Waking Nightmares

by Christopher Golden

  He staggered back. Amber screamed again and it hesitated.

  Octavian snarled, reached out, and thrust his own hand into the black, smoky ribbons that were its garments. He muttered words learned in the torment of Sheol and the smoke solidified. His fist closed around the narrow pipe of its neck and he summoned a deeper magic, old as angels, and the wraith stiffened, then froze solid, its essence turned to anthracite coal.

  With a kick, he shattered it.

  “What did you—”

  “Go!” Octavian snapped. “Where’s your parents’ room?”

  Rain-slicked hair veiling her face, Amber bolted, leading him through the foyer and up the first flight of stairs. His skin prickled, a dim golden light dancing from his fingers as he pursued her, glancing around for any other wraiths.

  Amber stopped in the open doorway to her parents’ room, then backpedaled until she hit the corridor wall. Octavian hurried past her and entered the room.

  The Morrisseys lay in their bed, eyes closed, limbs contorted as though they had been sleeping poorly. The bedclothes had been tossed or kicked aside. Amber’s mother wore a nightshirt bearing the image of Tweety Bird. It had rucked up to just beneath her breasts, exposing her plain white underwear. Mr. Morrissey wore pale blue boxer shorts.

  There were barely recognizable as human. Their facial features had almost completely vanished, the flesh hardening and smoothing out, turning into the same black plating that the other wraiths had for faces. No hair remained. They still had human weight and heft, but their bodies had withered horribly, thinning so much that soon they would be nothing but skeletal piping, like the creatures flitting around outside their house.

  “No,” Amber said. “Please, you’ve got to help them.”

  Seconds ticked by as Octavian stared at them, racking his brain for some spell that might reverse what was being done to the Morrisseys. In the vast store of occult knowledge he had acquired in Hell, there must be something, but he did not have time to think on it, and the Morrisseys didn’t have time to wait for him.

  Cursing under his breath, he raised his hands and sketched at the air. His muttering turned into a spell, and the color began to drain from everything in the room. The furniture, and Amber’s parents, started to fade until they were almost ghostly themselves, their pallor turning a strange sepia. Octavian backed into the hallway.

  “What are you doing?” Amber demanded.

  “Buying time. I’ve frozen them in a single moment. If stopping Navalica doesn’t heal them, and you, they’ll stay like this until I can figure something out.”

  Amber tried to reach into the room, her fingers bumping against an invisible barrier in the open doorway.

  “Where is your great-grandmother’s room?” Octavian asked, looking around.

  That woke her up. “Top floor.”

  Octavian ran. Down the hall, he saw something flitting from room to room, but he did not slow as he mounted the next flight of steps two at a time.

  “Do you think they were all people once?” Amber asked, huffing with effort.

  “Looks that way,” Octavian said.

  Then there was no more time for questions. They reached the third-floor landing and rushed toward her great-grandmother’s room. The door stood halfway open. A low whisper of motion, like silk on silk, issued from the bedroom. Octavian nearly barged in, but paused, listening to that sound. Amber made a small, urgent noise behind him as he reached out and gave the door a light push.

  It swung inward.

  The wraiths slid against one another, brushing together like animals huddled for warmth. There must have been nine or ten of them around the old woman’s bed, and several of them clutched undulating masses of light and color, as though stripping it from the old woman’s flesh. Others had their smoky hands plunged deep inside her.

  “Oh, no. Gran,” Amber whispered.

  The wraiths all looked up, almost as if she’d screamed.

  Octavian charged into the room. His left hand snapped up and he cast the spell that brought their intangible essence in synch with this dimension. The one at the front door had hurt him because he hadn’t anticipated its true nature, and he wouldn’t allow that to happen again.

  He thrust out his right hand, summoning all of his strength, tapping the core of magic in him that burst out in a wave of concussive force. Wraiths blew back into the walls and crashed through windows. One hit the ceiling. A crucifix fell from the wall and snapped in half when it hit the floor. Knickknacks tipped over on a shelf. A lamp shattered.

  “Kill them,” Amber said, hatred in her voice, the chaos in the air giving her a savage edge.

  Octavian grabbed the nearest wraith, working the hex that would transform its smoke into anthracite, just as he had done to the one downstairs.

  But then he heard Amber cry out.

  “Gran?” the girl said.

  Octavian turned and stared. The old woman had begun to change, but there was no carapace, no black smoke, no skeletal bone structure. As he and Amber watched, her youth and vigor were restored, but her body altered, shifting, growing. Her skin darkened not to black but to a pale blue and her chest pulsed and blossomed as new breasts pushed out from her flesh.

  Her hair ignited in cold, blue-black flames, and then that indigo fire was her hair.

  “Oh, shit,” Octavian whispered.

  Amber staggered backward, crashing into the wall. The wraiths began to shake and fall to their knees. The figure on the bed sat up, eyes opening wide, gleaming golden yellow.

  The goddess Navalica looked at Octavian and began to scream.

  MILES felt like he now lived and breathed in a nightmare that would never end. He could feel his heart beating in his chest, knew that this wasn’t a dream, but neither did it feel entirely like reality. Whatever happened to Hawthorne now, his life had reached its apocalypse, and everything now was only him wandering in the ashes of the world he’d once known.

  He sat with Keomany Shaw in the back of Chief Kramer’s car. The vampire girl, Charlotte, was in the passenger seat in front of him. Miles himself had offered to let the girl ride shotgun, but not out of any sense of chivalry. The tension between Keomany and Charlotte was palpable and he thought it best to separate them. He was also not thrilled about the idea of being trapped in the back of a police car with an irritable vampire. Don Kramer had a gun, at least.

  “Are you all right, Miles?” the chief asked. “You’re awfully quiet back there.”

  Miles glanced at Keomany, who studied him curiously.

  “I suppose I’m feeling a bit guilty for letting Amber go off without me. We’ve been looking after each other through this.”

  Charlotte snickered, turning a lascivious gaze upon him. “Oh, is that what you call it?”

  Miles frowned. “She’s half my age.”

  “Yeah,” Charlotte said, “the good half.”

  Behind the wheel, Chief Kramer smiled but said nothing. Miles wanted to protest further, but he didn’t want to make a fool of himself. The chaos storm had done something to all of them, made them more aggressive in a variety of ways, and stirred lust for sex and violence in them. He could see it in the others and feel it in himself. From the first day of the semester he had liked and admired Amber, and now he felt as if this filthy magic had perverted his fondness for her. Perhaps it was better that they were apart for now.

  The chief had turned on the blue lights and as he drove through the rain, Miles could see the pale, ghostly color flashing off parked cars and the dead, unblinking eyes of darkened house windows. Chief Kramer had pulled a pair of officers away from the hospital and the two uniforms followed in another car, just behind them, but both patrol cars proceeded without sirens. No one was on the street, so there hardly seemed any point. But Miles thought there was more to it than that—sirens were an announcement that the police were on their way, like the cavalry, and all would be well. One glance at Don Kramer’s eyes in the rearview mirror, and it was clear to Miles that the chief didn’t
have the confidence to use the siren tonight.

  “How far to . . . what was his name?” Keomany asked.

  “Bill Hodgson,” Chief Kramer said. “He lives on Sweeney’s Point, on the north end of town. Sandpiper Hill overlooks the water. A lot of ship owners built homes there when Hawthorne still thrived as a port. When they moved on, it was all captains up there. Now it’s dentists and advertising executives who get to work at home.”

  Charlotte pushed her damp hair away from her face, the red darker now that it was wet. “I thought you guys said he was a fisherman?”

  “Lobsterman,” the chief corrected. “He is. Hodgson’s grandfather built the house way back when. In those days, the family had a lot of boats in the water. Now it’s just the one, with Bill as skipper, but when he was in his twenties, he used some family money to open up the Surfside Restaurant, and he still owns it. Does just fine for himself, Bill Hodgson.”

  “Sounds like a nice life,” Keomany said.

  “Doesn’t it?” Chief Kramer agreed.

  “The Dunne boy said he was some kind of expert on sunken ships,” Miles said.

  The chief glanced at him in the rearview mirror. “You don’t know him?”

  Miles almost managed to smile. “You know me, Don.”

  “You’re something else, Miles,” Chief Kramer said. He glanced at Charlotte. “He grew up in this town, but he hardly knows anyone.”

  Miles felt Keomany studying him.

  “But you stayed here,” she said, and he understood what she was saying. What she was asking. If he had such little interest in his hometown that most people were strangers to him, why had he taken a position teaching at the university in town instead of trying to find a job elsewhere?

  “I went to college in New York,” he said. “But I hated leaving my mother alone.”

  Charlotte laughed. “Mama’s boy. No wonder you’re single.”

  Miles had to stifle the urge to strangle her with the strap of her seat belt. She would likely have killed him seconds later, but the vampire girl’s sneering had begun to get to him. He wondered if she was always like this, or if it was just chaos talking.

  “I wasn’t always single,” he said, and then wondered why he’d said it. He didn’t have to justify anything to these people.

  “Charlotte,” Keomany said, her voice low and dangerous. “You want to keep your catty fucking comments to yourself?”

  “I really don’t,” the vampire replied, grinning.

  “You’re lucky Peter didn’t kill you.”

  Charlotte’s eyes flashed excitedly. “He doesn’t want to kill me. He wants to do me.”

  Miles watched Chief Kramer’s nervous eyes in the rearview mirror. He might be the chief of police, but what was he supposed to do if these two gave in to the chaotic influence and went at each other? A vampire and a . . . what had the chief said Keomany was? Not just a witch, but an earthwitch. Some kind of elemental sorceress.

  “More things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio . . .” he muttered.

  “What?” Charlotte snapped, glaring at him, spoiling for a fight.

  “Girl,” Chief Kramer said, his tone so stern that they all turned toward him. He kept his hands firmly on the wheel, looking out through the oily, rain-slicked windshield.

  “Who’re you calling girl?” Charlotte demanded.

  Chief Kramer ignored the question. “You need to decide whose side you’re on.”

  Charlotte glanced back at Keomany. She grimaced, her fangs glinting in the blue light that flashed into the vehicle from the police car behind them. Her eyes danced with violence. She looked like she might crawl out of her skin, like a junkie badly in need of a fix. But then she smiled.

  “I’m on your side, Sheriff.”

  “Chief,” Kramer corrected.

  “Whatever.”

  “Good,” the chief replied. “Because we’re here. And Norm Dunne beat us to it.”

  As Chief Kramer hit the brakes, Miles grabbed hold of the seat in front of him. The car skidded to a halt, and then everything happened quickly. The chief left the car running as he jumped out, hand going to his gun. Charlotte moved so quickly that she was out of the vehicle almost before he was, leaving Miles blinking stupidly in the backseat.

  “Charlotte, the door!” Keomany yelled, and only then did she remember that the backseat had no door handles.

  Miles bent to look through the door Chief Kramer had left open. Keomany might be in a hurry to get out, but he wasn’t sure that he shared her urgency. This was police business now. He wanted to help, but he’d been brought along to secure and examine the chest that the Dunnes had brought up from the water, not for a confrontation involving cops and their weapons. Even the aggression wrought within him by the chaos storm didn’t override his dislike of guns.

  “Forget it,” Keomany said angrily.

  She put a hand on the window and it grew suddenly cold in the back of the car. Miles shivered as icy air gripped him, and he realized he could see his breath. The window frosted over and Keomany shifted in the seat, leaned back, and punched her boot right through it. As she reached through the shattered window and opened the door from the outside, Miles hesitated. How much of what happened from now on would be dictated by the chaos worming its way inside them?

  “Come on,” she said.

  Heart pounding with anticipation of the possibility of violence, he slid across the seat and climbed out after her. Only as his shoe crunched it underfoot did he realize that she had not just frozen the glass, but turned it to ice. Already it was melting.

  “Put it down and back away, Mr. Dunne!” one of the cops shouted, moving past Miles and Keomany, his gun leveled.

  Miles took in the scene in an instant. Lights burned in some of the houses on Sandpiper Hill Road, but in the rain and mist they were only blurred beacons. The two police cars were parked at hard angles in front of a hip-roofed Georgian surrounded by trees and prickly bushes. The screen door hung partially off its frame, the main door wide open. Beyond the house, a rocky ledge overlooked the ocean. Metal railing indicated the stairs that led down to the water or a beach below. Out over the Atlantic, the storm churned and roiled, but within the clouds was a dim light that reminded him that outside the Hell that had swept over them, it was daylight. Hell, it was morning. He had forgotten.

  “Norm, I’m not messing around here!” Chief Kramer barked, snapping Miles back to the nightmare that had ensnared them all. “Put the damn box down.”

  Miles blinked. He felt detached from reality.

  Chief Kramer and his two officers surrounded a middle-aged man with graying hair and a long scar on the left side of his face. Norman Dunne might be in his forties, but his chest was broad and his arms were powerful. His hair and his clothes were soaked through by the storm, but the blood splashes on his shirt would never come out, and Miles understood that old Bill Hodgson—lobsterman and restaurateur—must be dead.

  Norm Dunne held the iron chest in front of him.

  “For the goddess,” the fisherman said, as though he expected the police officers to understand, to lower their weapons and let him pass. As though murder were entirely reasonable.

  The three cops surrounded him. Charlotte joined the circle, crouched and ready to pounce. God, Miles thought, she looks hungry. Chief Kramer barked at the vampire girl to back off, but Charlotte didn’t move. Keomany kept her distance, but when Miles glanced at her, he saw that the wind seemed to swirl around her, as though she had her own private twister.

  Dunne started to walk toward a gap between Chief Kramer and one of the other cops, but the chief got in his way, aiming at his chest.

  “Not another step, Norm!” the chief barked.

  Dunne cocked his head, almost birdlike. Inhuman. Miles noticed for the first time that his eyes were black.

  “Bill?” Chief Kramer called toward the house. “You in there? You all right?”

  Only the wind replied. They all knew that Bill Hodgson was anything but all right.


  “Damn it, Norm, put the box on the goddamn ground right now!” the chief shouted, his voice cracking.

  His nerves were frayed. The muscles in his neck stood out, and for the first time, Miles understood that Don Kramer wanted very badly to shoot Norman Dunne. To shoot someone.

  Chaos.

  Dunne’s upper lip curled in disgust. Miles thought that in his chaos-twisted mind, the man must have only just realized they meant to stop him, that they did not worship his goddess. He started forward again.

  A gunshot cracked the air, echoes bouncing off the storm and Bill Hodgson’s house. Miles flinched and took a step back, looking at Don Kramer, but the chief hadn’t fired his weapon. One of his men, a young guy with a crew cut and some kind of Chinese symbol tattooed on the back of his hand, had pulled the trigger, and he looked like he very much wanted to do it again.

  And he might have to.

  Norm Dunne glanced down at the hole in his shirt—in his chest—as fresh blood soaked into the fabric. This time it was his own blood, but the bullet had barely made him flinch. It seemed to mystify him, and he stared at the hole as the fluid leaking from his body and staining his shirt turned from red to darkest black.

  Gripping the chest more tightly to him, Norm Dunne looked up and grinned.

  “Shoot him again, for Christ’s sake!” someone shouted.

  It took Miles a couple of seconds to realize it had been him.

  CHAPTER 15

  THE police opened fire. Miles flinched with every shot as bullets punched through Norm Dunne’s chest and arms. Chief Kramer shot the fisherman in the left knee, and the man’s leg buckled. He went down on one knee, clutching the iron chest against him as if it were a child he would give his life to save. One of the other cops took aim and squeezed off a round that hit Dunne in the temple, and the impact rocked the fisherman over onto his side, where he curled into a fetal position, protecting the chest.