The Ninth Nightmare

Henry sucked more cocktail and nodded. ‘He surely did. Mago Verde told me about it, too. According to him, it was some hocus-pocus they devised in the Vatican in the Middle Ages. You know what hocus-pocus is, don’t you?’

‘Hocus-pocus? What are you talking about? Sure I do.’

‘No, you don’t. I can tell by your face. Hocus-pocus comes the Latin hoc est corpus, which is the words they speak in the Eucharist when the communion wafer is supposed to turn into flesh. If you can turn a biscuit into a person, it can’t be too much trouble to turn a dream into a person, can it?’ He tapped his forehead. ‘Don’t look so surprised, detective. There’s a whole encyclopedia up inside of this head. I wasn’t no director of no museum for forty-eight years without learning nothing, even if it was only a clown museum.’

Walter said, ‘OK. I’m impressed. So what was this hocus-pocus, exactly?’

‘Mago Verde told me that you had to make a trade. To bring one dead person out of the world of dreams and back to the world of reality, you had to take nine innocent people from the world of reality and take them through to the world of dreams, like forever. Nine for one.’

‘Why nine?’

Henry rolled up his eyes as if he were talking to a six-year-old child. ‘Because nine is the magic number which is the beginning of everything. Nine makes everything tick. Time, space, life, death — everything runs on the number nine. Nine is like the key to the universal clock. So nine people had to be taken away before one could come back.’

‘Oh, yeah?’

‘Why do you think we say that cats have nine lives? And “a stitch in time saves nine”?’ He held up nine fingers, and counted each of them in turn. ‘In the Christian religion, there are nine orders of angels. In Hebrew, God has seventy-two names, and seven and two add up to nine. In Arabic, God has ninety-nine names. The Mayans believed that nine was a sacred number, and in China, on the ninth day of the ninth month, the day of Double Yang, people believe that their dead and faraway friends can appear in front of them.

‘Nine is the number that makes dreams work. Next time you have a dream, try to remember how many nines appeared in it. Could be anything — nine doorknobs, nine cakes, nine people, nine trees. But I guarantee you, the number nine will be in there someplace.’

‘I don’t dream, Henry,’ said Walter. ‘I don’t dream ever.’

‘You do, detective, even if you can’t remember it. Next time, try to remember. Nine bottles of beer hanging on the wall, nine willing women.’

‘So what happened?’ asked Walter, trying to change the subject. ‘Mago Verde conned Gilbert Griffin into thinking that he could bring his beloved Emily back to life, and in return Gilbert Griffin paid him to kidnap nine innocent people and take them off to the land of nod? That sounds suspiciously like conspiracy to me, if not murder for hire.’

Henry shrugged. ‘I never had no proof, detective, which is why I never told nobody for all of these years. What would have been the point? They probably would have carted me off to the funny farm. But it was only a few days after Mago Verde went to see Gilbert Griffin that he quit the circus without saying so much as goodbye to nobody, and then all of them killings and all of them disappearances started in the Cleveland Flats.

‘There was all manner of suspects. At first Eliot Ness thought it was some doctor from Glenville. Then he thought it was a longshoreman called Cruddick. But there must have been at least one eye witness who said it was somebody dressed up as a clown, because the cops came around two or three times to Corey’s Circus, and each time they ransacked the place. They never found Mago Verde, though. Mago Verde had flown the coop, and none of us ever saw him again, which made us all think that he could have been the killer.

‘Once Eliot Ness came around to Corey’s Circus in person, although he didn’t talk to me. I always remember how he had this dark shiny hair parted in the center, and a red necktie.

‘They never caught Gordon Veitch though, did they?’ asked Walter.

‘No, they didn’t. Not to bring to trial, anyhow. There was more murders and more rapes, and more disappearances, and in August of nineteen thirty-eight the cops got a tip-off about the whereabouts of Mago Verde and they burned down half of Shantytown. There was a huge public hoo-ha, especially in the press, but after that the killings stopped, so the cops presumed that they had done their job, and that Mago Verde was dead.’

‘But you blame Gilbert Griffin for what happened?’

‘Who else? I’m ninety-nine percent sure that Gilbert Griffin paid Mago Verde to kill or kidnap those innocent people. And what was more, he gave Mago Verde the wherewithal to take his victims through to the world of dreams.’

‘The wherewithal? What do you mean by that?’

‘Mago Verde told me that all nine victims had to be dreamed about, and each of the nine dreams had to be arranged in the same building in a special mystical pattern — an ennead, which means a figure of nine. It was like a psychic combination-lock, that’s how he put it. Once you had dreamed all nine dreams in the same building, in the right pattern, the doors to the world of dreams would be opened up, click- clickety-click, and a person could be taken through from one reality to the other, or vice versa.’

‘I see,’ said Walter. ‘Or rather, I don’t see. To be totally honest, I don’t understand what the fuck you’re talking about.’ He was pretty sure that Henry didn’t hear him say that, because Henry simply shrugged.

‘We never found out if Mago Verde was shooting us a line or not. Eighteen women was murdered or raped in all, but only seven people disappeared for good, five women and two men. So maybe he didn’t make the nine before the cops got him.’

‘Tell me,’ said Walter. ‘Have you ever seen Mago Verde since August, nineteen thirty-eight?’

Henry shook his head. ‘No, sir. Not once. And let’s face it, even if the cops didn’t get him, Old Father Time would have done for him by now.’

‘Yes. You’re right. Although somebody else could be wearing his make-up, couldn’t they?’

‘Sure. But stealing some other clown’s face, that’s the worst thing that any clown could do. They never do that, ever. Stealing a man’s face is like stealing his soul. If somebody is passing themselves off as Mago Verde, then I’d sure like to know who it is.’

‘Yes, Henry. Me too.’

Once Henry had gone, Walter drained his Diet Coke and then snapped his fingers at the waitress. ‘Get me a beer, would you?’

‘What do you think?’ asked Charlie.

‘About Henry? I think he’s wandering, the poor old coot.’

‘But how was Maria Fortales taken out of her room?’

‘What — you believe that Mago Verde spirited her away in some dream? Come on, Charlie. I’ll have to send you off on a psych break if you start talking like that.’

‘But what Henry said — it all fits, doesn’t it? And if there were seven disappearances back in the thirties, that means that Maria Fortales could be the eighth.’

‘You can count. Congratulations.’

‘If Maria Fortales is the eighth then there’s only one left to before Mago Verde opens up the door between the world of dreams and the world of reality.’

‘So what? He’s going to bring back a child-bride who must be ninety-two years old by now.’

‘She wouldn’t have grown any older, Walter, any more than Mago Verde would. She’s in a dream.’

‘Whose dream? Who the hell do you think dreams about her any more? Almost everybody who ever knew her must be dead by now.’

‘I still think there’s some truth in what Henry told us. What about that Mrs Kercheval, who had that hallucination in Room Seven-One-Seven? She thought she saw a mutilated woman in her bed, didn’t she? Maybe that was one of Mago Verde’s dreams.’

Walter covered his face with his hands and said nothing for a very long time. When he looked up again, he said, ‘Charlie… dreams are dreams. They’re not real. You can’t cross from the real world into the world of dreams because there’s nothing there to cross into. Dreams are like your brain trying to make sense of your life, that’s all, and most of the time they can’t make heads nor tails of anything.’