The Ninth Nightmare

only because he was so well built, but because he really cared for these two young twins. They were good-looking, they were hugely successful, and they had nightly faced audiences of thousands. But this was their first time in Night Warrior combat. Dom Magator was confident that they had inherited all of the tactical skills they needed, but they had no experience yet of how harrowing it could be, fighting in nightmares; how bizarre, or how bloody.

Xyrena and the twins started to walk toward the carnival tents. As they did so, from inside the big top, the Night Warriors heard a muffled drum roll, and then a man bellowing through a megaphone. They couldn’t make out what the man was saying, but his announcement was immediately followed by a discordant blast of trumpets and a smattering of applause.

‘Sounds like show time,’ said Zebenjo’Yyx.

‘Xyrena, Jekkalon, Jemexxa…’ said Dom Magator. ‘You take it real easy, you hear me? And keep us up to the minute, OK? You need us, you just yell, and we’ll be right there before you can say “catfish po’boy with everything on it”.’

Xyrena circled around the back of the caravans and trailers, with Jekkalon and Jemexxa staying close behind her. Just as before, when Kieran and Kiera had explored the carnival site on top of the hill, all of the trailers had black blinds drawn tightly down at the windows, although they could hear voices and music and occasional bursts of shouting from inside some of the trailers, and there was a pungent smell of tobacco smoke on the wind.

From the direction of the big top, they heard another drum roll, longer this time, followed by another fanfare of trumpets, and another round of applause.

‘I think we should go see what’s going on,’ said Xyrena. ‘If it’s some kind of show, then the chances are that the Big Cheese is going to be there.’

‘Can’t we find our mom first?’ asked Jekkalon.

‘Come on, Jakki, you know what our priority is,’ Xyrena told him. ‘We have to pull the rug out from under this freak show as soon as we possibly can.’

‘You will help us find her, though?’

‘Like I said to my first husband, I promise I’ll try to keep my promise, but I can’t promise.’

They walked along the line of animal cages. The stench of tiger’s urine and elephant’s dung was overwhelming, and made Xyrena’s eyes water. The tiger snarled at them listlessly, but its eyes were dull and its fur was patchy and even if it managed to escape from its cage, Xyrena doubted if it had the strength even to run after them, let alone eat them. The bear was in much the same condition, sitting in one corner of its cage, endlessly rocking backward and forward like a mental patient in a rundown asylum.

In the last cage a Great Dane bitch was lying on her side on a heap of dirty straw, apparently asleep. Her pale honey-colored coat was caked with black mud and she was so undernourished that her ribcage was showing.

Jemexxa went up to the bars of the cage and said, ‘Such a beautiful dog. We used to have one when we were little — Princess, we called her. We used to be able to ride on her back, like a pony. Look at her — how could they treat her so bad?’

‘Come on,’ Xyrena urged her, ‘we have to get going.’

But just then the Great Dane stirred on her straw, and lifted herself up on her front paws, and turned her head around. Jemexxa clamped both hands over her mouth and took two staggering steps backward. Jekkalon said, ‘Holy shit! I don’t believe it.’

Even Xyrena found it impossible to believe what she was looking at. The Great Dane had the head of a human woman. She was very pallid, with a heart-shaped face and raggedy brown hair and pale green eyes, although the whites of her eyes were bloodshot. Her cheeks were streaked with dirt and there were clusters of dark red sores around her lips.

She stared at Xyrena and Jekkalon and Jemexxa, occasionally blinking. Then she stood up on all fours and came trotting over to the bars of the cage.

‘Who are you?’ she said, in a reedy voice, as if she were being half strangled. Xyrena could see now that there were crude stitch-marks all the way around her neck, where her head had been sutured to the Great Dane’s body. ‘Do you live in the village? I’ve never seen you before.’

‘No,’ said Xyrena. ‘We don’t live in the village. We’re just kind of passing through.’

‘You don’t belong to the circus?’

Xyrena shook her head. She found the dog-woman both horrifying and fascinating, both at the same time, but more than that she felt desperately sorry for her.

‘You’re naked but you’re not naked,’ the woman frowned.

‘Well, that’s my armor,’ Xyrena explained. ‘I’m a kind of a freelance warrior. Like a mercenary only I don’t get paid for it.’

‘A warrior?’ the dog-woman asked her.

‘Like I say, kind of.’

The dog-woman thought for a moment, and then she said, ‘Would you kill me?’

‘Excuse me? Would I kill you? Of course not.’

‘If I begged you to kill me, would you kill me?’

Xyrena didn’t know what to say. She opened her mouth and then she closed it again.

‘Look at me!’ the dog-woman insisted. ‘I used to be pretty. I used to have a husband, and children. I used to be so happy. Now look at me. I’m not even human any more.’

‘What happened to you?’ asked Jemexxa.

‘A clown happened to me. A clown with a gray face and gray hair and a bright green smile.’

‘What did he do to you, this clown?’

‘I first saw him at the Empire Fair, in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where I used to live. It was so long ago now that I can’t even remember when it was. I saw him smiling at me through the crowd and I smiled back at him, and he gave me this little wave with his fingers. Then I took the children home and he was waiting for me, in my living room. How he got there before me and how he got into my house I shall never know.

The dog-woman’s eyes suddenly filled up with tears. ‘That was the end of my happiness. That was when hell started.’

‘This clown—’ Xyrena prompted her.

‘Most of the freaks call him Mago Verde, or the Green Magician, but Zachary always calls him Gordon. Zachary — he’s the Freakmaster — he’s in charge of all of the living exhibits, like me.’

‘Gordon — that wouldn’t be Gordon Veitch by any chance?’

‘I don’t know. I only know Gordon.’

‘And he’s still here now, with the carnival?’

Elizabeth nodded. ‘Yes. But he’s always coming and going. Sometimes he disappears for days on end, but then he comes back and shuts himself up in his caravan for weeks and nobody sees him. All of the other clowns hate him. The freaks hate him and the animal trainers hate him. But the Grand Freak thinks he’s wonderful. The Grand Freak treats him as if he was Jesus Christ, almost.’

The dog-woman was out of breath now, and panting painfully. Xyrena waited for a few moments, and then she said, ‘The Grand Freak? Who the hell is the Grand Freak?’

‘Brother Albrecht. He calls himself the Grand Freak because he wants everybody to pity him. He doesn’t want anybody to forget that he was beautiful once and how much he’s suffered. But he doesn’t care how cruel he is to other people. He loves to see them tortured — even little children.

She paused again, to catch her breath. Then she said, ‘Please kill me. Please. I tried to strangle myself with my collar, and once I tried to bite off one of my paws so that I bled to death, but Brown Jenkin found me, both times.’

‘Who’s Brown Jenkin?’

The dog-woman gave a shivery shake of her head. ‘He’s a what rather than a who. Half a human being and half a rat. But he helps Zachary to keep his eye on all of us freaks, just to make sure we don’t harm ourselves. I’m sure that he has some kind of a sixth sense, because when one of us can’t take it any more, and wants to end it all, he always sniffs it out, and stops us.’

Xyrena said, gently, ‘Tell me your name.’

‘My name? You don’t need to know my name to kill me. It would be easier for you if you didn’t know it.’

‘Please, tell me your name.’