The Ninth Nightmare Part 15

Kieran turned back, and there, in the mirror, he saw a reflection of an athletic young man wearing a skintight suit made of some glittery black fabric that looked as if it had been cut out of a starry night sky. On his head he had a sleek black helmet with slanted black lenses covering his eyes and two long antennae.

'Is that me?' said Kieran. He leaned forward to look at himself more closely, and his reflection leaned toward him. 's.h.i.+t! It really is me!'

'To be more accurate, it's Jekkalon,' Springer corrected him. 'But, yes, it really is you.'

'And I'm some kind of an acrobat? Is that it?'

'The best. You can jump, you can roll, you can run on stilts as fast as most athletes can run on their feet. You can walk on a high wire without using a balancing pole and you're one of the greatest trapeze artists that ever was. Double flips, triple flips, easy.'

Keiran stood back, and spread his arms wide. 'This is unbelievable. This is absolutely un-fricking-believable. I am Jekkalon. I can feel it. I know that I can really do all of that stuff.'

'Well - you can't quite do it yet,' said Springer. 'You'll have to wait until you're asleep, and dreaming. You don't want to risk hurting yourself, like your old friend Kenny.'

'So how do I go about making people go blind?' Kieran asked him. 'I don't seem to be carrying any guns or nothing.'

'Take a look at your hands.'

Kieran raised both hands and turned them over. The palms of each hand were so highly reflective that he could see his face in them.

'So I got s.h.i.+ny hands, so what?'

'Kiera - stand beside him,' Springer asked her. Kiera put down her bottle of nail polish and came across the room. As she stood beside her twin brother, her reflection in the mirror began to s.h.i.+ne, and soon she was wearing a tight silvery suit as sparkling as Kieran's, and a wedge-shaped silver helmet to match. On her back, however, she was carrying a metal grid like a hiker's backpack frame, except that it was covered with layers of complicated copper shapes like fall leaves, each connected by wires and circuit-breakers and switches.

'Jemexxa is acutely sensitive to any static electricity stored in the upper atmosphere,' Springer explained. 'She can almost smell it, even if it's twenty miles away and thirty-five thousand feet high. She attracts it in exactly the same way as a lightning rod attracts lightning, and stores it up in the framework that she carries on her back. Then - when Jekkalon needs to zap somebody - like Nepththys and her priests for example - Jemexxa raises her hand and sends him a bolt of lightning. Or two bolts, one from each hand, if he needs them. All he has to do is angle his hand so that the lightning ricochets off it and hits whoever or whatever he wants it to.'

Kiera looked at the palms of her hands and they were as highly reflective as Kieran's.

Springer said, 'See - it's as simple as s.h.i.+ning a sunbeam from one mirror to another.'

Kieran and Kiera looked at each other again. Their helmets gave them the appearance of two giant praying mantises, one black and the other silver.

As they stood there, their Night Warriors uniforms gradually faded. After less than a minute, Kiera was back in her football s.h.i.+rt and Kieran was wearing his T-s.h.i.+rt and his jogging pants.

'So what's it to be?' Springer asked them.

'I just don't know,' said Kiera. 'It's all so much to take in. I can't decide if I'm dreaming all of this, or if it's real, or if you guys are pulling some kind of scam.' She started to sound panicky. 'Like, how can we cancel an entire sold-out concert? That's two thousand five hundred seats. And we're supposed to be on stage in less than three hours, for a final soundcheck.'

John shrugged. 'Like Springer says, sweetheart, it's entirely up to you. But if you don't come with us, the rest of us will have to go anyhow, and from my experience we're going to need all the firepower we can muster.'

Kiera clapped her hands over her ears in frustration. 'Even if we say yes, Lois will be back soon, and there's no way that she's going to let us cancel tonight's concert and drop off to sleep, just like that! Think of all the money that the promoters are going to lose if we don't show! Think of all the money that we're going to lose. And how can we let so many fans down? They'll hate us for it! They'll never forgive us!'

'OK,' John told her. 'If that's the way you feel. But what about your mom, trapped in that freak show? Are you just going to leave her there?'

'She's not real. She's just a dream. You said so yourself.'

'Right now she is, yes. But people suffer, sweetheart, even in the world of dreams. And if we don't stop Brother Albrecht from bringing his carnival back to this world, she won't be a dream any more. She'll be real, and suffering for real. Brother Albrecht will put her on show, along with all of his other freaks, so that the paying public can come along and gawp at her.'

Kieran said, 'He's right, Kiera. We can't let that happen.'

Kiera sat down at her dressing table again and stared at three reflections of herself in its mirrors. 'Look at me,' she said. 'Selfish Kiera and mean Kiera and uncaring Kiera.'

But Rhodajane came and stood behind her and laid her hands on her shoulders. 'Honey, all of us are selfish, and all of us are mean, and none of us give a s.h.i.+t. That's the way I've been all of my life - with men, and with money, and with my own dear sisters. But you only have to do one thing for somebody else - just one - for no other reason except that you believe it's your duty as a human being, and G.o.d will forgive you for all of your heartlessness, and you might even find that He gives you a heart by way of saying thank you.'

Kiera wiped tears away from her eyes. Springer came up to stand beside Rhodajane and said, 'When you walked into that dream last night, Kiera, that wasn't even your dream. Kieran knew that, didn't you, Kieran? It was being dreamed by a young girl of eight years old who was staying with her parents in Room Six-Two-Five. Your psychic sensitivity enabled you and Kieran to enter her dream and find out what had happened to your mother.

'You can see the dead, can't you - you and Kieran?'

'You know about that, too?' said Kieran. 'Is there anything you don't know about us?'

'To Ashapola, Kieran, all human beings are an open book. All I do is turn the pages and read what's written there.'

'So you know we saw some b.u.m on Santa Monica Boulevard jumping in front of the traffic and never getting hurt; and some gangster with his throat cut in the barbershop at the Handlery Hotel in San Francisco; and some drowned woman in the j.a.panese Garden in Portland, just lying under the water in the pond smiling up at us like she was happy at last.'

'Yes,' said Springer. 'And that's why you can be so useful to us. We suspect that Gordon Veitch could be one of those dead people who won't lie down. A Dread, we call them. That's why he can move so easily from the real world to the dream world, and back again. He can appear, he can disappear, whenever he feels like it. But he won't be able to hide from you two, in either world.'

Kiera reached out and took hold of Kieran's hand. She briefly closed her eyes and gave him an almost imperceptible nod.

'OK,' said Kieran. 'We'll do it.'

'You're sure about that?'

'We're sure,' Kiera told him. 'Kieran's right. If there's any chance of rescuing our mom - we have to try, at the very least.'

'The point is, how do we get out of here?' asked Kieran. 'Sherwin and Lamar won't let us out of their sight, even if you turned yourself back into "Lois". The promoters pay for them, to protect their investment.'

'Oh, don't worry,' said Springer. 'I've already booked a room on the fourth floor, room Four-Three-Nine, directly above this one. All you have to do is climb two stories up the fire escape. I left the balcony doors unlocked. Meantime, I'll leave here through the front door and tell your bodyguard friends that you're not to be disturbed.'

Kiera said, 'So you have everything arranged already. How did you know we were going to say yes?'

Springer was gradually changing his appearance, from Kenny Ballantine back into Lois Schulz. They all found it fascinating to watch, as "Kenny" dwindled down to five feet four and his hair turned dark and his long gangly legs became skinny and bowed, with s.h.i.+ny black pantyhose and black patent shoes with very high heels.

'How did I know you were going to say yes? You're natural-born Night Warriors, that's why. You're Jekkalon and Jemexxa, the acrobat and the acrobat's twin. That's who you are, even more than Kieran and Kiera Kaiser. It's your destiny.'

TWELVE.

Night Flight By midnight, David was snoring softly with his green mask over his eyes. Katie eased herself out of bed and went through to her dressing room. She opened up her white satin-covered jewelry box and took out the folded slip of paper that Springer had given her. Before she opened it, she looked at herself in her dressing-table mirror.

'You don't have to do this, Katie,' she told herself. 'If you'd rather take a rain check, what can he do to you? He's just a young guy who happens to look a whole lot like Mr Flight, that's all.'

Actually, she wasn't so sure about that. If Springer was capable of showing her what she looked like when she was all dressed up in her Night Warriors suit, maybe he was capable of making sure that she wore it, and that she went out hunting for this Gordon Veitch character, and Brother Albrecht's carnival, whether she wanted to or not.

She held up the piece of paper. To her surprise, the words on it seemed to be written in her own handwriting. Very softly, she read them out.

'"Now, when the face of the world is hidden in darkness, let us be conveyed to the place of our meeting, armed and armored; and let us be nourished by the power that is dedicated to the cleaving of darkness, the settling of all black matters, and the dissipation of all evil. So be it."'

Katie thought that the words sounded rather pompous and medieval, but in spite of that she still found them stirring, and she particularly liked the phrase about 'the place of our meeting, armed and armored', which rea.s.sured her that she was not going to be alone, but part of a fighting force with other Night Warriors.

She crept back into the bedroom and slid herself under the covers. David was lying on his right side now, and talking to himself. As far as she could make out, he was giving a lecture, but it all sounded like nonsense. 'Not psychotic, no. Umbrellas. And everybody has to go now.'

He was talking so loudly that she was afraid that she wouldn't be able to fall asleep, but somehow the words that Springer had given her to read had affected her as if she had taken a strong sedative, and after only a few minutes her eyes began to close. The illuminated clock on the nightstand beside her read twelve twenty-seven.

Darkness flooded into her mind; and at the same time she began to feel lighter and lighter. With the abrupt buoyancy of a helium balloon caught by a gust of wind, she bobbed up from her bed and floated upward, toward the ceiling. Startled, she rolled around in mid air, and as she did so she looked down and there she was, her own sleeping self. Her short brunette hair was already tousled, and she was touching her cheek with one hand as if she were making sure that she was real.

She rolled around again, so that she was facing upward, just as she reached the ceiling. She held up both hands to prevent herself from being pressed up against it, but her hands disappeared right into the plaster as if it were nothing but the softest of fine white sand. The rest of her followed, with a thick shus.h.i.+ng sound, and she found that she was rising through the attic, where all of their suitcases and their books and their old furniture was stored. She saw the carved pine headboard from Daisy's bed, the bed in which poor little Daisy had died, and somehow that gave her all the more determination to carry on. Even if she hadn't been able to save Daisy, she could save other innocent children.

She kept on rising, and pa.s.sed through the attic ceiling as easily as she had pa.s.sed through the bedroom ceiling; and then the roof s.h.i.+ngles; and in a few seconds she was high above the house. To the south she could see the glittering lights of Miami Beach, and to the west she could see clear across Biscayne Bay to Morningside Park. To the north, on the far side of the Surprise Waterway, she could see La Gorce Country Club, and an endless red stream of tail lights on Collins Avenue, like blood corpuscles flowing through the darkness.

Now she hung suspended for a few moments. At first she could feel the breeze from the ocean blowing against her face and ruffling her hair, but then her helmet began to take shape, and her head was soon enclosed in the distinctive falcon-shaped helmet of An-Gryferai. The lenses that protected her eyes were tinted amber, but her night-vision was stunning. She could clearly see all the way to the Golden Glades interchange, which was nearly twelve and a half miles to the north-west. All she had to do was lightly touch the side of her helmet with her fingertips, and she could see even further, with just as much clarity. She could even read the traffic sign on I-95 for Fort Lauderdale Airport, and see a small plane taking off, with the lights on its wing tips flas.h.i.+ng.

She looked down and saw that she was now dressed all over in the soft brown-feathered plumage of An-Gryferia, with white feathers across her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. On each forearm her powerful mechanical claws had materialized, with all of the rods and ratchets and pulleys that operated them. She squeezed them open and shut, and rotated them, and each movement was accompanied by a satisfying series of whirrs and clicks.

Her wings had developed, too. They were strapped to her back and her upper arms with a soft leather harness, which allowed her to open them by flexing her shoulders. At first they were folded, and very heavy, but An-Gryferai soon discovered that when she opened them up, they were caught at once by the warm updraft from the ground. With a rumble of windblown feathers, she was carried even higher up into the air, until she could see the sparkling curve of the Florida Keys, all the way south to Plantation Key, and that was over seventy-five miles away.

She spun slowly around and around, marveling at the way she could fly, and how far she could see. She flapped her wings cautiously, only three or four flaps, and she was lifted over fifty feet higher into the air. Then she stretched them as wide as she could, and angled them into the wind. She swooped down, and then up, and then she dared to plummet head first toward the ground, breaking out of her dive less than twenty feet from the seventh hole at La Gorce Country Club. She flew the length of the lake on the right-hand side of the hole, so that she could see her reflection flas.h.i.+ng over the surface of the water. An-Gryferai, in her falcon helmet, the Avenging Claw.

When she reached the far end of the lake, she was about to soar up into the air again when she saw a solitary figure standing beside the trees. Her eyesight was so sharp that she could identify him at once as Springer. She tilted to the left, and then feathered her wings so that she landed only a few yards away from him, although she nearly lost her balance as her feet touched the ground, and finished up her flight with a scurrying little run.

As she stood there panting, Springer circled around her, nodding his head in admiration. An-Gryferai thought he looked different - darker, taller, more intense - less like Mr Flight and more like her first boyfriend Gideon, who had been seventeen years older than her. Very attractive, but domineering.

'You look wonderful,' said Springer. 'Your grandmother would be very proud of you.'

'Thanks, it's amazing. I could see all the way down to the Keys.'

'You'll have to travel far and fast tonight,' Springer told her. 'We've noticed that the president of a meat-packing company in Chicago is dreaming about Brother Albrecht's carnival. He lives in the Drake Tower, on Lake Sh.o.r.e Drive. Dom Magator and the rest of your team will be waiting for you right outside.'

'Chicago? But that's over a thousand miles! It's going to take me all night to get there!'

Springer smiled. 'You're forgetting, An-Gryferai. You're dreaming. You're not bound by the laws of the physical world. You're a Night Warrior. Katie's asleep in her bed, but you can go anyplace you want, as fast as you want.'

'But how?'

'Use your natural instincts. An-Gryferai has all the natural sense of direction of a migratory bird. She uses the Earth's magnetic field to guide her, just as migrating birds do. The only difference between An-Gryferai and a migratory bird is that a bird has to fly to its destination by flapping its wings - whereas you can fly there just by thinking about it.'

'But-'

Springer laid his hand on her shoulder, and for a moment she felt the same sense of being controlled as she had with Gideon. But then he said, 'You know where Chicago is. You know where Lake Sh.o.r.e Drive is. Have confidence in yourself, An-Gryferai. Inside your mind you have a map of everywhere, and you have the ability to use it. Compared to your navigational skills, a satnav is a clumsy toy.'

He took his hand away. He was nothing like Gideon, not at all, because Gideon always used to make her feel that she was useless and stupid, whereas Springer made her feel that she could do whatever she put her mind to.

'Close your eyes,' Springer told her. 'Now visualize the coordinates of Lake Sh.o.r.e Drive, Chicago, and be there.'

Katie closed her eyes. In her mind's eye, she could see an extraordinary illuminated map of the entire United States, a tracery of fine s.h.i.+ning filaments set against a seamless black background, like the sky at night. Instinctively, she steered her mind north-north-westward, and the map began to rotate. Far beneath her, she saw spatterings of light that she recognized as Orlando, Gainesville, Atlanta, Louisville and Indianapolis. She felt no sensation that she was moving. There was no slipstream blowing through her feathers. She felt only that her consciousness was carrying her to the western sh.o.r.e of Lake Michigan, and the glittering conurbation of Chicago and all of its suburbs.

It took her only seconds. She had seen Stargate SG1 on TV, where squads of soldiers were transported through a wormhole in s.p.a.ce from one planet to another, almost instantaneously, in a roller-coaster rush of colored lights. But that was nothing compared to the silent, effortless way in which she had simply thought herself from one city to another.

As she approached East Lake Sh.o.r.e Drive, she opened up her eyes and opened up her wings, too, so that she could fly down the last thousand feet. She didn't have far to go. The Drake Tower was directly beneath her, a red-brick apartment block in the beaux-arts style - thirty stories and nearly three hundred fifty feet high.

Suddenly she could hear noise, too - of honking traffic and the wind whipping off the lake, and a helicopter thump-thump-thumping over Cicero.

An intense blue light flashed from the roof garden of the Drake Tower, and as she see-sawed downward with her wings outstretched, she saw Dom Magator and Zebenjo'Yyx and Xyrena and the twins Jekkalon and Jemexxa, already gathered together and waiting for her. To her surprise, Springer was there, too, in the same form in which he had appeared to her on the golf course at La Gorce Country Club.

Zebenjo'Yyx was busy marveling at his outfit. Lincoln lifted his right arm, and then his left. Attached by straps to the upper side of each forearm, all the way from his elbows to his wrists, there was an elaborate mechanism which looked like the workings of a crossbow, with tightened cords and a system of cogs and ratchets. Each mechanism was loaded with three arrows, with viciously-barbed heads on them, six arrows altogether. But when he turned his head further and looked at his upper arms, he saw that there were three further arrows on each of those, too. He reached behind him, and realized that he was carrying even more arrows on his back, in a herringbone pattern, and that he had an extraordinary kind of quiver rising out of his back, like a scorpion's tail. In all, he reckoned he must have been carrying more than a hundred arrows, and they were all connected to hooks and pulleys, so that when one arrow was fired, another arrow would immediately tilt over his shoulder and slide along his arm to replace it.

When An-Gryferai touched lightly down on the roof, Springer came over and took hold of her arm. 'Everybody, this is the last member of our team, the Avenging Claw.'

He led her across to the other Night Warriors, and introduced her. Dom Magator said, 'Very pleased to meet you, little bird-lady. I have to say that I ate a chicken bigger than you once, spit-roasted, at Pluckers Restaurant in Baton Rouge.'

'I'll take that as a compliment. I've been trying to lose weight.'

An-Gryferai was slightly taken aback by Xyrena, with her high golden crown and her billowing golden cloak and her naked-look breastplate. It was more than just her appearance - her s.h.i.+ny golden b.r.e.a.s.t.s and her s.h.i.+ny golden genitalia. When she took hold of An-Gryferai's hands to welcome her, An-Gryferai felt a strange electrifying sensation, as if Xyrena had slyly drawn her fingertips up the inside of her thighs, and intimately touched her.

Springer noticed her quick, involuntary s.h.i.+ver. 'Xyrena is the Pa.s.sion Warrior,' he explained. 'She has the same effect on everybody, man or woman. It's her princ.i.p.al weapon.'

'Same as it is for most women, wouldn't you say?' Xyrena put in.

Now Zebenjo'Yyx came forward. His wooden arrow-launchers clattered as he walked. 'Good to have you here, Avengin' Claw. Some fancy-dress party, don't you think? If I hadn't nearly been killed by this Gordon Veitch guy, I would have thought this was some kind of seriously bad joke.'

'I still can't believe any of it,' said An-Gryferai. 'I keep thinking that it's all a dream, but then it is.'

Jekkalon and Jemexxa introduced themselves - Jekkalon in his gleaming black suit and Jemexxa in her dazzling silver suit. They both nodded their helmets and said, 'Hi, pleased to meet you,' but An-Gryferai thought that they seemed diffident and edgy and not very happy to be here. She didn't know that earlier that evening, three-and-a-half thousand disgruntled fans had almost caused a full-scale riot at the State Theater in Cleveland when they realized that the Kaiser Twins were not going to be making their promised appearance.

'All right,' said Springer. 'We don't know how much longer this gentleman's dream is going to last, so we have to make this quick. His name is George Roussos and he's the president of ABR Foods, which is one of the major meat-packers in Chicago. He's asleep in his apartment on the twenty-seventh floor, along with his wife Margarita.'

'How do we get in there?' asked Jekkalon. 'This has to be a high-security building, right?'

'You flew here from Cleveland, didn't you?' said Springer. 'You're insubstantial. You're a dream, just like the rest of us. You can pa.s.s through the walls as easily as you pa.s.sed through the ceiling of the Griffin House Hotel.'

'Come on,' said Dom Magator. 'Let's do it, before this meat-packer starts dreaming about something else, like short ribs or navel pastrami pieces.'

Springer arranged the six of them so that they were standing together in a tight circle, almost too close for comfort. 'OK?' he said. 'Now think sink.'

They sank through the floor of the roof garden with the same soft shus.h.i.+ng sound that Katie had felt when she had risen through the attic of her house in Nautilus. Then they descended through the master bedroom of the penthouse apartment on the thirtieth floor, which was unoccupied, stuffy and airless, with its blinds drawn; and then through the master bedroom of the apartment below. Here, a middle-aged couple lay dozing in front of a huge flickering TV which took up most of the opposite wall, their eyes closed and their mouths wide open.

'Murder, She Wrote,' said Dom Magator. 'That's enough to send anybody to the land of Nod.'

But without hesitation, the Night Warriors continued to sink through the thick cream carpet, and the ceiling below, down to the twenty-eighth floor. In this bedroom, the king-sized bed was empty, but the sheets had been dragged halfway on to the floor, and a couple were having a shouting match in the brightly-lit en-suite bathroom.

'You were making eyes at that wh.o.r.e all evening!' the woman was screaming. 'Don't tell me you weren't!'

'That wh.o.r.e as you call her could help us to land a multimillion-dollar contract, you lamebrain!'

But before they could hear any more of their argument, the Night Warriors' descent continued, down through the patterned carpet to the twenty-eighth floor apartment below. With a faint shush, they alighted as softly and silently as parachutists in George Roussos' bedroom. Here, they stopped, and looked around.