The Ninth Nightmare Read online

  ‘Any way of telling if she was still alive when he took her arms off?’

  ‘From the copious bloodstains on the upper part of the arms, I’d say yes. But with any luck she may have been sedated.’

  Walter looked around. ‘Find any blood trails?’

  ‘Unh-hunh. Not a drop outside of this locker.’

  ‘Are we sure that this is Maria Fortales?’

  ‘We’ll be taking prints, of course, and DNA. But Ms Lipschitz ID’d her jewelry.’

  ‘Ms Lipschitz?’

  The CSI nodded her head toward the opposite side of the corridor. Officer Skrolnik was talking to a stocky woman with cropped gray hair and circular spectacles and a thick plaid skirt. When he saw Walter and Charlie looking their way, he beckoned them over.

  ‘This is the co-director, Naomi Lipschitz,’ he said. ‘Ms Lipschitz – this is Detective Wisocky and this is Detective Hudson.’

  ‘We’re very sorry about what happened here, ma’am,’ said Walter. ‘It must have come as one heck of a shock.’

  ‘Who could have done such a thing?’ asked Ms Lipschitz. Tears were crowding her eyes and dribbling down her cheeks like the rain that was dribbling down the window. ‘Maria – she was such a vivacious young girl. And such a hard-working student. Everybody liked her.’

  ‘You’re absolutely sure that it’s her?’

  Ms Lipschitz nodded. ‘The bracelet, and the rings, I don’t have any doubt. And I was always scolding her about biting her nails.’

  ‘You say that everybody liked her. Maybe you can think of somebody who didn’t like her quite as much as all the rest?’

  ‘No – nobody that I can think of. Our students are all very competitive, believe you me, but they’re far too busy to waste their time on personal feuds and petty animosities. All of the ground floor here – this is the Milton A. Kramer Law Clinic Center. The students here get involved in real-life court cases, so that they can gain practical experience, and their workload is highly demanding.’

  ‘Was Maria Fortales involved in any real-life court cases?’

  ‘Of course. Every student is given a caseload of several court actions at once. Maria Fortales was currently involved in three, so far as I know. One was an action for disability benefit; the second was a DUI; and the third was a case of domestic violence.’

  ‘OK,’ said Walter, ‘we’re going to need details of all of those. And every other case she’s ever been involved in, going right back to when she first enrolled. You never know – one of her clients may bear a grudge against her for some reason.’

  ‘I can’t imagine why any of them should. But, very well, detective, yes, I’ll make sure you get them.’

  She started to turn her head to look behind her, but Walter laid a hand on her shoulder and restrained her. ‘Give it a couple of minutes, OK? You don’t want to see this.’ The CSIs had wrapped up Maria Fortales’ arms in clear polyethylene and were stowing them into a black zip-up body-parts bag, the type they usually used for torsos and severed heads. The arms looked to Walter as if they had been detached from a storefront mannequin.

  ‘Do you think she’s dead?’ Ms Lipschitz asked him.

  Walter shrugged. ‘We can’t tell for sure, ma’am, but I think I hope so.’

  ‘How could anybody do anything so cruel? How could they?’

  ‘I don’t know the answer to that. I wish I did. Or then again, maybe I’m glad that I don’t.’

  He turned to Charlie and said, ‘OK . . . what we need to do now is talk to all of Maria’s fellow students, and all of her professors, and most of all we need to find out who was the last person or persons to see her alive. We also need to discover if she had any boyfriends that nobody knew about.’

  ‘I think I should be running some background checks on Mago Verde,’ said Charlie.

  ‘Huh? What the hell for?’

  ‘I still have this very strong intuition that Mago Verde is the key to all of this.’

  Walter tried his best to sound patient. ‘Charlie,’ he said, ‘listen to me. You’re not supposed to have intuitions.’

  ‘But you do. You have them all the time.’

  ‘I know I do. But that’s because I have a very short span of attention. You – you’re not supposed to have intuitions. You’re supposed to be procedural, get it? You’re supposed to collect all of the available evidence, and carefully analyze it, and then come to logical conclusions that will stand up in court. It’s not your style, jumping to conclusions and then screaming at people until they’re prepared to admit that they’re guilty, even if they’re not. That’s my job.’

  ‘I understand that, Walter. But Maria Fortales disappeared from a locked room, and that was just like some kind of conjuring trick, right? And she’s had her arms sawn off, which is just like another kind of conjuring trick. If anybody could pull this off, it’s a conjuror, which is exactly what Mago Verde is.’

  Walter took a deep breath. ‘OK, then, what exactly do you propose to do, o intuitive one?’

  ‘First off, I think I ought to find out if any local clowns have been making themselves up as Mago Verde recently. I should check out any circuses or carnivals within a fifty-mile radius at least, and any children’s entertainment agencies. The yellow pages, too. If none of that gives me anything, I’ll need to check if Mago Verde appeared in any circuses or carnivals in Cleveland in the past thirty years at least; and if anybody ever got arrested for any kind of felony while wearing Mago Verde greasepaint, and what that felony was.’

  Walter stared at him for a long time with heavy-lidded eyes. He looked like a lizard basking on a rock. Eventually, however, he tugged at the end of his nose and said, ‘OK, you win. I guess what you’re saying makes some kind of sense, although I don’t exactly know what. I’ll call the captain and have Burrows and Gysin come out to do the routine questioning.’

  Charlie said, ‘Trust me, Walter. I know it sounds wacky but I genuinely think I’m on to something here. After I’ve checked out Mago Verde I’m going to do like you said and read all the way through Maria Fortales’ diary. I don’t believe that it was any kind of coincidence, Netta having the same nightmare that she did. I’m also going to try and work out what that rat-character was supposed to be saying.

  He took out his notebook and flipped it open. ‘“Coop sign pianos” and “gang up you start”. I’m sure it means something.’

  ‘Sure it does,’ said Walter. ‘“A bird in the hand makes it really difficult to blow your nose.”’

  Walter returned to his apartment well after eleven p.m. that evening, and he was exhausted. He hung up his trench coat in the narrow hallway and then went through to the kitchen. This morning’s half-empty coffee mug stood on the draining board by the sink, next to a plate that was covered in yellow semicircles of solidified egg-yolk.

  He went directly to the fridge and took out a Miller, which he popped and swallowed straight out of the can, loosening his necktie with one finger. Then he went through to the living room and collapsed backward on to his sagging brown corduroy couch. He switched on the television and it was Shatner’s Raw Nerve, William Shatner interviewing Rush Limbaugh, a repeat, so he switched it over to Nightline, although he kept the sound muted.

  He lay there for a while, trying to relax, but grisly images of Maria Fortales’ severed arms kept jumping into mind’s eye, like pictures from a flicker book, with that Mexican bracelet and those silver rings.

  He was deeply troubled by the Maria Fortales case. It was like a jigsaw puzzle in which the pieces seemed to belong to two different pictures, or even more, and he had the feeling that even if they managed to complete it, they wouldn’t understand what he was looking at, like Washington Crossing The Delaware all mixed up with American Gothic, with maybe a bit of wallpaper from Whistler’s Mother thrown in. The perpetrators he usually collared fell into one of four predictable categories. They were either creepy psychotic stalkers with halitosis who tortured and killed people to compensate for their own personal inadequa
cies; or moronic blue-collar bullies with tattooed necks and the temperament of pit-bull terriers; or equally moronic members of the Folks or the Latin Kings or the Waste Five gang who felt it was a matter of honor to stab or shoot anybody who disrespected them; or gray-suited office-workers who had simply cracked under the strain of everyday life – losing their jobs, or losing their children in some heartbreaking custody settlement.

  But whoever had taken and dismembered Maria Fortales had much more obscure motives than any of these. He and Charlie hadn’t been able to get any kind of handle on how he had abducted her, let alone why. To begin with, he had been skeptical about Charlie’s intuition that Mago Verde was somehow involved, but in truth he had a nagging suspicion that Charlie maybe on to something. This was no ordinary missing persons case. This was all about nightmares and circuses and conjurors and clowns. And what about Netta? Netta had experienced nightmares that were almost identical, but of course there was no apparent connection between Netta and Maria Fortales. One was a trainee lawyer and the other was a hamburger waitress with screwy eyes, and so far as he knew they had never met. All the same, Walter felt that he had been deliberately given a very forceful nudge. How, or by whom, he couldn’t begin to understand. But just like Charlie, he was beginning to feel that the circus was coming.

  He jolted, and opened his eyes. He had been dropping off to sleep.

  Walter heaved himself upright. As he did so his cellphone rang. He rummaged in his pocket until he found it, and then he snapped, ‘What?’

  ‘Sorry, Walter, didn’t mean to disturb you. It’s Charlie.’

  ‘What’s up, Charlie?’ he asked him. ‘Don’t you ever fucking sleep?’

  ‘I was lucky . . . I think I got a rough translation of what that rat-thing was saying to Netta.’

  ‘You’re kidding me.’

  ‘No. I was talking to some of the guys at the station and one of them speaks Spanish. He said that “pianos” sounded like “piernas” which is Spanish for “legs”. So “coop” could be French for “cut” and “sign” could be German for “sein” meaning “yours”. So the whole phrase could be a multilingual mishmash that actually means “cut off your legs”.’

  ‘Come on, Charlie, that’s stretching it a bit, don’t you think?’

  ‘Maybe so, if the context was different. But what we have so far is “beware Mago Verde, he will cut off your legs”. And that makes sense, doesn’t it, considering what happened to Maria Fortales—’

  ‘OK, OK, I’ll go along with it just so far as it goes. What about the other bit? “Gang up your start” or whatever it was.’

  ‘I was lucky there, too. Detective Smit overheard us, and he still speaks pretty good Dutch. He said that “gang up your start” sounded like “gang op uw staart”, which means “walk on your tail”.’

  ‘So what this rat-thing was saying to Netta was: “Watch out for Mago Verde because he’s going to cut off your legs, and you’ll be walking on your tail.”’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘You realize this could be total bullshit, and it doesn’t mean anything like that at all?’

  ‘It makes sense, Walter. What else could it mean?’

  ‘You need to remember who said it, Charlie. A creature that looked like a rat, from out of some waitress’ nightmare. It’s not real. It’s Alice In Fucking Wonderland.’

  ‘A recurring nightmare, Walter. A nightmare she’s been having so often she can actually remember what the rat-creature was saying to her.’

  Walter suddenly thought of the popcorn that he had smelled, as he dozed off on the couch, and the off-key music, and the thumping of the circus tents in the wind that blew across the meadow.

  ‘OK,’ he said, grudgingly. ‘Let’s talk about it in the morning. Maybe you’re right. Maybe we need to go on a clown hunt.’

  ELEVEN

  Heavenly Twins

  Springer said, ‘Two more Night Warriors will be joining you tonight. That will make six in all.

  He counted them off on his fingers. ‘Dom Magator, the Armorer; An-Gryferai, the Avenging Claw; Zebenjo’Yyx, the Arrow Storm; you, Xyrena, the Passion Warrior; as well as Jekkalon and Jemexxa, the Lightning Dancers. We’ll be going to see Jekkalon and Jemexxa right now.’

  ‘Do they already know they’re Night Warriors?’ asked Rhodajane.

  Springer shook his head. ‘Not yet. But they very soon will. They’re staying here, in this hotel, on the second floor.’

  ‘Do you want us to come with you?’ John asked him. He didn’t feel too enthusiastic about it, but at the same time he was Dom Magator, the senior ranking Night Warrior, and he was the only one amongst them who had yet had any experience of combat in the world of dreams. Because of that, he thought that he had some responsibility to give Springer his support – and besides, the more backup you had when you were fighting in somebody else’s nightmare, the better. He didn’t yet know what a Lightning Dancer actually did, but it sounded as if a whole lot of lethal voltage was involved, and that could only be to the Night Warriors’ advantage.

  ‘Yes, please come along,’ said Springer. ‘I think it would help a great deal if they met you face to face. You know yourself that it isn’t exactly easy, accepting that you’re a Night Warrior.’

  ‘OK. What are their names?’

  ‘Jekkalon and Jemexxa. “Jekkalon” means “acrobat” and “Jemexxa” means “twin”.’

  ‘I meant their real names. Their waking names.’

  ‘You probably know them. Or you’ve heard of them, anyhow. Kiera and Kieran Kaiser.’

  Rhodajane let out a high-pitched squeal. ‘The Kaiser Twins? You’re kidding me! The Kaiser Twins are Night Warriors? I don’t believe it! I love the Kaiser Twins!’

  ‘Their late mother was Azurina, the Sky Dancer. It was a very great loss to us when she was abducted.’

  ‘She was abducted?’ said Rhodajane.

  ‘Kidnapped, yes. Taken away. Not her waking body, but her dream personality, so she never woke up. In the end they turned off her life support.’

  ‘I thought she died of a stroke, just after giving birth. That’s what it said in OK! magazine, anyhow.’

  ‘That was what everybody thought, Xyrena, including her doctors. But she was abducted in her sleep by a Dread called the Gray Memory. The Gray Memory took her out of revenge, because she had seriously injured the Gray Memory’s sister, the Pale Confusion, during a battle in the dreaming world. The Pale Confusion could never walk or speak, ever again, either in the dreaming world or the waking world.’

  ‘The Gray Memory and the Pale Confusion,’ said Rhodajane. ‘Jesus! They sound spooky.’

  ‘Well, they were, yes – although I don’t think “spooky” quite sums up how dangerous they were, and how scary. We’re pretty sure that the Gray Memory is still hiding in somebody’s nightmare someplace, although we haven’t sensed her presence in more than seven years. It’s possible that she was injured at the same time as her sister was hurt. She could be dead, but I don’t think so. My feeling is that she’s biding her time, so that she can get her revenge on the rest of the Night Warriors who were fighting with Azurina.’

  ‘When she abducted the Kaiser Twin’s mother – what did she do with her?’

  ‘She gave her to Brother Albrecht, by way of a gift. Evil people are always doing favors for other evil people; just like good people do favors for good people.

  Springer paused for a moment, as if he was thinking about times gone by and all of those people whom time had carried away.

  Then he said, ‘The Gray Memory and the Pale Confusion were part of a nightmare army of over a hundred Dreads. They were trying to destroy the human race by erasing our memories – rubbing them out and blurring them. If they had won, none of us would be able clearly to remember our childhood, or one single word of what we were taught when we were growing up. We wouldn’t recognize our own parents, or even remember where we lived. We wouldn’t know what we had done an hour ago, or even five minutes ago. We would have bee
n like orphans, who can never find their way home.’

  ‘That sounds too much like me to be funny,’ said John. ‘Like, ask me what I ate for breakfast, and I couldn’t tell you.’

  ‘I wouldn’t want to know,’ Rhodajane retorted. ‘Besides, it would probably take too long for you to recite the entire order. Let me guess, though: you had pancakes.’

  ‘I always have pancakes. How can you seriously call it “breakfast” unless you have pancakes? That’s like having a funeral service without a stiff.’

  ‘Come on, you two,’ said Springer. ‘Let’s introduce ourselves to Jekkalon and Jemexxa.’

  They left Rhodajane’s room and walked along the corridor together with all the grim-faced determination of a posse in a cowboy movie. Two passing guests turned around to stare at the three of them in bemusement – a fat man with a pompadour in a bursting sport coat, a big-breasted woman in very tight jeans, and a curly-headed young man in a billowing raincoat.

  They went down in the elevator to the floor below. Rooms 237 and 239 were on the north-east side of the Griffin House Hotel, the only two rooms at the end of a short private corridor, which was cordoned off with a thick night-club-style rope. It was guarded by two huge black men with shaved heads and mirror sunglasses and black suits that rivaled the size of Brother Albrecht’s circus tents.

  John and Rhodajane approached them cautiously, expecting to be stopped. But as they came nearer, the security guards unhooked the rope, and pressed themselves back against the walls on either side, so that their double-chins bulged out. ‘Afternoon, Ms Schulz. How’s it going?’

  ‘Fine, thanks, Sherwin. How are you, Lamar? I think we’re all set for tonight.’

  John turned around and accidentally stumbled over one of the security guard’s feet. That voice wasn’t Deano’s. That wasn’t even a man’s voice. He and Rhodajane were being closely followed by a small Jewish-looking woman with a haircut like a jet-black skullcap and a large complicated nose and pouting crimson lips. She was wearing an electric-bronze suit with padded shoulders and a flared waistline and a skirt that was much too short and tight for her age.