’

‘Screw Einstein, it makes sense to me. Kind of, anyhow. Do you have a better idea?’

‘I don’t know, John. I have the feeling that there’s a whole lot more to Brother Albrecht than meets the eye. He’s so bitter, you know? So angry, and so cruel, and he hasn’t stopped railing against God for eight hundred years. How can anybody stay so vengeful for so many centuries?’

‘Well — that’s a question we have to answer asap,’ John told him. ‘But there’s no future in us going back into Brother Albrecht’s dream unless we work out a way to effectively bust his ass, is there?’

‘I agree with you, John, one hundred and ten percent. But the situation is critical. From what Mago Verde said, it’s going to take only one more sacrifice before Brother Albrecht can break the sacred sanction that Pope Eugene placed on him, and then he’ll be able to lead his circus back here into the waking world. That poor girl who had her arms cut off, she was the eighth sacrifice. We have to find a way to stop Brother Albrecht before Mago Verde finds him a ninth.’

John blew his nose again and thought about it. It came as no surprise to him that Springer knew every detail of what had happened in Brother Albrecht’s nightmare last night. Springer had a cerebral connection to everything that the Night Warriors experienced when they entered other people’s dreams. When they returned to their bodies in the morning, all of their impressions flowed into Springer’s consciousness as if he were living through them himself — a kind of psychic debriefing, with sights and sounds and smells and conversations and even emotions. He had shared their elation when the fire breather exploded. He had also known how frightened they were when they thought that the clowns had barred their way back through the portal.

John said, ‘I think the answer is for us to go looking for Mago Verde, or Gordon Veitch, or whatever the bastard calls himself. If we can stop him, we can stop Brother Albrecht getting his final sacrifice, or delay it, anyhow. And we know for sure that we can take him out, because he skedaddled like a jackrabbit when Jekkalon went after him at the circus. If he was invulnerable, the same as Brother Albrecht, he would have stayed put and given us the finger.’

He sniffed. ‘The only trouble is, where the hell do we find him?’

‘The Griffin House Hotel,’ said Springer. ‘To start with, he attacks his victims in all kinds of random locations. Back in the nineteen-thirties, he went for women in the slums like Kingsbury Run. Later, he went for more upscale neighborhoods like Bratenahl. But no matter where he actually kills them, or mutilates them, where does the evidence always finish up? In the Griffin House Hotel, inside the walls.’

‘Well, yes,’ John agreed. ‘But by the time he dreams his ninth sacrifice into the hotel walls, it’s going to be a little too late for his victim, isn’t it? She’ll have been cut in half already, or set on fire, or had her arms or her legs sawn off, or maybe both.’

‘I know, John, but I don’t see any other way. Ashapola weeps for all of his children, but the most important thing is to stop Mago Verde from taking this ninth sacrifice through to Brother Albrecht’s dream. Once that happens it’s going to be “Chaos and Old Night”. You’ve seen that circus for yourself, first hand, and you’ve seen how much it excites people, how it gets them baying for blood. It’s frightening.

‘We have to stop Brother Albrecht from bringing it back to the waking world. If we allow that to happen, it’s going to trail pandemonium behind it, wherever it goes.’

‘OK,’ said John. ‘The Griffin House it is.’ He went to his bedroom door and opened it.

Springer blinked at him. ‘You’re not going to put on your shoes?’

John gave him a long, sober look. If the situation hadn’t been so desperate, he probably would have laughed.

Rhodajane had just stepped out of the shower when they knocked at Room 309. She opened the door with a pink towel wrapped around her head like a turban and a pink toweling robe with Griffin House Hotel embroidered on it. Without her false lashes and her make-up, John thought she looked surprisingly young, although her eyes were a little puffy.

‘Well, good morning, boys!’ she greeted them. ‘I was just about to order some breakfast on room service. Want some?’

‘Coffee and pancakes would be good,’ said John. ‘And tell them not to be tight-assed with the maple syrup.’

Springer said, soberly, ‘You did a very brave thing last night, Rhodajane. You saved all of your fellow Night Warriors.’

Rhodajane walked over to her dressing table and sat down in front of the triple mirrors. She pouted at herself and then she said, ‘I did what Xyrena is supposed to do. Xyrena’s the super slut, right? It wasn’t difficult. That poor clown didn’t know whether he was coming or going, and in the end he did both.’

‘It may not have been difficult, Rhodajane, but it took great nerve. Ashapola is aware how courageous you were, and Ashapola is deeply appreciative.’

‘We didn’t manage to take out El Grando Freako, though, did we? Are we going to have another crack at him tonight?’

‘Actually, we’re considering a different approach,’ said Springer.

‘I sure hope so. I’m still sore from the last approach.’

John shook his head in amusement, but Springer stayed deadly serious. ‘For whatever reason, Dom Magator’s Absence Gun had no effect on Brother Albrecht, so we’re going to go for Mago Verde instead, to see if we can stop him from taking Brother Albrecht his ninth and last sacrifice.’

Three Rhodajanes looked at Springer out of her triple mirrors. ‘OK — you take out Mago Verde. But won’t Brother Albrecht simply find somebody else to bring him victim number nine? Another one of those — what do you call them — Dreads?’

‘I don’t know,’ Springer admitted. ‘I can’t tell for sure if Mago Verde is Brother Albrecht’s only contact with the waking world, but so far I haven’t sensed the presence of any other Dreads in this vicinity, not for hundreds of miles, and so I’m assuming that he is.

‘If Brother Albrecht doesn’t receive his ninth sacrifice, he’ll have to stay in the world of dreams for ever — or at least until he recruits some other Dread to do his dirty work for him. Which may be hundreds of years. Or never, let us pray to Ashapola.’

John said, ‘The thing is, sweetheart, we don’t know where Mago Verde is going to find his next victim, which is why we’ve come here, to the Griffin House. Sooner or later, no matter where he first attacks them, he stays here and dreams them into the walls of this hotel. We don’t know why. But from this hotel he passes them on to Brother Albrecht’s circus.’

‘It’s my guess that he mutilates them as a way of preparing them for Brother Albrecht’s dream,’ said Springer. ‘He makes it physically impossible for them to think of returning to their normal life. Then — once they arrive at the circus — Brother Albrecht decides what kind of freaks he wants them to be turned into, and his surgeons get to work on them and finish what you might call the finer details. The dogs’ faces, the goats’ legs. All of the other abominations.

‘Throughout history, in all religions, from the Aztecs to the Norsemen, a sacrifice is only considered to be spiritually meaningful if the victim is willing to accept their fate — happy, even. Whenever a Viking chieftain died and was burned on his boat, one of his female slaves would volunteer to die with him. By the time Brother Albrecht has finished with them, I very much doubt if any of his victims aren’t willing to stay in his circus. They can never return to the waking world, can they, and pick up their lives where they left off? Not if they have no legs, or snakes instead of arms, or a face like a llama.’

Rhodajane was pouting at herself as she applied bright red lip gloss. ‘What if I tried?’

John frowned at her three reflections. ‘What? What if you tried what?’

‘What if I tried to take out Brother Albrecht, the same way I took out that clown?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Springer. ‘Brother Albrecht is no ordinary man, and I don’t think he ever was. What goes on inside of his mind, nobody knows.’

‘I have no intention of appealing to his mind, Springer! I’m going to appeal to his… Kercheval. He might not have arms or legs but he’s not lacking in that department.’

‘Too darn dangerous,’ said John, dismissively.

‘Then why the hell was I invited along last night?’

‘You were chosen for this mission so that you would distract Brother Albrecht’s attention,’ Springer explained. ‘We know that he has a fatal weakness for women. That’s what got him mutilated in the first place.’

‘I took out that harlequin, didn’t I — and that harlequin was dreamed up by Brother Albrecht. If the harlequin went for me, so will he.’

‘But this time, sweetheart, he’s going to be ready for us, and he’s going to know all about your needles, and how you could make his blood boil.’

‘I still think I ought to try.’

‘And what happens if he takes you out, instead? Where does that leave the rest of us? If the Absence Gun doesn’t have any effect on him, I doubt if any of the rest of our weapons are going to be much good.’

Springer said, ‘Listen — all of this is academic until we find Mago Verde. Maybe, when we do, we can persuade him to tell us if the good Brother Albrecht has any other weaknesses, apart from women.’

‘Oh, you mean we could torture him?’

‘No, I don’t. There are other ways of extracting information from people without torturing them.’

‘Like bribing him?’

‘In a way, yes. Remember that Mago Verde is a Dread, who can shift at will from the waking world to the dream world, and back again. But in the human sense, Dreads are not alive. They are something between ghosts and zombies. And if there is one thing that all Dreads crave more than anything else, it is to have their humanity back.’

‘But how can we offer him that? I don’t know about you, but I’m fresh out of humanity.’

Springer closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again, his pupils were a very pale agate color, and luminous. ‘Ashapola is the greatest power in the universe, John. Ashapola can turn the night into day. Ashapola can heal the sick and make the dead dance.’

‘OK,’ said John. ‘I’ll take your word for it. But what we need to do now is set up some kind of surveillance, right? One of us needs to keep an eye on the hotel lobby in case Gordon Veitch tries to register, and the rest of us should patrol the corridors. Whatever happens, we mustn’t let him slip into the hotel unnoticed. Otherwise we’re screwed.’