The Ninth Nightmare (22 page)

Kieran said, ‘I don't know whether to believe you or not, dude. But you sure look like Kenny Ballantine. You're the spit of him. Even got that warty thing by the side of your nose.'

Carefully and quietly, Springer explained who he was and where he had come from. He told them about Ashapola, and how the purity of Ashapola could protect every person on earth, regardless of their religion or their core beliefs. He told them about the Night Warriors, and how their mother had been Azurina, the Sky Dancer, and how, as twins, they had both inherited her powers.

He also told them about Brother Albrecht, and how his arms and legs had been amputated, and how that had led him to set up his carnival and freak show.

When Springer had finished, he sat back to let his words sink in. Kieran and Kiera stared at each other in complete silence, but it was obvious that they were sharing their thoughts about everything that he had told them.

Eventually, Kiera said, ‘How could we have been these Night Warriors all of our lives and never known that we were?'

‘Because you weren't needed, until now. Some Night Warriors go through their whole lives without finding out, simply because their special abilities were never called for.'

‘I never knew I was, not until last year,' John told her.

‘And
I
never knew until about an hour ago,' said Rhodajane.

‘So who are you supposed to be?' Kieran asked John.

‘Me? I'm Dom Magator the Armorer. I carry every kind of handgun and rifle and bladed weapon that you can possibly think of, and most of which you can't. You want a pistol that can make somebody half a mile away go stone deaf? You want a knife that you can throw through solid concrete? How about an Amnesiac Rifle, that can make your enemy forget who he is and what the hell he's supposed to be doing there?'

‘This has
got
to be a joke,' said Kieran. ‘Amnesiac Rifle? Who are you trying to kid?'

‘It's no joke,' Rhodajane assured him. ‘I'm Xyrena, the Passion Warrior. I can turn on anything that has a pulse, and a few things that don't, I wouldn't be surprised.'

Springer said, ‘The best way for me to convince you that I'm telling you the truth is to show you what Jekkalon and Jemexxa actually look like.'

‘Jekkalon?' Kieran protested. ‘What kind of a stupid name is that?'

‘Actually, Jekkalon is a highly-respected name amongst the Night Warriors,' said Springer. ‘The very first Jekkalon was a servant at the court of the Egyptian pharaoh Seti the First in the year twelve ninety-one BC.'

‘Now I'm
sure
you're kidding me.'

‘Not at all. The demon goddess Nepththys ambushed Seti in his dreams and took him to her palace in the dry desert. She tried to mummify him in his sleep, so that he would be powerless to act out his dreams. We all have to act out our dreams in order to stay fit and sane, but Nepththys was hoping that she would drive Seti mad and that she could turn the entire kingdom of Egypt into a barren wasteland.

‘But Jekkalon and Jemexxa followed her, and Jekkalon vaulted over the walls of Nepththys' palace, which had always been believed to be impregnable. He blinded Nepththys and her priests with lightning, which Jemexxa had reflected from a distant electric storm. Seti escaped, and rewarded Jekkalon and Jemexxa with great riches.'

‘Well, it's a cool story,' said Kieran. ‘Sounds like something out of
X-Men
.'

‘Do you want to see yourself as Jekkalon?' asked Springer. ‘All you have to do is stand in front of that mirror.'

‘Go on, Kieran,' Kiera urged him. ‘You know you love looking at yourself more than anything else in the world.'

Kieran walked across to the large oval cheval mirror in the corner of the bedroom. Springer stood up and joined him, laying a hand on his shoulder.

‘Be patient,' said Springer. ‘It doesn't take long.'

Kieran shook his head. ‘Jesus, man. You look so much like Kenny, I can't believe it. Remember that time you swung on that rope over Mill Creek Falls, pretending to be Tarzan so that Susan Ladenes would be all impressed, and the rope broke and you fell in head first and broke your arm?'

‘It was my collar bone, as a matter of fact,' Springer corrected him.

‘This is totally crazy,' said Kieran.

He turned away from the mirror for a moment, grinning at Kiera in disbelief, but Kiera suddenly said, ‘
Look
! Just look at yourself!'

Kieran turned back, and there, in the mirror, he saw a reflection of an athletic young man wearing a skintight suit made of some glittery black fabric that looked as if it had been cut out of a starry night sky. On his head he had a sleek black helmet with slanted black lenses covering his eyes and two long antennae.

‘Is that me?' said Kieran. He leaned forward to look at himself more closely, and his reflection leaned toward him. ‘Shit! It really
is
me!'

‘To be more accurate, it's Jekkalon,' Springer corrected him. ‘But, yes, it really is you.'

‘And I'm some kind of an acrobat? Is that it?'

‘The best. You can jump, you can roll, you can run on stilts as fast as most athletes can run on their feet. You can walk on a high wire without using a balancing pole and you're one of the greatest trapeze artists that ever was. Double flips, triple flips, easy.'

Keiran stood back, and spread his arms wide. ‘This is unbelievable. This is absolutely un-fricking-believable. I
am
Jekkalon. I can
feel
it. I know that I can really do all of that stuff.'

‘Well – you can't quite do it yet,' said Springer. ‘You'll have to wait until you're asleep, and dreaming. You don't want to risk hurting yourself, like your old friend Kenny.'

‘So how do I go about making people go blind?' Kieran asked him. ‘I don't seem to be carrying any guns or nothing.'

‘Take a look at your hands.'

Kieran raised both hands and turned them over. The palms of each hand were so highly reflective that he could see his face in them.

‘So I got shiny hands, so what?'

‘Kiera – stand beside him,' Springer asked her. Kiera put down her bottle of nail polish and came across the room. As she stood beside her twin brother, her reflection in the mirror began to shine, and soon she was wearing a tight silvery suit as sparkling as Kieran's, and a wedge-shaped silver helmet to match. On her back, however, she was carrying a metal grid like a hiker's backpack frame, except that it was covered with layers of complicated copper shapes like fall leaves, each connected by wires and circuit-breakers and switches.

‘Jemexxa is acutely sensitive to any static electricity stored in the upper atmosphere,' Springer explained. ‘She can almost
smell
it, even if it's twenty miles away and thirty-five thousand feet high. She attracts it in exactly the same way as a lightning rod attracts lightning, and stores it up in the framework that she carries on her back. Then – when Jekkalon needs to zap somebody – like Nepththys and her priests for example – Jemexxa raises her hand and sends him a bolt of lightning. Or
two
bolts, one from each hand, if he needs them. All he has to do is angle his hand so that the lightning ricochets off it and hits whoever or
what
ever he wants it to.'

Kiera looked at the palms of her hands and they were as highly reflective as Kieran's.

Springer said, ‘See – it's as simple as shining a sunbeam from one mirror to another.'

Kieran and Kiera looked at each other again. Their helmets gave them the appearance of two giant praying mantises, one black and the other silver.

As they stood there, their Night Warriors uniforms gradually faded. After less than a minute, Kiera was back in her football shirt and Kieran was wearing his T-shirt and his jogging pants.

‘So what's it to be?' Springer asked them.

‘I just don't know,' said Kiera. ‘It's all so much to take in. I can't decide if I'm dreaming all of this, or if it's real, or if you guys are pulling some kind of scam.' She started to sound panicky. ‘Like, how can we cancel an entire sold-out concert? That's two thousand five hundred seats. And we're supposed to be on stage in less than three hours, for a final soundcheck.'

John shrugged. ‘Like Springer says, sweetheart, it's entirely up to you. But if you don't come with us, the rest of us will have to go anyhow, and from my experience we're going to need all the firepower we can muster.'

Kiera clapped her hands over her ears in frustration. ‘Even if we say yes, Lois will be back soon, and there's no
way
that she's going to let us cancel tonight's concert and drop off to sleep, just like that! Think of all the money that the promoters are going to lose if we don't show! Think of all the money that
we're
going to lose. And how can we let so many fans down? They'll
hate
us for it! They'll never forgive us!'

‘OK,' John told her. ‘If that's the way you feel. But what about your mom, trapped in that freak show? Are you just going to leave her there?'

‘She's not real. She's just a dream. You said so yourself.'

‘Right now she is, yes. But people suffer, sweetheart, even in the world of dreams. And if we don't stop Brother Albrecht from bringing his carnival back to
this
world, she won't be a dream any more. She'll be real, and suffering for real. Brother Albrecht will put her on show, along with all of his other freaks, so that the paying public can come along and gawp at her.'

Kieran said, ‘He's right, Kiera. We can't let that happen.'

Kiera sat down at her dressing table again and stared at three reflections of herself in its mirrors. ‘Look at me,' she said. ‘Selfish Kiera and mean Kiera and uncaring Kiera.'

But Rhodajane came and stood behind her and laid her hands on her shoulders. ‘Honey, all of us are selfish, and all of us are mean, and none of us give a shit. That's the way I've been all of my life – with men, and with money, and with my own dear sisters. But you only have to do one thing for somebody else – just one – for no other reason except that you believe it's your duty as a human being, and God will forgive you for all of your heartlessness, and you might even find that He gives you a heart by way of saying thank you.'

Kiera wiped tears away from her eyes. Springer came up to stand beside Rhodajane and said, ‘When you walked into that dream last night, Kiera, that wasn't even your dream. Kieran knew that, didn't you, Kieran? It was being dreamed by a young girl of eight years old who was staying with her parents in Room Six-Two-Five. Your psychic sensitivity enabled you and Kieran to enter her dream and find out what had happened to your mother.

‘You can see the dead, can't you – you and Kieran?'

‘You know about that, too?' said Kieran. ‘Is there anything you
don't
know about us?'

‘To Ashapola, Kieran, all human beings are an open book. All I do is turn the pages and read what's written there.'

‘So you know we saw some bum on Santa Monica Boulevard jumping in front of the traffic and never getting hurt; and some gangster with his throat cut in the barbershop at the Handlery Hotel in San Francisco; and some drowned woman in the Japanese Garden in Portland, just lying under the water in the pond smiling up at us like she was happy at last.'

‘Yes,' said Springer. ‘And that's why you can be so useful to us. We suspect that Gordon Veitch could be one of those dead people who won't lie down. A Dread, we call them. That's why he can move so easily from the real world to the dream world, and back again. He can appear, he can disappear, whenever he feels like it. But he won't be able to hide from you two, in either world.'

Kiera reached out and took hold of Kieran's hand. She briefly closed her eyes and gave him an almost imperceptible nod.

‘OK,' said Kieran. ‘We'll do it.'

‘You're sure about that?'

‘We're sure,' Kiera told him. ‘Kieran's right. If there's any chance of rescuing our mom – we have to try, at the very least.'

‘The point is, how do we get out of here?' asked Kieran. ‘Sherwin and Lamar won't let us out of their sight, even if you turned yourself back into “Lois”. The promoters pay for them, to protect their investment.'

‘Oh, don't worry,' said Springer. ‘I've already booked a room on the fourth floor, room Four-Three-Nine, directly above this one. All you have to do is climb two stories up the fire escape. I left the balcony doors unlocked. Meantime, I'll leave here through the front door and tell your bodyguard friends that you're not to be disturbed.'

Kiera said, ‘So you have everything arranged already. How did you know we were going to say yes?'

Springer was gradually changing his appearance, from Kenny Ballantine back into Lois Schulz. They all found it fascinating to watch, as “Kenny” dwindled down to five feet four and his hair turned dark and his long gangly legs became skinny and bowed, with shiny black pantyhose and black patent shoes with very high heels.

‘How did I know you were going to say yes? You're natural-born Night Warriors, that's why. You're Jekkalon and Jemexxa, the acrobat and the acrobat's twin. That's who you are, even more than Kieran and Kiera Kaiser. It's your destiny.'

TWELVE

Night Flight

B
y midnight, David was snoring softly with his green mask over his eyes. Katie eased herself out of bed and went through to her dressing room. She opened up her white satin-covered jewelry box and took out the folded slip of paper that Springer had given her. Before she opened it, she looked at herself in her dressing-table mirror.