The Ninth Nightmare (27 page)

They were accompanied by a pianist, who was sitting behind them at a shabby red upright piano. He was thin and pale, with a half-starved face and curly white hair, but what was immediately striking about him were the two curved horns which protruded from the top of his head, each of them at least nine inches long. Xyrena guessed that they must have been grafted on to his skull to give him the appearance of a devil or a demon or a faun. He was naked to the waist, with a scarred, emaciated back; but it was only when Xyrena moved a few feet to the right that she could see that he was completely naked. Not that he was exposing himself – he was covered from the waist down in shaggy white fur. He had no feet, only hooves, which he was using to jab at the loud and the soft pedals. He had been literally cut in half, and his hips and his legs replaced with those of a Rocky Mountain goat.

Xyrena was so horrified that she couldn't take her eyes off him. Jekkalon and Jemexxa came up close behind her. ‘Holy moly,' Jekkalon breathed. ‘I never saw anything like that in my whole goddamned life. Never. That is so
gross
.'

The pianist swept his fingertips all the way up the keyboard, to the plinkiest note at the top,
plink
! Then he sat with his horned head dropped down and his arms hanging limply at his sides and staring at the floor. A few moments later, with a collection of squeaks and honks, the jazz band petered out, too. The audience gave them a smattering of applause, but almost immediately they were drowned out by another ferocious drum roll, and another strident fanfare of trumpets.

Out of the red velvet drapes at the back of the stage burst a hugely fat man in a ringmaster's top hat and a bottle-green tailcoat and shiny black knee-boots. He swaggered up to the footlights, cracking a ringmaster's whip.

‘Ladies and gentlemen! And those who are both, or neither! Welcome to Brother Albrecht's Traveling Circus and Freak Show! This evening we have gathered you here to celebrate the penultimate step toward the realization of our dreams! And when I say “realization” I mean “
real
-ization” – our seemingly endless nightmare at last made flesh! A triumphant return to the world of reality from the world of dreams in which we have been so cruelly and unjustly exiled for so long!'

There was a short pause before anybody in the audience applauded, and when they did, the clapping sounded half-hearted and sporadic. One or two of them cheered and whistled, but the Night Warriors noticed that there were just as many who sat with their hands in their laps, although they looked more bewildered than hostile.

‘Today I am overjoyed to tell you that the great Mago Verde has brought us back sacrifice number eight! Not only that, he has already dreamed her abduction and her mutilation into one of the bedrooms of the Griffin House. Her pain is now part of that building's fabric, mixed with its very molecules, joining the seven other sacrifices whose suffering is secreted within its walls!'

Again, a few desultory handclaps, accompanied by coughing and the shuffling of feet.

The ringmaster cracked his whip three times. ‘Now there remains only one more sacrifice to be made before the gates to the waking world will be flung open to us, and the circus can pass through, with its bells and its trumpets and its clowns! One more nightmare, that is all – just one! And then we can bring chaos and anarchy to the entire planet, and undo the works of God for ever!

‘Ladies and gentlemen! And those who purport to be one or the other, or neither! I give you the greatest Dread who ever walked the world of reality and the world of nightmares – Mago Verde, the Green Magician!'

More clapping, more enthusiastic this time, and one or two piercing whistles, and then through the curtains appeared the gray-faced clown with the poisonous green smile. He circled around the stage with a self-satisfied strut, nodding his head to acknowledge the applause – occasionally flicking his long gray hair with his fingertips and blowing kisses, as if he were pretending to be gay.

‘Thank you, my friends, thank you,' he said. ‘Thank you dreamers all for joining our dream.' His voice was hoarse and barely audible, so that everybody in the audience had to strain to hear him. ‘You are all
far
too kind to me – unlike the shits who are under the delusion that they run this circus!

He paused, and gave a real grin underneath his painted grin. ‘They all detest me, every one of them! And do you know why? They detest me because I am the only one,
ever,
who has shown himself capable of giving them what they want! I am the only one who can lead them back through to the waking world, and give them back the real life which they have almost forgotten.

‘You would think they would show me some
gratitude
, wouldn't you? But no! They are all so
jealous
! I have the ear and the confidence of the Grand Freak himself, our beloved Brother Albrecht, and they
hate
that! But the Grand Freak knows that nine sacrifices have to be made, and that every one of those nine sacrifices has to be dreamed into the walls of the Griffin House, and that nobody else can do that, except for
moi
! Only then will he be able to wake up out of his dream, and lead his circus back to reality.

‘Of course the Grand Freak loves me! How could he
not
love me? He escaped into this dream eight centuries ago, thinking that he could easily return to the waking world whenever he wanted to, and continue to wreak his revenge on God, and all of God's creation. But he reckoned without Pope Eugene. Pope Eugene cast a holy sanction – Sanctus Sanctio – which prevented the Grand Freak from waking up. And so for eight hundred years he continued to dream this dream. This wonderful, terrible, fearful, depraved and disgusting circus, which is everything that Heaven deplores, on wheels!

He stepped backward, toward the curtains, and then he called out, ‘Bring on the sacrifice!'

There was some tussling behind the curtains, but after a few moments two clowns staggered out, carrying high between them a bentwood chair. One of the clowns was in traditional white face and dressed entirely in white, while the other was made up like an Auguste, with a wild gingery wig and scowling red lips and baggy check pants.

Sitting in the chair, and tied to it with cords, was a plump young Hispanic girl with wavy black hair. She was wearing a long sleeveless dress of dirty gray linen, heavily bloodstained, and Xyrena could immediately see why. She had no arms, only two stumps at her shoulders which had been covered with thick gauze pads and adhesive tape to prevent them from bleeding, although both pads were now dark brown with congealed blood.

The two clowns carried the girl to the front of the stage and set her down facing the audience. ‘Behold!' cried out Mago Verde, performing a little fluttering dance around her. ‘The eighth offering!
Número ocho
! Maria Fortales is her name! A Mexican beauty beyond compare!'

It appeared to Jemexxa that the girl was concussed, or drugged, or dreaming. She made no sound at all, and her eyes roamed around as if she couldn't understand where she was, or what was happening to her. But even if she were semi-conscious, her eyes were filled with tears, and tears were glistening on her cheeks.

The audience of assembled dreamers started a slow handclap, as if they approved of this latest victim, but were growing impatient to see what would happen to her. Dom Magator said, ‘What the two-toned tonkert is going on in there, Xyrena?'

But he didn't have to wait for long to find out. Mago Verde returned to the curtains at the back of the stage and cried out, ‘Now! The spectacle that you have all been waiting to see! The Arch-Dreamer himself! The creator of all of this unholy carnival! The Grand Freak, Brother Albrecht!'

FOURTEEN

The Eighth Sacrifice

T
his time, with a thunderous drum-roll, all of the curtains were drawn back. Immediately, out poured a crowd of clowns, acrobats, dancers, jugglers, fire breathers and wildly assorted freaks.

Even though the Night Warriors were themselves dressed in bizarre costumes, suitable only for fighting in nightmares, they stared at Brother Albrecht's circus performers in disbelief. A legless man in a scarlet satin costume turned backward flip-flaps all the way across the stage, while a one-legged woman in a ballet tutu spun around and around so fast that it was almost impossible to see her face – until she eventually stopped spinning, and they could see that she had the long narrow snout and the glassy yellow eyes of a timber wolf.

Crawling awkwardly around in the background was a whey-faced boy with a pudding-basin haircut and a black one-piece swimming-costume of the style worn by men in the nineteen-twenties. He had to crawl – or to
lurch
, rather – because both of his legs had been replaced by somebody else's arms, and two more arms had been surgically attached to the sides of his body. He had six arms altogether, so that he looked like a human spider, and that was probably how Brother Albrecht billed him.

Xyrena stared at all of these monstrosities and shook her head. ‘Dom Magator, I think you need to get in here with that Absence Gun of yours and de-exist everything in here. I can't believe what I'm looking at. This isn't just revenge on God. This is revenge against everything that ever lived.'

Even as she spoke, a fire breather in a spangled costume tilted his head back and blew a fine haze of lamp oil into the air. The oil drifted back downward, and it was only then that he ignited it, so that for a few seconds his entire head was on fire, his eyes closed but his mouth wide open in a silent scream. He stepped back grinning in a cloud of smoke, his face blackened, with the tips of both ears still alight, so that he looked like a demon freshly arrived from hell. Almost immediately a woman appeared beside him in a bonnet decorated with crimson ostrich plumes, and a crimson crinoline dress. Her face was beautiful but mask-like, as if she were a porcelain doll rather than a human being. Her bodice was unlaced to expose what should have been her breasts, but her breasts had been removed and replaced with two breast-shaped birdcages with blue cockatiels perched inside. The cockatiels fluttered and squawked while the woman smiled serenely at the audience and gave them little Marie Antoinette waves.

Jemexxa gripped Jekkalon's hand and said, ‘Look –
look
! It's Mom!'

Sure enough, their mother Demi the Demi-Goddess was being wheeled on to the stage by Zachary. She was balanced on a small gilded cart with a black velvet cushion on it. She was staring unfocused at nothing at all.

‘We could snatch her,' breathed Jekkalon. ‘We could run down there and snatch her and they wouldn't even know what had hit them.'

‘No, you couldn't,' said Dom Magator, close to his ear. ‘You'd be caught before you got anywhere near her, and you'd fuck up this whole operation. So don't even think about it, you hear?'

‘Yeah, OK. I know. Sorry. It's just seeing her like that. It doesn't matter what they've done to her, she's still our mom.'

‘I know that. But
concentrate
, dude. Any sign of the Big Cheese yet?'

‘Not so far.'

But he had barely spoken when there was another flourish of trumpets, and out of the darkness at the back of the stage rolled a four-wheeled contraption about the size of a stagecoach, with huge spoked wheels. It was painted glossy black, with a domed canopy of black leather, which completely concealed its occupant.

It was being pushed forward by naked men and women, at least ten of them, every inch of whose bodies was decorated with tattoos, although the Night Warriors were too far away at the back of the big top to see what the designs were. But what they could see was that all of their legs had been amputated below the knee and replaced with much longer prosthetic legs with absurdly high heels, more like designer boots than feet, so that all of them, both men and women, stood well over six-and-a-half feet tall. Their heads had been shaved and fitted with crowns and antlers and bells. They jingled as they walked, and the wheels of the black contraption squeaked in accompaniment.

The black contraption was rolled right up to the chair where Maria Fortales was tied, and then it stopped. The naked men and women remained where they were, standing beside it, motionless. Xyrena could see now that their genitalia had been tied up tightly with elaborate cat's-cradles of very thin twine, so that their flesh bulged in diamond-shaped patterns. Now Mago Verde came prancing forward, bowing and nodding his head.

‘Here it is, Brother Albrecht! The eighth offering! How close we are now, to the great day of glory! Only one more sacrifice to bring back to you after this one, and then you can cry out
up stakes
! and
wagons roll
! and return to the world where men can really be tortured and women can really be fondled!'

The ringmaster stepped up now, and took hold of the framework of the black canopy which covered the inside of the black contraption. ‘Ladies and gentlemen! And those undecided! I proudly present to you . . . the Grand Freak, Brother Albrecht!'

He was just about to raise the canopy, however, when Xyrena felt something wrench violently at her sleeve – something so strong that she was pulled right around in a semicircle and almost lost her balance. At the same time, she was half deafened by a screech and a chattering noise, and then a nasal voice shouting out, ‘
Arresto
!
Parada
!
Ne soulevez pas la
canopy!
Wij hebben hier
strangers!
Arresto
!
Parado
!'

Jekkalon and Jemexxa turned around, too. Tearing at Xyrena's sleeve was the rat-creature that they had first encountered when they came looking for their mother. Now that they could see it close up, they realized that it was much more human than rat, and although it was so diminutive, and so hunched-up, it was more man than boy. It was wearing the same yellow tweed coat as before, and a strange pair of brown britches with buttoned-up spats.