The Nightmare Maker
By Gregory Pettit
Text copyright © 2017 Gregory Pettit All Rights Reserved
Cover art by Grady Earls
Editing by Kelly Cozy
To Stella and Noa—meidän pieni and little dude
Table of contents
Chapter 1 Sunday, September 20, 2015
Chapter 2 1300, Sunday, September 20, 2015
Chapter 3 1900–2300, Sunday, September 20, 2015
Chapter 4 2300, Sunday, September 20–0045, Monday, September 21, 2015
Chapter 5 0645–1130, Monday, September 21, 2015
Chapter 6 1145–2300, Monday, September 21, 2015
Chapter 7 0700–1700, Monday, September 28, 2015
Chapter 8 1700, Monday, September 28–0630, Tuesday, September 29, 2015
Chapter 9 0630–2030, Tuesday, September 29, 2015
Chapter 10 2030–2300, Tuesday, September 22, 2015
Chapter 11 2300, Tuesday, September 29–1200, Wednesday, September 30, 2015
Chapter 12 1200–2200, Wednesday, September 30, 2015
Chapter 13 2200–2400, Wednesday, September 30, 2015
Chapter 14 0000–0600, Thursday, October 1, 2015
Chapter 15 0900–1400, Thursday, October 1, 2015
Chapter 16 1400, Thursday, October 1–0100, Friday, October 2, 2015
Chapter 17 0100–0200, Friday, October 2, 2015
Chapter 18 0200–0400, Friday, October 2, 2015
Chapter 19 0900–2230, Friday, October 2, 2015
Chapter 20 2230–2330, Friday, October 2, 2015
Chapter 21 0900–1421, Saturday, October 3, 2015
Chapter 22 1421–2100, Saturday, October 3, 2015
Chapter 23 2100, Saturday, October 3–0711, Sunday, October 4, 2015
Chapter 24 0712–1100, Sunday, October 4, 2015
Chapter 25 1500–2100, Sunday, October 4, 2015
Chapter 26 2100–0500, Sunday, October 4, 2015
Chapter 27 0400–1800, Monday, October 5, 2015
Chapter 28 1800–1900, Monday, October 5, 2015
Chapter 29 1900–2200, Monday, October 5, 2015
Chapter 30 2200–2300, Monday, October 5, 2015
Chapter 31 2300–2359, Monday, October 5, 2015
Epilogue
“Hope is a waking dream.”
― Aristotle
Chapter 1 Sunday, September 20, 2015
The giant’s foot slammed into the ground, making the fibrous purple tree sway, forcing me to dig trembling fingers into the bark until my tendons creaked and knuckles crackled. The creature passing below me lifted its enormous, misshapen head into the air, and nostrils the size of dinner plates flared as it snuffled wetly, trying to pick up my scent. I held my breath as the twenty-foot-tall, gray-skinned biped covered in writhing tentacles strode past me. The longest of the questing tentacles came within a hand’s breadth of my branch, and I strained to keep from slipping farther down the trunk. My arms were screaming with fatigue, and it took all of my concentration to hold together the supernatural energies that concealed me from the monster’s senses. I closed my eyes and tried to still my hammering heartbeat.
“Daddy, please wake up.”
The simple words rang in my ears and reverberated through my soul. Somehow these words seemed important to me, and the voice sounded achingly familiar, although I couldn’t place it. My mind tried to reject the thought; how could these words be important if they didn’t help me survive the monsters of my nightmare prison? That distraction was enough.
The cloak of shadows concealing me slipped, and an eyeless head the size of a Ford Focus swung in my direction. “Shit.” The creature lunged toward me and wildly gnashed row upon row of blunt teeth that clacked and ground against each other, making a noise that sent shivers up my spine, though what they’d do to my spine if they caught me would be much, much worse.
I let go of the tree trunk, just avoiding the grasp of a big, three-fingered hand that slammed into the tree and shattered it, sending bark flying everywhere. A chunk scored my cheek; blood welled up, but I gritted my teeth and ignored it as the rock-strewn ground leapt toward me. The whistling wind of my passage caused my trench coat to billow like the wings of a swooping bird of prey. I reached for a memory to slow my fall, but it didn’t come immediately; ice water flooded my veins, and I screamed. I screwed my eyes shut in concentration—and then I had it. I recalled the rush of air and the soft whump of pressure against me as I rebounded from the floor of a bouncy castle as a child. I held the memory in my mind and pushed. There was a reverberation in the air, and my feet impacted the dusty, shale-covered ground at thirty miles an hour—but instead of breaking both of my ankles, the stone gave beneath me in a way that had no truck with the laws of physics, and I rebounded up toward the perpetually twilit sky with an unaccustomed whoop of exhilaration.
The giant responded with its hunting call—a hoot that sounded like a cross between an elephant trumpeting and a foghorn. I landed on my feet, hit the ground running, and drew my sword, an eighteen-inch gladius of gleaming steel with a leather-wrapped grip and a plain wooden pommel. I covered ground faster than an Olympic sprinter, dodging around looming purple trees made of waist-thick, fibrous cables and vaulting head-high cones of basalt as I crossed the alien landscape that had been my home, my prison for so long. In the back of my mind, I knew that I couldn’t afford to burn this much energy, but the voice that had distracted me still rang in my ears, and my heart leapt for reasons that I couldn’t quite understand—and I knew where I had to go.
Broken trees crashed to the ground behind me as the giant lumbered in pursuit, emitting another call to summon aid. I’d managed to take down a half dozen of the huge, eyeless creatures during my imprisonment, but never more than one at a time. I focused on an occasion when I’d watched a deer flee from a pack of wolves, bounding through an orchard as I drove home through the twilight of a Wisconsin evening. Adrenaline flooded my body, and I put on a burst of speed, thankful at least that the giant’s bellowing had driven away the lesser beasts of this nightmare dimension—the skittering hand-spiders and doughy fleshpiles fleeing deep into the forest of rustling, fifty-foot-tall, purple cable trees.
The crack of shattering rock ahead and to my right warned me of the blundering approach of a second cyclopean-minus-an-eye horror. I veered left and broke into the clearing, flashing past dozens of thigh-high piles of twisted, gray bark-like substance—and bones. Even as the giants thundered out of the forest, somehow angled onto perfect intercept courses, my mind was drawn back to my first days here.
Originally, I hadn’t been alone. The clearing had been full of other dreamers, wrapped up by my fallen enemy, the puca, the original lord of this realm, in thick ropes of purple sinew, like insects trussed up by a spider for later feasting. I’d woken here, my consciousness sucked into this nightmare, after I was horribly injured in the real world while using my dream magic to banishing the puca, and I’d had the bright idea of freeing the trapped dreamers. It had been a horrible mistake. I’d initially been jubilant to find that freeing the newest victims had caused them to fade away, presumably to wake up in the real world. But the less-recent victims were a different story. When I hacked away their bindings, they didn’t disappear, and although some of them still had enough of themselves left to function, most of them were helpless. That helplessness had brought out the predators of the forest.
I’d fought with sword and armor, memory and magic, but in the end the victims all fell, and I was forced, bloody and battered, to flee the clearing. I’d stayed away—until now.
“Daddy, I had a bad dream!”
The words made the air thrum like God had plucked a note on his celestial guitar. Olivi
a. That was the voice. My daughter. She needed me! A torrent of images flashed through my mind’s eye: her blue eyes and blond hair, her tiny fingers wrapped in mine as we walked in sun-drenched fields. I stumbled—just in time for a boulder the size of my head to whistle through the air exactly where my skull would have been if I hadn’t lost my balance. The giants were only a couple dozen yards behind me, and the big creatures were gaining fast.
The air rippled, as if in a heat haze, a hundred yards in front of me, and my heart leapt; I knew that if I could reach it, I’d get to see my little girl again. But I’d lost too much momentum—a straight sprint would see me grabbed in huge, horny hands and crushed to jelly before I could cover another fifty strides. I slid to a stop, gravel flew, and I spun to face my pursuers: I was done running.
The power of my will had been the only thing that had kept me alive during my long exile in this dimension, and once again I reached out with it. Instinct drove me, and I latched onto the memories of my little girl playing in the sun—a sun that didn’t exist in the gray nothingness of this world’s sky. I thought first of the joy of sunshine on my face, the heat of its rays on my pale skin; I gritted my teeth and transitioned to the pain of a blistering-hot day searing my unprotected back as I worked. Then I turned it up to eleven. “Let there be light!” I screamed my defiance and slashed my sword in an arc through the air in front of me as I released the construct of memory that I’d fashioned.
The ground shook as the enormous beasts lumbered forward, and their stench made me retch and take a stumbling step backward. I set my feet again and snarled, curling my lip in contempt, as twenty tons of tentacled, lumbering horror bore down on me. Nothing happened, and for a pair of heartbeats I thought maybe I was about to die in the ultimate gesture of hubris—
And then there was light, and it was good.
A ray of retina-scorching brilliance lanced out of the rent in space that I’d forced upon the fabric of my reality, transmitting the fury of a star onto the surface of this benighted twilight world.
I may have underestimated the effect that my working would have; blast furnace heat slammed into me, searing pain engulfed every inch of exposed skin, and I huddled inside of my trench coat for protection. The gateway hadn’t been very big, and when it closed a moment later, I stood up and surveyed the damage. If you pictured the scene in Star Wars where Luke finds the charred remains of his aunt and uncle, then you wouldn’t be too far off from the state of the giants after they were introduced to the coronal discharge of a star at a range of twenty feet. Unlike Luke, I didn’t shed any tears for the corpses.
The whoop of some hunting beast echoed in the distance, and I turned toward the ripples in the air fifty yards away. I wanted to run, but my exertion against the horrible giants had drained my reserves of will and memory, so my feet dragged against the ground as I stumbled implacably forward.
“Daddy, wake up, Daddy!” Olivia’s voice chimed, making my throat tighten with emotion, and I didn’t lift a hand to wipe the tears that left trails in the gray dust that covered my face. The incipient egress from my prison pulsed and started to emit a glow as I approached it reverently; I extended my hand and focused on the echoes of Olivia’s call, pounding out her words in my memory again and again and again until the cable trees shook with the sound, and the air began to warp in front of me. The vision of a little girl in blond pigtails danced in front of my eyes. The ground shook, monsters screamed, and the fabric of reality writhed in protest, but I didn’t care. I focused on the slender thread of need and memory that I’d woven…and pulled.
“I’m coming, baby.”
Chapter 2 1300, Sunday, September 20, 2015
I awoke. I tried to open my eyes, but the lids felt like they’d been sewn together with barbed wire. “Ol…” I tried to say my little girl’s name, but the croak that I managed to force out past parched lips couldn’t have been intelligible. That didn’t stop tiny arms from being thrown around my neck.
“Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” Her squeals rang off the walls, and I luxuriated in them as if they were the fine tones of a trained mezzo-soprano. I felt her peeled abruptly off of me, and when I tried to grab her, my body ignored my demands to get to work, like a teamster on a tea break. I caught a whiff of cheap perfume just before one of the last voices I had expected to hear, my irresponsible sister-in-law Becky, spoke in exasperated tones.
“Ollie, sweetie, your daddy is sleeping very deeply. You have to be gentle, he—”
“Oliiiiviaa…” It wasn’t more than a whisper, but there was no doubt that I’d uttered a proper word. Yeah, me. The next half hour was a blur as I sensed and heard busy, well-ordered activity all around me. Somewhere around the fifteen-minute mark, I pried my right eye open, but screwed it immediately shut again as the harsh light of a midday sun filled the room and stabbed into my fully dilated pupil. At some point, they pried Olivia off of my neck, and I heard her wail as she was taken away, but things were still pretty fuzzy, so I wasn’t able to put up much of a fight—I think I might have drooled a bit in protest. Mostly I spent the time until the doctor showed up stitching my psyche back together.
When I’d stepped through the portal, reuniting my mind and body, a flood of memories had washed over me, and I was able to recall parts of myself that had been lost, eroded by the unceasing horror of my prison. My name was Julian Lucas Adler, six foot two, lanky, ginger, and twenty-eight years old, born in Wisconsin but living in London for the last four years. I worked in the procurement department of a large pharmaceutical company, and I’d toed the straight and narrow, picking up a mortgage, a wonderful wife, and a beautiful daughter at an age when a lot of my peers were still struggling to move out of Mom and Dad’s house. From the outside, my life had probably looked perfect, but I had a secret—I was a Dreamwatcher. When I went to sleep, I didn’t have my own dreams; instead, I entered the dreams of my fellow Londoners, battling their worst nightmares with steel, and fire, and the power of my will.
That perfect life had been shattered the previous summer, when my attempt to save London from a dream demon had cost me my wife. But before I could follow that line of thought any further, a doctor appeared and asked a battery of questions. After I’d answered them to his satisfaction, I heard scribbling on a notepad, and then he spoke again: “Mr. Adler, do you have any questions? It’s normal in situations like yours to have trouble maintaining wakefulness for long periods, and I don’t want to overtax you, so we’ll keep this short.” The accent was definitely English and sounded like it came from somewhere west of London without quite straying into a broad West Country drawl.
“Where’s my wife?”
“Mr. Adler, I’ll let the police give you the details on that topic.”
My lips started to form a vile word, but I stopped myself. “Why am I having so much trouble moving? How badly was I injured?” I could feel tingling and pressure in my limbs, but I hadn’t managed to lift anything heavier than an eyelid yet.
This time there was no pause, which I took as a good sign. “You’ve been in a coma for over a month. When we brought you in there was a…parasitic infection, a…fungus.”
I noted the lack of certainty in describing my problems and choked back a laugh. The thing that had been inside of me was a growth produced by a mythological dream demon called a puca as part of its digestive cycle. It had infected me during an attack at my office, and when I had tried to banish it from our reality, the creature had fought back, causing the growth to go berserk, finally dragging my spirit into the puca’s alien realm, from which I’d only just emerged.
“We believe that the rare fungus was undergoing a rapid period of growth that might have presaged a bloom, and as part of this, it needed to draw on your body for nutrients. When it got far enough in, the pain must have become too much, and you passed out.”
“So how am I still here then, smart guy?” I was pretty sure that I knew the answer, but I wanted to hear it.
“Ahh…that supports our assumption
that the fungus was preparing to bloom. It seems that after you passed out, the organism must have completed its life cycle, and after releasing its spores, it senesced and died shortly thereafter. We kept you isolated for a couple of days but, besides being in a coma, you were fine, so we let your daughter and sister-in-law in to visit.” I could hear the excitement in the man’s voice as he provided far more information than I needed. “The organism had one of the most unique cellular structures that we’ve seen…but strangely, we didn’t actually find any spores near your body. If you could perhaps suggest where you might have picked up such an infection…” His body language showed how eager he was to get some hint from me. I was incredulous. The man knew that I had just woken up from a coma, and he’d just virtually confirmed that my wife was missing if not dead, but he had his own set of priorities.
“I’m tired. Piss off,” I said, losing the battle to keep the sob out of my voice. I could practically hear the man frowning, but in the end he dredged up a modicum of professional detachment and left me alone. It was about two hours later, and well past normal visiting hours, when my next guest arrived.
“Mr. Adler. I’m gratified and pleased to see you awake.” In the dim light, I was able to keep my eyelids open and, for my next trick, managed to turn my head. Nearly three inches. Detective Inspector James Badger stood several feet away, clad in a trench coat and Coke-bottle-lensed glasses, blinking moleishly.
“The doctor told me that you had information about Dana for me?”
Badger squinted and twitched his gray-streaked brown mustache, an affectation that I’d learned passed for a nervous tic in the self-possessed former military man. He’d spent two weeks hounding me as a person of interest in relation to several particularly gruesome killings that had actually been perpetrated by the alien puca, and he’d been present when I’d destroyed the monster.
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