The Ninth Nightmare

want you! I want you!’

‘You said you wanted me more than anything?’

‘Yes! Yes! Yes, curse you! Yes! I have to have you, you whore!’

‘Do you want me more than life itself?’

‘Yes!’ he screamed at her, with spit flying out of his mouth. ‘Yes-yes-yes-yes! Yes!’

When he said that, Xyrena took her hand away from his penis and sank downward on to his hips, slowly allowed the weight of her body to take him deep inside her. He let out a terrible groan like a man having his bowels dragged out of him by a medieval torturer, part agony and part ecstasy, and his head dropped back into the grass.

Dom Magator turned back to the rest of the clowns. Almost all of them had their eyes closed now, and all of them were swaying backward and forward, as if they were anemones on the bottom of the ocean. He looked down at Xyrena, and she was rising and falling in the same rhythm, lifting her hips so high that the tip of the white-faced harlequin’s penis almost slipped out of her, hesitating, and then lowering herself slowly down again.

It was then that it began to dawn on Dom Magator what Xyrena must have understood intuitively. Each of these hundreds of clowns, physically, was an individual. Each one of them was dressed in a wildly differing outfit, and each one of them wore his own distinctive face-paint. If you killed any one of them, he fell, without affecting any of the others. But inside their heads, they were one and the same person. They all shared a common consciousness. They were all Brother Albrecht.

When Xyrena had aroused the white-faced harlequin, she had aroused all of these hundreds of clowns at the same time, just as she had affected Brother Albrecht when she had confronted him on the stage. Even now, it was possible that Brother Albrecht, back at the circus, was sharing this same sexual excitement.

Xyrena rose up and down two or three more times, and then she said, ‘Go, John! All of you! Go now!’

As if to emphasize the urgency of the situation, the seismic sensor in Dom Magator’s helmet started to let out a repeated buzzing noise. George Roussos’ eyes were flickering and he was only seconds away from waking up.

Dom Magator hurried Jekkalon and Jemexxa to the portal. They turned, and the portal lit up their faces in intermittent flashes of electric blue. ‘We can’t go without Xyrena!’ Jemexxa insisted.

‘Don’t worry! Go! I’ll take care of her! If she doesn’t make it, we can always come back for her!’

Jekkalon and Jemexxa hesitated a split second longer, but then Zebenjo’Yyx forcibly pushed them toward the portal. ‘Go! You supposed to be warriors! Warriors do what they damn well tol’ to!’

The twins disappeared through the portal with a sharp crackle of static. Then An-Gryferai landed nearby, folded her wings, and ducked through the portal after them, with another crackle. Zebenjo’Yyx caught a whiff of scorched feathers.

‘Come on, man! Your turn!’ he shouted. But Dom Magator was still hovering protectively over Xyrena as she continued to bring the white-faced harlequin closer and closer to a climax. The harlequin had started groaning again, and all of the other clowns had started groaning, too, in a hideous chorus, and swaying their hips even more lasciviously backward and forward.

‘I’m OK, John,’ said Xyrena, in a low, businesslike voice. ‘I have this all under control. I’m sliding the needles out of my fingers right now.’

Dom Magator said, ‘Zebenjo’Yyx — it’s OK — she’s just about to give our white-faced friend the needle treatment. Go! We’ll be right behind you, I swear it!’

Xyrena bent forward over the white-faced harlequin, kissing his blackberry-painted lips and biting his neck. He was almost delirious, and his feet were arched with sexual tension. He was right on the very brink of ejaculating, and his eyes were tight shut.

‘Oh, yes!’ he shouted. ‘Oh, yes! Oh, yes! Oh, my Lord Lucifer and every demon that ever was!’

Suddenly, however, he started to shudder, and to kick, and to toss his head from side to side. He made gagging noises, like somebody trying to be sick on an empty stomach. Gradually, Xyrena sat up straight and it was then that Dom Magator could see that she had spread both hands wide across his chest and run the long needles that protruded from the ends of her fingers into his ribcage.

There was a spitting, sizzling noise. The white-faced harlequin struggled even more furiously, and then smoke began to puff out of his lips. He uttered another extraordinary cry, more like a whoop than a scream, as Xyrena’s needles brought the blood in his body to boiling point. His white skin was suffused with blotches of crimson, and he started to blister.

He stared up at Xyrena but he couldn’t see her because both of his eyes had been poached white.

‘You said you’d go blind for me, didn’t you?’ Xyrena reminded him.

He tried to speak, but all that came out of his mouth were more puffs of smoke. His head fell back and his bloated white face was mercifully covered by the grass.

‘RIP,’ added Xyrena, much more quietly. ‘You said you wanted me more than life itself. Well, you got what you wanted.’ She paused, and then she lifted herself off him. In the rigor of death, his penis was still erect.

On the slopes, the hordes of clowns were milling around, bewildered and shocked. They had shared the white-faced harlequin’s passion so they must have shared his pain. Dom Magator picked up Xyrena’s armor for her and took hold of her hand. ‘Come on, Rhodajane, we need to get out of here prontissimo!’

‘I’m not decent!’

‘Who cares? Even when you were decent you weren’t decent! Now, go!’

He pushed her through the dazzling blue portal — crackle! — and followed right behind her — crackle! — just as the first of the clowns reached them, howling and waving their knives and their clubs. One of them managed to pull back the elastic of his catapult and fire a pebble into the Roussos’ bedroom. Zebenjo’Yyx was kneeling close beside the portal and in retaliation he loosed off three arrows.

Dom Magator said, ‘No! They won’t—’

But it was too late. The arrows hit the bedroom wall and stuck there, shivering like wheatstalks in the wind. The instant he had stepped through it, Dom Magator had closed the portal behind him, and the way through to Brother Albrecht’s nightmare had been sealed off.

‘Sorry, man. Didn’t want them comin’ through after us, is all.’

‘They wouldn’t have. They couldn’t. They can stop us from getting through but they can’t get through themselves. They’d be fried.’

Zebenjo’Yyx plucked his arrows out of the bedroom wall and slotted them back into his quiver. Meanwhile Xyrena was fastening the buckles on her gilded armor and tugging her cloak straight. On the bed next to them, George Roussos was still asleep, but he was beginning to stir, and they could see his pupils darting from side to side beneath his eyelids as he came closer and closer to waking up.

‘Let’s go,’ said Dom Magator. ‘We didn’t manage to knock out Brother Albrecht tonight, but we learned a whole lot, didn’t we, and next time we’ll make sure we do it right.’

‘What I don’t understand is why the Absence Gun had no effect on him at all,’ said Jekkalon. ‘You zapped that meat-packing plant, right, and everybody in it. Why couldn’t you zap Brother Albrecht?’

Dom Magator shook his head. ‘I have no idea. But right now, it’s past six a.m. We need to get back to our beds. Thanks, everybody. For a first outing you all did real good.’

They embraced each other in a circle, and as they did so they rose upward through the ceiling of George Roussos’ bedroom, and up through the bedrooms above it, and out on to the rooftop of The Drake Tower. It was light now, and Lake Michigan was sparkling with early-morning sunlight.

An-Gryferai spread her wings and peeled away to the south-east, to Florida. The rest of the Night Warriors flew east toward Cleveland.

Meanwhile, George Roussos swung his legs out of bed, and stretched, and yawned. He hadn’t had such a bad night’s sleep in years. Nothing but nightmares about cutting up animals — all kinds of animals, not just cattle and pigs and sheep. And clowns, and he had always hated clowns, ever since he was a small boy.

He checked the clock on his nightstand. Six seventeen. Time to take a shower and get to work. But then his