Henry shrugged. ‘I never had no proof, detective, which is why I never told nobody for all of these years. What would have been the point? They probably would have carted me off to the funny farm. But it was only a few days after Mago Verde went to see Gilbert Griffin that he quit the circus without saying so much as goodbye to nobody, and then all of them killings and all of them disappearances started in the Cleveland Flats.
‘There was all manner of suspects. At first Eliot Ness thought it was some doctor from Glenville. Then he thought it was a longshoreman called Cruddick. But there must have been at least one eye witness who said it was somebody dressed up as a clown, because the cops came around two or three times to Corey’s Circus, and each time they ransacked the place. They never found Mago Verde, though. Mago Verde had flown the coop, and none of us ever saw him again, which made us all think that he could have been the killer.
‘Once Eliot Ness came around to Corey’s Circus in person, although he didn’t talk to me. I always remember how he had this dark shiny hair parted in the center, and a red necktie.
‘They never caught Gordon Veitch though, did they?’ asked Walter.
‘No, they didn’t. Not to bring to trial, anyhow. There was more murders and more rapes, and more disappearances, and in August of nineteen thirty-eight the cops got a tip-off about the whereabouts of Mago Verde and they burned down half of Shantytown. There was a huge public hoo-ha, especially in the press, but after that the killings stopped, so the cops presumed that they had done their job, and that Mago Verde was dead.’
‘But you blame Gilbert Griffin for what happened?’
‘Who else? I’m ninety-nine percent sure that Gilbert Griffin paid Mago Verde to kill or kidnap those innocent people. And what was more, he gave Mago Verde the wherewithal to take his victims through to the world of dreams.’
‘The wherewithal? What do you mean by that?’
‘Mago Verde told me that all nine victims had to be dreamed about, and each of the nine dreams had to be arranged in the same building in a special mystical pattern – an ennead, which means a figure of nine. It was like a psychic combination-lock, that’s how he put it. Once you had dreamed all nine dreams in the same building, in the right pattern, the doors to the world of dreams would be opened up, click-clickety-click, and a person could be taken through from one reality to the other, or vice versa.’
‘I see,’ said Walter. ‘Or rather, I don’t see. To be totally honest, I don’t understand what the fuck you’re talking about.’ He was pretty sure that Henry didn’t hear him say that, because Henry simply shrugged.
‘We never found out if Mago Verde was shooting us a line or not. Eighteen women was murdered or raped in all, but only seven people disappeared for good, five women and two men. So maybe he didn’t make the nine before the cops got him.’
‘Tell me,’ said Walter. ‘Have you ever seen Mago Verde since August, nineteen thirty-eight?’
Henry shook his head. ‘No, sir. Not once. And let’s face it, even if the cops didn’t get him, Old Father Time would have done for him by now.’
‘Yes. You’re right. Although somebody else could be wearing his make-up, couldn’t they?’
‘Sure. But stealing some other clown’s face, that’s the worst thing that any clown could do. They never do that, ever. Stealing a man’s face is like stealing his soul. If somebody is passing themselves off as Mago Verde, then I’d sure like to know who it is.’
‘Yes, Henry. Me too.’
Once Henry had gone, Walter drained his Diet Coke and then snapped his fingers at the waitress. ‘Get me a beer, would you?’
‘What do you think?’ asked Charlie.
‘About Henry? I think he’s wandering, the poor old coot.’
‘But how was Maria Fortales taken out of her room?’
‘What – you believe that Mago Verde spirited her away in some dream? Come on, Charlie. I’ll have to send you off on a psych break if you start talking like that.’
‘But what Henry said – it all fits, doesn’t it? And if there were seven disappearances back in the thirties, that means that Maria Fortales could be the eighth.’
‘You can count. Congratulations.’
‘If Maria Fortales is the eighth then there’s only one left to before Mago Verde opens up the door between the world of dreams and the world of reality.’
‘So what? He’s going to bring back a child-bride who must be ninety-two years old by now.’
‘She wouldn’t have grown any older, Walter, any more than Mago Verde would. She’s in a dream.’
‘Whose dream? Who the hell do you think dreams about her any more? Almost everybody who ever knew her must be dead by now.’
‘I still think there’s some truth in what Henry told us. What about that Mrs Kercheval, who had that hallucination in Room Seven-One-Seven? She thought she saw a mutilated woman in her bed, didn’t she? Maybe that was one of Mago Verde’s dreams.’
Walter covered his face with his hands and said nothing for a very long time. When he looked up again, he said, ‘Charlie . . . dreams are dreams. They’re not real. You can’t cross from the real world into the world of dreams because there’s nothing there to cross into. Dreams are like your brain trying to make sense of your life, that’s all, and most of the time they can’t make heads nor tails of anything.’
‘You said you didn’t have any dreams.’
‘I don’t. Not printable ones, anyhow.’
The waitress brought Walter his beer, and he drank half of it in one gulp, leaving himself with a white foam moustache. ‘Jesus, I needed that.’
Charlie was anxiously biting at the edge of his thumbnail. ‘Listen, Walter, I know you don’t believe a word of what Henry was telling us, but I spent a long time studying clowns. I got to know them, the way they think. The clown code of honor. Clowns play tricks but they don’t tell lies. And they have a long history of psychic sensitivity. I still think we ought to follow this line of enquiry a whole lot further.’
‘Meaning what?’
‘For starters, we ought to check all of the rooms in this hotel and see if we can come up with some kind of pattern. Not just forensic evidence – something more like the pieces of a puzzle. Henry talked about a figure of nine, didn’t he? Something’s going down here, and it’s going down tonight. I can feel it. Something weird.’
Walter finished the rest of his beer and belched into his fist. ‘I thought I told you before, Charlie. Me Hunch Detective. You Deductive Detective. Leave the frissons to me, OK?’
‘OK. But don’t you get any sense that something in this hotel is out of whack?’
‘Sure I do. I get a sense that I need another beer, and maybe some giant pretzels.’
‘And then we can check out the rooms?’
Walter’s head dropped in resignation. ‘OK. I give in. Then we can check out the rooms – but only so long as the manager allows us to do it without a warrant. If he doesn’t object, ask him if we can borrow a floor plan and a couple of pass keys. But I hope you realize that this hotel has one hundred thirty rooms and nine suites. It’s going to take us forever.’
Charlie stood up. ‘You’re not going to regret this, Walter. I really think we’re going to have this case cracked.’
‘Cracked is the word for it.’
Charlie went off to the find the manager, and Walter turned around to wave to the waitress and order another beer. As he did so, he saw John step out of the elevator and walk past the entrance to the Lantern Bar.
He squeezed his way out of the booth and waddled out into the lobby. John had found himself an armchair underneath a potted palm, and was shaking open a day-old copy of the Baton Rouge Advocate. Walter approached him and stood right in front of him, with his arms folded.
John lowered his paper. The headline was Iguana Regulation Bill Killed. The state senate had decided it was unnecessary to control the sale of pet iguanas, despite the fact that they could grow to ten feet long and pose a lethal threat to children and small animals.
‘Not taxi-driving tonight?’ asked Walter.
‘Taking some time off, detective. Catching up with some homespun gossip from B.R.’
‘Right here? In the Griffin House Hotel?’
‘Is there a law against it?’
‘Not that I know of.’
John looked up at Walter, unblinking. It was obvious that Walter felt that there was something suspicious about him sitting here, but he couldn’t think what it was. After a few moments, Walter said, ‘OK. But watch the attitude, OK?’
‘Oh, you bet,’ said John. ‘I’m keeping my attitude under constant scrutiny.’
Walter returned to the Lantern Bar, although he stopped and turned around before he went back inside, and gave John a look that almost made the potted palm wither up. John, for his part, shook his newspaper ostentatiously, lifted it up high in front of him, and pretended to read an article about people in Baton Rouge burning trash in their back yards and creating too much toxic smoke.
John was sitting in the lobby to keep a watch for Mago Verde. He didn’t expect Gordon Veitch to walk into the hotel wearing his clown make-up, but he reckoned he could pick out a Dread without too much difficulty. There was something about Dreads which he always recognized – a blurriness, as if he were seeing them through a fogged-up window.
From his vantage point beside the potted palm, he could clearly see the main entrance, as well as the elevators and the stairs. He could also see the entrance to the Lantern Bar and the Boa Vinda Restaurant and the corridor that led to the hotel parking-lot in back. The only way that anybody could enter or leave the hotel without him noticing them was if they climbed up one of the fire escapes.
He checked the time by the art deco clock standing by the reception desk. Seven-twelve. Kieran had promised to relieve him after two hours and he knew that he was going to need relieving. The smell of pan-fried escalopes of veal was wafting his way from the restaurant and he hadn’t eaten since twelve thirty.
Upstairs, meanwhile, Kieran, Kiera and Rhodajane had walked up and down every corridor and looked into every door that was open. When they returned to Rhodajane’s room, they found Springer sitting on the balcony, keeping an eye on the fire escapes.
‘Nothing,’ said Kieran, as he closed the door behind him. ‘Maybe he’s not coming.’
‘Oh, he will, I’m absolutely sure of it,’ said Springer. ‘After your attack on him last night, Brother Albrecht is going to be very anxious to complete the sacrificial ritual as soon as possible. Think about it: this could be his last and only chance to bring his circus back to reality.’
It was growing dark outside, and street lights were beginning to twinkle all around University Circle.
Kiera said, ‘What if we miss him? What if he manages to get into the hotel without us seeing him?’
‘Then you’ll have to go after him in Brother Albrecht’s dream, and hope that you can nail him before he manages to hand over his sacrifice.’
‘And if we can’t get to him before that?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Springer, gravely. He was still in the guise of Dean Brunswick III, but he was beginning to look older and grayer than he had at first, as if the alcoholic ravages of Deano’s later life were catching up with him. ‘I guess you’ll just have to give it all you’ve got, and hope for the best.’
‘That sounds like a plan,’ said Kieran. ‘Not.’
‘I don’t know what else I can say,’ Springer told him. ‘For some reason, Brother Albrecht appears to be invulnerable to the most powerful existential weapon in Dom Magator’s armory. Maybe he’s vulnerable to something more rudimentary – like a regular bullet-firing gun, or a crossbow bolt, or an ax.’
‘You think we should try chopping his head off?’ said Kiera, her eyes wide with revulsion.
‘It wouldn’t hurt,’ said Rhodajane. ‘Not us, anyhow.’
Springer said, ‘Anyhow, all we can do is wait. Mago Verde may have abducted and mutilated a ninth victim already, but he still has to come here and dream what he did to them into the hotel walls. Hopefully, that should give us enough time to find him. And even if we can’t find him, thousands of people all around the Great Lakes will be asleep by then, and dreaming, and at least some of them will be dreaming about Brother Albrecht’s circus. We can enter one of their dreams and go after him.’
‘I have a real bad feeling that this isn’t going turn out too good,’ said Kiera.
‘And what about our mom?’ asked Kieran.
‘I can’t tell you,’ said Springer. ‘You’ll have to play this as it comes. If you get the chance to rescue her, then take it. But I can’t offer you any guarantees. I can’t even offer you a plan. The truth is, with Brother Albrecht, I don’t even know what we’re up against.’
TWENTY
The Ninth Nightmare
By twenty after eight, Walter had checked out seventeen rooms and two de luxe suites. It was police procedure at its most procedural, and to make matters worse he wasn’t even sure what he was supposed to be looking for. A pattern? An ennead – whatever the hell that was?
Five of the rooms he had thankfully found unoccupied, but when he had knocked at the doors of all of the others the patter had always been the same. ‘Good evening, sir, madam. Real sorry to disturb you but my name is Detective Wisocky from the University Circle PD and I’m making a routine security check of all of the rooms in the Griffin House Hotel. Do you mind if I take a quick look around? It will only take a moment.’
Almost every time, the guest had asked him, ‘What exactly is it you’re looking for, detective?’
‘Signs of disturbance.’
‘Oh.’ Pause. ‘So what do they look like, these signs of disturbance?’
‘Hard to describe. But – you know – we always recognize them when see them.’
‘Oh.’
Maybe Charlie had been talking b.., but in some of the rooms that Walter had walked into – not all of them – he had felt a distinctly unwelcoming atmosphere. Not exactly a tangible chill, but a feeling that there was somebody else’s presence here, somebody hostile, apart from the current guests. It had given him the same discomfort that he felt when he walked into an unfamiliar house, when the owners were away, or when they had been killed. Even the family photographs over the fireplace seemed to frown at him disapprovingly.
After he had finished checking every room on the sixth and seventh floors, he sat down on the couch next to the elevators and unfolded his hotel floor-plan. Taking out his pen, he marked a cross against every room where he had felt unsettled. Five on the sixth floor and three on the seventh floor. Only eight altogether. But when he laid one floor-plan over the other, he saw that it would have taken the addition of only one more room to make a nine-cornered star.
He sat back. Now, was this a coincidence or what? He was tempted to call Charlie and tell him what he had discovered. But he had picked those eight rooms only because of some indefinable feeling of unease, and not because of any empirical evidence that Mago Verde or Mago Verde’s successor had ever been there. OK, so he was Hunch Detective, but maybe this was one hunch too far. He didn’t want to look like an asshole.
He looked at the floor-plans again. The room which would have completed the nine-cornered star was Room 702, which had been unoccupied. Maybe he hadn’t experienced that unwelcoming feeling in Room 702 because Mago Verde hadn’t yet visited it.
He took out his cellphone and called the front desk. ‘Detective Wisocky here. Can you tell me if Room Seven-Oh-Two is booked for tonight?’
‘Please hold on a moment, sir.’
Walter sat and waited. As he did so, he felt a sudden draft, as if somebody had walked past him, yet the corridor was completely deserted. Shit, he thought. I’m giving myself the heebie-jeebies. I don’t seriously believe in any of this dream crap.
The desk clerk came back to him. ‘Yes, sir. Room Seven-Oh-Two is booked for tonight. One night only.’
‘Under what name?’
‘Wisocky, sir
. Same as yours. Now, that’s a coincidence, wouldn’t you say?’
‘It’s been booked in the name of Wisocky?’
‘Yes, sir. Cash in advance.’
‘Shit. When was it booked?’
‘This evening, sir. Six ten p.m.’
‘Shit. Why the fuck didn’t you tell me? I’ve just spent two hours knocking on every goddamned door on the sixth and seventh floors and I needn’t have bothered.’
‘I’m sorry, sir. You didn’t ask.’
‘What did the guy look like?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘The guy who made the booking. What did he look like? Thin, fat, short, tall? Black, white, Hispanic, Chinese, what?’
‘White, sir. Thin. Not too tall, not too short. I can’t say I got a really good look at him.’
‘He made a booking right in front of you and you didn’t get a really good look at him?’
‘No, sir. I can’t say that I did.’
‘What about his address?’
‘Give me a moment, sir. Oh, yes. Here it is. Five-one-oh-two, Pearl Road, Cleveland.’
‘You know where that is?’
‘Not exactly, sir. No.’
‘It’s the fucking Clown Museum.’
Walter snapped his cellphone shut. Again, he was tempted to call Charlie, but then he thought: this is beginning to smell more and more like some kind of practical joke. Maybe Charlie wasn’t in on it, but that Henry Marriott could well have set it up. As elderly as he was, he was still a clown, wasn’t he? And what did clowns do, except trip people up and make them look like suckers?
Stepping into other people’s dreams, for Christ’s sake. Henry had almost had him believing it, and Charlie had been taken in, hook, line and sinker.
He followed the sign to Room 702. He found it right at the end of the corridor, with a Do Not Disturb tag hanging on the knob. He knocked, and called out, ‘Open up, sir! Police!’
He waited, but there was no response. He knocked again, ‘Police! Can you hear me, sir? You need to open this door right now!’
Still no response. He took out the pass key that the hotel manager had given him, and unlocked the door. He eased it open an inch, and then he lifted his gun out of its holster.
The Ninth Nightmare Page 28