The Nightmare Maker

by Gregory Pettit

  There was a sensation like I’d just let out a big breath that I hadn’t realized I was holding, and then I felt the heft of the sword in my hand and saw flickers of blue, protective energy rippling over my trench coat. I let out a grunt of satisfaction and raised the gladius, fixing the image of it shattering the barrier in my mental processes and feeding in my anger until the tip of the sword glowed red, like a really, really…red…thing…okay, so maybe I’d hit my head harder than I thought.

  “Julian!” Becky yelled, and I looked back at my sister-in-law. “I’m sorry. Toscan tricked me. He showed up at the house and said that you’d sent him to take us to the Redderton office. I knew he was your friend so…” She trailed off, wringing her hands and leaving a smear of blood on her pink T-shirt.

  I didn’t know if I could break the barrier, but I knew that I could break Toscan. I thought back to the lessons I’d learned while trapped in the puca’s nightmare dimension: kill or be killed. My heart beat faster, and my vision drew down to a red-tinged tunnel that was focused on my weakened enemy. I took a step toward Toscan’s recumbent form, sword still poised to strike.

  “Julian—what the hell, why are your eyes black?” Becky said, tripping over Badger and landing on her bottom as she backed away. Her words cut through the sudden haze of blood lust that had swept over me. The only time I’d seen black eyes before had been in people being possessed by alien, otherworldly entities. I felt my arm trembling, aching to slash down and open Toscan’s throat. My anger bled away, replaced by fear…what the hell was happening? I watched my foot stomp down on Toscan’s chest.

  I fed the fear into my struggle—simple fear about losing control, fear of failing my family, and fear of being alone—but it didn’t seem to be enough. I gritted my teeth, but against my will the red-hot sword tip continued to move toward Toscan’s throat.

  “Don’t do anything that would make Dana ashamed of you,” Becky said, hiccupping and with tears streaming down her face as she crawled away from me.

  It was exactly what I needed to hear. My ring finger burned like my wedding band was on fire (Come find me), but I was able to twitch the finger, and the spell broke. I roared my defiance at the entity trying to subvert my will and whirled, striking the magical force field with the glowing gladius. There was a flash of light and a sound like a soap bubble popping, and the barrier was gone—as was the alien presence. I was going to get my daughter, and then I was going to find my wife, or I was going to die trying. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and stepped through the portal.

  Chapter 29 1900–2200, Monday, October 5, 2015

  I opened my eyes. An open space roughly three football fields long and two wide stretched out in front of me. There were the remains of twisted, purple cable-mounds dotted about the field. Shit. I was back in the puca’s realm. This had been the supernatural predator’s larder, each of the dozens of piles of material representing a life ruined—a mother, father, brother, or sister stolen away—until I’d banished the bastard thing to oblivion. I’d spent ages trying to escape this place, and after only a little over a month I was back—in the flesh! My skin prickled at that thought, and a cold chill ran down my limbs as I considered the unexpected, unprecedented psychic attack that I’d just defeated, but images of my little girl screaming for me, hands outstretched, pushed those concerns to the back of my mind, and I hardened my resolve.

  In the real world, I was barely more than a normal man, but here I was the Master. I was a Dreamwalker, and the Senior Auditor, for all of his knowledge and all of his tricks, was not. I glanced at the portal behind me and saw that it was starting to close, so I pushed a bit of willpower toward it, mentally wedging it open. The contraction abated. I wasn’t sure how long it would last, but I didn’t have time for anything else.

  Next, I pictured my old school buddy Tim’s hunting dog, a big Walker Coonhound named Spike. That dog had been able to follow a scent anywhere. Once, as a teenager, when I’d spent all day clearing brush, I’d lost my wallet. I’d driven down to Tim’s and asked to borrow the hound. Within five minutes of letting it off the lead, Spike found my wallet. That was a good dog. I smiled, and sure that he’d be there, reached down to pet him. I felt Spike’s head under my hand and scratched behind his ear. A tail thumped my leg. I reached into my jeans and pulled out one of Ollie’s stuffed animals. I’d pocketed it with the intention of using it to form a link to her in the Dreamscape, but now I held the soft little bunny down and let the hound get its scent.

  “Hunt ’er up, boy,” I called, giving the command for the dog to start searching for its quarry. Muscles tensed, and then Spike took off like a shot across the strange, gray-grassed ground, bellowing high and sharp as he found the scent almost instantly. I took off after him.

  In real life, Spike would have left me in the dirt, but in the Dreamscape only the barest whisper of my will was enough to let my legs blur with hugely accelerated motion, so I was able to keep pace easily. We passed out of the familiar field within about thirty seconds, entering the forest of large cable trees, ropey agglomerations of purple fibers the size of my wrist and fifty feet long. Any thought that we might be on the wrong trail disappeared like Timmy down a well as we came across the smashed corpse of a leg-spider. They were the least of this pocket-realm’s denizens, but they were still deadly; well over a dozen legs radiated out from a central point with no discernible body, forming a writhing mass the size of a large man’s hand, and each one existed for the sole purpose of finding prey and pumping it full of hundreds of eggs to produce more disgusting leg-spiders. On the plus side, they made a really satisfying crunch when you smashed them.

  I pulsed a flash of awareness out around me, and I was surprised to find the tiny sparks of this dimension’s monstrous fauna withdrawing—which made sense a few moments later when I came across a clearing. Perhaps clearing wasn’t quite the right word, though, because the flattened, burnt circle of destruction was so complete that it would have been more accurate to call it a desolation. Spike and I hurried through, trampling over the burnt-out husks of at least twenty fleshpiles—flabby, eyeless things with dozens of thin, claw-tipped legs supporting large, pink, fleshy bodies three feet across and standing four feet tall. There was nothing about them that wasn’t revolting, especially the sphincter-mouth at the base of their central mass. They were proof that ugliness, like stupidity, knows no bounds.

  The amount of power that Brown was throwing around would have left me exhausted; since I knew that he wasn’t a Dreamwalker, I had to assume that he was using Olivia as a battery, just as Mia had described. I didn’t like to consider what people did to batteries when they were empty. Spike must have picked up on my emotions, because he bellowed and put on a further burst of speed. I kept up.

  I was hurtling after an enemy that I’d faced multiple times, and so far I’d not managed to accomplish much more than really pissing him off. My rage and fear for Olivia had carried me this far, but I needed to think; I needed a plan. Even though I was strong in the Dreamscape, I might not be strong enough on my own to defeat the Senior Auditor, with all of his knowledge and my daughter to use as a hostage. When I’d driven him off in the bank, I’d taken advantage of a special location, and given what had happened to the man I was supposed to protect, I wasn’t going to do that again. Moreover, I suspected that stopping the Senior Auditor’s attempt on Badger’s life had required the assistance of a god, and going into danger relying on divine intervention instead of a plan is a great way to arrange a meeting with capital-G God. Finally, I’d had to rely on sacrifices from Miranda and Mia to survive my other encounters, one losing her life and the other her belief. I wasn’t sure which had suffered the worst wound.

  My legs pounded the dry, gray ground, and the hound stayed on Olivia’s scent as my mind continued to try to piece together what I knew, but I was so tired. I’d driven myself relentlessly for the past month trying to find Dana, and the furious battles that I’d fought with Brown over the past week had sapped whatever
energy I had left. I knew that somewhere in my head I had all of the strands of information that I needed, but I just couldn’t weave them together into a coherent picture. However, I knew I wasn’t finished yet—I could still manage a complex metaphor.

  That train of thought was derailed (and he nails another one!) when I caught the harsh, crashing consonants of the Senior Auditor intoning another invocation. A moment later, I spotted him in a small clearing next to an unnaturally conical boulder. Olivia was tucked under his left, more human arm. She squirmed feebly, looking tired. I slowed and ducked behind a cable tree, reached down, and patted Spike’s head. “Good dog,” I mumbled, and squatted down. “I never could have found her without you, but I need one more favor from you, boy,” I said, and then whispered into his ear.

  Spike cocked his wide head to the side, licked my face, and bolted away, noiselessly skirting the edge of the clearing. I held my position, heart pounding. The back of my neck itched with the feeling of being watched by the ill-intended denizens of the puca’s realm, but I didn’t dare to take my eyes off of the Senior Auditor; I was going to need to time this just right. I dredged up a memory of hurtling down the hill outside my parents’ house on the mountain bike that I’d received for my thirteenth birthday, the wind whipping past my face fast enough to steal my breath away. I held it vivid in my mind, and then Spike let out a bellow and burst out of the strange forest, snarling, teeth bared. Brown turned toward him, and I gave a mental push.

  The bicycle shot out of the forest and silently covered the distance to Brown in only a couple of seconds. My vision tunneled down to a point, focusing entirely on the little girl held loosely at his side. There was a chuffing noise, and then I heard Spike cry out in pain, but I didn’t take my eye off the prize. My thighs pumped frantically as I leaned to the left, extended my arms…and snatched Olivia away from the monster!

  I think that Brown was so surprised at the sight of my frantic pedaling that he didn’t react immediately, only flinging a ball of something green and sticky at me as I was three-quarters of the way through the turn that would take me back the way I had come and to the portal back to the real world that I hoped was still waiting there. The throw missed me but landed directly in my path, causing me to jink sharply to the left. My front tire hit a patch of gray sand and slid, so I tucked Olivia into my side and bailed off the bike, taking the impact fairly well on my side and hip. Fairly well being a relative term at twenty miles an hour, meaning that with the protection of my trench coat, I only lost most of the skin on my right hand and cheek (I’ll leave which cheek to your imagination).

  I glanced down at the little girl in my arms, blond hair lying over her face. She seemed to be asleep but unharmed. I used a trickle of will and the memory of endless hours bouncing on a trampoline to spring to my feet in one smooth motion, landing on my heels and stumbling toward the cover of the cable tree line. Flicking my attention around, I was concerned when I couldn’t spot my enemy. I slowed to a jog and cautiously approached the first towering mass of purple, ropey growths. That caution saved my life because a tentacle-arm, dripping a fluid that hissed as it struck the ground, flicked out from behind the very growth that I’d been aiming for, missing my face by a couple of inches.

  Brown howled, whether in frustration or rage I couldn’t tell. I didn’t stick around to find out, putting leather to ground and sprinting away from the deranged sorcerer. I heard gravel crunching behind me. Anyone who has ever experienced a nightmare knows that when something is chasing you, you shouldn’t stop to look back, so I didn’t, zigzagging from side to side. A blast of something dark and deadly missed my feet by a few inches. From his aim, it seemed like Brown was intent on not harming Olivia, but it was still enough to force me to take cover behind a large, dodecahedral boulder. My chest was heaving with exertion, so I tried my usual trick of using willpower to restore my stamina—to absolutely no effect. I guess it should have been obvious that if I was here in body, that wouldn’t work, but it still sent a chill down my spine.

  While that thought flashed through my head, the Senior Auditor bellowed at me from about fifteen yards away: “Julian, for the love of God, man, stop! With your daughter, I can kill Mammon, I can end his cycle of greed and lies, I can restore free will to man!” Was this guy kidding me?

  “The only will you should be worried about is the one that they’ll read out after I put you in a box,” I screamed, and then I blew his fucking arm off.

  The tentacle-arm that pinwheeled through the air had been subject to unconsented emergency amputation courtesy of a 10-gauge Remington SP10 semiautomatic shotgun firing a 3 ½-inch load of buckshot. I’d called the pistol-gripped shotgun into my free hand at the same instant that I’d shouted, managing to pull the trigger three times before the recoil dislodged the weapon from my one-handed grip. I turned away from the sorcerer, keeping my body between him and Olivia, and I bolted toward the edge of the clearing, away from the portal back to the real world.

  The edge of the forest of cable trees was only twenty yards in front of me when Olivia spoke, murmuring a sleepy, “Daddy?” I glanced down—and tripped over the corpse of a leg-spider. I’d been moving faster than an Olympic athlete, and I fell awkwardly, Olivia spilling out of my arms. I quickly summoned a pile of cushions for her, and then I hit the ground hard. I heard Olivia give a sharp little squeal of pain, and my heart leapt into my throat at the same instant that my right arm dislocated from my shoulder with a sucking pop. I tumbled end over end three or four times, which felt really special, before I came to rest against the bole of a particularly large purple growth.

  Things went a bit fuzzy for a few moments, and when they came back into focus, Senior Auditor Brown was looming over me, two feet of his right tentacle-arm missing and dripping blue-black fluid. A corona of red-and-ebon power danced around him, and he pointed his left hand, which ended in wrinkled tube-fingers, at me. “You had such promise, boy, and I wanted so badly to allow you to live a full, happy life as a reward for your help in making my master’s triumph tonight possible, but now you—aaargh!”

  Somewhere, sometime there will be a villain that doesn’t like to monologue, but I hope I never meet one. Spike, 120 pounds of snarling canine, exploded out of the forest and latched on to the Senior Auditor’s good left arm, driving better than a dozen two-inch long fangs into the sorcerer’s corrupted flesh. Brown howled with pain, and the glob of goo that had extruded from the ends of his tube-fingers splatted harmlessly onto the ground. While Brown gnashed his shark-like teeth and flailed the stump of his right arm at the dog, I lurched to my feet and stumbled toward Olivia.

  I’d spent most of my life singlehandedly policing the nightmares of the people around me, and it had made me arrogant. Thanks to an assist from man’s best friend, one of the pieces had finally snapped together in my head. I’d been trying to figure out from my previous encounters what the Senior Auditor’s weakness was, and I suddenly understood it. He was alone. Sure, he could magic up a crowd of rioters, but when it came down to it, he only had himself to rely on. I’d spent years thinking the same thing, but now I wasn’t alone. To defeat the Senior Auditor, I needed help, lots of help, and I knew where to find it. In retrospect, I guess it should have been obvious, but hey—I’d been hit in the head a lot.

  I scooped up my daughter just as I heard a pitiful yelp of pain from my friend’s dog. My stomach turned, and I grimaced as I looked at Brown and saw him bent over the dog’s limp form, mouth latched onto its throat and hot blood pumping over his ghoulish features. He noticed my expression and snarled, a mouthful of nearly black fluid running onto the stony ground. While the Senior Auditor rose, I quickly gathered my Dreamwalker’s senses and quested outward, remembering what Mia had said about the gates between the worlds being open tonight. I felt the presence of my daughter, warm but subdued in my arms; I sensed the writhing madness of Brown’s mind as I probed past him; I took in the dozen or so vicious and slyly intelligent predators prowling in the few hundred yards aro
und the clearing; and about a third of a mile away, on a straight line with the Senior Auditor’s original course, I found what I was looking for. There was another gate, and I knew as certainly as I knew my own name that it lead to the bank and my potential allies.

  Strangely symmetrical gravel slewed in all directions as I hoisted Olivia over my shoulder and rushed toward the new gate. Brown had expected me to head back the way I had come, so he was out of position when I plunged past a rugose sphere of stone that made my eyes itch when I looked at it, dashing into the forest of cable trees in almost precisely the opposite direction.

  It was only five hundred yards to the exit, so normally I would have been confident of covering the distance safely, but with an injured shoulder, fleeing from an attacker, and carrying a young child, I knew that I would be sending signals that were nearly irresistible to the predators lurking in the bushes. Therefore, I wasn’t surprised when, about halfway to my goal, a pair of fleshpiles pounced out of the undergrowth of chest-high, gray, desiccated grass. When I say I wasn’t surprised, it was literally true; I’d sensed the creatures coming and met them with a torrent of 9mm bullets that sprayed out of the end of an Uzi that I’d just “found” in my pocket. The gun wasn’t accurate, but at least a handful of rounds thwapped home, and the flabby, stinking blobs of flesh squealed and scrambled away, their crab-like legs dragging them back into cover.

  It had only taken two or three seconds to deal with the creatures, but I could hear Brown’s huge, slug-bottomed form crashing through the forest just behind me. At that moment, I wished desperately that I’d had some experience of an antipersonnel mine I could tap into so that the pursuing sorcerer could helpfully glide over it and end the chase, but instead I reached into my pocket and drew out a handful of caltrops; I turned tail and ran, scattering the twisted bits of metal on the ground behind me. As I pounded along with Brown’s monstrous form in pursuit, I realized that my plan was, essentially, to take the Senior Auditor and my daughter exactly where he wanted to go; it was that kind of brilliant thinking that had made me a fast-rising corporate star before all of this weirdness had kicked off. There was a howl of pain—maybe I wasn’t entirely stupid after all. I ran.