Walkers (28 page)

‘One hamburger out of every ten will
make you ill. An old friend of mine proved that.

He ate nine hamburgers and he was
perfectly okay, but when he tried to eat the tenth, he was violently sick.’

‘You and your silly stories,’
Susan’s grandmother complained.

The old couple took a long time
getting to bed. There were teeth to be taken out, corns to be planed, curls to
be wound up in heated rollers. By the time the toilet had flushed for the very
last time, it was almost quarter of eleven, and Susan was growing anxious that
she would miss the rendezvous with Henry and Gil.

At last, however, the house was
silent and dark. She lay back on the pillow, looking up at the ceiling, and she
repeated the words that Springer had given her to memorise. They were strange
and simple words. Springer had said that they were translated from Latin and
carried to the New World in 1601 by the first of the Night Warriors.

‘Now when the face of the world is hidden in darkness, let us be
conveyed to the
place of our meeting, armed and armoured;
and let us be nourished by the power
that
is dedicated to the cleaving of darkness, the settling of all black matters,
and the
dissipation of all evil, so
be it.’

Susan repeated the words three
times, as Springer had told her to, and then she closed her eyes and lay
perfectly still on her bed. I’ll never get to sleep in time, she thought to
herself. I’m going to be late, and then the others will go off without me.

The luminous hands of her bedside
clock said six minutes of eleven. How can I possibly get to sleep in six
minutes? Curiously, though, her eyes began to close, and even when she wanted
to open them again to look at the clock, she found that she couldn’t. Her body
slowly began to relax, all the way through, as if it were a building in which
all the lights were being extinguished, floor by floor. Her heartbeat slowed,
her respiration became flat and shallow, and she began to feel as if she were
slowly moving backward, inside her head, backward into the darkness that all of
us carry inside of ourselves. She went back faster and faster, deeper into
inner space, and she heard a high-pitched metallic singing sound, an inanimate
choir.

She rose now, dark and invisible,
through the ceiling of her room, through the attic, and up into the night above
Del Mar. To the south, she could see the dim surf gleaming as far as La Jolla,
and the lights of San Diego sparkling beyond. To the north, she could see the
long curve of Cardiff and San Elijo Lagoon and Encinitas.

The traffic poured along 1-5 like
streams of fireflies. Beyond the highway, the inland hills were wrapped in
shadows, and crowned with condominiums.

Susan didn’t feel as if she were
flying. The sensation was more like being
absorbed
through the evening air, as if she were no more substantial than ink that was
quickly being absorbed by blotting-paper. She felt as if the molecules of her
personality were mingling with the molecules of the night through which she was
passing; as if nobody could tell where the night ended and Susan began, a girl
of shadows. But she could see the landscape below her quite clearly and as she
spun slowly down towards the house on Camino del Mar, and passed through its
roof-shingles and into the upstairs room, she was aware of an extraordinary
friction.

The room was lit by a single naked
bulb, which threw stark shadows in all directions, as if a black box had
exploded in the centre of the room. Springer was already there, in his male
manifestation, dressed in a plain black suit. Gil had arrived, too, but as yet
there was no sign of Henry.

Susan went straight to the mirror
and looked at herself. She had not yet taken on the guise of Samena: she was
still wearing her tee-shirt. But she was delighted and frightened and
fascinated to see that she was
transparent,
that she could see the opposite side of the room right through the outlines
of her body. Gil was the same.

Substantial enough to recognise and
to talk to, but unreal. A dream-figure, a living memory of himself.

Springer said, with a small nod of
his head, ‘You are both to be congratulated. It is not easy to leave one’s body
for the first time.’

‘Will we be safe?’ asked Susan. ‘Our
actual bodies, I mean. I was worried that my grandmother might try to wake me
up.’

Springer smiled. ‘All you need worry
about is someone destroying your body. That would give you nowhere to go back
to. But I don’t think your grandmother is likely to do that, do you?’

‘I feel like I’m dreaming,’ said
Susan.

‘You
are
dreaming,’ Springer told her, coming up behind her and laying a
hand on her semi-transparent shoulder. ‘Your mind is here, your spirit is here,
but your material substance remains at home, sleeping.’

Gil said, ‘There’s no sign of Henry
yet.’

‘Henry will be here,’ Springer
assured her.

‘I hope he wasn’t doing any more –
you know,’ Susan remarked, making a drinking gesture with her hand.

Springer ignored what she had said,
and held out his hands to the two of them. ‘Now is the time for you to prepare
yourselves, Tebulot and Samena, for your first training as Night Warriors. Come
here, both of you, and kneel in front of me.’

A little hesitantly they knelt side
by side. Springer raised both of his hands, with the palms facing outwards, and
chanted the ancient words of the Night Warriors. ‘Now, when the face of the
world is covered in darkness, let us prepare ourselves here at this place of
our meeting, let us arm and armour ourselves; and let us be nourished by the
power that is dedicated to the cleaving of darkness, the settling of all black
matters, and the dissipation of evil. So be it.’

‘So be it,’ Gil and Susan repeated.

‘You are Night Warriors now,’ said
Springer. ‘You are members of that great and glorious host who captured and
chained all nine hundred and ninety-nine manifestations of the Devil, and who earned
for all time the gratitude of Ashapola and of the Council of Messengers. You
have dedicated your dream selves to the extinction of evil, and in particular
to the pursuit and capture of Yaomauitl, the Deadly Enemy.’

Springer circled his hands in the air,
and over their heads two golden circles of light appeared, then slowly faded.

‘Tebulot! Stand,’ Springer
instructed Gil, and Gil rose to his feet and found as he did so that he was
mantled in the hard gleaming white armour of the machine-carrier, and that in
his arms he was carrying the huge weapon with which he would protect himself
from harm, and which he would use to track down Yaomauitl. This time, the
armour felt solid, although it wasn’t excessively heavy: it was fashioned out
of a thick, lightweight alloy, and brightly enamelled. The^ machine, though,
was a different matter. It weighed at least thirty pounds, and even though its
odd horn-shaped handles made it easy to hold, it was not the most manoeuvrable
of devices.

‘Whoever dreamed this up, could have
dreamed it up lighter,’ complained Tebulot.

‘Its weight is necessary, in order
to stabilise it when it fires,’ Springer explained. ‘At full strength, it can
vaporise the walls of a fortress.’

He turned now to Susan, and said,
‘Samena! Stand,’ and Susan rose to her feet to assume the identity of Samena,
the finger-archer. Her plumed hat gleamed in the light of the naked bulb, and
the arrowheads hooked around her briefs jangled as she turned around.

Now that her costume had
materialised fully, she could see that the soft leather had been perfectly
tailored to fit her snugly, and that it was elaborately decorated with
semi-precious stones, opals and turquoises and jet.

Springer said, ‘The design of these
costumes and armour stretches back hundreds of years. They are the combination
of many men’s dreams, and many women’s dreams, too. Parts of Tebulot’s armour
can be seen in the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci; some of Samena’s jewelled
decorations are exactly the same as decorations seen at the Kandariya Mahadeva
temple at Khajuraho, in Bundelkhand, dating from one thousand AD.’

Tebulot said, ‘What time is it now?
Henry’s late.’

‘Give him the chance to leave his
body,’ said Springer. ‘Remember that he is older than you, and much more set in
his attitudes. It is not at all easy for a man of his age and his demeanour to
leave his body while he sleeps. There are many chains which have to be broken
first. Chains of habit, chains of doubt, chains of apprehension.

The mind argues, why should I take
the risk of facing the Devil, when I would much rather stay asleep, in the
safety of my own bed?’

But Springer had hardly finished
speaking when there was a soft noise like someone dragging the hem of a silk
cape along a polished wooden floor; and Henry slid into the room through the
ceiling, wearing a pair of pale blue pyjamas.

‘I couldn’t get to sleep,’ he told
them, apologetically. ‘I tried and I tried, but my brain was free-wheeling so
fast I thought I was going to burn out my cortex. Even after I repeated the
incantation, I stayed awake. I’m sorry.’

Springer said, ‘It was not your
fault, my friend. Your difficulty was quite understandable. But, we should
hurry now. The quicker we prepare, the longer we will have to train you. Kneel,
please, Henry, and I will recite the words which will transform you into
Kasyx.’

Samena touched Henry’s arm. Under
her plumed hat, her eyes were bright and serious. ‘Henry?’ she said. ‘Are you
all right?’

Henry shook his head. ‘If you mean,
am I
drunk,
the answer is no. I spent
the whole evening staring at a bottle of vodka, but I didn’t open it once. I
remembered what you told me about your parents. Then I looked around my house
and remembered what Gil had told me when we first decided to be Night Warriors.
He said that I had nothing to lose, and he was right. So I thought to myself
this evening, I’ve been alive for nearly half a century, and to have nothing to
lose at the age of fifty is not much of an achievement. In fact, it’s a pretty
miserable thing to have to admit. So – even if I have no real duty to you two,
or to that girl who died on the beach – at least I have a duty to myself.’

Springer was waiting patiently, so
Henry said, ‘That’s all of it,’ and knelt down where Springer had told him to.

Springer repeated the ancient words
of the Night Warriors. He swept his hand around, and drew the golden halo over
Henry’s head. ‘Stand, Kasyx,’ he said, more quietly than he had before; and
Henry stood up in the full armoured paraphernalia of the charge-keeper, the
source of all righteous energy. Kasyx’s armour was a dull metallic crimson, and
fingers of electrical energy played repeatedly across his chest and around his
shoulders, crackling fire-creatures of sheer hair-raising voltage.

Instinctively, Kasyx laid his left
hand on Tebulot’s right shoulder; and his right hand on Samena’s left shoulder,
and for a moment they stood in silence as the vast amounts of power which Kasyx
had been given by the god-of-gods Ashapola coursed through their bodies. At
last, the charging was complete, and the three of them saw now that they were
no longer transparent, that their flesh and muscle was as real as any waking
human’s.

Springer said, ‘I will take you
first into a nightmare, so that you may see and feel and hear for yourselves
what the landscape of dreams can often be like. I have scanned the sleeping
minds of thousands of people in Del Mar – children and old people, blacks and
whites – and I have found for you a nightmare which will challenge your
abilities, but which will not be too dangerous.’

‘We’re going to do that
now?’
asked Samena, nervously. ‘I
thought we were just going to train. You know – like learning to use our
weapons. ‘In the landscape of dreams,’ smiled Springer, ‘the only useful
training is through practical experience. I can tell you anything you like. I
can tell you about nightmares in which terrible monsters appear, and absolutely
refuse to die, no matter what you do to them. I can tell you about nightmares
in which you can be torn apart, or in which you
think
that you’ve been torn apart. I can tell you about tortures
and spiders and drowning and fire. But I can never recreate for you in words
what you would ultimately have to face in the real world of dreams.’

Springer walked around them, and
showed them how to grip their hands together, so that as they passed from dream
to dream, they would be inseparable.

‘The night is full of dreams; it is
like a huge invisible palace, of a million rooms, one room for every dream. It
is not difficult to lose one of your warriors as you move from one dream to
another. Sometimes, this can be perilous. Occasionally, it can be fatal.

It takes a long time to trace your
way through to any one particular dream, and by the time you have returned to
where you left your stray warrior... well, dreams change and many dreams are
more frightful than you can possibly imagine.’

He faced them one last time, and
said, ‘I have asked you to take up the task of being Night Warriors because
each of you has inherited something of those mystic qualities which make you a
natural hunter of Devils. But, you may still choose not to take up your dream
identity; you may still return to your sleeping body, even now, and never again
wear this armour and never again carry these weapons. It is yours to decide.
There is much terror ahead of you, and much struggle. But, if you succeed in
your adventures, you will know the ecstasy of great achievement, and you will
become exalted.’