Scarlet Dream

by James Axler

  Kane screwed up his eyes, forcing the illusion out of his head as he concentrated on pulling on his pants. The women continued to taunt him, asking him to return to the bed, to come, to be with them.

  “Keep away from me,” Kane told them again, opening his gray-blue eyes to slits so as to watch them. “I can see you now.”

  The emaciated, sticklike things writhed on the bed, pressing their mouths to one another as if kissing, the noises they made as they touched no longer alluring, sounding now like grinding bones to Kane’s ears. He could see them if he looked hard enough, if he kept his mind disciplined and held the illusory power of the house at bay.

  “Baptiste?” Kane called, engaging the Commtact as he pulled the sleeves of the shadow suit over his arms. “How are things with you? Still on top of it?”

  DOWNSTAIRS, Brigid was just making her way to the foot of the staircase beneath the orange glow of the chandelier.

  “I’m right here, Kane,” she responded automatically over the Commtact. “Be with you in a minute.”

  “Any sign of Grant?” Kane asked, his voice piping straight into her ear as if he stood right next to her.

  “Nothing yet,” Brigid replied as she took the first stair. As she did so, she heard a noise coming from the corridor and she halted, the metal pole in her hand resting against the next riser like a walking cane. She dipped her head, peering back down the corridor that led into the depths of the house. It was hard to see, the corridor was lost to shadow after just a dozen paces. But as she looked, she heard the noise again, a thumping as if of a heavy tread.

  “Wait, I’m going to check something out,” Brigid whispered into the hidden Commtact pickup.

  “Negative, Baptiste.” Kane’s voice rasped over the Commtact. “We need to stick together.”

  Brigid took a step back, peeking over her shoulder to make sure no one was sneaking up on her. “Pipe down, Kane,” she instructed in a harsh whisper. “I’ll be one minute and I’ll be sure to take care, I promise.”

  Kane grunted an acknowledgment but Brigid chose to ignore it, tuning out the Commtact receiver.

  Cautiously, the titian-haired warrior made her way into the corridor that ran along the staircase. Pictures lined the walls here, and Brigid’s eyes flicked to them for just a moment. She was wary now, conscious that this house had many subtle traps that could snag the mind with the most casual of efforts. The pictures, she saw, were masked by velvet curtains, like tiny theatrical stages, as if each one contained a whole story just waiting to spring to life.

  Brigid heard the noise again, more clearly this time—footsteps coming from the shadowy end of the corridor. She waited in place against the side of the stairs beside a door handle, silently peering into the darkness as the footsteps became slowly louder. Then she spied the figure in the shadows, recognized it as the wide form of housemistress Ellie.

  “That you, brave soldier?” Ellie called as she strode toward Brigid.

  Brigid saw that the woman was squinting, and she recalled how she had struggled to make out the moving figures beyond the house when her team had arrived. She was short-sighted, and that might just be the only thing that Brigid had on her side at that moment. It seemed that this woman could somehow hypnotize with a look. It wouldn’t do to be caught by her, not without some kind of plan in place. Brigid was armed, but that was no use—for one thing, she did not have a blood-thirsty temperament, and killing this woman in cold blood did not appeal to her, despite the mind-trickery on display in this house. For another, Brigid realized that killing someone with the power to instantly make one see whatever they wanted would be about as easy as catching dreams in a paper cup. Even Perseus had needed a trick to kill the gorgon, Brigid reminded herself.

  With a swift decision, the beautiful Cerberus warrior reached for the door at her back and pulled it open. The door opened outward, and in a moment she had ducked her svelte form inside, pulling the door quietly shut behind her.

  With the door closed, Brigid found herself in darkness. She stilled her breathing, listening to the heavy footsteps as Ellie’s shadow flickered past the edges of the door where the light seeped in, and then moved along the corridor, muttering to herself about imagining things and about handsome gentleman callers.

  Brigid turned then, trusting her eyes to adjust to the darkness. What she had at first taken to be a cupboard was actually a small, boxlike landing that opened out into a staircase leading into the basement of the old house. Balancing her metal pole against her side, Brigid ran a hand along the wall until she located the light switch and flicked it on. Nothing happened—either the bulb was dead or there was no power coming into the house. However, as her eyes continued to adjust to the darkness, Brigid realized she wasn’t absolutely blind in this environment. There seemed to be something glowing at the foot of the stairs, glowing with a slow pulse, first soft, then bright, then soft once more.

  Cautiously, Brigid took a single step down the wooden staircase, ducking her head at the low ceiling, hearing the stair creak as she applied her weight. The glow below her was faint, but it was surely there.

  “Kane,” Brigid whispered over the Commtact, “I’ve found something. Down in the basement. Something glowing like it’s—I’m not sure—alive, maybe. I’m checking it out.”

  “Baptiste…” Kane began, a note of irritation in his tone.

  “You haven’t cornered the market on impetuous decisions just yet, Kane,” Brigid reminded him in a brisk whisper. “I think this may be important.”

  With that, Brigid stole her way down the stairs, taking care to keep her movements light and still wincing every time the old wooden boards creaked. As she watched, the glowing continued to throb, like some slow pulse, dull then bright, dull then bright, making the dark basement pop into brightness and long black shadows every ten seconds or so. As she reached the foot of the stairs, Brigid saw the glowing more clearly, and she began to define the shapes as they became brighter before fading away. It was not just one item that glowed, but over a dozen, all pulsing in unison as if they were somehow linked despite being strewed across the copious area of the basement.

  The glowing pieces were arranged in a roughly semi-circular, radial pattern with a large glowing hunk dominating its center, so that when they glowed it seemed reminiscent of a sunburst. Close up, Brigid saw that the small pieces were jagged, and it seemed as though they had been broken off from the main body of the item that rested in the center of the otherwise ordinary basement room.

  That central item was familiar to Brigid Baptiste, and she had to stifle a gasp of surprise as she recognized it. It was a chair, its back to her. But not just any chair. This was the so-called voodoo chair that she had seen and become ensnared by when she and Kane had met with Papa Hurbon, local practitioner of the dark voodoo arts. In actuality, it was an astronavigator’s chair from the starship Tiamat, a part of the literal mothership of the Annunaki, and it possessed the ability to project images of star maps into a user’s mind.

  When Brigid had last seen the chair, it had been missing its lower section and had been propped up on bricks. The lower section was still missing, but now panels from the side and back had gone missing, also, and there was just a strut where the headrest should be. Peering around the room, Brigid saw the missing parts all around her, they were the other items that seemed to pulse in time with the chair’s glowing palpitations. It had been taken apart with some degree of finesse she saw, despite the rough edges of the breaks, and its parts arranged in a manner that seemed almost as if they had been planted, sown into the floor of the grand old house’s basement, like the points and convergences of a pentagram. With its known ability to project images into a sitter’s brain, Brigid realized that the scope of the chair’s abilities may very well include overlaying illusions into a person’s mind, making them see whatever it was programmed to make them see.

  Suddenly the nature of the book she had been reading and, presumably, whatever weird experiences Kane and Grant had been thr
ough in the House Lilandera, began to make a strange, alarming kind of sense. The book she had held had been a prop—all the things in the house were props—and the chair projected its illusions into the minds of anyone who interacted with those props.

  “I think I’ve found the source of our trouble,” Brigid whispered, trusting the Commtact to enhance her voice for Kane’s ears wherever he now was in the house.

  After a moment Kane’s voice came to Brigid. “Care to elaborate, Baptiste?”

  “It’s that chair,” she subvocalized. “Papa Hurbon’s chair. It’s here.”

  Brigid took another pace forward, aware of the creeping tension in her muscles. The chair may be casting the illusion but there was one part of the puzzle that remained unanswered—when Brigid had encountered the chair before, it had needed to physically bond with her before it began to project its information for her brain to interpret. Like much Annunaki machinery, it was organic technology, and it required a person’s touch to make it operate.

  Cautiously, Brigid paced around the edge of the chair, the TP-9 semiautomatic held out steadily in front of her in a one-handed grip, the metal pole she had snagged from the artillery truck prepped in the other.

  Just as Brigid had guessed, there was a figure sitting in the chair. It was an elderly woman, with white hair and skin so pale that, in the glowing pulsation of the chair and its parts, it looked as if it may never have been touched by the sun’s rays. As far as Brigid could tell, the woman was sleeping.

  Chapter 14

  No matter the size of a prisoner’s cell, the prisoner will eventually examine every inch of it. And so it was with Grant. At first, he had dismissed the place he found himself in, aware that it was a painting somehow brought to life through means he could not begin to comprehend. But, having alerted Kane to his predicament via their linked Commtacts, he decided to search the place, to find out a little more about this odd trap he had been placed within.

  The first thing that struck Grant was how real it all felt. Yes, there was a sense of unreality about it, the way the people had appeared to be loosely of the same appearance, the way that the Shizuka analog had broken down when he had shot her. But on a surface level it seemed to be real. Grant could feel the wind on his face, and he watched as it rustled the leaves in the trees and the branches above him swayed with the breeze. The place smelled like a forest, too, a cold, damp smell as if there was moisture in the air. Yet when he examined the trees up close, he saw the brush marks there, like a backdrop from a stage play.

  Grant walked deeper into the forest, leaving the fumbling couples behind him, dismissing their pleas and groans of ecstasy. Behind him, the city continued to burn, lightening the sky. The flames acted as a fixed point, like north on the compass, and Grant kept them at his back at all times to ensure he walked in the same direction. In theory, he was walking toward the external frame of the painting and hence an exit, since the burning city had formed the distant background of the picture as he looked at it on the wall of the House Lilandera. As theories went, it was the best he could come up with given the unreality of his situation.

  The forest was like a dark streak, only defining itself into individual trees when he got close to them, as if the details didn’t really exist until they were within arm’s reach.

  On the ground, twigs and a few fallen leaves lay on the loam. Grant halted, crouching to examine one of the fallen leaves. It was as big as his spread hand and a yellowish green in color. He picked up the leaf, its three prongs stretched out like the fingers of a cartoon character’s hand. Close up, the leaf didn’t have veins as leaves should; instead, it seemed untextured, like a flat sheet of colored paper in the shape of a leaf. The green of its surface was not complete, and Grant saw now that white peeked through where the paint had not been applied evenly. It was curious—in his mind, he comprehended this as a leaf from a tree, but his eyes could see the defects, the limitations in the artist’s work.

  Grant cast aside the leaf, pushing himself up from the ground on powerful legs. The sounds of coupling had become distant now, and the forest was instead a place of forest sounds, owls hooting, foxes barking and other nocturnal things prowling for food and shelter. Grant walked on, striding through a copse of trees and onward, in the opposite direction to the burning pyre of the city.

  IN THE CONFINES of the House Lilandera, Kane was concentrating on keeping a level head as the only way that he could think of to hold the house’s strange illusions at bay. He shrugged into his jacket, sighing and shaking his head when he saw the frayed rip across the front where the undead thing with the eye patch had torn it during their earlier scuffle. That seemed like days past, and yet it had been perhaps ninety minutes. Which reminded Kane—the Red Weed was even now being mixed in the laboratory of Redoubt Mike, the glowing clock counting down atop the centrifuge spinner in the glass-walled room. Kane and his companions had less than eight hours to halt it.

  From the well-worn mattress, the two fetuslike figures reached for Kane, a haunting sense of desperation in their childlike expressions.

  “Don’t leave us,” said Kirsten, still recognizable because of her vibrant blue eyes.

  “We would love you here forever,” the one with green eyes added.

  “Yeah,” Kane grumbled, “that’s what I’m afraid of.”

  The woman creatures, unable to comprehend that Kane had truly broken their illusion, cooed to him once more, making a performance of touching each other’s naked bodies, pudgy fingers playing through dark flesh with the texture of dough. Repulsed, Kane turned away and made his way to the door.

  “I’d like to say it’s been nice knowing you, ladies,” Kane said without turning back, “but let’s just say it’s been an experience.”

  With that, he pulled open the remnants of the rotten door and stepped out into the corridor. Like the bedroom, this previously impressive hallway now looked like hell, the last proud hurrah of a struggling dumpsite.

  The window at the end of the corridor was missing, shards of glass clinging to the wooden frame like spiders hanging to the remains of a broken web. The walls were speckled with mold, and here and there toadstools were growing in pools of moisture, the floor and walls beside them sprayed with their black spores. The floorboards were bare, with wide streaks of dirt worn into them.

  Kane made his way toward the staircase, passing the doorways that led to the other bedrooms of the bordello. Several featured doors, though two of them were half rotted away, while the third had paint scarred across its surface and a small hole in its lower panel where someone—or something—had put a foot through it. Peering into one of the rooms, Kane saw a man lying on the bed with another of the dark-skinned fetuslike things riding astride him, teasing his body as wind blew through the shattered remains of the window. The man was naked and delirious, wailing in either pleasure or abject horror, Kane didn’t care to think about which.

  For a moment Kane’s concentration slipped, and he saw the bedroom as he was supposed to, in the vivid colors of the shared illusion. The man seemed to lie amid a circle of flickering candles as moonlight spilled through the window, a gorgeous woman with dark hair and dark looks teasing his body to extremes of pleasure. It was easy to get sucked into the illusion.

  Kane halted, closing his eyes and recentering himself. Without consciously thinking it, his wrist muscles flinched and he called the Sin Eater back to his hand. He opened his eyes then, and the illusion of the beautiful room had evaporated like steam. Without hesitating, Kane drilled a single shot through the back of the head of the woman-thing, and she toppled from the man’s body, a bloody circle appearing on her forehead. What the man on the bed saw, Kane couldn’t imagine.

  “Get up, get dressed and get out,” Kane instructed. “This place isn’t safe.”

  The man looked startled. “What are you? Some kind of magistrate?”

  “Yeah.” Kane nodded. “Now get your stuff and get out. I’m closing this rat hole down.”

  Perhaps the man
recognized the Magistrate tone in Kane’s order. Perhaps he just saw something that wasn’t really there. Whatever it was, he pushed himself from the bed and started gathering his clothes, looking timidly at the slumped body of the woman who had been bringing him pleasure just a moment before.

  Kane moved on, ignoring the fact that the half-formed woman was twitching. Hard to kill, maybe? Didn’t matter now, he had bigger fish to fry.

  Then he saw a woman standing at the top of the staircase, blocking his exit as she glared at him, her skirts still glamorous despite the squalor of her true surroundings. It was Ellie.

  “And just what do you think you’re doing?” she asked, her voice still rich.

  “Getting out of here,” Kane told her.

  Ellie shook her head indulgently. “Oh, no, that ain’t how things happen ’round here, sugar,” she said. “This here is a celebration of life. You don’t want to be leaving that, now, do you?”

  Kane raised his right hand, showing Ellie the Sin Eater blaster he held. “I broke your spell,” he explained. “Without that, this joint looks a little too members-only for my liking. So me and my friends are going to have to be on our way, I’m afraid.”

  Ellie tsked, shaking her head heavily. “No one ever gets out alive,” she told Kane. “That’s the charm.”

  Before the ex-Mag could respond, Ellie became a blur of motion, rushing forward the four steps between her and the muzzle of his blaster. She yanked it to one side as Kane clung on to its grip. Kane’s finger squeezed at the trigger, and a 9 mm burst whizzed past Ellie’s head and drilled into the wall, kicking up dried-out plaster where they struck.

  “No one ever gets out alive,” Ellie repeated, pulling Kane close to her by the end of his own pistol. Her other pudgy fist struck out, ramming into Kane’s gut with such force that he felt the breath burst from his lips.