The Nightmare Maker

by Gregory Pettit

  “Why are you here, Julian? Shouldn’t you be with your daughter? Do you even know where she is?” The priest asked the question with a tilt of his head and a tone that hit me like a bucket of cold water. Why was I here? I’d had to get out of the hospital and start looking for Dana, but I’d come to see the priest based on a mixture of instinct and rage. Instead of getting closer to finding Dana, I’d broken into a church, punched a priest, and was monologuing. Was I the baddie here? I quickly checked and was relieved to find I wasn’t dressed in black, yet the old man had a point.

  “I’m here because I want my wife back,” I said, trying to hide the hitch in my voice. I stared into his eyes without moving and hoped that he interpreted it as intensity. If I had moved, I might have fallen over.

  “I can’t give her back to you, Julian. Sacrifice is the greatest expression of love. Remember her sacrifice. Go home. Take care of your daughter.” He continued to speak forcefully, but gestured toward the door with a casual wave of his hand.

  “You can’t give her back to me, and I don’t have a home, but you spied on me, and you held back information that got my family hurt. I need to know what you know.” I was tempted to tell him that I suspected that Dana wasn’t really gone, but the last time I’d opened up to the man hadn’t turned out very well, and as my dad always said, “Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice…you won’t fool me again.” Dad wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed.

  “How long did you hold back information from your family, Julian? If Dana had known sooner, would she have chosen to be with you?” he said, pursing thin lips. I opened my mouth to speak, but he held up a hand, “As I’ve said—I didn’t lie to you. Every time you asked for my assistance, I gave it to you. What I won't do—what I can’t do—is tell you where the book is or anything about the organization or the operation that put it in the hands of Ms. O’Brian. I freely admit that I was involved, and I can assure you that the outcome of the action was more than satisfactory—a supernatural predator that had done incalculable damage and that my organization had tried to remove for centuries has been eradicated. For your part in that, you have my thanks, my condolences, and my respect—but I can offer you nothing more than that. If you bother me again, there will be consequences,” the priest said. He dabbed at his upper lip and gestured toward the door.

  I thought about Father O.’s words. If I had understood his insinuation correctly, then he was essentially admitting that he and the group he represented had orchestrated the entire horrible set of events involving the puca. The events that had cost me my house, my wife, and very nearly my life. If he had hoped that the words would get me out of the door peacefully, then someone clearly hadn’t been paying enough attention when they were spying on me. I’d come into the rectory furiously angry and looking for answers, but I wasn’t getting anywhere. I had a choice: I could take the priest’s advice and go find Olivia, or I could force him to talk. The old me would have been out the door in a second, but after years outside of our reality…I raised my fist and took a step forward.

  Chapter 4 2300, Sunday, September 20–0045, Monday, September 21, 2015

  I didn’t punch the lying asshole. Five minutes later, I was pounding the pavement in the general direction of the Ealing Travel Lodge, intentionally avoiding looking toward the empty lot where my house had been. I couldn’t be sure until I arrived, but Detective Badger had told me that my sister-in-law was staying there with Olivia. I could have called a taxi, but I needed the time to think, even if my steps were still wobbly.

  I’d barged into the priest’s house half-cocked and had let him know how much I knew. By revealing that ace in the hole, I’d managed to surprise him into giving away not only that he had provided the means for the puca to be summoned but that the whole episode had been a setup from beginning to end—taking in me and poor, dead Ena O’Brian. All of the other victims had been acceptable collateral damage. I hadn’t learned anything that might help me get Dana back, but at least the incident left me with a better understanding of what was going on. And I’d gotten to punch Father O. in the nose.

  I wasn’t going to find Dana by sleeping under hedges or getting thrown in jail, and the years we had spent together left me suspecting that she wouldn’t be overly happy if I consigned Olivia to her sister’s tender loving care any longer than absolutely necessary. Becky had always hated me, and her judgement about how to express that feeling had been shockingly bad. For example, she had once hidden a baggie of pot in my suitcase, hoping that that would get me arrested. Luckily I’d spotted it, and she’d had the gall to ask for it back when Dana had confronted her. There had been other stupid stunts, and the half dozen times that Dana had had to wire Becky money to bail herself, or various thuggish boyfriends, out of jail.

  So - my first order of business was to track down Olivia. After that I needed to take stock of my financial situation, then I had to find somewhere to live, and finally, I would find my wife. As I passed an all-night West Indian food joint, I remembered that I hadn’t eaten in over a month and reconsidered. The first order of business was definitely getting a lamb pattie.

  Exiting the shop with my culinary treasure a minute later, I never even saw the slap coming. If I had been healthy and in form, maybe I would have tried to get back to my feet and make a good showing of things, but having been in a coma earlier that morning, I just sat on my pasty-white posterior, staring dumbly at an enormous man in a well-cut black suit with a red silk shirt and a carnation in his lapel. Seriously, this guy had to be at least seven feet tall and weigh in at 350, without much flab.

  “Shit.” Okay, I wasn’t staring entirely dumbly. And I’d dropped my lamb pattie.

  “If you killed my baby brother, I’m gonna end ya…” The slurred, East End accent triggered a flash of memory, but the picture didn’t want to resolve in my battered skull. Following an entirely disproportionate negotiation, I finally talked my neck into bending upward.

  “Shit…” I swear that I’m well known for being articulate. It had been really nice walking around for the last couple of hours without any broken bones, but that luxury came to an end as the heavy-browed man, big fat tears rolling down his puffy face, lifted a foot and stomped down onto the hand that I’d put on the sidewalk in a vain effort to get up.

  “Tha’ was fer Derrick,” he said with an expression like he’d just trod in something.

  “Shit!” Okay, maybe he’d slapped me even harder than I’d thought, but that wasn’t much of a surprise because Derrick Redderton, a P.I. for the Redderton’s Detective Agency who had been in the OMG witches’ employ, had been a compact brute of a man, and his brother was just as ugly, in a bulldog sort of a way, but supersized. I opened my mouth again, hoping that something more sensible, like the fact that Derrick had been trying to kill me when he’d accidentally shot a cop and died in the return fire, would come out. Unfortunately, something went in as the man took another swing and popped me a meaty backhand right in the kisser, and I tasted blood.

  I’d been stunned at first, and then I’d momentarily assumed that this was just going to be a good revenge stomping, but now somewhere in my thick skull a trickle of worry managed to make it into my consciousness. Hurt, disoriented, and scared, I fell back on my time in the puca’s realm and instinctively reached for the malleable stuff of the Dreamscape for a weapon. I pushed hard with my will and searched for the hilt of my gladius, feeling my fingers wrap around leather a moment later. Before Redderton could follow me, I rolled and brought the short sword up toward him in a practiced motion.

  “Shi—” The blade of my sword seemingly evaporated away into nothingness at the same moment Redderton’s left cross caught me on the chin and snapped my mouth shut before I could even finish yelling. That was probably for the best, really. I landed on my back again, and I could hear shouting in the distance. I guessed that someone else had noticed the fight. I hoped that they’d called the cops.

  “Wha the hell was that?” the big man slurred, reaching down
and hauling me up by the collar. My eyes struggled to focus, and he gave me a shake. Counterintuitively, his tender ministrations seemed to help as my thoughts cleared a bit.

  “Sss…nothin’.” Like I said, they cleared a bit.

  “Well, Derrick kept talkin’ some kinda crazy shit ’bout dreams before he died. I’ve been look…lookin’ inna you. What the hell are you? You some kinda sorcerer? I wanna know what actually happened to my baby brother—I saw ’is body after the Met released ’im, and no bullets did that to ’im.” The man’s face was only inches away from my lolling head. I could smell the whiskey on his breath—and I could see the tears trickling off the end of his red nose to plop onto my chin. His words reminded me of the last minutes of his brother’s life: Derrick pursuing us through the Ealing Broadway shopping center. I had an ugly realization.

  “Wass…purple…cablesss?” I slurred the words out while blood dribbled from the corner of my mouth. The man squinted his eyes, and his nostrils flared.

  “How’d ya know? Did you do that to him! If ya did, then I swear I’ll bloody kill you, you filthy little shit!” He screamed the last words so that they rang off the high art deco facades of the buildings on Greenford Broadway. The man at the analytics desk in the back of my mind returned from his coffee break and whispered to me that it didn’t make sense for someone to threaten to kill you if they wanted a confession. Clearly brains didn’t run in this family. Then I had an idea.

  “Wasssn me. But I’ll tell ya who wass…”

  Seemingly satisfied, or at least intrigued, he threw me back to the cold concrete. More bruises. Compared to what I guessed were at least two broken fingers, they were inconsequential.

  The huge man blinked and shook his head, seemingly surprised by my denial. “You’ll tell me everythin’ that—” His words were cut off in midsentence when a cop car threw on its siren just a block away. With a backward glance, he took off running at a clip that seemed pretty improbable for a guy his size, especially one who looked to be in his midforties.

  The police car carried on around the corner, and I couldn’t be sure if it had been responding to my altercation or whether it had been a lucky coincidence. Either way, I didn’t feel like sticking around to find out. I hobbled a couple of hundred yards down the road and then hopped on an E3 bus toward Chiswick.

  I considered what I’d just learned, and I realized it was obvious that Derrick would have been infected after the fight with the puca, but how was that information useful now? More importantly, why had my gladius disappeared? My ability to use my powers in the real world had always been binary before, either working or not, and then if they worked, causing me to fall almost instantly into a deep, dreamless sleep, but I wasn’t tired at all now.

  I was racking up a lot of information in a short period of time and needed to get somewhere where I could start putting the pieces together. I had the feeling that if I understood more about what had actually been behind the puca’s attack, I’d know where to really start the search for Dana. The bus dropped me off in West Ealing at the Lido, and a short walk brought me to the Travel Lodge. Looking like I knew where I was going was enough to help me breeze past reception but left me with the problem of locating Becky and Olivia’s room, assuming that they were even really here. I decided to start on the first floor and work my way up the building’s ten or eleven stories.

  I’d checked the first couple of floors and had just stepped out of the elevator when I heard the wailing. I was moving at top speed before a conscious connection had even formed in my mind, but that caught up as I reached the door to the room that the noise was coming from. I pounded on the door with my busted hand, and my nerves screamed, but mostly I ignored the pain because, in a way that any parent understands, I recognized the crying: Olivia.

  “God damn it all! There she goes again.” Surprised by the sudden imprecation, I turned my head to the right and saw an older man with a pot belly leaning out of his room. “You can pound all you want, but she won’t shut up. Every night this week she’s been screaming like that, and the desk won’t do anything about it,” he said, slamming the door.

  The door opened. “Juliaaan?” Becky’s squeaky drawl was so thick with exhaustion that it almost verged on slurring. For a moment I wondered if she’d been drinking, but if this was going on every night, then it wasn’t a surprise to find her on the ragged edge of sleepless exhaustion. I pushed past the young woman, barely slowing as I bumped her 115 pounds out of the way.

  My daughter was lying in bed, long blond hair plastered to her head in sweaty ringlets, a look of absolute terror on her face. She was crying at the top of her lungs, but her blue eyes were closed tight. Two steps took me across the room, and I swept her off the cheap white sheets in a single motion.

  “Ollie—wake up, sweetie, it’s just a bad dream. It’s okay, sweetheart; Daddy’s here now.” My daughter trembled in my arms, and I wanted nothing more than to protect her, so I held her tight against my chest, concentrating only on keeping her safe. The dreams of the very young are often some of the most disturbing that I venture into because of the way they inflate fears and misunderstand the world around them. I didn’t even want to think about the kind of nightmares that Olivia was having with her house destroyed and her parents missing.

  After about twenty seconds, I felt her body beginning to relax, and her crying quieted. I buried my face in her hair and breathed in my daughter’s scent. As her whining stopped and she lapsed into the boneless and untroubled sleep of the very young, I thought how much I loved that little girl. I sat down on the bed cradling Olivia and looked up at Becky.

  “How’d you do that?” In the dim light coming through the half-open door, her pale skin almost glowed where it was bared from hip to foot, reminding me painfully of how Dana had looked when I’d first met her.

  “Compared to when she had colic as a newborn, that was nothing.” I lay back on the bed and felt a wave of fatigue crash over me. I thought I heard Dana’s sister saying something about nothing getting Olivia to stop crying, but I couldn’t really focus through the drowsiness that was pulling at my eyelids like lead weights. I was asleep before my head hit the p…

  Chapter 5 0645–1130, Monday, September 21, 2015

  I opened my eyes and found myself staring into my daughter’s grinning face. Whose dream was I in? Had I jumped into her nightmares? I reached out with my dream senses…and felt nothing. My heart started hammering in my chest, and I pushed myself up from the bed with a start and winced.

  “Sh—” With Olivia right there, I didn’t want to start up with the swearing again. The throbbing in my smashed fingers and the ache in my neck told me that I was actually awake, but how could that be true? How could I have not gone to the Dreamscape?

  “Daddy!” Olivia shouted, smiling up at me while I continued to wonder what was going on. The only time in my life that I’d ever been unconscious without dreaming had been after I’d used my powers in the waking world, causing me to fall into what amounted to a mini coma. I’d already experienced one trip to the Dreamscape the day before, so I didn’t think there had been some fundamental change caused by my extended stay in the puca’s pocket dimension. I had to break off my thoughts as thirty pounds of squealing three-year-old flung herself at me.

  “Pick me up! Pick me up!” My little girl thumped onto my chest, and I couldn’t keep the grin off my face as I scooped her in my arms and stood there just hugging her for a least a minute. “Where’s Mummy?”

  I felt like I’d been kicked in the stomach. I should have been ready for the question, and I was sure that Becky and her parents would have tried to explain to Olivia what had happened, but it was only natural to a little girl that if her daddy could reappear, then surely her mummy must be around somewhere too. I must have waited too long to answer.

  “Where’s Mummy!” Her tone had shifted to one of petulant insistence that usually drove me up the wall, but instead I just held her tight.

  “Mommy went away, sweethe
art. Daddy was in trouble, and Mommy came and saved him. Your mommy was the bravest, most loyal, most wonderful woman that your daddy ever met, and she loved you very, very much.” I realized that I’d used the past tense to refer to Dana, and then my daughter wasn’t the only one crying. At least Olivia didn’t have to worry that her mother might be getting tortured or worse by a monster while stuck in a lightless realm of nothingness.

  There was a rattle of keys in the door, and it swung open with a bang, snapping me out of my gloomy thoughts.

  Becky looked at us, her face unreadable, before speaking. “I got some Krispy Kremes from Tescos. I hope y’all are ready for some breakfast.” My sister-in-law breezed through the door, a patterned summer dress swishing around her legs. “Is everyone all right in here?” I couldn’t help but wonder how she could think that we would have been all right.

  “I’ve been trying to explain to my daughter where her mother is…I don’t suppose you’ve spent any time on that?” I volleyed at the young woman without any kindness. I immediately regretted it, knowing that she’d lost a sister, and she didn’t have even the slim hope that I held out of being able to find her.

  Becky put her hands on her hips and scowled. “Well, Julian, I don’t rightly know where she is, but she isn’t here and safe with you—like you promised she’d be when you married her and convinced her to leave the rest of her family. The family that showed up to take care of your daughter when your family was nowhere to be found.” Ahh…it was almost comforting to fall into the familiar pattern of sniping that we’d established over the years. I rose with a still-sniffling Olivia on my hip and absently rubbed at my wedding band. Come find me, Dana’s voice whispered in my thoughts.