Waking Nightmares

by Christopher Golden

  So it was no trouble for him to meet with Tremblay today. He was in Montreal, after all. But it certainly did nothing to heal the rift that he felt beginning to grow between himself and Nikki. He loved her, but of late he had begun to wonder if that was enough.

  “I’m happy to help, if I can,” Octavian continued. “Derek and I go back a long way.”

  The professor smiled awkwardly. “I knew Peter before he came out as a vampire,” he said, and then he glanced quickly at Octavian. “Sorry. A shadow. No offense.”

  Octavian waved it away, though it did make him tense, being called a vampire. The world had learned the truth of their existence years before, thanks to live news coverage of a bloody battle in Venice between shadows—the blood-drinking shapeshifters who were the source of the world’s vampire legends—and a rogue sect of Vatican sorcerers who’d murdered the pope and launched a crusade to exterminate all shadows, whether good or evil. The world was still feeling the aftershocks both of that revelation and of the events that followed. The Roman Catholic Church had splintered and was severely weakened. Shadows lived peacefully, side by side with humanity, but there were still some who embraced the word vampire and all of the savagery it entailed, and those creatures were hunted by human and shadow alike.

  “No offense taken,” Octavian said. “Though you know I’m not one of them anymore.”

  Viviane nodded. “I read that somewhere. How does that work, exactly? How do you stop being a vam—I mean, a shadow?”

  Octavian thought about answering, considered telling her about the thousand years he’d spent in Hell learning magic, and the metamorphosis that had evolved him from shadow to human mage. But then he remembered why he had come.

  “It’s a long story,” he said, remembering how much trouble people had understanding how he could have spent a thousand years in Hell while only five years had passed in the human world. Infernal physics was enough of an answer for someone used to dealing with the supernatural, but just another conundrum for a regular citizen. “Another time, maybe.”

  Guilt and sadness washed over Viviane’s face, as though she had been trying just for a moment to forget her troubles and knew she couldn’t put them off any longer.

  “Sure,” she said. She glanced at the professor and then back at Octavian. “He’s in my bedroom.”

  Octavian gestured for Viviane to lead the way, and at last she did, walking down the hall as if she wished she were anywhere else. When she reached for the bedroom doorknob, her hand trembled. She pushed the door open and stood aside to let them enter first.

  “Jesus,” the professor said, wrinkling his nose. “What’s that smell?”

  Octavian had caught it as well, earthy and damp, like a hothouse full of dying flowers. Both bedroom windows were open, but the warm breeze did nothing to diminish the aroma. And unless Viviane had a wilting, rotten garden hidden underneath her bed, there could be no doubt about the source of the smell.

  A young guy lay sprawled on the bed, legs tangled in the sheets like he’d been sleeping off a bad drunk or ugly nightmares. His arms were flung wide and his head lolled to one side, a thin stream of yellowish drool trailing from one corner of his mouth. His throat rattled with every exhalation and his neck looked swollen, and for a second, Octavian thought of plague . . . he’d seen more than his share of such sickness since his childhood, but that had been centuries ago. And there were no welts or sores or even the sort of inflammation that might suggest plague. The sight of the young man and his constricted breathing reminded him of hideous memories, but this was no plague.

  Still, even if the professor hadn’t already said so, Octavian would have known at first glance that this was no ordinary flu or infection. The smell offered the first clue. The man’s complexion provided the second. No healthy human being had flesh of that particular hue—not so much a jaundiced yellow as a slight greenish tint.

  “His name is Michael, you said?” Octavian asked, glancing at the professor.

  “Michael,” Viviane confirmed from just inside the open bedroom door. She hung back, arms crossed, fretting and tense as though she might flee. “He hates being called Mike.”

  Octavian nodded. “Michael it is, then. How long has he been like this?”

  “Two days that we know of,” the professor said.

  “The sink was leaking,” Viviane said, her voice cracking with emotion, her gaze haunted, as though she blamed herself for her brother’s condition. “The landlord kept promising to fix it, but he never showed up, so Michael came over to take care of it. He didn’t . . . well, I mean, he wasn’t . . . green. Just a little pale. But he didn’t look well and he kept coughing and he was short of breath and he seemed a little weird—”

  “Weird how?”

  Viviane shrugged. “Like he’d been smoking something, y’know?”

  Octavian nodded and moved closer. Something was strange about the unconscious man’s arms and legs, his body hair. Bending to take a closer look, Octavian saw that amid the hair were tiny growths that looked almost like sprigs of something growing there. Something green.

  “He thought he was getting a cold or something,” Viviane went on. “I told him to come in here and lie down and when I checked on him a little while later, I couldn’t wake him up.”

  He investigated the man’s hands. Similar sprigs grew from beneath his fingernails. Unsettling as these things were, the most troubling of Michael’s afflictions were the tiny leaves visible in his right ear and both nostrils. Octavian cursed inwardly, wondering how much time had elapsed since he had gotten in the car with the professor, and how much time he had before Nikki took the stage at The Red Door.

  “It’s awful,” the professor said.

  Octavian shot him a hard look. Of course it was awful. Did he think Viviane needed him to confirm that her brother going catatonic and growing twigs and tiny leaves out of his orifices and pores was something other than a joyous event? Asshole.

  With what he hoped was a comforting glance toward Viviane, Octavian turned back to her brother. The thick rattle of his breathing turned into a choking noise, and Michael twitched several times before he began breathing through his nose and relaxed again. The rattle hadn’t vanished, but lessened.

  Octavian reached for his face. Gently, he pulled back one of Michael’s eyelids. Tiny plant roots had grown across the eyeball like the miniature wiring on an old computer circuit board.

  “Oh, my God,” Viviane whispered.

  Octavian glanced at her. “His eyes weren’t like that before?”

  “I didn’t look at his eyes,” she said. “But check his throat. I thought . . . I wanted to see if I could clear his breathing or do something to help him, so I got a little flashlight and had a look. I would’ve taken him to the hospital, or called an ambulance, but once I saw that, I knew there was nothing a doctor could do for him. When Derek said he knew you . . . Please tell me you can help him?”

  Her smile was brittle, as though she were teetering on the brink of hysteria.

  Octavian did not answer. Conjecture would not help Viviane or her brother at this point. Instead, he worked Michael’s mouth open, massaging the muscles of the lower jaw to get it wider. A dark mass was visible just inside, and at first Octavian thought the man’s tongue had swollen. The smell that wafted out of Michael’s throat was much worse than the rest of the room—moist and filled with rot.

  He glanced around, grabbed the slim flashlight from the nightstand, clicked it on, and shone its beam into Michael Chenot’s throat. The mass had seemed more solid in the dark, but now Octavian could make out the tiny leaves and green and brown strands that made up the mossy clump growing there.

  “Have you ever seen anything like this before?” the professor asked.

  “Not exactly like it, no,” Octavian admitted, stepping away from the bed.

  “What is it?” Viviane asked. “How does something like this happen?”

  Octavian narrowed his eyes, studying the man in the bed. “Things like
this don’t just happen. It could be a curse. It could be that Michael was attacked by something or someone . . . an earthwitch, maybe.”

  “What the hell is an earthwitch?” the professor asked.

  “Usually benevolent, actually,” Octavian replied.

  “But can you help him? Can you get it out of him?” Viviane pleaded.

  “I can try,” Octavian said. Somehow that did not assuage Viviane’s fear for her brother, but he had not come to take away her fear. He’d come to help, if he could. “Do you know what kind of plant this is?”

  The professor glanced away. Obviously he had some ideas. Viviane only frowned and shook her head.

  “It’s cannabis,” Octavian said. “Marijuana.”

  Viviane stared at him and gave a soft chuckle of horrified disbelief. “Pot? Michael’s got pot growing inside him?”

  “Does he smoke regularly?” Octavian asked.

  Her eyes began to glaze over with confusion, as though she were looking inward for an answer.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Plenty.”

  “Where does he get it?”

  At that, Viviane gave a sickly laugh. “Get it? They grow it. Michael and his housemates. They’ve got a whole crop in the basement of their place. Heat lamps and everything.”

  “Have you heard from any of the housemates since Michael came over here the other day?”

  Viviane shook her head.

  Octavian glanced at the professor, then back to his girlfriend.

  “Give me the address,” he told her.

  “Okay. But . . . can you get this stuff out of him? Derek said you . . . that you knew magic.”

  She said the last word as though it embarrassed her. Octavian figured it probably did. Not the word itself, but the suggestion that she might believe it to be more than a word. A lot of people felt that way about magic, right up until they needed it.

  “I’m going to check out the house,” Octavian said. “Try to get to the bottom of this. If I can, that might cure him. But if it doesn’t, I know an earthwitch who probably can.”

  “But you said you thought an earthwitch might have done this!” Viviane said.

  Octavian took a last glance at her brother.

  “Time to find out.”

  MICHAEL Chenot lived in a three-story brownstone with a faded blue awning over the door and a peaked roof with a little walk-out balcony. According to his sister, there were three apartments in the building, all occupied by McGill students. Michael and three friends lived on the first floor, which gave them the best access to the basement, but the students in the other apartments didn’t complain about their little pot farm as long as they were able to share in the spoils once in a while.

  Octavian had learned all of this from Viviane before leaving her place. Now he and the professor stood outside Michael Chenot’s brownstone, studying the dark windows and quiet façade. The place seemed almost abandoned. One of the first-floor windows had a crack in it. A strange moss grew from beneath the window frames on the ground level.

  “You’ve been here before?” Octavian asked.

  The professor clicked the tab on his key fob and his hybrid chirped, doors locking.

  “Never inside,” he said. “I’ve dropped Viviane off a couple of times, but never met her brother.”

  Octavian looked down at the weeds growing up between the cracks in the sidewalk and the concrete pathway leading up to the front door of the brownstone.

  “She didn’t want her brother to know she was sleeping with her teacher,” he said.

  “Why is this relevant?” the professor asked.

  Octavian glanced at him, saw the pain in his eyes, and softened. “It’s not, Derek. Sorry. It would’ve been helpful if you knew the internal layout of the place, that’s all. Since you don’t, I’m going to ask you to stay outside.”

  For a moment, the professor looked relieved, but then he frowned in irritation. “I’m not exactly frail, Peter. I can take care of myself.”

  “No doubt,” Octavian agreed. “But you’re human. Okay, technically so am I. But unless you’re secretly a mage and have real sorcery at your command, then whatever happened to the people in that building is probably going to happen to you the second you set foot inside.”

  The professor looked as though he might argue further, but then he glanced at that strangely silent house and said nothing more. Of course it was impossible to know if there was activity inside a building simply by looking at it, but Octavian had a sense for such things. The place felt still. As if it waited, holding its breath.

  “There’s nothing I can do?” the professor asked after a moment.

  “If I don’t come out in ten minutes, call my cell. If I don’t answer, go over to The Red Door and tell Nikki what happened.”

  The professor nodded and went back to his car, leaning against the door. Octavian bent to study the weeds growing in the sidewalk cracks. There were small leaves with a very familiar shape. He stood and started up the front walk, noticing the ragged grass in the small yard and the tiny plants that had begun to grow.

  Cannabis plants grew like vines inside the door frame, poking out in fringes along the top and bottom. Viviane had given Octavian the keys to her brother’s place, but the knob was crusted over with a strange moss, the lock bursting with a bristly marijuana bud. The key wouldn’t be any use to him at all. He held out a hand and nearly cast a spell that would have burned away the plant growth, then considered another that would have caused it to age and rot, but he worried about the building and the people within it. Instead, he settled for brute force, launching a hard kick at the door.

  It barely shuddered.

  Force was still the answer, but he needed more than he could muster with a kick. A thousand years in Hell had given him time to become a true mage, so intertwined with magic that he wielded it by instinct and reflex. With a gesture, he cast a concussive spell, causing the doorknob itself to explode. The door blew open with a loud ripping noise as tightly latticed tendrils of plant matter tore away from the frame. Where the doorknob had been was a smoking hole in the wood, and the door hung at an angle from its shattered frame, but the spiderweb of pot plants that filled the foyer would not let it fall.

  The plants grew up through the floorboards and from cracks they had forced through the walls. They hung from the light fixture overhead and had woven together in a hanging mesh, a cannabis jungle. The house was filled with the same aroma of damp decay that had come off Michael Chenot, but another smell lingered beneath it—one Octavian knew all too well. This was a different kind of rot. He smelled death in that house, and a moment later, he saw the source.

  He could see the body through the curtain of marijuana plants. The girl lay on the stairs, halfway up to the second floor. Or halfway down, Octavian thought, and realized that made more sense. He grabbed a fistful of plants and tore them away, ripping himself a path toward the bottom of the stairs. Moving nearer, he could see down the short corridor to the left, where the door to the first-floor apartment—the one Michael Chenot shared with his friends—stood partway open.

  The door to the basement was farther back, set into the wall beneath the stairs. The door was closed, but so many pot vines had pushed through between door and frame that the wood had cracked and warped. In some places, it seemed as though cannabis plants were growing right out of the cellar door, and now that he looked more closely, he saw that the same was true of the floor, and the banister at the bottom of the stairs.

  The dead girl was sprawled on the stairs, face first, hands outstretched as though she had not only been crawling, but dragging herself toward the foyer . . . toward the front door. Marijuana stalks and leaves and buds had burst through her dead flesh. The thickest and strongest of the plants grew up out of the back of her skull, but whether it had taken root there or grown up through the stairs and then through her brain, Octavian couldn’t tell. Her vital fluids had dribbled down the stairs and puddled at the bottom, but were dry now.

  She
had been pretty, once upon a time.

  “Jesus,” a voice said.

  Octavian turned to see that the professor had followed him up to the door.

  “What are you doing, Derek? I told you to stay back.”

  But Octavian knew. He’d seen the naked curiosity in the professor’s eyes before, usually on people who ended up dead.

  “I just . . .” the professor said. He shrugged, trying to look penitent and failing. “This is awful. But it looks like whatever happened here, it’s over.” He covered his face with his hands, peering out over the tops of his fingers. “This is like a nightmare.”

  “Enough of that. It’s real enough. And it’s not over.”

  That troubled the professor. He furrowed his brow. “It’s not?”

  “The plants are still growing. They’re thriving.”

  “Is it magic?” the professor asked, taking a nervous step back, looking at the plants fringing the frame of the broken front door. “Witchcraft?”

  Octavian shook his head, tearing away more of the cannabis web, moving toward the open door to the first-floor apartment. “I’ve only ever met one earthwitch capable of something like this. But if one of them had done this, she’d have moved on by now. Whatever did this, it’s still here. Can’t you feel it?”

  “Do you think they’re all dead?”

  “That,” Octavian said, “or they wish they were.”

  “So . . . what is it?” the professor asked, his voice barely a whisper. He’d moved back several paces from the door, looking as though he might be starting to understand how stupid he’d been to come up after being warned off.

  “A wood god, maybe. Some kind of forest spirit, for sure. It must have slipped through.”

  “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  Octavian shot him a hard look that sent him scampering back down the front walk to wait by his car, the way he should have from the beginning. A wood god wasn’t something he would joke about, but to the professor he knew it must seem almost ridiculously fanciful. Octavian would never understand the human mind’s reluctance to believe in the extraordinary even after learning how common extraordinary things were. In a world where vampires and demons existed, why was it so hard to believe in forest spirits and goblins?