The Ninth Nightmare

eye was caught by the framed wedding photograph next to the bedside lamp.

He reached over and picked it up. He said, ‘What the fuck?’

The glass in the photograph was shattered like a spider-web. He stood up, still frowning at it, and as he did so he trod on a smooth brown pebble.

EIGHTEEN The Sleepers Awake

Kiera opened her eyes to see Lois Schulz smiling at her.

‘At last you’re awake, my darling, Gott zu danken!’

Kiera blinked and looked around her. She was no longer in the fourth-floor room that Springer had booked for them at the Griffin House Hotel. Instead, she was lying in a hospital bed, in a sunlit room with pale green walls and framed prints of pink orchids all around. When she tried to turn over and sit up she realized that her left arm was connected to a vital signs monitor.

‘Lois? Where is this? What am I doing here?’

‘University Hospital, my darling. Kieran is here also.’

‘What am I doing in a hospital? I’m not sick!’

‘Oh, you’re not sick? Hah! You could have fooled me!’

‘Why, what happened?’

‘Who knows, already? Yesterday evening I came to your hotel room to take you and your brother to the concert and you were gone. I went crazy! My first thought was that you had been kidnapped! You know, for ransom or something like that! It was only by chance that one of the maids said that she had gone into another room on the fourth floor to take in some clean towels, and she had seen you both asleep, and recognized you. Otherwise, we would have had the police searching the whole of Cleveland! The whole of Ohio, even!’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Kiera. ‘We really didn’t mean to worry you.’

‘Worry me? Worry me? Even when we found you, we couldn’t wake you! Believe me, we tried! I shook you! I screamed in your ears, wake up, wake up! But you wouldn’t wake up, neither of you, so what did I do? I called nine-one-one of course. I thought maybe you’d both been taking that Georgia Home Boy or that Special K or whatever.’

Kiera said, ‘Lois, you know we never take party drugs. You know that.’

‘Well, of course. The doctors gave you a blood test and he said you were clean like whistles. He tested for everything and he couldn’t understand why you wouldn’t wake up. He thought maybe it was some kind of a coma.’

‘I don’t know. Maybe we were just exhausted.’

‘If you were so exhausted, why didn’t you tell me? Why did you sneak off and hide like that? Don’t you trust me to take care of you? I could have maybe rescheduled.’

‘Oh, get real, Lois. You think you really would have?’

‘Well, maybe not. But how exhausted do you have to be to sleep through a seven-and-a-half million-dollar concert? Do you know what the penalties are going to be? The refunds! Do you have any idea how much our insurance premiums are going to go up? You were exhausted? God made the whole world and He took only one day off!

She paused for breath and then she said, ‘At least your next concert isn’t until Saturday. I should have such luck.’

‘I’m sorry, Lois, truly I am. But there are some things which are much more important than money.’

‘Name one. Please. I’d love to know what it is.’

At that moment the door opened and Kieran appeared. His hair was sticking up as if he had just woken up and he was wearing yellow hospital pajamas. ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘You’re awake!’

‘Oh, great,’ Lois greeted him. ‘The other Comatose Kaiser. So how are you feeling?’

‘OK, I guess,’ Kieran told her. ‘Kind of bushed, but that’s all.’

‘How can you be bushed? You two, you’ve been sleeping all night like dead people!’

‘I’ve been telling Lois how sorry we are,’ said Kiera. ‘But I have tried to explain that money isn’t everything.’

‘Kiera’s right,’ said Kieran. ‘So we miss one concert. It isn’t the end of the world. Unlike the end of the world, which is the end of the world.’

‘I would just like to know what it is that means more to both of you than your careers.’

Kieran sat down on the end of the bed. ‘Our mom, Lois. Our mom is more important. And, like I say, the end of the world. That’s more important, too.’

Lois looked from one twin to the other. ‘Your mom. Your mom? You know how sorry I am, but your mom is long ago passed over.’

‘Passed over, yes,’ said Kieran. ‘But not passed away.’

‘I don’t know what that means, Kieran. I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about.’

‘If it comes to the end of the world, Lois, then believe me, you will.’

David shook Katie’s shoulder and said, ‘Wake up, sleepyhead. I have to be gone in an hour. I made you coffee.’

Katie sat up in bed and frowned at him. ‘What time is it?’

‘A quarter of eight. I thought I’d let you sleep a little longer.’

‘Urrgghh,’ said Katie, falling back and wrapping her head in the pillow. ‘I feel like I haven’t slept in a week.’

David pried the two sides of the pillow apart. His face was very serious. ‘That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. You were so restless last night. In fact “restless” is the understatement of the century. It was like you were having a full-scale fight with somebody. Flapping your arms and kicking your feet and twisting around and shouting.’

‘Shouting?’ said Katie, staring at him suspiciously. ‘What was I shouting?’

‘All kinds of stuff. Something about how stormy it was, and how you couldn’t lift somebody out through the roof. I mean, really weird things like that. You said you could see some circus, but it was too far away and you needed to gain more height. I swear to God you sounded like you thought you were flying.’

Katie reached up and touched his cheek with her fingertips. ‘It was only a nightmare, David. That’s all. Maybe I’ve been working too hard.’

‘All the same, when I get back from Denver you and I are going to go talk to Aaron. Or Miriam, if you’d prefer.’

‘David, I keep trying to tell you. I’m perfectly OK.’

‘No, you’re not. Something’s happened to you. You’ve changed.’

She looked at him for a long time without saying anything, trying to communicate with her eyes that she had changed, yes, but that her feelings for him were as strong as ever, maybe even stronger. How could she possibly tell him that she was An-Gryferai, and that she had flown in a rainstorm over a circus, and snatched a fire breather into the air, so that her fellow Night Warriors could blow him up?

How could she make him believe that she had fought against clowns and freaks and barely escaped from the most terrible nightmare that had ever threatened the human race?

‘I love you, David,’ she said, very softly.

‘I still want us to talk to Aaron. Will you do that for me?’

Katie nodded. ‘Of course I will. I have changed, I know that. But it’s not for the worse, and it doesn’t affect you and me. People grow up, that’s all. Even when they reach our age, they can discover really important things about themselves that they never knew before.’

‘So what have you discovered about yourself that’s so important?’

‘I think I’ve discovered that I’m much braver than I thought I was; and much more adventurous.’