The Ninth Nightmare

FOUR Rooms 237 and 239

Kieran was sitting up in bed watching Paranormal Activity and eating handfuls of chili peanuts when Kiera came in through the connecting door in her bright pink knee-length pajamas.

She climbed on to the bed next to him and said, ‘What are you watching this crap for? You have enough trouble sleeping without watching scary movies.’

Kieran clapped another handful of peanuts against his mouth. ‘It’s good. It’s all about this girl who thinks she’s being stalked by this demon and she can’t get away from it.’

‘The same way that I am, you mean, by Mickey Veralnik?’

‘Mickey Veralnik isn’t a demon. He’s just a crappy two-bit pain-in-the-ass promoter. You shouldn’t pay him any mind.’

‘But he’s always there, right in my face, isn’t he? When has he ever missed one single concert? Or one single promotion? Or one single TV special? Don’t tell me he won’t be sitting in the front row tomorrow night. I’m sick of the sight of him grinning at me and giving me those winks and those little finger-waves. And those endless text messages. “Kiera I know you’re a twin but you’re the true star! You could shine so much more brightly if you only dumped your brother and let me handle your meteoric rise to fame and fortune!”’

Kieran shrugged. ‘Maybe you should go solo. You always sang a hundred times better than me.’

Kiera scruffed up his thick blond hair and gave his shoulder a shove. ‘We’re the Kaiser Twins, stupid! And even if I did split up with you, I wouldn’t let Mickey Veralnik handle me. I mean, like, yuck! That comb-over! And bad breath or what?’

Kieran continued to chew for a while. Then he said, ‘What if I was to split up with you?’

‘What do you mean? You don’t seriously want to split up with me, do you?’

‘I don’t know. Yes. No. I guess I’m just bushed, that’s all. All this fricking traveling. I don’t even know which city we’re supposed to be in.’

‘Cleveland, Ohio. Tomorrow we open at the State Theater at Playhouse Square for three alternate nights and then we’re off to not-so-sunny Cincinnati.’

‘Cleveland. Jesus. To think we got famous to wind up in Cleveland — the Mistake on the Lake. If that’s not a fricking paradox, I don’t know what is.’

The twins sat on the bed in silence for a while. They were seventeen-and-a-half years old, although Kiera was actually older than Kieran by thirty-one minutes. They had blond hair and faces that were almost ethereally good-looking, with wide green eyes and straight Grecian noses and sensual lips. Their manager Lois Schulz often said that they reminded her of the very young Elvis Presley and his twin Jessie — ‘Well, they would if Jessie had been a girl instead of a boy, and if he hadn’t been stillborn.’ Lois often came out with remarks like that.

In actual fact they looked like their mother Jenyfer Kaiser, who had died of an apparent stroke only two hours after giving birth to them. Their father Jim had raised them as if they were the most precious children on earth — and to him, of course, they had been. They were the living reminder of the woman he had loved so much and lost.

Kieran and Kiera had always sung songs together, ever since they were very small. They used to swing on their swing set at the end of their yard in Brentwood, harmonizing Puff, The Magic Dragon. To them, singing together was as natural as talking. When they were sixteen Lois had heard them singing in their high school musical Grease and had persuaded their father to let her take them on. Within two months they had appeared on America’s Got Talent and won rapturous applause from the audience, and the day after their sixteenth birthday they had been signed by Sony. Their first album Kaiser Twins had reached number nine on the Billboard Top 100.

‘I don’t know why you think this movie is so scary,’ said Kiera, frowning at the TV. ‘Ghosts never hurt people, do they? Not real ghosts.’

‘That old bum was scary,’ Kieran reminded her. ‘That one we saw on Santa Monica Boulevard.’

‘Well, kind of. But he didn’t actually do anybody any real harm, did he? Just stepping right out in front of cars like that.’

‘He could have caused a serious accident.’

‘Only in somebody’s pants.’

Kieran gave his sister a wry smile and shook his head. ‘What time do they want us for the run-through tomorrow?’

‘Early. Seven at the latest. Lois wants us to make some changes. She wants us to finish up with Magic Mirror instead of I Love The World And The World Loves Me. She thinks it’s much more upbeat and the audience always sing along so we can make it into a really grand finale. She’s even hired a twelve-piece horn section.’

‘Jesus. I don’t know why she doesn’t go the whole hog and bring in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.’

‘Oh, come on, Kieran, it’s going to be amazing. There’s going to be hundreds more mirrors, too, so the whole stage is going to be sparkling.’

Kieran smacked the chili powder from his hands. ‘You love all of this, don’t you?’

‘What, and you don’t?’

‘Sure I do. I just don’t want to spend the rest of my life singing I Love The World And The World Loves Me, over and over and over, until I’m about a hundred-and-eleven years old. At some time in my life I want to do something important — something that really makes a difference.’

‘Our singing makes a difference. We make millions of people happy, don’t we?’

‘Pizza makes millions of people happy, but that doesn’t mean it’s important. If you woke up tomorrow and nobody had ever heard of pizza, what difference would it make? Same with us.’

‘So what do you want to do? Run for the White House?’

‘I don’t know. I can’t describe it exactly, but I feel like I have this destiny waiting for me.’

‘Oka — a–ay,’ said Kiera, uncertainly. ‘Maybe you’ll go to med school after all, and be like some really famous surgeon. I know plenty of people who could do with a head transplant — Mickey Veralnik, for one.’

‘You should forget about Mickey Veralnik. I keep telling you, he’s not worth it.’

‘And you should stop watching this stupid movie and get some sleep. It’s half after one already.’

She reached over to grab the remote but Kieran snatched it away from her. ‘Just because you’re a half hour older than me, that doesn’t mean you can tell me what to do. I want to watch the end of this, OK?’

‘Have it your way. But if you have one of your nightmares again and you feel like crap tomorrow morning, don’t blame me.’

‘Do I ever blame you for anything?’

‘Yes. Always.’

Kieran flicked a peanut at her and it bounced off her nose. In retaliation, Kiera picked up one of the pillows and whacked him over the head, so that he spilled his peanuts all over the bedcover. ‘Shit!’ said Kieran, and hit her with his own pillow. Kiera hit him back and then the two of them clambered to their feet and stood on the bed, bouncing up and down and bashing each other with their pillows.

Eventually — panting and laughing — they both lost their balance and fell over sideways. They lay on the bed, breathless, looking into each other’s green eyes. Even after all of these years of growing up together, they still found it a source of fascination that they should look so much alike, and think so much alike. For each of them, it was like owning a mirror which could talk back.

Kiera reached out and stroked Kieran’s hair. ‘You need a haircut. Your hair is almost as long as mine.’

Kieran said, ‘The last time I had a haircut we saw that dead guy, remember?’

‘Oh, so you’re not going to get a haircut because you’re scared you might see him again?’

Kieran said nothing but shook his head. It had been over two months ago but they could both visualize him as clearly as if he were sitting in the bedroom with them now. Kieran had been having his hair cut in the old-fashioned barbershop in the Handlery Hotel in San Francisco. It was a long, mirrored room with a dozen red-leather chairs in a row, and a row of white basins. Kieran had been sitting two chairs away from a bulky, balding man who appeared to be asleep. Nobody was cutting his hair or shaving him, even though there were two barbers at the far end of the room, talking to each other and laughing. Kiera had come into the barbershop, carrying a whole bunch of shopping bags, and said, ‘You should see the dress I’ve just bought! Prada, seventeen hundred dollars!’

The barber who was cutting Kieran’s hair had gone to fetch more towels. Kiera had said to Kieran, ‘What’s the matter with that guy? He looks like he’s asleep.’

It was then that they had both noticed that the towel around the man’s neck was stained bright red, and that the stain was rapidly spreading. Kiera had gone over to him and said, ‘Sir? Sir? Are you OK? You look like you’re bleeding.’

She had turned his chair around and it was then that the man’s head had suddenly dropped to one side, revealing that his neck had been cut open all the way back to his spine. Kiera had looked at Kieran in horror, but they had both realized that what they were seeing was a memory of a dead man, an after-image, like all the ghosts they saw. None of the barbers were cutting his hair or paying him any attention because in reality he simply wasn’t there.

Later they had Googled the history of the Handlery Hotel and discovered that Tony Sciarro, a San Francisco gangster, had been murdered in the barbershop in September of nineteen thirty-seven by a man who was dressed as a barber. One diagonal cut with a straight razor had almost taken his head off. His murderer was never identified or caught.

Kiera climbed off the bed and rearranged the pillows. ‘Seriously, Kieran, you need to get some sleep. I’ll wake you up at six.’

‘Make that six fifty-nine. It won’t take me more than a minute to get dressed.’

She came up to him and hugged him and gave him a kiss. ‘Sweet dreams,’ she said. ‘And I mean it. None of your nightmares.’

A few minutes after three in the morning, Kiera was woken by a soft sighing noise. At first she thought it was a woman crying, but it went on and on for over five minutes, low and persistent, and she realized then that it couldn’t be a woman because a woman would have had to pause for breath.

She sat up in bed and listened. After a while she heard a light pattering sound, too, and she thought: rain. That’s what it sounded like, rain. And the sighing was the wind, blowing underneath the connecting door to Kieran’s bedroom.

She could smell rain, too, and wet soil; and when she drew back the bedcovers and put her feet on the carpet, she could feel the wind blowing cold against her legs.

She switched on her bedside lamp. Then she crossed over to the door and pressed her ear against it. Before she opened the door she wanted to make sure that she wasn’t hearing things. Kieran would inevitably wake up if she entered his room, and he had always found it very difficult to get to sleep. When he was little she had often woken up in the middle of the night to find him standing beside her bed, staring at her, like the girl in Paranormal Activity.

Not only could she hear rain pattering against the other side of the door, however, and feel the wind blowing, she could hear thunder, or what sounded like thunder — a deep rumbling sound punctuated by an intermittent slap! slap! slap!

She opened the door, and was immediately met with a strong, blustery wind and freezing cold rain. Kieran’s bedroom was no longer a bedroom, it was a steeply-sloping field, and it was no longer night-time, either, although the sky was dark. Low gray clouds hurtled above Kiera’s head like an endless pack of hungry wolves, and the long wet grass lashed at her ankles.

On the horizon she could see a stand of oak trees silhouetted against the sky, their branches thrashing and waving in the storm. Not far away, there was an assortment of geometric shapes — triangles and rhomboids and rectangles — that looked like tents. They could have been a military encampment, or a traveling circus. The rumbling and the snapping was the sound of the wind blowing through their flysheets.

Kiera stood in the doorway in disbelief. She turned around, and there behind her was her hotel bedroom, with the bedside lamp shining and the bedcover turned back. She could clearly see her pink robe hanging over the back of the chair. Yet here in front of her was a wild, blustery hillside, and it had to be just as real as her bedroom because she could feel the rain on her face and hear the wind whistling. Where was Kieran’s bedroom? And more urgently, where was Kieran?

‘Kieran!’ she shouted. ‘Kieran — where are you?’

Reluctantly, she walked a few yards further into the field. The storm was roaring so loudly that she could hardly hear her own voice, and it began to rain even harder, so that her pajamas were soaked through and clung to her skin and raindrops dripped from the end of her nose. ‘Kieran!’ she screamed. ‘Kieran!’

She looked back at her bedroom. She was frightened that the door might close, or disappear altogether, so that she would have to stay here, wherever this was. But so far her bedroom was still there, warm and tranquil, with the bedside lamp still shining.

She smeared the rain from her face with the back of her hand. She was so cold now that she was shivering. She wondered if there was any point in continuing to look for Kieran. If this wasn’t his hotel bedroom then maybe he wasn’t here at all. Maybe this was nothing but a nightmare and she was still in bed. But it felt far too real to be a nightmare.

She was still trying to make up her mind what to do when — all around the darkened tents — she saw strings of colored lights winking on. There were dozens of them, every one of them blood-red. She could also see an illuminated wrought-iron archway, with illuminated letters on top of it, although from where she was standing she couldn’t make out what the letters said. She could hear music, too, carried on the wind. Odd, discordant and eerie, like a barrel organ that was badly out of key.

She turned around and started to high-step her way back through the long wet grass to her bedroom. She had gone only a short distance, however, when she saw Kieran standing about fifty yards away, off to her left. He was bare-chested and his pajama pants were as wet as hers. He had his face lifted toward the wind and the rain but his eyes were closed as if he were praying.

‘Kieran!’ she called him, and hurried over.

He opened his eyes and stared at her. For a split second he looked as if he didn’t recognize her.

‘Kieran, it’s me! Are you all right?’

She took hold of both of his hands. He felt as cold as she did.

‘We have to go find her,’ he said.

‘What do you mean? Who?’

‘She’s up there. She’s been up there all the time.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Who’s been up there all the time?’

Kieran pulled his hands away and started to walk uphill, toward the trees and the tents. Kiera ran after him and caught hold of his arm. ‘Kieran — where are you going? We don’t even know where this place is! This is supposed to be your hotel room, not a field!’

‘It’s a dream,’ said Kieran.

‘How can it be a dream? I can feel it! Look at me — I’m soaked to the skin!’

‘It’s not my dream. It’s not yours, either. It’s somebody else’s. That’s why it feels so real.’

‘What do you mean? How can we both be in somebody else’s dream?’

‘I don’t know, but we are. And I know that she’s up there and we have to go find her.’

‘Who’s up there?’

Kieran lifted his hand and touched Kiera’s forehead with his fingertips. ‘Can’t you feel her? I can feel her.’

Kiera looked at him in bewilderment. But she began to feel a rising sense of excitement, too. She thought she knew who he was talking about. It was impossible, but so was this sloping field, and so was this wind and so was this rain.

‘You mean Mom?’ she said.

Kieran lowered his hand and nodded. ‘She’s up there someplace. She’s been there all the time, ever since the day that you and me were born.’

‘How can that be? She didn’t go away or anything. She died, Kieran.’

‘How many times have you and I seen dead people? Dozens.’

‘Yes, but none of them was anybody we knew, were they? And we’ve never seen mom.’

Kieran took hold of Kiera’s hand. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘She’s up there and she needs us.’

Kiera looked up at the dark, billowing tents, and the strings of red lights that flickered in the wind like blood cells pouring through human arteries. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t like the look of those tents at all. And even if we do find Mom, what then? She’s dead. She won’t be able to come back with us.’

‘Let’s just see if she’s there first.’

‘I don’t know, Kieran. It’s really scary.’

‘Yes, but I’m sure mom knows that we’re here. What is she going to think of us if we turn our backs on her and leave her, just because we’re chickenshit?’

Kiera took a deep, shivery breath. ‘OK, then. But if we can’t find her we go back through my bedroom door and we close it and we keep it closed.’

Still holding hands, they struggled up the hill. In some places the grass was waist high, and Kiera felt as if she were wading through a stormy sea. In other places the ground underfoot was rocky and loose, like shale, and they found it difficult to keep their footing.

Several times Kiera turned back to make sure that her bedroom doorway was still there. It was standing in the middle of the wildly-waving grass, softly lit, an unearthly vision of the real world that they had left behind them. She felt like telling Kieran that they ought to go back. Their mother had been dead for seventeen-and-a-half years, and even if they found her, what could they do to help her? But Kieran kept on pulling her up the hill, and his urgency seemed to increase with every step.

At last they reached the encampment. More than a dozen tents and small canvas pavilions were clustered around a huge black marquee, as well as seven or eight trailers and old-style horse-drawn caravans, all of them painted in shiny black varnish and beaded with raindrops. The blood-red lights were strung up everywhere, from one tent to the next, and all around the top of the marquee.

The barrel-organ music was still playing but Kiera found it difficult to tell where it was coming from, because it faded and swelled in the wind. It was a discordant version of In The Good Old Summertime, which she and Kieran used to sing together when they were very little, and she couldn’t help herself from silently singing the words in her head.

‘In the good old summertime — in the good old summertime—’

Several of the tents or trailers were lit up inside, but all of the tent flaps were tightly secured and the trailers had black blinds drawn down at every window. It was raining even harder now and the rumble-slap! of wet canvas was almost deafening.

Kieran and Kiera made their way around to the front of the marquee. From this angle they could read the red illuminated letters on top of the archway, even though they were trembling in the wind. They said Albrecht’s Traveling Circus & Freak Show.

Kiera tugged anxiously at Kieran’s hand. ‘Kieran — she can’t be here. I think we’re making a mistake. Let’s go back.’

‘—strolling through the shady lanes with your baby mine—’

Kieran said, ‘No — I’m sure she’s here! It’s almost like I can hear her calling to us! Come on — let’s just take a quick scout around.’

He went through the archway but Kiera stayed where she was. She had such a bad feeling about this. ‘Kieran,’ she said. ‘Please don’t. I’m really frightened.’

Kieran went up to the front of the marquee and took hold of the flap. ‘Come on, sis… it’s only some old circus.’

‘Yes, but freak show? Who has freak shows these days?’

‘I don’t know. But there’s only one way to find out.’

‘—you hold her hand, and she holds yours, and that’s a very good sign—’

He drew back the flap and pushed his way inside. Kiera hesitated for a moment and then she followed him. The flap was heavy and wet and smelled of soil and diesel oil, and something else, too — something that brought back a strong childhood memory. Popcorn.

Once through the flap, the twins found themselves in a small, stuffy vestibule, not much larger than the inside of a wardrobe, and when the flap fell back it was totally dark inside. Kiera nearly panicked, because she hated confined spaces. But then Kieran pulled back the second flap, and they stepped into the main marquee.

The marquee appeared much larger on the inside than it had from the outside, with at least a dozen gasoliers suspended from the roof, and dark red drapes all around the walls, arranged in swags. Tiers of wooden seats were arranged around a low boarded stage. It was more like an old-time vaudeville theater than a circus tent.

‘—that she’s your tootsie-wootsie — in the good old summertime—’

Kieran walked out on to the stage and circled around. ‘Anybody here?’ he called out. ‘Hallo there! Anybody here?’

Kiera said, ‘For God’s sake, Kieran. Supposing there is somebody here? We’re trespassing!’

‘I know — but they’re not going to be mad at us, are they? Circus folk, they’re always real friendly.’

‘Oh, yes? And how do you know? You’ve never been to a circus in your life.’

‘I saw Toby Tyler.’

‘Oh, sure. And I saw Something Wicked This Way Comes.’

Kieran called out again. ‘Halloo! Anybody here?’ But again there was no reply.

‘Come on, let’s go,’ Kiera urged him. ‘This place really creeps me out. And don’t forget that we have a rehearsal first thing tomorrow. We have to get at least a couple hours’ sleep.’

‘OK, OK. But I want to take a quick look around outside.’ They were about to leave the marquee when they heard a sudden clattering of feet behind the tiers of seats. They turned around — just in time to see a diminutive figure in a yellow coat running across the other side of the marquee, a figure no taller than a six-year-old boy. It disappeared almost immediately behind a fold in the canvas.

Kieran seized Kiera’s hand and pulled her across the stage and up the aisle between the seats.

‘No!’ Kiera protested.

But Kieran said, ‘Think about it! He must know where Mom is!’

‘Kieran, Mom’s dead! This is crazy!’

‘Don’t tell me that you don’t feel her!’

They reached the far side of the marquee and Kieran ran along the canvas wall, pulling it and thumping at it with the flat of his hand, trying to find the fold into which the figure in the yellow coat had disappeared. Kiera stood watching him, exhausted and afraid, but she knew better than to try and persuade him to give it up and come back to her hotel room. Once Kieran had his mind set on doing something, he always pursued it to the bitter end.

‘Here!’ he called out, lifting up the canvas to reveal an opening.

‘Kieran—’

‘Come on! Hurry!’

He pushed his way into the opening and Kiera followed him. They had a brief moment of battling with the canvas, and then they were out in the open again, amongst the trailers and the caravans, with the wind and the rain in their faces.

‘Can you see him?’ Kieran shouted. ‘I can’t see him anywhere!’

They walked quickly between the lines of trailers, looking left and right — even ducking down now and again to see if the figure in the yellow coat was crouching underneath. They reached the last trailer, and they were about to turn back when a dazzling flash of lightning lit up the whole encampment, and in that bleached-out flash they saw the figure in the yellow coat running toward one of the caravans and scaling the ladder at the back of it. The figure knocked frantically at the stable door, and the lower half of the door was immediately opened up. Before the figure scuttled inside, however, it turned its head toward them for a split second so that Kieran and Kiera caught a glimpse of it.

‘Jesus,’ said Kieran, and Kiera felt a terrible thrill of shock.

Although he was dressed as a boy, in his yellow tweed coat, the figure looked more like a giant rodent. His face was covered in brindled hair, even his cheeks and his forehead, and he had a long pointed snout rather than a nose, and protruding brown teeth. His eyes glittered as black as buttons.

He vanished into the stable door, and slammed it shut behind him, and as he did so there was a shattering burst of thunder, as if the whole sky above their heads were collapsing.

‘What the hell was that thing?’ asked Kieran.

‘I guess he must be one of the freaks. Rat Man, or something like that. My God. We should really get out of here, Kieran. I mean it.’

‘But Mom’s here, Kiera. I know she is. What if we go back to your bedroom and this place disappears and we can never find it again?’

‘You said it was somebody’s dream.’

‘I know, and I’m pretty sure that it is. But sooner or later they’re going to wake up and it’s all going to vanish. And what are the chances that they will never have the same dream again — like, ever? What’s going to happen to Mom then? How will we ever find her then?’

Kiera squeezed her eyes tight shut and covered her face with her hands. This was all madness. How could the two of them be in somebody else’s dream? How could their dead mother be in somebody else’s dream?

Kieran laid his hands on her shoulders and said, ‘Let’s give it one last try, OK? Let’s go over to that caravan and knock on the door and ask them if they know where mom is. If they don’t know what the hell we’re talking about, we’ll go right back to your room and close the door and try to forget this ever happened. Is that a deal?’

Kiera lowered her hands and opened her eyes. Kieran looked so much like her that she almost felt as if she were appealing to herself.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘But be really careful, won’t you? That Rat Man might bite you.’

‘Oh, come on. The way he skedaddled off like that, he’s probably a whole lot scareder of us than we are of him.’

They crossed over to the caravan into which the figure in the yellow coat had just disappeared. It reminded Kiera of Professor Marvel’s caravan in The Wizard of Oz, except that it was varnished black and it had a frieze of carved wooden faces all the way around the overhanging roof — some of them leering, some of them scowling, some of them screaming. The rain dripped from every face as if they were all weeping, either with rage or disappointment or fear.

Kieran climbed the three steps up to the stable door. He glanced back at Kiera and then he knocked.

He waited, but there was no answer, and so he knocked again, harder this time. ‘Is there anybody in there? We only want to ask you something, that’s all! We’re not going to hurt you or nothing!’

He waited again. He was just about to try knocking a third time when the shuttered windows in the stable door were both opened up. A bald, white-faced man appeared, wearing tiny wire-rimmed spectacles with mirror lenses. He had a silver ring through his nose and silver hoop earrings in each ear. He was wearing what looked like a silver satin cloak.

‘What do you want?’ he demanded, in a tired, impatient tone. He had an accent that sounded Eastern European. Czech, maybe.

Kieran said, ‘We don’t want to disturb you, sir, but we think our mom may be here someplace. In fact, we’re sure that she is.’

The bald man looked Kieran up and down, and then looked at Kiera.

‘What if she is?’ he asked them.

‘What do you think? We’d like to see her, of course.’

‘And you think that this would do either of you any good?’

‘Well, sure. We thought that she died when we were born, but if she didn’t — I mean, we have seventeen years to catch up on.’

‘You thought that she died?’

‘That’s what we’ve always been told.’

The bald man pursed his lips for a moment, as if he were sucking a very sour candy, or thinking. Then he said, ‘I suppose it depends on your definition of dying.’

‘What do you mean? Either she’s dead or she isn’t.’

‘You think so? You don’t know too much about dying then.’

Kiera was shivering and wetter than ever. ‘Is our mom here or not?’ she called out.

The bald man nodded. ‘Yes, she’s here OK. But I don’t know if you’ll be very glad to see her.’

‘Just tell us where she is,’ said Kieran. ‘We’ll decide if we’re glad to see her when we see her.’

‘Very well,’ the bald man agreed, with a sigh. He turned back toward the interior of the caravan and said, sharply, ‘Stay here, will you? I’m taking these young people to see Demi.’

Kiera couldn’t hear the reply clearly, but it sounded harsh and guttural. She looked at Kieran as he climbed down from the back of the caravan but Kieran could only shrug and pull a face to show that he didn’t understand what the Rat Man was saying, either.

The bald man closed the two windows in the stable door but reappeared a few moments later wearing a black ankle-length raincoat and a wide-brimmed waterproof hat. He came down the steps and approached them. He wasn’t tall, but there was a strongman solidity about him which Kiera found quite intimidating. She felt that you would need to hit him very hard, over and over again, with something like a ball-peen hammer, before he would even blink.

‘You’re certain you want to do this?’ he asked them. He pronounced it ‘vont’.

‘Yes, we do vont,’ said Kieran, trying to sound challenging.

Without another word, the bald man turned and started to walk away, beckoning them to follow him. He led them between the trailers and the caravans, past a fenced-off corral in which twenty or thirty miserable-looking horses were standing in the rain, their heads down and their manes dripping, and a line of massive black Diamond-T trucks, pre-World War Two vintage by the look of them.

They came at last to a small black pavilion, with an awning in front of it which had filled up with so much rainwater that it was sagging between its poles. The bald man drew back the entrance flap and Kieran and Kiera could see that the interior was illuminated by an oil-lamp with a dim green glass shade.

‘Demi!’ the bald man called out. ‘Demi, it’s Zachary!’

Kiera looked at Kieran and said, under her breath, ‘Mom’s name was Jenyfer. Why is he calling her “Demi”?’

Kieran shook his head. ‘Maybe it’s like a stage name.’

‘Demi, you’re not sleeping are you? I brung two young people to see you. I think you might recognize them.’

Kiera heard a faint, sibilant voice saying ‘What time is it?’

‘It’s ten minutes of two. You weren’t sleeping, were you?’

‘No. You know me. I haven’t slept in days.’

‘You want to see these young people or not? It’s up to you, my darling. You don’t have to if you don’t want to.’

‘No… all right. I’ll see them.’

The bald man pulled back the flap and said to Kieran and Kiera, ‘Go on. You can go inside. But remember that she is very delicate. I don’t want you to upset her, no matter what you think.’

Kiera ducked her head and went inside the pavilion, with Kieran right behind her. They found themselves in an airless living area lined with moth-eaten velvet drapes in faded maroon. On the right-hand side of the pavilion there was a gilded couch with maroon velvet cushions to match the drapes, and a gilded table with a bowl of black grapes on it. A ghostly-looking gray cat was sleeping on the couch, but as they came into the pavilion it opened its eyes and stared at them with suspicion.

But it was the tall gilded chair on the left-hand side of the pavilion that riveted their attention. It was more like a royal throne than a chair, and the woman who was sitting in it was wearing a coronet of dried flowers. She was startlingly pale, and very thin, and her hair was dead white instead of blonde, but there was no mistaking her resemblance to Kieran and Kiera. She had the same sea-green eyes and the same straight nose and the same sensual curve to her lips.

She was wearing a tight black velvet dress with a high collar and a row of small jet buttons all the way down the front. Her thin, bony hands were resting on the arms of the chair, with long black-varnished fingernails and silver rings on every finger.

The bald man joined them inside the pavilion and took off his hat, deliberately shaking the raindrops over the cat so that it flinched and hissed at him.

‘Here is Demi,’ he announced. ‘Demi, here is your twins.’

‘My twins?’ asked the woman. Her voice was weak but it was very clear. ‘How could I have children?’

Kiera could hardly breathe. The interior of the pavilion was very stuffy and here she was, face-to-face with the mother she had always believed to be dead.

‘Mom?’ she said. ‘It’s Kiera — Kiera and Kieran.’

The woman frowned at her. ‘My twins?’ she repeated.

‘That’s right, Mom. You had twins but they said you had a stroke and died.’

‘How could I have children?’

‘Because you had a husband who loved you, Mom. You had a husband who loved you and he’s been grieving for you all of this time.’

‘But, my dear,’ the woman insisted. ‘I can’t have children.’

With that, she started to unbutton the front of her dress, from the hem upward. As she did so, Kiera suddenly realized with a deep, cold feeling of dread that the woman had no legs. The lower half of her dress which was hanging over the seat of the chair was empty and flat.

She stared at the woman in alarm and said, ‘What are you doing? Mom — what’s happened to you? What are you doing?’

Kieran said, ‘Stop, Mom! Stop! We don’t need to see!’ But the woman carried on unbuttoning her dress, higher and higher, one small button after another.

Kiera turned to the bald man and said, ‘Stop her, please!’

The bald man remained impassive. ‘She is a sideshow. She is doing what sideshows always do. They show you what you paid to see.’

‘But we didn’t pay to see this, for Christ’s sake! We’re her children! Stop her!’

‘I cannot. I would not. She is explaining what she is. She needs to. And you need to understand.’

Now the woman had unfastened her dress all the way up to her breastbone. She was still staring at Kieran and Kiera — not defiantly, not truculently, but with a terrible look of pride in her eyes that almost made Kiera faint with horror.

She parted her dress with both hands to reveal a bony white midriff, and that was all. She had no pelvis, no hips and no legs. Her abdomen ended as a lumpy bag, with the criss-cross scars of sutures all the way around it.

‘You see, my dears?’ she said. ‘I could not possibly have children. I am Demi, the Demi-Goddess, the Half-Woman. I am surprised that you have not heard of me before. I am famous from coast to coast, isn’t that true, Zachary?’

The bald man nodded. ‘Coast to coast, Demi, my darling. Coast to coast.’

Kiera turned around and collided with Kieran. He grabbed hold of her sleeve, but she twisted herself away from him and pushed her way out of the pavilion. Once she was outside, she began to run back between the trailers and the caravans, past the trucks, past the horses, in between the tents.

She could hear herself panting and see the red lights jiggling in front of her eyes. She ran out of the carnival encampment and bounded down the sloping field, toward the lighted doorway of her bedroom.

‘Don’t close,’ she gasped. ‘Please don’t close.’

She turned her head around only once, to make sure that Kieran was following her, which she knew that he would, and of course he was. In fact he was less than twenty yards behind her, and gaining on her.

Soon the two of them were running side by side with the thunder rumbling all around them like heavy artillery and the long wet grass whipping at their ankles. They reached the bedroom doorway and Kiera ran straight into it without even breaking her stride. Kieran came hurtling after her and slammed the door behind him.

Kiera fell backward on the bed, whining for breath. Kieran stood beside her, bent forward, his hands on his knees. They stared at each other for a long time, not knowing what to say, not knowing what to think, hardly even daring to understand what they had just experienced.

‘That wasn’t a dream,’ said Kiera, at last. ‘Even if it was somebody else’s dream. That was a nightmare.’

Kieran pulled up his pajama pants. ‘Whatever it was, it really happened. I’m totally soaked through, and look at you — you are, too.’

Kiera looked toward the bedroom door. ‘Do you think it’s gone?’ she asked Kieran.

They both listened. The room was silent, except for the sound of somebody talking in the corridor outside. No rain, pattering against the other side of the door. No wind, blowing underneath it.

Eventually Kieran went across and turned the doorknob. He opened the door about a half inch and peered through it. Then he opened it wide. The sloping field had disappeared. The rain and the thunder and the rumbling tents had all disappeared, too. There was nothing but his hotel bedroom, with the bedside lamp tipped over on to the floor and all of his bedcovers dragged off the end of the bed.

‘That was mom, wasn’t it?’ said Kiera.

Kieran said, ‘Yes. I could feel it.’

‘So what do you think happened to her? And how did she get into that freak show? And where is that freak show? Do you think it really exists?’

Kieran shook his head. ‘I don’t know. But there’s one thing I do know. I’m not going back into the fricking bedroom tonight. You don’t mind if I sleep with you, do you?’

At about four a.m., Kieran was woken up by somebody singing, high and breathy. It was only when he had sat up in bed that he realized that it was Kiera, and that she was singing in her sleep.

‘In the good old summertime — in the good old summertime—’