The Ninth Nightmare

and then he snapped, ‘What?’

‘Sorry, Walter, didn’t mean to disturb you. It’s Charlie.’

‘What’s up, Charlie?’ he asked him. ‘Don’t you ever fucking sleep?’

‘I was lucky… I think I got a rough translation of what that rat-thing was saying to Netta.’

‘You’re kidding me.’

‘No. I was talking to some of the guys at the station and one of them speaks Spanish. He said that “pianos” sounded like “piernas” which is Spanish for “legs”. So “coop” could be French for “cut” and “sign” could be German for “sein” meaning “yours”. So the whole phrase could be a multilingual mishmash that actually means “cut off your legs”.’

‘Come on, Charlie, that’s stretching it a bit, don’t you think?’

‘Maybe so, if the context was different. But what we have so far is “beware Mago Verde, he will cut off your legs”. And that makes sense, doesn’t it, considering what happened to Maria Fortales—’

‘OK, OK, I’ll go along with it just so far as it goes. What about the other bit? “Gang up your start” or whatever it was.’

‘I was lucky there, too. Detective Smit overheard us, and he still speaks pretty good Dutch. He said that “gang up your start” sounded like “gang op uw staart”, which means “walk on your tail”.’

‘So what this rat-thing was saying to Netta was: “Watch out for Mago Verde because he’s going to cut off your legs, and you’ll be walking on your tail.”’

‘Exactly.’

‘You realize this could be total bullshit, and it doesn’t mean anything like that at all?’

‘It makes sense, Walter. What else could it mean?’

‘You need to remember who said it, Charlie. A creature that looked like a rat, from out of some waitress’ nightmare. It’s not real. It’s Alice In Fucking Wonderland.’

‘A recurring nightmare, Walter. A nightmare she’s been having so often she can actually remember what the rat-creature was saying to her.’

Walter suddenly thought of the popcorn that he had smelled, as he dozed off on the couch, and the off-key music, and the thumping of the circus tents in the wind that blew across the meadow.

‘OK,’ he said, grudgingly. ‘Let’s talk about it in the morning. Maybe you’re right. Maybe we need to go on a clown hunt.’

ELEVEN Heavenly Twins

Springer said, ‘Two more Night Warriors will be joining you tonight. That will make six in all.

He counted them off on his fingers. ‘Dom Magator, the Armorer; An-Gryferai, the Avenging Claw; Zebenjo’Yyx, the Arrow Storm; you, Xyrena, the Passion Warrior; as well as Jekkalon and Jemexxa, the Lightning Dancers. We’ll be going to see Jekkalon and Jemexxa right now.’

‘Do they already know they’re Night Warriors?’ asked Rhodajane.

Springer shook his head. ‘Not yet. But they very soon will. They’re staying here, in this hotel, on the second floor.’

‘Do you want us to come with you?’ John asked him. He didn’t feel too enthusiastic about it, but at the same time he was Dom Magator, the senior ranking Night Warrior, and he was the only one amongst them who had yet had any experience of combat in the world of dreams. Because of that, he thought that he had some responsibility to give Springer his support — and besides, the more backup you had when you were fighting in somebody else’s nightmare, the better. He didn’t yet know what a Lightning Dancer actually did, but it sounded as if a whole lot of lethal voltage was involved, and that could only be to the Night Warriors’ advantage.

‘Yes, please come along,’ said Springer. ‘I think it would help a great deal if they met you face to face. You know yourself that it isn’t exactly easy, accepting that you’re a Night Warrior.’

‘OK. What are their names?’

‘Jekkalon and Jemexxa. “Jekkalon” means “acrobat” and “Jemexxa” means “twin”.’

‘I meant their real names. Their waking names.’

‘You probably know them. Or you’ve heard of them, anyhow. Kiera and Kieran Kaiser.’

Rhodajane let out a high-pitched squeal. ‘The Kaiser Twins? You’re kidding me! The Kaiser Twins are Night Warriors? I don’t believe it! I love the Kaiser Twins!’

‘Their late mother was Azurina, the Sky Dancer. It was a very great loss to us when she was abducted.’

‘She was abducted?’ said Rhodajane.

‘Kidnapped, yes. Taken away. Not her waking body, but her dream personality, so she never woke up. In the end they turned off her life support.’

‘I thought she died of a stroke, just after giving birth. That’s what it said in OK! magazine, anyhow.’

‘That was what everybody thought, Xyrena, including her doctors. But she was abducted in her sleep by a Dread called the Gray Memory. The Gray Memory took her out of revenge, because she had seriously injured the Gray Memory’s sister, the Pale Confusion, during a battle in the dreaming world. The Pale Confusion could never walk or speak, ever again, either in the dreaming world or the waking world.’

‘The Gray Memory and the Pale Confusion,’ said Rhodajane. ‘Jesus! They sound spooky.’

‘Well, they were, yes — although I don’t think “spooky” quite sums up how dangerous they were, and how scary. We’re pretty sure that the Gray Memory is still hiding in somebody’s nightmare someplace, although we haven’t sensed her presence in more than seven years. It’s possible that she was injured at the same time as her sister was hurt. She could be dead, but I don’t think so. My feeling is that she’s biding her time, so that she can get her revenge on the rest of the Night Warriors who were fighting with Azurina.’

‘When she abducted the Kaiser Twin’s mother — what did she do with her?’

‘She gave her to Brother Albrecht, by way of a gift. Evil people are always doing favors for other evil people; just like good people do favors for good people.

Springer paused for a moment, as if he was thinking about times gone by and all of those people whom time had carried away.

Then he said, ‘The Gray Memory and the Pale Confusion were part of a nightmare army of over a hundred Dreads. They were trying to destroy the human race by erasing our memories — rubbing them out and blurring them. If they had won, none of us would be able clearly to remember our childhood, or one single word of what we were taught when we were growing up. We wouldn’t recognize our own parents, or even remember where we lived. We wouldn’t know what we had done an hour ago, or even five minutes ago. We would have been like orphans, who can never find their way home.’

‘That sounds too much like me to be funny,’ said John. ‘Like, ask me what I ate for breakfast, and I couldn’t tell you.’

‘I wouldn’t want to know,’ Rhodajane retorted. ‘Besides, it would probably take too long for you to recite the entire order. Let me guess, though: you had pancakes.’

‘I always have pancakes. How can you seriously call it “breakfast” unless you have pancakes? That’s like having a funeral service without a stiff.’

‘Come on, you two,’ said Springer. ‘Let’s introduce ourselves to Jekkalon and Jemexxa.’

They left Rhodajane’s room and walked along the corridor together with all the grim-faced determination of a posse in a cowboy movie. Two passing guests turned around to stare at the three of them in bemusement — a fat man with a pompadour in a bursting sport coat, a big-breasted woman in very tight jeans, and a curly-headed young man in a billowing raincoat.

They went down in the elevator to the floor below. Rooms 237 and 239 were on the north-east side of the Griffin House Hotel, the only two rooms at the end of a short private corridor, which was cordoned off with a thick