“Clear the emergency room and lock the doors. Someone needs to show me where the rest of the cops went,” she bellowed. Her voice and accent cut through the growing din, and the staff jumped to obey. I squeezed her arm and then sprinted, wet shoes squeaking, through the nearest door, following a sign that pointed me toward the collection.
Spots of inky-black ichor dotted the hall, starting off as the odd splash but soon turning into a clear trail. It seemed that the thing was injuring itself in its eagerness to reach the irresistible smorgasbord before it. I was all broken up.
I winced at the sound of shattering glass behind me and realized that my pace had slowed to a stumbling jog; I noticed the ache in my ribs for the first time since I woke up. Shaking my head, I ran back through the rationale for my plan.
From the first time I’d dealt with the creature, I had been sure that I wouldn’t be able to defeat it in the world of dreams, but I couldn’t figure out what “battlefield” would be better until a couple of days ago. Once I had visited the puca’s home plane of existence, seen how it fed, and observed the effect that it had on people, I had begun to get the barest outline of a plan. That outline had been fleshed out over the past couple of days; it had become obvious that this was the best possible place to draw the puca to and hold it in the real world as I tried to end its loathsome existence.
You see, I’d known for years that the Dreamscape could be affected by things in proximity to the dreamer in the real world and furthermore, I knew that nothing would be more appealing to the puca than a buffet of defenseless dreamers. The concentration of madness, for the best part of two hundred years, on these grounds must had churned the Dreamscape here to a dangerous froth that I hoped would hold the puca trapped in our dimension, and my activation of the thousands of brains in the collection back into a perverted semblance of dreaming life would lure it here in the first place, if I could get it close enough to notice…and I had succeeded.
The doors to the collection were only a hundred feet away from me, and through the little glass porthole I could see lights flickering. It was in there. My back suddenly clenched in agony, and I stumbled. In the distance, I heard shots ring out. I used my borrowed shotgun to brace myself and got back to my feet. A brief vision of alien landscapes danced in front of my eyes as reality blurred at the edges.
Using my makeshift crutch, I tap, tap, tapped another seventy-five feet before the next bout of dizziness hit me. The shots in the distance stopped, but on the other side of the door, there was a crashing noise, and the lights went out. I stumbled another five steps before the scream came, shattering the nearest window into shards. It was a cry of impersonal malice, let out for unknowable, alien reasons, but it didn’t have the focused power of previous attacks. Nevertheless, I hadn’t had any preparations in place and was barely moving. I don’t know what I would have been able to do if I made it into the room, but the point became moot as I felt myself falling. I was vaguely aware that it should have hurt when I hit the floor, but I was too tired to care…everything went black.
CHAPTER 51 2200–2215, Thursday, August 6, 2015
***Julian***
I opened my eyes. My trench coat was on my shoulders and the pain in my chest was gone. The crawling ache in my back was still there, but I did my best to ignore it as I looked around and saw…myself.
My body was on the floor in front of me. Blood trickled from my mouth and, revoltingly, I could see purple cables writhing on my back, pressing against the cotton of my black T-shirt. Conversely, when my back moved again a second later, I was immensely relieved to realize that it was from an intake of breath. There were a couple of cops in front of me, including one that I recognized.
“Badger, what happened, and where is my wife?” His head snapped around, and his walrus mustache twitched furiously; the look on his face as close to shock as I think he could come. I was surprised too, mostly that I had dreamt myself into the real world instead of falling into dreamless oblivion, but it seemed the laws of reality were being treated more like suggestions tonight. However it was happening, whether it was the puca, my lightning bolt, or a glitch in the matrix, I wasn’t going to complain; I was back in the game.
“Twins?” The word came from the older man as a whisper, and the other two officers backed away as I shook my head.
“Don’t make me repeat myself,” I said, gesturing to my body. “I’ve done that enough already tonight.” The short detective gave himself a shake, straightened his back, and came to parade-ground attention, years of military training kicking in and helping him function in a situation for which he could not have been remotely prepared.
“We stopped the…escaped inmates? Your wife helped us protect the staff and patients, and we were able to do so with predominantly disabling shots. We lost one man to those maniacs, but with the help of orderlies and straitjackets, we restrained most of them. The doctors were howling about that making them harder to treat, but I left my sergeants to deal with that because your wife took off like a bat out of hell, screaming about the monster devouring a bunch of brains. We followed her here. She took one look at your body and plunged in…there.” Badger pointed toward the heavy doors with their blacked-out widows.
I collected my gladius from the ichor- and blood-drenched floor. Dana was in there, and I wanted to plunge in after her immediately, but I wasn’t going to do any good rushing in there blindly.
“Detective, I can’t explain what is going on here, but if you want to help stop the thing, then I need your cooperation. Do you have any flashlights?” He looked confused, but one of the uniformed officers immediately offered up a Maglite, which he passed to the detective’s outstretched hand.
The other uniformed man piped up, “We’ve got a portable spotlight in the van.”
I turned toward him and thrust out a finger. “Get it now and shine it through the doors as soon as you get back.” The man looked for direction to Badger, who simply nodded. Both of the uniformed policemen took off at a sprint to get the equipment, happy to get away from the palpable alienness emanating from the other side of the door.
“I need you to hold the flashlight,” I said. Badger, the ex-military officer, was obviously offended at my suggestion. Apparently, he didn’t realize how important the torchbearer was when fighting monsters in the darkness. I didn’t give him any time to argue.
The collection was housed in a glorified freezer. The specimens were in temperature-controlled, glass-fronted cabinets all around the room, but enough cold leaked through that the room couldn’t have been more than a few degrees above freezing…or maybe that was just the puca’s influence. At least I’d always liked air conditioning.
The room was blacker than black, but when I stepped in, the door creaking ominously, I felt the psychic turbulence in the confined space. Visions of nameless horrors danced in front of me, and I reeled. If I was made of the stuff of dreams, then it was no surprise that I felt the power of this place and the temporarily revived minds in this room. But even half expecting it, I felt myself slipping. Was that a flower? Why didn’t that man have a head?
“Julian!” Dana saved me again. I might have become lost in that place of madness and never found my way back if it hadn’t been for her, but she brought me back to myself. It took all of my concentration not to be drawn into the mental maelstrom, and when I turned to Badger to ask him to turn on the light, I realized it was already on.
I looked for the source of her yell, but I couldn’t spot my wife anywhere; the light penetrated about five feet and then simply stopped. I looked to the detective, but his expression was blank, and I knew that I wasn’t getting any help from that corner. I plunged into the darkness…
And immediately banged my knee on a short filing cabinet, swore, and fell flat on my face. Considering I wasn’t real, it still hurt like hell, but at least no one had been able to see it. That reminded me, though…I wasn’t real. After the first shock of entering the room, I’d acclimated, and now I found enough spare conc
entration to picture one of those massive mining helmets with the light on top strapped to my head. Where normal light hadn’t had any effect, the imaginary beam cut through the psychic darkness like a…sharp thing through a soft thing…and I could finally see the effect of my trap on the puca.
“Oh, shit.”
I’d succeeded in getting the puca here, to a place where it was trapped, by using the world’s largest and only collection of reanimated brains for bait. What I hadn’t considered was what would happen after it had consumed them. The horror had busted through cabinet after cabinet, and tentacle-ravaged brains littered the floors. The creature plunged a long black appendage through a cabinet, shattering the last pane of unbroken glass.
The thing had looked mostly human as it piloted Kelly’s corpse, but as it had fed and fed and fed, it had outgrown that shell. The puca loomed over me, its head hunched down from the fifteen-foot ceiling as it rested on a mass of stumpy pseudopods, and only the odd ragged chunk of Kelly’s flesh hanging off of the elephant-sized mass of inky, pulsing blackness testified to its borrowed humanity. I spotted my wife huddled under a metal workbench on the other side of the room, trying to avoid the questing of a hungrily searching tentacle.
The creature groaned then, and its eyes swiveled to look at me. Previously, there had always been two burning pits that marked the only constant feature on an otherwise constantly shifting form, but I shuddered as more than a dozen opened up, seemingly at random, on the monster. I think it tried to assault me with another sonic blast, but it came out as nothing more than a wet gurgle. I saw the tentacle that had entered the last cabinet withdraw, scooping a half-dozen brains into its dripping maw. It was done feeding.
It was done feeding on diseased food. I had only thought about how this place might help me, but I had fed an inscrutable, alien creature that subsisted on thought a big old helping of concentrated crazy, and it didn’t seem to be digesting it very well. Without a host, the puca couldn’t stay in this reality indefinitely, but considering the meal it had just eaten, I had the feeling that it would be able to do incalculable damage before it was forced out, and whatever odd restraint it had shown before had disappeared as its own particular form of sanity had been undermined by the tainted meal that I’d served up.
I knew what I had to do. I picked up the gladius and, grunting with the effort, I plunged it into the ground at my feet and started shuffling to my left. The familiar rent into which I’d hurled so many nightmares greeted me, but instead of being a gateway to nothingness, I thought I could see shapes swirling at the bottom. I had to fight to wrench myself away from their nauseating pull.
Tentacles lashed out blindly in every direction, rending a metal cabinet with a shriek, and I ducked, holding on to my concentration by the barest thread. I needed to walk a circle nearly two hundred feet around to make this work, but if I succeeded, then I’d drop the creature into the nothingness of utter oblivion. I worried that the puca would disrupt me or try to leave before I could finish, or even worse, that it would go after Dana, but there was nothing I could do. It took everything I had to keep rending reality without losing my mind. I could feel the cables infesting my back spreading, worms of fire sapping my strength and whispering of the glory of surrender. I kept walking.
Step, pain, step, pain. When I was a quarter of the way around the circle I was cutting through reality and the tentacles on my back were trying to crush my ribs, the door burst open and light flooded the room. The Maglite had been useless against the murky potency of the puca, but the same couldn’t be said of the twenty-million-candlepower portable spotlight that the two officers wrestled through the door. The room lit up like day, and there was a chorus of noise as the creature hissed at the searing brightness while the three policemen and my wife all let out various exclamations of fear, dismay, and disgust. I kept walking.
Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed one of the cops heft an MP5 to his shoulder and tried to yell for him to stop, but I was a fraction too slow as a stream of nine-millimeter rounds leapt across the room. Some of them hit the creature and chewed into it, doing more damage than I had expected, but maybe that was because it was more here than it had ever been before. More rounds pinged off the wall, and a few of them left holes in the bench that Dana was crouched behind. Nevertheless, it turned out to be a very bad idea for the policeman. I kept walking.
The light had left the creature blind, just as I’d hoped, but the abomination was already flailing for the source of its pain and could still hear without any problem, so as soon as the first shot was fired, it homed in on the noise. The man vainly tried to dodge at the last second, but a stygian appendage speared him and burrowed into his flesh. He didn’t quit screaming for the entire thirty seconds it took for the puca to reduce him to a twitching husk. I kept walking.
The other officer wet himself, dropped his gun, and ran away as fast as he could. Badger collapsed to his knees. As I watched in horror, Dana rose up from behind her bench and swung her MP5 to aim at the puca. This time I was quick enough. “Stop! Just let me finish the circle”—it wasn’t really round, but this wasn’t the time to split hairs—“this is how I destroy nightmares. When I get all the way around, it’ll just…stop being.” I wheezed and spit a gobbet of bloody phlegm. I don’t know if it was because it still harbored some notion about making use of me as a host, but no tentacle came my way, and although Dana didn’t go back into cover, she didn’t pull the trigger. Badger’s knees gave out, and I lost sight of him behind a workbench. I kept walking.
I was three-quarters of the way around when the puca’s wildly questing appendages finally found the light that had been pinning it in place. With a bang and a cascade of yellow sparks, the sodium bulb exploded, and the room was once again only illuminated by the beam from my helmet. Free of the agonizing light, the creature’s eyes snapped open again, and there were even more of them than before. They followed me around the room. I kept walking.
The puca decided to start walking then too, and my heart sank. The creature’s warped flesh squelched forward. It was aimed at a gap twenty feet across in the circle that I was ripping in the universe, and there was no way that I could speed up enough to close it in time and still hold my concentration. Everything was going to be in vain. I kept walking.
But I wasn’t the only one who could see how this was going to end. Dana vaulted the workbench with the kind of grace that I’d seen in her as a young co-ed, shedding years of sedentary living and motherhood as she let out a roar of defiance and sprinted into the gap. She ducked and twisted past a multitude of flailing appendages before one caught her feet and she tripped, managing to turn her fall into a roll and coming up on one knee. The creature loomed over my wife, a mountain of flesh and madness. Dana squeezed the trigger. I kept walking.
The MP5 barked, and hunks of blackened substance flew in all directions. The creature hissed again and crashed down toward her as I screamed a wordless sound of despair. I kept walking.
I stopped. One more step would close the circle. Dana writhed in the puca’s grasp, looked me in the eyes imploringly and started to mouth something, but then her back arched with torment as tendrils of the monster’s being burrowed into her skin. I knew that there was nothing I could do to help her, but if I took that last step, then my wife would be gone. My heart thudded once, twice, three times. I kept walking.
When the circle closed, there was a sudden sucking sensation as air began to rush out of the room. That never happened in the Dreamscape, but I didn’t have much attention to spare for that either, because something else that never happened in the Dreamscape occurred. Instead of being pulled in and quickly shrinking until it disappeared from sight in a background of endless darkness, the puca fought.
I don’t know how old that thing was or where it came from, but its overriding drive was to survive. The creature had been sucked in a dozen feet when a plethora of tentacles shot out from every part, and it managed to hook a few of them onto the sides of the rift, and e
ven as the hole in reality closed, the creature was levering itself up, slowly but inexorably winning the fight against the pull of nothing. I grabbed my gladius and charged forward, hacking down at the thing’s tentacles with wild, hate-filled abandon, but for every one that I severed another took its place. From behind me, I heard a shot ring out and glanced at Detective Inspector Badger as he emptied a small-caliber pistol at the thing, blasting off yet more tentacles as he advanced a step with every shot. Still, it wasn’t enough, and after a few more seconds, the top of the puca’s head crested the rim of the portal. It reached out, contemptuously swatting me across the room, and I bounced off the wall with sickening force.
I don’t know if she’d fought her way free or if the puca had no attention to spare for her as it tried to escape the trap I’d set, but as I slumped dazed on the floor, I saw Dana one last time. The monstrosity had almost pulled itself entirely out when, like an avenging angel, she rose up from its back and put the MP5 against the thing’s lumpy and misshapen head. She could have jumped. There was no doubt in my mind that she would have cleared the edge from that height. Dana looked into my eyes again, mouthed three simple words, and then she pulled the trigger.
Lead slammed into the puca, and the creature shuddered as its tentacles lost their purchase on the floor…and they were gone. I tried to crawl to the hole, but it was closing quickly, and it snapped shut before I could reach it. I didn’t see it close, but the moment was unmistakable as I felt a tearing inside of me and a sense that I didn’t know I had was blinded. The thing that had been growing from my back went berserk, and I screamed as every inch of my body was instantly infiltrated by millions of searching tendrils of liquid fire; I passed into merciful darkness.
Dream Job (The Dreamwalker Chronicles Book 1) Page 34