The Ninth Nightmare

NINE Call to Arms

In his previous life, John Dauphin had been a restaurant inspector down in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, which was a job that probably would have killed him before he was fifty. Unlike many of his fellow inspectors, he judged restaurants not only on their ambience and their standards of hygiene and the quality of their cooking, but on how generously they could pile up his plate.

Of course he always expected his pepper-jack shrimp at Boutin’s to be crisp and crunchy and spicy on the outside and firm and white and sweet on the inside, but he also expected to be given more than a measly five shrimp per portion. As far as John was concerned, a chef might cook equally as well as Paul Prudhomme or Emeril Lagasse but that didn’t entitle him to be a tight-ass.

John had lost his restaurant-inspecting job after some political jiggery-pokery in the East Baton Rouge catering community, apart from reaching the point where he tipped the bathroom scales at 289 pounds, and his BMI was only two more cheeseburgers away from fifty. Last year, with little else to do, he had driven over two thousand seven hundred miles north-east to attend the funeral of his old Army buddy Dean Brunswick III in Presque Isle, Maine, but on the way back his beloved ’71 Mercury Marquis had given up on him, dropping its engine on the highway like a cow giving birth, and ever since then he had been trying to earn enough money to limp home to Baton Rouge.

He had chosen taxi-driving as a means of making a living because it meant that he could sit down all day, and eat and drink whenever he felt like it, and he also got to meet a never-ending variety of people. Most of his passengers were quirky and interesting, although some of them were dull beyond all human endurance, especially the business types he picked up at the airport, who sat in the back texting the whole time, or talking on their cellphones. John always thought, can’t you stop communicating for twenty minutes out of your life, and just look around and breathe the exhaust fumes? OK, Cleveland is a world-class dump, but it does have some redeeming features, like the Cleveland Grays Armory building, which pre-dates the Civil War, and the West Side Market, and the Lake View cemetery, where John D. Rockefeller was planted, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

The job he detested the most was cleaning out his cab at the end of his shift. Apart from the usual contributions of chewing gum and used Trojans and folded paper napkins filled with spat-out chicken-skin, he had also found an expensive red alligator purse filled with lumpy beige vomit, an upper set of false teeth, a long-dead turtle in a Burger King box, and a white angora scarf that its owner had obviously used to wipe his rear end.

It never surprised him, how disgusting people could be. Before he had taken up taxi-driving, he had already known that people were disgusting, because he had worked in the restaurant trade. What did surprise him, endlessly, was how they never seemed to think straight. Instead of saying, “Pardon me, driver, I really need a leak, would you mind pulling over?” they would rather pee into their open briefcase, and walk into the airport with it dripping behind them.

Another reason he detested cleaning out his cab was because the space was so confined and he was so generously built. He had to force his way in through the rear doors and bend down to look underneath the seats, in case anybody had dropped anything valuable or revolting, and this always made him feel as if he were free diving in ninety fathoms under water and he was just about to run out of oxygen.

Today the back of his taxi was reasonably clean, except for a gristly piece of half-chewed sausage that somebody had forced into the ashtray in the armrest. He switched on his Vac’n’Go and gave the seats a quick once-over, and he was about to do the same for the carpets when he saw something sparkling underneath the front passenger seat. He rolled up his left sleeve and pushed his arm into the space beneath the seat, and after two minutes of grunting and scrabbling he managed to hook out whatever it was.

He gripped the door handle and hauled himself, panting, on to his feet. It was a gloomy morning here on Gooding Avenue, in Glenville — so gloomy that he could hardly make out what the sparkly thing was. He squinted at it more closely, and then he realized it was an earring — one of the hoopy, loopy earrings that Rhodajane Berry had been wearing. It was made up of three overlapping gold crescents, each of them studded with zircons. The long curved wire that went through her pierced ear-lobe had bent askew, and that was probably why it had fallen off.

He turned the earring over and over. It was a sign, he was sure of it. He even sniffed it, and it still smelled of Boss Intense.

John believed in signs. He didn’t believe that you could see Jesus in the scorch patterns on a slice of burned toast, or that three knocks on the door meant that somebody had died; but he did believe that some things were meant to be, and that if people couldn’t find a way to get together, or didn’t realize that they ought to be together, the natural world would conspire to make sure that they did, like the rabbits and bluebirds in a Disney picture.

He looked around. Gooding Avenue was a short, flat suburban street with small brick-and-clapboard houses set well back from the road. The clouds hung over it like dark gray quilts. There was no other living being in sight apart from a brindled dog trotting from one house to the next, sniffing at the trash cans. If John hadn’t been able to hear the traffic from East 105th Street and Lakeview Road, he would have thought that the world had come to an end.

‘If this isn’t a sign,’ he told himself, ‘then I’m due for a hefty tax rebate.’

He went into the pale-green-painted house where he rented an upstairs room at the back. His landlady Mrs Gizmo had gone shopping, or to one of her bridge mornings. Her real name was Ada Weiss, but John had called her Mrs Gizmo right from the start. Ada Weiss = A Device = Gizmo.

His room was small and brown and plain, with a sloping ceiling on the right-hand side. He had only one poster on the wall, a hand-colored picture of the ferry landing at Baton Rouge, sometime in the 1890s. He had carried it around with him for so long that it was falling apart at the folds. His bedcovers were all scrumpled up and his trash basket was crammed with empty take-out boxes. He always had to have a late-night sub from Quizno’s, usually honey bourbon chicken, so that he didn’t wake up at three in the morning feeling ravenous.

He pulled off his brown leather windbreaker and wrestled his way out of his raspberry-colored polo shirt. In his closet he found a pale blue button-down shirt that didn’t look too creased, and his tan linen coat. There was a three-inch split in the back of his coat, but if he made sure that he always kept his face toward whoever he was talking to, then nobody would notice.

He washed his teeth and brushed up his thinning dyed-black pompadour and splashed his cheeks with American Crew aftershave. Then he grimaced at his face in the mirror over the washbasin and said, ‘Mister Eee-resistible, that’s you!’

He knocked on the door of Room 309 and waited. There was no reply at first but he was sure that he could hear voices inside, and they didn’t sound like some daytime television show. He knocked again, and then cleared his throat loudly. Still no reply.

Eventually he pressed his ear against the door. He could hear a woman talking, and he was pretty certain it was Rhodajane; he would recognize the drawn-out vowels of that Brunstucky accent anywhere. The other voice was so soft and growly that it was impossible for John to make out what he was saying, but it was definitely a man.

Oh well, he thought. Maybe the sign wasn’t telling me what I thought it was telling me. Or maybe I just got my timing wrong. I should go eat, and come back later.

He had just started walking back along the corridor, however, when the door opened and he heard Rhodajane whistle and call out, ‘Taxi!’

He stopped as abruptly as if he had been hit on the back of the head by a flying baseball, and slowly turned around. He hoped that she hadn’t seen the split in the back of his coat. She was standing in the open doorway with her arms folded so that her breasts were pressed so tightly together that he couldn’t have slipped a credit card between them. She was wearing a purple silk headscarf, a very tight purple velour top, and narrow-leg jeans, and another pair of her impossible shoes — in silver this time, with buckles. Her pose was jaunty, and she was smiling — even if it was one of those smiles that said here we go, I was expecting this.

‘Dead on time, JD,’ she told him.

He waddled back toward her with his arms held up in surrender. ‘Hey — it’s not what you think, believe me.’

‘How do you know what I think?’

‘Sorry, but it’s pretty obvious. You think I’m hitting on you. You think I’m some kind of stalker. Whereas that is absolutely not the case.’

‘“That is absolutely not the case,” huh?’

‘Absolutely one hundred thirteen percent.’

Rhodajane thought for a moment, with her lips pursed. Then she said, ‘You want to know what I’m really thinking?’

‘OK. What are you really thinking?’

‘I’m thinking that you found my earring in the back of your taxi and you came here to return it to me. You’re hoping that I’m going to be so — o–o grateful that I’ll agree to have dinner with you and maybe one thing will lead to another. Or that at the very least I’ll give you a sawski by way of a tip.’

John held out the earring in the palm of his hand. ‘Here — look — take it. I’m not looking for a tip and I’m not expecting you to come out to dinner with me and I’m not expecting one thing to lead to another, although I acknowledge that it can sometimes happen, you know — one thing leading to another — especially after the cream-cheese pierogis at Sokolowski’s. They’re almost worth learning Polish for.

He paused, and frowned, and then he said, ‘Wait up a goddamned minute. How the hell did you know I came here to return your earring?’

Rhodajane kept smiling. ‘Your friend told me. He said that you’d show up in exactly twenty-one minutes, and sure enough here you are.’

John leaned sideways, trying to see over her shoulder into Room 309. ‘Excuse me? Who — what — which friend is that, exactly?’

‘Come on in and meet him,’ said Rhodajane. ‘He’s been telling some real interesting stuff. Weird, I’ll grant you, but interesting.’

She stepped aside so that John could enter the room, but he didn’t want to go in first because of the split in his coat. He took hold of her elbow and gently pushed her ahead of him, and closed the door behind him.

‘I could sew that for you,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t think it, but I’m pretty good with a needle and twist.’

John was about to ask her how the hell she knew about that, too, but then he saw the figure standing in the bay window with his back to him. He was silhouetted against the gray, subdued daylight, his hands deep in his pockets, his coat collar turned up, his shoulders slightly hunched, but John recognized him immediately. He felt as if he had forgotten how to breathe.

‘Deano,’ he said. ‘Deano, is that you?’

The man turned around. The hotel room was so dark that it was difficult for John to see his face, but there was no question that he was smiling.

‘Hallo, John. How’s it hanging?’

‘Deano! I know you’re not Deano, so don’t try to give me that “how’s it hanging” bullshit.’

Rhodajane went over and switched on the bedside lamps. Now John could see that Deano was very much younger than the last time he had seen him. He had died of chronic alcoholism at the age of forty-two, with blotchy skin and rheumy red eyes and a mass of white tangled curls, like a half-starved Santa Claus. But here today, in Room 309 at the Griffin House Hotel, he looked as young as he was when John first met him at Fort Polk, over twenty-one years ago, when they had joined the Army together. Handsome, in a rakish way, with a broken nose like Owen Wilson and piercing blue eyes and short-cropped blond hair. He held out his hand but John ignored it. This wasn’t Deano. Deano had been cremated on a gray day up in Presque Isle, Maine, with only four people to sing Amazing Grace and one of them had throat cancer.

‘Your friend’s been spinning me all kinds of fancy stories,’ said Rhodajane. ‘Like how I’m descended from some kind of family who can walk around in other folks’ nightmares and hunt down demons. Hey, would you care for a drink?’

‘Best not,’ said John, guardedly, without taking his eyes off ‘Deano’. ‘The cops have been keeping a pretty close eye on me lately. They even pulled me over for taking a bite of my muffaletta sandwich at a traffic signal. It’s that fat guy, what’s his name? Detective Windsocky. He really has it in for me.’

‘Well, I’m going to have a drink,’ Rhodajane declared. She went across to the mini bar and bent down in front of it so that her purple thong appeared over the waistband of her jeans. ‘Champagne, I think. How about you, Deano?’

‘Deano doesn’t drink,’ said John.

‘Oh, really? What, are you in AA or something?’

‘Deano doesn’t drink because Deano isn’t Deano. The real Deano is dead and his ashes scattered at the Fairmount Cemetery in Presque Isle, Maine. This is a messenger from the great Power-That-Is, who recruits poor suckers like us to fight the eternal war against good and evil.’

Rhodajane stood up with a half bottle of Cuvée Napa in one hand and a champagne flute in the other. She blinked her eyelashes furiously, as if she were trying to create two miniature hurricanes. ‘You mean what he’s been telling me is true? It isn’t just a line?’

‘Deano’ kept looking at John and smiling, although he didn’t say a word.

John said, ‘It’s true all right, Rhodajane, and I can prove it to you. I never would have had you down as one of us unlucky few, but there you are. Most of us look pretty unlikely in our everyday bodies. One of the last guys who fought with us, he was kind of a retard in real life but inside of those dreams and nightmares, he was a regular genius. I mean it was like eat your heart out, Stephen Hawking.’

Rhodajane turned to ‘Deano’ and said, ‘So who did you say I was supposed to be?’

‘Xyrena, the Passion Warrior. The woman who can inflame the sexual desires of everyone and everything she meets — man or woman, demon or beast.’

‘There!’ said Rhodajane. ‘That’s some line, isn’t it? “Man or woman, demon or beast!” But you’re trying to tell me it’s for real? If you’re not this guy’s old army buddy, then who the hell are you?’

‘So far as I know, his name is Springer,’ said John. ‘Well — I say “his” name but he can pop up in pretty much any kind of guise he wants to, male or female. He gets sent here by the Man Upstairs — God, or Gitche Manitou, or Allah. Springer always calls him Ashapola.

‘Ashapola is who or what protects the human race from the forces of evil, and believe me there are plenty of forces of evil out there. That’s why he created the Night Warriors, which is us — you and me, and hundreds more like us. It’s our dubious distinction to save the world from corruption, chaos and ultimate destruction. Let me put it this way, ma’am: if there had never been any Night Warriors, the human race would never have survived so long as it has. We would have gone to hell in a handcart centuries ago.’

‘So you’re a Night Warrior, too?’ said Rhodajane. She handed him the half bottle of sparkling wine and said, ‘Here — can you open this for me? I don’t mean to be rude or nothing, but how did you get past the physical?’

John gently eased the cork out of the bottle so that the gas came out with faintest piff! ‘Angel’s fart,’ he told her. ‘That’s the correct way to do it.’

Then he said, ‘Like I told you, none of us look especially prepossessing, present company excepted. You don’t have to be Steven Seagal in your waking life to be a tough guy in your dreams.’

‘So who are you?’ asked Rhodajane. ‘You know — like I really believe all of this, not.’

Springer came over and laid a hand on John’s shoulder. ‘This is Dom Magator, the Armorer. He carries most of the weapons that the Night Warriors need when they do battle in the world of dreams. For instance, he has over two hundred different kinds of knives — like a Retinal Stiletto, which — when you throw it — will exactly follow your line of sight, and unerringly hit who or what you are looking at. Or a Spiral Flensing Knife, which will peel whoever you cut with it like an apple, in one long spiral — skin, subcutaneous fat and all.

‘He also carries over a dozen guns, like the Density Rifle, which compresses its target down to its ultimate possible density. A two-hundred-fifty pound man can be instantly reduced to the size of a smoking walnut. Or an Absence Gun, which uses quantum physics to negate the existence of whoever it hits. If you get shot by an Absence Gun, you don’t get killed. You were never born in the first place. There never was any you. I have to tell you that it makes a most thrilling sound when it hits its victims, like a thunderclap, echoing back for years.’

Rhodajane poured herself a glass of sparkling wine and drank almost all of it in three gulps. She burped and said, ‘Excusez-moi! I have to tell you two mooks that I am finding it very difficult to get my head around all of this. Either this is some kind of ridiculous set-up for Candid Camera, or it’s a joke in very bad taste, or you’re both out to lunch.’

‘It’s none of the above,’ said John. ‘It’s for real.’

She prodded her finger into John’s chest. ‘OK, if it’s for real, prove it. You said that you could. So go ahead.’

John looked at Springer and said, ‘What are you doing here, man? Is something going down?’

Springer nodded. ‘Yes, there is, and it’s serious, and it’s happening right here, in this hotel. But before I tell you what it is, I think it would be a good idea if we convinced Xyrena here that we’re not spinning her a line.’

John took a deep breath. ‘When you say serious—?’

‘I mean serious to the point of the whole world falling victim to the same nightmare, all night, every night. I mean serious to the point of the human race losing all of its morals, all of its scruples, all of its kindness, all of its humanity. I mean what John Milton meant in Paradise Lost when he wrote about “Chaos and Old Night”. A hell on earth, John, where nobody respects anybody else’s authority, or their dignity, or their freedom, or even their right to life. A mirror image of the US Constitution, if you like, in which it is almost mandatory to do harm to others.’

‘That does sound serious,’ Rhodajane agreed. ‘I think that sounds very, very, very serious,’ and she nodded her head emphatically with every ‘very’.

‘Then let us prove it to you,’ said Springer. He went across to the closet and opened it up, adjusting the door so that John could see himself in the mirror on the back of the door. Springer beckoned to him, and John slowly walked over to join him.

‘This is how Dom Magator appears in the world of dreams,’ Springer announced.

John stared at his reflection in the mirror. He thought his face was looking baggy and lived-in, and he hadn’t realized that his pompadour was now so thin that his scalp was gleaming through. However, Springer rested his hand on his shoulder again, and after a few seconds he began to see the ghostly image of a helmet materializing around his head — big and black and cube-like, with only the narrowest visor for him to see through, and even that was tinted dark green like the vizier in a welder’s face-mask. The helmet was encrusted with knobs and switches and locking springs and other small metal attachments.

‘Jesus,’ said Rhodajane. ‘Talk about Transformers.’

Now Dom Magator’s battledress began to appear — a heavy cloak made of some soft, gray, metallic material, and underneath it a suit of black, leathery armor, jointed like the thorax of a stag beetle. He wore a wide metal belt, from which seven or eight handguns were suspended, all with decorative handles and elaborate cocking mechanisms and illuminated sights — some laser, some infrared, some ultraviolet. Across his back was fastened a curved chrome-plated frame, in which all of his various knives were fitted, as well as his armory of rifles and bazookas.

His outfit was finished off by heavy-duty knee-boots, to which even more knives were clipped. There was scarcely an inch on his body which had no weapon attached to it.

Rhodajane came up to Dom Magator and cautiously touched his helmet with her fingertips.

‘There’s nothing there,’ she said, in bewilderment. ‘I can only feel your hair.’ She paused, and then she added, ‘What there is of it.’

‘Get out of here,’ John snapped at her.

Springer said, ‘You cannot feel his helmet because this is nothing more than a holographic vision of Dom Magator’s battledress. This is the waking world, Rhodajane, and your Night Warriors’ uniforms only take on physical reality in the dream world. Likewise, Dom Magator’s weapons. We couldn’t have anybody running around the waking world with an Absence Gun, or a Successive Detonation Carbine. Think what a terrorist could do with a weapon like that.’

Rhodajane stepped back, and Dom Magator’s armor gradually began to fade, until he was back in his crumpled blue button-down shirt and his tan sport coat with the split in the back.

‘Now do you believe us?’ John asked her, primping up his hair. ‘It isn’t easy, I’ll admit. I didn’t believe it myself at first — not until our first mission.’

Rhodajane looked at her champagne glass. ‘OK, I guess I have to believe you. That’s unless you’ve slipped me a roofie.’

‘So what’s happening?’ asked John, with a sniff. ‘“Chaos and Old Night” — that sounds like Satan’s involved.’

‘A child of Satan, if you like,’ said Springer. ‘At least, that’s what he likes to call himself. His name is Brother Albrecht and he used to be a Cistercian monk. For a very long time, though, he has called himself der Ursprüngliche Sohn des Teufels — the Original Son of the Devil.’

‘When you say “a very long time”,’ said John, easing his backside down on the corner of the bed with his feet planted wide apart. ‘How long a very long time would that actually be, roughly?’

Springer looked at him with a faraway expression. It was unnerving enough, seeing Deano recreated exactly as he had looked on that humid morning in 1991, when he and John had both showed up at Fort Polk, Texas, as gangling young recruits, but it was even more unnerving to think that Springer might be able to remember what he and Deano had done together.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Springer. ‘Brother Albrecht has described himself as the son of the Devil ever since he was dismissed from his monastery in Southern Germany for blasphemy and other transgressions against God. That was more than eight hundred years ago.’

‘Eight hundred years?’ asked Rhodajane.

‘He exists in the world of dreams,’ Springer explained. ‘Nobody grows old in the world of dreams — not unless they want to, or unless some malevolent spirit makes them wither away. Brother Albrecht runs a carnival, a traveling freak show, a circus of pain and torture and human atrocities. It’s already infecting the night-time consciousness of thousands of people, this circus. You only have to look at what’s happening in our society. But now we’re beginning to suspect that Brother Albrecht is trying to bring it back to life in the waking world, too.

‘Can he do that? I mean, like, it’s only a dream. Or a nightmare, by the sound of it.’

‘We don’t yet know, but we’re doing everything we can to find out. We strongly suspect, though, that this hotel is a critical part of whatever Brother Albrecht is planning; and we think that he’s being helped out by a one-time mass murderer called Gordon Veitch. If not Veitch himself, then a copycat.

‘Veitch used to mutilate or murder his victims in some of the poorest parts of Cleveland, like Kingsbury Run and the Roaring Third. He used to paint his face like a clown, so that nobody would recognize him.

‘He was never caught, even though some of the finest law enforcement officers in the country were hunting for him for months. One of them was Eliot Ness, who was Cleveland’s Safety Director in those days. The main reason Veitch eluded capture was because he dreamed about every attack that he committed, and then he came here to this hotel, and dreamed it into the walls. All of the evidence that could have convicted him is right here, in the plaster. He left none of it behind, at any of the actual crime scenes.’

‘I think I might have seen him here, in this room,’ John told him.

‘You’re kidding me!’ said Rhodajane. ‘You mean I’ve been sleeping all night in a bedroom with somebody’s murder inside of the walls?’

‘I don’t know,’ said John. ‘But when I fetched your bags up yesterday, and switched on the TV, I saw the TV reflected in the mirror and in the mirror it was showing a different picture altogether.’

‘Hey… you’re giving me the creeps now, JD.’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t mean to. But it was what I saw. There was a woman lying on a bed and a guy was standing over her with his back to me.’

‘Could you see what he was doing?’ Springer asked him.

‘Not too clearly. But his elbow was going back and forward, like he was sawing. I’ll tell you what it reminded me of… one of those stage magic acts where the magician saws the woman in half.’

‘Oh, my God,’ said Rhodajane.

Springer said, ‘That was him, I’d lay money on it. That was Gordon Veitch, or his copycat. You didn’t have any nightmares last night, did you, Rhodajane?’

‘If I did, I can’t remember them. I was so bushed I slept like ten babies. Two bottles of Chardonnay didn’t exactly help to keep me awake, either.’

Springer said, ‘Maybe the dream image in this room isn’t as powerful as some of the others. Maybe Gordon Veitch didn’t actually kill the woman you saw in the mirror — only mutilated her. Pain, of course, is a very efficient conductor of spiritual images, but nothing like as graphic as the passing of a human spirit. It could very well be that the woman he attacked here could still be alive, someplace — either in the waking world or the world of dreams.’

‘What, like, sawn in half?’

‘It’s amazing what the human body can withstand. You remember when we went to Fort Hood, John, and saw that young corporal crushed under a tank track? He was talking and laughing like nothing had happened. He even smoked a cigarette while he was lying there.’

‘Oh, sure,’ said John. ‘He was fit as a fiddle until they moved the tank off of him.’

Springer said, ‘Anyhow, we need to go looking for Gordon Veitch as a matter of extreme urgency. The music from Brother Albrecht’s circus is growing louder and nearer every night. The chaos is coming closer, and you have no idea what this world is going to be like when it arrives.’

‘Yeah, the January sales at Dillard’s.’

‘You will be ready to go tonight, won’t you, Dom Magator?’ Springer asked him.

‘Tonight? Hey — I’m not so sure about that. I have a late shift tonight, finishing at one.’

‘In the case you’ll have to cancel it. Xyrena?’

Rhodajane swiveled around to see who he was talking to before she realized that she was Xyrena.

‘Me? Tonight? You’re kidding. I have my grandma’s funeral this afternoon, and then a reception afterward.’

‘Xyrena, it’s critical. You have to join us.’

Rhodajane pulled a face. ‘Well… they’re holding the reception right here, in the Griffin Room. I guess I could find an excuse to sneak off a little early. To tell you the truth, it would be a relief. My family make the Munsters look normal.’

Springer said, ‘I need you asleep by one a.m. at the latest. And — please — try to keep your drinking within reasonable limits. Too much alcohol can affect your dream body as well as your waking perceptions, and the chances are that you’re going to have to make plenty of split-second judgments.’

‘Talking of my dream body, Mister Old-Army-Buddy-Who-Ain’t-Really, I still have no idea what my dream body is going to look like. If I can turn on “man or woman, demon or beast”, I must look pretty damned hot.’

Springer raised his eyebrows. ‘You do. You will. I promise you.’

‘Then show me. You showed me what he’s going to look like — Dom Magator. Let me see me.’

Springer hesitated, and looked across at John, but John pulled a face that meant, why not? She’s going to find out anyhow, and sooner rather than later.

‘Very well, then,’ said Springer. ‘Step over here and face the mirror. Try to empty your mind as much as you can. Think of nothing at all, but the surface of a lake.’

Rhodajane stood in front of the mirror, still with her arms folded. Springer said, ‘Relax, now. Arms by your sides. Breathe very gently, as if you’re floating on the water.’

‘Old army buddy or not,’ Rhodajane said to John, out of the side of her mouth. ‘Your friend here is some character, isn’t he?’

‘Please, Xyrena, relax.’

Rhodajane stared at her reflection, and to begin with it was obvious that she was trying very hard not to laugh. After a few seconds, however, the air around her head began to glitter and sparkle, as if it were filled with scores of tiny fireflies, and a high curved crown began to appear on top of her head, made up of the finest filaments of light. Two curving epaulets appeared on her shoulders, as high as the epaulets of a Japanese gala costume, and then, with a soft rumble, a huge cloak of rich golden fabric billowed out from her shoulders, rising and falling and curling in a dream wind that none of them could feel.

Around Rhodajane’s neck seven gleaming gold neck-rings materialized, so that it looked as if her neck were elongated. At the same time the diamond-shaped heads of two golden snakes peeped out from between the toes of each foot. They slid out and formed themselves into an elaborate pair of very high heels — first of all coiling themselves into the shape of shoes and then pouring relentlessly up her calves and around her knees, around and around her thighs, until they finished up as a pair of high golden boots.

But it was the gradual appearance of her breastplate that made Rhodajane’s mouth slowly drop open. It was a perfect replica of her naked torso, in highly-polished gold. Her big, full breasts, complete with dimpled nipples. Her slightly rounded stomach; and her navel, like a tiny shining mollusk. Below that shone a golden facsimile of her plump, bare vulva, complete with a peeping clitoris.

‘Oh my Gawwd,’ she said. ‘I cannot walk around like this, flaunting my pussy! Not even in somebody’s dream!’

‘I did tell you,’ said Springer. ‘Xyrena arouses man or woman, demon or beast.’

‘But I’m showing everything I’ve got. Well, I’m not really, but as good as.’

‘Xyrena is the ultimate paradox,’ Springer told her. ‘She attracts, she arouses, she fascinates. Did you know that the word “fascinates” comes from fascinum, which was a penis-shaped object worn around the neck in Ancient Rome, and often used in medieval witchcraft? If a woman fascinates a man, she gives him an erection, and that’s just what Xyrena does. But even though it looks so revealing, nothing can penetrate Xyrena’s armor, and believe me, Xyrena herself is deadly.’

Rhodajane pouted at herself in the mirror. She struck an exaggerated pose to the left and then to the right, and then she slowly tottered around in a circle. Underneath her voluminous gilded cloak, her back was armored in the same polished gold, with her shoulder blades and her dimpled buttocks as perfectly replicated as her breastplate.

‘Well, I don’t know…’ she said, thoughtfully. ‘Maybe I could get used to this I do have a pretty good figure, though I say it myself.’

‘But what’s the point?’ John asked Springer. ‘OK, fine, she turns people on. As a matter of fact, she’s making me feel distinctly twitchy in the BVD department right now. But why does she do it?’

‘Hold out your hands, Xyrena,’ Springer instructed her. ‘That’s right. Spread out your hand so that your fingers are totally rigid.’

Rhodajane did as she was told, and almost immediately eight long fine needles slid out, one from the tip of each finger. The needles were at least three inches long, and slightly curved inward.

‘Xyrena arouses her intended prey until they’re blinded with lust,’ Springer explained. ‘Then she takes them into her arms and embraces them — whether it’s a he or a her or an it. All she has to do then is run these needles into their back. They’re forged out of an alloy of titanium and ultrasound, way beyond the range of human hearing, and they can pierce through anything. Skin, leather, chitin, armor. Absolutely nothing can bend them or deflect them.’

‘So she gives her prey a few little pricks,’ said John. ‘Then what?’

Rhodajane turned around to face him and struck another pose, her hands on her hips, her crowned head slightly tilted to one side. ‘I’m really turning you on, aren’t I, John?’

‘Let’s just get this over with, shall we?’ John protested. ‘I have to go eat before I can think about sleeping.’

Springer said, ‘The needles enter the victim’s veins and his blood literally boils. It usually takes less than twenty seconds for his entire blood supply to evaporate, and that’s between five and six liters. Then, of course, he’s dead. It’s a very effective way of killing somebody at very close quarters.’

‘Do you have anybody in particular in mind?’ John asked him. ‘This clown guy, for instance?’

Springer didn’t answer, but closed the closet door so that Rhodajane’s Night Warrior costume instantly vanished.

Rhodajane said, ‘Oh, no. Not the clown guy. I feel like every guy I ever went to bed with in the whole of my life was some kind of clown.’