The Nightmare Maker Read online

  “Julian Adler speaking,” I answered in my best business voice, hoping that the Kylie Minogue playing in the background didn’t ruin the effect—and that I could get Donna out of my head. I was already feeling guilty for my momentary lapse and reminded myself that I needed to speak to all of the people present to see if they might have some insights that could be useful to my goals.

  “Mr. Adler. So good to see you again.” The cultured voice on the end of the phone was that of the mysterious brunette that had warned me off of Father O. a few days before. “I hadn’t expected that you’d be back in Paddington Basin again so soon after I gave you and dear Becky a ride home. I do worry though that you’re keeping some unsavory company. I’ve been speaking to some of my friends, and we just don’t think that it is in anyone’s best interest if you continue to…associate with people of such…flexible moral fiber.”

  “Ahh…so your people are qualified to judge morality? The last time I checked, you tricked a bunch of stupid university students into unleashing a monster on London.” My temper flared, and my voice came out in a bass growl.

  “Given the number of magistrates and justices in our little association, I think that they indeed are qualified to pass judgment. It would be a pity if that judgment was passed against you, say in respect of an arson conviction or the disappearance of your wife?” Her words were cool and dispassionate, but I would have had to be a complete idiot to miss her meaning.

  “Look, you’ve tried to bully me once, and I told you to—”

  Before I could complete my sentence, I heard a shout behind me: “Oy—none of that in here!”

  I turned quickly and saw Donna locked in an embrace with another trench coat–wearing member of the group, her hand down the front of his trousers and actively questing. The barman was already starting to come out from behind the long oak bar when another member of the group ran up, red faced and fists clenched. Seeing that she was an overweight woman in her sixties, I wasn’t sure if the six-foot-four, Mohawk-sporting bartender was all that concerned.

  “Are you making trouble here, you dirty little punk!” she yelled in a high-pitched voice with a distinctly northern accent.

  I’m a complete idiot. I looked at my phone and was chagrined to see that the call was still connected.

  “You were trying to warn me, weren’t you?” I mumbled sheepishly. The message that my new friend was trying to get across was that whatever it was about me that had been triggering odd behavior in the puca’s victims had outlived the alien creature’s banishment.

  “Yes, Mr. Adler. Believe it or not, my organization is only concerned with the greater good, and as you can see, your presence amongst these people does not do anyone any good. If you’ll be so kind as to leave, then I’ll be outside for the next couple of minutes.” Her tone of forbearance was almost insufferably smug, but no one in London turns down the opportunity to avoid the tube at rush hour.

  I sighed and waved a hasty good-bye to an embarrassed-looking Richard. I had come tonight looking for a chance to unwind and potentially learn something useful. I’d hoped for an opportunity to tap into the skills of this group to help me in my search, but it was obvious now that anything like that was going to need to be done remotely. I’d only been around these survivors a handful of minutes, and their worst behavioral excesses, effects that they had happily consigned to the past, were being brought out. I hurried out of the building before the small northern woman that looked a bit like my grandmother got herself charged with grievous bodily harm. I could see the headline now: “Pugilistic Pensioner Punches Pint-Pulling Punk.”

  The rain pattering into the Grand Union Canal basin was falling harder now, but it was easy to spot the Aston Martin idling on the canal path. I had no idea how she’d managed to get the car here, but I opened the door and, after a glance to make sure that the driver was who I was expecting, climbed in.

  Today’s cream pantsuit was nearly as flattering as the black number she’d worn when we’d first met, the curve of her thighs flexing intriguingly as she worked the clutch. My libido, just wrestled back into control after Donna’s advances, flared up again. I tore my gaze away and stared forward as we pulled through an alley I hadn’t known was there and back onto the street.

  “You could have warned me that that might happen,” I stated into a lull as she shifted gears. She opened her mouth to speak, but I intentionally cut her off with a chopping motion. It was a dirty negotiating tactic, but I didn’t like being at such a disadvantage. I decided to ask her name. It might seem like an inane question, but I’d learned early on while experiencing their nightmares that people fear the unknown, so putting a name to this mysterious woman would do a lot to remove the psychological edge that she held over me. “You clearly know my name. What am I supposed to call you?”

  “Ma’am,” she said immediately. Her reply was so unexpected that I snorted with laughter. That kind of suave reaction has always been a part of my irresistible charm for the opposite sex. A smile touched her lips for an almost unnoticeable instant before her mask of professionalism slammed back down.

  “However, you are correct,” she said. I raised an eyebrow. “We should have warned you that this could happen. You were inevitably going to come into contact with your former colleagues or others with whom you would resonate.” I added a slight nod of my head to my raised eyebrow, so she kept speaking, “There isn’t time to go into extradimensional mathematics in detail, but due to the time that you all spent together outside of our reality, the Unadled now ‘vibrate’ at a slightly different frequency than the vast majority of humanity. When you get together, it sets up a sort of resonance, and the effect gets amplified,” she explained.

  “But my understanding is that they’ve met a few times already?” I said.

  “Yes, but you weren’t there, Julian. Your essential nature already vibrated on the same, or almost the same, frequency. Where their extradimensional vibrations are fading echoes, incapable of influencing each other, you are like a string that is constantly being plucked.”

  “That sounds like a load of plucking bullshit,” I said, smirking.

  She took a slow, deep breath. “Mr. Adler, as fortunate as it was that I was on hand to extricate you from the morass into which you had blundered, I was actually sent to deliver an offer from my employers—”

  “No.” I cut her off again, firmly but with my tone even, and watched as her knuckles went white against the black leather of the steering wheel. “If you think that I’ll even consider working for your employers, then you don’t know half as much about me as you keep trying to imply.”

  “I believe that you’re making a mistake.” She chastised me without taking her eyes off of the slick pavement as she wove in and out of traffic on the A40, passing Westfield Shopping Centre on our left.

  “Yeah, I did make a mistake. Mama always said not to get into cars with strangers, and ma’am, I still don’t even know your name,” I replied.

  “Things have been going smoothly for you, and you’ve been allowed to indulge your obsession with recovering your wife, but people are dying, Mr. Adler. We believe that something or someone is attacking them through their dreams. We’ve put our best people and not-quite-people on this, but they haven’t been able to find the killer, let alone stop it.” She said it matter-of-factly, but I didn’t miss the way that her gray eyes flicked momentarily in my direction. I looked out the window without breaking my silence and folded my arms across my chest.

  “Doesn’t the death of innocent people, people that you might be able to help, matter to you anymore? After what you’ve been through, we wouldn’t contact you unless we believed that you were the only one capable of helping.” A note of desperation crept into her voice.

  “I’m going to dedicate my efforts to finding Dana. Besides Olivia, the rest of the world can burn for all I care. I’m done.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Julian. We could offer you—”

  “NO!” I slammed my hands on the
dash. My emotions flared red hot at the implication that my commitment to Dana was for sale. My reaction must have been even stronger than I had realized because when I pulled my hands back they left a smoking, black char mark on the expensive leather upholstery of the luxury car. I looked over and saw my driver gulp, her well-tanned skin paling three shades. I needed to get to someplace where I could crash quickly. Even manifesting that miniscule amount of power in the real world was surely going to come with a cost, and if I was right, then I’d be passing out in the next couple of minutes. Luckily, we were only a few blocks from the Travel Lodge.

  The remaining trip passed in a tense silence as I began to fight the first waves of exhaustion. She pulled over to let me out, and I stumbled out of the car and into the elevator without a backward glance. I was going down quickly and fumbled in my pockets as the world started to spin.

  Eventually, I got my wallet out and removed the key card. As I did so, a piece of paper fluttered down toward the gray heavy-traffic carpeting. I grabbed it before it could hit the ground and waved my key card at the electronic lock, which obligingly clicked open. Unfolding the paper, I read the message as I slammed the door and stumbled toward the bed.

  If you change your mind 07981624524.

  When the hell had she found time to slip this into my pocket? On the bottom there was a handwritten signature.

  Mia Noel

  I crashed onto the bed next to Olivia.

  Lights out.

  Chapter 8 1700, Monday, September 28–0630, Tuesday, September 29, 2015

  I opened my eyes. The sound of waves washed over me, and my black, hard-soled shoes sank an inch into the sand as I surveyed a tropical beach. This was different. I’d passed out after using my powers in the real world, and unlike every other time that had happened, I found myself dreaming.

  Almost as oddly, I could count on my hands the number of times that I’d shown up in the dreams of someone that was having a nightmare about a tropical resort. Haunted houses? Hell yeah. Dark alleys? Definitely. Burning buildings? Bet your bottom. But tropical beaches—not so much.

  Alert to danger, I squinted and scrutinized the beach, but the most threatening thing I spotted was a fist-sized crab scuttling along the white sand. It wandered past an especially comfortable-looking rattan chair on the edge of a large, marble-floored veranda that ran from the side of a grass roofed, upscale tiki bar down to the beach. Plopping down on the chair, I used just the slightest amount of willpower to create a bubble of cool air in the tropical heat. After the number of times it had saved my life, there was no way that my trench coat was coming off because of a little sweat, but this called to mind my deep-seated conviction that air conditioning was the pinnacle of civilization to date.

  I sat in the chair and willed my consciousness outward across the Dreamscape. I quickly detected the warm glow of the dreamer’s mind a few hundred yards to the northwest, but I ignored it. My perception expanded…until I ran up against the edge of a bubble of thought half a mile away. I held the shape of that portion of the Dreamscape in my mind and repeated the process twice more, mentally mapping the area, which made my vision blur momentarily, and I gripped the edge of the chair. For years I’d known how to sense my general surroundings, and it had always been easy to locate the dreamer, the source from which the reality of the Dreamscape took form, but until now I’d never consciously tried to take in the entirety of that creation—or tried to break through it.

  I gathered my concentration, testing the boundaries of the dream with senses that were a bit like sonar if sonar tasted blue, looking for some flaw or seam that I could pick at with my mind. If I could find a way out, then maybe I could find Dana. I kept probing, but started to build a mental image of my wife: silky black hair, dimples when she smiled, the way she felt in my arms at night, the scent of her skin.

  “Julian?” Dana’s voice called out behind me; I whirled, going from sitting to standing in one smooth motion that would have made Jackie Chan jealous. She stood in front of me, arms open wide, and my heart leapt into my throat.

  “Dana! Where have you been? How are you here?” I took a step toward her.

  “Julian?” Her inflection was identical, and I watched in dismay as she opened her arms and beckoned me in once again. I took two more steps forward and stared into vacant eyes. “Julian?”

  Nothing more than a dream. But what a good dream she was. I studied the apparition of my wife, seeing hazel eyes, full of my own reflection, staring out of well-tanned skin with only the slightest dusting of freckles across her nose. In one sense, we’d only been separated for a few weeks, but in another way of reckoning time, I’d spent years locked away from her.

  “Get the rich boy!” I was snapped out of my navel gazing by a Caribbean-accented shout that split the air behind me, and Dana’s apparition disappeared like a soap bubble popping, making me grind my teeth in frustration. I tamped down my anger and turned to see a fat young man huffing and puffing his way down the beach, flip-flops on and skin blistered in the sun. Behind him by about two hundred yards was a group of young men and women. I spent a tiny effort of will to become unremarkable and innocuous, calling forward memories of being overlooked at a school dance. Unlike nowadays, lanky redheaded guys haven’t always slayed the ladies. No one would notice me now.

  Something about the scene felt off, so I leaned forward to watch. The chubby guy’s cheeks were flushed bright red, and he fell to his hands and knees in a quivering puddle about twenty feet away from me. The throng of approximately twenty pursuers caught up to him ten seconds later, forming a circle around him.

  “You take your bonus while we’re out on our asses,” a young black woman said with a distinctly south-of-the-river accent.

  “Bankers caused me to lose my house!” This was in a Polish accent and came from a burly white guy with a receding hairline, and the others chimed in with a chorus of similar invective. I’d thought at first that this was a nightmare about a revolution in a third world country, but the multiethnic bent of the mob seemed to rule that out. My attempt to map the Dreamscape had worn me out, so I figured that I’d benefit from getting a bit of extra rest. I was just about to step into the open to end this bad dream when a feeling of wrongness made my stomach roil. I grabbed a palm tree to keep my balance.

  “Gdrnak murgh palacranakaldiaje!” The syllables rolled like thunder through the air, and the angry crowd froze. Not like in a game of Simon Says or even in the “stop or I’ll shoot” way; instead, they actually ceased moving in a “someone pushed pause on the universe” way. I looked around, brow furrowed and jaw hanging slightly open, while the dreamer hauled his bulk up to his hands and knees and started to crawl away, sobbing and sniveling the whole time. I thought for a moment that if the mob didn’t get him, I would put him out of his misery pretty soon. After having my search for Dana interrupted, I was feeling all heart.

  From the corner of my eye, I noticed motion at the back of the crowd. At first I assumed that whatever had frozen the man’s pursuers was wearing off. When no more shouting accompanied it, I turned my head and realized that there was only one person moving. A person that hadn’t been there a moment before. I squinted for a moment, thinking that my contact lenses had slipped somehow, but then I realized that that I was dreaming and could see just fine—it was the person, not my vision, that was blurry.

  I tried concentrating to get a better look, but it didn’t work. All I could make out was a human shape, hooded and robed, with one of those Guy Fawkes masks hovering where its face should have been—oh, and there was a huge anarchy symbol on the back of his robe. He looked like he’d gotten dressed in a Hot Topic in 2010. Without getting closer I couldn’t be sure, but I guessed that the person was about six feet tall. The breadth of the shoulders suggested that it might be a man, but I wasn’t even certain of that much. I was certain that I was face to…er, not-face with the Anarchist.

  There had been a time when I would have come out swinging, confident in my ability to sma
sh whatever I ran into in the land of dreams. Being played for a fool by my priest, beaten to a pulp by a monster, and then hunted through an alien landscape had taught me that maybe…just maybe I wasn’t all that. Instead, I stayed where I was and watched.

  “Gdrnak Ai, Ai Gdrnak.” The sound that came from the Anarchist was astonishingly loud, and the entire landscape shook. The feeling of wrongness redoubled, and the mental probes that I’d instinctively extended toward the figure felt like they’d been dipped in acid; I collapsed to my knees. As the echoes of the enormous sound faded, I spotted a glowing anarchy symbol on the hand of one of the members of the crowd—it immediately brought to mind the marks that the women from OMG had used to make a thaumaturgical link between the shadowy demon and their victims. I’d had the concept of thaumaturgy explained to me by Father O. as being the mystical connection of like to like, and because that information had specifically helped me defeat the puca, I was pretty sure that he’d been telling the truth.

  I was surprised once again when the pasty, sweating banker stood up and took a few steps toward the man. The blurry stranger looked up and spoke in the false, robotic tones of an artificial voice box that still couldn’t wholly disguise the cultured, upper-crust accent of the speaker: “Did you have a pleasant life? Did you enjoy making all of your money? Was your master pleased?” he asked, running a finger along the shoulder of a busty young co-ed, tracing the glowing anarchy symbol there and somehow causing it to fade under his touch.

  “I—I earned every penny. I’m not guilty about it, and I don’t know what you people think you’re doing. You won’t get away with this. My master will destroy you. You’ll die starving in a gutter,” the banker said. His nasal voice came out belligerently, and his double chin wobbled furiously as he rose to his full five-foot-eight-inch height.

  The Anarchist stopped what he (for the convenience of pronoun usage, I decided to assume it was a man) was doing and stared. “Thank you. You’ve just made this sooo much easier,” he said calmly before bursting into furious motion. He covered the ground separating him from the fat man in just a couple of bounds. If he had pulled out a weapon or smote the man down with a blast of light, I wouldn’t have been surprised—I’d seen crazier things dozens of times—but he simply tackled the terrified banker and sank a thumb into each eye socket in a burst of blood. My stomach turned, and I took an involuntary step forward as the pudgy banker tried to push his attacker off, emitting a pathetic squeal like a wounded rabbit, but the Anarchist grabbed a rock and smashed it against the banker’s temple, causing the pasty man to go as boneless as a bucket of popcorn chicken.