The Ninth Nightmare

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 they 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