The Nightmare Maker

by Gregory Pettit

  “Daddy?” Her little girl’s voice cracked as she sobbed out two final, bewildered words before nothingness crashed down. “Help me.”

  Chapter 21 0900–1421, Saturday, October 3, 2015

  I awoke. A headache that felt like someone was lobotomizing me with a spoon tore into my brain, and I screamed until my throat was raw. Eventually, churning guts forced me to crawl to the toilet, and I spent ten minutes worshiping the porcelain goddess. Again. Finally, I collapsed, sweating and trembling, onto the cool linoleum, my worries about the little girl temporarily pushed out of my mind by exhaustion.

  “You’re disgusting. Drinking until you get a hangover and puking again. You’re not fit to be that little girl’s father,” Becky said as she wandered up, a tabloid rag in hand.

  “Fu—”

  “Daddy!” My daughter trailed after her aunt and thundered up to me, making more noise than a pink elephant on parade (and I’d actually experienced that in one particularly crazy dream, so I’d know).

  “—dge would be an excellent dessert, dearest sister-in-law,” I finished lamely, the words bringing on a raw-throated coughing fit. Becky smirked and went into the living room to read. I cleaned myself up, made Olivia breakfast, popped a few aspirin, headed to the shower, and got ready to meet Father O.

  I was due to meet him at noon and made it out of the house with plenty of time to spare. I tried to think about how to make this meeting run smoothly, but my head still hurt, so I put it against the glass and enjoyed the coolness on my fevered skin. Soon I arrived in Paddington station and switched onto the District Line to Victoria, looking wistfully toward the office before plunging underground.

  I was an hour early when I arrived at Victoria and made my way through the station to the shops on the upper concourse. Part of my preparation this morning had been to fill a backpack with a change of clothes and other items for a basic disguise. I didn’t think that there was any chance that it would stand up to close scrutiny, but I figured that it might help me get lost in a crowd. When I left the restrooms on the upper level, I was wearing a black puffer jacket, sneakers, and a cheap black wig. My eyes were covered with dark mirrored sunglasses, and I had put a surgical mask over my face. I nodded happily to my reflection as I went down the escalators. As I went out of the station, my pocket buzzed. It was a message from Jack Redderton.

  Jules—That is the worst disguise I have ever seen. We chased away two people trailing you. I think you’re clean. Though maybe a bit racist.

  Shit.

  I ducked down into the puffer jacket as I shuffled the five minutes to Westminster Cathedral, stopping to drop a couple of quid in the bucket of a poppy seller, but the icy-cold rain pelting down made it feel much longer. Instead of going directly in, I wandered into the gift shop. If I was lucky, any followers, and particularly Mia, would have been thrown off by the fake “scouting” trip that I’d attempted a couple of days before. My real scouting had been done courtesy of the Ealing central library and a Google image search. While the main entrance opened onto a wide plaza, what I was hoping any pursuers didn’t think of was the clergy house on Francis Street. The clergy house with its own rear entrance into the cathedral proper.

  As I said, I had a number of pieces of clothing in my bag so, after I slipped back out of the gift shop, a quick stop in McDonald’s restroom erased the tourist, producing Father Julian Adler. I strode confidently toward the entrance to the clergy house, cheap black Halloween costume cassock slapping wetly against my thighs in the drenching autumn storm. Despite the cold, sweat ran down my back as I tried the handle on the door and let myself in with a sigh as it clicked open.

  I squelched across the wooden floors as quickly as I could without breaking into a run as I passed a series of doors that I guessed must open into bedrooms. There was a thump ahead, and I froze, heart hammering against my ribs, though I couldn’t tell if the reaction was from fear or the ingrained reaction of a Catholic upbringing to the sacrilege I was committing. There was another thump, but the sound of the choir practicing drifted through the walls, and I couldn’t be sure where the thumping was coming from. I tiptoed forward, taking a sharp left toward where, according to the floor plans I’d studied, the entrance to the cathedral proper should be.

  I was just a few feet away from the door when a rough voice spoke behind me. “Excuse me, who are you?” I turned slowly and took in the man standing there. He was in late middle age, wearing blue jeans and a sweater vest. He had a white paper collar around his throat. He squinted at me through rheumy eyes, and before I could answer he let out a body-shaking sneeze. I figured that I could sprint through the door and into the cathedral if I just pushed past the priest, but if I did, my cover would certainly be blown as he chased me into the cathedral. I had a cunning plan.

  “Co?” I said, putting a puzzled look on my face. Pretending to be a stupid American tourist had gotten Dana and I past some police once, so I decided to try a similar trick using my command of the Polish language: all three words of it. Hopefully, the priest wouldn’t be one of the hundreds of thousands of people in London that actually spoke it.

  “Quid est nomen tibi?” Nope, he spoke Latin.

  I pretended to sneeze too; maybe he’d believe that it was catching? “Ummm…nomen…ummm…mihi…hic, hoc hunc?” I finished lamely. The priest’s red eyes narrowed, and I tensed to bolt. Before I could move, one of the doors along the hallway squeaked open.

  “Ahh…Julian, Father Adler. How very good of you to meet me here.” Father O.’s kindly face beamed with an expansive smile that emphasized the deep laugh lines around his eyes and mouth as he greeted me.

  The other priest turned and sneezed again before speaking. “Ah, you didn’t say that you had a guest, Michael. I’ll leave you be, then.” He turned away.

  “I’ll bring you some chicken soup after I’ve chatted with the young lad,” Father O. called after him.

  I studied the priest, noticing that the deepening of the lines on his face hadn’t all been because of his smile. He looked a decade older than when I’d seen him a few weeks before: his silver hair was fading to white, his nose was a bright red, and, after years of insisting that he didn’t need one, he was leaning on a cane to compensate for the place where a demon had burned a chunk out of his leg fifty years ago.

  “Perhaps it’s best if we continue this conversation in my cell,” he said, moving back into his room without waiting for a reply. I followed.

  “What do you have that can help me find someone?” I asked before he could sit down. I watched his back heave as he took in a deep breath.

  “They put me out to pasture after your last visit. Fifty years of service, and they pin the blame on me. I got them the damned book back. You took care of the puca. There was some collateral damage, but nothing outside of the mission projections. No—the problem was that somehow you found out, and when I told them, they pointed the finger back at me!” The old priest’s voice had risen to a shout, and he tried to spin toward me with a sweeping gesture of disgust but ended up losing his balance and sitting heavily onto a low bed, the only piece of furniture in the Spartan room. He reached into a pocket and drew out a flask, from which he took a deep pull before continuing.

  “If I had spilled the details of our operation to you, then would you have barged into my house, threatened me, and broken my nose?” he said through gritted teeth. There was a gleam in his eye that told me it hadn’t been his first pull from the flask, and the red nose and other signs of physical deterioration suddenly made more sense.

  “They put me out to pasture, but they didn’t do anything to the almighty Senior Auditor John Brown,” Father O. said, making the other man’s name into a curse. “He’s still running the audit department, so of course he’s going to be beyond suspicion,” the priest said, his bitter tone matching his words. “If you’re still wasting time trying to find Dana, then he’s the best chance that you have. He understands all of that string theory malarkey. Hell, if you just want reveng
e, then he’s probably the best too. Frankly, that’d be my preference.”

  “What do you have?” I repeated, my voice a growl.

  “The money?” he replied. I tapped my phone a few times and sent the five thousand pounds he’d demanded.

  “What. Do. You. Have.” I demanded for a third time.

  “You really aren’t quite as smart as you think, are you?” Father O. lashed out. “I’ve got a lock of the bastard Senior Auditor’s hair. You’ll never be able to force any information out of him in London if he doesn’t want you to, but if you find him in the Dreamscape…” The priest trailed off, a smile twisting his lips. I wondered for a moment if I was looking in a mirror. He extended his hand and passed over a small envelope, and then his words hit home.

  “Wait—so all you have is some hair? From the asshole who set me up? I thought you had a device or some kind of magic book or something that would let me find anyone! I’m not some pathetic pity case that’s just out for revenge. I’m looking for whoever is killing the bankers. If I can find him, then I’ll have all the resources I need to get Dana back. If I don’t find him, then I don’t think I’ll live to regret it! You’ve screwed me again, you—” A buzzing in my pocket interrupted the tirade with a text message.

  They’re coming.

  “Oh—you think that anyone will honor that little deal that you made with Ms. Noel? How naive are you? With what you’ve done, with the people you’ve hurt, the Senior Auditor will have not the slightest problem getting approval to take you into custody after they’ve used you. The Sons will put you in a windowless white room next to all of the other freaks. John is the best sorcerer in Britain; he’ll find the exact resonance of the extradimensional component of your makeup, and then he’ll wrap you in sigils and bindings that will cut you off from the Dreamscape. When the inhuman part of you has been starved for a few days, you’ll beg for death and agree to be their good little slave,” Father O. sneered. Cold sweat broke out on my back, and I turned toward his door—whether he was right or not, I couldn’t let the Sons of Perseus grab me again.

  “He’ll take your daughter too—he’ll take everyone to get to you. Revenge, boy. Revenge and blood are your only way out of this. You’re a loose end…like me. They’ll get us both in one swoop now!” The broken old man cackled after me as I bolted out of the room—and immediately collided with someone.

  I bowled the smaller man over, cursing in pain as my injured hand banged hard against the wall as I fought to keep my balance and the cheap costume cassock tangled around my legs. A glance down as I hurdled the prone figure showed me that it was the priest who had stopped me in the hallway, presumably drawn to the shouting in Father O’s room. I heard a banging at the outer door—someone must have locked it since I’d come in, so at least one of my exits was blocked.

  The unwell priest was just barely back up to his knees, a deep chesty cough racking his frame. I dashed toward the door to the cathedral, ripping off the wildly flapping garment and leaving it in a black pile on the floor along with my fake collar and rosary.

  The door to the cathedral was unlocked from this side, which made sense for an out-of-the-way passage between a house full of priests and a gargantuan church. I was just slamming the door shut when I heard the lock at the front of the house give way with a crunch. I had spent half an hour memorizing the interior of the building the night before, so I trotted through the turns in the hall just as I had planned. Thirty seconds later, I emerged into the interior of the cathedral.

  The sound of my tennis shoes slapping against the stone floor reminded me of basketball games in high school, and I wove through the staring crowd like I was on a not-so-fast break, covering most of the distance to the massive double doors representing freedom before I even heard any sign of my pursuers. Unfortunately—continuing the sports metaphor—that was about the time that I was blindsided by a flying football tackle that hit with the force of a freight train.

  My shoulder slammed into a wooden chair, and my head glanced off the floor as I went to the ground. Almost-automatic reflex had me back on my feet and stumbling for the cover of one of the long line of massive columns supporting the roof. Luckily, my assailant didn’t land on top of me; their momentum carried them into a row of pews. I didn’t waste time looking around as bystanders started shouting and pointing at me.

  “Julian—we can still fix this. You can’t believe whatever he just told you, but if you come back with me to headquarters, you can work from there until this is over, and then we’ll help you, just like we promised,” Mia said, rising from the pew. I cursed under my breath at the realization that she was the one who’d taken me down, and I tried to ignore the pale, sweetly curved flesh that showed where a few buttons had come undone in the scuffle. I started to open my mouth to reply when there was a low growl all around me: apparently, the part of the crowd that hadn’t seen what had happened was making the assumption that I’d knocked her over. Great.

  A ring of onlookers had formed around me, and just outside of them I could see a couple of big goons jog up, looking to Mia for direction. I put my back to a thousand-year-old sarcophagus and turned back to the sophisticated, leggy brunette, whose fingers had already deftly remedied her sartorial slip—with the exception of her crimson lipstick being slightly smudged across full lips, there was nothing to indicate that she’d just had a violent altercation. She smiled like a cat that had gotten the cream and swayed toward me.

  “I’ve been authorized to tell you that we’ll be able to start the search for your wife a bit early if you just hand over the priest’s property and come with me,” she said. The insinuation that I’d taken something from a priest brought another growl out of the crowd, though some of the outer ring had started to melt away as they realized that I wasn’t able to flee.

  After Father O.’s words about me being locked in a little white room, Mia’s offer sent a chill down my spine. It was hard to believe anything that the traitorous old wretch had told me, but I didn’t feel like taking any chances. To my right, the goons started to elbow their way through the crowd. One was blond and fair skinned, while the other had the olive complexion and hooked nose of an ethnic Persian, but both had the same kind of brick-house-solid build that promised a world of hurt if they got their hands on me.

  I hadn’t tried to use my dream powers in the real world since they’d failed so unhelpfully when Jack had beaten the snot out of me in the traditional Redderton greeting, but I started to reach for that place now. I wanted to keep this simple, so I started to concentrate on the old standby of my childhood trampoline. A good three- or four-meter bound would take me over the crowd, and with the element of surprise I figured I could hit the ground running and be to the door before Mia or her thugs could push through the throng of onlookers.

  Being a couple of inches over six feet came in handy sometimes, and this was one of them because I spotted all seven feet of Jack Redderton, easily visible in a powder-blue tuxedo, making his way calmly through the doors to the cathedral. He was alone, so I didn’t think we could fight our way out, but backup never hurt. I started to feel the same pressure that had built in me before, and I mentally pushed as hard as I could on imagining myself bouncing into the air. I tensed my legs to spring but, like a sneeze that just won’t come, I knew that I wasn’t ready. I think that she must have figured out what I was doing because I caught a glimpse of Mia’s spooky gray eyes going wide, and she rushed forward, an unladylike word on her cupid’s-bow lips. Her hand reached out and was only inches from me when, with a rush of mental relief, I felt the shackles of reality give. I jumped.

  I made it two meters into the air and five meters forward, easily clearing the crowd. I heard a gasp at the improbable sight as I sailed over the first section of chairs, and I shouted, “White men can jump!” My head then immediately smashed into an ornate iron chandelier, and I tumbled, head over heels, to the floor, landing in a heap. Blood ran down my forehead, and it felt like the phone in my pocket was now in th
ree or four pieces. Shaking my head to clear it, I grabbed on to the back of a chair with my injured hand and hauled myself up with a roar of fear-laced pain.

  A lifetime of nightly battles had me moving again almost instantly, knowing instinctively that loss of momentum might mean loss of life. Nevertheless, this was the second big hit that I’d taken in less than a minute, and I would have been done for if Jack hadn’t reached me, throwing an arm under my shoulder and shoving me toward the door.

  “You damned well better have got what you came for, Jules,” he growled as he knocked some chairs into the aisle behind me. People were shouting now, and every eye was on the fracas as we stumbled toward the door. Mia and the two agents from the Sons were fighting their way through the crowd, shoving and cursing to get past the hindrance of the people that they’d been happy to take advantage of just a moment before.

  “You’ve got to get me somewhere where I can lie down. Fast,” I said to Jack as we passed the last pillar in the nave.

  “Now, now, Jules, it’s never a good idea to mix business and pleasure,” he ground out between clenched teeth, but he managed a wink that caused the skin around the long scar trailing down from his right eye to flare redly.

  I rolled my eyes and clarified, “I bent the laws of physics; I’ll be lucky if I can stay awake another couple of minutes.” Despite my words, I actually didn’t feel the expected wave of exhaustion. We might just make it, I thought. That’s when the thunder of a gunshot profaned the already sullied atmosphere of the cathedral.

  The Sons of Perseus had just upped the ante, and I could see people at the far end of the building already poking at their phones to contact the emergency services. In the short term, though, it had its intended effect as their path to us opened up as if by…umm…magic. Jack started to reach inside of his jacket, obviously not squeamish about returning fire in the crowded building.