by Tim Waggoner
Since I’d given Melody my coat, all I had to protect my upper body from the cold December air – not to mention the ass-biting wind blowing in off the lake – was a long-sleeved white shirt that was part of my official Shadow Watch uniform. I could feel the cold starting to seep into my bones, slowing me down and making me clumsy.
Evidently I was doing too good a job of not falling, for the sand on top of the tower became softer, looser, and Montrose’s laughter rose in volume. I started sliding more then, and even my boots couldn’t find me steady footing. Then it happened: my right foot slid out from under me at the same instant the tower jerked in a new direction. My left ankle twisted, and I fell. My left knee hit the tower’s surface, followed by my left elbow. The sand had become hard again, and it felt like hitting solid stone. I was too terrified for the pain to register as anything more than a distant annoyance. I flopped onto my back and began sliding headfirst toward the tower’s edge. The circular top wasn’t especially wide, only ten feet across or so, and I knew I had only a couple seconds to prevent what would most likely be a fatal hundred-foot fall to the beach below.
I curled my fingers into claws and pressed them against the tower’s hard surface. My nails tore with piercing pain, but I pressed my fingers down harder. I came to a stop with my head hanging over the tower’s edge, and I made the mistake of turning to look down. A wave of vertigo hit me, and I closed my eyes and scooted back to the center of the tower’s surface. I got to my feet, fingers throbbing, heart pounding, breath coming in ragged gasps, stomach roiling with industrial-strength nausea. But at least I wasn’t dead. Not yet, anyway.
I realized then that the tower had stopped moving, and I could no longer hear Montrose’s laughter. A small patch of sand near my feet shifted, bulged upward, and formed into a humanoid face.
“This is the most fun I’ve had in ages!” Montrose said.
My first impulse was to raise my foot and stomp down as hard as I could on the sonofabitch’s face. I almost did it, too, but then I caught movement out of the corner of my eye, and I looked toward the lake. Jinx ran across the water, his already large boots swollen even larger to become miniature pontoons. His boots made loud slapping sounds as he came, and he moved surprisingly fast and gracefully.
So… Jinx can walk on water. I’ll never hear the end of that.
Now that Jinx was coming, I knew I only needed to stall Montrose for a few more minutes. I knelt down next to his face, and he frowned in surprise. His face slid back a couple inches, but it didn’t disappear into the tower.
“Is that all this is to you?” I asked. “A game?”
As I spoke, I reached toward the front pocket of my jeans, moving slowly and holding Montrose’s gaze to keep his attention fixed on my face.
“Of course,” he said, his tone indicating that this should be obvious to anyone with even a modicum of intelligence.
I inserted my bleeding fingers into my pocket, fighting to keep the pain I felt from registering on my face.
“It’s not a game to me. And it’s not to my friends. You hurt them, really badly.”
Montrose giggled. “I know.”
I slipped the plastic bag containing the shuteye capsules from my pocket. As I palmed the bag, I heard Jinx’s splashing footfalls becoming louder. He was getting close to shore.
“So I guess it only matters if something is fun for you, huh?”
I dug my sore, bloody fingertips into the plastic, working to tear a hole in it. My blood made the plastic slippery, complicating the job, but I was determined – not to mention more than a little desperate – and I succeeded. I felt a single capsule fall into my palm. I wasn’t sure one would be enough, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to get any more before Montrose realized what I was up to.
His expression became puzzled then.
“Well, sure. Isn’t that how it is for everyone?”
Shuteye comes in gel-coated liquid doses, and I pressed what remained of my thumbnail into the semisoft gel coating until I felt it break. I leaned closer to Montrose’s face and was relieved when he didn’t slide away from me.
“It’s not that way for me,” I said. “But I have to admit that I’m going to enjoy this.”
I lunged forward and jammed my hand into Montrose’s mouth.
Despite what I’d said to him, I really didn’t want to do this. I’d seen the horrific results of what shuteye could do when someone had a bad reaction to it. But right then shuteye was the only weapon I had at my disposal.
Montrose tried to close his mouth, but I’d caught him off-guard. I shoved my arm down his throat almost all the way up to my shoulder and released the capsule. And then, while he was still too surprised to harden his substance and bite my arm off, I withdrew it and scooted back a couple feet. I had no idea if he had a true digestive system, but I hoped it wouldn’t matter.
Montrose’s features contorted into a distorted mask of hate. His face rose from the tower’s surface, a humanoid body forming beneath it until he stood before me in all his gritty glory. His hands shot toward me, arms lengthening so he didn’t have to step so much as an inch forward to reach me. I expected to feel sandpaper-rough fingers wrap around my neck and begin to squeeze. Instead, they fastened over my nose and mouth, and an instant later I felt sand begin to slide up my nasal passages and down my throat. I immediately started gagging – or at least I tried to. The sand was too thick, and there was too much of it. Panic took hold of me, and, if it hadn’t been for my training, I might well have thrown myself off the tower in an attempt to get away from Montrose. Death by, as we call it in the trade, “sudden deceleration trauma” would’ve been preferable to choking slowly on living sand. But I forced myself to remain standing where I was, and, while there was nothing I could do to fight back the panic, I did my best to endure it.
Just a few more seconds, I told myself. Just… a… few… more…
Montrose’s face had become a mask of savage glee as he drank in my suffering. But now his features went slack, and, considering what he was made of, I mean slack. Lines of sand began running down his face, and his facial features softened as they eroded. The process started slowly, but it picked up speed, and soon his entire body – arms included – collapsed into a lopsided pile on top of the tower. I began hacking and coughing and exhaling air through my nose to clear away the residue that Montrose had left behind. I didn’t spend too much time congratulating myself on my brilliant ploy, however. Montrose’s body was much larger than the humanoid extrusion that had tried to kill me – and I was standing on it, one hundred feet above the ground. The sand tower remained steady for several seconds after the collapse of Montrose’s avatar, but then it began to shake, and I could feel the surface beneath my feet begin to soften. The tower was about to fall apart under me, which meant that I had only one option if I wanted to survive. I ran to the edge and jumped out into space.
As I fell, I relaxed my body and waited. I heard a distant sproinging sound, and, an instant later, Jinx – propelled by his powerful shoe springs – came flying toward me. He caught me easily, and, as we plummeted toward the ground, his springs extended once again to soften our landing. We bounced a couple times, and then something strange happened. Stranger than usual, I mean. For an instant – just an instant – a wave of dizziness came over me and my vision blurred. When it cleared, I was looking at myself, and I… she was staring back at me, wide-eyed with shock. We were descending toward the ground, and I realized that I was holding me. I mean her. I glanced at my hands and saw they were chalk-white. I was… Jinx?
The dizziness hit again, accompanied once more by blurry vision. But, just as it passed, I felt a jarring impact. When my vision cleared this time, I found myself looking at Jinx. We were lying side by side on the sand.
“Sorry,” he said, his voice devoid of any hint of clownly lunacy. “Guess I didn’t stick the landing.”
He stood and held out a hand. I took it and he helped me to my feet. I ached all over, but I’d survive. Ji
nx noticed my wounded hands.
“I thought you didn’t go in for manicures,” he said, sounding much more like his usual demented self.
I displayed one of my injured fingers to him to show what I thought of his joke. Neither of us said anything about what had happened as we were landing. Maybe we were both hoping it hadn’t really happened. Maybe we kept quiet about it because we knew it had.
Jinx and I turned toward the lake and saw a huge mound of sand where Montrose’s tower had been.
“I could make an erectile dysfunction joke right now,” Jinx said.
“I’d rather you didn’t.”
Before I could say or do anything else, a loud, low mournful tone came from the direction of the street. Jinx and I turned in its direction to see a midnight-black hearse with eerie green glowing headlights come roaring over the sand toward us. Evidently, my wisper call to Connie’s cell had gone through, and she’d heard enough of what was going on to figure out where we were. I couldn’t have been more relieved.
I waved to Connie and pointed to Melody and Trauma Doll – the latter of whom had sat up and was putting the remaining shards of her head back into place by hand. Melody, however, was no longer sitting and holding my bunched-up jacket to her face. She lay on her side, very, very still.
I ran toward her and Jinx followed. The Deathmobile came along behind us, and I prayed to the First Dreamer that the fact that a hearse had come to rescue Melody wouldn’t turn out to be a bitter irony.
Two
“How much longer do you think it will be?” Trauma Doll sounded like a lost little girl. She looked to me for reassurance, but I didn’t have any to give.
“I don’t know.”
The three of us – Jinx, Trauma Doll, and me – sat in a crowded waiting room, Jinx next to me, Trauma Doll on the other side of him. The chairs were uncomfortable, the plaster on the walls was cracked, and the floor tiles were yellowed, warped, and covered with unidentifiable stains. The air was cool to the point of being chilly, and it smelled like toxic waste. The lights were overly bright fluorescents, the kind that give you a headache if you sit under them too long and which hum almost below the threshold of human hearing, making you feel increasingly on edge. Most of the others in the waiting room were Incubi of one sort or another, but there were a few humans in the mix. Ideators, probably, but, since some were unaccompanied by Incubi, it was hard to tell for certain.
The staff members were primarily Incubi, and the only way to tell them apart from the other living nightmares in the room was by the white uniforms they wore, although many of those uniforms were so discolored by stains from blood or other less identifiable bodily fluids that there was little visible white remaining. The Sick House is the only official hospital in Nod, but there’s no shortage of doctors around. Nightmare physicians and nurses are almost as ubiquitous in Nod as nightmare clowns, and many of the medical-themed Incubi find employment at the Sick House. Their Ideators dreamed them with medical knowledge and skills, and when they assumed full physical existence, they retained those abilities. How in the hell someone without medical training can create a being with medical training is just one more of the Maelstrom’s little mysteries.
Most nightmare docs and nurses look relatively normal, although their features tend to be exaggerated and distorted – pronounced brows, ears that taper to points, bulging eyes, sharp cheekbones, large teeth that are almost, but not quite, fangs. Far worse were the medical devices they carried, most of which looked more like weapons or instruments of torture. Sometimes they carried severed limbs – arms, legs, the occasional head. Once in a while someone would go by dragging a body behind them, leaving a bloody smear in their wake. Needless to say, bedside manner isn’t something they worry much about at the Sick House.
Occasionally, something goes wrong with an Incubi’s healing ability. Certain drugs can disrupt their ability to absorb Maelstrom energy, and, if they suffer severe brain damage and survive, the same thing can happen, leaving them vulnerable to injury or illness. And there are conditions that can occur to Incubi naturally: fading, of course, being one of the most serious. So it was no surprise to me that there were so many Incubi in the waiting room. Most of the ones present were of the normal type: sharp-toothed, long-clawed, with distorted features. Typical nightmare stuff. But there were a few stand-outs. Something that resembled a skeletal giraffe stood in a corner, the sockets of its skull-head glowing a baleful yellow-green. The giraffe-thing was trembling, its bones making constant clacking sounds. A being made entirely out of various-sized baby heads sat a few chairs away from me, the heads whimpering softly. I studiously avoided looking in its direction. Then there was something that resembled a circulatory system without a body. Veins and arteries formed a criss-crossing cage around a heart that spasmed with loud squelching sounds. The heart had a leak in it, and, every time it pumped, crimson fluid jetted through the air and splashed onto the tiles.
Connie had driven us from the beach straight to here. Doors to Nod come into existence each night, but always in different locations. Incubi can sense these Doors – one of the reasons human Shadow Watch officers are paired with them – and the Deathmobile hauled ass to the nearest Door large enough for it to fit through: a garage door of a closed auto body repair shop. We passed from one dimension into another, coming out in the Arcade, the entertainment district in Newtown. The Sick House is located in Oldtown, and the Deathmobile roared through the streets like a mechanical demon to get Melody there as fast as possible. Once we were in Nod, I’d used my wisper to call ahead, and an emergency team was waiting for us outside when we arrived. They whisked Melody away on a gurney, and that was the last we’d seen of her.
Connie had headed back to Earth after dropping us off. She made her living as a freelance cabbie for Incubi and Ideators in Chicago, and she needed to get back to work. Before leaving, she asked me to call and let her know how Melody was doing when I got a chance. I promised her I would.
According to my wisper, we’d been waiting at the Sick House less than an hour, but it felt like much longer. Trauma Doll’s face was almost completely healed by now. Faint cracks were still visible here and there though, and I wondered if she was healing more slowly because she was worried about Melody. Jinx’s face was expressionless, which, on a clown, is even more frightening than when he smiles. He stared off into the distance and passed the time by eating long roofing nails which he’d found somewhere in his bottomless pockets. He ate them slowly, one at a time, biting off small chunks of metal with soft snapping sounds.
When we’d first sat down, Jinx – who had cleaned the flesh-colored make-up off his face – had tried to console Trauma Doll, but tender emotions aren’t exactly his specialty. He tried to distract her by showing her his famous exploding frog trick, but I managed to stop him before he made a mess. He then began reciting limericks, each one filthier than the last. But they only made Trauma Doll cry tiny porcelain tears which fell to the floor with tiny plinking sounds.
“Melody loves dirty limericks!” she said, and began sobbing.
Jinx had looked to me for help at that point, but I could only shrug. I’m not exactly the tender type myself. So Jinx gave up and started biting his nails – get it? – again, Trauma Doll eventually stopped crying, and a custodian came by and swept away her tears.
As we waited, I tried not to beat myself up for what had happened to Melody. I told myself that every officer knew the risks of the job, and we were prepared to accept whatever might happen. We lived with the possibility – even the likelihood – of death and injury on a daily basis. We shoved that knowledge to the back of our minds and got on with our work. Melody might’ve been a trainee, but she was still a member of the Shadow Watch. She’d known what she was getting into. But Melody was my responsibility, and, because I’d made the wrong call, she’d been horribly injured by a living sandblaster. If she died, I knew I’d never forgive myself.
I tried not to think about the last time I’d been sitting here
, waiting to find out whether a fellow officer was going to survive a stakeout gone horribly wrong. Only that time, I’d been the trainee, and the officer fighting for his life and sanity had been my mentor, Nathaniel Sawyer.
Jinx swallowed the last piece of the nail he’d been working on, and then he turned to look at me.
“You know, this reminds me of the time–”
I hit Jinx as hard as I could on the jaw. Big mistake, since my fingers were still sore as hell. I let out a yelp of pain which was loud enough to cause several of the hospital staff to look my way – a little too eagerly for my comfort. The doctors in the Sick House are known for the enthusiasm with which they practice medicine, as well as for their predilection for trying new and often hastily improvised techniques, which are radical at best and psychotically dangerous at worst. I wouldn’t want one of the docs to start off treating my hands only to try and transplant a second head onto me for the fun of it.
Jinx and I still wore civvies, so no one in the waiting room gave us a second look. On one level it was nice not to have people giving us nervous glances, but it also felt disquieting. Without my Shadow Watch uniform on, I was just a medium-height human, not particularly intimidating. I like to think that I project a general aura of bad-assness, but the truth is that most Incubi respond not to me but to my uniform, and I didn’t like being reminded of that. It’s hard enough being a human in a city full of living nightmares without being reminded of how truly vulnerable you are when compared to the average Incubus.
A doctor finally came walking down the hall toward us. He looked like a normal human male, in his late thirties, and handsome enough to be a character in a soap opera. His black hair was thick and mussed just enough to be adorable. Strong chin, full lips, high cheekbones, a brow that could only be called noble. His eyes were forest green and shone with intelligence, compassion, and enough good humor to keep the first two qualities from being boring. As he drew near, he gave us a professional smile that was at once friendly and sympathetic. It didn’t offer false hope, but it didn’t take away hope, either.