The Ninth Nightmare (35 page)

‘
Lois
? Where
is
this? What am I doing here?'

‘University Hospital, my darling. Kieran is here also.'

‘What am I doing in a hospital? I'm not sick!'

‘Oh, you're not sick? Hah! You could have fooled me!'

‘Why, what happened?'

‘Who knows, already? Yesterday evening I came to your hotel room to take you and your brother to the concert and you were gone. I went crazy! My first thought was that you had been kidnapped! You know, for ransom or something like that! It was only by chance that one of the maids said that she had gone into another room on the fourth floor to take in some clean towels, and she had seen you both asleep, and recognized you. Otherwise, we would have had the police searching the whole of Cleveland! The whole of Ohio, even!'

‘I'm sorry,' said Kiera. ‘We really didn't mean to worry you.'

‘
Worry
me?
Worry
me? Even when we
found
you, we couldn't wake you! Believe me, we tried! I shook you! I screamed in your ears, wake up, wake up! But you wouldn't wake up, neither of you, so what did I do? I called nine-one-one of course. I thought maybe you'd both been taking that Georgia Home Boy or that Special K or whatever.'

Kiera said, ‘Lois, you know we never take party drugs. You know that.'

‘Well, of course. The doctors gave you a blood test and he said you were clean like whistles. He tested for everything and he couldn't understand why you wouldn't wake up. He thought maybe it was some kind of a coma.'

‘I don't know. Maybe we were just exhausted.'

‘If you were so exhausted, why didn't you tell me? Why did you sneak off and hide like that? Don't you trust me to take care of you? I could have maybe rescheduled.'

‘Oh, get real, Lois. You think you really would have?'

‘Well, maybe not. But how exhausted do you have to be to sleep through a seven-and-a-half million-dollar concert? Do you know what the
penalties
are going to be? The refunds! Do you have any idea how much our insurance premiums are going to go up? You were
exhausted
? God made the whole world and He took only one day off!

She paused for breath and then she said, ‘At least your next concert isn't until Saturday. I should have such luck.'

‘I'm sorry, Lois, truly I am. But there are some things which are much more important than money.'

‘Name one. Please. I'd love to know what it is.'

At that moment the door opened and Kieran appeared. His hair was sticking up as if he had just woken up and he was wearing yellow hospital pajamas. ‘Hi,' he said. ‘You're awake!'

‘Oh, great,' Lois greeted him. ‘The other Comatose Kaiser. So how are
you
feeling?'

‘OK, I guess,' Kieran told her. ‘Kind of bushed, but that's all.'

‘How can you be
bushed
? You two, you've been sleeping all night like dead people!'

‘I've been telling Lois how sorry we are,' said Kiera. ‘But I
have
tried to explain that money isn't everything.'

‘Kiera's right,' said Kieran. ‘So we miss one concert. It isn't the end of the world. Unlike the end of the world, which
is
the end of the world.'

‘I would just like to know what it is that means more to both of you than your careers.'

Kieran sat down on the end of the bed. ‘Our mom, Lois. Our mom is more important. And, like I say, the end of the world. That's more important, too.'

Lois looked from one twin to the other. ‘Your mom. Your
mom
? You know how sorry I am, but your mom is long ago passed over.'

‘Passed over, yes,' said Kieran. ‘But not passed away.'

‘I don't know what that means, Kieran. I don't have the faintest idea what you're talking about.'

‘If it comes to the end of the world, Lois, then believe me, you will.'

David shook Katie's shoulder and said, ‘Wake up, sleepyhead. I have to be gone in an hour. I made you coffee.'

Katie sat up in bed and frowned at him. ‘What time is it?'

‘A quarter of eight. I thought I'd let you sleep a little longer.'

‘
Urrgghh
,' said Katie, falling back and wrapping her head in the pillow. ‘I feel like I haven't slept in a week.'

David pried the two sides of the pillow apart. His face was very serious. ‘That's what I wanted to talk to you about. You were so restless last night. In fact “restless” is the understatement of the century. It was like you were having a full-scale fight with somebody. Flapping your arms and kicking your feet and twisting around and shouting.'

‘Shouting?' said Katie, staring at him suspiciously. ‘What was I shouting?'

‘All kinds of stuff. Something about how stormy it was, and how you couldn't lift somebody out through the roof. I mean, really weird things like that. You said you could see some circus, but it was too far away and you needed to gain more height. I swear to God you sounded like you thought you were flying.'

Katie reached up and touched his cheek with her fingertips. ‘It was only a nightmare, David. That's all. Maybe I've been working too hard.'

‘All the same, when I get back from Denver you and I are going to go talk to Aaron. Or Miriam, if you'd prefer.'

‘David, I keep trying to tell you. I'm perfectly OK.'

‘No, you're not. Something's happened to you. You've changed.'

She looked at him for a long time without saying anything, trying to communicate with her eyes that she
had
changed, yes, but that her feelings for him were as strong as ever, maybe even stronger. How could she possibly tell him that she was An-Gryferai, and that she had flown in a rainstorm over a circus, and snatched a fire breather into the air, so that her fellow Night Warriors could blow him up?

How could she make him believe that she had fought against clowns and freaks and barely escaped from the most terrible nightmare that had ever threatened the human race?

‘I love you, David,' she said, very softly.

‘I still want us to talk to Aaron. Will you do that for me?'

Katie nodded. ‘Of course I will. I
have
changed, I know that. But it's not for the worse, and it doesn't affect you and me. People grow up, that's all. Even when they reach our age, they can discover really important things about themselves that they never knew before.'

‘So what have
you
discovered about yourself that's so important?'

‘I think I've discovered that I'm much braver than I thought I was; and much more adventurous.'

‘
Braver
?' David plainly couldn't understand what she was trying to tell him. But he leaned forward and kissed her forehead and said, ‘OK. That's good. We'll talk about it some more when I get back. Just take care of yourself, you hear?'

John was woken up by a furtive tapping on his bedroom door. He opened his eyes and looked up the sloping ceiling above his bed. Then he turned his head to check what time it was. Ten after eight. Jesus. He felt as if he had been drinking tequila slammers all night.

More tapping. He knew who it was – Mrs Gizmo, his landlady. She always knocked like that, as if she was afraid to disturb him. ‘John?' she called out, querulously. ‘John? Are you awake? I don't hear you snoring!'

‘OK, Mrs Gizmo!' he called out, in a clogged-up voice. ‘I hear you!'

He heaved himself off the bed and went to the door. Mrs Gizmo was standing outside on the landing, but when she saw that he was wearing only a droopy red sweatshirt she immediately turned her back to present him with her iron-gray braids and her narrow widow's shoulders in her floral-print apron.

‘You have a visitor,' she told him.

‘A
visitor
? At this time of the morning?'

‘He says he's an old Army friend of yours.'

John puffed out his cheeks. He might have known it. Dean Brunswick III – Deano. The
late
Dean Brunswick III, aka Springer.

‘Do you think you could tell him to come back in maybe an hour?' John asked Mrs Gizmo. ‘I seriously need some sustenance first. Like, some buckwheat pancakes would be good. Do you have any maple syrup left? That Coombs Family Farm stuff, I could pour that over everything. I could pour it over
broccoli
, even.'

But before Mrs Gizmo could reply, a familiar voice called out, ‘
Hi–i–i
, John! Good to see you again so soon! How's it hanging? Well, I can see for myself!'

Dean Brunswick III came bounding up the stairs. The
young
Dean Brunswick III. He beamed flirtatiously at Mrs Gizmo as he passed her on the landing, and then he came up to John and gave him an affectionate back-slapping hug.

John said, ‘You'd better come in. Thanks a million, Mrs Gizmo.'

‘Quite all right, John,' said Mrs Gizmo, and went downstairs without turning back.

John led Springer into his bedroom. ‘You'll pardon me if I put on some pants.'

‘Oh, sure. Wow, it smells like mozzarella in here. That's not your feet, is it?'

John was pulling on a pair of comfort-fit Levis. ‘Just because you can make yourself
look
like my old dead Army buddy, that doesn't give you the license to talk to me the way he used to. That's the leftovers from a pepperoni pizza, if you must know.'

Springer sniffed and said, ‘Mmm. Appetizing. Not.'

John sat down on the bed and rolled on a pair of bright green Argyle socks. ‘What happened last night, that was a fiasco. We could have gotten ourselves permanently trapped in that dream, like forever and ever, amen, and then what?'

‘I still can't understand what went wrong,' said Springer. ‘You had Brother Albrecht in your sights, didn't you, at point-blank range? I've never known an Absence Gun to misfire before.'

‘I don't think it
did
misfire,' John told him. ‘Only a short time afterward, I zapped that meat-packing plant, didn't I? And the gun worked perfect.'

Springer went to the window and looked out over Mrs Gizmo's scruffy back yard, with her washing hanging sadly on the line. ‘Maybe it wasn't a weapons failure at all,' he suggested. ‘Maybe Brother Albrecht has some way of protecting himself.'

‘Oh, you mean like a force field, from
Star Trek
?'

‘No, nothing like that. Nothing technical. Whenever you Night Warriors enter other people's dreams, you may be trespassing inside their minds, so to speak, but there's nothing they can do to shield themselves against your weapons, any more than you can shield yourselves against
their
weapons, if they happen to have any.'

‘All the same, the Absence Gun didn't work on Brother Albrecht, did it?' said John. ‘It was
his
dream, right? Maybe he simply dreamed that it wouldn't work.'

‘He couldn't have done that,' Springer told him. ‘The whole carnival set-up – the clowns and the freaks and the acrobats – yes, those are all Brother Albrecht's creation. But being Dom Magator is
your
dream, and in
your
dream your Absence Gun never misfires, and there is absolutely nothing that Brother Albrecht could have done to jam it or deflect it.

He pressed the palms of his hands together, as if he were praying. ‘I'm talking about some other kind of protection. I don't really know what. Maybe something more
spiritual.
'

John dragged a Kleenex out of a battered box, and noisily blew his nose. ‘The Absence Gun works on a wave function, right?'

‘That's right.'

‘OK, then – supposing for the sake of argument Brother Albrecht doesn't exist on the same wavelength as anybody else? Supposing he's visible, but not quite there? Like supposing he exists a nanosecond ahead of us, or a nanosecond behind? Or a micromillimeter off to the left, or micromillimeter off to the right?'

‘What are you saying?'

‘I'm saying that if you fire an Absence Gun at somebody like that, it wouldn't have any effect, would it? If somebody wasn't actually
there
, you couldn't make them cease to exist, could you?'

Springer turned away from the window. ‘It's a theory, I suppose,' he said, doubtfully. ‘I don't know what Einstein would make of it.'

‘Screw Einstein, it makes sense to me. Kind of, anyhow. Do you have a better idea?'

‘I don't know, John. I have the feeling that there's a whole lot more to Brother Albrecht than meets the eye. He's so
bitter,
you know? So angry, and so
cruel
, and he hasn't stopped railing against God for eight hundred years. How can anybody stay so vengeful for so many centuries?'

‘Well – that's a question we have to answer asap,' John told him. ‘But there's no future in us going back into Brother Albrecht's dream unless we work out a way to effectively bust his ass, is there?'

‘I agree with you, John, one hundred and ten percent. But the situation is critical. From what Mago Verde said, it's going to take only one more sacrifice before Brother Albrecht can break the sacred sanction that Pope Eugene placed on him, and then he'll be able to lead his circus back here into the waking world. That poor girl who had her arms cut off, she was the eighth sacrifice. We have to find a way to stop Brother Albrecht before Mago Verde finds him a ninth.'

John blew his nose again and thought about it. It came as no surprise to him that Springer knew every detail of what had happened in Brother Albrecht's nightmare last night. Springer had a cerebral connection to everything that the Night Warriors experienced when they entered other people's dreams. When they returned to their bodies in the morning, all of their impressions flowed into Springer's consciousness as if he were living through them himself – a kind of psychic debriefing, with sights and sounds and smells and conversations and even emotions. He had shared their elation when the fire breather exploded. He had also known how frightened they were when they thought that the clowns had barred their way back through the portal.