The Ninth Nightmare (31 page)

She came soaring down, and as she did so, with a brisk clicking noise, she extended her mechanical claws. She hit the flame breather in the back, her claws crunching deep into his deltoid muscles, and with three strong beats of her wings she lifted him clear off the stage and high up over the audience. He tried to shout out in shock, but his cheeks were bulging with lamp oil and he breathed most of it into his lungs.

She lifted him higher and higher, while he spluttered and choked and kicked his legs in a vain attempt to wrestle himself free – even though he would have dropped more than seventy feet if he had managed it. An-Gryferai beat her wings harder and harder, until she had almost reached the ceiling of the big top. But as she rose nearer and nearer to the star-shaped cuts she had made in the canvas, she realized that the fire breather was much heavier than she had estimated him to be, and that she would have to spread her wings much wider than the cuts she had made in order to be able to lift him out of the big top and into the open air.

Not only that, the storm outside was howling even more fiercely than before, and she didn't think that she had the strength to battle the downdraft that was blowing in from outside – not when she was carrying a struggling man who must have weighed nearly two hundred pounds.

Maybe she should do what her grandmother Gryferai had done to the Black Shatterer, and simply let go of him. But there was no guarantee that the drop was enough to kill him, and put him out of action for ever.

‘Jekkalon!' she gasped. ‘Jemexxa!'

‘What's wrong, A-G?' asked Jemexxa.

‘I can't lift him out through the roof – he's far too heavy and the wind's too strong!'

‘What are you going to do?'

The fire breather was close to asphyxiating now, and thrashing his arms and legs even more violently. It was only because An-Gryferai's claws were buried so deep in his muscles that she was able to hold on to him. The wind shrieked in through the cuts in the canvas and made her dip and spin in mid-air.

‘I'm going to drop him, but as soon as I let go of him, I want you to zap him!'

‘You got it! Jekkalon?'

Jekkalon said, ‘Got you!' He pushed his way through to the rear of the stage and mounted the ladder that would take him back up to the trapeze platform. None of the clowns or freaks made any attempt to stop him. They were too busy dragging Brother Albrecht off the stage, and out of Dom Magator's line of fire. They were even shouting out a ragged chorus of, ‘
Heave
!' and, ‘
Heave
!' Dom Magator kept trying to get a clear shot, but even though Brother Albrecht no longer had his fire breather to keep the Night Warriors at bay, he still couldn't manage it, not without the risk of hitting an innocent performer.

‘I swear to God, man!' Zebenjo'Yyx shouted at him. ‘You just need to total the whole frickin' lot of them!'

Dom Magator was almost beginning to believe that he was right, and that firing indiscriminately into the crowd was going to be the only way to ensure that the Grand Freak was eliminated for ever. But at that moment, high above their heads, An-Gryferai released her grip on the fire breather, and Jekkalon launched himself off the trapeze platform and performed a triple backflip to intercept the fire breather as he came down.

It was all over in a fraction of a second, but it seemed as if it took for ever, like a slow-motion ballet. As soon as An-Gryferai released her mechanical claws from his shoulder muscles, the fire breather dropped toward the stage, his arms flailing as if he were trying to swim. Jekkalon was tumbling over and over in mid-air, and as he did so, he extended his right hand, rotating his wrist so that his reflective palm would line up with Jemexxa's.

Jemexxa fired a dazzling lance of lightning out of her right hand. It hit Jekkalon's hand with a deafening crack, and instantly ricocheted upward. The fire breather exploded still thirty feet up in the air, the lamp oil in his lungs detonating in a massive orange fireball bigger than those he had breathed out over the Night Warriors.

Fragments of flesh sprayed all across the audience, as well as bones that whirled over and over as if somebody were juggling with them, and surrealistic loops and skeins of skin. As Jekkalon reached the next trapeze, and deftly caught hold of it, the whole of the big top was already in an uproar, with men roaring in disbelief and women screaming in horror, and performers and circus hands running in all directions.

The clowns and the freaks who were dragging Brother Albrecht's contraption off the stage were momentarily dazed with shock. They stood staring at the fine drizzle of blood which drifted across the auditorium, and the scorched tatters of orange clothing which were the very last to come see-sawing down to the ground.

For the first time, as the girl with the dog's paws and the old woman with the blood-red eyes watched the smoke from the explosion curl away, Dom Magator had an unobstructed line of fire. He aimed his Absence Gun until he saw Brother Albrecht in his sights, tousle-haired, impossibly handsome but still frowning in fury, and he pulled the three-stage trigger. The ceramic barrels whirred around, and the air in front of the gun appeared to ripple, as if he were looking at Brother Albrecht through the hot rising fumes of a coke-fired brazier.

SIXTEEN

Send In The Clowns

D
om Magator had fired an Absence Gun only once before, at an elderly man who had appeared in a small boy's recurrent nightmares about being abused. In reality, the boy had never been abused, and the man in his dreams was long dead, but the only way to rid him of his nightmare was to make sure that the man had never existed at all. The thunderclap when the man had vanished had been the most exhilarating sound that Dom Magator had ever heard, and had left him deafened for several hours afterward – even in the waking world.

He pressed the first of the three sequential triggers, but tonight nothing happened. No hum, no thunderclap. Nothing at all. Brother Albrecht slowly turned around to frown at him, but even when he realized that Dom Magator was aiming his Absence Gun at him, he gave him nothing but a contemptuous shake of his head.

Dom Magator fired another wave, and then another, stopping only when the little girl with the dog's feet stepped into this line. But they had no effect on Brother Albrecht at all.

‘What's wrong, bro?' asked Zebenjo'Yyx, in frustration. ‘You
had
him, you totally had him! Don't tell me you
missed
?'

Dom Magator looked down at the Absence Gun in bewilderment. ‘You can't miss with this baby. It's soul searching. It
knows
who you want to hit, and it always hits them, even if it hits a few other people who happen to be standing in the way.'

‘Then what the hell happened?'

Brother Albrecht's black contraption had now been pulled right to the very back of the stage, and the ringmaster was furiously winding the handle that operated its black leather canopy. Just before the canopy folded down over his head, Brother Albrecht gave Dom Magator a sloping, sardonic smile. A few seconds later the heavy velvet curtains were jerked across the stage and the contraption and all of its attendants disappeared.

‘What do we do now?' asked Xyrena. ‘We've blown it, haven't we?'

‘Where's our mom?' said Jekkalon. ‘Kiera – did you see what happened to Mom?'

Dom Magator looked up. Up above them, An-Gryferai was slowly circling down to the stage.

‘Are we going to try and save this poor girl here?' said Xyrena. Maria Fortales was still lying on the gurney, her left shoulder exposed. She was shuddering slightly, but it looked as if she was unconscious.

Xyrena walked across the stage toward her, but she was immediately surrounded by more clowns and freaks and little people, all of them with threatening scowls on their faces.

‘Where's our
mom
, for Chrissakes?' said Jekkalon. ‘She was here a few minutes ago.'

The big top was filled with people talking and shouting and milling around. Although the clowns and the freaks looked hostile, and kept crowding around them and barring their way, they didn't seem to be making any attempt to attack them. They had killed Doctor Friendly and two circus hands and the fire breather, but none of the performers seemed to be interested in exacting revenge.

Dom Magator turned around and looked at the audience, and then he suddenly knew why. The rows of seats were emptying fast – not because the dreamers were walking out, but because they were vanishing. They had probably been jolted out of REM sleep by the grisly spectacle of the fire breather being blown apart, and one by one they were waking up.

‘
Crap
!' he said. ‘Is George Roussos still here?
Quick
!'

An-Gryferai switched on her sensors and scanned the remaining members of the audience, from one side of the big top to the other, and back again. But even as she did so, more of them simply vanished, and the auditorium was beginning to take on the appearance of a checkers board, with counters being taken faster and faster.

‘Jesus, An-Gryferai!' Dom Magator shouted at her. ‘Is George Roussos still here or not? If he's woken up already, we're screwed! We're going to be stuck here in this goddamned nightmare with no way of getting out of it until he dreams it again!
If
he ever dreams it again – 'cause I sure as hell wouldn't want to, if I were him!'

‘I don't see him!' said An-Gryferai. ‘I don't see him anywhere!'

‘
Sheeit
!' said Zebenjo'Yyx. ‘How much worse luck can any one person
get
, man? I'm crippled by day and stuck in some asshole's nightmare by night!'

‘No – no, wait a minute!' An-Gryferai interrupted him. ‘I see him now! George Roussos! He's sitting right at the end of the sixteenth row, talking to some woman. It looks like the woman's upset, and he's trying to comfort her.'

‘Then let's get the hell out of here, right now!' said Dom Magator.

‘What about our mom?' Jekkalon begged him. ‘We can't just leave her here!'

‘We'll be
back
, Jekkalon!' Dom Magator told him. ‘We
have
to come back! We still haven't finished off Brother Albrecht yet!'

Dom Magator took hold of Xyrena's arm and helped her to climb down from the stage. The clowns and the freaks nudged them and pushed them, but none of them made any serious effort to stop them, especially when Zebenjo'Yyx pointed his finger at them, and Dom Magator unholstered a large nickel-plated handgun.

‘You know what this is?' he demanded, waving it from side to side. ‘It's called a Jangle Pistol. You know what they call it that? Because it
jangles
, and when it jangles it shakes your teeth out, that's what it does.
All
of your teeth – incisors, canines and molars, so you end up as gummy as a geriatric. Now, get out of my fricking way, unless you want to be sucking rusks for the next eight hundred years.'

The clowns and the freaks lifted their hands in mocking surrender, and some of them jeered, and pursed their lips to pretend that they had no teeth already, but they stayed well back. The Night Warriors jostled their way out through the main entrance of the big top and emerged into the wild and windy darkness. As An-Gryferai had warned them, it was stormier than ever, and a blizzard of leaves and twigs were flying through the air. A wooden chicken-coop was being blown between the caravans, over and over, with three black chickens squawking inside it.

They started to head back the way they had come, toward the hill. But before they had reached the last of the tents, An-Gryferai saw what looked at first like a long line of fir bushes waving in the field up ahead of them. She said, ‘Hold it, everybody! Wait up just a second!' and focused on the bushes more closely. They had pointed tops but they weren't swaying in the same way that bushes would sway. When she switched on her night-vision clarifier, she realized that they weren't bushes at all, but
clowns
– clowns wearing black and white and blood-red suits, and that all of them were wielding knives or clubs or sickles or catapults. Their faces were painted in a variety of classic clown expressions – dead white and expressionless, or scowling in exaggerated hostility, or madly grinning.

‘
Clowns,
' warned An-Gryferai. ‘And it looks like they seriously don't want us to escape from this dream.'

Dom Magator reached over his shoulder to the rack on his back and unfastened one of his rifles. ‘Acoustic Carbine,' he said, pulling back a chrome lever at the side to arm it. ‘It resonates in your enemy's inner ear and throws him off balance.'

‘What about your Absence Gun, man?' asked Zebenjo'Yyx. ‘That would wipe the smiles off of their faces – and for ever, too.'

‘Unh-hunh,' Dom Magator told him. ‘You only use an Absence Gun as an absolute last resort. Think about it. If a person never existed, then their children never existed, neither. So their grandchildren never existed, nor their great-grandchildren, all the way down the line. You understand me? Some of these clowns could be hundreds of years old, right, and have literally
thousands
of descendants. It could be a twenty-generation massacre.'

‘OK, man. I get it. But if you're going to throw them off balance, then you'd better do it, like,
now
! It looks like they're heading this way!'

He was right. The long ragged line of clowns was marching toward them, all with that bustling, exaggerated walk that clowns use in their circus acts. They were brandishing their clubs and their sickles and their knives were flashing in the darkness, and as they came hurrying nearer, the Night Warriors began to hear them hooting and howling.