The Ninth Nightmare nw-5 Read online

  Kiera lowered her hands and opened her eyes. Kieran looked so much like her that she almost felt as if she were appealing to herself.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘But be really careful, won’t you? That Rat Man might bite you.’

  ‘Oh, come on. The way he skedaddled off like that, he’s probably a whole lot scareder of us than we are of him.’

  They crossed over to the caravan into which the figure in the yellow coat had just disappeared. It reminded Kiera of Professor Marvel’s caravan in The Wizard of Oz, except that it was varnished black and it had a frieze of carved wooden faces all the way around the overhanging roof — some of them leering, some of them scowling, some of them screaming. The rain dripped from every face as if they were all weeping, either with rage or disappointment or fear.

  Kieran climbed the three steps up to the stable door. He glanced back at Kiera and then he knocked.

  He waited, but there was no answer, and so he knocked again, harder this time. ‘Is there anybody in there? We only want to ask you something, that’s all! We’re not going to hurt you or nothing!’

  He waited again. He was just about to try knocking a third time when the shuttered windows in the stable door were both opened up. A bald, white-faced man appeared, wearing tiny wire-rimmed spectacles with mirror lenses. He had a silver ring through his nose and silver hoop earrings in each ear. He was wearing what looked like a silver satin cloak.

  ‘What do you want?’ he demanded, in a tired, impatient tone. He had an accent that sounded Eastern European. Czech, maybe.

  Kieran said, ‘We don’t want to disturb you, sir, but we think our mom may be here someplace. In fact, we’re sure that she is.’

  The bald man looked Kieran up and down, and then looked at Kiera.

  ‘What if she is?’ he asked them.

  ‘What do you think? We’d like to see her, of course.’

  ‘And you think that this would do either of you any good?’

  ‘Well, sure. We thought that she died when we were born, but if she didn’t — I mean, we have seventeen years to catch up on.’

  ‘You thought that she died?’

  ‘That’s what we’ve always been told.’

  The bald man pursed his lips for a moment, as if he were sucking a very sour candy, or thinking. Then he said, ‘I suppose it depends on your definition of dying.’

  ‘What do you mean? Either she’s dead or she isn’t.’

  ‘You think so? You don’t know too much about dying then.’

  Kiera was shivering and wetter than ever. ‘Is our mom here or not?’ she called out.

  The bald man nodded. ‘Yes, she’s here OK. But I don’t know if you’ll be very glad to see her.’

  ‘Just tell us where she is,’ said Kieran. ‘We’ll decide if we’re glad to see her when we see her.’

  ‘Very well,’ the bald man agreed, with a sigh. He turned back toward the interior of the caravan and said, sharply, ‘Stay here, will you? I’m taking these young people to see Demi.’

  Kiera couldn’t hear the reply clearly, but it sounded harsh and guttural. She looked at Kieran as he climbed down from the back of the caravan but Kieran could only shrug and pull a face to show that he didn’t understand what the Rat Man was saying, either.

  The bald man closed the two windows in the stable door but reappeared a few moments later wearing a black ankle-length raincoat and a wide-brimmed waterproof hat. He came down the steps and approached them. He wasn’t tall, but there was a strongman solidity about him which Kiera found quite intimidating. She felt that you would need to hit him very hard, over and over again, with something like a ball-peen hammer, before he would even blink.

  ‘You’re certain you want to do this?’ he asked them. He pronounced it ‘vont’.

  ‘Yes, we do vont,’ said Kieran, trying to sound challenging.

  Without another word, the bald man turned and started to walk away, beckoning them to follow him. He led them between the trailers and the caravans, past a fenced-off corral in which twenty or thirty miserable-looking horses were standing in the rain, their heads down and their manes dripping, and a line of massive black Diamond-T trucks, pre-World War Two vintage by the look of them.

  They came at last to a small black pavilion, with an awning in front of it which had filled up with so much rainwater that it was sagging between its poles. The bald man drew back the entrance flap and Kieran and Kiera could see that the interior was illuminated by an oil-lamp with a dim green glass shade.

  ‘Demi!’ the bald man called out. ‘Demi, it’s Zachary!’

  Kiera looked at Kieran and said, under her breath, ‘Mom’s name was Jenyfer. Why is he calling her “Demi”?’

  Kieran shook his head. ‘Maybe it’s like a stage name.’

  ‘Demi, you’re not sleeping are you? I brung two young people to see you. I think you might recognize them.’

  Kiera heard a faint, sibilant voice saying ‘What time is it?’

  ‘It’s ten minutes of two. You weren’t sleeping, were you?’

  ‘No. You know me. I haven’t slept in days.’

  ‘You want to see these young people or not? It’s up to you, my darling. You don’t have to if you don’t want to.’

  ‘No… all right. I’ll see them.’

  The bald man pulled back the flap and said to Kieran and Kiera, ‘Go on. You can go inside. But remember that she is very delicate. I don’t want you to upset her, no matter what you think.’

  Kiera ducked her head and went inside the pavilion, with Kieran right behind her. They found themselves in an airless living area lined with moth-eaten velvet drapes in faded maroon. On the right-hand side of the pavilion there was a gilded couch with maroon velvet cushions to match the drapes, and a gilded table with a bowl of black grapes on it. A ghostly-looking gray cat was sleeping on the couch, but as they came into the pavilion it opened its eyes and stared at them with suspicion.

  But it was the tall gilded chair on the left-hand side of the pavilion that riveted their attention. It was more like a royal throne than a chair, and the woman who was sitting in it was wearing a coronet of dried flowers. She was startlingly pale, and very thin, and her hair was dead white instead of blonde, but there was no mistaking her resemblance to Kieran and Kiera. She had the same sea-green eyes and the same straight nose and the same sensual curve to her lips.

  She was wearing a tight black velvet dress with a high collar and a row of small jet buttons all the way down the front. Her thin, bony hands were resting on the arms of the chair, with long black-varnished fingernails and silver rings on every finger.

  The bald man joined them inside the pavilion and took off his hat, deliberately shaking the raindrops over the cat so that it flinched and hissed at him.

  ‘Here is Demi,’ he announced. ‘Demi, here is your twins.’

  ‘My twins?’ asked the woman. Her voice was weak but it was very clear. ‘How could I have children?’

  Kiera could hardly breathe. The interior of the pavilion was very stuffy and here she was, face-to-face with the mother she had always believed to be dead.

  ‘Mom?’ she said. ‘It’s Kiera — Kiera and Kieran.’

  The woman frowned at her. ‘My twins?’ she repeated.

  ‘That’s right, Mom. You had twins but they said you had a stroke and died.’

  ‘How could I have children?’

  ‘Because you had a husband who loved you, Mom. You had a husband who loved you and he’s been grieving for you all of this time.’

  ‘But, my dear,’ the woman insisted. ‘I can’t have children.’

  With that, she started to unbutton the front of her dress, from the hem upward. As she did so, Kiera suddenly realized with a deep, cold feeling of dread that the woman had no legs. The lower half of her dress which was hanging over the seat of the chair was empty and flat.

  She stared at the woman in alarm and said, ‘What are you doing? Mom — what’s happened to you? What are you doing?’

 
Kieran said, ‘Stop, Mom! Stop! We don’t need to see!’ But the woman carried on unbuttoning her dress, higher and higher, one small button after another.

  Kiera turned to the bald man and said, ‘Stop her, please!’

  The bald man remained impassive. ‘She is a sideshow. She is doing what sideshows always do. They show you what you paid to see.’

  ‘But we didn’t pay to see this, for Christ’s sake! We’re her children! Stop her!’

  ‘I cannot. I would not. She is explaining what she is. She needs to. And you need to understand.’

  Now the woman had unfastened her dress all the way up to her breastbone. She was still staring at Kieran and Kiera — not defiantly, not truculently, but with a terrible look of pride in her eyes that almost made Kiera faint with horror.

  She parted her dress with both hands to reveal a bony white midriff, and that was all. She had no pelvis, no hips and no legs. Her abdomen ended as a lumpy bag, with the criss-cross scars of sutures all the way around it.

  ‘You see, my dears?’ she said. ‘I could not possibly have children. I am Demi, the Demi-Goddess, the Half-Woman. I am surprised that you have not heard of me before. I am famous from coast to coast, isn’t that true, Zachary?’

  The bald man nodded. ‘Coast to coast, Demi, my darling. Coast to coast.’

  Kiera turned around and collided with Kieran. He grabbed hold of her sleeve, but she twisted herself away from him and pushed her way out of the pavilion. Once she was outside, she began to run back between the trailers and the caravans, past the trucks, past the horses, in between the tents.

  She could hear herself panting and see the red lights jiggling in front of her eyes. She ran out of the carnival encampment and bounded down the sloping field, toward the lighted doorway of her bedroom.

  ‘Don’t close,’ she gasped. ‘Please don’t close.’

  She turned her head around only once, to make sure that Kieran was following her, which she knew that he would, and of course he was. In fact he was less than twenty yards behind her, and gaining on her.

  Soon the two of them were running side by side with the thunder rumbling all around them like heavy artillery and the long wet grass whipping at their ankles. They reached the bedroom doorway and Kiera ran straight into it without even breaking her stride. Kieran came hurtling after her and slammed the door behind him.

  Kiera fell backward on the bed, whining for breath. Kieran stood beside her, bent forward, his hands on his knees. They stared at each other for a long time, not knowing what to say, not knowing what to think, hardly even daring to understand what they had just experienced.

  ‘That wasn’t a dream,’ said Kiera, at last. ‘Even if it was somebody else’s dream. That was a nightmare.’

  Kieran pulled up his pajama pants. ‘Whatever it was, it really happened. I’m totally soaked through, and look at you — you are, too.’

  Kiera looked toward the bedroom door. ‘Do you think it’s gone?’ she asked Kieran.

  They both listened. The room was silent, except for the sound of somebody talking in the corridor outside. No rain, pattering against the other side of the door. No wind, blowing underneath it.

  Eventually Kieran went across and turned the doorknob. He opened the door about a half inch and peered through it. Then he opened it wide. The sloping field had disappeared. The rain and the thunder and the rumbling tents had all disappeared, too. There was nothing but his hotel bedroom, with the bedside lamp tipped over on to the floor and all of his bedcovers dragged off the end of the bed.

  ‘That was mom, wasn’t it?’ said Kiera.

  Kieran said, ‘Yes. I could feel it.’

  ‘So what do you think happened to her? And how did she get into that freak show? And where is that freak show? Do you think it really exists?’

  Kieran shook his head. ‘I don’t know. But there’s one thing I do know. I’m not going back into the fricking bedroom tonight. You don’t mind if I sleep with you, do you?’

  At about four a.m., Kieran was woken up by somebody singing, high and breathy. It was only when he had sat up in bed that he realized that it was Kiera, and that she was singing in her sleep.

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

  FIVE

  A Disturbing Visitor

  David said, ‘You’re bushed. You need to take it easy. Why don’t you cancel this afternoon’s visit?’

  ‘Because I promised,’ Katie told him. ‘It’s Mrs Copeland’s birthday. And it’s only in Coral Gables. I’ll be fine.’

  ‘Seriously, Katie, I don’t think you’re fine at all. That hallucination you had in Cleveland — sure, OK, maybe it was caused by nothing more than exhaustion. But I really wish you’d let Aaron run some tests on you. I just want to make absolutely sure that you don’t have peduncular hallucinosis.’

  ‘David — what happened in Cleveland was an aberration. A one-off. Next time I have to go away, I’ll make sure that my schedule is much less punishing. You can count on it. And what the hell is “peduncular hallucinosis” when it’s at home?’

  David pursed his lips to show her that he was far from happy, but he didn’t try to dissuade her any further. She would go to the Coral Gables retirement home today no matter what he said, and both of them knew it. He could hardly lock her in her room.

  Katie had never loved any man as much as she loved David, but he was controlling by nature and she constantly had to make sure that she protected her own individuality. He was handsome and athletic and he had a buoyant sense of humor, but his psychiatric training always led him to observe closely everybody’s behavior, especially hers. Sometimes she caught him watching the way she performed the simplest of everyday tasks like spreading jelly on her toast and she had to challenge him and say ‘What? What am I doing wrong now? I’m spreading it, like, compulsively?’

  He finished his coffee and stood up. He was thirty-five, only two years older than she was, but his hair was already steel gray. He had a squarish face and dark blue eyes which he had inherited from his Swedish mother. He wore rimless spectacles which accentuated his very analytical manner.

  ‘I’ll be home around seven,’ he told her, coming around the table and giving her a kiss on the top of the head. ‘Maybe we can go to Shula’s tonight and treat ourselves to a steak.’

  ‘I love you,’ she said, turning around in her chair. ‘And I won’t allow myself to get too tired today, I promise you.’

  ‘OK,’ he said, kissing her again. ‘Just remember that you’re the most precious person in the whole of my life. And — since you asked — peduncular hallucinosis is a condition when a patient experiences highly-realistic hallucinations. The most common ones are scary or deformed faces, or strange landscapes, or people walking in a line, or people appearing to be unusually small. It’s usually caused by a variety of serious problems in the midbrain, including tumors and subarachnoid hemorrhage. So please understand why I’m concerned for you.’

  ‘You’re concerned? If that’s what I’ve got, I’m ten times more concerned than you are.’

  David left, and she waved to him through the living-room window as he backed out of the driveway in his ruby-red Audi convertible. She cleared up the breakfast plates and stacked them into the dishwasher. Then she went through to the bedroom to get dressed. It was a warm, sunny morning, as it almost always was in Nautilus, and the French windows in the bedroom were open. Outside she could see their small red-brick yard, with its terracotta flowerpots and its sundial.

  She had taken two sleeping pills last night and this morning she felt much calmer and more rested. All the same, as she sat in front of her dressing table, putting on her eye make-up, she couldn’t help thinking about the woman she had seen in that bloodied bed in the Griffin House Hotel. The woman must have been a hallucination, there was no other rational explanation for it, but she had seemed utterly real. And Katie couldn’t imagine why she should have hallucinated about anybody who had been so horribly mutilated.


  She took out her coral pink lipstick and was about to apply it when the door chimes rang. She frowned at herself in the mirror. She wasn’t expecting any visitors, nor any special mail deliveries. She got up and went to the front door, peering through the peephole to see who was there. It was a young man in a light green linen coat, with a white rose in his buttonhole.

  ‘Yes?’ she called out. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Katie? Mrs Kercheval? I need to talk to you. It’s important.’

  She peered through the peephole again. As far as she knew, she had never seen this young man before, ever, although he strongly reminded her of her music teacher from junior high school. He had short reddish hair and a few freckles across the bridge of his nose, and pale blue eyes. He looked respectable enough, but maybe he was a door-to-door Bible salesman, or a Mormon, or a Jehovah’s Witness. But how did he know her name?

  ‘What’s it about?’ she asked him.

  ‘Something happened to you, Katie. Something bad. I really need to discuss it with you.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’m somebody who knows what happened to you, and why.’

  ‘All right, then — what happened to me, exactly?’

  ‘Katie, I can’t discuss this on the doorstep. I need to talk to you face-to-face.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to let you in. Not without some kind of ID.’

  The young man turned away from the front door, with the his right hand cupped over his ear as if he were thinking, or listening. Then he turned back and said, ‘Your grandmother used to sing you a song whenever you came to visit. Do you remember it?’

  ‘My grandmother? What the hell do you know about my grandmother?’

  But, very softly — so softly that Katie could barely hear him — the young man sang, ‘Fly, little falcon, fly high in the sky! So sharp are your claws, so sharp are your eyes! No one can escape you, because you will see, wherever they run to, wherever they flee!’

  Katie stood behind the door for almost half a minute. Despite herself, despite her strong sense of self-control, she had tears in her eyes. She hadn’t heard that song for more than twenty-five years, when her grandmother had sung it to her in the living room of her house in Sarasota, overlooking the ocean. She could see her grandmother now, her white hair fraying in the warm Gulf wind, her blue eyes faded, her neck withered, but still beautiful, one hand resting on Katie’s head as if she were blessing her, a priestess passing on a benediction.