The Ninth Nightmare

NINETEEN Hunt The Clown

Detective Wisocky was studying the menu outside the entrance to the Boa Vinda restaurant when Detective Hudson came toward him across the hotel lobby, accompanied by a white-haired old man in a brown three-piece suit.

He checked his wristwatch and said, ‘It’s five after six, Charlie. You’re twenty minutes late. I was just about to go in and order the tilapia with peanuts. I never ate tilapia with peanuts before. Come to that, I never ate peanuts with tilapia.’

‘Sorry, Walter. We had to stop off on the way and buy a new battery for Henry’s hearing aid. By the way, this is Henry Marriott. Henry — this is Detective Wisocky.’

The old man held out his hand. He was small and frail, with a bulbous nose and large hairy ears, and he put Walter in mind of a miniature version of Jimmy Durante. He wore a crisp white shirt with a red silk necktie and a matching red carnation in his buttonhole. His hand felt like a turkey’s claw.

‘Good to meet you, Henry,’ said Walter. ‘My partner tells me you used to run the Clown Museum down on Pearl Road. When was that?’

‘What’s that?’ asked Henry, cupping his hand to his left ear. The background music in the hotel lobby didn’t help, and neither did a business executive standing right next to them, yelling into his cellphone.

Walter leaned forward and shouted, ‘When — did — you — run — the — Clown Museum?’

‘Oh! Got you! I was there for almost forty-eight years, from August nineteen hundred and thirty-five through June nineteen hundred and seventy-nine. I was only eighteen years old when I started. I took over the running of it when I was twenty-seven, which was in nineteen forty-four, because Mr Cascarelli was called up to join the Marines. He was killed at Okinawa, poor fellow. Stepped on a mine and got blown to smithereens. Good way for a clown to go, though.’

Charlie said, ‘Henry knew Gordon Veitch. In fact he knew him better than most — didn’t you, Henry?’

Walter laid a hand on Henry’s angular shoulder. ‘Let’s go through to the bar, shall we, Henry? It’s a whole lot quieter in there, and you’ll be able to hear me better. What would you like to drink?’

‘A long slow comfortable screw up against a cold hard wall, if that’s OK.’

Walter looked across at Charlie and raised one eyebrow, but Charlie simply shrugged. ‘That’s kind of a circus drink, I guess.’

They walked across the lobby toward the Lantern Bar, passing beneath the portrait of the stern-faced man with the reddish hair and the formal black suit. As they did so, Henry stopped and pointed up at him and said, ‘Now there’s your guilty party. Gilbert T. Griffin.’

‘Gilbert Griffin? Gilbert Griffin built this hotel and it’s the best hotel in Cleveland. What’s he guilty of?’

‘Meddling with things that shouldn’t be meddled with. That’s what he’s guilty of.’

‘OK…’

‘That’s Gilbert Griffin and the girl next to him, that’s his child-bride Emily Griffin, God rest her soul, wherever her soul might be.’

‘I see. You’ll have to tell us about it.’

They found a dark corner booth in the Lantern Bar, with squeaky black leather seats. Walter would have given anything for an ice-cold Coors, but he had to settle for a Diet Coke. Sometimes he wished he had picked a career in which drinking was not only acceptable but obligatory, like politics, or acting, or writing fiction. Charlie ordered a glass of water, with a twist.

‘So you knew Gordon Veitch,’ said Walter, when Henry’s cocktail arrived.

‘You bet. We all knew him, all of us clowns. Gordon Veitch was Mago Verde, the Green Magician. His father before him, Daniel Veitch, he was Mago Verde, too, and he handed it down to Gordon — the make-up, the tricks, but most of all that mean malicious attitude. If there was ever a son-of-a-bitch on this planet it was Daniel Veitch and if there was ever a son-of-a-son-of-a-bitch it was Gordon Veitch. But let me tell you one thing. Gordon Veitch may have been mean and malicious to everybody else, but he was never once mean and malicious to me. I guess you could say that he took me under his wing.’

‘How did you come to meet him?’ asked Walter.

‘I met him at Corey’s Circus. I used to work there after school, making myself some money by mucking out the animals. You ever smell lion shit? There is no worse smell on this planet than lion shit. Well, tiger shit maybe.

‘I got to know some of the clowns and most of them were good to me, considering I was nothing more than a part-time shit-shoveler. Bongo especially. He was Portuguese, believe it or not, and his real name was Remi. He helped me to design my own make-up and he lent me some of his outfits and he showed me how to juggle with knives and how to walk on the low wire and how to fall on my ass without hurting myself.

‘But it was Mago Verde who took a real shine to me, especially if I ran errands for him, like placing bets on the horses and bringing him cigarettes and bottles of hooch. All of the other circus folk, though, they stayed well clear of him. He would trip people up when they were carrying boxes of light bulbs; or he would do this trick when he threw an egg up into the air and catch it in a velvet bag, but when he asked some sucker to dip his hand into the bag and pick the egg out for him, the bag was cram-full of razor blades. Like I say, he was a regular son-of-a-bitch. He had the power, though, no mistake about that.’

‘The power?’ asked Walter. ‘What power was that, exactly?’

Henry sucked noisily at his cocktail. Then he held it up to the light and said, ‘Not bad. But too much sloe gin.’

‘What power, Henry?’ Walter pressed him.

Henry blinked at him as if he had never seen him before in his life. But then he lifted one finger and tapped it against the side of his bulbous nose. ‘Daniel Veitch had given Gordon a whole lot more than his make-up and his magic tricks and his mean and malicious attitude. He had passed on the family knack of stepping into other people’s dreams. That’s what he told me, anyhow, and he proved it to me.’

‘Excuse me? Stepping into other people’s dreams? How exactly did he do that?’

‘Search me. But he always insisted that he could do it, and once he told me that he had stepped into one of my dreams when I was sleeping — a dream I was having about fishing out on Lake Erie and my boat was sinking — and he described that dream to me in every detail — just like he had actually been there, too, standing right behind me.’

‘OK,’ said Walter, trying not to sound too skeptical. ‘Go on.’

‘Well, the dream thing, that’s where Gilbert Griffin came into it, and Gilbert Griffin was the real instigator of what happened next, although I never told nobody about it because nobody would never have believed me.’

‘So what makes you think that we’re going to believe you?’

‘You can believe me if you want to, or not if you don’t. I’m ninety-three years old now and I don’t give a rat’s ass. But I might as well tell somebody before I cash in my chips and it might as well be you. Especially young Charlie here. He understands about clowns, don’t you, Charlie?’

‘All right,’ said Walter. ‘What heinous act of heiniosity did Gilbert Griffin commit?’

‘It was that child-bride of his, Emily. He was nuts about her — and you can see from the picture in the lobby how cute she was. But in July of nineteen thirty-five, only eighteen months after they were married, she came out of Kroger’s Family Store on Noble Road up in Cleveland Heights and she was knocked down by a speeding automobile and she died two days later in hospital.

‘Gilbert Griffin, he was inconsolable and it was public knowledge how grief-stricken he was. He placed advertisements in the Plain Dealer every day, offering thousand-dollar rewards to any mediums who could contact Emily in the spirit world so that he could talk to her and tell her how much he missed her. That’s when Mago Verde got in contact with him and said he could visit Emily in his dreams and bring him back messages from her, and even letters. But that wasn’t all. For a price, he said, there was a way that he could bring her back to life.’

‘Jesus,’ said Walter. ‘Did Gilbert Griffin believe him?’

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.’

‘You said you didn’t have any dreams.’

‘I don’t. Not printable ones, anyhow.’

The waitress brought Walter his beer, and he drank half of it in one gulp, leaving himself with a white foam moustache. ‘Jesus, I needed that.’

Charlie was anxiously biting at the edge of his thumbnail. ‘Listen, Walter, I know you don’t believe a word of what Henry was telling us, but I spent a long time studying clowns. I got to know them, the way they think. The clown code of honor. Clowns play tricks but they don’t tell lies. And they have a long history of psychic sensitivity. I still think we ought to follow this line of enquiry a whole lot further.’

‘Meaning what?’

‘For starters, we ought to check all of the rooms in this hotel and see if we can come up with some kind of pattern. Not just forensic evidence — something more like the pieces of a puzzle. Henry talked about a figure of nine, didn’t he? Something’s going down here, and it’s going down tonight. I can feel it. Something weird.’

Walter finished the rest of his beer and belched into his fist. ‘I thought I told you before, Charlie. Me Hunch Detective. You Deductive Detective. Leave the frissons to me, OK?’

‘OK. But don’t you get any sense that something in this hotel is out of whack?’

‘Sure I do. I get a sense that I need another beer, and maybe some giant pretzels.’

‘And then we can check out the rooms?’

Walter’s head dropped in resignation. ‘OK. I give in. Then we can check out the rooms — but only so long as the manager allows us to do it without a warrant. If he doesn’t object, ask him if we can borrow a floor plan and a couple of pass keys. But I hope you realize that this hotel has one hundred thirty rooms and nine suites. It’s going to take us forever.’

Charlie stood up. ‘You’re not going to regret this, Walter. I really think we’re going to have this case cracked.’

‘Cracked is the word for it.’

Charlie went off to the find the manager, and Walter turned around to wave to the waitress and order another beer. As he did so, he saw John step out of the elevator and walk past the entrance to the Lantern Bar.

He squeezed his way out of the booth and waddled out into the lobby. John had found himself an armchair underneath a potted palm, and was shaking open a day-old copy of the Baton Rouge Advocate. Walter approached him and stood right in front of him, with his arms folded.

John lowered his paper. The headline was Iguana Regulation Bill Killed. The state senate had decided it was unnecessary to control the sale of pet iguanas, despite the fact that they could grow to ten feet long and pose a lethal threat to children and small animals.

‘Not taxi-driving tonight?’ asked Walter.

‘Taking some time off, detective. Catching up with some homespun gossip from B.R.’

‘Right here? In the Griffin House Hotel?’

‘Is there a law against it?’

‘Not that I know of.’

John looked up at Walter, unblinking. It was obvious that Walter felt that there was something suspicious about him sitting here, but he couldn’t think what it was. After a few moments, Walter said, ‘OK. But watch the attitude, OK?’

‘Oh, you bet,’ said John. ‘I’m keeping my attitude under constant scrutiny.’

Walter returned to the Lantern Bar, although he stopped and turned around before he went back inside, and gave John a look that almost made the potted palm wither up. John, for his part, shook his newspaper ostentatiously, lifted it up high in front of him, and pretended to read an article about people in Baton Rouge burning trash in their back yards and creating too much toxic smoke.

John was sitting in the lobby to keep a watch for Mago Verde. He didn’t expect Gordon Veitch to walk into the hotel wearing his clown make-up, but he reckoned he could pick out a Dread without too much difficulty. There was something about Dreads which he always recognized — a blurriness, as if he were seeing them through a fogged-up window.

From his vantage point beside the potted palm, he could clearly see the main entrance, as well as the elevators and the stairs. He could also see the entrance to the Lantern Bar and the Boa Vinda Restaurant and the corridor that led to the hotel parking-lot in back. The only way that anybody could enter or leave the hotel without him noticing them was if they climbed up one of the fire escapes.

He checked the time by the art deco clock standing by the reception desk. Seven-twelve. Kieran had promised to relieve him after two hours and he knew that he was going to need relieving. The smell of pan-fried escalopes of veal was wafting his way from the restaurant and he hadn’t eaten since twelve thirty.

Upstairs, meanwhile, Kieran, Kiera and Rhodajane had walked up and down every corridor and looked into every door that was open. When they returned to Rhodajane’s room, they found Springer sitting on the balcony, keeping an eye on the fire escapes.

‘Nothing,’ said Kieran, as he closed the door behind him. ‘Maybe he’s not coming.’

‘Oh, he will, I’m absolutely sure of it,’ said Springer. ‘After your attack on him last night, Brother Albrecht is going to be very anxious to complete the sacrificial ritual as soon as possible. Think about it: this could be his last and only chance to bring his circus back to reality.’

It was growing dark outside, and street lights were beginning to twinkle all around University Circle.

Kiera said, ‘What if we miss him? What if he manages to get into the hotel without us seeing him?’

‘Then you’ll have to go after him in Brother Albrecht’s dream, and hope that you can nail him before he manages to hand over his sacrifice.’

‘And if we can’t get to him before that?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Springer, gravely. He was still in the guise of Dean Brunswick III, but he was beginning to look older and grayer than he had at first, as if the alcoholic ravages of Deano’s later life were catching up with him. ‘I guess you’ll just have to give it all you’ve got, and hope for the best.’

‘That sounds like a plan,’ said Kieran. ‘Not.’

‘I don’t know what else I can say,’ Springer told him. ‘For some reason, Brother Albrecht appears to be invulnerable to the most powerful existential weapon in Dom Magator’s armory. Maybe he’s vulnerable to something more rudimentary — like a regular bullet-firing gun, or a crossbow bolt, or an ax.’

‘You think we should try chopping his head off?’ said Kiera, her eyes wide with revulsion.

‘It wouldn’t hurt,’ said Rhodajane. ‘Not us, anyhow.’

Springer said, ‘Anyhow, all we can do is wait. Mago Verde may have abducted and mutilated a ninth victim already, but he still has to come here and dream what he did to them into the hotel walls. Hopefully, that should give us enough time to find him. And even if we can’t find him, thousands of people all around the Great Lakes will be asleep by then, and dreaming, and at least some of them will be dreaming about Brother Albrecht’s circus. We can enter one of their dreams and go after him.’

‘I have a real bad feeling that this isn’t going turn out too good,’ said Kiera.

‘And what about our mom?’ asked Kieran.

‘I can’t tell you,’ said Springer. ‘You’ll have to play this as it comes. If you get the chance to rescue her, then take it. But I can’t offer you any guarantees. I can’t even offer you a plan. The truth is, with Brother Albrecht, I don’t even know what we’re up against.’