The Ninth Nightmare

FIVE A Disturbing Visitor

David said, ‘You’re bushed. You need to take it easy. Why don’t you cancel this afternoon’s visit?’

‘Because I promised,’ Katie told him. ‘It’s Mrs Copeland’s birthday. And it’s only in Coral Gables. I’ll be fine.’

‘Seriously, Katie, I don’t think you’re fine at all. That hallucination you had in Cleveland — sure, OK, maybe it was caused by nothing more than exhaustion. But I really wish you’d let Aaron run some tests on you. I just want to make absolutely sure that you don’t have peduncular hallucinosis.’

‘David — what happened in Cleveland was an aberration. A one-off. Next time I have to go away, I’ll make sure that my schedule is much less punishing. You can count on it. And what the hell is “peduncular hallucinosis” when it’s at home?’

David pursed his lips to show her that he was far from happy, but he didn’t try to dissuade her any further. She would go to the Coral Gables retirement home today no matter what he said, and both of them knew it. He could hardly lock her in her room.

Katie had never loved any man as much as she loved David, but he was controlling by nature and she constantly had to make sure that she protected her own individuality. He was handsome and athletic and he had a buoyant sense of humor, but his psychiatric training always led him to observe closely everybody’s behavior, especially hers. Sometimes she caught him watching the way she performed the simplest of everyday tasks like spreading jelly on her toast and she had to challenge him and say ‘What? What am I doing wrong now? I’m spreading it, like, compulsively?’

He finished his coffee and stood up. He was thirty-five, only two years older than she was, but his hair was already steel gray. He had a squarish face and dark blue eyes which he had inherited from his Swedish mother. He wore rimless spectacles which accentuated his very analytical manner.

‘I’ll be home around seven,’ he told her, coming around the table and giving her a kiss on the top of the head. ‘Maybe we can go to Shula’s tonight and treat ourselves to a steak.’

‘I love you,’ she said, turning around in her chair. ‘And I won’t allow myself to get too tired today, I promise you.’

‘OK,’ he said, kissing her again. ‘Just remember that you’re the most precious person in the whole of my life. And — since you asked — peduncular hallucinosis is a condition when a patient experiences highly-realistic hallucinations. The most common ones are scary or deformed faces, or strange landscapes, or people walking in a line, or people appearing to be unusually small. It’s usually caused by a variety of serious problems in the midbrain, including tumors and subarachnoid hemorrhage. So please understand why I’m concerned for you.’

‘You’re concerned? If that’s what I’ve got, I’m ten times more concerned than you are.’

David left, and she waved to him through the living-room window as he backed out of the driveway in his ruby-red Audi convertible. She cleared up the breakfast plates and stacked them into the dishwasher. Then she went through to the bedroom to get dressed. It was a warm, sunny morning, as it almost always was in Nautilus, and the French windows in the bedroom were open. Outside she could see their small red-brick yard, with its terracotta flowerpots and its sundial.

She had taken two sleeping pills last night and this morning she felt much calmer and more rested. All the same, as she sat in front of her dressing table, putting on her eye make-up, she couldn’t help thinking about the woman she had seen in that bloodied bed in the Griffin House Hotel. The woman must have been a hallucination, there was no other rational explanation for it, but she had seemed utterly real. And Katie couldn’t imagine why she should have hallucinated about anybody who had been so horribly mutilated.

She took out her coral pink lipstick and was about to apply it when the door chimes rang. She frowned at herself in the mirror. She wasn’t expecting any visitors, nor any special mail deliveries. She got up and went to the front door, peering through the peephole to see who was there. It was a young man in a light green linen coat, with a white rose in his buttonhole.

‘Yes?’ she called out. ‘What do you want?’

‘Katie? Mrs Kercheval? I need to talk to you. It’s important.’

She peered through the peephole again. As far as she knew, she had never seen this young man before, ever, although he strongly reminded her of her music teacher from junior high school. He had short reddish hair and a few freckles across the bridge of his nose, and pale blue eyes. He looked respectable enough, but maybe he was a door-to-door Bible salesman, or a Mormon, or a Jehovah’s Witness. But how did he know her name?

‘What’s it about?’ she asked him.

‘Something happened to you, Katie. Something bad. I really need to discuss it with you.’

‘Who are you?’

‘I’m somebody who knows what happened to you, and why.’

‘All right, then — what happened to me, exactly?’

‘Katie, I can’t discuss this on the doorstep. I need to talk to you face-to-face.’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to let you in. Not without some kind of ID.’

The young man turned away from the front door, with the his right hand cupped over his ear as if he were thinking, or listening. Then he turned back and said, ‘Your grandmother used to sing you a song whenever you came to visit. Do you remember it?’

‘My grandmother? What the hell do you know about my grandmother?’

But, very softly — so softly that Katie could barely hear him — the young man sang, ‘Fly, little falcon, fly high in the sky! So sharp are your claws, so sharp are your eyes! No one can escape you, because you will see, wherever they run to, wherever they flee!’

Katie stood behind the door for almost half a minute. Despite herself, despite her strong sense of self-control, she had tears in her eyes. She hadn’t heard that song for more than twenty-five years, when her grandmother had sung it to her in the living room of her house in Sarasota, overlooking the ocean. She could see her grandmother now, her white hair fraying in the warm Gulf wind, her blue eyes faded, her neck withered, but still beautiful, one hand resting on Katie’s head as if she were blessing her, a priestess passing on a benediction.

‘You will turn — yes, you’ll spin, and you’ll drop from on high! No one can escape you, however they try!’

She drew back the security chain and opened the door. The young man in the light green linen coat was standing on the porch, both arms held out wide, as if he were trying to show her that he was neither armed nor dangerous. He was grinning at her like a long-lost friend who had found her address on Facebook and turned up without warning to surprise her.

‘Katie!’ he said.

‘I don’t know you,’ said Katie. ‘Should I know you? How do you know my grandma’s bird song?’

The young man kept on grinning. ‘Is it OK if I come in? Then I can tell you all about it.’

Katie looked left and right, up and down the street. Only two doors away, Mr Tomlinson was outside in his front yard, trimming his hedges, so she guessed that she could always call out for help if this young man gave her any trouble. Besides, he didn’t give her the impression that he would. He was standing well back from her, giving her plenty of personal space, with his arms still spread wide.

‘All right,’ she agreed, ‘but any funny business—’

‘Katie, this is very far from being funny business. This is deadly, deadly serious.’

She stood back and allowed him to walk into the hallway. She noticed as he passed her that he was wearing a light but distinctive cologne, slightly lemony, with a hint of vetiver grass. He went through to the living room, crossed over to the white leather couch and said, ‘May I?’

‘Sure, sit down. Do you want coffee? I think it’s still hot.’

‘No, thank you,’ said the young man, raising his hand. ‘I never eat or drink during the hours of daylight.’

‘Oh, really? You’re not some kind of a vampire, by any chance?’

The young man smiled, but when he spoke he sounded completely serious. ‘There are no such beings as vampires, Katie. Vampires exist only in folk stories, and in nightmares.’

‘Well that’s good to know.’

‘Yes. But there are beings which are far more frightening than vampires, and they exist not only in nightmares, but in reality, too.’

‘Oh, really?’

‘Yes, really. We call them Dreads, because we dread them.’

Katie looked at him narrowly. ‘Dreads? Is this a joke?’

‘Do I look as if I’m joking?’

‘So what, then? Are you trying to scare me?’

‘Quite the opposite. In fact: I’m trying to reassure you. But after your experience at the Griffin House Hotel, I think you already know that nightmares can be much more than your sleeping imagination gone wild. Nightmares are another world. Of course we can only visit them when we’re unconscious, but then we can only visit the real world when we’re awake.’

‘You know about my nightmare? How?’

The young man hesitated for a moment, as if he were trying to think how to phrase what he was going to say next. ‘It’s what I do, Katie. You could almost say that it’s my job.’

‘Are you a cop?’

‘No.’

‘A private detective, then? No? Not that either? You’ve been talking to the Cleveland police, though, haven’t you? What did they tell you? That I was just some hysterical woman who must have eaten too much cheese before she went to bed?’

The young man shook his head. ‘I haven’t talked to anybody. There wouldn’t be any point. Besides, the police can’t deal with this. Only you can. Well — you and several others like you.’

‘You’re talking in riddles. If you’re not a cop or a private detective then what’s your interest in this?’

‘I told you, I know what happened to you, and why. I also know who you are, and what you can do about it. And — most importantly — how you can do it.’

‘All right,’ said Katie. ‘You tell me what happened to me, and then I might believe you.’

The young man patted the couch. ‘Sit down, why don’t you? Take the weight off.’

‘I’ll stand, thanks, if it’s all the same to you. Just tell me what you know.’

‘You thought you had a nightmare. In fact you did have a nightmare. You imagined that you were in some shabby apartment in Cleveland Flats, although you probably didn’t know that it was Cleveland Flats. You found a woman lying in your bed. She was begging you for help. She told you that she tried to stop her killer but he was too strong for her. She was seriously mutilated. In fact she was sawn in half, and I’m sure that you were very frightened.’

‘Frightened?’ said Katie. ‘I was absolutely terrified, if you want to know the truth. But if it was only a nightmare, how come it was all so totally real? I saw it, I felt it. I talked to the woman on the bed. I could even smell it, for Christ’s sake. How often can you smell something you’re only dreaming about?’

‘Not often, I’ll admit,’ the young man told her. ‘But it was closer to being a memory than a nightmare — somebody else’s memory. You happened to stay in Room Seven-One-Seven and the very walls of that room are a witness to what happened, even though it didn’t actually happen there.’

‘You’ve completely lost me. I’m sorry.’

‘It’s not too difficult to understand. Sometime in the mid-nineteen-thirties, a man called Gordon Veitch broke into this woman’s apartment in Cleveland Flats. He raped her and butchered her, as you saw for yourself. Shortly afterward, he checked in at the Griffin House Hotel, and dreamed about what he had done to her, in every little detail. His dream was absorbed by the walls of his hotel room, not unlike movie footage being developed on to celluloid.

‘When the police eventually went to the woman’s apartment to find out what had happened to her, they could find no sign of her, and no evidence at all of how she died. No body, no blood, no fingerprints, no hair, no fibers, no semen, nothing. Every trace of what he did there had been taken away in Gordon Veitch’s dream, or nightmare if you prefer to call it that, as if it never happened.

‘Besides, Cleveland Flats was a really rundown area, and the police were not going to devote hours of valuable time trying to find some drug-addicted whore. The whole investigation was filed away under missing persons and Gordon Veitch went free. But his dream of what he did remains, right until today, imprinted on the walls of Room Seven-One-Seven.’

‘I still don’t get it,’ said Katie. ‘How can you take physical evidence away from one place and move it someplace else? Just by dreaming about it?’

She was still suspicious that this young man was playing an elaborate practical joke on her. But how did he know everything that she had seen in her nightmare? She hadn’t even told Detective Wisocky what the woman had said to her — about her attacker being too strong.

The young man said, ‘It’s like a magician’s trick, in a way. You know how a magician can make you believe that somebody disappears from one cabinet and reappears in another cabinet on the other side of the stage? Some Dreads can do that with dreams. This Dread, in particular.’

‘But how come I had a nightmare about this woman? If she was murdered as long ago as nineteen-thirty-something, surely everybody else who’s ever slept in that room would have had the same experience? Or some of them, at least.’

‘No, they wouldn’t. They couldn’t, not like you. Maybe one or two of them might have heard whispers, or seen shadowy outlines, or simply had the feeling that there was somebody else in the room with them when there patently wasn’t. But you, Katie, you’re uniquely sensitive, and that’s why you saw it.’

‘Go on,’ said Katie, although she still felt highly suspicious.

‘You don’t know how special you are,’ the young man told her. ‘You’re descended from a long line of people who have the ability to enter the dreams and nightmares of other people, and to use that ability for the greater good of all humanity.’

‘What?’

‘I know, Katie. I know it’s very difficult for you to grasp, because I’ve never had to call on you before. Many people have a similar ability but they live out their entire lives and I never have to recruit them, ever, because their talents are simply not suitable. But I need you now, and that’s why I came here today to talk to you.’

‘Who are you?’ Katie asked him. ‘And what do you mean by “recruit”? You’re nothing to do with the military, are you?’

‘My name is Springer. I am the earthly representative of what you might loosely describe as the forces of good.’

‘Terrific. I was right, then. You’re selling Bibles.’

‘Katie—’

Katie raised both hands. ‘I don’t know how you knew my grandma’s bird song, or what I dreamed about in Cleveland. Excellent sales pitch, I grant you. But I don’t need a Bible, thank you. I really don’t. And I think it’s time for you to leave.’

Springer said, in a flat, expressionless tone, ‘Remember all those nightmares your sister Daisy used to have? Those really scary nightmares about that circus.’

Katie stared at him, breathless with surprise. ‘Daisy died when she was nine years old,’ she said. ‘How the hell do you know what nightmares she had?’

‘I told you, Katie. I’m not selling Bibles. I’m the earthly representative of the forces of good.’

‘Daisy never told a soul about those circus nightmares. She never told anybody! Only me.’

‘I realize that. But like I told you — knowing about nightmares, that’s my job. And Daisy’s nightmare about the circus is the reason why I’m here today. Your nightmare — the nightmare you had at the Griffin House Hotel — that was part of the same nightmare, believe it or not.’

‘How could that be?’

‘Because the circus doesn’t vanish when you wake up. It exists in its own reality. It’s going on right now — even during the day, when there’s nobody asleep and dreaming about it. Do you understand that? The barrel-organ music is still playing. The clowns are still tumbling. The circus has a terrible unstoppable life of its own, in the world of dreams.’

‘You said that my nightmare was part of it, too,’ said Katie. She felt badly shaken, and she had to sit down on the opposite end of the couch.

Springer nodded. ‘That’s because Daisy was the same as you, descended from the same line. If the meningitis hadn’t taken her when she was so young, I would have been talking to her today, too, and asking her to help us.’

‘What line? I don’t understand any of this.’

Springer said, ‘I know you’re not very religious, Katie, but the forces of good are embodied in a spirit which is known in the waking world by many different names, and in dream world by the name of Ashapola.

‘Ashapola is light. Ashapola is purity. Ashapola protects us from the forces of darkness and destruction, and everything which would jeopardize our civilization and our sanity. Over the millennia, Ashapola has constantly battled to defend our world from being torn apart at the seams.’

‘But what does any of this have to do with my nightmare?’

‘Everything — because the woman you encountered in your nightmare had deliberately been mutilated so that she could be presented as an attraction at the circus. The selfsame circus which your sister Daisy used to dream about.’

‘Go on.’

‘This circus has survived in the world of dreams for nearly nine centuries, believe it or not. Circus and freak show, I should say, because it has always had giants and dwarves and monkey women and babies with two heads. Until nineteen-thirty-six, it was in hibernation, its freaks and its clowns and its animals all deeply asleep, as if they were dead.

‘In nineteen-thirty-six, however, Gordon Veitch found out how to rouse it, although we don’t know how, and more to the point we don’t really know why. He was stopped before he could revive it completely, but he woke it up, and now it seems as if either he or somebody else is trying to finish what he began. For the past seventy-five years the circus has been making itself felt in the consciousness of thousands upon thousands of people, in their dreams. Maybe millions. So far, when we dream about it, the music is still very faint and far away, thank Ashapola. But if this latest attempt to bring it back to life is successful, there is a very real risk that the entire world is going to be plunged into darkness and brutality and chaos like nothing that you could ever imagine.’

Katie said nothing, but waited for Springer to carry on. She felt a complete sense of unreality, as if she were dreaming this, too; but however outlandish his story was, Springer had to be telling her the truth. Daisy had told her all about the freaks that had frightened her so much in her nightmares; especially the woman with one eye in the middle of her forehead, and a small creature that was half human and half rat, which used to gibber and curse in all kinds of different languages.

‘The story goes that the circus was originally created in the middle of the twelfth century by a Cistercian monk from the Maulbronn monastery in Germany. His name was Brother Albrecht, and he was supposed to have been so handsome that some of the villagers in the Salzbach Valley believed that he was a saint. Maybe he was a saint, but if he was, he was a tainted saint, because he had a passionate affair with one of the prettiest girls in the village.

‘Unfortunately for Brother Albrecht, she was already married, and her husband came home one day and found them in bed together. After he had beaten Brother Albrecht almost senseless, her husband tied him up and sawed off his arms at the elbows, so that he would never be able to touch another woman. Then he sawed off his legs at the knees, so that he would permanently have to be kneeling on the floor to pray for forgiveness. He daubed the stumps of Brother Albrecht’s arms and legs with scalding pitch to prevent him from bleeding to death. I won’t tell you what he forced his wife to do, as punishment for her infidelity.’

‘That’s a horrible story,’ said Katie. ‘That’s absolutely horrible.’

‘Yes, it is. But I wish it were only a story.’