The Ninth Nightmare (23 page)

‘You don't have to do this, Katie,' she told herself. ‘If you'd rather take a rain check, what can he do to you? He's just a young guy who happens to look a whole lot like Mr Flight, that's all.'

Actually, she wasn't so sure about that. If Springer was capable of showing her what she looked like when she was all dressed up in her Night Warriors suit, maybe he was capable of making sure that she wore it, and that she went out hunting for this Gordon Veitch character, and Brother Albrecht's carnival, whether she wanted to or not.

She held up the piece of paper. To her surprise, the words on it seemed to be written in her own handwriting. Very softly, she read them out.

‘“Now, when the face of the world is hidden in darkness, let us be conveyed to the place of our meeting, armed and armored; and let us be nourished by the power that is dedicated to the cleaving of darkness, the settling of all black matters, and the dissipation of all evil. So be it.”'

Katie thought that the words sounded rather pompous and medieval, but in spite of that she still found them stirring, and she particularly liked the phrase about ‘the place of our meeting, armed and armored', which reassured her that she was not going to be alone, but part of a fighting force with other Night Warriors.

She crept back into the bedroom and slid herself under the covers. David was lying on his right side now, and talking to himself. As far as she could make out, he was giving a lecture, but it all sounded like nonsense. ‘
Not psychotic, no. Umbrellas. And everybody has to go now.'

He was talking so loudly that she was afraid that she wouldn't be able to fall asleep, but somehow the words that Springer had given her to read had affected her as if she had taken a strong sedative, and after only a few minutes her eyes began to close. The illuminated clock on the nightstand beside her read twelve twenty-seven.

Darkness flooded into her mind; and at the same time she began to feel lighter and lighter. With the abrupt buoyancy of a helium balloon caught by a gust of wind, she bobbed up from her bed and floated upward, toward the ceiling. Startled, she rolled around in mid air, and as she did so she looked down and there she was, her own sleeping self. Her short brunette hair was already tousled, and she was touching her cheek with one hand as if she were making sure that she was real.

She rolled around again, so that she was facing upward, just as she reached the ceiling. She held up both hands to prevent herself from being pressed up against it, but her hands disappeared right into the plaster as if it were nothing but the softest of fine white sand. The rest of her followed, with a thick
shushing
sound, and she found that she was rising through the attic, where all of their suitcases and their books and their old furniture was stored. She saw the carved pine headboard from Daisy's bed, the bed in which poor little Daisy had died, and somehow that gave her all the more determination to carry on. Even if she hadn't been able to save Daisy, she could save other innocent children.

She kept on rising, and passed through the attic ceiling as easily as she had passed through the bedroom ceiling; and then the roof shingles; and in a few seconds she was high above the house. To the south she could see the glittering lights of Miami Beach, and to the west she could see clear across Biscayne Bay to Morningside Park. To the north, on the far side of the Surprise Waterway, she could see La Gorce Country Club, and an endless red stream of tail lights on Collins Avenue, like blood corpuscles flowing through the darkness.

Now she hung suspended for a few moments. At first she could feel the breeze from the ocean blowing against her face and ruffling her hair, but then her helmet began to take shape, and her head was soon enclosed in the distinctive falcon-shaped helmet of An-Gryferai. The lenses that protected her eyes were tinted amber, but her night-vision was stunning. She could clearly see all the way to the Golden Glades interchange, which was nearly twelve and a half miles to the north-west. All she had to do was lightly touch the side of her helmet with her fingertips, and she could see even further, with just as much clarity. She could even read the traffic sign on I-95 for Fort Lauderdale Airport, and see a small plane taking off, with the lights on its wing tips flashing.

She looked down and saw that she was now dressed all over in the soft brown-feathered plumage of An-Gryferia, with white feathers across her breasts. On each forearm her powerful mechanical claws had materialized, with all of the rods and ratchets and pulleys that operated them. She squeezed them open and shut, and rotated them, and each movement was accompanied by a satisfying series of whirrs and clicks.

Her wings had developed, too. They were strapped to her back and her upper arms with a soft leather harness, which allowed her to open them by flexing her shoulders. At first they were folded, and very heavy, but An-Gryferai soon discovered that when she opened them up, they were caught at once by the warm updraft from the ground. With a rumble of windblown feathers, she was carried even higher up into the air, until she could see the sparkling curve of the Florida Keys, all the way south to Plantation Key, and that was over seventy-five miles away.

She spun slowly around and around, marveling at the way she could fly, and how far she could see. She flapped her wings cautiously, only three or four flaps, and she was lifted over fifty feet higher into the air. Then she stretched them as wide as she could, and angled them into the wind. She swooped down, and then up, and then she dared to plummet head first toward the ground, breaking out of her dive less than twenty feet from the seventh hole at La Gorce Country Club. She flew the length of the lake on the right-hand side of the hole, so that she could see her reflection flashing over the surface of the water. An-Gryferai, in her falcon helmet, the Avenging Claw.

When she reached the far end of the lake, she was about to soar up into the air again when she saw a solitary figure standing beside the trees. Her eyesight was so sharp that she could identify him at once as Springer. She tilted to the left, and then feathered her wings so that she landed only a few yards away from him, although she nearly lost her balance as her feet touched the ground, and finished up her flight with a scurrying little run.

As she stood there panting, Springer circled around her, nodding his head in admiration. An-Gryferai thought he looked different – darker, taller, more intense – less like Mr Flight and more like her first boyfriend Gideon, who had been seventeen years older than her. Very attractive, but domineering.

‘You look wonderful,' said Springer. ‘Your grandmother would be very proud of you.'

‘Thanks, it's amazing. I could see all the way down to the Keys.'

‘You'll have to travel far and fast tonight,' Springer told her. ‘We've noticed that the president of a meat-packing company in Chicago is dreaming about Brother Albrecht's carnival. He lives in the Drake Tower, on Lake Shore Drive. Dom Magator and the rest of your team will be waiting for you right outside.'

‘
Chicago
? But that's over a thousand miles! It's going to take me all night to get there!'

Springer smiled. ‘You're forgetting, An-Gryferai. You're dreaming. You're not bound by the laws of the physical world. You're a Night Warrior. Katie's asleep in her bed, but you can go anyplace you want, as fast as you want.'

‘But
how
?'

‘Use your natural instincts. An-Gryferai has all the natural sense of direction of a migratory bird. She uses the Earth's magnetic field to guide her, just as migrating birds do. The only difference between An-Gryferai and a migratory bird is that a bird has to fly to its destination by flapping its wings – whereas you can fly there just by thinking about it.'

‘But—'

Springer laid his hand on her shoulder, and for a moment she felt the same sense of being controlled as she had with Gideon. But then he said, ‘You know where Chicago is. You know where Lake Shore Drive is. Have confidence in yourself, An-Gryferai. Inside your mind you have a map of everywhere, and you have the ability to use it. Compared to your navigational skills, a satnav is a clumsy toy.'

He took his hand away. He was nothing like Gideon, not at all, because Gideon always used to make her feel that she was useless and stupid, whereas Springer made her feel that she could do whatever she put her mind to.

‘Close your eyes,' Springer told her. ‘Now visualize the coordinates of Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, and
be
there.'

Katie closed her eyes. In her mind's eye, she could see an extraordinary illuminated map of the entire United States, a tracery of fine shining filaments set against a seamless black background, like the sky at night. Instinctively, she steered her mind north-north-westward, and the map began to rotate. Far beneath her, she saw spatterings of light that she recognized as Orlando, Gainesville, Atlanta, Louisville and Indianapolis. She felt no sensation that she was moving. There was no slipstream blowing through her feathers. She felt only that her consciousness was carrying her to the western shore of Lake Michigan, and the glittering conurbation of Chicago and all of its suburbs.

It took her only seconds. She had seen
Stargate SG1
on TV, where squads of soldiers were transported through a wormhole in space from one planet to another, almost instantaneously, in a roller-coaster rush of colored lights. But that was nothing compared to the silent, effortless way in which she had simply
thought
herself from one city to another.

As she approached East Lake Shore Drive, she opened up her eyes and opened up her wings, too, so that she could fly down the last thousand feet. She didn't have far to go. The Drake Tower was directly beneath her, a red-brick apartment block in the beaux-arts style – thirty stories and nearly three hundred fifty feet high.

Suddenly she could hear noise, too – of honking traffic and the wind whipping off the lake, and a helicopter
thump-thump-thumping
over Cicero.

An intense blue light flashed from the roof garden of the Drake Tower, and as she see-sawed downward with her wings outstretched, she saw Dom Magator and Zebenjo'Yyx and Xyrena and the twins Jekkalon and Jemexxa, already gathered together and waiting for her. To her surprise, Springer was there, too, in the same form in which he had appeared to her on the golf course at La Gorce Country Club.

Zebenjo'Yyx was busy marveling at his outfit. Lincoln lifted his right arm, and then his left. Attached by straps to the upper side of each forearm, all the way from his elbows to his wrists, there was an elaborate mechanism which looked like the workings of a crossbow, with tightened cords and a system of cogs and ratchets. Each mechanism was loaded with three arrows, with viciously-barbed heads on them, six arrows altogether. But when he turned his head further and looked at his upper arms, he saw that there were three further arrows on each of those, too. He reached behind him, and realized that he was carrying even more arrows on his back, in a herringbone pattern, and that he had an extraordinary kind of quiver rising out of his back, like a scorpion's tail. In all, he reckoned he must have been carrying more than a hundred arrows, and they were all connected to hooks and pulleys, so that when one arrow was fired, another arrow would immediately tilt over his shoulder and slide along his arm to replace it.

When An-Gryferai touched lightly down on the roof, Springer came over and took hold of her arm. ‘Everybody, this is the last member of our team, the Avenging Claw.'

He led her across to the other Night Warriors, and introduced her. Dom Magator said, ‘Very pleased to meet you, little bird-lady. I have to say that I ate a chicken bigger than you once, spit-roasted, at Pluckers Restaurant in Baton Rouge.'

‘I'll take that as a compliment. I've been trying to lose weight.'

An-Gryferai was slightly taken aback by Xyrena, with her high golden crown and her billowing golden cloak and her naked-look breastplate. It was more than just her appearance – her shiny golden breasts and her shiny golden genitalia. When she took hold of An-Gryferai's hands to welcome her, An-Gryferai felt a strange electrifying sensation, as if Xyrena had slyly drawn her fingertips up the inside of her thighs, and intimately touched her.

Springer noticed her quick, involuntary shiver. ‘Xyrena is the Passion Warrior,' he explained. ‘She has the same effect on everybody, man or woman. It's her principal weapon.'

‘Same as it is for most women, wouldn't you say?' Xyrena put in.

Now Zebenjo'Yyx came forward. His wooden arrow-launchers clattered as he walked. ‘Good to have you here, Avengin' Claw. Some fancy-dress party, don't you think? If I hadn't nearly been killed by this Gordon Veitch guy, I would have thought this was some kind of seriously bad joke.'

‘I still can't believe any of it,' said An-Gryferai. ‘I keep thinking that it's all a dream, but then it
is
.'

Jekkalon and Jemexxa introduced themselves – Jekkalon in his gleaming black suit and Jemexxa in her dazzling silver suit. They both nodded their helmets and said, ‘Hi, pleased to meet you,' but An-Gryferai thought that they seemed diffident and edgy and not very happy to be here. She didn't know that earlier that evening, three-and-a-half thousand disgruntled fans had almost caused a full-scale riot at the State Theater in Cleveland when they realized that the Kaiser Twins were not going to be making their promised appearance.

‘All right,' said Springer. ‘We don't know how much longer this gentleman's dream is going to last, so we have to make this quick. His name is George Roussos and he's the president of ABR Foods, which is one of the major meat-packers in Chicago. He's asleep in his apartment on the twenty-seventh floor, along with his wife Margarita.'