The Nightmare Maker

by Gregory Pettit

  “Just…gimme a doughnut.” I grabbed an original glazed, and Becky raised an eyebrow at the swollen purple fingers on my hand while Olivia reached out and snagged a blueberry frosted. I really shouldn’t let her eat that but… “Becky—thanks.”

  “S’all right.” the blonde said, pausing to take a bite before she continued, “I’m a bit snappy too. I wasn’t kidding when I said that the kid hasn’t been sleeping very well for weeks—have you, Ollie?” She reached out and pecked her only niece on the cheek before sitting down on the bed.

  Over the next thirty minutes, we put our differences aside, and Becky filled me in on what had been going on. It turned out that there had been frantic activity while I was physically in a coma for three weeks and mentally inhabiting the personal pocket dimension of an alien horror for what had felt like an age of the world.

  The event that the media had dubbed The Hanwell Horror, where I’d lured the puca to its destruction, had led to nearly twenty deaths. Coming on top of the so-called Saint Mary’s Massacre, where the same monster had killed half a dozen hospital workers, there had been worldwide media attention—but not as much as there should have been. In fact, somehow it seemed that my connection to so many of the incidents hadn’t flared up beyond a couple of photos in some of the London papers, and I wondered if there had been someone pulling strings behind the scenes to make that happen.

  The media attention had had a positive impact though; a charity had been set up for victims of what was being billed as a rash of terrorist activity. Money had poured in, and that had been used to pay for the hotel room we were in as well as Becky and Olivia’s airfare. Becky didn’t know what the status was on the insurance claim related to the destruction of our house or whether my work had been trying to reach me, but she did know that I’d have to go to the Ealing police station. Apparently our safe had survived the fire and was being held there. The most disturbing thing that she told me was held back until last.

  “I’m not sure how to put this, Julian, but your dad and your sister, Lucy, weren’t interested in coming over here. Heck—I couldn’t even get them on the phone. I just got some lame e-mails back from them. I’m sorry.” I wasn’t sure what she was apologizing for, but that didn’t sound right. I thought back to the days leading up to Dana’s disappearance and recalled that I’d had to leave messages for both of them. I added one more thing to my list of worries.

  I took a shower, got Olivia dressed, thanked Becky for her help, and then imposed once again by asking her to watch Olivia while I started sorting out some of my issues. I figured that I’d see about getting my swollen fingers looked at, swing by the police station, make some calls to the insurance company, and then go by my (former?) office. She refused.

  “I’ve been watching this kid for three weeks. I can’t keep a houseplant alive, and I’ve been in London all that time, spending every day visiting you and holding things together when my sister is gone. I need a break, and you need to be ready to explain where she is when I get back,” she said while tying her hair in a ponytail with a few twists of a hair scrunchy. I’d have to learn how to do that for Olivia now; Dana had always taken care of that kind of thing.

  Becky left a couple of minutes later, and Olivia and I trudged out not long after. Given the beating I’d taken at the hands of the Redderton P.I. the night before, I was moving slowly and was more than a little paranoid as my three-year-old daughter clung to my good hand. The sky was overcast, and the summer heat wave that had ended in an apocalyptic storm on the night of my battle with the puca was a distant memory, but a bit of complaining about the cold (from Olivia) was as dangerous as my first task got as I stopped in at my local General Practitioner. Forty five minutes later, not a penny poorer (hooray single-payer health care), and with fingers bandaged together, I strolled into the police station and picked up the contents of our family safe. The outside was charred, but it had done its job, and our important papers were inside. I cringed as I saw my marriage certificate and Dana’s life insurance paperwork, and then I had a bit of a meltdown when I realized that my passport was missing. I spent a futile half hour trying to find out where it had gone, but finally gave up and left for my next task.

  I made a call to our home insurance company while we walked down the Uxbridge Road, and I was amazed to find that Becky hadn’t been exaggerating about the effect of the media attention—the woman on the other end of the phone told me that I should be expecting my payout via direct deposit in the next couple of days. I hung up just as we reached Ealing Broadway Station, dodging around the Cross Rail upgrade works to get inside.

  A train journey to Paddington set me up for my next task, and I bought Olivia a princess magazine of some sort to keep her entertained. I rang ahead to find out whatever I could, but when I tried to reach my buddy, Toscan, it went straight to voice mail. My next call was to Anne from Accounting. Her squeaky voice answered on the first ring, and I almost laughed at the sound of it. Anne was the exception that proved the rule in that she looked exactly like you’d expect her to based on her voice: tiny, blond, and cute as a button. Of course, her two ex-husbands might have used a less charitable and more expletive-laden description.

  “Hey, Anne.” Julian Adler—smooth talker.

  “Julian? You’re-awake-from-your-coma-oh-my-God-I-need-to-tell-Richard!” She blurted out the sentence as a single word, and I caught some shouting in the background. There was a long pause, and then I heard Anne again in the background just before a cultured male voice came onto the phone.

  “Mr. Adler, I’m very pleased to hear from you. If you’ll come to Reception, I’ll let you in straightaway.” The voice belonged to Richard, Anne’s boss and the head of Accounting for the central procurement team. He’d also been one of the victims of the puca’s entrapment, and the last time I’d seen him, he’d been standing spellbound in the creature’s nightmare realm. I’d looked for him and the other victims that I’d known, like my boss, Janice, during my long imprisonment, but I hadn’t been able to locate them. I felt a flush of pleasure that I’d at least managed to help someone out of the whole mess.

  A few minutes later, Richard was walking toward me. His lips turned downward in a faint frown at my daughter’s presence, but then he shrugged and carried on, extending one pale hand. I did a double-take; his receding hair had changed from its previous sandy brown and now floated like a snowy halo around his head.

  He must have noticed my faux pas because he said, “Yes—it’s been like that ever since I woke up, but I only woke up because of you!” I raised my eyebrows and shook his hand before he carried on. “Before you ask, yes, I remember what happened. Some of it’s a bit fuzzy, like…well…a dream, but I know that you were there, and I saw how you chased that thing off. When you were fighting it at the end, we all got glimpses of what was going on…your wife…” He looked at Olivia and trailed off for a moment before continuing in a softer voice: “Well, when she forced it back into the hole, we all just…woke up.”

  “What do you mean by ‘we’”? I asked, noticing his use of the pronoun.

  His forehead creased in thought. “Of course, you wouldn’t know. There were at least fifteen of us that woke up from that…thing’s slavery. Some of them were able to resume a normal life, like me and Janice.” He motioned toward my former boss’ desk. “And some of them were a bit worse off. Obviously, the authorities don’t want to hear about it, but we’ve formed a Facebook group. There’s a meeting next week. We’d be glad to have you there as a guest of honor.”

  My mind was slightly blown, but I thought that it was a testament to human resilience that more than a dozen people would experience being enslaved and fed on by an alien intelligence, and their response would be to get together on a social network.

  “Umm…I’d be honored? How is Janice, anyway?” I asked, trying to get as much information as I could.

  “Oh—that silly cow. She’s fine. Nothing could faze her. She’s back to her old tricks with the suppliers, going out fo
r ‘fact-finding lunches’ every chance she can get.” The accountant made some air quotes with his fingers while I winced inwardly at his casual sexism as he carried on speaking. “But I’m sure that you’re tougher than she is. I’ve arranged everything so that you can come back as soon as you’d like. You’ve officially been on a holiday in lieu of bonus, and I could fiddle that to last at least another month.” He smiled smugly as I shook my head incredulously.

  “Holiday in lieu of what?” I asked.

  “Well, in lieu of the out-of-cycle bonus that you were awarded for the sterling work that you did around the conference center acquisition via OMG, of course. The CEO really appreciated how quickly you took care of it, the benefits you achieved even with the disruption to the rest of the team, and that the first event went down brilliantly with the shareholders last week.” His smug smile stretched into a grin.

  “But how in the world was there no bad press? I did that deal with a firm connected to a string of headline-grabbing ‘terrorist’ incidents. Hell, I was even in the paper, lying on top of one of them outside the steps of a courthouse.” My voice must have been getting a bit loud because Olivia started to squirm, looking slightly upset. Richard grabbed my elbow and led me toward the elevator.

  We ended up in a meeting room on the third floor, and he filled in a few more details, but it boiled down to the press having spent all of its energy vilifying the OMG partners and painting a picture of Ena O’Brian in particular as being the head of a cell of radical druid fundamentalists.

  “I wasn’t aware that there was any such thing as a radical druid fundamentalist.” I said innocently.

  “Julian, that just proves how sneaky they are,” Richard added with a wink before finishing his spiel. He explained that I was free to return any time in the next month, and that if I needed to spend a few days getting my life back in order, I shouldn’t worry about it, after which he made some polite noises and excused himself. After he’d left, I met Anne for a few minutes, and after she’d greeted me with a brief hug, I managed to get in a question.

  “So have you seen Toscan at all?” I asked casually, but I didn’t think that I’d pulled it off as Anne’s pert nose wrinkled in concentration.

  “Oooh…well, I actually haven’t, now that you mention it. I had some expense claims a couple of weeks ago from…Milwaukee I think it was? Hey—weren’t you from near there?” she replied while tapping one red-nailed, well-manicured finger on her lips.

  I answered in the affirmative, asked Anne to give him a message to call me, and then made some polite chit-chat while letting her coo over Olivia for a few minutes. I promised to drop by again next week at the latest to sort out returning to work and escaped.

  So far on my first full day back in the land of the living I’d managed to make progress on one of my two insurance headaches, fetched my property from the police station, discovered I’d saved over a dozen lives, gotten invited to be the guest of honor at a very strange party, and found out that I still had a job—all without getting beaten up once.

  I walked out of the building optimistically ready to start my search for Dana. I probably should have expected what was coming next.

  Chapter 6 1145–2300, Monday, September 21, 2015

  The trip out of the building went all right, and even the drizzle that had accompanied us earlier that morning had disappeared by the time Olivia and I ambled out of Paddington basin. As often happens, sirens in the distance were the first herald of a coming headache. At least they weren’t literal Sirens—I’d fought some of those once, and it had taken me ages to get the wax out of my ears afterward. By the time I turned onto Praed Street, I could see what was bringing the emergency services because the narrow space between the buildings was a sea of activity. There had to be at least five hundred people with placards milling about just outside of the station, and I was turning to head in the opposite direction when I realized with a groan that I was inside of the “kettling” perimeter.

  The last time I’d been “kettled” by the police, I’d spent the best part of three hours trapped inside of their perimeter with a few thousand antiglobalization protesters when I’d been innocently traveling home from a conference on efficiently offshoring resources. Well…in retrospect, maybe I’d deserved that one, but I’d thought that, after an incident a few years previous when a protestor had died, the Met had given up the practice of bottling up protestors for hours. And I really didn’t have the patience to deal with this while carrying a three-year-old due for her nap time.

  The phalanx of riot shield-wielding officers stood only about twenty yards away when a silver Aston Martin Rapide tore out, tires squealing and engine roaring over the din of protestors, from the gate of Saint Mary’s hospital. The car turned sharply and skidded up next to me, and I tensed to run, shielding Olivia with my body. A woman wearing dark glasses and with brown hair in a complex-looking bun leaned out of the window, shouting at me.

  “Mr. Adler, I have business with you, and I don’t have time for this foolishness; get in the car.” Her words came out with a decidedly upper-crust, sophisticated accent that turned her final word into caaa. I didn’t recognize her, and personally I’d had nothing but bad experiences connected to Saint Mary’s.

  “I think I’ll take my chances with the nice officers,” I said, meaning of course the nice officers that were currently sprinting toward us with riot shields and batons. Apparently they weren’t keen on the notion of allowing people out of their perimeter.

  “I think that Becky would appreciate it if you got into the car.” The woman’s ruby-red lips formed a perfect bow as she puckered them after making that slightly mystifying declaration. The mystery was cleared up a second later when the back windows rolled down just enough for me to peer into the back seat.

  It honestly wasn’t like Becky was some kind of a country bumpkin, so how in the hell was it possible that she’d wandered out shopping by herself and managed to get kidnapped within a couple of hours? I wouldn’t know until I had a chance to speak to her, but there was no doubt that the young blonde tied up and gagged in the back of the luxury coupe was my sister-in-law.

  Clearly the mystery woman expected that sight to force me into a panicked reaction—which was a good thing. If she thought that would work, then she was underestimating me. I’d spent years fighting nightmares—I wasn’t going to be thrown off by this. On the other hand, the nice police officers were getting very close, and I only had eight unbroken fingers left. I got into the car, noticing that the mystery woman had on a little black dress that was tight in all the right places. I shook my head. Focus, Julian.

  “The Ritz, driver, and make it snappy.” I projected confidence and flashed her my best smile as I buckled myself in and then added, “You’ve forgotten the child seat.” I turned to Olivia and gave her a wink. She giggled. This whole turn of events obviously seemed very silly to her, and she put her arms out to her aunt. I let her crawl across the seat, and she put her head on Becky’s lap; I hoped that the little girl continued to fail to understand the situation.

  Just as the Met were reaching for the nearest door handle, the mystery woman pressed one red pump down on the accelerator, and the car rocketed away, making my eyeballs feel like they were going to disappear back into my skull. “You didn’t arrange this just to give me a lift home,” I ground out through clenched teeth. Olivia giggled again. She just didn’t get the tough-guy vibe I was trying to put out.

  “Not to rub salt into a wound, Mr. Adler, but I’m well aware that you don’t have a home to go back to, though I would be happy to drop you off at the Travel Lodge at the successful conclusion of our little…discussion,” she said crisply while guiding us onto the Westway toward Ealing. Yeah, I could tell that we were going to be best friends.

  “I just wanted to make you aware face-to-face that Father Michael O’Hanrahan has been reassigned for his own safety and that we’d very much appreciate it if you didn’t attempt to…impinge on him any further. We are all very s
orry for your loss and, as Michael said, we appreciate all of the efforts that were expended in the successful operation. For that, we’ve tried to make the resumption of your life as smooth as possible.” She smirked and paused while shifting gears, leaving a Ford Fiesta in the dust. With a few exceptions, it had seemed like things had been falling into place a bit too easily.

  “Then why do you have my passport?” I was fishing, but whatever group Father O. and this woman were a part of seemed to have serious connections, so it was a reasonable guess that they’d been behind that disappearance.

  “Oh—that. I’m sure that it’ll show up in due course. I often find that it takes three or four months for the police to find items like that when they’re…misplaced. As long as they don’t have a reason to hold on to it. That happens sometimes too.” The threat was unmistakable, but she hadn’t missed a beat in answering, so I decided to throw my line out again.

  “Okay, if you already had that in place, then why did you send your thug after me as soon as I left the hospital?” I asked while Becky whimpered in the next seat.

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?” Her reply was only a heartbeat slow, but years of dealing with salesmen had given me an epic-level bullshit detector, and it was pinging off the chart.

  “Hmm…so that wasn’t you, then. Good to know. There’s something that I think would be good for you to know about: I’m going to find my wife, and I’m not going to let anything get in my way.” I saw Becky’s eyes get big when I said that, and I wondered what she’d make of my statement.

  “Actions speak louder than words, Mr. Adler. You’ve been left alone only because you didn’t make any overt actions for so many years. Don’t make a mistake now—just let those unfortunate events fade into the past. You still have that lovely little girl. I always wished that I’d known my birth father; don’t let that be her future.” The mystery woman finished speaking just as the car pulled up in front of the Travel Lodge. “You’re free to go,” she said, and blew a little kiss to me with her perfect bow of a mouth.