The Ninth Nightmare nw-5 Page 8

  ‘You will turn — yes, you’ll spin, and you’ll drop from on high! No one can escape you, however they try!’

  She drew back the security chain and opened the door. The young man in the light green linen coat was standing on the porch, both arms held out wide, as if he were trying to show her that he was neither armed nor dangerous. He was grinning at her like a long-lost friend who had found her address on Facebook and turned up without warning to surprise her.

  ‘Katie!’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know you,’ said Katie. ‘Should I know you? How do you know my grandma’s bird song?’

  The young man kept on grinning. ‘Is it OK if I come in? Then I can tell you all about it.’

  Katie looked left and right, up and down the street. Only two doors away, Mr Tomlinson was outside in his front yard, trimming his hedges, so she guessed that she could always call out for help if this young man gave her any trouble. Besides, he didn’t give her the impression that he would. He was standing well back from her, giving her plenty of personal space, with his arms still spread wide.

  ‘All right,’ she agreed, ‘but any funny business—’

  ‘Katie, this is very far from being funny business. This is deadly, deadly serious.’

  She stood back and allowed him to walk into the hallway. She noticed as he passed her that he was wearing a light but distinctive cologne, slightly lemony, with a hint of vetiver grass. He went through to the living room, crossed over to the white leather couch and said, ‘May I?’

  ‘Sure, sit down. Do you want coffee? I think it’s still hot.’

  ‘No, thank you,’ said the young man, raising his hand. ‘I never eat or drink during the hours of daylight.’

  ‘Oh, really? You’re not some kind of a vampire, by any chance?’

  The young man smiled, but when he spoke he sounded completely serious. ‘There are no such beings as vampires, Katie. Vampires exist only in folk stories, and in nightmares.’

  ‘Well that’s good to know.’

  ‘Yes. But there are beings which are far more frightening than vampires, and they exist not only in nightmares, but in reality, too.’

  ‘Oh, really?’

  ‘Yes, really. We call them Dreads, because we dread them.’

  Katie looked at him narrowly. ‘Dreads? Is this a joke?’

  ‘Do I look as if I’m joking?’

  ‘So what, then? Are you trying to scare me?’

  ‘Quite the opposite. In fact: I’m trying to reassure you. But after your experience at the Griffin House Hotel, I think you already know that nightmares can be much more than your sleeping imagination gone wild. Nightmares are another world. Of course we can only visit them when we’re unconscious, but then we can only visit the real world when we’re awake.’

  ‘You know about my nightmare? How?’

  The young man hesitated for a moment, as if he were trying to think how to phrase what he was going to say next. ‘It’s what I do, Katie. You could almost say that it’s my job.’

  ‘Are you a cop?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘A private detective, then? No? Not that either? You’ve been talking to the Cleveland police, though, haven’t you? What did they tell you? That I was just some hysterical woman who must have eaten too much cheese before she went to bed?’

  The young man shook his head. ‘I haven’t talked to anybody. There wouldn’t be any point. Besides, the police can’t deal with this. Only you can. Well — you and several others like you.’

  ‘You’re talking in riddles. If you’re not a cop or a private detective then what’s your interest in this?’

  ‘I told you, I know what happened to you, and why. I also know who you are, and what you can do about it. And — most importantly — how you can do it.’

  ‘All right,’ said Katie. ‘You tell me what happened to me, and then I might believe you.’

  The young man patted the couch. ‘Sit down, why don’t you? Take the weight off.’

  ‘I’ll stand, thanks, if it’s all the same to you. Just tell me what you know.’

  ‘You thought you had a nightmare. In fact you did have a nightmare. You imagined that you were in some shabby apartment in Cleveland Flats, although you probably didn’t know that it was Cleveland Flats. You found a woman lying in your bed. She was begging you for help. She told you that she tried to stop her killer but he was too strong for her. She was seriously mutilated. In fact she was sawn in half, and I’m sure that you were very frightened.’

  ‘Frightened?’ said Katie. ‘I was absolutely terrified, if you want to know the truth. But if it was only a nightmare, how come it was all so totally real? I saw it, I felt it. I talked to the woman on the bed. I could even smell it, for Christ’s sake. How often can you smell something you’re only dreaming about?’

  ‘Not often, I’ll admit,’ the young man told her. ‘But it was closer to being a memory than a nightmare — somebody else’s memory. You happened to stay in Room Seven-One-Seven and the very walls of that room are a witness to what happened, even though it didn’t actually happen there.’

  ‘You’ve completely lost me. I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s not too difficult to understand. Sometime in the mid-nineteen-thirties, a man called Gordon Veitch broke into this woman’s apartment in Cleveland Flats. He raped her and butchered her, as you saw for yourself. Shortly afterward, he checked in at the Griffin House Hotel, and dreamed about what he had done to her, in every little detail. His dream was absorbed by the walls of his hotel room, not unlike movie footage being developed on to celluloid.

  ‘When the police eventually went to the woman’s apartment to find out what had happened to her, they could find no sign of her, and no evidence at all of how she died. No body, no blood, no fingerprints, no hair, no fibers, no semen, nothing. Every trace of what he did there had been taken away in Gordon Veitch’s dream, or nightmare if you prefer to call it that, as if it never happened.

  ‘Besides, Cleveland Flats was a really rundown area, and the police were not going to devote hours of valuable time trying to find some drug-addicted whore. The whole investigation was filed away under missing persons and Gordon Veitch went free. But his dream of what he did remains, right until today, imprinted on the walls of Room Seven-One-Seven.’

  ‘I still don’t get it,’ said Katie. ‘How can you take physical evidence away from one place and move it someplace else? Just by dreaming about it?’

  She was still suspicious that this young man was playing an elaborate practical joke on her. But how did he know everything that she had seen in her nightmare? She hadn’t even told Detective Wisocky what the woman had said to her — about her attacker being too strong.

  The young man said, ‘It’s like a magician’s trick, in a way. You know how a magician can make you believe that somebody disappears from one cabinet and reappears in another cabinet on the other side of the stage? Some Dreads can do that with dreams. This Dread, in particular.’

  ‘But how come I had a nightmare about this woman? If she was murdered as long ago as nineteen-thirty-something, surely everybody else who’s ever slept in that room would have had the same experience? Or some of them, at least.’

  ‘No, they wouldn’t. They couldn’t, not like you. Maybe one or two of them might have heard whispers, or seen shadowy outlines, or simply had the feeling that there was somebody else in the room with them when there patently wasn’t. But you, Katie, you’re uniquely sensitive, and that’s why you saw it.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Katie, although she still felt highly suspicious.

  ‘You don’t know how special you are,’ the young man told her. ‘You’re descended from a long line of people who have the ability to enter the dreams and nightmares of other people, and to use that ability for the greater good of all humanity.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I know, Katie. I know it’s very difficult for you to grasp, because I’ve never had to call on you before. Many people have a similar ability but the
y live out their entire lives and I never have to recruit them, ever, because their talents are simply not suitable. But I need you now, and that’s why I came here today to talk to you.’

  ‘Who are you?’ Katie asked him. ‘And what do you mean by “recruit”? You’re nothing to do with the military, are you?’

  ‘My name is Springer. I am the earthly representative of what you might loosely describe as the forces of good.’

  ‘Terrific. I was right, then. You’re selling Bibles.’

  ‘Katie—’

  Katie raised both hands. ‘I don’t know how you knew my grandma’s bird song, or what I dreamed about in Cleveland. Excellent sales pitch, I grant you. But I don’t need a Bible, thank you. I really don’t. And I think it’s time for you to leave.’

  Springer said, in a flat, expressionless tone, ‘Remember all those nightmares your sister Daisy used to have? Those really scary nightmares about that circus.’

  Katie stared at him, breathless with surprise. ‘Daisy died when she was nine years old,’ she said. ‘How the hell do you know what nightmares she had?’

  ‘I told you, Katie. I’m not selling Bibles. I’m the earthly representative of the forces of good.’

  ‘Daisy never told a soul about those circus nightmares. She never told anybody! Only me.’

  ‘I realize that. But like I told you — knowing about nightmares, that’s my job. And Daisy’s nightmare about the circus is the reason why I’m here today. Your nightmare — the nightmare you had at the Griffin House Hotel — that was part of the same nightmare, believe it or not.’

  ‘How could that be?’

  ‘Because the circus doesn’t vanish when you wake up. It exists in its own reality. It’s going on right now — even during the day, when there’s nobody asleep and dreaming about it. Do you understand that? The barrel-organ music is still playing. The clowns are still tumbling. The circus has a terrible unstoppable life of its own, in the world of dreams.’

  ‘You said that my nightmare was part of it, too,’ said Katie. She felt badly shaken, and she had to sit down on the opposite end of the couch.

  Springer nodded. ‘That’s because Daisy was the same as you, descended from the same line. If the meningitis hadn’t taken her when she was so young, I would have been talking to her today, too, and asking her to help us.’

  ‘What line? I don’t understand any of this.’

  Springer said, ‘I know you’re not very religious, Katie, but the forces of good are embodied in a spirit which is known in the waking world by many different names, and in dream world by the name of Ashapola.

  ‘Ashapola is light. Ashapola is purity. Ashapola protects us from the forces of darkness and destruction, and everything which would jeopardize our civilization and our sanity. Over the millennia, Ashapola has constantly battled to defend our world from being torn apart at the seams.’

  ‘But what does any of this have to do with my nightmare?’

  ‘Everything — because the woman you encountered in your nightmare had deliberately been mutilated so that she could be presented as an attraction at the circus. The selfsame circus which your sister Daisy used to dream about.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘This circus has survived in the world of dreams for nearly nine centuries, believe it or not. Circus and freak show, I should say, because it has always had giants and dwarves and monkey women and babies with two heads. Until nineteen-thirty-six, it was in hibernation, its freaks and its clowns and its animals all deeply asleep, as if they were dead.

  ‘In nineteen-thirty-six, however, Gordon Veitch found out how to rouse it, although we don’t know how, and more to the point we don’t really know why. He was stopped before he could revive it completely, but he woke it up, and now it seems as if either he or somebody else is trying to finish what he began. For the past seventy-five years the circus has been making itself felt in the consciousness of thousands upon thousands of people, in their dreams. Maybe millions. So far, when we dream about it, the music is still very faint and far away, thank Ashapola. But if this latest attempt to bring it back to life is successful, there is a very real risk that the entire world is going to be plunged into darkness and brutality and chaos like nothing that you could ever imagine.’

  Katie said nothing, but waited for Springer to carry on. She felt a complete sense of unreality, as if she were dreaming this, too; but however outlandish his story was, Springer had to be telling her the truth. Daisy had told her all about the freaks that had frightened her so much in her nightmares; especially the woman with one eye in the middle of her forehead, and a small creature that was half human and half rat, which used to gibber and curse in all kinds of different languages.

  ‘The story goes that the circus was originally created in the middle of the twelfth century by a Cistercian monk from the Maulbronn monastery in Germany. His name was Brother Albrecht, and he was supposed to have been so handsome that some of the villagers in the Salzbach Valley believed that he was a saint. Maybe he was a saint, but if he was, he was a tainted saint, because he had a passionate affair with one of the prettiest girls in the village.

  ‘Unfortunately for Brother Albrecht, she was already married, and her husband came home one day and found them in bed together. After he had beaten Brother Albrecht almost senseless, her husband tied him up and sawed off his arms at the elbows, so that he would never be able to touch another woman. Then he sawed off his legs at the knees, so that he would permanently have to be kneeling on the floor to pray for forgiveness. He daubed the stumps of Brother Albrecht’s arms and legs with scalding pitch to prevent him from bleeding to death. I won’t tell you what he forced his wife to do, as punishment for her infidelity.’

  ‘That’s a horrible story,’ said Katie. ‘That’s absolutely horrible.’

  ‘Yes, it is. But I wish it were only a story.’

  SIX

  Avenging Claw

  Katie didn’t know what to say. She felt as if she ought to tell Springer to get out of her house, right now, and never come back. But she also felt that he had arrived here this morning with the key to the rest of her life. She had to hear him out, no matter what he was going to say to her. If she didn’t, she would never discover what she really was, or what Daisy could have been, and why she had dreamed or hallucinated about that mutilated woman in the Griffin House Hotel. For some reason that she couldn’t understand, she also felt a sense of obligation, as if it was her duty to listen to him. Maybe ‘recruitment’ was the right word.

  Springer said, ‘I know that none of this is easy, Katie. It’s sickening, most of it, and very scary. But you and all of the others who are like you have no real choice. It is what you were born to do, if you were ever called.’

  ‘Just tell me about the circus.’

  Springer stood up and walked across to the window. Outside, over the rooftops of the houses opposite, Katie could see a thick bank of orange cumulus clouds rising up, like the clouds of dust raised by a vast approaching army — still many miles away, but approaching them relentlessly. There would be a thunderstorm by the middle of the afternoon.

  ‘The Cistercian monks came to the village and took Brother Albrecht back to the monastery. He spent months recovering from his mutilation, but according to monastery records he never prayed again. Not for forgiveness, not for the glory of God, not for anything. In fact he swore and blasphemed so much that after less than a year the monks forced him to leave the monastery, and he had to survive by begging in the village square and showing himself off as a freak.

  ‘He had his entire body tattooed with illustrations of demons having sex with women, and he advertised himself as der Ursprüngliche Sohn des Teufels — the Original Son of the Devil. He persuaded a local carpenter to construct him a small mechanical cart in which he could push himself around, using the stumps of his elbows to propel himself. There are woodcuts of him in several medieval books about German mythology.’

  Springer turned away from the window. ‘It wasn�
��t long before he became well known throughout the southern part of Germany, and he was joined by other freaks who wanted to profit from his notoriety. By the spring of the year eleven-fifty-two, he had established a traveling sideshow with more than twenty-five VSPs.’

  ‘VSPs?’

  ‘Very Special People. That’s what we’re supposed to call them these days. And it’s right that we do. They are very special. As if it isn’t hard enough surviving in this world without suffering from some hideous deformity. But of course Brother Albrecht wasn’t born without arms and legs. He couldn’t rail against his parents, or against God. All he wanted was revenge for its own sake — especially against those who had once admired him so much for his angelic looks and now crowded around him to stare at him in horror.

  ‘His avowed aim was to drag down the whole world to the level of a freak show. He wanted to turn it all into a circus — a world in which art and beauty were either derided or ignored, and the ugliest and the loudest and the most obscene were applauded by all.’

  Katie said, ‘Seems like he’s nearly succeeded, doesn’t it? You only have to watch daytime TV.’

  Springer looked at her steadily and said, ‘Yes. You’re right. That’s where it all comes from. The reality shows, the hideous art, the raucous music, the worship of trashy celebrities. It all comes from Brother Albrecht and his traveling freak show.’

  ‘But that was — what? — nine hundred years ago. How could the circus have survived all of that time?’

  ‘That was the mistake of the Pope at the time, Eugene III. He was horrified by the way in which Brother Albrecht was glorifying Satan and mocking great art and music, which, in the High Middle Ages, was almost all religious. But Eugene III was also the first ever Cistercian Pope, and he was gravely concerned that Brother Albrecht’s circus was bringing the Cistercian Order into serious disrepute.