The Ninth Nightmare

SEVENTEEN Flesh Forward

They ran in silence, like six shadows flickering between the tree trunks, their feet making barely any noise at all. They startled a few deer, and as they reached the edge of the trees, half a dozen gray grouse burst out of the undergrowth in alarm, like feathered bombs. But they kept on running. They had to circle around the right-hand side of the hilltop to stay out of sight of the clowns from Brother Albrecht’s circus until the very last moment.

As soon as they were clear of the trees, An-Gryferai started to run even faster, and flap her wings. She lifted off into the drizzle, and rose higher and higher as if she were climbing up one invisible flight of stairs after another. Soon she was almost a hundred feet over their heads, and a hundred yards ahead of them.

Although it was still raining it was gradually beginning to grow lighter, and the mist was shining like a breathed-over mirror. An-Gryferai switched on her green fog-lenses, and, as she beat her wings and rose up to more than two hundred feet, she could see the rabble of clowns and freaks pouring over the hilltop and hurrying down the long grassy slope. The leading clowns were already less than a quarter of a mile away from the Night Warriors’ shimmering octagonal portal — the portal that was their only way back into George Roussos’ bedroom, and the world of reality.

‘Dom Magator—’ she panted. ‘They’ve almost reached the portal already. There’s no way we have any chance of reaching it before they do.’

‘In that case, sweetheart, we’ll have to meet them head on. I still have plenty of fancy ordnance left. But if we’re forced to use the Absence Gun — well, that’s just too bad. I’m worried that I might hit the portal, that’s all. If the portal doesn’t exist any more — we’re Gregged, believe me.’

‘In that case, let’s hustle,’ said Zebenjo’Yxx. ‘It’s not goin’ to do us no good standin’ around discussin’ nothin’, and that’s for sure.’

They ran even faster, with An-Gryferai sweeping and swooping overhead. Inside his helmet, Dom Magator could hear them all panting in chorus. He thought at first that they might have a chance of reaching the portal first. But as they came around the hilltop, however, and ran down the slope together, they saw that the clowns were already waiting for them — hundreds of them. They were standing in a long line, their pointed hats drooping, their make-up streaked by the rain. They weren’t moving. Most of them had their arms folded, and they were simply staring at the Night Warriors with a combination of real and painted hostility.

The white-faced harlequin with the blackberry lips was standing right in front of the portal. It appeared that he was the leader, since all of the other clowns were standing well back. He was holding a curved scimitar which he kept circling around and around, so that it flashed in the mist like a steel propeller. Directly behind him, framing him, was the crackling blue electric portal, and by the expression on his face it looked as if he was challenging the Night Warriors to try to reach it.

Dom Magator stepped up to face him. ‘How about letting us pass, pal?’ he shouted out. ‘We didn’t come here to hurt none of you, believe me.’

‘Oh!’ replied the white-faced harlequin, in a croaky, drawn-out voice. ‘What about the fire breather? I think you hurt him somewhat. And what about Doctor Friendly? Looked like a pincushion by the time you’d finished with that unfortunate fellow, didn’t he?’

‘He deserved it. Trying to sew snakes on to that poor girl’s arms. How sick is that?’

‘Depends on your definition of sick, my friend. Life is sick, from beginning to end. Think how we’re born! Our faces squeezed out of our mothers’ nether regions like rabbits out of a tight pink hat! Only to grow, and suffer, and then to decline, and our teeth to drop out, and finally our hearts to seize up, and our bodies to become a tumbling mass of maggots! Don’t you call that sick?’

‘Listen, bro — are you goin’ to let us through or what?’ Zebenjo’Yyx challenged him, raising his right arm and clicking the elaborate wooden levers that prepared his arrows for firing.

The white-faced harlequin shook his head from side to side and made a tick-tocking sound with his tongue as he did so. ‘The Grand Freak wants you to stay here. The Grand Freak wants you to join his circus. Think of what wonderful attractions you would be! The fat man and the bird woman and the black archer and the glittering twins, not to mention the naked woman who isn’t naked at all!’

Out of the side of his mouth, Jekkalon said to Jemexxa, ‘How much lightning do you have left? We could cremate this idiot in two seconds flat!’

But inside their helmets Dom Magator quickly said, ‘No, Jekkalon! This close to the portal, one of your lightning strikes could short it out. Then we could never get back.’

High above their heads, An-Gryferai was circling and circling through the clouds, sometimes appearing, sometimes disappearing. ‘Hey, D.M. — how about I dive down and grab him?’ she said. ‘He wouldn’t survive a drop of two hundred feet, would he? And then we’d be clear to go.’

But Dom Magator looked at the crowds of clowns assembled on the other side of the portal. If An-Gryferai swooped down and hoisted this white-faced harlequin up into the air, and let him drop, the rest of the clowns would fall on them like a human tsunami, and six Night Warriors wouldn’t stand a chance. For all of their arrow storms and wave-function rifles and intuitive throwing-knives, they would be overwhelmed by sheer numbers. Brother Albrecht could dream up as many clowns as he wanted to, and they would never be able to kill them all.

‘I’ll make you a deal, OK?’ Dom Magator suggested to the white-faced harlequin. ‘You let us go through that portal, and out of your way, and I won’t use my Absence Gun on you.’

‘Your what?’ croaked the clown.

‘Oh — you never heard about Absence Guns? You know what an Absence Gun can do? It doesn’t kill you. It doesn’t even hurt you. It simply makes sure that you never existed, ever. You get hit by an Absence Gun and your parents never had you.’

‘I’m not making no deals with you, tin man,’ the clown retorted. ‘The Grand Freak sent us here to bring you back to the circus, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do.’

Dom Magator hesitated. Zebenjo’Yyx could easily take out the white-faced harlequin with a quick storm of arrows; or Dom Magator could use a weapon against him that posed less of a risk of damaging the portal than the Absence Gun. But it would be suicide. If they brought down the white-faced harlequin, the rest of the clowns would never let them escape. They would either tear them to pieces right here and now, or tote them triumphantly back to Brother Albrecht’s circus, where they would be cut apart, and sewn back together again with limbs taken from all kinds of animals and reptiles, and that would be even more unbearable than death.

Inside Dom Magator’s helmet the seismic sensor quivered again. George Roussos was stirring, which meant that he had only minutes to make up his mind, if that. But before he could decide what to do, Xyrena came forward and touched his arm.

‘Let me try, John,’ she murmured. ‘Maybe this is one situation that can’t be solved by firepower alone, if you know what I mean.’

‘What the hell can you do against all of this rabble?’

‘Watch me.’

Without saying anything else, she walked right up to the white-faced harlequin, her crown glittering and her gilded cloak idly flapping. The white-faced harlequin stopped whirling his scimitar around and around and looked her up and down, his eyes restless with prurient interest. Raindrops were quivering on her gleaming metallic breasts and the sensual curve of her stomach, and dripping from between her legs.

‘So, my lovely lady… who are you?’ he asked her, in his frog-like voice.

Xyrena reached out and laid her hand on his sloping left shoulder. ‘You don’t need to know my name, Clown. You want me. Isn’t that enough?’

He stared at her for a long time with those kohl-blotched eyes. Xyrena was the least heavily-armed of all the Night Warriors, but in her own mesmerizing way she was one of the most lethal. And she was fearless, too. To approach the harlequin so closely, and to start stroking his white-painted cheek, that took ice-cold nerve, especially since he was still gripping his scimitar, and he could have slashed her throat at any moment.

‘You want me so bad, don’t you, Clown?’ said Xyrena. ‘So what if it’s raining, and so what if hundreds of your fellow pranksters are watching us. What do you care? You want me here and now — right here in the grass.’

‘Jesus, Xyrena,’ said Dom Magator.

But Xyrena murmured, ‘Get ready, John. As soon as he’s distracted, you guys make a dive for the portal.’

‘What about you?’

‘I’m a big girl, John. I can take care of myself.’

All of the Night Warriors had heard her. An-Gryferai circled down closer, and said, ‘I’m ready, Dom Magator. Just give me the word and I can fly straight through.’

‘I’m not sure I like this,’ said Dom Magator. ‘In fact I don’t like this at all.’

‘Well, neither do we,’ Jekkalon retorted. ‘But what choice do we have? You want to end up with some orang-utan’s face, instead of your own?’

Now Xyrena was untying the ruff around the white-faced harlequin’s neck. She whirled it teasingly around her finger and dropped it into the grass. Then she started to unbutton his sodden wet clown suit. She tugged it off his shoulders, revealing a narrow white chest with a prominent ribcage. He neither helped her nor resisted her, but his nostrils flared and he began to breathe very deeply, his chest rising and falling, and his eyes never stopped roaming over her gold-plated breasts.

Uneasily, Dom Magator looked around at the crowds of clowns gathered on the slopes. He would have thought that they would have started to become restive by now, especially since their leader seemed to have temporarily forgotten what the Grand Freak had sent them here to do. But they were all staring at Xyrena with as much fascination as the white-faced harlequin, and some of them were clutching their clown suits between their legs and rhythmically squeezing their fingers.

Xyrena knelt down in front of the white-faced harlequin and wrenched his pants all the way down, tearing the thin white cotton as she pulled them over his shoes. Now he was completely naked, except for his white conical hat. His penis was standing up as stiff and white as a bone, with only the faintest tinge of purple on the glans. His scrotum had shrunk so tight that they had almost disappeared inside his body.

‘Lie down,’ Xyrena ordered him, but she said it very gently and warmly. ‘Lie down, Clown, and you can have me.’

The white-faced harlequin lay down in the long wet grass. He looked thin and vulnerable, more like a boy than a man. Xyrena unfastened the buckles that held her armor in place, and opened it up, like a golden seashell. Underneath, she looked exactly the same, except that now she really was naked — her breasts were real breasts, that swung when she moved, and her nipples knurled tightly in the rain. She laid her armor on the ground, and then she approached the white-faced harlequin as he lay in the grass in front of her.

‘Come on!’ she taunted him. ‘How much do you want me?’

‘I want you more than any woman I ever met,’ he croaked back at her.

‘Do you want me more than diamonds? Do you want me more than gold?’

‘Yes, yes!’

‘Would you go blind for me?’

‘Anything!’

Xyrena smiled and said, ‘That’s what I needed to hear.’

She tossed back her cloak and then she knelt astride him, her head held high, with a strangely serene smile on her face. With her left hand, she took hold of his erect penis and guided it up between her thighs, until the glans was nestling between the parted lips of her vagina. She looked down for a moment in satisfaction, but when the white-faced harlequin attempted to force his penis deeper inside her, she gripped him very tight, so that he couldn’t.

He struggled for a moment, bumping his hips up and down. ‘What are you doing to me?’ he demanded. ‘I 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 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.