Those Who Fight Monsters (34 page)

Albert swallowed hard. Knight darted his head from side to side, checking the air around them, adding, “Madame Raniella has travelled the dreamplane before. She is one of the most reliable dreamwalkers to be found.” As his young companion simply stared, the professor added:

“She’ll take you inside, help best she can. You’ll find her far more vigorous in that realm than our own. No matter what she and I can do, however, the thing you
must
concentrate on is that, if you can catch this thing by surprise, you could give Debbie the rest of her life. If you can’t, then really…” Knight paused for a moment, then in a voice filled with nothing but cold practicality, he asked, “Is it actually going to matter to her how much time she has left … or if you’re there or not?”

The inside of Harper’s head fizzled with an anger tempered by practicality. Knight was correct, of course. He hated to admit it, but at present there was no connection between himself and his daughter. She was a lump of breathing meat that he cleaned and fed and dressed and put to bed. She could not button buttons, take herself to the bathroom, brush her teeth — none of it. She did not know who he was. If he was dead, she would not care.

She did not know how.

A tear on the verge of breaking free from his left eye, Harper growled, “Tell me one thing. If you’ve known all this for so long, why’d you wait? Why’d you
fucking
wait?”

“I’ll be honest,” answered Knight, his voice low, “yes, I did need to find someone like Raniella to assist, but also … I got distracted … and … please understand—” The professor coughed, excused himself, then went on.

“Listen, I’m certain if I were to go from hospital to hospital, I could find hundreds, thousands of cases like yours. I don’t go looking for horrors to combat. I’m not some supernatural policeman. Or demon hunter. I’m just a man. But you’re my friend, and once I was certain I was correct about Debbie, then I had to pull my courage together and act like your friend.”

“Yeah.” Harper spat the single word, his mind still reeling from all it had been asked to accept. Finally, after several seconds that dragged on for hours, he said, “I’d call you a bastard, but you’d still be right. So, okay, since you’ve got me in the mood where I’d like to kill something, let’s go see if I can.”

Twenty minutes later, it began. Upon returning to his home, Harper took Madame Raniella into the master bedroom while Knight remained with Debbie. Knight had started in with the same kind of distracting chatter the old woman had thrown at her, keeping the girl’s attention while the assault was prepared in the next room.

Giving Harper an opened bottle, Raniella told him, “Hold it under your nose. Breathe the fumes deeply.”

The pungent vapors began to relax him immediately. Then, while Harper stretched out on his bed, the old woman sat in a chair next to it, cautioning him not to wander off into his own dreams.

“You must stay focused. Wait for me to arrive. Once we find each other, we will then search for your quarry.” Harper nodded. Then, just as he was sinking into unconsciousness, Raniella added;

“And remember, dear boy, this is the dreamplane where we go. If you can imagine something, you can
will
it to be — as real as anything around you.”

“Meaning what?” Harper asked groggily.

“Meaning,” Raniella told him, “Whatever this
thing
throws at you, you just throw it right back…”

Everything worked as Knight had said it would. In seconds Harper was asleep. Remembering what he was supposed to do, he searched his memory, bringing the image of Madame Raniella clearly into his mind. The drawn face, silvered hair, delicate hands, stiff, slender body—

And then, suddenly the two were together, the scenery within Albert’s mind taking on a disturbingly real substance. The two stood on a vast and open plane, a red and purple expanse stretching in all directions. As vague bits of crimson dust swirled about them, she said;

“Concentrate, Albert. Return yourself to that first moment you saw your daughter, back in the delivery room — remember it, take yourself back to it —
be
there…”

Time shattered into millionths of a second. In each passing fraction Harper saw pieces of his most cherished memory reconstructed. Bit by bit, it fell into place — the unexpected cut, the gushing blood, his shock, the assurances, and then the nurse, walking forward—

“Would you like to hold your daughter, Mr. Harper?”

He took the bundle without hesitation. Held her for the briefest of instants, then raised the tiny, fragile body upward, touched his head to hers—

—flash—

Albert Harper fell to his knees, screaming. Bolts of pain shattered his chest and ricocheted off his nerves, blasting his senses, spinning him around, slamming him onto his back—

“Look at the maggot come to hold his little freak.”

Harper tried to drag himself away from the assault. Molten metal poured over him, searing flesh from bone, evaporating his skin, boiling his blood, dissolving him—

“I just knew I was going to meet you in here some day.”

The taunting voice did not issue from a mouth of any kind. It rode the electric jolts pummeling Albert, crawling into his organs and ripping them open one after another. It had a female lilt to it that somehow managed to be both familiar and frightening.

“I wish I could say it was good to see you again.”

That voice was one he knew. Recognizing notes, Harper began to identify its pattern. Despite the furious pain lashing every fiber of his essence, still he began to pull a face together within his mind.

“Linda?”

“Very good.” The voice chuckled. “Now I suppose you’re going to pull yourself back together and, how did he put it … kick my damned ass until I leave for good. Is that next, Albert, dear?”

Harper strained to open his eyes. Madame Raniella was nowhere to be seen. He was no longer in the delivery room, but further back in the past, sitting in a movie theater, the voice of the creature snarling behind him.

“This is where we met, isn’t it, darling? This is where you fell in love with me.”

Exactly as he remembered it.

“Is it all coming back to you, sweetheart? Is it?”

Harper remembered it all — being in a bad mood, going to a movie alone, not caring what he saw. He remembered throwing himself into the middle of the emptiest section of the theater. Remembered two women coming in and sitting directly behind him. The two talked throughout the film, but having his theater-going experience interrupted by the pair did not bother Harper for long. He was too busy falling in love with one of them.

“It never did dawn on you, did it, Al? A beautiful woman, with an interest in mystery novels, and gaming, and comics … a beautiful woman who voted the same way you did, who couldn’t wait to leave the theater and go to that new Vietnamese restaurant … how vain
are
you?”

Harper turned in his seat.

“Do you think I’m going to believe anything you tell me?”

“Baby,” the form of his wife said sweetly, lifting a hand to point a single finger at him, “do you think I care?”

An arc of blue-white flame erupted from her hand, cascading over Albert, roasting his skin, boiling his eyes. Remembering himself whole, inside his shower, he drenched himself, regenerating his body as he screamed:

“I don’t give a rat’s ass what you care about, what you think, or what you have to say. Just get out of my daughter’s head!”

“Al, sweetie,” the familiar thing smiled. “What makes you think I’m
in
her head anymore?”

The Linda-like thing waved its hand and boils flooded forth from every pore of Harper’s body. Hundreds, thousands of them, they burst open, pus and blood bubbling up from each of them. Harper endured the torment for a moment, then rejected the plague, throwing it off as he had the earlier torments. As he did, the ever-changing landscape settled once more into the red and purple wasteland he first encountered. As Harper steadied himself, the Linda thing strode purposely into his field of vision.

“Very slow, sweetheart,” it told him. Hands on its knees, body bent to show all its parts off to their best advantage, the thing told him, “Too slow, really. I mean, seriously, what do you think can really come of all this?”

Before Albert could answer, the ground opened and swallowed him. He tried to leap away, but he could not compensate for the slam of crushing gravity sent to shovel him into the latest torment. As he fell below the surface of the dreamplane, the ground rushed in, sand and gravel and choking dust, not just piling atop him, but grinding against him, digging its way into his skin — tearing it from his body, shredding it. First one layer, then the second, hair torn away, scalp bloody, nails being etched, eye brows and lashes ripped out by the roots—

“
No
!”

Albert clawed his way to the surface, breaking the ground open with his back and shoulders. His head felt cracked; blood sluiced over his ears, down his forehead. His hands ached from clawing his way free. The Linda thing cackled as he gasped for air.

“You can’t do it, you know.”

“Do what?” Albert’s voice was a ragged, panting thing, weak and feeble.

“Beat me. Can’t be done.”

“Bullshit,” Harper said weakly. “Human beings been … kicking the ass of your, your kind for centuries.”

“True, perhaps.” Sitting on a large violet rock seemingly carved to resemble a great, rolling tongue, the Linda thing added, “But that takes actual faith.”

With a snap of its fingers, the thing unleashed a ravenous horde of insects to devour Albert. As quickly as he could shield himself, regenerate his flesh, the overwhelming waves of chittering creatures would find their way to him once more, begin chewing again, ripping again, tearing, slicing, stinging, gnawing—

“The moment Linda first sat down behind you,” the thing snickered, “you had no faith in your chances with her.”

Albert cleared his mind enough to summon a great wind to carry the horde away from him. He had nearly a full second’s respite before the Linda thing turned his body to glass and began tossing shards of rock at him.

“When she started to talk,” the thing laughed, shattering Albert’s left arm at the elbow, “you wanted her so badly. But you never
believed
you could actually have her.”

Concentrating, Albert was able to reform his body, but only for as long as his opponent allowed it. While he wiped at the sweat running down his forehead, half of it water, half of it tiny glass beads, the Linda thing took the moment to finish its thought.

“You don’t have the belief in you to get rid of me, sweetheart, and that’s what’s going to make this so much fun.”

“Fun?” asked Albert, confused. “What’s going to be so much fun?”

“Why,
us
— darling.”

Before he could react, the thing was behind him, its all-too familiar arms encircling his chest. The touch jarred too many memories, splitting him, rending him — making him ache for his ex-wife the way a starving man yearns for food. The feel of her was fire; crisping skin, sweat that tasted like bacon — alluring, forbidden, salty — delicious. Her breasts came against his back in exactly the way he remembered; the heat of her breath curled across his neck, into his ear. He had been so long without female contact — any female contact — let alone hers, that his body surrendered to the touch involuntarily. Craving it; luxuriating against it — simply, pitifully, longing for it to never end.

“You’re my dog, Albert,” the thing whispered. “You may fight against me, but I’ve got you.” The young man struggled against the all-too-pleasant hold binding him. The arms held him securely while their owner whispered; “Poor boy — you just don’t understand yet, do you? You can’t resist me. No matter how many pains you endure, how many trials you turn back, I can always think up more. You don’t have any way to resist me. You don’t have any faith in anything, sweetheart. And, without faith, I can’t be driven away.”

Chuckling, its voice a mad titter swirling the dust about his head in never-ending spirals, the creature shifted its grip and suddenly drove its hands into Albert’s sides. Pulling organs free from his body, it tossed them casually over its shoulder, saying;

“And, even if you could ever drive me out of your head, what would it gain you? You sad, stupid man…”

Albert sagged, tiring from the pain, the endlessness of it — the futility of it — hurt too much, so terribly
much
he simply had to rest. As he gasped, struggling desperately to marshal his thoughts, the red-handed thing above him sighed, dribbling spittle into Albert’s face as it said;

“After all, if you ever get me to run from you, where do you think I’ll go?” The demon let him go then did a little dance, spinning itself madly as it screeched, “I’ll just go back into Debbie.”