Waking Nightmares

by Christopher Golden

  Connelly started to holster his weapon, obviously pleased with himself.

  “It’s just a damn dog, yeah,” Chief Kramer agreed. “But the call that came through said there were dozens of wild dogs running in a pack, Jim. Dozens. Do the fucking math and get back in the—”

  A howl silenced him. The rain pelted the cars loudly and the wind moaned around them, but another sound rose above the noise of the storm. Whining, growling, and snarling, they burst from darkened doorways and beneath sidewalk benches, lunged through the broken glass of the apartment building from which the 911 call had originated, and surged toward the two police cars. In the dark and the storm, Chief Kramer could not count them all, but he thought there might be as many as twenty.

  Connelly wasn’t the only one who should get back in his car.

  “Chief!” Connelly called.

  Kramer jumped onto the hood but his wounded leg gave way beneath him. He collapsed onto the rain-slicked metal and rolled off onto the ground, pain shooting through his leg. His elbow smashed down onto the pavement and his gun spun free, sliding several feet through the driving rain.

  He heard the dogs howling, yipping in savage victory, and knew he would feel their teeth any moment. Connelly yelled for him, came running, and popped off a couple of shots. And where the hell was Moschitto? Still in the goddamn car, which was fine when his chief wasn’t about to get torn apart by a pack of wild dogs, the son of a bitch.

  Kramer scrambled for his gun, pain searing his leg and his elbow—had he cracked bone?—and as he reached for it, he looked up into the sickly yellow eyes of a Doberman. It snarled, lips drawing back to reveal teeth stained with blood, strings of raw flesh caught in its jaws. It had already killed tonight, this dog.

  He lunged for the gun. The Doberman shot forward, jaws opening.

  Connelly shot it twice, then started firing at the others, but there were too many of them. Far too many. They slammed into Connelly, jaws flashing, claws raking his flesh, dragging him down to the ground as they drove their snouts into the soft places, his throat and his stomach, and began to rip him open. Kramer retrieved his gun and tried to help, but after just a few shots the weapon clicked on an empty chamber.

  They were both going to die.

  Headlights washed over the dogs, backlighting them, revealing how many there truly were, and he wondered if what he was seeing was every dog in Hawthorne. Then tires skidded to a halt, spraying an arc of rainwater. Some of the dogs turned toward the new arrival, others merely hesitated, but that hesitation was enough.

  The car’s front doors opened and two people stepped out. The dogs were on them instantly. Snarling, jaws snapping, they attacked the pretty redhead on the passenger side, biting and clawing. Chief Kramer shouted, frantic, thinking she would go down in a mass of undulating fur and tearing flesh like Connelly. Instead, she began to kill them, picking up a collie and snapping its neck, grabbing a bulldog and smashing it against the pavement. Blood—hers and the dogs’—mixed with the rain.

  The driver of the car did not fight the dogs. He destroyed them. Tall and grim as a reaper, already soaked with rain, he put out his hands and brilliant golden light erupted from his palms. Like Zeus’s lightning bolts, he hurled that crackling fire at the dogs nearest to him and they were incinerated where they stood, flaking away to cinder and ash in seconds. Others ran at him, but now he made his hands into fists and the golden light vanished, replaced by a strange pink glow that made Kramer think of something being born.

  The man dropped to a crouch and slapped his palms onto the pavement. That pink glow spread out in all directions and a shock wave traveled beneath the street, jarring Kramer and shaking the cars, cracking glass and setting off alarms. The dogs were all thrown to the ground by the tremor, but the man—the magician—kept walking.

  As the dogs tried to rise, the magician contorted his fingers, muttered something that sounded more like a growl of his own, and then opened his arms wide, still striding among them.

  “Sleep,” he said.

  And the dogs obeyed. They crumpled to the ground, deep in slumber, innocent as newborn pups. Two of them had somehow been out of range of his influence, and they darted into the alley, fleeing from the magician. He put out one hand, fingers hooked into a claw, and blue lightning arced from his empty grasp and froze the animals where they stood. In the rain, Kramer could not tell if they had become stone or ice, or somehow been frozen as flesh and blood, and he did not want to know.

  The magician stood over him, reached down a hand to help him up.

  “From the insignia on your vehicle, I take it you’re the chief of police.”

  “Don Kramer,” the chief said, taking the offered hand and rising to his feet, limping badly on his wounded leg.

  The redheaded girl came over to join them, her clothes torn and soaked through with blood and rain, but otherwise somehow unharmed. She smiled brightly, as though greeting an old friend. The girl had perfect lips. A beautiful smile. Her fangs gleamed in the headlight glare from the car she’d arrived in.

  “Hi,” the vampire said. “I’m Charlotte.”

  “Peter Octavian,” the magician said, nodding in greeting.

  “I know who you are,” Chief Kramer told him. He glanced around at the sleeping dogs. “Who the hell else could you be?”

  “I wish I hadn’t had to kill some of them,” Octavian said, looking at the place where he’d gotten out of his car with real regret.

  Tony Moschitto chose that moment to finally get out of his patrol car. Gun out, he walked carefully among the sleeping dogs, then stared in fear and wonder at Octavian and Charlotte.

  “I’ve come to offer what help I can, Chief,” Octavian said. “You’ve got chaos magic building up in Hawthorne, and if we can’t figure out where it’s coming from, it’s only going to get worse.”

  Kramer had seen video footage of some of the places Octavian had shown up to help. He had often wondered if the magician and his associates kept things from getting worse, or if their presence made them worse. He supposed he was going to find out. After what he had seen tonight—black wraiths wielding curved daggers, people driven to try to kill each other, massive animal attacks—he had known something unnatural was unfolding in Hawthorne . . . something he didn’t have the knowledge or experience to combat. Octavian did, which meant that he would have to roll the dice.

  “I hope to God you know what you’re doing, Mr. Octavian,” Chief Kramer said, glancing again at the dogs. “Have you made any headway figuring this all out? How long until things get back to normal?”

  “We’re working on it, Chief,” Octavian told him, pushing back his rain-soaked hair. “But I can almost guarantee that it’s going to get a lot worse by the time we figure out how to stop it. If we haven’t sorted it out by noon tomorrow, I’d recommend you evacuate the town.”

  Kramer cringed. “The mayor will never go for it.”

  Charlotte laughed. “Maybe not tonight. But ask him again over lunch. If this stuff keeps getting worse, he won’t have much choice.”

  “It’ll have to get better once the sun is up, won’t it?” Kramer asked. “Isn’t that the way this stuff—evil, dark magic, all of that—usually works?”

  “Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t,” Octavian said, his eyes cold. “But look at the sky, Chief. The night’s only going to last a couple more hours, but that doesn’t mean the sun is going to come out today. Whatever happens next, I suspect we’ll be doing all of our fighting in the dark.”

  CHAPTER 10

  AMBER stands in the hot rain and stares up into the eye of the storm. The clouds swirl into a dark, undulating whirlpool in the sky, as though a hole has been punched through the atmosphere and the storm is pouring into space, bleeding chaos out into the universe. Her face upturned, she revels in the hot rain, in the baptism of anarchy that blesses her anew with every drop.

  Voices are raised around her, some in pain and some in terror, some in anguish and some in worship. With a s
ilent laugh, she glances at the clock tower jutting up from the town hall and sees the goddess there, her arms raised to the storm, which even now washes away the blood of her victims. Wraiths dart through the air above her, riding the wind currents, and they open their mouths and vomit blood and gore down upon their goddess like diabolical crows feeding their babies. The goddess opens her mouth and accepts the offering, swallowing what she can and allowing the rest to splash her face and sluice down over her breasts and arms and belly.

  Amber shudders at the sight. She blinks, trying to remember who she is, and why she is here. Shaking, she glances to either side and finds that she is flanked by skeletal wraiths clothed in tatters of black smoke, their carapace faces blank and cruel, all grasping those deadly, curved blades. Terror blooms instantly within her, and yet the wraiths seem not to notice her at all.

  The goddess screams, her voice a cacophony, a thousand maniacs shrieking in disharmony. Other wraiths dart down from the storm, dragging fluttering creatures of iridescent light on the blades of their scythes. They feed the goddess, who is greedier with these gifts, gobbling them down without wasting so much as a strand of that light. The blood she had thirsted for was as nothing compared to her desire for these shifting, glowing treasures.

  It is an abomination. Amber can barely stand the sight of this hideous devouring. Despite the fear that infuses her very essence, she must do something. Yet as she tries to move, to slip away from the wraiths clustered around her, she realizes that she holds something clutched in her hands and that she cannot seem to unclench her fingers. Her limbs are stiff and aching, and she looks down to find the source of her discomfort.

  She is nude. Her skin is a black so dark it is blue, a terrible indigo that has hardened and cracked at the joints, a carapace beginning to form around her muscle and bone. In her hands, she grips the handles of twin ebony scythes.

  Amber throws her head back and screams into the storm, hot rain spattering her skin . . . yet it is not her skin anymore.

  When her voice is raw and her scream dies, she is startled by the silence around her. Save for the wind and the rain, she hears nothing, but she can feel their attention on her. Staggered by the weight of the dread that bears down upon her, she gazes around in expectation that the wraiths are about to descend upon her with their blades flashing. Instead, she sees the goddess up on her ledge on top of the clock tower . . . and watches the hideous queen of chaos fall to her knees and reach downward with the yearning of a spurned lover.

  The wraiths shuffle aside, opening up a path among them. On the wind-and-rain-swept pavement their parting has revealed dead dogs and cats and the skeletons of birds. There are human bodies, though only a very few, ruined and trampled. From beyond the cluster of adoring wraiths comes a solitary human figure, a burly man with his eyes downcast. He walks as though his limbs are controlled by some invisible puppeteer, feet lifting and falling, knees bending . . . and he never looks up.

  In his arms he carries some sort of offering, and Amber understands immediately that this is the thing for which the goddess has yearned. As the man staggers closer, Amber shifts, feeling her stiff limbs grow light as mist, becoming intangible for a moment before coalescing once again.

  In his arms he carries a small iron box, strangely shaped, its locks broken.

  No rain falls upon the man or the box, as though the storm hesitates to touch him.

  The man raises his eyes at last to gaze upon the goddess, and Amber gets a look at his face, realizing that she knows him.

  Norm Dunne, her friend Tommy’s father.

  He falls to his knees and places the iron chest on the cracked pavement. The moment he is no longer touching it, the rain punishes him for letting go, the storm beating down upon him. Norm lowers his face until he can rest his forehead on the street, and his body shakes until Amber understands that he is sobbing.

  The wraiths begin to surround him, slowly encroaching upon him, their blades gleaming wetly in the rain.

  Amber wants to scream again, but she has lost control of her own limbs. Instead, she finds herself drifting toward him along with the others. Her hands lift of their own accord, her black scythes thrusting ahead of her. She tries to hold them back, but they pull at her like hungry dogs struggling to be unleashed, and she knows they will not be satisfied—that she will not be sated—until they are stained with Norman Dunne’s blood.

  THE buzzing of her alarm clock invaded Amber’s slumber, insinuating itself into the fog of her sleeping mind and growing in irritation until, at last, her eyes opened into narrow slits. With a frown, she let her brain sift through the sounds around her. Yes, the alarm clock buzzed, which was strange since she had it set to RADIO. Instead, it emitted a crackling static drone. The rain still beat down upon the roof and pelted the windows, but now it sounded more like sleet. The storm made the timbers of the house groan, as if its foundations were barely able to stay buried in the ground.

  She took a deep breath and glanced at the window, wondering for a moment why everything seemed so off. So wrong. Then she had it—beyond her gauzy white drapes, through the glass, the darkness remained. Her alarm clock showed that 7:30 A.M. had come and gone, but the sky had lightened only a few shades, from night-black to the deepest storm-gray.

  The idea of dragging her ass out of bed and going to class made her want to bury her head under the pillows. She had begun to do that very thing when her mind at last reached a state of wakefulness full enough that the details of the previous day returned to her, and she froze. Fragments of her dreams and visions flashed across her mind. She remembered the thing she had seen in her house last night, and her certainty that she would never be able to fall asleep after such a fright. Obviously she had managed it, but doubted she’d had more than four hours’ sleep, all told.

  Get up, she told herself. Do something.

  The idea almost made her laugh. She was a college kid. What the hell could one twenty-one-year-old girl do against the kind of evil she knew was brewing in Hawthorne? If the things from her visions were now stalking the real world, all she wanted to do was run and hide, or maybe scream.

  But it was here. In my house. And her family lived in that house. They were all in danger, and so were most of her friends. Something had to be done. If she let fear get in her way, she might as well surrender their lives, and her own life as well, to the ancient evil poisoning Hawthorne.

  She slapped a hand down on the alarm clock, silencing the buzz, and threw back her sheets. Her mother had left a basket of clean and folded laundry next to the bed, and she dug through it and yanked out a pair of blue jeans and a dark red top. Stripping out of her T-shirt and panties, she put on clean underwear and then the clothes she’d selected. She slipped her feet into scuffed black lace-up shoes—in this storm, flip-flops just weren’t going to do the job.

  At her bureau, she grabbed an elastic and tied her hair back into a ponytail. A quick glance in the mirror revealed dark circles beneath her eyes, evidence of a night of limited and fitful sleep.

  In the midst of the sound of the rain on the window came another sound, a scritch-scratch noise that might have been a branch scraping the glass, bent by the wind, if there had been a tree that close to the house. Amber studied the reflection of her bedroom window in the mirror, seeing only darkness and rivulets of rain sliding down the glass. She realized she had stopped breathing and forced herself to exhale, then inhale. She couldn’t let her fear get the better of her before she even left the house.

  In the mirror, she saw something move.

  Amber spun and saw the face outside the window, the flat, black, expressionless countenance of a wraith.

  Her hand reached out and snatched her hairbrush from the bureau. Instead of fear, rage surged up inside of her and she hurled the brush at the window, screaming at the creature to go away. The brush thunked into the window frame and fell to the carpet, even as the wraith slithered away.

  Amber ran to the window and looked out to see it clinging to the
outside of the house, the tatters of its clothing half-mist and half-fabric. Where it had hidden its blades she could not tell, but it clung to the siding like a salamander. As she studied it, the wraith glided upward, crawling toward the third floor, where her Gran would be sleeping.

  “No,” she said. “No way.”

  Her fear returned, but this was not fear for herself. It was fear for the old woman whose words she found so difficult to understand, but whose love for her family had always been in evidence.

  Amber bolted from the room, frantic, her heart thudding in her chest as she mounted the steps to her great-grandmother’s attic apartment. Not Gran, she thought. You can’t have her.

  She thought of all the times Gran had cooked for her, and taken care of her when she was little, and sat in her chair knitting while Amber watched whatever foolish TV show had been her favorite that month. Gran liked soap operas and the Three Stooges, and would laugh at both, which had always made Amber laugh, too. Fear carved into her heart and squeezed the air from her lungs, and she took the stairs two at a time until she burst onto the landing at the top of the stairs and saw that Gran’s bedroom door was slightly ajar.

  She nudged it open and hurried in as quietly as she could manage.

  Gran snored. Sometimes it annoyed the hell out of Amber, but this morning it was the most beautiful sound she had ever heard. The old woman lay on her bed, deep in slumber, snoring deeply. The gray light of the stormshrouded day filtered through the curtains, but there was no trace of the wraith. Still, it wasn’t until Amber hurried to the window—careful not to tread too heavily for fear of waking Gran—that she managed to exhale. The wraith had been on this side of the house. She saw no sign of the thing now, but was it still out there?

  Only one way to know.

  She hustled down two flights of stairs, flung open the front door, and ran out into the rain. Turning, she began to scan the outside of the house, but even as she did so, she felt the rain on her face and arms and shuddered in revulsion, as though what poured down out of the storm was the blood of innocents. As in her visions, the rain felt hot. It soaked through her shirt and slid down her skin, and she wanted to run from it.