The Nightmare Maker

by Gregory Pettit

  “And you’re free to go to hell, lady,” I replied. Smoothly. She pouted.

  “Hell! Hell! Hell!” Olivia squealed, and I got the standard-issue DuCaine family glare from Becky; her sister would have been proud.

  Not wanting to get any extra attention, I used my keys to break the zip strips binding Becky’s wrists, and she grabbed Olivia and scurried into the hotel. I carefully clambered out of the car, and the woman noticed my broken fingers, frowned, and touched them gently with a manicured hand. The touch sent an electric thrill up my spine and a stab of guilt through my heart, causing me to stumble away. A crowd of onlookers had gathered around to gawk at the Aston Martin, and my new best friend took the opportunity to show off as she left in a squealing cloud of tire smoke.

  I stomped up to the hotel room. Becky was trembling and crying on the bed, and I felt guilty that she’d been caught up in this situation. I didn’t understand why Becky had been tied up and kidnapped, but I thought about all of the secrets that I’d kept from Dana, and the fact that if I hadn’t then she might still be here. I had learned my lesson – I’d tell Becky the truth about my Dreamwatching, and let her make her own decisions.

  I sat down next to my sister-in-law. “Becky, ever since I was a little boy, when I go to sleep…” I spent the next half hour trying my best to explain my powers, and how her sister had disappeared, to a wide-eyed, sniffling Becky.

  “Are you – did they actually release you from the hospital? Are you okay Julian? Because that is the craziest bullshit anyone has ever tried to sell me. Do you owe someone money? Is that why that woman took you? Are you a spy? Just tell me the truth damnit. Don’t keep lying to me; I’m not stupid,” Becky replied, color rising in her cheeks as she warmed to her conclusion.

  She rose from the bed, wiping tears from her eyes and leaving long mascara streaks. “If I wasn’t so worried about that little girl”—she pointed at a napping Olivia—“I’d be heading home tonight. As things are, I expect you to get your own room by tomorrow, Julian. But I’m not going to leave her here alone with you,” she said. After that, she seemed to run out of steam emotionally, plopping down in the room’s only chair.

  We ended up getting takeaway for the rest of the evening and watching television in silence. I was grateful when Olivia fell asleep a bit early, because I had a lot to sort through. Dana was still missing, and besides the fact that I now knew that I’d been under observation for years and that I had some insurance payouts coming, I was no closer to finding her and didn’t really have any leads. In fact, I’d just had my very own Bond girl show up to warn me off of the one avenue of investigation I’d hoped to pursue. On top of that, my sister-in-law thought I was a potentially brain-damaged liar, and seemed to suspect that I might be involved in her sister’s disappearance, and Derrick Redderton’s ultraviolent big brother was blaming me for his death just as my ability to defend myself in the real world with my powers had fizzled. Oh—and my best friend and my family seemed to have dropped off the face of the earth, which I couldn’t follow up at all since my passport was “missing.” On the plus side, I now had my very own fan club—and I still had a job.

  As some cretin came on TV to talk about the latest celebrity gossip, I turned my thoughts to what I was going to do after I closed my eyes tonight. The previous evening, when I’d shown up in some random Londoner’s dream, I had brutally and dismissively dispatched the nightmares residing there. It had been traumatic for the dreamer, but in the state I’d been in, I hadn’t cared. I now realized that at the very least, I’d missed an opportunity.

  Once before, I’d managed to use my powers in the Dreamscape to reach out to Dana. I thought it wasn’t impossible, especially considering how much stronger I’d gotten in the puca’s realm, that I might be able to find her again that way. Not impossible, but not bloody likely either. The one time I’d made that work, I’d been lying next to my wife, in physical contact with her, and had the impetus of a monster chasing me through the Dreamscape. Still, I had to try. Nothing was going to stop me from looking for Dana. I fell asleep to the eerily familiar sound of sirens in the distance.

  **********

  I opened my eyes. Looking down, I saw that I had my trench coat on, and a familiar gladius hung from my hip. I was appreciative of the coat not just because my unshakeable faith in its protection made it as strong as steel, and not just because it was immeasurably stylish, but because the room was as cold as the Grinch’s green ass on the summit of Mount Crumpit.

  I was standing in a dark room, gray light filtering in from a window that showed the outside world just on the edge of night. I could make out a row of empty beds running up and down the long room as my breath formed clouds of steam. I thought I could hear the sound of a little girl crying somewhere in the distance. I put it out of my mind.

  Instead, I reached out with my dream senses, hoping against all evidence that I might have somehow made a connection to Dana. My mind quested outward and—

  The next thing I knew, I was on the floor of our room in the Travel Lodge. As a kid, I’d discovered that dreamers had essentially two possible reactions if their minds detected my intrusion: Flight—they could get jolted into wakefulness, creating a backlash that, like now, left me with a splitting headache. Or Fight—the dreamer’s mind would go on the offensive, generating a steady stream of defenders. Of the two options, I greatly preferred Fight, because my years of experience gave me a good chance to outfox the dreamer’s mental constructs so that I could banish the nightmare. My eyes burned and my head throbbed. I could feel wetness streaking down my face and tried to rise, but dizziness pressed me down, and suddenly the floor felt incredibly comfortable. That may have just been a reflection of the quality of beds in the Travel Lodge, though.

  “What in the world are you doin’?” a sleep-addled southern drawl asked to the darkness in a familiar voice. For a moment my heart rose, but then my brain engaged; I realized that it was the wrong DuCaine sister in the room with me.

  “Bad dream,” I mumbled in a thick voice, finally levering myself up after about thirty seconds of trying. I decided to hit the head before I went back to bed.

  “Another one that can’t sleep…” I heard Becky say acerbically as I wandered toward the bathroom. I bit back a vile stream of curses as I banged my bandaged hand reaching for the light switch and did a double take as my image flashed across the mirror; I’d assumed that the wetness I’d felt on my face when I awoke had been tears. Instead, my reflection told a different story—it was blood. That probably wasn’t good.

  Chapter 7 0700–1700, Monday, September 28, 2015

  I awoke. Another night wasted. I’d spent every dreaming moment for the last week trying to reach out to Dana, and I’d come up empty. Again and again, I’d found myself in the mundane nightmares of mundane people. I’d ignored their pleas and screams and used the time to try everything I could think of and every method of summoning I’d read about in books: I’d screamed my wife’s name, I’d drawn pentagrams, I’d gone to sleep with a picture of her in my hand, I’d written her name on paper and burned it, I’d done indescribable things with a goat. Nothing. Not a ripple, not a tug of guidance. Nothing. Except the sobbing of dreamers as they were torn to pieces while I ignored them, leaving me with pounding headaches, bloody noses, and upset stomachs.

  Virtually every miserable waking hour had been spent in research. I’d been through every occult book or book of mythology in the Ealing Library system and found no useful scraps for days. I hadn’t been able to contact my parents or Toscan, and I also hadn’t had even a moment to try to understand why my gladius had disappeared when I’d tried to use it to defend myself. At least my poor, broken fingers were healing up pretty well.

  I rolled out of bed and wandered over to the tiny bathroom, careful not to wake Olivia. The small Travel Lodge room was a mess. I should do something about getting into somewhere better. The room wasn’t expensive, but it was eating into my bank account now that I was renting it, and I’d
taken over responsibility for the bill on the original room. The manager had given me a dirty look when I’d arranged the switch, and I’d mumbled about Becky being my sister-in-law. I don’t think she bought it, but I honestly had bigger problems.

  After taking care of business, I picked up my planning notebook. Becky had scribbled, “Went shopping,” over my to-do list. The girl was about as responsible as Hunter S. Thompson in a warehouse full of coke, but she didn’t oversleep—also like Hunter S. Thompson in a warehouse full of coke. Looking past her note, I checked what was next on my list. I’d spent days searching through the Ealing Library, but today Richard’s group was holding their get-together in the evening, so I’d decided that maybe I could find new information if I hit a bigger library in central London before I went to the event. My ego could use the stroking that a room full of grateful survivors of the puca’s attention would provide, and maybe today's research would turn up something useful.

  An hour later, I had gotten Olivia up and deposited her at Happy Babes nursery. They were a bit surprised to see her for the first time in weeks, but we’d paid in advance, so they couldn’t say much. Her clothes were a bit dirty, but it wasn’t like she would have kept them clean anyway, and she certainly wasn’t old enough to care. She was mostly just excited to be getting some Rice Krispies.

  On my trip into Paddington, I picked up a Metro. The headlines were the same as they had been for days now: financial instability, reports of small-scale riots springing up throughout the capital, and several column inches about the murders being committed by the Anarchist serial killer. With my research, I hadn’t had much time to pay attention, but the article seemed to be alternately blaming the government for heavy-handed responses to the riots and excoriating it for related sentences being too lenient.

  It seemed odd to me that the disturbances were still occurring. There had been small-scale looting and rioting several times when I’d been unraveling the plot based around the puca, and if there were any kind of link, then I would have expected it to end with the creature’s banishment. I decided to spend at least some of my time in the Paddington Library researching any link that might explain why the riots might still be continuing.

  A thirty-minute delay on the train meant that I had plenty of time to read, flipping past a Nemi comic and a story about a murdered banker before getting to the business section. It felt comforting to bury myself in that world for a few minutes. For years, I’d spent sixty-hour weeks trying to get ahead in my career, and now I hadn’t really thought about my job for days. That train of thought led me to consider my invitation to attend Richard’s survivors group, and I realized that having the day and night parts of my life meet was going to require a serious rethink of my career. Even if I somehow won Dana back, I didn’t know if it would ever be possible to go back to caring about limitations on liability, best practice in procurement conferences, or magic quadrants.

  By the time I was in the station, my mood matched the weather: bleak, gray, and unyielding. Rain splattered down, and I was thankful for having contact lenses. I’d worn glasses since I was about five years old and remembered having to deal with moisture-splattered and fogged-up lenses constantly until I’d switched to contacts as a teenager. I shook my head. What in the hell was I thinking about that for? It was too tempting to ignore my train wreck of a life. I had to stay focused. I’d gotten out of the puca’s godforsaken realm for a reason, and it was not to be excited about contact lenses.

  I noted a sign warning of more strikes on the tube, and I made the short walk to the Paddington Library in around ten minutes. Once I was there, I headed to the occult section and grabbed a handful of books, and then swung around to the mythology section. Weighed down by half a dozen volumes, I sat down to read and make notes.

  A few hours later, I had a page full of scribbles in my notebooks that just might be of some use. More interestingly, I had a time line of rioting in London. I had been afraid that looking into my hunch would take all day, but through the magic of Wikipedia, I had my answer in minutes. It was blindingly clear that rioting in the capital had increased in recent years. The list had around twenty entries from 1900–2010, but including the most recent outbreaks of violence, it had nearly fifteen in the last five years. Something had happened around 2010, and austerity didn’t seem like the only answer. There had been hard times before without violence, and the last couple of years, the busiest of all, had left the credit crunch in the dustbin of history. If they had stopped with the puca’s demise, then the timing would have fit almost perfectly, but the paper I’d read just hours before assured me that the answer wasn’t going to be so neat. One more mystery that might just hold a clue to getting my wife back. I fiddled with the ring on my hand and left the library. Come find me.

  I’d agreed to meet Richard around three in the afternoon. That was pretty early for him to be leaving the office, but we had agreed to treat this as a “keeping in touch” session, which actually counted as a little gold star on both of our records from an HR point of view. It slipped our minds to mention that our meeting was going to take place in a pub. Sometimes I loved working in the UK.

  The Grand Union pub was almost empty when I walked in and ordered a pint of London Pride, taking a booth in the far corner. It wasn’t my favorite venue, but it was close to the office, and in the summer its location next to the canal made it feel vibrant as it almost caught a hue of continental class. On a cold early-fall day with drizzle misting the windows, the pub felt distinctly British.

  Speaking of distinctively British, Richard walked in with blue jeans and a tan trench coat on. My first reaction was that it looked good. My second reaction was to let out a groan as I realized that the coat was an exact duplicate of the one that I’d used every night since I was old enough to watch Humphrey Bogart’s heart break in Casablanca. I slid off my stool and looked for a place to hide as I spotted a couple more people dressed identically following behind the accountant.

  “Richard! If imitation is the highest form of flattery, then I’m sure you’re all pretty high.” I smiled as I said the words, and I figured that I’d snuck that one by him as he returned my smile and extended his hand.

  “I appreciate what you did for us, and it would be a high crime if the Payroll Department forgot to pay you for a few days.” He kept smiling, but I reminded myself that he was a couple of rungs above me on the corporate ladder. He certainly wasn’t forgetting that just because I’d saved his life.

  The next twenty minutes were consumed by extremely enthusiastic introductions to around a dozen people. I was embarrassed to find out that their Facebook group name was the UnAdled, but it was better than the puns that I’d been trying to come up with (the Puca’s Puke, the Shadow’s Survivors, the Monster’s mash). A second pint appeared in my hand, and suddenly Richard was banging on a glass and gesturing in my direction. Within moments, the UnAdled had crowded around me, chanting, “Speech, speech, speech!” I blushed as an involuntary grin spread across my face, and I stepped up onto a chair. My first instinct was to thank them all for coming and get down as quickly as possible. Then I had a thought, and my grin faded. I touched my ring. Come find me.

  “I’m proud to have been able to help you. I’m disappointed that I wasn’t able to save everyone, but with your help, I think that there is even more that I can do.” I scanned the diverse faces in front of me, seeing their jocular smiles fading. “I think that there is a chance that I can still find my wife. You don’t know her, but you know her actions. You know that she sacrificed herself to protect you, your city, and your country. You feel like you owe me your lives? I owe her my soul. So I’m begging you…” I held out my hands and paused to smooth the roughness that had crept into my voice. “I’m begging you, please, please, can I count on you to help me find her?”

  There was silence for five seconds. If this had been a Hollywood movie, then someone would have started a slow clap before everyone broke into cheering, but this was London, not Hollywood. “Of c
ourse,” Richard stated matter-of-factly. He was joined by a chorus of assent, and I felt my back pounded heartily, and a fresh pint was shoved into my hands by Brett, a lawyer from Putney who offered to help any way he could. It wasn’t a dramatic response, but it left me with a warm glow of pride. Or maybe that was the beer.

  I had a few more drinks and mingled, spending just enough time to exchange pleasantries with most of the people I’d saved. I was laughing heartily at a story about two men and a goat when a short woman wearing high heels swayed up to me and introduced herself.

  “Hi—I’m Donna. From Bristol. You sent me a Facebook invite when all of this madness was going on. I would have answered you, but by the time you sent it I was having trouble staying focused on anything…productive for more than a few minutes at a time. I came all the way here to meet you.” The suggestive way she licked her lips left me in no doubt about how she’d filled her unproductive time under the puca’s influence. “If it weren’t for you, I don’t even want to think about what would be left of me by now.” She was a pretty woman, not beautiful, but with a shoulder-length bob of brown hair that showed a bronze tint when she tossed her head.

  “Ummm…” I replied eloquently. She thrust her chest out in reply. Objectively, it had only been a few weeks since I’d seen my wife, but in subjective time outside of our reality, I’d spent years without a woman. I almost managed to formulate a more cogent response (my name) when I was saved from that difficult task by my phone ringing. Luckily, it was in a coat pocket, otherwise I might not have been able to get it out. I held up one finger to indicate that Donna should wait, and I limped over to a corner away from the sound system.