The Nightmare Maker

by Gregory Pettit

  As soon as the struggling slackened, the killer lowered his nonface toward the dreamer, and an indentation began to form in the haze. Ice water ran through my veins as I realized that the Anarchist actually intended to bite the incapacitated man. I decided that I had to break cover. I was sure that this wasn’t just a regular dream, and there was no way that I was going to let this ghoul have his fill.

  “Hey, asshat.” My time outside of reality might have made me stronger in the Dreamscape, but it had not necessarily helped develop my interpersonal skills. To the killer’s credit, he didn’t give any indication of being startled by someone appearing out of the blue next to him. As a debit against his account, by the time I reached him, he had a mouth full of blood and flesh torn from the throat of his unmoving victim.

  I concentrated on a memory of getting stuck in the mud while walking along the banks of the Mississippi River as a child, of the sucking stickiness that had pulled at my legs and left me exhausted and gasping for help after only a handful of steps. I was rewarded by the portion of the beach beneath the Anarchist rapidly transforming to quicksand that he sank into within moments. He stayed calm as I approached with my gladius out.

  “Join me, Julian. We can destroy real monsters together!” the Anarchist shouted in a high-pitched voice that made the hair stand up on the back of my neck; I froze. He knew me. How did he know me?

  “What the hell are you doing? How, how can you, you, you….” I stammered, unable to continue. At some deeply ingrained level, I found what he was doing so viscerally repulsive that I couldn’t speak anymore. I’d spent almost every night of my life trying to end nightmares, and here he was creating one. How could he turn a gift as amazing as being able to see inside other people’s dreams to wicked ends? It was like using the Mona Lisa to bludgeon someone to death.

  “I’m doing what you don’t have the brains or the guts to do, Julian—I’m killing real monsters.” He swallowed on the last syllable, making a visible effort to gulp down a bloody gobbet before grinning with bloodstained teeth. “If I had your kind of power, then I could take care of this in an instant, but I don’t. Instead, I’m going to have to get by with a little help from my friends.”

  I froze. How was this possible? The Anarchist, frothy red liquid running down his chin, glanced down, and I realized that while I’d been distracted by his little speech, he’d been working.

  The quicksand that I’d created had already pulled him down to his waist, but since he wasn’t struggling it moved slowly, and his arms were still free enough to easily scrawl onto the banker’s forehead the same symbol that adorned each of the still-motionless rioters, using the dying man’s own blood. There was a sudden pressure against my senses, and the entire Dreamscape joined the crowd, waves stopping, birds hanging motionless in midair, and all sound except my breathing cutting out completely.

  The man lifted one surprisingly long arm, palm flat, and although I wasn’t sure exactly what would happen, I suspected that if he managed to slap his free hand on the symbol, I wasn’t going to enjoy the consequences. My heart beat quickened as fear tried to push conscious thought out of my mind; I latched on to that fear.

  There were three ways that I could affect the realms of dreams. The one that I’d learned first, as a child, was to concentrate on my memories, forcing them into existence through my own will, like I had with the quicksand. The second, which I’d figured out through trial and error as a teenager, had been to tap into the collective unconscious to summon forth the aggregated mental energy that surrounded popular figures like the Hulk, Freddy Kruger, or Clifford the Big Red Dog (don’t ask). It could accomplish more than I could ever do on my own, but it could also slip the bounds of my control. The final way, one that I hadn’t really understood was possible until I’d been put into a life-or-death situation last summer, was to use strong emotions to fling targeted bursts of power, and it was this third one that I called forth now.

  I yelled, high and panicked, and a blast of green light shot out of my right hand, crossed the distance in less than a heartbeat, and impacted on the Anarchist’s gore-covered chest with a flash of viridian iridescence—he stopped moving.

  “Let…me…go…” he squealed through paralyzed lips. I sighed and smiled, resting my hands on my knees. I hadn’t had much call for nonlethal action recently, what with the hordes of nightmare creatures trying to lay eggs in my brain and giants chasing me around. The Anarchist’s previously cool demeanor cracked, and I could feel the strain that it was costing him to get the words out. I could have stopped him from moving enough to speak, but I was interested in what he had to say. And in this place, I was calling the shots…in fact…

  “Stop. Who would cross the Bridge of Death must answer me these questions three, ere the other side he see.” I just couldn’t resist. Monsters never get a good reference. One line from Manos: the Hands of Fate or Flash Gordon and they’re falling all over themselves, but give them Python and all you get is…

  “Are you insane? This place is going to collapse any moment when this sack-of-shit banker dies, and you’re babbling on about Monty Python? You need to let me finish butchering this pig, or everyone here is going to die!” The Anarchist yelled, his terror sufficient to push partway through the bonds of my will, and also prove me wrong about his cinematic taste.

  “I was serious about the three questions: tell me how you know me, tell me how you got here, and tell me why you’re killing these bankers.” The Anarchist was right; I needed to focus because it was imperative that I didn’t waste my opportunity to pump him for information.

  “Why kill bankers? Why not? Kill, kill, kill—” he started to rant, but I clamped down with my will again, and he hissed in pain. Maybe I accidentally overdid it a little. Or not accidentally. Whatever.

  “Answer!” He hadn’t even tried to protest about not having the information I’d demanded, and it felt like I’d hit the jackpot on my first pull of the lever, but before my shout could even stop echoing back at me from the preternaturally still Dreamscape, there was a noise like cloth ripping, and at the same time the dying man let out a final rattle of breath. A rent of nothingness opened up a few hundred yards out to sea, and the previously still water began to rush into it with a roar. I shuddered in fear. He hadn’t been kidding about running out of time, and as I glanced at the now unmoving banker, I wondered why this pocket of the Dreamscape hadn’t shattered yet. I loosened my will ever so slightly and felt a mental pang of relief. This was taking more out of me than I had expected.

  “Don’t you want your wife back, Julian? You already have everything that you need – if you were clever enough to understand what you have. Let me go. Put your search on hold for a couple of weeks, and then I’ll tell you what—”

  There was a further ripping sound, and new tears opened up all around us, the Dreamscape starting to look like a cheap, moth-eaten suit. One chasm of blackness streaked toward me, and I had to recall a childhood trampolining adventure to bound into the air to avoid it.

  When I came down, the world exploded.

  Either my concentration had slipped more than I’d thought, or the man had been playacting after my initial strike because his hand was now resting on the forehead of the corpse. I wasn’t exaggerating either when I said that the world exploded. All around me, everything that wasn’t touched by the arcane symbols had burst into flames, and the dead man’s blood shone on the ground like molten gold. I could feel the heat rising toward me, baking my exposed skin, and I hissed with pain, pulling my arms inside the sleeves of my trench coat and concentrating on the memory of a bitterly cold winter’s day in my childhood Wisconsin.

  I landed in a rush of steam, and when I opened my eyes, it felt like I was staring into an open oven, causing me to cover my face with my hands, but the bubble of survivable air kept me from literally bursting into flames. I worried for a moment about breathing before I remembered that I didn’t actually exist. When the steam finally cleared, I took stock of my surroundings. Th
e Anarchist was gone, the rioters were missing, and the corpse of the banker had almost disappeared into the quicksand that I’d summoned.

  Unfortunately, the holes in reality were still there and growing. Scientists that study dreams say that the average episode lasts between five and twenty minutes. That’s usually plenty of time for me to take care of business, after which I wake up when the dream comes to its natural conclusion; however, I’d never been in the dream of someone who was dying, and somehow I was sure that wherever the banker’s real body was at the moment, it wouldn’t be rising with the dawn.

  Usually when I tore a hole in the Dreamscape to banish some monster, it would “paper over” with its original substance almost immediately because the dreamer’s subconscious abhorred the vacuum I’d created, but with the dreamer gone that wasn’t happening. I tried to close the hole myself, imagining a beautiful summer’s day spent on the beach in Barbados on my honeymoon. I thought for a moment that I had been successful as the nothingness faded from view, replaced by my memory, but almost as soon as I began to relax, my patch tore, and inky blackness showed through. I slammed my will down again, but this time the darkness merely stopped expanding for a moment. Shit.

  Another hole into oblivion started to swallow up the sand near my feet, and I bounded a few yards to my right, landing at the base of a tall palm tree. At the rate that the Dreamscape was falling apart, I had about sixty seconds to find a way out. My usual early-exit method, which tended to leave me with a splitting headache and bloody nose upon waking, was the old standby of falling. I was up the tree before you could say supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. Three times. Slowly. I’m not a great climber.

  I pushed off, closed my eyes and…smacked into the sand like a sack of potatoes. It hurt. Quite a bit. I swore. Quite a bit. Then I scrambled as quickly as I could back to my feet and ran inland; a bunch of the smaller holes had joined together a few dozen feet offshore, and I could feel wind tugging at me as the “air” began to empty out of the Dreamscape. I figured I had about thirty seconds left before…I found out exactly where all of the nightmares that I consigned to oblivion went to. I could only hope that Dana wasn’t trapped there with all of those horrors.

  I’d been stuck in the puca’s realm for ages without finding a way out, but in the past I’d once been able to jump from one person’s dream to another; I hoped that the situation was similar enough for it to work again. There was a crashing cacophony to my right as a rent formed halfway up the wall of a beach hut and chewed into the structure. I thought of Olivia. In the real world, my daughter was asleep beside me, nestled into crook of my arm. She was flesh of my flesh and blood of my blood; I really hoped she was dreaming right now. I concentrated on her and….pulled.

  **********

  I’d sometimes wondered what went on in the mind of my three-year-old daughter: the glorious occasion that she’d thrown my phone in the toilet, or the impressive performance when she poured a glass of milk over her head, or the time that…well, you get the picture. Now I knew. It was weird.

  It was doubly weird to be back in our house—the house that had burned to the ground under “mysterious” circumstances a month before. Everything looked absolutely enormous: the chairs were fifteen feet tall, our TV was the size of a billboard, and the counters were as high as a house. The only things that were a reasonable size were the princesses. In the middle of our dining room, I saw four quite famous young women who would be familiar to any moviegoer in the world, and they were all having a tea party on the kitchen floor. The one with the extremely long golden hair moved aside, and I was able to spot Olivia at the center of the group. She looked up and saw me. “Daddy! Come play with me!”

  I reached out with my dream senses and scanned for danger. All I felt was the almost painfully bright spark of my daughter’s consciousness and the palpable wave of affection that flowed out toward me. I smiled and ambled to my daughter.

  A few minutes later, I put down my teacup as Olivia got a slightly puzzled look on her face, stretched her arms out wide, gave an enormous yawn, padded over to me, and curled up on my lap. The Dreamscape began to dissolve, gently this time, and as I waited to exit my daughter’s strange-but-comforting imaginings, I considered what I’d learned tonight.

  First, I’d found out that there were barriers to me rejoining the life that I’d had. If I couldn’t be around my colleagues, it would be hard to go to the office and therefore hard to work. Second, I’d been asked to work for the organization behind Father O. and Mia again. I’d turned it down to focus on my hunt for Dana, but those two things no longer seemed entirely at odds because I now had absolute confirmation that I wasn’t the only person that could visit other people’s dreams. The Anarchist knew who I was, and he claimed to be able to tell me how to get Dana back. And he was killing people. In the Dreamscape. I shuddered. I didn’t care about Mia’s agenda, but I was going to hunt him down, ruin his plans, take everything he cared about away from him, get my wife back, and, when his hopes were utterly destroyed, I’d smile as I cast him into oblivion.

  Chapter 9 0630–2030, Tuesday, September 29, 2015

  I awoke. A small, smiling face framed by long blond hair stared down at me. I smiled back.

  “Daddy, it’s morning time!” Olivia seemed truly happy, and I gave her a squeeze before dragging her off to the loo to make sure that we didn’t end up with a puddle on the Travel Lodge carpet. That would almost certainly have blown the deposit. I’d be out at least five quid.

  The first thing that I found was a note from Becky taped to the inside of the door. Using words that I had never actually seen written down, she emphatically got across the idea that I was in deep shit for leaving Olivia at nursery and passing out drunk after my party. She also didn’t fail to mention the fifty quid I owed her in late pickup fees.

  I was sore, and my broken fingers were still killing me, but I had a new sense of purpose, excited that there might be a lead to help me get Dana back after all. As much as I wanted to do nothing but try and track down the murdering Anarchist, if I got Dana back, then I needed to make sure that she had a decent life to come back to. Munching on a leftover doughnut, I got Olivia up and dressed, and then I proceeded to slay all of the mundane chores that made up a normal life.

  With Becky nowhere to be found, I dragged Olivia to her nursery, where the familiar staff brought a smile to her face. That smile had been absent a depressing amount of the time recently. When I left, she ran to the door and pressed her little face to the glass, watching me until I went around the corner, but I told myself again that it was necessary if I was going to get her mother back.

  I pushed the more disturbing implications of last night’s trip to the land of dreams to the back of my mind and focused on the opportunity. There was a time when the idea that someone else was a Dreamwatcher would have blown my mind. That time was before I resurrected a room full of brains to lure a demon into an insane asylum. Therefore, I just focused on the fact that I had to stop him—but that would have to wait until tonight.

  My first stop was to a letting agency at Ealing Broadway, where the best part of £3,000 secured the rental of a three-bedroom flat in West Ealing near the station. I’d been tempted to stay in Greenford so that I could keep an eye on the reconstruction of our house, but if I was going to be going into the office and looking after Olivia, when would I have found the time? That transaction ate up over half of the cash that I had access to before the insurance payments came through, and the rest of my chores weren’t going to help the situation.

  A few more hours saw me picking up bag after bag of new clothes for the two of us, getting bedding, and ordering furniture. By the time I was done, I was scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of my bank account, but I wouldn’t have to live out of a suitcase anymore. I was grabbing a late lunch of Tuscan-style spare ribs at Osteria Del Portico, enjoying the afternoon sun by dining al fresco on their distinctive AstroTurf lawn, when my phone rang.

  “Julian—where are
you and Olivia at? There are some issues that I’d like to discuss with you right away.” Becky’s voice sounded less angry than I would have expected, and I was immediately on guard. There was no way that she’d have let me off the hook for (supposedly) passing out drunk without rubbing it in some more unless she wanted something. In the nearly ten years that I’d known her, she always wanted something, and that something was almost always money.

  “Olivia’s at nursery; I’ve been sorting out a new flat, clothes, and furniture for us. I’m just getting lunch, but if you meet me at West Ealing station around four, I can take you to the new place.” I wanted to keep this brief; I wasn’t in the mood to make any more apologies to Becky. I already had enough regrets without her heaping on the guilt.

  Her wheedling tone disappeared.“You left her alone? Again?”

  I mentally groaned—physically, I took another drink of wine.

  “You may find this hard to believe, Becks”—she hated that nickname—“but I’ve been taking care of that little girl for over three years. We’ve left her at nursery for well over half that time, and they haven’t broken her yet.” I thought about the private investigator that had shaken me down the other night and the mysterious woman that had snatched Becky yesterday; maybe I had been a bit laissez-faire, but I wasn’t going to admit that.