Waking Nightmares

by Christopher Golden

  “But where did the storm come from?” Miles asked.

  Octavian looked over at the rain-slick window. Charlotte stood looking back, and he saw that she had bitten into her lip and now licked the blood from her mouth.

  “According to one of the clay tablets found by de Sarzac during the excavation of the Sumerian city of Lagash, the storm had a mother.”

  The people in the room had fallen silent, staring at him. The rain pelted the window and the wind shook the building. Hospital noises continued in the corridor, but in that room, no one breathed, until at last Amber spoke.

  “Navalica,” she said.

  Octavian studied her frightened eyes and saw the moment when grim determination made her stand a bit straighter. She wanted to live. She wanted to fight. He admired her for that.

  “Time had eroded some of the tablet. No name could be found for the mother of the maelstrom. But I suspect it may be her, yes. The pieces connect.”

  “But why here?” Chief Kramer demanded.

  “Why anywhere?” Miles whispered.

  “We’ll find an answer,” Keomany said. “While we’re all trying to stay alive, we’ll find an answer.”

  “The important thing,” Octavian added, “is that all of this is going to get much worse if we don’t stop it.”

  He looked at the young man in the hospital bed. “I believe if we can get that iron chest, we’ll understand much more about why here, and why now. If Amber’s visions hold true, your father means to get it and bring it to Navalica. We need to get the chest before he can do that.”

  Tommy brightened, looking for the first time like something more than an injured child, and more like a man. He glanced from Chief Kramer to Amber and then pushed himself up into a sitting position.

  “He doesn’t know where it is,” Tommy said. “The last my dad knew, it was on the boat. We left it there when the ambulance came to take him to the hospital. But I went back yesterday after I left the hospital. I . . . I thought it might be valuable and I wanted to make sure no one took it.”

  “He’s under the influence of the goddess,” Keomany said. “It’s possible he can sense the chest. That he’ll find it anyway.”

  Chief Kramer stood straighter, grasping at something he understood, a purpose he could claim.

  “Maybe, but this gives us a chance of getting to it before he does. Where is it, Tommy?”

  “I brought it over to Mr. Hodgson’s house,” Tommy said.

  “Bill Hodgson, the lobsterman?” Chief Kramer asked.

  Tommy nodded. “He’s always telling stories about diving on old wrecks and things he brought up from the bottom. I thought he could figure out where it came from and what it might be worth.”

  Chief Kramer looked at Octavian. “I’ll get my car and meet you out front.”

  Octavian nodded. “Let’s go. We’ve wasted too much time already.”

  But as they all began to move toward the door, Amber shouted and blocked the way.

  “No,” she said, eyes wide, shaking her head. “No way. My family is . . . they’re infected or something. The only reason I left them was to find help. I know you had to figure this all out, and I get that you have to find this treasure chest, or whatever the hell it is, but I can’t go anywhere but home. I left them, don’t you understand? I need help.”

  Octavian glanced at Keomany and Charlotte.

  “We’ll help,” Keomany promised.

  But Octavian’s attention had caught on a single word.

  “What do you mean, ‘infected’?” he asked.

  “They’re changing,” Amber said, taking Miles’s hand. “They’re changing into those things.”

  An icy shudder went through Octavian. “Wraiths, you mean? Like the one that killed Professor Varick’s mother?”

  Amber nodded. “My great-grandmother looked like she was changing, too. I tried to wake her, but I couldn’t, and then I ran out of the house, and saw Miles, and we thought if we talked to Tommy and figured out how it all started, we could stop it. I could save them.”

  Octavian didn’t like the sound of that at all.

  “Chief Kramer,” he said, “Keomany, Charlotte, and Professor Varick will go with you. I’ll stay with Amber. Whether you get to the chest before Norman Dunne or not, catch up with me at Amber’s house.”

  Amber’s expression softened. “Thank you.”

  Octavian said nothing. He had seen these wraiths in action, and it had never occurred to him that they might have begun as humans. Nor had Chief Kramer mentioned anything about people vanishing, or any other instance of such a transformation.

  Charlotte stood next to him. “You don’t want me with you?”

  Keomany shot her a sharp glance that could only have been jealousy. The chaos that had been unbridling the urges of so many had created a dangerous dynamic among the three of them, almost without Octavian’s realizing it. Much better for them to be parted for now. He thought of Nikki and wondered if she had begun to worry yet that she hadn’t heard from him. The lust that rose in him, the animal passion of it, looked at Keomany and Charlotte—a witch and a vampire—and wanted the magic in them, something he could never get from Nikki. He wondered if it was only the chaos, or if the desire had been in him all along.

  “You stay with Keomany,” he told Charlotte, aware of the others all watching him. “If you run into trouble, the two of you are better off together.”

  Chief Kramer had his radio out as he went into the corridor, Officer Moschitto at his side. Amber thanked Tommy Dunne, and then she and Miles followed the policemen. Charlotte went next.

  Keomany said nothing, only walked over to Octavian, took his hands, and pressed her body against him. A fire of lust ignited inside him. He could feel every curve of her, and it felt to him as though she burned with a heat that prickled his skin, even through his clothes. She stood on her toes and pressed her lips to his throat in a kiss that weakened him for a moment.

  Then he pushed her back, held her away from him.

  “No,” he said.

  She turned her face from him in shame. “I know. It’s making me crazy.”

  “It’s going to make us all crazy before too long.”

  And then Keomany was gone, she and Charlotte hurrying down the corridor with Moschitto, Professor Varick, and the chief. Octavian turned and thanked Tommy, who stared at him in fascination, and then walked out into the corridor, where Amber awaited him.

  “My family,” Amber said as the two of them rushed down the hall. “Do you think you can help them?”

  “I’ll do whatever I can,” he said.

  Octavian wanted to reassure the girl, to promise her that her parents would be all right, but he didn’t have the heart to lie.

  CHAPTER 14

  THE storm had grown worse. As Octavian sped through Hawthorne, the rain drummed on the roof of the car and punished the windshield with such force he thought the glass would crack. He bent over the steering wheel in search of a clear view, but the hot rain had turned even more oily, and the wipers did little more than smear it into long streaks. As he rounded a corner, the tires skidded on slick pavement, forcing him to slow down.

  A wraith flitted across the street, black smoke and skeletal piping outlined in the headlights, before vanishing into the rain. Octavian tapped the brakes, slowing further.

  “Don’t stop,” Amber said from the passenger seat. “Please.”

  Reluctantly, he drove on. She was right, though. The only way to help the people of Hawthorne was to find Navalica and destroy her, to end this storm and send the wraiths back to wherever they had come from.

  “There are more of them, I think,” Amber said, peering out her window.

  They had seen at least a dozen in the scant miles they’d traveled from the hospital, clinging to houses and perched on roofs, slipping through windows and doors. The chaos magic that prickled Octavian’s skin and suffused his heart with a simmering violence and lust had gripped many people in Hawthorne. The evidence was all
around them. Though most of the residents remained indoors, they had seen a mob chasing a man down a narrow side street, three separate bloody brawls, and various couples fucking savagely on street corners and up against buildings. In the storm of anarchic magic, illuminated only by flashes of crisp blue lightning, it had become impossible to tell the difference between sex and rape.

  A wraith flashed by the window, flying ahead of the car into the churning storm, dragging an amorphous butterfly of color-shifting light beneath it on the hooks of its curved blades. What were they taking from people, Octavian wondered. Souls? Vitality? Morality?

  “There may be more,” Octavian said. “Or they’re just not as worried about being seen now. The storm’s getting stronger. It’s building to something. Whatever purpose they serve, they’re not trying to hide it anymore.”

  Octavian thought another moment, troubled. The girl beside him was beautiful, her body young and ripe, and he could sense that the chaos had worked its dark, twisted magic on her hungers just as it had on his own. But she was young, still in college, and he was in love with someone else. There was nothing between them. They didn’t even know each other.

  He noticed her squirming in her seat and saw her frustration. The things the chaos did to her were making her angry. Like Octavian, she refused to give in to those baser instincts. But the wraiths had no such hesitation.

  “It could be that they’re just excited,” he said quietly, his voice barely audible over the pounding rain. “They’re in a frenzy.”

  Amber settled back in her seat, gaze lowered, as though she no longer wanted to see what the storm had brought to her hometown.

  “So, what, they’re like sharks when there’s blood in the water?” she asked.

  Octavian didn’t think she meant for him to answer, so he kept quiet. He glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the blue lights of Officer Moschitto’s patrol car flashing. Chief Kramer had decided that they should have a policeman with them to add an official element to whatever actions Octavian might have to take. The chief did not understand that official meant nothing now. The police might help some of the people in town make it through the next few hours, but when it came to surviving to see another sunrise, the chief and his officers were not a factor.

  “Turn left on Herman Street, right up here,” Amber said.

  Octavian signaled for the turn, that tiny gesture a small victory for order.

  But then he saw the car ahead. An old Honda had gone over the curb, scraped its passenger side along a telephone pole, and then crashed into a stone retaining wall in front of an old Victorian set back from the road.

  “Mr. Octavian,” Amber started.

  “I see them.”

  There were people in the car, and they were screaming. He counted three, but he couldn’t be sure because the wraiths had come. They darted around the car, long thin arms flashing in through shattered windows, curved blades hacking and tearing. The rain and the wraiths’ tattered clothing whipping in the wind blotted out much of their view, but the screaming continued. Arms flailed but passed through the creatures. They could reach into their victims’ flesh, into their very souls, and no one could touch them.

  “That’s Mrs. Robideau’s car!” Amber said, sounding much younger than her twenty-one years. “They live right down the street from me.”

  Octavian aimed his car at the Honda, turned on the bright lights, and laid on the horn. He hit the brakes, and the tires skidded on the oily pavement. The wraiths were in a frenzy around the crashed Honda—sharks in the water, like Amber had said—but now they all looked up. The bright lights seemed to strip some of the mist away from them, leaving them nothing more than slim black bones, but the effect lasted only a moment.

  They darted away from the Honda. Octavian slammed the car into park and popped open the door, his skin prickling with magic summoned up by instinct. A rich silver light leaped in arcs of energy between his fingers as he stepped out into the rain, but already they were fleeing. He counted five wraiths, and three of them had those amorphous colorful lights speared on their blades, dragging beneath them.

  Octavian didn’t know exactly what they were stealing from people, but he had seen souls manifested in the world before, and they looked nothing like this. He suspected it was something that fed chaos, that the wraiths fed on human passion or imagination.

  Officer Moschitto pulled up, tires skidding so badly on the slippery rain that his patrol car bumped the curb and the big blue mailbox on the sidewalk.

  “You know where Amber lives?” Octavian asked as the cop jumped out of his car.

  “Just around the corner,” Moschitto replied.

  “Do what you can for these people and catch up to us there,” Octavian said, and he slid back behind the wheel of his car.

  “They all took off in the same direction,” he said. “Maybe it’s a coincidence, but we’re going the same way. The wraiths were headed toward your house.”

  Octavian put the car in gear and hit the gas, the tires spinning as he made the turn onto Herman Street. Amber’s house was number 136, and he bent to stare through the smeared windshield, searching for any sign of the wraiths, hoping he was wrong about their destination.

  It took him several seconds to realize Amber hadn’t replied. Frowning, he glanced at her and saw that she was staring down at her hands, which were turned palm upward.

  “Amber?” he ventured.

  Over the drumming of the rain on the car, he hadn’t heard the sound at first, but now he could make out the low hitching of her breath, and he saw the tears on her cheeks.

  “Look at me,” she said.

  Octavian skidded to a halt again, only blocks from her house. Blood running cold, he turned on the interior light. He clenched his jaw to keep from cursing out loud, because he didn’t want to scare the girl. He was the sorcerer, the one who had lived a life that to her must have seemed almost eternal. If he didn’t know how to help her, she would think her death was imminent. Octavian thought it might be.

  The skin of her forearms had taken on a darker tint and begun to harden. It had an almost chitinous texture, like the shell of an insect. Her fingers had grown longer and narrowed ; soon they would be claws.

  “When did this start?” he asked.

  Her head shook and she gave a tiny shrug. “I was itchy. I scratched . . . I thought it was just itchy,” she said, an edge of hysteria in her voice. Then she looked up at him. “What will it feel like, do you think? Being one of them?”

  Octavian reached out and touched her arm. She flinched, then stared at the silver light sparking from his hand.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Does it hurt?”

  “A little.”

  “Give me your hands,” he said.

  She turned to him, there in the illumination of the dome light with the rain pounding above them and the darkness of the storm cradling the car, rocking it with gusts of wind. They linked hands, and Octavian closed his eyes.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Hush,” he said.

  Octavian felt the magic within him reacting to the dark magic infecting her, transforming her. He let his mind slip back to his centuries in Hell, to demons and twisted souls he had encountered there, to things that had tried to taint him and enslave him. The filth of those things, their poison, felt something like this.

  He took a deep breath and exhaled, forcing away the violence and lewd thoughts the chaos storm had raised within him. A second breath, and this time when he exhaled, he let the magic flow from him, the energy of it crackling along his arms and through his hands, then spreading up Amber’s arms and engulfing her in silver light. She let slip a tiny noise, a gasp of surprise or pleasure or both.

  Octavian spoke.

  “Káto apó to dérma kai sto esoterikó ton ostón, píso apó ti génnisi kai tin koiliá tis mitéras tou, katharízei tin kardiá kai sárka ólon ton dilitiriáseon, káthe kakó, kai i kilída tis skoteinís mageías.”


  Amber’s eyes fluttered as if she were waking from a dream. He released her hands and she reached up to wipe her tears.

  “It stopped itching,” she said, but when she held up her hands, they remained altered, the flesh of her arms like hard carapace, her fingers like claws. “But . . .”

  “I did a purification spell,” Octavian said. “It might cleanse you completely, or it might only slow whatever is being done to you. If I can figure out the nature of this transformation, that will help.”

  She stared at her hands, horror etched on her face. Octavian could feel her fear and uncertainty, but he needed her attention.

  “Amber,” he said firmly. “Your family.”

  She nodded. “Drive.”

  The tires spun as Octavian hit the gas. They spoke not a word as the car sped through the storm, engine growling, houses flashing by in the unnatural dark. He had felt the dark power working inside Amber and wondered how many hours had passed since it had first begun its work on her parents and great-grandmother.

  “Right here,” she said. “On the left.”

  He turned into the driveway of the well-kept, bone-androse-hued Victorian and killed the engine. It loomed above them, almost brooding, and Octavian felt a presence filling the house as though the walls were its womb and it cried out to be born.

  “There!” Amber said, pointing at a wraith darting in through a second-story window. But there were others, some on the roof and some flitting around the turret at the top like wasps around a nest.

  “Stay in the car,” he told her, stepping out and pocketing his keys.

  Amber got out. “I don’t think so.”

  She rushed for the door, slipping on the driveway a little before regaining her footing. Octavian chased her, passed her, reached the front door first and didn’t let her bother using the keys she fumbled from her pocket. With a wave of his hand, the door swung inward.

  A wraith lunged out at them. Amber screamed as Octavian thrust both hands forward, hurling concussive magic at the thing. The spell passed right through it and struck a table in the foyer, shattering a vase and smashing framed family photos, and then the wraith was upon Octavian, black blades flashing, ripping into him without cutting his skin. They slashed at his consciousness, at his mind, and he shouted in pain and confusion.