Dreamonologist Read online

  Dreamonologist

  The Dreamwalker Chronicles: Volume 3

  By Gregory Pettit

  Text copyright © 2019 Gregory Pettit All Rights Reserved

  Cover art by Warren Design

  Editing by Kelly Cozy

  ISBN-13: 9781095474402

  To my Grandmother, who taught us how to read, and my Mother who taught me why

  “Wise men have interpreted dreams, and the gods have laughed.”

  ―H. P. Lovecraft

  Prologue

  0900–945 Monday, April 4, 2016

  “Olivia, where are you!” I called out to my missing daughter, and thumbed the trigger on my flamethrower, hurling a stream of fiery jellied petroleum toward yet another charging werewolf. The slavering beast dug inch-long claws into the ground, futilely trying to halt its momentum, but globules splashed onto its tawny brown fur, and the creature ignited with a howl, displaying rows of inhumanly sharp teeth. As the monster slapped at its burning flesh, I swung an AK-47 off of my shoulder, pulled down on the sights, and sent a stream of silver bullets into the creature’s chest, blasting it off its feet to disappear into the darkness. I tensed for another charge, surrounded by pools of burning homemade napalm that illuminated the rocky outcropping where I’d made my stand against the pack of werewolves, but at least for the moment I seemed to be safe.

  I drew together my willpower and pictured Olivia’s face, forcing my mind to imagine her as perfectly as possible. Did she have the freckle under her left eye, or her right? How could I not remember? I took that frustration, flung it together with my memory, and shouted out for Olivia again. “Ollie, if you can hear me, give me some sign.” Nothing. Wait. Had I felt something? Did the ground shake a little? I sent my dream senses out, looking for the dreamer’s mind. Almost instantly, I felt the warmth of his presence. The young man whose nightmare I was sharing was three hundred yards to the south and coming up fast—just not as fast as the giantess whose head crested the top of the outcropping at that moment. She was at least thirty feet tall, with pale skin, red hair, and…pearl earrings? Margaret That— I didn’t have time to finish my thought as a black handbag the size of a Volkswagen whipped toward me.

  I dropped my gun and ducked as dark leather and buckles flew over me, missing my head by less than a foot. The ground shook again. I rolled, imagining a huge, high-heeled foot coming down on my head; instead, twenty tons of Detroit steel in the form of an M4 Sherman tank, which I’d supplied the dreamer with, hurtled over the rise and slewed to a stop.

  “Go on, Corey,” I growled as I recognized the dreamer hanging out of the turret.

  “Now,” Corey ordered, and the tank belched smoke as it flung a 75mm shell at the gargantuan politician, making my ears ring with the cacophonous noise. Terra firma trembled again, and when the haze cleared a few seconds later, Maggie Milk-Snatcher was nowhere to be seen. A roar of triumph went up from the young man, and I grinned at his obvious elation.

  “Thanks for the backup, man,” the dreamer said, giving me a thumbs-up and a salute simultaneously. The nightmare started to dissolve, causing my smile to fade as I realized that I’d failed again.

  “Olivia!”

  I awoke.

  ◆◆◆

  I limped out of St. Paul’s station, exhausted. I’d been up until midnight with my wife, Dana, studying Enochian, and after I’d gone to bed, I’d spent the rest of the night searching for my missing daughter. I’d delved into London’s nightmares, but I hadn’t found any hint of Olivia. Again.

  A year ago, I would have needed to hustle to get through the arterial flow of businesspeople spurting out of the underground and into the City of London. Nowadays, that spurt had weakened to a trickle. More than half of the investment banks in the City had decided to make sweeping job cuts in the last six months. The economists were baffled by the decision, but I knew it was just one more side effect of a crazed sorcerer banishing Mammon, the god of money, from London. The UK finance sector was hurting. Luckily for me, the UK supernatural sector wasn’t.

  Wending through the ancient, narrow roads, I quickly found myself on Temple Avenue, and I flashed my pass at a standard electronic scanner. It beeped and let me into my office—the UK headquarters of the Sons of Perseus. Yeah, the same organization that had burned down my house, gotten my wife kidnapped by a demon, and tried to kill me half a dozen times last year. They’d made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.

  I strode through the chrome-and-glass lobby, gave a wave and a nod to a liveried guard, and ascended a flight of stairs. At the top, I was greeted by an elderly British woman. “Good morning, Mr. Adler,” she said, flashing me a smile. “If you’d just give me your hand?”

  I’d hit the real security. I put my hand into her proffered palm. She took a deep breath and closed her sightless eyes. As she breathed out, a prickling sensation burrowed into my hand and flowed up my arm. I flinched, and the short ginger hair on the top of my head stood straight up, the way it does when you get too close to a live electrical current. I hated this part.

  A few moments passed, and then the prickling sensation receded. “Thank you, Mr. Adler, and have a nice day.”

  I gave the woman a wan smile and passed through the heavy Plexiglas doors that led to the least secure part of the Sons’ HQ, where I had my cubicle. It was important that we had good security here. There were a lot of unusual things going on in the world lately, enough that the word “magic” was getting whispered not just by the denizens of occult shops, but by solid, middle-class Britons. However, the policy of the Sons of Perseus had been to deny, to suppress the existence of the supernatural world on the basis that people won’t try to mess with something that they don’t believe in. There was solid logic there, but it felt to me like our efforts to keep magic secret were the equivalent of Nero fiddling while Rome burned. It was only a matter of time before something happened that blew the lid off of our hidden world—even more than last winter’s events in Cairo already had.

  Nevertheless, within a few minutes I’d sat in front of my laptop and was deep into my inbox, reviewing tenders for a new telephone system.

  “Hey, Julian, my man.” The words jolted me out of the groove I’d gotten into, and I looked around the empty cubicle for the origin of the voice. A red stapler flapped open and closed for no discernible reason. “Look behind you,” the office equipment said, somehow managing to give a jaunty tilt.

  I chuckled and looked up into the beaming face of Vir Sharma. His brown eyes sparkled with life behind a pair of small, square glasses, and his wiry frame was perched on the edge of my desk before I even had a chance to open my mouth. It was no wonder the man was the strongest astral projector in the country; life palpably radiated off of him like heat from the sun.

  “Hey, Vir,” I said, doing my best Droopy Dog impression.

  The other man leaned into me, patting me on the shoulder. “Buddy, what have I said to you about bringing the energy? Cheer up, man. There’s more training soon. You can find out more info, and I’ll try to, you know, not get my ass kicked again. The old lady has something special planned.”

  My ears perked up, and I couldn’t help sitting up straighter. “You better not let Mia hear you refer to her that way. You’re only a couple of years younger than her. You got any idea what it’s about?”

  Vir hopped off the desk and pointed a finger at me as he backed away. “Nah, man. They’ll tell us after class. Maybe today they’ll force us to conjugate Old Enochian again; we haven’t done that lately. Does it matter, though? Any training’ll get me out of working on the end-of-quarter accounts. Nothing’s worse than quarter end. Anyhow, catch you in class.”

  Class. There probably wasn’t a better word for it, but I did thirteen years of the US public school sy
stem, followed up by four years of engineering at UW-Madison, and this wasn’t like any of those classes. For one thing, there were only three of us allowed to be taught together at any one time—can you imagine that student–teacher ratio in a US public school? For another thing, none of my other classes had this kind of exchange on the first day of class:

  Student 1: “So are we mutants, or wizards, or something?”

  Instructor: “Or something. You are all what are called, in the supernatural community, ‘attuned.’ We attuned, in some way, naturally resonate with other dimensions. Dimensions that lie adjacent to the one in which we exist.”

  Student 2: “Like alternate realities?”

  Instructor: “No. Alternate realities have similar physical laws, but different choices have been made. Other dimensions have different physical laws. Our attunement to these other dimensions allows us to either cross over to those dimensions or bring some of their matter into our dimension.”

  Student 1: “So we’re mutants.”

  Instructor: “Gnk’ar leng, ai Yog-sothoth phtagn! Now, Bensen, have you noticed how your hand just caught fire? Even though I have no attunement to anything that would let me summon fire? That’s because anyone can learn, with enough study and the right instruments, to tap into any dimension. An ‘attuned’ just has a huge leg up on the unattuned in contacting their particular dimension.”

  Student 1: “Fuck, you’re crazy! Arggh…”

  That last arggh was when our instructor, Auditor Mia Noel, an athletic woman in her late twenties or early thirties with chestnut hair, tan skin, and a red bow of a mouth, punched my classmate Bensen in the face and knocked him unconscious. As I said—not like any other class I’d been to.

  When I walked into class on April 4, I was surprised to find that Mia wasn’t alone. Senior Agent Christian van der Merwe had blond hair, blue eyes, arms as big around as my thighs, and an M16 automatic carbine. For all of that, he looked much friendlier than he had when we’d first met. But then again, that had been in the Bank of England during a magically fueled riot caused by a serial killer sorcerer who was trying to kill a god. We’d killed the sorcerer—who also happened to be Mia’s adoptive father, Senior Auditor John Brown. It was a stressful evening for Christian. For me, it was Sunday.

  “I am Christian,” he stated with a broad Afrikaans accent, gave a laconic wave to me, and sat down in a plastic chair next to Mia at the front of the room. He wasn’t attuned, but he’d gotten lumped in with us after last fall’s debacle.

  “Christian is joining us today because he is going to be leading your triad of attuned into the field. He’ll be your handler, and he’ll be joining us on all future missions,” Mia said.

  “Ummm, yo, I thought that we weren’t supposed to be going into the field for, like, a long time?” Vir said, shifting around in his seat.

  “Those time scales have been revised. A decision has come down that we are to employ our attuned assets more aggressively to combat the growing extradimensional threat at this time. In particular, you are to assist in the capture of approximately twenty individuals who were released last year to cover my father’s attempt to escape—”

  “Why’re they a problem now? That was months ago,” Bensen interrupted, crossing his arms, which rippled with muscles and were almost covered in tribal ink. Bensen was a good guy, but not the sharpest tool in the shed.

  Mia continued like she hadn’t even noticed the young man’s interruption. “Perhaps you saw an article in the paper this morning about a ‘carbon monoxide leak’ in Hounslow that killed a family of six? No? Or did you see last week on the news when one of those fancy new electric cars spontaneously burst into flame due to a technical glitch? Did you, perhaps, notice that nearly a dozen people have been reported missing in Berkshire, near Hatfield, in the past two months? Is that enough reason for you?”

  I put my head in my hands. I had seen the article in the paper this morning, but I hadn’t had any idea that it was related to last year’s debacle. I hadn’t created the situation that led to these dangerous attuned being let loose, but I’d made decisions that had necessitated the outcome.

  Mia glared around the room and continued to dress us down. “There was a time when any attuned individual was hunted down and butchered by this very organization, and there are many people who would like to go back to those times. They even have a point. If you’ll recall our very first lesson, you’ll remember that every single time you use an extradimensional ability, it wounds the very fabric of our reality, easing the passage here of malevolent entities. Therefore, besides the death and destruction, the Escapees’ actions reflect extraordinarily poorly on all of us. Does that answer ‘Why now?’ for you, Bensen?”

  Bensen opened his mouth. “Hey, I—”

  “Shut up,” I growled. Bensen raised his eyebrows and made a zipping motion.

  Mia continued the briefing, explaining the events of last fall, leading up to the release of the “Escapees” in more detail. I was intimately familiar with the situation—it had led to my wife being rescued from the clutches of a demon and my daughter being kidnapped. By my mom.

  To get my daughter back, I’d made a deal to join the Sons of Perseus, which made me, at twenty-eight, the oldest person ever accepted into the Sons’ training program, and my aching body was telling me that maybe I’d made a mistake. I would just rest my eyes for a few moments while Mia went over ancient history…

  I opened my eyes. Looking down, I saw that I wore a long, tan, Burberry trench coat and had a gladius strapped to my hip. I was in the Dreamscape. Shit. That meant that I had fallen asleep in class. As long as I was here, I figured that I may as well see if I could take care of the dreamer’s nightmare. You see, I’m a Dreamwalker. That means that I’ve spent every night since I was a kid fighting the worst dreams of the world’s sleepers. That was the very base of my supernatural powers, and, according to what Mia and I had been able to figure out, the way that I “recharged” my capacity to affect the real world.

  I looked around. The sun sank behind a horizon studded with tower blocks, looming over a forest of red-slate roofs dotted with the odd tree. West London, if I had to guess. I heard a scream in the distance, and sprinted toward the sound, drawing my gladius. As I pounded the pavement, I reached out with my mind, probing for the dreamer, who showed up about two hundred yards away as a glowing “warm” beacon to my senses—the best way I can describe it was as if I could smell yellow or taste a song. Judging from what I sensed, the dreamer was a young woman.

  I slowed down as I closed in on the young woman. I imagined the stairs, door, and doorknob leading into her house being made of rubber, and I pushed. The Dreamscape bent to my will, and I made my way silently into the house.

  “Leave me alone. I don’t want to go with you,” an Englishwoman’s voice said from a room away. That was a good sign. If the woman was dreaming about something that could be reasoned with, then I could probably try to use that to defuse the nightmare without resorting to violence.

  “If you didn’t want to go with me, then why did you have me kill your husband?” a man’s soft, sibilant voice said as I crept forward and sheathed my sword.

  “I didn’t think you’d do it,” the woman sobbed.

  “It’s too late now. Come with me—we’ll be together forever!” the man said as I rounded the corner and realized that I’d made a mistake. There is one kind of monster that is dangerous and that people always want to talk to. Vampires. I blame Anne Rice. The creature detected me somehow and spun, its floppy, tousled hair flying. Was that a kid from One Direction? I was pretty sure he didn’t really have three-inch fangs.

  I jumped back and drew my sword while summoning a three-foot-high riot shield. The vampire slammed into me and—

  I awoke.

  “I said, wake up, Mr. Adler.” Mia emphasized her command with the toe of a two-inch-heeled black pump. I fell out of my chair and vomited on the floor. Whenever I was jolted from a dream, the consequences were rough,
and this time was a bad one. I was pretty sure that Mia kept berating me, probably something about the quality of my latest homework assignment, but at least the classroom was empty, so I was able to take a couple of minutes to pull myself together. When I finally did, she was staring down at me. “Mr. Adler, I’ll be expecting you here tomorrow morning, bright and early, to go on your first live mission to capture one of the Escapees. The sooner they are captured, the sooner we’ll be able to allocate more resources to finding your daughter.”

  “What about our other deal?”

  Mia paused and tapped her teeth for a moment. “Yes. We will need to amend that, won’t we? How about this? We’ll continue our weekly extra training sessions where possible, and if you are successful, then you’ll continue to receive truthful answers from me in regard to your questions about the supernatural. However, if our training session is canceled by an operation, then I’ll answer your questions during debriefing—provided you don’t balls up the mission,” Mia offered, looking at me impassively. “Will I continue to have your services in this endeavor?”

  I needed the Sons’ help and information to get Olivia back, so I wiped off my face, squared my shoulders, and nodded. “I’ll be there.”

  Chapter 1

  0200–0700, Sunday, June 12, 2016

  I opened my eyes. Wan light trickled down from an LED streetlight, putting me on an island of illumination in a sea of darkness. I glanced down at myself, nodding in satisfaction to see that I was decked out in my tan trench coat, my gladius strapped to my side. With my ginger hair and slender build, I probably looked like a matchstick. I reached into the Dreamscape with my sixth sense and, within a few seconds, found the glowing point of consciousness that was the dreamer. I knew immediately that it wasn’t Olivia. I’d set the thaumaturgic circle perfectly; I’d even visited one of my wife’s dreams last week just to make sure that I could still Dreamwalk—move from one person’s dream to another—properly. So why hadn’t it worked? There was a fairly obvious answer, but I shivered and tried not to think about it. My mother certainly wasn’t Mom of the Year material, but she wouldn’t kill her own granddaughter…would she?