The Ninth Nightmare (24 page)

‘How do we get in there?' asked Jekkalon. ‘This has to be a high-security building, right?'

‘You flew here from Cleveland, didn't you?' said Springer. ‘You're insubstantial. You're a dream, just like the rest of us. You can pass through the walls as easily as you passed through the ceiling of the Griffin House Hotel.'

‘Come on,' said Dom Magator. ‘Let's do it, before this meat-packer starts dreaming about something else, like short ribs or navel pastrami pieces.'

Springer arranged the six of them so that they were standing together in a tight circle, almost too close for comfort. ‘OK?' he said. ‘Now think
sink
.'

They sank through the floor of the roof garden with the same soft
shushing
sound that Katie had felt when she had risen through the attic of her house in Nautilus. Then they descended through the master bedroom of the penthouse apartment on the thirtieth floor, which was unoccupied, stuffy and airless, with its blinds drawn; and then through the master bedroom of the apartment below. Here, a middle-aged couple lay dozing in front of a huge flickering TV which took up most of the opposite wall, their eyes closed and their mouths wide open.

‘
Murder, She Wrote
,' said Dom Magator. ‘That's enough to send anybody to the land of Nod.'

But without hesitation, the Night Warriors continued to sink through the thick cream carpet, and the ceiling below, down to the twenty-eighth floor. In this bedroom, the king-sized bed was empty, but the sheets had been dragged halfway on to the floor, and a couple were having a shouting match in the brightly-lit en-suite bathroom.

‘You were making eyes at that whore
all
evening!' the woman was screaming. ‘Don't tell me you weren't!'

‘That
whore
as you call her could help us to land a multimillion-dollar contract, you lamebrain!'

But before they could hear any more of their argument, the Night Warriors' descent continued, down through the patterned carpet to the twenty-eighth floor apartment below. With a faint
shush
, they alighted as softly and silently as parachutists in George Roussos' bedroom. Here, they stopped, and looked around.

Xyrena said, ‘Jesus! Whore's boudoir, or what?' but Dom Magator held up his finger to indicate that they should stay quiet. All the same, Katie had to agree with her. The bedroom was decorated in a style which she could only have described as Greek Billionaire Bombastic, with a gilded four-poster bed, and purple velvet drapes, and bow-fronted Regency nightstands. On either side of the window stood two life-size statues of Greek muses, Urania the goddess of astronomy and Thalia the goddess of comedy.

Dom Magator beckoned to them, and the Night Warriors gathered around the right-hand side of the bed, where George Roussos was sleeping. He was lying on his back in purple silk pajamas which matched the purple velvet drapes. His comb-over had strayed across the pillow like seaweed, and the bottom two buttons of his pajama jacket were unfastened, revealing a huge furry stomach.

His wife Margarita lay with her back to him, a pink chiffon scarf tied over her head to protect her platinum-blonde pleat.

George Roussos was twitching and muttering in his sleep, and every now and then his left elbow would jerk up, as if he were trying to push somebody away.

‘He's still having the carnival dream,' said Springer. ‘Go on, Dom Magator. You know what to do. But let's do it quick.'

Dom Magator said, ‘OK. Everybody ready for this? Here goes nothing.'

He raised both arms and pointed his fingers upward. There was a few seconds' pause, and then a sharp crackle. Two narrow streams of sapphire-blue light jumped out of the ends of his fingers and joined together in an apex next to George Roussos' sleeping body. A strong smell of ozone filled the air, and the two streams of light jerked and twitched like electrocuted snakes.

Slowly and evenly, Dom Magator lowered his arms, using the twin streams of light to describe a shimmering octagonal figure in the air, close to the side of the bed.

‘This is the portal which will take you into this gentleman's dream,' said Springer. ‘All you have to do is to step through it, and you will find yourself right inside his mind.'

Zebenjo'Yyx bent down and tried to peer into the center of the octagon, shielding his eyes against its intense sapphire-blue brightness. ‘I can't see
nothing
inside of there, only pitchy-black dark.'

‘Our friend here is dreaming about someplace dark, that's why,' said Dom Magator. ‘Don't worry, I have plenty of night-vision goggles and gunsights if we need them. Let's just hit the bricks, shall we?'

‘
We can
really
step through here?' asked Zebenjo'Yyx.

‘We really can,' Dom Magator assured him. ‘And just to prove it to yourself, you can go first.'

Zebenjo'Yyx shook his head and lifted up both hands in mock surrender. ‘That's OK, man, you've done this before.
You
go first. I'll stand back and watch how you do it.'

‘Will you please just
go
?' said Dom Magator. ‘I need to have somebody on the other side to cover the girls when
they
come through. It's called, like,
chivalry
. It's also called good tactical sense. We don't know what the hell might be waiting for us through there, do we?'

‘Yeah, precisely, man. That's what concerns me.'

Xyrena linked arms with him and said, ‘Come on, big boy! Don't tell me you're chicken!'

‘Who said anything about chicken?' Zebenjo'Yyx protested. ‘There's a whole world of difference between “chicken” and “circumspect”.'

All the same, he cocked the arrow launchers on each of his forearms, turned to the rest of the Night Warriors, and said, ‘This is it, then. Like my grandfather used to say, you can't make no omelets without breakin' no legs.'

‘Eggs,' Xyrena corrected him.

‘My grandfather wasn't just a cook. I know that now. He was Zebenjo the Arrow-Storm. So when he said “legs” I think he maybe
meant
legs.'

George Roussos let out a loud grunt and shifted his bulk sideways. At the same time, inside the octagonal portal, the Night Warriors saw lightning flicker, and they distinctly heard the rumbling of distant thunder.

Springer said, anxiously, ‘Hurry, Zebenjo'Yyx! If our friend here changes his dream, or if he wakes up, we could have wasted this entire night's mission.'

Without any further hesitation, Zebenjo'Yyx ducked his head down and stepped through the portal. He vanished from the bedroom with a sharp snapping sound, like a high-voltage electrical short, as if he had never been there.

‘He's
gone
,' said Jemexxa. ‘That's incredible.'

Dom Magator said, ‘Why don't you and Jekkalon go next? Then An-Gryferai and Xyrena. I'll bring up the rear.'

‘Well, nobody can say that you don't have plenty of rear to bring up,' said Xyrena.

Dom Magator said, ‘Good joke, Xyrena. But don't let's forget how dangerous this could be, and that some of us might get badly hurt, or even killed. So, you know, let's get serious, shall we? And keep our eyes open. And our ordnance ready. If there's any weapon you need apart from your natural allure – like a gun of any kind – you only have to ask.'

‘Oh, I'm serious, mister, believe you me,' Xyrena retaliated. ‘Don't let one or two wisecracks fool you. I've spent my whole life fighting and I can assure you that the skin underneath this armor is just as tough as the armor itself.'

Dom Magator looked at her through his green-tinted visor for a moment, and then he said, ‘OK. Let's get hustling, shall we?' He could have told her that talking tough wasn't enough when you were fighting in the world of dreams, but he decided it was best if she found out for herself. Fighting in the world of dreams was terrifying, chaotic, and violently disorienting. Nothing and nobody ever stayed the same. The terrain could drastically alter right beneath your feet, from limestone butte into fever-ridden bayou, and the weather could change, too, from a summer heatwave to a midwinter's blizzard, all without a moment's warning.

Jekkalon stepped through the portal, followed closely by Jemexxa. An-Gryferai went next. She had no idea what to expect, and the sharp
snap
! as she passed from the real world into the dream world gave her a jolt. But immediately she felt rain pattering against her helmet, and when she stood up straight, she found herself on a hillside, under a black, lowering sky.

Lightning was stalking across the horizon on crooked stilts, as threatening as the Martian tripods in
The War of the Worlds
. Jekkalon and Jemexxa were standing only a few feet away to her left, while Zebenjo'Yyx had taken up a position on top of a low promontory off to her right, his right arm cocked up like a sentry holding a rifle.

An-Gryferai waded through the grass toward Jekkalon and Jemexxa. ‘Some dream for a meat-packer!' she shouted.

Jemexxa tilted her helmeted head toward her and shouted back, ‘This is the same place that Kieran and me found ourselves, when we went through the door at the Griffin House Hotel! Except that the carnival was right at the top of the hill there, and now it's not!'

‘It must have moved on!' said An-Gryferai.

Behind them, Xyrena appeared, closely followed by Dom Magator, with all of his guns and his swords and his serried racks of knives.

An-Gryferai shouted at Dom Magator, ‘Jemexxa said that she and Jekkalon were here before, in this same exact place! She said that the carnival was up on top of the hill, but it's gone now!'

Suddenly, in her ear, as clearly and as warmly as if he had been standing right beside her, Dom Magator said, ‘We don't have to yell at each other, An-Gryferai. We all have a close-communications system inside of our helmets, except for Xyrena, who has an induction loop in her crown. This means that we can talk to each other in our natural voices, at any distance. Switch is on the left-hand side, under your ear protectors.'

‘Oh,' said An-Gryferai. ‘I didn't realize.'

Jekkalon hadn't been listening. ‘Are they the same, then?' he screamed. ‘Dream time and waking time?'

‘I can hear you, for Christ's sake!' said Dom Magator. ‘You don't have to bust my goddamned eardrums!'

‘Sorry!' said Jekkalon. ‘But it was only last night when Kiera and me saw the carnival here. So if dream time is the same as waking time, then they couldn't have traveled too far since then, could they? For starters, they would have had to pack up all of their tents, and all of their equipment, and hitch up all of their trailers, and that would have taken them
hours.
'

‘Dream time is different, for sure,' said Dom Magator. ‘But this carnival has more than dream people in it. It has
real
people, and you can't mess around with time too much when you have real people involved. Real people have to live out their lives sequentially.'

‘So what does that mean?' asked Xyrena.

‘It means that the carnival can't travel backward and forward in time, the same way that
we
can, as Night Warriors. So the whole shebang has to carry on like a real carnival, hour by hour and minute by minute and day by day. And that's to our advantage, now that we're hunting for them. They can't dream themselves back to nineteen thirty-six, for example, to get away from us.'

‘In that case, let's go huntin' for them,' said Zebenjo'Yyx. ‘I'm just itchin' to get my revenge on that freak who broke my frickin' back!'

‘They won't be far away,' said Dom Magator. ‘This is where our meat-packing pal started his dream, right here, which is why
we
entered it here. Judging by his physical condition, he couldn't have walked too far to catch up with them.'

He turned to Xyrena, as if he were challenging her to make some smart remark about
his
physical condition, but Xyrena simply shrugged. Then he said, ‘An-Gryferai, how about taking off and having a look around? Just be careful – it looks like it's pretty damned blowy up there.'

An-Gryferai walked a few paces up the hill, with the wet grass lashing at her knees. Then she flexed her shoulders and spread her wings, and the wind immediately plucked her upward.

Dom Magator had been wrong; this weather was very much more than ‘pretty damned blowy'. This wasn't at all like the warm, serene thermals in which she had floated so triumphantly over the Florida coastline. Here, the wind was harsh and cold and ill-tempered, constantly switching direction and velocity. Bursts of rain kept exploding against her helmet, and the lightning seemed to be crackling so close to her that she was afraid of being electrocuted.

She was buffeted by downdrafts again and again, and at one time she was almost beaten back down to the ground, and her boots actually kicked against the grass. But she struggled and dipped and spun, and tilted her wings to catch every rising gust of wind that she could, and at last she managed to fly up to the top of the hill.

She battled upward and looked around, repeatedly angling her wings to steady herself. It was clear that the carnival had been here, and only recently. The ground had been churned into glistening black mud by scores of criss-crossing tire tracks, and there was trash scattered everywhere – broken orange-crates, chicken carcasses, dirty diapers, worn-out tractor tires. Near the center of the site a wide oval area had been covered several inches deep with sawdust, which is where the big top must have been pitched. Over on the right, a large bonfire was still smoldering, filling the night with acrid smoke, and stray sheets of paper were dancing across the muddy furrows as if they were panicking that they had been left behind.