The Ninth Nightmare

‘Yeah, precisely, man. That’s what concerns me.’

Xyrena linked arms with him and said, ‘Come on, big boy! Don’t tell me you’re chicken!’

‘Who said anything about chicken?’ Zebenjo’Yyx protested. ‘There’s a whole world of difference between “chicken” and “circumspect”.’

All the same, he cocked the arrow launchers on each of his forearms, turned to the rest of the Night Warriors, and said, ‘This is it, then. Like my grandfather used to say, you can’t make no omelets without breakin’ no legs.’

‘Eggs,’ Xyrena corrected him.

‘My grandfather wasn’t just a cook. I know that now. He was Zebenjo the Arrow-Storm. So when he said “legs” I think he maybe meant legs.’

George Roussos let out a loud grunt and shifted his bulk sideways. At the same time, inside the octagonal portal, the Night Warriors saw lightning flicker, and they distinctly heard the rumbling of distant thunder.

Springer said, anxiously, ‘Hurry, Zebenjo’Yyx! If our friend here changes his dream, or if he wakes up, we could have wasted this entire night’s mission.’

Without any further hesitation, Zebenjo’Yyx ducked his head down and stepped through the portal. He vanished from the bedroom with a sharp snapping sound, like a high-voltage electrical short, as if he had never been there.

‘He’s gone,’ said Jemexxa. ‘That’s incredible.’

Dom Magator said, ‘Why don’t you and Jekkalon go next? Then An-Gryferai and Xyrena. I’ll bring up the rear.’

‘Well, nobody can say that you don’t have plenty of rear to bring up,’ said Xyrena.

Dom Magator said, ‘Good joke, Xyrena. But don’t let’s forget how dangerous this could be, and that some of us might get badly hurt, or even killed. So, you know, let’s get serious, shall we? And keep our eyes open. And our ordnance ready. If there’s any weapon you need apart from your natural allure — like a gun of any kind — you only have to ask.’

‘Oh, I’m serious, mister, believe you me,’ Xyrena retaliated. ‘Don’t let one or two wisecracks fool you. I’ve spent my whole life fighting and I can assure you that the skin underneath this armor is just as tough as the armor itself.’

Dom Magator looked at her through his green-tinted visor for a moment, and then he said, ‘OK. Let’s get hustling, shall we?’ He could have told her that talking tough wasn’t enough when you were fighting in the world of dreams, but he decided it was best if she found out for herself. Fighting in the world of dreams was terrifying, chaotic, and violently disorienting. Nothing and nobody ever stayed the same. The terrain could drastically alter right beneath your feet, from limestone butte into fever-ridden bayou, and the weather could change, too, from a summer heatwave to a midwinter’s blizzard, all without a moment’s warning.

Jekkalon stepped through the portal, followed closely by Jemexxa. An-Gryferai went next. She had no idea what to expect, and the sharp snap! as she passed from the real world into the dream world gave her a jolt. But immediately she felt rain pattering against her helmet, and when she stood up straight, she found herself on a hillside, under a black, lowering sky.

Lightning was stalking across the horizon on crooked stilts, as threatening as the Martian tripods in The War of the Worlds. Jekkalon and Jemexxa were standing only a few feet away to her left, while Zebenjo’Yyx had taken up a position on top of a low promontory off to her right, his right arm cocked up like a sentry holding a rifle.

An-Gryferai waded through the grass toward Jekkalon and Jemexxa. ‘Some dream for a meat-packer!’ she shouted.

Jemexxa tilted her helmeted head toward her and shouted back, ‘This is the same place that Kieran and me found ourselves, when we went through the door at the Griffin House Hotel! Except that the carnival was right at the top of the hill there, and now it’s not!’

‘It must have moved on!’ said An-Gryferai.

Behind them, Xyrena appeared, closely followed by Dom Magator, with all of his guns and his swords and his serried racks of knives.

An-Gryferai shouted at Dom Magator, ‘Jemexxa said that she and Jekkalon were here before, in this same exact place! She said that the carnival was up on top of the hill, but it’s gone now!’

Suddenly, in her ear, as clearly and as warmly as if he had been standing right beside her, Dom Magator said, ‘We don’t have to yell at each other, An-Gryferai. We all have a close-communications system inside of our helmets, except for Xyrena, who has an induction loop in her crown. This means that we can talk to each other in our natural voices, at any distance. Switch is on the left-hand side, under your ear protectors.’

‘Oh,’ said An-Gryferai. ‘I didn’t realize.’

Jekkalon hadn’t been listening. ‘Are they the same, then?’ he screamed. ‘Dream time and waking time?’

‘I can hear you, for Christ’s sake!’ said Dom Magator. ‘You don’t have to bust my goddamned eardrums!’

‘Sorry!’ said Jekkalon. ‘But it was only last night when Kiera and me saw the carnival here. So if dream time is the same as waking time, then they couldn’t have traveled too far since then, could they? For starters, they would have had to pack up all of their tents, and all of their equipment, and hitch up all of their trailers, and that would have taken them hours.’

‘Dream time is different, for sure,’ said Dom Magator. ‘But this carnival has more than dream people in it. It has real people, and you can’t mess around with time too much when you have real people involved. Real people have to live out their lives sequentially.’

‘So what does that mean?’ asked Xyrena.

‘It means that the carnival can’t travel backward and forward in time, the same way that we can, as Night Warriors. So the whole shebang has to carry on like a real carnival, hour by hour and minute by minute and day by day. And that’s to our advantage, now that we’re hunting for them. They can’t dream themselves back to nineteen thirty-six, for example, to get away from us.’

‘In that case, let’s go huntin’ for them,’ said Zebenjo’Yyx. ‘I’m just itchin’ to get my revenge on that freak who broke my frickin’ back!’

‘They won’t be far away,’ said Dom Magator. ‘This is where our meat-packing pal started his dream, right here, which is why we entered it here. Judging by his physical condition, he couldn’t have walked too far to catch up with them.’

He turned to Xyrena, as if he were challenging her to make some smart remark about his physical condition, but Xyrena simply shrugged. Then he said, ‘An-Gryferai, how about taking off and having a look around? Just be careful — it looks like it’s pretty damned blowy up there.’

An-Gryferai walked a few paces up the hill, with the wet grass lashing at her knees. Then she flexed her shoulders and spread her wings, and the wind immediately plucked her upward.

Dom Magator had been wrong; this weather was very much more than ‘pretty damned blowy’. This wasn’t at all like the warm, serene thermals in which she had floated so triumphantly over the Florida coastline. Here, the wind was harsh and cold and ill-tempered, constantly switching direction and velocity. Bursts of rain kept exploding against her helmet, and the lightning seemed to be crackling so close to her that she was afraid of being electrocuted.

She was buffeted by downdrafts again and again, and at one time she was almost beaten back down to the ground, and her boots actually kicked against the grass. But she struggled and dipped and spun, and tilted her wings to catch every rising gust of wind that she could, and at last she managed to fly up to the top of the hill.

She battled upward and looked around, repeatedly angling her wings to steady herself. It was clear that the carnival had been here, and only recently. The ground had been churned into glistening black mud by scores of criss-crossing tire tracks, and there was trash scattered everywhere — broken orange-crates, chicken carcasses, dirty diapers, worn-out tractor tires. Near the center of the site a wide oval area had been covered several inches deep with sawdust, which is where the big top must have been pitched. Over on the right, a large bonfire was still smoldering, filling the night with acrid smoke, and stray sheets of paper were dancing across the muddy furrows as if they were panicking that they had been left behind.

‘How’s it going?’ asked Dom Magator, inside her helmet.

‘Jekkalon and Jemexxa were right: the carnival was here. I’m just trying to work out which way it went.’