The Ninth Nightmare Read online

‘Oka–a–ay,’ said Kiera, uncertainly. ‘Maybe you’ll go to med school after all, and be like some really famous surgeon. I know plenty of people who could do with a head transplant – Mickey Veralnik, for one.’

  ‘You should forget about Mickey Veralnik. I keep telling you, he’s not worth it.’

  ‘And you should stop watching this stupid movie and get some sleep. It’s half after one already.’

  She reached over to grab the remote but Kieran snatched it away from her. ‘Just because you’re a half hour older than me, that doesn’t mean you can tell me what to do. I want to watch the end of this, OK?’

  ‘Have it your way. But if you have one of your nightmares again and you feel like crap tomorrow morning, don’t blame me.’

  ‘Do I ever blame you for anything?’

  ‘Yes. Always.’

  Kieran flicked a peanut at her and it bounced off her nose. In retaliation, Kiera picked up one of the pillows and whacked him over the head, so that he spilled his peanuts all over the bedcover. ‘Shit!’ said Kieran, and hit her with his own pillow. Kiera hit him back and then the two of them clambered to their feet and stood on the bed, bouncing up and down and bashing each other with their pillows.

  Eventually – panting and laughing – they both lost their balance and fell over sideways. They lay on the bed, breathless, looking into each other’s green eyes. Even after all of these years of growing up together, they still found it a source of fascination that they should look so much alike, and think so much alike. For each of them, it was like owning a mirror which could talk back.

  Kiera reached out and stroked Kieran’s hair. ‘You need a haircut. Your hair is almost as long as mine.’

  Kieran said, ‘The last time I had a haircut we saw that dead guy, remember?’

  ‘Oh, so you’re not going to get a haircut because you’re scared you might see him again?’

  Kieran said nothing but shook his head. It had been over two months ago but they could both visualize him as clearly as if he were sitting in the bedroom with them now. Kieran had been having his hair cut in the old-fashioned barbershop in the Handlery Hotel in San Francisco. It was a long, mirrored room with a dozen red-leather chairs in a row, and a row of white basins. Kieran had been sitting two chairs away from a bulky, balding man who appeared to be asleep. Nobody was cutting his hair or shaving him, even though there were two barbers at the far end of the room, talking to each other and laughing. Kiera had come into the barbershop, carrying a whole bunch of shopping bags, and said, ‘You should see the dress I’ve just bought! Prada, seventeen hundred dollars!’

  The barber who was cutting Kieran’s hair had gone to fetch more towels. Kiera had said to Kieran, ‘What’s the matter with that guy? He looks like he’s asleep.’

  It was then that they had both noticed that the towel around the man’s neck was stained bright red, and that the stain was rapidly spreading. Kiera had gone over to him and said, ‘Sir? Sir? Are you OK? You look like you’re bleeding.’

  She had turned his chair around and it was then that the man’s head had suddenly dropped to one side, revealing that his neck had been cut open all the way back to his spine. Kiera had looked at Kieran in horror, but they had both realized that what they were seeing was a memory of a dead man, an after-image, like all the ghosts they saw. None of the barbers were cutting his hair or paying him any attention because in reality he simply wasn’t there.

  Later they had Googled the history of the Handlery Hotel and discovered that Tony Sciarro, a San Francisco gangster, had been murdered in the barbershop in September of nineteen thirty-seven by a man who was dressed as a barber. One diagonal cut with a straight razor had almost taken his head off. His murderer was never identified or caught.

  Kiera climbed off the bed and rearranged the pillows. ‘Seriously, Kieran, you need to get some sleep. I’ll wake you up at six.’

  ‘Make that six fifty-nine. It won’t take me more than a minute to get dressed.’

  She came up to him and hugged him and gave him a kiss. ‘Sweet dreams,’ she said. ‘And I mean it. None of your nightmares.’

  A few minutes after three in the morning, Kiera was woken by a soft sighing noise. At first she thought it was a woman crying, but it went on and on for over five minutes, low and persistent, and she realized then that it couldn’t be a woman because a woman would have had to pause for breath.

  She sat up in bed and listened. After a while she heard a light pattering sound, too, and she thought: rain. That’s what it sounded like, rain. And the sighing was the wind, blowing underneath the connecting door to Kieran’s bedroom.

  She could smell rain, too, and wet soil; and when she drew back the bedcovers and put her feet on the carpet, she could feel the wind blowing cold against her legs.

  She switched on her bedside lamp. Then she crossed over to the door and pressed her ear against it. Before she opened the door she wanted to make sure that she wasn’t hearing things. Kieran would inevitably wake up if she entered his room, and he had always found it very difficult to get to sleep. When he was little she had often woken up in the middle of the night to find him standing beside her bed, staring at her, like the girl in Paranormal Activity.

  Not only could she hear rain pattering against the other side of the door, however, and feel the wind blowing, she could hear thunder, or what sounded like thunder – a deep rumbling sound punctuated by an intermittent slap! slap! slap!

  She opened the door, and was immediately met with a strong, blustery wind and freezing cold rain. Kieran’s bedroom was no longer a bedroom, it was a steeply-sloping field, and it was no longer night-time, either, although the sky was dark. Low gray clouds hurtled above Kiera’s head like an endless pack of hungry wolves, and the long wet grass lashed at her ankles.

  On the horizon she could see a stand of oak trees silhouetted against the sky, their branches thrashing and waving in the storm. Not far away, there was an assortment of geometric shapes – triangles and rhomboids and rectangles – that looked like tents. They could have been a military encampment, or a traveling circus. The rumbling and the snapping was the sound of the wind blowing through their flysheets.

  Kiera stood in the doorway in disbelief. She turned around, and there behind her was her hotel bedroom, with the bedside lamp shining and the bedcover turned back. She could clearly see her pink robe hanging over the back of the chair. Yet here in front of her was a wild, blustery hillside, and it had to be just as real as her bedroom because she could feel the rain on her face and hear the wind whistling. Where was Kieran’s bedroom? And more urgently, where was Kieran?

  ‘Kieran!’ she shouted. ‘Kieran – where are you?’

  Reluctantly, she walked a few yards further into the field. The storm was roaring so loudly that she could hardly hear her own voice, and it began to rain even harder, so that her pajamas were soaked through and clung to her skin and raindrops dripped from the end of her nose. ‘Kieran!’ she screamed. ‘Kieran!’

  She looked back at her bedroom. She was frightened that the door might close, or disappear altogether, so that she would have to stay here, wherever this was. But so far her bedroom was still there, warm and tranquil, with the bedside lamp still shining.

  She smeared the rain from her face with the back of her hand. She was so cold now that she was shivering. She wondered if there was any point in continuing to look for Kieran. If this wasn’t his hotel bedroom then maybe he wasn’t here at all. Maybe this was nothing but a nightmare and she was still in bed. But it felt far too real to be a nightmare.

  She was still trying to make up her mind what to do when – all around the darkened tents – she saw strings of colored lights winking on. There were dozens of them, every one of them blood-red. She could also see an illuminated wrought-iron archway, with illuminated letters on top of it, although from where she was standing she couldn’t make out what the letters said. She could hear music, too, carried on the wind. Odd, discordant and eerie, like a barrel organ that was badly
out of key.

  She turned around and started to high-step her way back through the long wet grass to her bedroom. She had gone only a short distance, however, when she saw Kieran standing about fifty yards away, off to her left. He was bare-chested and his pajama pants were as wet as hers. He had his face lifted toward the wind and the rain but his eyes were closed as if he were praying.

  ‘Kieran!’ she called him, and hurried over.

  He opened his eyes and stared at her. For a split second he looked as if he didn’t recognize her.

  ‘Kieran, it’s me! Are you all right?’

  She took hold of both of his hands. He felt as cold as she did.

  ‘We have to go find her,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean? Who?’

  ‘She’s up there. She’s been up there all the time.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Who’s been up there all the time?’

  Kieran pulled his hands away and started to walk uphill, toward the trees and the tents. Kiera ran after him and caught hold of his arm. ‘Kieran – where are you going? We don’t even know where this place is! This is supposed to be your hotel room, not a field!’

  ‘It’s a dream,’ said Kieran.

  ‘How can it be a dream? I can feel it! Look at me – I’m soaked to the skin!’

  ‘It’s not my dream. It’s not yours, either. It’s somebody else’s. That’s why it feels so real.’

  ‘What do you mean? How can we both be in somebody else’s dream?’

  ‘I don’t know, but we are. And I know that she’s up there and we have to go find her.’

  ‘Who’s up there?’

  Kieran lifted his hand and touched Kiera’s forehead with his fingertips. ‘Can’t you feel her? I can feel her.’

  Kiera looked at him in bewilderment. But she began to feel a rising sense of excitement, too. She thought she knew who he was talking about. It was impossible, but so was this sloping field, and so was this wind and so was this rain.

  ‘You mean Mom?’ she said.

  Kieran lowered his hand and nodded. ‘She’s up there someplace. She’s been there all the time, ever since the day that you and me were born.’

  ‘How can that be? She didn’t go away or anything. She died, Kieran.’

  ‘How many times have you and I seen dead people? Dozens.’

  ‘Yes, but none of them was anybody we knew, were they? And we’ve never seen mom.’

  Kieran took hold of Kiera’s hand. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘She’s up there and she needs us.’

  Kiera looked up at the dark, billowing tents, and the strings of red lights that flickered in the wind like blood cells pouring through human arteries. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t like the look of those tents at all. And even if we do find Mom, what then? She’s dead. She won’t be able to come back with us.’

  ‘Let’s just see if she’s there first.’

  ‘I don’t know, Kieran. It’s really scary.’

  ‘Yes, but I’m sure mom knows that we’re here. What is she going to think of us if we turn our backs on her and leave her, just because we’re chickenshit?’

  Kiera took a deep, shivery breath. ‘OK, then. But if we can’t find her we go back through my bedroom door and we close it and we keep it closed.’

  Still holding hands, they struggled up the hill. In some places the grass was waist high, and Kiera felt as if she were wading through a stormy sea. In other places the ground underfoot was rocky and loose, like shale, and they found it difficult to keep their footing.

  Several times Kiera turned back to make sure that her bedroom doorway was still there. It was standing in the middle of the wildly-waving grass, softly lit, an unearthly vision of the real world that they had left behind them. She felt like telling Kieran that they ought to go back. Their mother had been dead for seventeen-and-a-half years, and even if they found her, what could they do to help her? But Kieran kept on pulling her up the hill, and his urgency seemed to increase with every step.

  At last they reached the encampment. More than a dozen tents and small canvas pavilions were clustered around a huge black marquee, as well as seven or eight trailers and old-style horse-drawn caravans, all of them painted in shiny black varnish and beaded with raindrops. The blood-red lights were strung up everywhere, from one tent to the next, and all around the top of the marquee.

  The barrel-organ music was still playing but Kiera found it difficult to tell where it was coming from, because it faded and swelled in the wind. It was a discordant version of In The Good Old Summertime, which she and Kieran used to sing together when they were very little, and she couldn’t help herself from silently singing the words in her head.

  ‘In the good old summertime – in the good old summertime—’

  Several of the tents or trailers were lit up inside, but all of the tent flaps were tightly secured and the trailers had black blinds drawn down at every window. It was raining even harder now and the rumble-slap! of wet canvas was almost deafening.

  Kieran and Kiera made their way around to the front of the marquee. From this angle they could read the red illuminated letters on top of the archway, even though they were trembling in the wind. They said Albrecht’s Traveling Circus & Freak Show.

  Kiera tugged anxiously at Kieran’s hand. ‘Kieran – she can’t be here. I think we’re making a mistake. Let’s go back.’

  ‘—strolling through the shady lanes with your baby mine—’

  Kieran said, ‘No – I’m sure she’s here! It’s almost like I can hear her calling to us! Come on – let’s just take a quick scout around.’

  He went through the archway but Kiera stayed where she was. She had such a bad feeling about this. ‘Kieran,’ she said. ‘Please don’t. I’m really frightened.’

  Kieran went up to the front of the marquee and took hold of the flap. ‘Come on, sis . . . it’s only some old circus.’

  ‘Yes, but freak show? Who has freak shows these days?’

  ‘I don’t know. But there’s only one way to find out.’

  ‘—you hold her hand, and she holds yours, and that’s a very good sign—’

  He drew back the flap and pushed his way inside. Kiera hesitated for a moment and then she followed him. The flap was heavy and wet and smelled of soil and diesel oil, and something else, too – something that brought back a strong childhood memory. Popcorn.

  Once through the flap, the twins found themselves in a small, stuffy vestibule, not much larger than the inside of a wardrobe, and when the flap fell back it was totally dark inside. Kiera nearly panicked, because she hated confined spaces. But then Kieran pulled back the second flap, and they stepped into the main marquee.

  The marquee appeared much larger on the inside than it had from the outside, with at least a dozen gasoliers suspended from the roof, and dark red drapes all around the walls, arranged in swags. Tiers of wooden seats were arranged around a low boarded stage. It was more like an old-time vaudeville theater than a circus tent.

  ‘—that she’s your tootsie-wootsie – in the good old summertime—’

  Kieran walked out on to the stage and circled around. ‘Anybody here?’ he called out. ‘Hallo there! Anybody here?’

  Kiera said, ‘For God’s sake, Kieran. Supposing there is somebody here? We’re trespassing!’

  ‘I know – but they’re not going to be mad at us, are they? Circus folk, they’re always real friendly.’

  ‘Oh, yes? And how do you know? You’ve never been to a circus in your life.’

  ‘I saw Toby Tyler.’

  ‘Oh, sure. And I saw Something Wicked This Way Comes.’

  Kieran called out again. ‘Halloo! Anybody here?’ But again there was no reply.

  ‘Come on, let’s go,’ Kiera urged him. ‘This place really creeps me out. And don’t forget that we have a rehearsal first thing tomorrow. We have to get at least a couple hours’ sleep.’

  ‘OK, OK. But I want to take a quick look around outside.’ They wer
e about to leave the marquee when they heard a sudden clattering of feet behind the tiers of seats. They turned around – just in time to see a diminutive figure in a yellow coat running across the other side of the marquee, a figure no taller than a six-year-old boy. It disappeared almost immediately behind a fold in the canvas.

  Kieran seized Kiera’s hand and pulled her across the stage and up the aisle between the seats.

  ‘No!’ Kiera protested.

  But Kieran said, ‘Think about it! He must know where Mom is!’

  ‘Kieran, Mom’s dead! This is crazy!’

  ‘Don’t tell me that you don’t feel her!’

  They reached the far side of the marquee and Kieran ran along the canvas wall, pulling it and thumping at it with the flat of his hand, trying to find the fold into which the figure in the yellow coat had disappeared. Kiera stood watching him, exhausted and afraid, but she knew better than to try and persuade him to give it up and come back to her hotel room. Once Kieran had his mind set on doing something, he always pursued it to the bitter end.

  ‘Here!’ he called out, lifting up the canvas to reveal an opening.

  ‘Kieran—’

  ‘Come on! Hurry!’

  He pushed his way into the opening and Kiera followed him. They had a brief moment of battling with the canvas, and then they were out in the open again, amongst the trailers and the caravans, with the wind and the rain in their faces.

  ‘Can you see him?’ Kieran shouted. ‘I can’t see him anywhere!’

  They walked quickly between the lines of trailers, looking left and right – even ducking down now and again to see if the figure in the yellow coat was crouching underneath. They reached the last trailer, and they were about to turn back when a dazzling flash of lightning lit up the whole encampment, and in that bleached-out flash they saw the figure in the yellow coat running toward one of the caravans and scaling the ladder at the back of it. The figure knocked frantically at the stable door, and the lower half of the door was immediately opened up. Before the figure scuttled inside, however, it turned its head toward them for a split second so that Kieran and Kiera caught a glimpse of it.