The Ninth Nightmare (13 page)

‘What happens then?'

‘Then, their real-life bodies never wake up.'

‘Ever?'

‘Never. It's like they're in a coma for the rest of their life.'

They sat and talked together for another half hour, until it was time for Katie to go to the retirement home in Coral Gables. She had to make a progress report on several of the residents, especially Mrs Gladys Sweetman, whose senile dementia had been worsening in the past three months, until she no longer recognized her own daughter.

Springer said, ‘Whenever he wanted new attractions for his freak show, Brother Albrecht used to send out his agents into the towns and villages of Swabia, looking for people to deform, especially women. Deformed women were always very popular with the crowds who came to his circus, particularly if they performed degrading sexual acts.

‘His agents would creep into people's houses at night and commit the most atrocious acts of mutilation. Those women who didn't die from shock or loss of blood would be carried away to join the freak show. There was no point in them trying to escape. Where else could a woman go if she had no arms and no legs, or if her face had been cut off and replaced with that of a dog, or if she and another woman had been inextricably sewn together?'

‘My God,' said Katie. ‘How did Brother Albrecht get away with it?'

‘Because this was the Middle Ages and there was no law enforcement in the way we understand it now. Apart from that, Brother Albrecht's circus was hugely popular, even if the Pope wanted to close it down. Before the Duke of Swabia came to break it up, it had traveled all over Europe, and as far as Russia, and it made Brother Albrecht a very wealthy man. Thousands of people flocked to see the Centaur who had the upper body of a woman and the lower body of a horse. She would be covered by a stallion several times a day for the entertainment of the crowds. Then there was the Human Cockroach, a young boy with six arms instead of legs, who would publicly eat handfuls of excrement. And so many more, each one more disgusting than the last.

‘When Brother Albrecht dreamed it away, the whole circus went into a kind of suspended animation, but I can only guess that his intention was to bring it all back to life one day – and sooner, rather than later. I doubt if he realized that it wouldn't be revived for so many hundreds of years.'

‘But if the circus was so disgusting, why would anyone
want
to revive it?'

‘I don't know, to be frank. Why does anyone stub out cigarettes on children's arms, or beat women within an inch of their life? Why does anyone commit rape, torture, or homicide? Why do people spray graffiti on beautiful buildings, or throw acid at famous works of art? There's a very dark side to human nature and whoever is trying to bring Brother Albrecht's circus back to life has darkness in spades.'

‘How is he going to do it? Do you have any idea?'

‘Not entirely. But we're pretty sure that the Griffin House Hotel has always been central to this revival. In seven of its bedrooms – yours included – nightmares of mutilations and murders are imprinted in the walls. Between nineteen thirty-six and nineteen thirty-eight, Gordon Veitch stayed in each of those rooms. What we don't yet understand is what he was trying to do.'

‘But Gordon Veitch isn't likely to be alive today, is he?'

‘It's possible, if he's become a Dread. A Dread is a kind of a ghost which exists partly in dreams and partly in the waking world, as I do. On the other hand, it might be somebody else altogether, trying to carry on where Gordon Veitch left off. It will be up to the Night Warriors to find out, and track him down, and stop him.'

At a quarter of nine, Springer said that it was time for him to go. Katie opened the front door for him. The cumulus clouds were closer now, and a warm, fretful wind was blowing. In the far distance, over the Gulf, she could hear the rumbling of thunder.

‘I'm sorry,' said Springer, taking hold of both of Katie's hands.

‘Sorry for what? If it's my destiny to be a Night Warrior, then it's my destiny.'

‘You haven't yet entered anybody else's dreams. You may not feel quite so sanguine about it when you do.'

‘Well, we'll see. I'm off to visit my dementia patients now. I think I prefer your kind of madness to theirs.'

Springer said, ‘I
do
look like Mr Flight, don't I?'

‘What?'

‘Your music teacher, from Nautilus Junior High. You liked him a whole lot, didn't you? Which is why I came here looking like this.'

He raised his hand in a little salute and walked away down the path. Katie was about to call him back and ask him how he had known about Mr Flight, and more to the point, how he had managed to look almost exactly like him. But then she thought: leave it, maybe you don't really need to know.

SEVEN

Locked Room Mystery

D
etective Wisocky closed the file he was working on, tossed down his pen, and said, ‘That's it, Charlie. Time for nourishment. Rally's, for a triple cheeseburger. And you're buying.'

Detective Hudson looked up from his desk and said, ‘Come on, Walter – I picked up the check for yesterday's lunch.'

‘Sure you did, Charlie. But yesterday's lunch was chow fun noodles, right, and chow fun noodles is Chinese, right, which is a totally different ethnic cuisine from cheeseburgers, which is domestic. The last time we ate cheeseburgers
I
paid, and the next time we eat Chinese I'll pay for that. But you can't go confusing your different ethnic cuisines on a financial basis, otherwise we won't know where the hell we are.'

‘Well, to tell you the truth, I feel like Mongolian.'

‘You goddamned
look
Mongolian, too. What does that have to do with lunch?'

They had almost reached the door when the phone rang on Walter's desk.

‘You going to answer that?' asked Charlie.

‘What? No. Absolutely not. It's trouble.'

‘How do you know it's trouble?'

‘It's trouble because it's going to postpone the moment when I can open my mouth and take my first bite of a Rally's triple cheeseburger.'

‘You should answer it, Walter. Really. I got a hunch, that's all.'

‘You and your goddamned hunches. You got more hunches than Quasimodo.'

Charlie raised one eyebrow, and when the phone went on ringing, and ringing, Walter eventually went back to his desk and scooped it up. ‘Wisocky,' he snapped. ‘What?'

‘Officer John Skrolnik here, detective. We got called out to a house on Corydon Road, reports of a young woman screaming.'

‘Screaming? What was she screaming about?'

‘Nobody knows, because she disappeared.'

‘What do you mean, disappeared?'

‘She's not here. The owners of the property heard her screaming upstairs in her apartment but when they went up to find out what was wrong she wasn't there, even though they never saw her leave the house.'

‘Who was she?'

‘A student. Her name was – hold on – Maria Fortales, just twenty years old. She was studying law at CRWU.'

‘I thought all the Crew students had to live on campus, in a dormitory or a sorority house or something.'

‘Only for the first two years.'

Walter took a deep breath. ‘Maybe she went out for lunch. That's what I'm trying to do, believe it or not. Go out for lunch. Why don't
you
go out for lunch, too? What's the matter with you? You never hungry?'

‘Her landlord said that she was screaming like somebody was killing her. He said he never heard nobody scream like that before, never.'

‘But there's no sign of her?'

‘None. That's why I called you. Don't you remember, the last time we had a missing persons case, you said I could always call you?'

‘OK,' Walter admitted. ‘So I did. How sweet of me. Corydon Road, what number?'

‘Twenty-four eight hundred.'

‘Roger that,' said Walter. ‘Give us ten minutes.'

He hung up the phone. Charlie was standing right next to him with an expectant look on his face. ‘You and your goddamned hunches,' said Walter.

‘What is it? What's happened?'

‘Apparently some young girl was yelling her tits off like she was being murdered and then she took a powder and nobody knows where she went. And for that I have to forego my lunch.'

‘I don't know, Walter,' said Charlie. ‘As soon as that phone rang – for some reason it gave me this incredibly strong feeling that something seriously bad is going to happen.'

‘You bet your ass it is. My stomach's going to start rumbling, and you're going to have to listen to it.'

They parked behind Officer Skrolnik's white squad car, and climbed out. It was starting to rain, quite hard, and the rain came rustling down through the rusty-colored trees like an expectant audience waiting for the arrival of a great concert pianist.

‘Had to fucking rain, didn't it?' Walter complained, and by way of punctuation there was a loud bang of thunder from the direction of Cleveland Heights.

Corydon Road was a quiet suburban avenue less than a half mile from the university campus, and many of its residents let out rooms to students during term-time. Number 24800 was a small green-painted house with a gray-shingled roof and a veranda, with a sagging 1969 Buick Riviera parked in the driveway.

Officer Skrolnik was waiting by the front door. Inside the hallway, his partner was talking to an elderly man with white hair and a baggy gray cardigan. Officer Skrolnik was very tall, with a prominent larynx that bobbed up and down like a Halloween apple whenever he spoke.

‘Thanks for coming so quick, detectives. The landlord and his wife are really spooked.'

‘What's the landlord's name?' asked Walter.

Officer Skrolnik flipped open his notebook. ‘Richard Yarber. His wife's name is Maude. They said that Ms Fortales came back very early this morning, around five thirty, after spending the night with some of her college friends. Around eleven forty-five they heard her screaming but the door to her room was locked and they couldn't get in to find out what was wrong. Mrs Yarber went across the street and asked one of their neighbors to help them – Mr Herman Eisner, he's a retired fire marshal. He managed to kick the door open but the room was empty. No sign of Ms Fortales or anybody else.'

Walter sniffed. ‘Couldn't she have climbed out of the window?'

Officer Skrolnik shook his head. ‘It used to be their grandson's room and the windows all have childproof bars. Apart from which, it's a sheer twenty-foot drop down to the side of the house.'

‘Well,
très
mysterious. Let me talk to them.'

He entered the hallway and Charlie followed him. He showed Mr Yarber his badge and said, ‘Detective Wisocky, sir, and this is Detective Hudson. Sounds like you've had a kind of a weird experience this morning.'

‘I'll shay,' said Mr Yarber, with his false teeth clicking. ‘Shcared the living Jeshush out of ush.'

‘You heard Ms Fortales screaming?'

‘Never in my life heard nothing sho terrible. More like a pig being shlaughtered than a human being. And shomething elsh, too. Both of ush heard it. Like a
shaw
, if you know what I mean. A rashping noish, like a shaw.'

‘A rasping noise like a saw? But when your neighbor broke into Ms Fortales' room, you didn't see a saw?'

The young officer who had been talking to Mr Yarber had to cover his mouth with his hand to hide his grin.

‘No,' said Mr Yarber. ‘No shign of a shaw anywhere.'

‘OK,' Walter told him, laying a reassuring hand on his steeply-sloping shoulder. ‘Do you mind if my partner and me took a look at Ms Fortales' room?'

‘Shure. Go ahead. Be my guesht. It's upshtairs, shecond on the left.'

Walter and Charlie climbed the narrow, beige-carpeted stairs. The staircase was wallpapered with faded brown roses, and twenty or thirty photographs of the Yarber's sons and daughters and grandchildren were hung higgledy-piggledy on either side, not one of them straight. The house smelled sweetish and musty, as if the windows hadn't been opened in years, and there were dead blowflies lying on the window sills.

Walter carefully pushed open the door to Maria Fortales' bedroom. The Yarbers' neighbor Herman Eisner had kicked the door so hard that he had split the side of the frame and the tarnished brass knob was hanging at an angle. Walter eased himself inside.

On the left, against the wall, there was a single bed covered by a rumpled pink candlewick bedspread. It had three purple cushions on it and a small collection of soft toys – a floppy-eared rabbit, a bright green frog, and a pale green hand-knitted gnome.

Under the window stood a pine desk, with an Apple laptop on it, a half-empty coffee mug, and a thick red notebook bound with five or six elastic bands. A white home-knitted cardigan was drooping over the back of the chair. As Officer Skrolnik had told them, the windows were fitted with horizontal metal bars, so it would have been impossible for Maria Fortales to have climbed out.

On the right-hand side of the room there was a cheap plywood clothes-closet, painted cream. One side of the closet was plastered with dozens of cut-out pictures of circuses and clowns. Almost in the center was a large photograph of a gray-faced clown. He had wild staring eyes and tangled gray shoulder-length hair and dark green lipstick which was curved upward into a maniacal grin, even though his real lips were curved downward.

‘Somebody sure likes the circus,' said Charlie, crossing over to take a closer look. ‘This fellow here is Mago Verde, the Green Magician.'