Waking Nightmares

by Christopher Golden

  Octavian held the steering wheel with both hands. The wipers were at full speed, and still it was difficult to see through the rain.

  “How long?” he asked.

  Keomany didn’t reply at first. He glanced over and saw that she had her eyes closed, trying to get a sense of how badly the natural elements had been disrupted, or perhaps communing with Gaea herself. In the golden glow of the dashboard lights, with her almost regal Asian features, she had the air of a goddess herself. Octavian had always known she was attractive—anyone with eyes could see it—but he felt a new, keener awareness of her now. She really was lovely. But they were friends, nothing more, and he loved Nikki, so he forced himself to focus.

  “Kem?” Octavian prodded. “How long before it overflows?”

  She opened her eyes, frowning with uncertainty. “Two or three days, I think. Not much more.” She looked at him. “And maybe less.”

  Octavian turned off the radio. There was nothing the meteorologist could tell them. They were in the thick of the storm now. The rain had started as a light drizzle while they were driving south on Interstate 95, and hadn’t been much worse than that when they had turned north at the junction with 128. But while they were threading their way east toward the coast and into Salem, it had begun to rain in earnest, and now that they were working their way up toward Hawthorne, it beat down on the car as though a new deluge might be underway.

  The GPS on the dashboard instructed him to turn right in two hundred feet. Octavian complied, and soon they were wending their way along Route 116, which would turn into Hester Street when they crossed the town line into Hawthorne.

  The wind gusted hard enough to sway the car, and Octavian tightened his grip on the wheel. Strangely enough, the rain diminished slightly, enough so that he could click the wipers down to their ordinary speed, and they shushed the rain off the windshield so that when they approached the ENTERING HAWTHORNE sign, he could see it clearly.

  “Turn left in one hundred feet,” the GPS instructed. “Reverse direction.”

  Octavian frowned and glanced at the gadget. The screen showed white and green and red threads to illustrate the street plan of Hawthorne. The red arrow noted their current position as well as the course the GPS wanted them to take. A left. Another left. Essentially a U-turn.

  “Why is it—” Keomany asked.

  “Turn left now, Yancey Road. Reverse direction,” the GPS demanded, its electronic voice somehow more brittle.

  The Hawthorne sign lay ahead. Octavian slowed a bit as they approached it. The headlights picked out glossy black spray paint on the sign. Beneath ENTERING HAWTHORNE someone had written, NOW GO AWAY. The GPS seemed to agree.

  “Reverse direction,” it insisted.

  They rolled across the town line, and the GPS screen blinked off. Octavian glanced at it, then at Keomany, but neither of them spoke. They didn’t need directions anymore. They were driving right into the heart of chaos.

  As an experiment, he pulled out his cell phone. It hadn’t turned itself off and the window showed two bars for a signal. He had spoken to Nikki only an hour before, but he tried dialing her again. At first it seemed the call would go through, but then the screen blinked, two words popping up. CALL FAILED.

  He glanced at Keomany. “Try yours.”

  She did, with the same result. “Too much interference.”

  Octavian popped the GPS off the dash and tossed it into the backseat. They would have to find their own way from this point on.

  Hester Street banked eastward, where it merged with Shore Road, the picturesque stretch of two-lane that ran between deep woods on one side and rocky coastline on the other. Octavian had once been to Plum Island, which was several towns to the north, and been surprised at the expanses of marsh and the cottages and shacks that separated the stilted vacation homes out toward the beach. Hawthorne had none of that. There were huge, modern homes tucked away in the woods on the left and the occasional smaller home—probably 1950s in origin—on the right, high enough above the usual water line that no one had ever thought to put them on stilts.

  Hands steady on the wheel, Octavian bent to get a better look out the windshield, then to glance past Keomany, out her window. In the rain it was hard to tell, but the tide seemed to be out quite a ways. Keomany kept silent, watching the darkened homes as they passed, but peering even more closely at those with lights burning inside, looking for signs of the chaos that she had felt from so far away.

  The woods on the left were flanked by sidewalk now and broken by streets named after presidents and types of trees. They were broad avenues, lined with Federal Colonials and Victorians that had originally been inhabited by ship’s captains and well-to-do merchants more than a century before. Octavian thought they must be nearing the center of town.

  Another quarter mile or so, and Shore Road dipped down, the rocky coast giving way to actual beach. There were shops and restaurants on the left and a boardwalk on the right, just along the water, illuminated by streetlights fashioned to look like Victorian gas lamps.

  “Pull over,” Keomany said, her voice a hushed rasp.

  “What is it?” Octavian asked, hitting the brake and gliding the car up to the curb.

  Keomany got out and slammed the door. Octavian killed the engine and followed, pocketing the keys as he hurried around the front of the car, buffeted by wind and rain. She was already onto the boardwalk, and he quickened his pace so that when she started down a concrete ramp toward the sand, they were side by side.

  “Listen,” she said, wiping rain from her face.

  He did. At first, all he heard was the howling of the wind and the patter of rain on top of the metal roof of the sun shelter they’d just left behind on the boardwalk. Then he realized that he wasn’t listening for a sound, but the absence of one.

  As they stepped onto the sand and walked out onto the beach, Octavian focused. Straining, he could just hear the sound of distant surf. The tide was out, as he had already suspected. But as they kept walking on the soft, damp sand, leaving the illumination cast by the gas lamps behind, he peered into the night and the storm and realized that he could not see the ocean. His shoe splashed in a puddle made by the rain—or maybe left behind by the receding water—but they kept walking, and kept walking.

  “There,” Keomany said, squinting against the rain.

  Her black hair was plastered to her now, and Octavian felt the dampness soaking through his clothes. But he ignored the rain, picking up the pace. Keomany hurried to keep up with him. The sound of the surf grew louder, and at last they could see the white foam rippling on the sand ahead, hundreds of yards from the shore.

  Octavian stopped and looked back. He could see more of the town from here, the docks that had once been for fishermen but had been turned into a small warren of boutiques and cafés for the tourists who visited Hawthorne three seasons of the year. Farther inland, the land rose a bit, and he could see the buildings that composed Hawthorne’s original downtown, including a church with a white steeple bell tower and what he presumed was the city hall, with its clock tower the dark twin of the church.

  He turned back toward the water. Keomany stood beside him, staring, shaking her head.

  “How does this happen?” Octavian asked. “It’s like before a tsunami, the tide pulling out before the . . .”

  He trailed off, turning to stare at Keomany.

  “It’s not that,” she said. “I don’t think there’s a wave coming. I would feel that. It’s as if the ocean has withdrawn, like it’s holding its breath.”

  Octavian allowed himself another moment to stare at the surf, and then he turned back toward the boardwalk and the car. Maybe no tsunami was imminent, but the people of Hawthorne were in grave danger, nevertheless.

  “There’s something here,” Keomany said.

  Octavian glanced around, hands coming up, magical static crackling quietly at his fingertips. “An enemy something?”

  “Yes and no,” she replied. She had her eyes clo
sed and her head tilted back like a dog scenting the wind. The rain pelted her face, dripping from her chin and nose and pooling in her eyes. “The chaos . . . I think it started here. Like a bomb going off, somehow, and what we’re seeing is the fallout from that. It’s an ancient thing, so old it doesn’t have any place in the world anymore—”

  “Something else that’s found its way back in because the church’s wards are breaking down,” Octavian said.

  “Most likely,” Keomany agreed. “But it’s strange. It’s as though what I’m feeling is the echo of a burst of chaos magic, not the source of the magic.”

  “Can you track it to the source?”

  Keomany cocked her head. “Did you miss the part where it’s chaos magic?”

  “Worth a shot,” Octavian said. “Let’s get out of the rain.”

  “Please, let’s,” Keomany replied.

  They started back up the sand toward the boardwalk. Octavian looked around warily. Nothing could be trusted now, not in the middle of a chaos storm. He glanced left and right and then left again, and then he narrowed his gaze.

  “Now what?” Keomany asked.

  “Something’s moving over there.”

  They headed toward the movement, a dark slithering along the sand. Once again Octavian lifted his hands and woke the magic inside him. He could feel it surging through him like an electrical charge, and his fingers and palms prickled with the magic as though they ached to unleash it.

  “Are they crabs?” Keomany asked as they moved closer to the parade of creatures sliding along the sand.

  A few more steps and she could have answered her own question. They were indeed crabs, but not the sort likely to end up on a dinner plate. A line of horseshoe crabs extended from the distant, receded surf all the way up to the rocky seawall below the boardwalk. In the dark and the rain, their strange shells made them look like moving rocks, their tails leaving narrow trails in the sand behind them.

  “All right,” Keomany said. “Now this is just getting fucking weird.”

  Octavian laughed and pushed his hands through his hair, shedding rainwater.

  “Now it’s getting weird?”

  “You know what I mean,” she said, as they walked back to the ramp and started up to the boardwalk.

  “Considering the circumstances under which we met, I’d have thought your definition of weird would be a little more discriminating,” Octavian said, thinking back on the bizarre events that had first brought them into contact with one another, when a demon from a parallel world had begun stealing towns and cities from this one, shifting them from one reality to the next.

  “Point taken,” Keomany replied. “But you know how this sort of thing works. If we don’t get this thing squared away quickly, the crap with the Tatterdemalion could end up looking like a minor tremor of weirdness in comparison.”

  Octavian frowned, tugging his keys out of his pocket. He hoped Keomany was wrong. They’d had a lot more help against the Tatterdemalion. Now it was just the two of them. They had to get to the bottom of this quickly and restore order. If chaos erupted completely and started spilling outward, the effects would only snowball, picking up speed and strength. Octavian might be the most powerful mortal sorcerer in the world, but he was still only one man.

  Two days, more or less, Keomany had said. Two days of chaos.

  KEOMANY sat in the passenger seat, listening to the rain and feeling the rumble of the engine and the road beneath the tires. She looked through the rain-slicked windshield at the main area of the town ahead, the church steeple and the clock tower facing each other over the tops of the other buildings. She closed her eyes, tuning it all out, sifting through the things she could feel, what she could sense of Hawthorne. It had occurred to her that she should tell Octavian that she could no longer feel the presence of Gaea here, that in the rain and the air and the ground beneath them, she felt only the unnatural. She would tell him, of course. But first she wanted to try to break through whatever had tainted Hawthorne, to reach beyond that unnatural poisoning of the town. Gaea was there. She had to be. Go deep enough into the earth or far enough into the sky or out to sea, and Keomany would be able to touch her again.

  Closing her eyes, she let the earth magic inside her reach out and touch the ground beneath them. Under the paved road she found a sewer and in the sewer, weeds that grew through cracks in stone and concrete. With a gentle pressure from her mind, she reached out to those weeds and gave them the smallest encouragement, just to see if she could touch the elements without Gaea’s influence. The weeds grew larger, proliferating violently, shooting cracks through the walls and making chunks of concrete cave into the sewage.

  Keomany exhaled. The car rolled on, leaving the underground damage behind. Eyes still closed, she reached out and touched the rain, drew sigils on the leather seat with her right hand and soundlessly moved her lips, feeling the magic course through her, connecting her to the sky.

  Even before she opened her eyes, she knew the storm had lessened. Her earthcraft was unpredictable here, the tether between herself and Gaea corrupted, but she still had magic. The elements would still respond to her, and that was good. Without that power, Octavian would feel the need to protect her. She would be a liability.

  He clicked the windshield wipers down to intermittent and glanced over at her.

  “Did you do that?” he asked.

  Keomany glanced at him. “Yes.”

  “But you can’t stop the storm completely?”

  Even as he asked, the rain picked up again and wind buffeted the car hard enough that he had to grip the wheel tighter, as if the storm were angry at her for tampering with it.

  “Not even for long, apparently,” Keomany said. Octavian took that in, nodded gravely, and kept driving. Keomany wished she had his confidence. She had endured horrifying things, encountered demons and vampires and had her hometown destroyed, most of the people she had known her entire life murdered. The darkest time of her life, and yet it had also given her the greatest gift she had ever received—a full understanding of her capacity as an earthwitch. Somehow she had found a courage within herself during that time that had endured, but that did not mean she was not afraid now.

  The chaos swirling through Hawthorne made her so uneasy that she felt ill. The thought of it springing from some enemy, some ancient evil driven from the world centuries ago but now returned, terrified her. Yet Gaea had faith in her, and so did Octavian. He had lived so much longer than she had, so many lifetimes, in so many guises, and faced so many horrors, that he marched in without fear. He had been to Hell and back, literally. Someone had to step in and do something about order unraveling in Hawthorne, and if it was just the two of them, Octavian did not mind. A part of him must be afraid—only a fool would not have been—but he refused to be hindered by it. Keomany took inspiration from that, and from Gaea. This town had become a wound in the heart of the world, and she had to help heal it.

  As Octavian turned up the street that went through the center of town, Keomany surveyed the façades of stores and inns and bars. They passed a lawyer’s office and a proud old stone bank building and the office of the Hawthorne Letter , which she assumed was the local newspaper. An empty storefront had once been a video store, a relic of the past. Another had been converted into a campaign office for someone named Castiglione, who was running for mayor. She had seen a smattering of political signs as they drove in.

  The dashboard clock read 11:39 P.M. Thanks to the storm and the lateness of the hour the street was largely deserted, save for people exiting bars and hurrying for their cars. They drove by a two-story post office building and something caught her eye, movement on the roof. Keomany turned to look over her shoulder just in time to see a dark figure dart out of sight. She craned her neck, looking up at the roofs of the other buildings they passed.

  “What are you looking for?” Octavian asked.

  “Not sure.”

  But she kept scanning. Movement overhead made her crane farther
and she saw something diving through the clouds above, emerging long enough to be momentarily silhouetted against the storm by the lights of Hawthorne and then lost in the morass again.

  “There’s something up there,” she said.

  Octavian bent over the steering wheel, trying to peer up into the clouds.

  “I don’t see anything,” he said after a moment, his eyes gleaming in the glow of the dash.

  “You’re driving. Trust me,” she said.

  “I do. Want me to pull over?”

  Keomany considered it, but they were both soaked to the skin from standing out on the beach in the rain.

  “Let’s keep driving. Go slowly. Maybe we can follow one of them. We need to figure out what they are, and that’s more your area than it is mine. I know elemental magic. You’re more intimate with demons.”

  Octavian hesitated a second, bending over the steering wheel to look up at the sky again. “I don’t like the sound of that.”

  “Bad word choice, maybe,” Keomany said.

  “I forgive you. Find me something to catch. Something I can get answers from.”

  As Octavian slowed the car, she peered out the window again, searching for some sign of the black things that were lurking in the storm that had come to Hawthorne. Half a block later, as they neared the park at the center of town where City Hall and the old white church faced one another like opposing armies, she spotted another of the things. It clung to the brick exterior of an apartment building that had an ice cream shop on the first floor. Like some kind of skeletal salamander, it stuck to the bricks, looking down upon the people who were coming out of a trendy Thai restaurant, having drunk their way to last call at the bar inside. Umbrellas blossomed from their hands, buying them a few moments to exchange farewells.

  “You’d better stop after all,” she said.

  Octavian pulled the car to the curb by a parking meter. Keomany got out quickly and turned to get a better look at the dark shape clinging to the building, but it had vanished.