The Ninth Nightmare

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.’