The Ninth Nightmare

Absence Gun, which uses quantum physics to negate the existence of whoever it hits. If you get shot by an Absence Gun, you don’t get killed. You were never born in the first place. There never was any you. I have to tell you that it makes a most thrilling sound when it hits its victims, like a thunderclap, echoing back for years.’

Rhodajane poured herself a glass of sparkling wine and drank almost all of it in three gulps. She burped and said, ‘Excusez-moi! I have to tell you two mooks that I am finding it very difficult to get my head around all of this. Either this is some kind of ridiculous set-up for Candid Camera, or it’s a joke in very bad taste, or you’re both out to lunch.’

‘It’s none of the above,’ said John. ‘It’s for real.’

She prodded her finger into John’s chest. ‘OK, if it’s for real, prove it. You said that you could. So go ahead.’

John looked at Springer and said, ‘What are you doing here, man? Is something going down?’

Springer nodded. ‘Yes, there is, and it’s serious, and it’s happening right here, in this hotel. But before I tell you what it is, I think it would be a good idea if we convinced Xyrena here that we’re not spinning her a line.’

John took a deep breath. ‘When you say serious—?’

‘I mean serious to the point of the whole world falling victim to the same nightmare, all night, every night. I mean serious to the point of the human race losing all of its morals, all of its scruples, all of its kindness, all of its humanity. I mean what John Milton meant in Paradise Lost when he wrote about “Chaos and Old Night”. A hell on earth, John, where nobody respects anybody else’s authority, or their dignity, or their freedom, or even their right to life. A mirror image of the US Constitution, if you like, in which it is almost mandatory to do harm to others.’

‘That does sound serious,’ Rhodajane agreed. ‘I think that sounds very, very, very serious,’ and she nodded her head emphatically with every ‘very’.

‘Then let us prove it to you,’ said Springer. He went across to the closet and opened it up, adjusting the door so that John could see himself in the mirror on the back of the door. Springer beckoned to him, and John slowly walked over to join him.

‘This is how Dom Magator appears in the world of dreams,’ Springer announced.

John stared at his reflection in the mirror. He thought his face was looking baggy and lived-in, and he hadn’t realized that his pompadour was now so thin that his scalp was gleaming through. However, Springer rested his hand on his shoulder again, and after a few seconds he began to see the ghostly image of a helmet materializing around his head — big and black and cube-like, with only the narrowest visor for him to see through, and even that was tinted dark green like the vizier in a welder’s face-mask. The helmet was encrusted with knobs and switches and locking springs and other small metal attachments.

‘Jesus,’ said Rhodajane. ‘Talk about Transformers.’

Now Dom Magator’s battledress began to appear — a heavy cloak made of some soft, gray, metallic material, and underneath it a suit of black, leathery armor, jointed like the thorax of a stag beetle. He wore a wide metal belt, from which seven or eight handguns were suspended, all with decorative handles and elaborate cocking mechanisms and illuminated sights — some laser, some infrared, some ultraviolet. Across his back was fastened a curved chrome-plated frame, in which all of his various knives were fitted, as well as his armory of rifles and bazookas.

His outfit was finished off by heavy-duty knee-boots, to which even more knives were clipped. There was scarcely an inch on his body which had no weapon attached to it.

Rhodajane came up to Dom Magator and cautiously touched his helmet with her fingertips.

‘There’s nothing there,’ she said, in bewilderment. ‘I can only feel your hair.’ She paused, and then she added, ‘What there is of it.’

‘Get out of here,’ John snapped at her.

Springer said, ‘You cannot feel his helmet because this is nothing more than a holographic vision of Dom Magator’s battledress. This is the waking world, Rhodajane, and your Night Warriors’ uniforms only take on physical reality in the dream world. Likewise, Dom Magator’s weapons. We couldn’t have anybody running around the waking world with an Absence Gun, or a Successive Detonation Carbine. Think what a terrorist could do with a weapon like that.’

Rhodajane stepped back, and Dom Magator’s armor gradually began to fade, until he was back in his crumpled blue button-down shirt and his tan sport coat with the split in the back.

‘Now do you believe us?’ John asked her, primping up his hair. ‘It isn’t easy, I’ll admit. I didn’t believe it myself at first — not until our first mission.’

Rhodajane looked at her champagne glass. ‘OK, I guess I have to believe you. That’s unless you’ve slipped me a roofie.’

‘So what’s happening?’ asked John, with a sniff. ‘“Chaos and Old Night” — that sounds like Satan’s involved.’

‘A child of Satan, if you like,’ said Springer. ‘At least, that’s what he likes to call himself. His name is Brother Albrecht and he used to be a Cistercian monk. For a very long time, though, he has called himself der Ursprungliche Sohn des Teufels — the Original Son of the Devil.’

‘When you say “a very long time”,’ said John, easing his backside down on the corner of the bed with his feet planted wide apart. ‘How long a very long time would that actually be, roughly?’

Springer looked at him with a faraway expression. It was unnerving enough, seeing Deano recreated exactly as he had looked on that humid morning in 1991, when he and John had both showed up at Fort Polk, Texas, as gangling young recruits, but it was even more unnerving to think that Springer might be able to remember what he and Deano had done together.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Springer. ‘Brother Albrecht has described himself as the son of the Devil ever since he was dismissed from his monastery in Southern Germany for blasphemy and other transgressions against God. That was more than eight hundred years ago.’

‘Eight hundred years?’ asked Rhodajane.

‘He exists in the world of dreams,’ Springer explained. ‘Nobody grows old in the world of dreams — not unless they want to, or unless some malevolent spirit makes them wither away. Brother Albrecht runs a carnival, a traveling freak show, a circus of pain and torture and human atrocities. It’s already infecting the night-time consciousness of thousands of people, this circus. You only have to look at what’s happening in our society. But now we’re beginning to suspect that Brother Albrecht is trying to bring it back to life in the waking world, too.

‘Can he do that? I mean, like, it’s only a dream. Or a nightmare, by the sound of it.’

‘We don’t yet know, but we’re doing everything we can to find out. We strongly suspect, though, that this hotel is a critical part of whatever Brother Albrecht is planning; and we think that he’s being helped out by a one- time mass murderer called Gordon Veitch. If not Veitch himself, then a copycat.

‘Veitch used to mutilate or murder his victims in some of the poorest parts of Cleveland, like Kingsbury Run and the Roaring Third. He used to paint his face like a clown, so that nobody would recognize him.

‘He was never caught, even though some of the finest law enforcement officers in the country were hunting for him for months. One of them was Eliot Ness, who was Cleveland’s Safety Director in those days. The main reason Veitch eluded capture was because he dreamed about every attack that he committed, and then he came here to this hotel, and dreamed it into the walls. All of the evidence that could have convicted him is right here, in the plaster. He left none of it behind, at any of the actual crime scenes.’

‘I think I might have seen him here, in this room,’ John told him.

‘You’re kidding me!’ said Rhodajane. ‘You mean I’ve been sleeping all night in a bedroom with somebody’s murder inside of the walls?’

‘I don’t know,’ said John. ‘But when I fetched your bags up yesterday, and switched on the TV, I saw the TV reflected in the mirror and in the mirror it was showing a different picture altogether.’

‘Hey… you’re giving me the creeps now, JD.’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t mean to. But it was what I saw. There was a woman lying on a bed and a guy was standing over her with his back to me.’

‘Could you see what he was doing?’ Springer asked him.

‘Not too clearly. But his elbow was going back and forward, like he was sawing. I’ll tell you what it reminded me of… one of those stage magic acts where the magician saws the woman in half.’