Dream Stalkers

by Tim Waggoner

  We gave her our names, and, when we were finished, she said, “It’s so good to meet you all.” Then she let out that disturbing laugh of hers once more, making it sound as if she were looking forward to performing exploratory surgery on us sans anesthesia.

  “Especially you,” she said to Mordacity. “I think it will do Nathaniel a world of good to see you.”

  Mordacity’s head lowered slightly and his shoulders slumped, and I knew he also felt guilty for having stayed away so long.

  “I hope so,” he said.

  “It looks like you have everything under control here, Doctor,” Bruzer said. “If you don’t mind, I have other duties to attend to.”

  “Of course,” Dr Tittering said.

  Bruzer turned to Mordacity.

  “Good to see you again.” He glanced at me. “You as well, Officer Hawthorne.”

  He didn’t sound quite as sincere as when he’d addressed Mordacity, but at least he acknowledged me verbally. He merely nodded to Russell and Bloodshedder, and he ignored Jinx completely. He then turned to guards 5587 and 6323.

  “Stay with them, please, and render any assistance they might require.” He then frowned at Jinx. “And keep a close eye on him.”

  The guards nodded and Bruzer turned and walked back the way we’d come.

  “We have a love-hate thing going on,” Jinx explained to the doctor. “He loves to hate me.”

  The doctor tittered, whether in appreciation of Jinx’s bad joke or because she couldn’t not titter, I didn’t know.

  As Bruzer had led us down the corridor, we’d passed a number of staff, as well as a number of prisoner-patients. The former were easily distinguished from the latter by their uniforms. Staff members wore white lab coats, but the patients wore orange shirts and pants, along with white slip-on shoes. No laces, of course. The staff didn’t want to encourage suicide, homicide, or any combination thereof. Some of the patients were escorted by staff while others – more than I was comfortable with – were permitted to walk about on their own. I assumed this was because they posed no threat to those around them. At least, that was my hope. There were guards in this wing of Deadlock – there were always guards around – but fewer here than anywhere else in the facility.

  “Things have changed since the last time I was here,” I said to Dr Tittering. “The atmosphere wasn’t so… relaxed.”

  “This is the minimum security section of Deadlock,” Dr Tittering said. “The Warden has allowed us to explore less repressive and punitive methods of rehabilitation here. A large part of this exploration is creating a calm, open atmosphere that allows patients to work through their issues without resorting to aggression and violence.”

  A patient came walking toward us, an Incubus that was at most a foot-and-a-half tall and which resembled a human baby. I couldn’t tell its gender, but it had startlingly green eyes, and was kind of cute, but also kind of creepy. Okay – really creepy. As the baby walked past us, Jinx said, “You are so adorable!”

  The baby stopped and turned back to face Jinx. Its tiny hands balled into fists, and its features, once so innocent-seeming, contorted into a mask of absolute rage.

  “Adorable?” The baby’s voice was rough, raspy, and decidedly female. She sounded like a seventy-year-old who’d been chain-smoking most of her life. “Do you know what I did to the last motherfucker who called me that?” She stomped toward us – actually, toward Jinx – and, as she came, her eyes pulsed with eerie green light and she began to grow. Her physical form remained that of a baby, but she became a bigger baby. Her uniform, unfortunately, didn’t increase in size with her, and it grew tight and then began to tear at the seams as she continued growing. Two feet tall. Three. Five. Six-and-a-half. She topped out around seven feet by the time she reached Jinx. She was naked now, except for a few tattered scraps of her uniform that clung to her oversized body in several places. Her eyes now blazed bright as twin green fires, and, when she spoke next, she revealed a mouthful of sharp teeth.

  “I reached up his ass, pulled out his intestines, and strangled him with them.”

  Jinx grinned and reached out to pinch her cheek.

  “Kids say the darnedest things!”

  The giant baby shrieked with fury and threw herself at Jinx. She knocked him to the ground and began kicking, punching, biting, and clawing him. Dr Tittering frantically ordered the guards to intervene. Jinx giggled while the giant baby assaulted him, as if all she was managing to do was tickle him. This sent her into a wild fury, and she was shrieking and spitting like an animal as the two guards took hold of her by the arms and pulled her off Jinx. She fought to pull free from the guards’ grip, and she almost succeeded. But one of the guards pulled a stun gun from his belt holster, jammed it against the baby’s neck, and let her have it. The stun gun had been modified to deliver a burst of M-energy instead of electricity, and multicolored power flared bright. The baby stiffened, the green blaze in her eyes extinguished, and she slumped to the floor, unconscious. Once she was down, she quickly reverted to her original size, and one of the guards picked her up and handed her to a passing orderly who held Tantrum as if she was a bomb that might go off at any moment. The orderly hurried off, and the guards stepped back, remaining close but not too close.

  Jinx was bruised and battered, but otherwise uninjured. I gave him a hand, he took it, and I helped him to his feet.

  “If I ever have children, I want a dozen just like her,” he said.

  “My apologies,” Dr Tittering said. “Tantrum is one of our more… volatile patients.”

  I looked at Tittering and said, “So, about this calm atmosphere you were talking about…”

  She shrugged. “It’s a work in progress.”

  I decided to change the subject. “How’s Nathaniel?”

  “You’ve caught him on a good day,” she said. “He’s lucid. More or less. And it’s been almost two weeks since his last violent outburst. I wouldn’t advise all of you going in to see him at the same time, though. It’s been some time since he’s had anyone come to see him who wasn’t one of the staff.”

  I looked at Mordacity. “You should go.”

  “As should you,” he said.

  I turned to Jinx, but, since he’d shoved his hand into his shorts and begun playing pocket pool, I quickly turned away. I prayed to the First Dreamer that we wouldn’t switch bodies at that moment.

  “Bloodshedder and I will look after him,” Russell said. “And we have those two for backup.” He gestured toward the guards. “We’ll be okay.”

  I didn’t like going in without Jinx, but I knew it would be best to heed the doctor’s advice. Two visitors would be plenty for Nathaniel, at least to start.

  “You’ve both been to see him before,” Dr Tittering said, “so you know what to expect. His condition is essentially the same as it’s been all these years. I’ll accompany you inside to make certain he’s up to seeing you, and then, if all’s well, I’ll withdraw and leave the three of you alone. If you need anything, I’ll be waiting outside. All right?”

  Mordacity and I nodded. The doctor tittered, as if delighted by our agreement, and then she turned and keyed in an access code on the panel next to Nathaniel’s door. The locks disengaged, and the doctor opened the door and stepped inside ahead of us. Mordacity and I followed.

  “Nathaniel? It’s Doctor Tittering. You have some visitors.”

  The basic layout of the room was the same as the last time I’d seen it: bed, night stand with a reading lamp, small bookcase filled with paperbacks. The books were primarily nonfiction and covered a variety of subjects, although the majority of them dealt with Earth history. Another thing that hadn’t changed was the smell of oil paint. It was thick in the room, and it stung my nostrils and felt harsh on my throat.

  Three-fourths of the walls were covered with intricately detailed paintings that together formed an elaborate hodge-podge mural of mixed-up historical scenes. Napoleon sat astride a World War II-era motorcycle next to the Beatles, who
were deep in conversation with a T-Rex wearing bright purple lipstick. The Wright Brothers engaged in a dogfight with Amelia Earhart, while a cosmonaut wing-walked on her plane. Genghis Khan, Cortez, Rosa Parks, Copernicus, Andrew Jackson, William the Conqueror, and dozens more interacted in ways both mundane and fantastical. The depictions were almost photorealistic, and to my untrained eye at least, museum-worthy. There was a table in the center of the room upon which rested neatly organized rows of paint tubes and brushes of varying sizes.

  Nathaniel stood before a white section of the wall, brush in one hand, palette in the other, slowly and methodically adding color to the wall one painstaking brushstroke at a time. At first it looked as if he was working on adding to his mural, but a closer look revealed that the only color on his palette – indeed, the only color of paint tubes currently on the table – was white. Nathaniel wasn’t working on completing his mural. He’d already done that. Now he was working on covering it over with white. This is what he did, what he had been doing since the day Mordacity, Jinx, and I had brought him here. He painted elaborate scenes that took months, even years, to complete, then he painted over them and, when he was finished, started anew. I wondered how many murals he’d completed during his time in Deadlock and how many layers of paint coated these walls.

  Nathaniel wore the standard inmate uniform, but, despite his never-ending painting, there wasn’t a single speck of color on his clothes. His hair was a good deal longer than the last time I’d seen him, and he wore it bound in a ponytail that hung to his waist. His beard was fuller too, an unkempt mountain man thatch of hair. Although he was only in his early sixties, his hair and beard were as white as his uniform, but what really made him look so much older than his years was how skinny he was. You’ve heard the phrase skin and bones. Well, he looked like bones and more bones.

  Nathaniel didn’t turn to look at us as he spoke. He continued applying dabs of white paint to the flames of the Hindenburg, which also served as an outsize pyre for Joan of Arc.

  “Hello, Mordacity. Audra.”

  I know Nathaniel couldn’t sense Mordacity as long as the Incubus wore a negator collar, so I wasn’t sure how he knew we were his visitors without seeing us.

  As if reading my mind, Mordacity said, “He recognized us by our footsteps.”

  I couldn’t help smiling. Of course he had. Crazy or not, he was still Nathaniel Fucking Sawyer.

  “Do you feel up to speaking with them for a bit?” Dr Tittering asked.

  Nathaniel didn’t answer right away. I couldn’t tell if he was considering the matter or if he was so engrossed in his work that her question hadn’t registered with him. But finally he said, “Yes,” although he sounded distracted, as if he wasn’t fully aware of what he was agreeing to.

  The doctor looked uneasy, but she turned to us and said, “Call me if you need me.”

  I expected her to let out another of her creepy titters, but she didn’t. She gave Nathaniel a final look before leaving his room and closing the steel door behind her. She did not, however, lock it.

  Now that Mordacity and I were alone with Nathaniel, I wasn’t sure what to do. I’d come here to learn what, if anything, he might be able to tell me about the shuteye trade in Nod. Information he might’ve kept to himself and hadn’t gotten a chance to share before his chemically-induced breakdown. Or whatever theories or ideas about shuteye he might’ve developed during his time in Deadlock. Sure, his mental condition was hardly stable, but that didn’t mean his mind was inactive. Nathaniel was arguably the best officer the Shadow Watch had ever produced. Surely some part of his mind had continued to work on his last case while he’d been busy painting and unpainting his never-ending mural. But, now that we were here, I couldn’t bring myself to ask him any questions about the case. I felt ashamed for having let so much time pass since my last visit, and – as always – I felt guilty for having been the rookie whose inexperience had led to his condition. If only I’d been able to deal with the Angler on my own, or if he’d managed to force the shuteye capsule on me instead of Nathaniel. Then maybe it would’ve been me locked up in a room painting whatever fevered visions danced through my drug-addled brain, and Nathaniel and Mordacity would still be out on the street, keeping both Nod and Earth safe. They’d have most likely broken up the shuteye ring years ago, and who knew how much more good they’d have accomplished in that time? More than Jinx and I had, that was for sure.

  I didn’t feel worthy of being in the same room as this man, and, if Mordacity hadn’t been there, I’d probably have done the same thing that I had during my last visit. I’d stand quietly and watch Nathaniel paint for a while, and then I’d leave, without either of us saying a word to the other. But Mordacity spoke now, relieving me of the burden of coming up with a way to get the conversation going.

  “Hello, Nathaniel.”

  Mordacity’s voice in his Night Aspect isn’t particularly warm, but, if you’d been around him for any length of time, you could’ve detected the affection in his words. Nathaniel did. Although he didn’t turn to look at us, he did pause in his work, paintbrush poised an inch from the wall. He stood motionless for a long moment, before finally resuming.

  “It’s good to hear your voice, old friend,” he said. “How about you, Audra? Do you still talk as much as you did when I trained you? Not that you talked much compared to Jinx. I remember how you used to have to jam a balled-up sock down his throat to shut him up.”

  I couldn’t help laughing.

  “He’s not quite as bad these days,” I said.

  “Yes, he is,” Mordacity said. “You’re just more able to tolerate him. To a fault sometimes, I think.”

  I didn’t feel like getting into a fight with Mordacity, especially because I was afraid he might be right.

  “Where are you currently posted, Audra?” Nathaniel still didn’t look at us. He just continued adding tiny patches of white to the strut of the Wright Flyer’s wing.

  “Still Chicago,” I said. “But Sanderson’s offered Jinx and me the opportunity to transfer to New York.” I’m not sure why I told him this, especially when I wasn’t all that keen about moving. I guess a part of me wanted my mentor to be proud of me.

  “But you haven’t leaped at the offer, I take it?”

  More brushstrokes.

  “I haven’t. I’m not sure I want to even take baby steps toward the offer.”

  A small smile played on Nathaniel’s lips for a moment, but then it was gone.

  “A sensible reaction. Mordacity and I worked Milwaukee before Sanderson offered us Seattle, then Los Angeles, and eventually New York. Each time we weren’t sure moving was the right thing to do. Remember, Mordacity?”

  Nathaniel shot his Incubus a quick glance, then returned to his work. It wasn’t much eye contact, but it was a start.

  “Yes,” Mordacity said.

  “You get to know a place, it starts to feel like home,” Nathaniel said. He paused, then added, “Even a place like this. Makes it hard to want to leave.”

  Since Nathaniel didn’t need to sleep, I wondered if he ever took a break or if he painted around the clock. Presumably he had to at least pause in his work to eat and use the bathroom. But those might’ve been the only breaks he took. It made me sad to think of him continuously creating, destroying, and then recreating his mural. I felt an impulse to go to him and give him a hug, but I resisted. Although he seemed okay, during one of my earliest visits to see him, I’d tried to hug him and he screamed for ten minutes. At least he hadn’t tried to attack me.

  “How are you feeling?” Mordacity asked.

  “Great,” Nathaniel said. “Fit as a fucking fiddle. But, according to the doctors, I’m just as batshit crazy as ever, though.”

  It wasn’t his words that disturbed me so much as the detached, emotionless way he spoke them, as if he were talking about something as routine as the weather.

  “I’m sorry it’s been so long since my last visit,” I said.

  “Five years, three
months, seventeen days,” Nathaniel said. “But who’s counting? Don’t feel bad, though. I wouldn’t visit me either. There’s not a lot of space in here. Gets pretty cramped sometimes.”

  I looked at Mordacity, and, although I couldn’t read his immobile features, I could feel the sadness coming off him.

  “Audra and Jinx are working a new shuteye case,” Mordacity said. “She came to me for whatever insight I could offer, but I didn’t have much to tell her. We hope you might be able to help.”

  Nathaniel continued painting for a while without speaking, and I began to fear that his mind had wandered off and wouldn’t be returning any time soon. But he surprised me when he began speaking again.

  “It’s not shuteye you have to worry about. It’s what shuteye is really used for.”

  I frowned. “Incubi and Ideators use it to simulate sleep. Don’t they?”

  He turned away from the wall for the first time since we’d entered the room and gave me a sly look.

  “That’s the story.” He held up his paintbrush and examined the white-coated bristles. “I’m a bit concerned that this isn’t white enough. I mean, sure, it’s white, anyone can see that, but does this capture the true essence of white? People think black represents Nothingness, but black is something. Hell, the whole damn Murk is black, and so are all the Darkuns that infest it. But white is blank. It’s empty, a canvas waiting to be filled. So I need a really white white, and I’m just not sure this is it.” He held out the brush for us to inspect. “What do you think?”

  I looked at Mordacity, but I couldn’t tell what he was thinking or feeling. I turned back to Nathaniel.

  “It looks plenty white to me,” I said.

  Nathaniel broke into a grin, rushed over, and gave me a crushing bear hug. He was still quite strong for someone so thin.

  “That’s exactly what I’d hoped you’d say! Thank you! Thank you so much!”

  He held onto me a moment longer before releasing me. When he stepped back, I saw tears in his eyes, and it was all I could do to keep from crying myself.

  Nathaniel returned to the wall and resumed painting.