The Ninth Nightmare

Katie narrowed her eyes and peered at the woman intently. As she did so, the woman appeared to come nearer and nearer, as if Katie were looking at her through a zoom lens.

‘Keep focusing,’ Springer coaxed her. ‘An-Gryferai can see for miles and miles, in the sharpest detail.’

Katie kept her eyes fixed on the woman, and after only a few seconds she could clearly make out that she was young and Hispanic, with a plump oval face and heavy unplucked eyebrows, and that she was wearing a yellow headscarf to match her dress and a necklace of large orange-and-green beads. She could also see the baby in the stroller, a chubby little girl in a pink gingham romper suit, waving a pink plastic rattle and furiously kicking her legs. She could hear the rattle quite distinctly.

She turned to Springer and said, ‘That’s amazing. It’s like she’s standing right outside the window.’

‘An-Gryferai’s eyes have an effective range of more than ten miles,’ said Springer. ‘She also has highly acute hearing. She is the eyes and ears of the Night Warriors, as well as a fearsome fighter in her own right. When the Night Warriors go looking for Brother Albrecht and his freak show, her natural abilities will be essential.’

‘What do I have to do?’ Katie asked him. ‘And when?’

‘Tonight,’ said Springer. ‘Before one a.m.’

‘Tonight? But I have absolutely no idea what to do.’

Springer handed her a slip of paper. ‘Before you go to bed, read these words out loud. Once you’ve recited them, you won’t have any trouble dropping off. Then — once you start sleeping — your dream self will rise out of your waking self. I will be waiting for you, to guide you.’

‘But these claws… I don’t know how they work yet.’

‘You will, when you become An-Gryferai. You will have all of her knowledge and all of her skills.’

Katie kept on staring at their reflection in the mirror. She had never felt like this in her life. Excited, scared, so pumped up that she could hardly breathe.

‘Just tell me this,’ she said. ‘Is it going to be really dangerous? I mean, what if something happens to me when I’m An-Gryferai? What if I meet somebody like the Black Shatterer and he hurts me?’

‘It depends on how badly,’ said Springer. ‘I won’t lie to you, Katie, some Night Warriors do get seriously injured, and it can have an effect on their waking bodies. Some Night Warriors have been killed. Not many, but some.’

‘What happens then?’

‘Then, their real-life bodies never wake up.’

‘Ever?’

‘Never. It’s like they’re in a coma for the rest of their life.’

They sat and talked together for another half hour, until it was time for Katie to go to the retirement home in Coral Gables. She had to make a progress report on several of the residents, especially Mrs Gladys Sweetman, whose senile dementia had been worsening in the past three months, until she no longer recognized her own daughter.

Springer said, ‘Whenever he wanted new attractions for his freak show, Brother Albrecht used to send out his agents into the towns and villages of Swabia, looking for people to deform, especially women. Deformed women were always very popular with the crowds who came to his circus, particularly if they performed degrading sexual acts.

‘His agents would creep into people’s houses at night and commit the most atrocious acts of mutilation. Those women who didn’t die from shock or loss of blood would be carried away to join the freak show. There was no point in them trying to escape. Where else could a woman go if she had no arms and no legs, or if her face had been cut off and replaced with that of a dog, or if she and another woman had been inextricably sewn together?’

‘My God,’ said Katie. ‘How did Brother Albrecht get away with it?’

‘Because this was the Middle Ages and there was no law enforcement in the way we understand it now. Apart from that, Brother Albrecht’s circus was hugely popular, even if the Pope wanted to close it down. Before the Duke of Swabia came to break it up, it had traveled all over Europe, and as far as Russia, and it made Brother Albrecht a very wealthy man. Thousands of people flocked to see the Centaur who had the upper body of a woman and the lower body of a horse. She would be covered by a stallion several times a day for the entertainment of the crowds. Then there was the Human Cockroach, a young boy with six arms instead of legs, who would publicly eat handfuls of excrement. And so many more, each one more disgusting than the last.

‘When Brother Albrecht dreamed it away, the whole circus went into a kind of suspended animation, but I can only guess that his intention was to bring it all back to life one day — and sooner, rather than later. I doubt if he realized that it wouldn’t be revived for so many hundreds of years.’

‘But if the circus was so disgusting, why would anyone want to revive it?’

‘I don’t know, to be frank. Why does anyone stub out cigarettes on children’s arms, or beat women within an inch of their life? Why does anyone commit rape, torture, or homicide? Why do people spray graffiti on beautiful buildings, or throw acid at famous works of art? There’s a very dark side to human nature and whoever is trying to bring Brother Albrecht’s circus back to life has darkness in spades.’

‘How is he going to do it? Do you have any idea?’

‘Not entirely. But we’re pretty sure that the Griffin House Hotel has always been central to this revival. In seven of its bedrooms — yours included — nightmares of mutilations and murders are imprinted in the walls. Between nineteen thirty-six and nineteen thirty-eight, Gordon Veitch stayed in each of those rooms. What we don’t yet understand is what he was trying to do.’

‘But Gordon Veitch isn’t likely to be alive today, is he?’

‘It’s possible, if he’s become a Dread. A Dread is a kind of a ghost which exists partly in dreams and partly in the waking world, as I do. On the other hand, it might be somebody else altogether, trying to carry on where Gordon Veitch left off. It will be up to the Night Warriors to find out, and track him down, and stop him.’

At a quarter of nine, Springer said that it was time for him to go. Katie opened the front door for him. The cumulus clouds were closer now, and a warm, fretful wind was blowing. In the far distance, over the Gulf, she could hear the rumbling of thunder.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Springer, taking hold of both of Katie’s hands.

‘Sorry for what? If it’s my destiny to be a Night Warrior, then it’s my destiny.’

‘You haven’t yet entered anybody else’s dreams. You may not feel quite so sanguine about it when you do.’

‘Well, we’ll see. I’m off to visit my dementia patients now. I think I prefer your kind of madness to theirs.’

Springer said, ‘I do look like Mr Flight, don’t I?’

‘What?’

‘Your music teacher, from Nautilus Junior High. You liked him a whole lot, didn’t you? Which is why I came here looking like this.’

He raised his hand in a little salute and walked away down the path. Katie was about to call him back and ask him how he had known about Mr Flight, and more to the point, how he had managed to look almost exactly like him. But then she thought: leave it, maybe you don’t really need to know.

SEVEN Locked Room Mystery

Detective Wisocky closed the file he was working on, tossed down his pen, and said, ‘That’s it, Charlie. Time for nourishment. Rally’s, for a triple cheeseburger. And you’re buying.’

Detective Hudson looked up from his desk and said, ‘Come on, Walter — I picked up the check for yesterday’s lunch.’

‘Sure you did, Charlie. But yesterday’s lunch was chow fun noodles, right, and chow fun noodles is Chinese, right, which is a totally different ethnic cuisine from cheeseburgers, which is domestic. The last time we ate cheeseburgers I paid, and the next time we eat Chinese I’ll pay for that. But you can’t go confusing your different ethnic cuisines on a financial basis, otherwise we won’t know where the hell we are.’