Waking Nightmares

by Christopher Golden

  From the days of its founding, the Roman Catholic Church had spent nearly two thousand years driving unnatural things, creatures of darkness that preyed on humanity, out of the world. The Vatican trained sorcerers to wall off this reality from others, to keep those creatures out. The accumulated knowledge of those sorcerers, passed down from the time of Christ, had been kept in a book called The Gospel of Shadows. But that sect of sorcerers had been corrupted, and eventually destroyed, and the church had fallen into disarray. Splinters of the church still existed, but without the central power that Rome had represented, and The Gospel of Shadows had been lost to them.

  No one was keeping the monsters out anymore. They were slow to realize that the barriers between worlds were deteriorating, but once in a while, something slipped through. Considering the role he’d played in the destruction of the church and the loss of the book, Octavian did what he could to combat whatever dark forces slipped through. But monstrous incursions into this world had become more and more common. He couldn’t be everywhere.

  For tonight, however, he found himself in the right place at the right time.

  No, he chided himself, the moment the thought crossed his mind. Not the right time. Too late for the girl on the stairs. Too late, he figured, for everyone who lived in this house, except perhaps—if he worked quickly—for Michael Chenot. And if he didn’t stop this here, how many others would die? Somehow the entity, whatever it was, had gotten into the cannabis growing in the basement here. But now that it had spread out into the yard, where grass and weeds grew, its influence would touch those things as well. Plants and trees, all over Montreal. And who knew where it would end.

  The time for hesitation had passed. If he tried to tear his way through the jungle inside that house in search of someone who might still be clinging to life, he might be hours, and Michael would end up like the girl on the stairs. Even if he found someone alive, the first step in trying to save them would be to kill the thing growing inside them.

  Octavian took a step forward and felt his shoe catch on something. He looked down to see the plants that had started to curl around his ankles.

  “Enough.” He reached out his left hand and grabbed a fistful of the cannabis lattice. With his right, he began to sketch at the air with contorted fingers, muttering a few words in a guttural tongue that had been old before Babylon. It was not death magic—Octavian feared the consequences of wielding death—but the outcome was the same.

  The plants began to turn brown and then to wither, dying all around him. The lattice jungle of cannabis wilted and drooped and decayed so badly that it started to fall apart. Dust to dust, Octavian thought. That was the nature of the spell he’d cast, speeding up the process of entropy, hurrying something toward its natural corruption.

  The effect spread, plants dying and withering all through the foyer and hall, and up the stairs. He watched the dead girl on the steps a moment, hoping that it would affect only the plants that had taken root in her and not her own dead flesh. If the spell jumped from the cannabis to her, it might do the same to the others in the building, and if any of them had a chance of survival, that would be the end of them. But he’d had no other choice. Doing nothing would have killed them just as surely.

  Octavian moved down the hall, brushing away the dry, rotted remains of the cannabis web with ease. He went to the open door of Michael Chenot’s apartment and pushed it open the rest of the way, looking inside. A dead man sat on the sofa, almost as though he had died watching the television. If not for the pallor of his skin and the wilting plants growing where his eyes ought to have been, he might almost have been alive.

  The entropy spell spread. Octavian moved deeper into the apartment. He would have to confront the wood god before he left, but he wanted to see if anyone was still alive.

  The floorboards creaked underfoot, but then the walls seemed to do the same. Plaster flakes drifted down from the ceiling. He glanced at the walls and saw that the paint had begun to yellow and peel. A crack spread slowly from the upper corner of the door frame.

  “Shit.” The cannabis had so completely infiltrated the house that it had become a part of it. The entropy spell was eating away at the building itself. It wasn’t going to be safe in here for much longer.

  He ran, darting through rooms. Two other bodies, long past hope. But there were the upstairs apartments to think of.

  Octavian raced back into the hallway, hearing the creak and moan and crack of the brownstone’s structural integrity beginning to crumble. Dried, desiccated pot plants gave way like spiderwebs as he ran for the stairs. But he hadn’t made it halfway up to the second floor before a scream of grief and fury rose from beneath the building.

  From the cellar.

  Green shoots erupted between floorboards, and then the boards themselves splintered. The dust of desiccated pot plants sprayed across the foyer. Octavian took a step back, raising his hands, and his fingers contorted into claws as he cast a spell to solidify the air into a defensive shield in front of him.

  The green shoots twined together, branches and leaves and flowers growing off them with a fluid grace, sculpting a figure. Vines crawled along the floor, anchoring it there, spinning a new sort of web. From the budding figure, she bloomed, unfolding herself and standing up to her full height, nearly two feet taller than Octavian. Her hair was golden corn silk, spilling down her back, and her body pulsed with some semblance of breath. The wood god had a female form, lithe and strangely erotic, and Octavian thought of a thousand fairy tales, and the men who had been lured into the forest to find fleeting bliss and enduring regret.

  Her mouth opened, dewy sap stringing between her newborn lips.

  “You’ve hurt me,” the wood god said.

  Octavian made a fist of his right hand, summoning a raging flame. Entropy had not worked on her, but fire might. All he needed was a moment to distract her so that he could work a banishment spell and drive her from this reality.

  “You don’t belong here,” he told her.

  “I don’t belong?” she said, sneering. “It’s you who are the abomination here. You and your accursed civilization!”

  She lunged at him, fingers hooked into thorny claws, ready to flay his flesh from his bones. Octavian lifted a hand, a sphere of fire burning around his fist.

  Which was when the floor gave way, entropy crumbling it away beneath his feet.

  Fuck.

  NIKKI Wydra took the stage at The Red Door with a smile on her face, but it felt like a mask. The applause filled the room, blanketing her in welcoming energy and the happy aura of people who were, in that moment, exactly where they wanted to be. She let it wash over her, taking strength from it as she always did. With a nod toward the band—a handful of Montreal musicians she’d played with the last time she’d come through town—she launched into “Not Enough to Exist” and a cheer went up from the audience. People started to move to the music and some to dance. It was the right choice, a track off her second album that had never found its way onto the radio but had taken off online and quickly become a favorite among her fans.

  She tried to focus, feeling that she owed these people that much. They had put up their hard-earned cash for this show, and she wanted to make it worth their while, to connect with them. The set list had been cultivated with care. She pruned it every show, adding and subtracting, playing the best and most popular of her own songs, plus a few of her favorites from other artists. Sarah McLachlan’s “Ice Cream” didn’t always go over as well as she wanted, but she played it for herself, not for them. For them, she did “Cantankerous Bitch,” from her first album—she’d come to hate that song, but God they loved it.

  Finishing up the opener, she scanned the audience. On the last note, the hooting and cheering began. She said something appreciative into the microphone, then repeated it in French, but wasn’t really paying attention. She smiled, but her gaze slipped across the faces, searching for the only one that really mattered. With a glance into the wings, she sough
t him backstage, but there was still no sign of Peter.

  Nikki figured most girlfriends would have been pissed if their guy didn’t show up when he promised, especially for something like this. And with the too-long silences and unspoken pressures that had been putting a strain on them over the past year, even Peter couldn’t have blamed her. They had a lot of things they needed to sort out.

  But she wasn’t angry; she was worried. Peter Octavian wasn’t the sort of man who broke his word without a damn good reason, and for him, a damn good reason probably had sharp claws.

  Where are you, Peter? she thought, peering out at the crowd. Some of the faces she saw looked restless, and she realized that she must look a little lost on the stage.

  “Cantankerous Bitch!” someone called from backstage, off to her left.

  She turned and saw him there, tall and lanky, that laconic gunfighter stance, and relief flooded through her. He wore a mischievous grin, and no wonder—shouting for a song he knew she hated—but he looked a wreck. His shirt was spattered with what could only be bloodstains and there were scratches all over his face, along with what looked like soot smudges. His night had not gone well so far, but he was there and in one piece. God, she loved him. Whatever distance there was between them, she wanted to erase it.

  With a throaty laugh, she turned back to the audience and grinned. This time, the smile was real.

  “My boyfriend wants me to play ‘Cantankerous Bitch,’ ” she said.

  The audience erupted with clamorous applause and shouts for the song.

  “You think he’s trying to tell me something?” Nikki asked her audience, who answered with whistles and hoots.

  They started to chant—“Bitch! Bitch! Bitch!”

  Nikki laughed and shook her head. The song was supposed to come later in the set, but for once, she wanted to play it. She turned to the band and signaled them, nodding. A stagehand ran out and traded her electric guitar for the acoustic she’d opened with, and she hammered out the first, crashing chord.

  The crowd sang along.

  When she’d hit the last note, she ran to the wings, whipping off her electric. The applause raged, but she could spare a few seconds while she swapped guitars again. She ran into Peter’s arms, smiling, and shook him.

  “Where the hell were you? You scared the shit out of me!”

  His gray eyes brightening, he smiled the lopsided grin that had first made her want him. “You know the expression ‘Let sleeping gods lie’?”

  Nikki frowned. “It’s ‘dogs.’ ”

  “The rule works the same either way,” Peter said, speaking up to be heard over the crowd. “I’ll explain later. Get back out there.”

  Then he kissed her, and Nikki pressed her body against his, thinking about washing all of that blood and soot off him later tonight. How he could make her so frightened, make her laugh, frustrate the hell out of her, and make her want him all at the same time, she would never understand.

  They kissed deeply, the bristly stubble on his face scraping her skin, inspiring her to kiss him all the harder.

  She pulled back, narrowing her eyes, finally figuring out the taste and smell of him, and at last noticing how bloodshot his eyes had become.

  “Holy shit,” she said. “Are you high?”

  Octavian laughed and pushed her away. “Go. I’ll tell you all about it over a late dinner.”

  Staring at him in amused disbelief, she backed away. “I can’t wait.”

  Nikki took her acoustic from the stagehand who held it out for her, slung it over her shoulder, and ran back onstage, basking in the cheers of her audience. That was life with Peter Octavian—always fighting against the darkness, and finding their way back into the light.

  CHAPTER 2

  AMBER Morrissey knew a lot of girls on campus who didn’t care if they showed up to class looking like crap. Her best friend, Tami, had been known to roll out of bed, pull on a battered pair of out-of-date Uggs, brush her teeth, and go to class in whatever clothes and whatever condition she’d been in the night before. Pajama pants or stained sweats, a tangled nest of hair, a faded T-shirt . . . in warmer weather, when she couldn’t cover up with a sweatshirt, Tami would spare the extra seconds to put on a bra. Amber called it “junkie-hooker chic.”

  No one liked getting up for an early class, but Amber couldn’t go out without putting at least the minimum effort into her appearance. This morning she’d showered, pushed her coppery red hair back with a clip, and pulled on a clean, fitted cream top and a pair of jeans. She never managed even the slightest touch of makeup this early in the morning, but her face would have to do.

  As she walked along one of the tree-lined paths on Hawthorne University’s main academic quadrangle, she inhaled deeply of the September air. It had been warm yesterday, but now it felt more like mid-September—no longer summer, but not quite autumn yet. The morning felt good, though she would never have admitted it. She took a sip of her coffee, and all was right with the world.

  Hawthorne had not been her first choice of colleges. She loved her family, but going to the university in her hometown felt a lot like settling. There was no question that it was a great school, and it was the best of the universities to which she had been accepted. But for the first couple of years, it had almost felt as if she were still in high school. Too many of her childhood friends had not gone to college at all, or were attending the community college in Jameson, just a couple of towns away.

  Then, this past summer, she had spent a month in a study-abroad program in Talloires, France, and had barely seen any of her old friends before she’d left or after she had returned. Now she only ever heard from them if they got in touch on Facebook. She didn’t want to leave them behind completely—they would always mean something to her—but she was starting her junior year in college, and she had a new life, with new friends, and a future to start living.

  “Morning, Amber,” a voice said.

  She glanced over to see Ben Draper cutting across the grass to join up with her. He was a sweet guy whose tufted mess of hair, big hands, and goofy grin always made her think of him as a sort of giant puppy-boy. Amber always wanted to hug him, but she had a feeling that Ben hoped there were other things she wanted from him as well.

  “Hey, Ben.”

  “You forgot my coffee again, I see,” he joked.

  Amber feigned regret. “I’d give you mine but, y’know, cooties.”

  Ben grinned. He teased her about bringing him coffee nearly every time they had this class together. She was never without a cup, and happily endured the envious gazes of others in the class who hadn’t had the foresight to fortify themselves with caffeine before trudging onto the quad.

  “No one should have to get up this early on a Wednesday morning,” Ben said, falling in beside her as they approached Baker Hall, where the history department was headquartered.

  “It’s almost nine A.M.,” Amber said. “Most people with regular jobs are already at them.”

  “I know,” Ben replied. “Obviously I need to be independently wealthy, so I can sleep as late as I want.”

  Amber nodded, letting the sarcasm flow. “Yeah. So many history majors become independently wealthy.”

  He laughed and bumped her as they went up the front steps into the old brick academic building.

  “Hey! Watch the coffee,” she warned him.

  Properly chided, Ben stood aside and let her precede him through the inner door. Baker Hall had a musty, old-book smell that never went away, but Amber loved it. It was one of the oldest buildings on the Hawthorne campus, and she knew if she had the opportunity to search its closets and basements and eaves, she would probably find generations of history of the students and professors who had passed through these halls.

  “All right,” Ben whispered, taking a breath. “Ninety minutes of Professor Varick. I can make it.”

  “Stop. He’s not that bad,” Amber said.

  Ben rolled his eyes. They had this argument at least once a week. Pr
ofessor Miles Varick had a reputation for being acerbic, impatient, unsympathetic, and overall a merciless bastard. But he also had a reputation as a fantastic lecturer, from whom a great deal could be learned by a student willing to pay attention. Amber had found all of those things to be true. Professor Varick began his Byzantine History lecture at precisely 8:50 A.M., the scheduled class time, and he took his time, investing the stories of Byzantium with suspense and humor and a vibrancy that dusty books could rarely muster. When he finished his lecture, he would glance up, breaking the spell he had cast over the class, and the second hand would be ticking toward the final moments of the period.

  Varick’s Byzantine History was the one class Amber never minded waking up for.

  She drained the last of her coffee and dumped it the trash bin outside the women’s bathroom. Ben waited for her, then gestured for her to enter the classroom before him.

  “Go on. He likes you. Maybe he won’t notice me.”

  “I’m not sure he likes anyone,” Amber whispered. “But he likes people who take his classes seriously.”

  “How could you take them any other way?” Ben said.

  Smiling, Amber preceded him into the room. More than half the class had already arrived. Professor Varick perched on the edge of the desk at the front of the classroom, leafing through a thick leather-bound volume with ragged-edged pages like a priest searching for just the right prayer. The priestly analogy was one that popped up in Amber’s mind frequently. Something about Miles Varick’s lean shape and stern countenance brought her back to her Catholic school days. The man had haunted blue eyes and graying hair cropped close, likely so that he could pay as little attention to it as possible.