In the City of the Nightmare King

by V. S. Santoni

  “Hello?” I called into the hole.

  “Johnny?” Alison’s voice echoed back.

  I crawled through into a room with black walls and checkered floor tile. In one corner, a person with a face shaped like a deep bowl, wearing a robe that dangled off their emaciated body, with a blue patchwork quilt strewn across their lap. The stranger pointed to another niche where an empty rocking chair swayed furiously. Flashes like lightning sporadically lit the nook behind the seat. In the room’s center, a narrow golden beam struck the floor, coming from a tiny hole too high in the ceiling to reach.

  “Johnny!” I heard Alison’s voice again. This time it came from the ceiling. I approached the beam and pressed my hand to it. The ray bent like a flimsy wire. I tugged it to make sure it was sturdy, then I tightened my fingers around the line and pulled myself up. Dream physics made my body weightless. I reached the hole and poked a finger through, and it tore like a balloon—the whole ceiling was like a thin rubber sheet. I ripped the hole even wider and a torrent of gray sand exploded through the opening and flooded the room. I swam up through the sand until I popped out of a shallow dune.

  The world had transformed into a black sand beach, with basalt columns of different heights scattered throughout. Blake and Alison talked near an incline leading up to a shaky old pier. The dock stretched out over atrous water that gleamed with a silver sparkle, even though no moon cast such a glow upon it. A well-appointed wherry bobbed lazily at the end. I stumbled across uneven rocks and sandy dips on my way to join them.

  “Jesus, J, you scared the shit out of me!” Alison said upon seeing me.

  “How long have you guys been here?”

  “We just got here,” Blake said.

  “We were in some gross, underground, crypt-maze thing,” Alison said.

  Blake pointed at the wherry. “I think we’re supposed to get on that.”

  Hunter’s aura felt like a distant memory, something sweet on the turgid air. It pulsed in the darkness on the horizon, beyond the ocean. We traveled to the pier’s end to get a better look at the boat. A gilded scrollwork pattern snaked around its shiny black hull. In its spacious cockpit a fancy rug was strewn across the bottom boards. At the back, a cuddy with a brass lantern hung over a lavish bench, covered in jeweled pillows.

  The helmsman, a darkly robed figure whose face was hidden under a heavy cowl, didn’t look up at us. The coxswain drummed its long, pale fingers on the oar in its hands. We boarded the boat, and I camped on the bench in the cuddy with Alison. Blake, however, kept vigilant, arms folded over his chest, body directed at the ferryman.

  Churning waves lapped the hull, splashing like something moved under them. Just below the surface, a pale, ghoulish creature with skin that resembled heavily incised clay floated lifelessly. Its hair swayed like cobwebs in the shadowy water. But it wasn’t the only one of its kind down there. I hurried away from the edge, eager for the boat to move.

  “Okay,” Alison said, halfway between irritated and creeped out. “How do we make . . . them move the boat?”

  The boatman ferrying souls across an acheronian river was a cross-cultural archetype, such as Charon, who traveled the dead across the River Styx into the Underworld. Everywhen resided among humanity’s collected dreams, so it seemed reasonable that early wizards exploring the Night City discovered this Stygian boatman and brought back stories to the real world, only for those tales to give rise to said myths and legends. It was likely the other way around too: This figure existed not because it had always been here, but because humankind had dreamt it up. Everywhen was a perpetual chicken-egg conundrum.

  “It’s taking us . . . to the Underworld, right?” I asked. “How’s that story go again?”

  “Charon’s obol,” Alison muttered, thinking to herself. “A coin! Give them a coin.”

  Blake imagined up a penny then placed it in the spirit’s cold hand. The boatman closed their spidery fingers around the coin and vanished it. Then they used their oar to push off from the dock. My thoughts stayed on Hunter as we quietly floated into the abyss. I hoped for a short voyage. Alison stayed wordless. Her silence, a rare thing indeed, signaled immense anxiety. Blake’s, too, seemed concerned, but his mind likely churned out strategies, not fears.

  “Are your powers acting weird?” I said to them both.

  “Like, not acting at all?” Alison said.

  “It’s weird. It’s like sometimes I can use them, and sometimes I can’t.”

  “It’s been happening to me too,” Blake said.

  “What do you think is going on?” I asked.

  “I don’t know for sure, but we aren’t going to have much luck finding Hunter without them.”

  The oar’s somber slush became the only sound we heard. It felt like that for a while. Then a strangeness caught my eye, breaking the monotony. Another black ocean hung high above us, and in its bleak waters, ghoulish bodies, like the ones floating under us, hovered languidly. I shrank down next to Alison, alerting her to our ominous ceiling. Stricken with horror, she pulled me close. Blake noticed the panic on our faces and looked up. He looked uncertain.

  “What the hell?” Alison said.

  A terror possessed us as we expected the roof to come crashing down. But the water never moved, nor did the bodies suspended in it. The oarsmen moved us out from under the celestial ocean, and a clear look back revealed the massive hovering water cube under which we’d traveled. The dreamworld’s bizarre geography left us speechless.

  We didn’t travel much longer before a gray beach on a not-too-distant shore came into view. The ferryman guided us there and moored the vessel. Then they struck their oar against the bottom boards, hurrying us to disembark. Alison jumped off the boat, making a small splash as she dropped and starting for dry land before Blake and I had even turned.

  “Are we going?” she said. We joined her on the shore, and the ferryman pushed off the bank. “That was creepy.”

  Blake left to explore while we watched the ferryman slowly disappear back into the darkness. He took a few shaky steps up a sandy slope. At the top, he put his hands on his hips and said, “No way.”

  We joined him on a hill overlooking a vast clockwork junkyard. The landfill was covered in broken machinery, with knolls and hills and skinny, towering junk pillars that protruded out of the landscape like hundred-foot-tall fingers. Although no sun hung in the sky, everything was perfectly visible as if bathed in midday light. It seemed, judging by the horizon, that the sea of brass metal pieces never ended; however, Hunter’s aura glimmered faintly, somewhere beyond this place. We trekked down the hill and started into the metalwork wasteland.

  The machinery underfoot jingled and shifted unpredictably. I thought about using a spell to help traverse this no man’s land, but the Night City’s spotty magic barrier made it impossible to predict what would even work, and now was no time to investigate the barrier’s limits. Blake took big, heavy steps and plunged his feet firmly into the ground to steady himself. I stretched my arms out at my sides and tightrope walked so as not to trip on the uneven footing. One wrong move and we could find ourselves plummeting into a sinkhole. Alison stumbled over a dip herself and nearly fell face-first on a pile of sharp, broken wheels, but Blake caught her in time and helped her upright.

  “Do these pieces make you two feel weird?” Alison asked.

  “Yeah,” Blake said. “Like the vivit apparatus.”

  Strangely, I knew what she meant. The vivit apparatus felt like possibility, like the world existed as one big “what if” and you controlled the power to answer the question. This ancient place failed to hide its connection to a distant past. In my mind, I saw the shadowy Creators—whoever they were, whatever they were—painstakingly assembling the universe like a clock, starting with the City at the End of the World, and all the parts they didn’t want or need they tossed into Everywhen—here. A close-enough inspection even rev
ealed a slight gleam to them, like tarnished brass that needed a good polish. But that’s how this place differed from the vivit apparatus—its machinery lay dead.

  A tremor shook the ground. We all stopped moving to keep balance. The ground trembled briefly then stopped, but the sudden quake left us puzzled.

  “Do you think we stepped on a sinkhole?” I asked them.

  “Johnny,” Alison whined, “please don’t say stuff like that.” Then the ground shook again, throwing us all off balance. “Oh god, we’re going to fall in a sinkhole and die.”

  “Calm down,” Blake said, holding himself steady and studying our surroundings. “Let’s get close.” At his insistence, we inched together until we were standing back to back. The commotion grew until the land swayed like waves on an ocean.

  “Look!” Alison said, pointing at a serpentine shape moving beneath the machinery.

  A clockwork worm burst out of the ground near us, flinging machinery in every direction. The creature measured as tall as the Sears Tower, with a conical drill for a head and a hulking body made of jumbled cogs, wheels, and springs. All the leftover magic in this place had crashed together to form this monstrosity, and it looked committed to keeping us from progressing.

  “That thing’s going to dive for us,” Blake said, already preparing to dart.

  “We’ll never get away. It’s huge!” Alison said.

  The worm drove its spinning head toward us. I dug my feet into the ground, tensed my legs, and bounded like a spring, landing far away from the beast. It noisily tunneled underground and vanished. I had managed a spell to empower my jump—the inconsistent force affecting our magic had wavered again. Alison and Blake must’ve fled in another direction because I couldn’t find them. The creature partially surfaced again about twenty feet away and plowed toward me. I readied another jump, but my foot got stuck in the machinery. I pulled to free my limb with no success. As the worm neared, the ground undulated relentlessly, making it difficult to stand. I gave another stalwart tug and dislodged myself, then leaped again as the worm tore up the ground behind me. The creature noticed this and submerged again.

  The Night City’s magic barrier failed to keep me from strengthening my physical abilities, so I focused instead on finding Alison’s aura with my wizard sense. It manifested behind a rounded junk pillar. I jumped over there and found her peeking around a corner, immersed in her search.

  “Ali,” I whispered.

  She startled and put a hand to her chest. “Jesus, J. Now is not the time.”

  We hid together, both of us searching for the worm. “Where’d Blake go?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I stood. “I’m going to go look for him.”

  Alison yanked me back down. “Are you high, J? Let’s just . . . wait until that thing pops out again.”

  We waited ten minutes before I started to grow impatient. “We can’t just sit here.” I rose to my feet again. “Plus, don’t worry. We can . . . kind of use our magic.”

  “J!” Alison called as I walked away from the pillar.

  The worm didn’t emerge. I signaled for Alison to follow, but she hesitated, stepping only halfway out before nervously rushing back to her hiding spot.

  A vortex formed in the ground a few feet away. Its powerful suction pulled everything toward it. I readied another jump, but this time my jeans snagged on a broken cog. I jerked up, but the fabric ripped, throwing me off balance. My fall didn’t scare me nearly as bad as when the junk carried me into the whirlpool, though. I flipped on my side and twisted and turned my leg, but the sharp metal trapping me in place cut my foot. The whirlpool’s sides grew nearly perpendicular, but my caught foot kept me from falling into the pit. But the faster the whirlpool moved, the more the parts holding my foot loosened their grip.

  A massive drill emerged from the vortex’s center, gnashing everything that tumbled into it, crunching like a monstrous garbage disposal. The cog stuck around my foot slacked then rolled into the pit. I held on tenuously to the whirlpool’s sides, but the shifting metal sliced up my hands and I lost my grip and fell. Machinery spun around me in a disorienting eddy, but before getting pureed I crashed against a large gear that had fallen into the pit. The oversized machine part grinded against the drill, but it was too large to get minced. I latched onto it for safety. I sped around the whirlpool twice before the giant worm explosively surfaced and sent me spinning through the air, still clamped onto the gear. The creature’s clamorous rise destabilized the junk pillar Alison had been hiding behind, and it collapsed on top of the monster with such force the creature returned underground.

  I waited for the gear to stop spinning, but when it did, the velocity yanked me off and sent me plummeting to the ground. Blake caught me midjump and we landed safely next to Alison.

  “We can’t beat that thing,” Blake said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  We jumped like grasshoppers through the machine wastes, fleeing the pursuing monster. But no matter how quickly we moved, the worm stayed close behind, angrily smashing through junk pillars and anything that got in its way. Our escape terminated at the edge of a gorge. Though I saw land on the other side, harnessing enough magic to bridge the rift with a leap looked impossible. We were cornered, and the worm continued to drive toward us, only a few hundred feet away.

  “What the hell do we do?” Alison asked.

  With nowhere left to run, I jumped off the cliff.

  Chapter 15

  I was dropped in the middle of Fuller Street, right before the cul-de-sac where Dad and I used to live in Chicago. But something about this place didn’t sit well with me—it was like a grim reflection, with a pitch-colored sky that hung over everything like a funerary veil. A small fire raged on a split-level house’s lawn to my right. The home’s windows and doors were boarded up. I used to pass that house every day after school, on my walk home. It didn’t have any tenants because the sharky landlord had chased them all out. A black mailbox used to sit at the driveway’s entrance, but there was nothing there now. Weak fires also burned on other yards throughout the neighborhood, and hollowed-out, battered vans littered the streets. In the distance, screams rose into the night.

  Gunfire rattled close by. Convinced a roving band of killers was about to make me target practice, I took cover behind a sedan parked along the sidewalk near the split-level. I snuck around the vehicle and spied three young guys standing in the street, dressed in black SWAT armor and carrying AR-15s in one hand and beer in the other. They were celebrating—what they were celebrating I didn’t want to know. I could only imagine the horrifying things they’d been up to. One fired another volley into the air and laughed loudly, and his drunken friends hooted and cheered him on. The three horsemen of the suburban apocalypse. All they needed was a disconcerting fixation with Levitical law to make this nightmare complete. Each gunman had an average build, but one was taller and gawkier than the others. They hid their faces behind balaclavas. I leaned forward for a better look.

  “Look, boys, we got a kicker,” one yelled upon sighting me.

  I ducked as he fired, metal shards sparking off the trunk.

  “Time for a game of smear the queer!” said the one who had fired.

  His friends chuckled at his anemic wit. I was unimpressed, but more importantly, I was scared shitless. The two other gunmen slowed to load their weapons, giving me time to bolt across the lawn, toward the split-level’s back gate, which was locked. I scaled the fence. Gunfire sounded behind me—I didn’t have long to seek refuge. I made my way around the house to the back, where I spotted a patio door. Thankfully, it slid aside easily and let me into the kitchen. Although the inside was dark, fires outside, visible through the windows, gave me enough light to spot a staircase.

  Since the Night City’s magic barrier failed to stifle my spells in the junkyard, I wondered if I could cast a fireball here. I set about imagining the flames appe
aring in my hands, but nothing happened. The barrier’s power again suppressed my magic. That simplified my choices: I ran upstairs and hid in the first room I saw—it had a king-sized bed in it, another door leading into a bathroom, and a bifold closet against the wall. The dreamworld existed in flux, and portals connected these ever-changing realities. I checked the bathroom for a way out, but it was just a bathroom.

  Someone caved in the front door downstairs.

  “Where are you, little piggy?” a voice bellowed from downstairs—the one who’d spoken earlier. His two accomplices snickered, then a clamor erupted in the kitchen. It sounded like they were crashing appliances and metal utensils against the floor while hollering gleefully. Loud thuds in the stairwell—a gunman was coming upstairs. I didn’t have time to investigate the closet, so I scuttled under the bed and pressed myself flat against the floor. The footsteps stopped at the bedroom door, which creaked open, revealing a pair of combat boots.

  They plodded across the carpet, walking around the bed. Downstairs, the gunman’s allies continued to trash the kitchen, shattering plates and clanging pans, doing everything in their power to be obnoxious.

  I saw then as Alison carefully peeked her head out of the bifold closet.