The Nightmare Maker

by Gregory Pettit

  “Aaarghh…” I groaned and sank back down to my knees, a lance of pain tearing through my head. It had taken all of my willpower to hammer through the girl’s dream.

  I was afraid to even expend enough concentration to sense the dreamer’s location, so I fell back on my eyeballs and ears. It took my trembling legs five minutes of wandering increasingly expensive and completely deserted corridors before I finally found anything interesting. I paused at a window that showed a turning of the Thames laid out below me, twinkling with reflected streetlights and leafy trees stretching out in the distance for as far as the eye could see. I recognized the scene—Richmond. More interesting still was the blood on the broken window pane.

  The hallway ahead branched out to right and left, with a heavy paneled set of double doors presumably leading into some kind of grand room directly in front of me. I’d appeared wearing my trench coat and gladius, so I drew the sword and put leather to floorboard until I stood at a cross section. I froze and listened. I couldn’t be sure, but the air seemed ever so slightly warmer coming from the doors. That could have been because the shattered window was to my back, letting in cool autumn air that raised goosebumps on my arms. Yeah, it deeeefinitely wasn’t fear doing that. I put my ear against the door.

  “Help me, help me, help me…” I could just make out the words. That doesn’t seem right, I thought, judging the voice to sound more like a woman’s. I paused. Did I go through, not knowing anything and trusting to years of experience and the element of surprise, or did I hang back?

  “I know you’re out there, please, please help me. He’s going to come for me again soon.” This time the voice was louder and unmistakably feminine. And familiar.

  “Let me in,” I said, sotto voce.

  “I can’t,” she replied in a whimper.

  “I’m not doing anything until you let me in. I need you to open the door and then get back against the far wall where I can see you. Then I’ll come in,” I said in as commanding a stage whisper as I could manage.

  “I can’t,” she replied desperately, a distinct tremble in her voice carrying through the wood. I opened my mouth to reply in annoyance at whatever game she was playing, but she cut me off.

  “I can’t open the door because he took my hands.”

  Oh. That seems like a valid excuse, I thought, my mind resorting to sarcasm to deal with the horror of the situation. I braced myself; I’d seen worse in the past, or so I’d thought before I made the mistake of opening the door.

  I grew up in a farming community, so I learned how to slaughter and butcher an animal before I knew how to read. And along with a lifetime of experiencing other people’s worst nightmares, I’d thought myself pretty desensitized to gore. I’d been wrong.

  “Oh dear sweet Jesus…” I muttered numbly, my Catholic upbringing escaping as it only did when I was in shock.

  The thing in front of me had almost certainly been a woman at one point, but that point had been an eternity of suffering ago, and how she’d held any semblance of sanity together long enough to beg for my help was hard to imagine. Where her hands should have been there were only bones but, instead of being jagged stumps, someone had reshaped them, fashioning two hooks by removing a chunk of her lower ulna. The hooks had been put to an evil use, suspending her from a pair of rings that dangled from the ceiling like a side of beef. Blood and pus wept down arms bleached white by shock, and big handfuls of hair had been yanked out, scalp and all. However, even that was nothing compared to what the psycho had done to her eyes; instead of just putting them out, he’d removed them from the sockets but left them connected to the optic nerve. Not content with that, he’d cut new holes into her nose while stitching the existing nostrils shut so that every time she breathed, her eyeballs swung wildly. I would have guessed that she had two or three teeth left, but it was hard to tell around all of the swollen and mangled tissue that used to be her lips.

  Still not done, the killer had made use of her severed hands to display a perverse sense of modesty as I realized what the black lumps stitched in place to cover her small breasts were. Below that travesty, I could see her stomach protruding out of a tear in her abdominal cavity. Acid had dribbled out and left a trail of chemical burns down her torso, and for a moment I thought that she’d tried to stuff the wound with pink gauze or some kind of light-red paper, but then I understood what it was: a mess of half-digested fifty-pound notes.

  It only got worse from there.

  I retched and fell to my knees. This was no regular nightmare that I had stumbled on. No one could dream up this kind of horror for themselves without waking up. I could feel the power of her mind and the willpower that was holding her sanity together radiating outward like the heat of a furnace, and I had to put a hand across my face. I knew who she was, but I couldn’t understand how I’d ended up in her dream when I’d specifically used the link to follow the Senior Auditor.

  “Mrs. Jenkins…” I whispered when I could speak again. This was the woman that I was supposed to protect. The next financier-priestess on the Anarchist’s hit list. Her suffering had been for my benefit. No one else could possibly see it, but I couldn’t understand what the point of this was. What I did understand was that I had to help her. The splitting headache that I’d received for trying to use my powers seemed petty compared to her suffering, and horror-borne resolve stiffened my spine as I rose. Dreams were my turf, and no slithery, one-armed son of a bitch was going to do this on my turf. I was getting pissed off, and I had an idea.

  “Mr. Adler, Dennis said that you might be able to protect me. I’m sorry to say that I just wasn’t able to stay awake anymore. I had only intended to rest my eyes, but I’m not as young as I used to be.” She paused to draw in another pained breath. “I suppose I won’t be getting any older now, though. Always look on the bright side of life, eh, boy?” she said in a surprisingly strong voice with a touch of a Welsh lilt.

  “Please don’t talk, Mrs. Jenkins. I’m going to help,” I said as I fought down my revulsion, laying my trench coat on the ground in front of her and then taking her under the armpits. With a grunt, I lifted her off the hoops, causing a small whimper of pain to escape her ruined lips. As gently as I could, I laid the abused woman on the coat and wrapped it around her. A tension that I hadn’t even known I’d been carrying let go, and I felt my breath come a bit more easily.

  “Thank you, Mr. Adler. My lord helps as he can but…this hurts like a bitch…” She trailed off and shrugged weakly.

  “Mrs. Jenkins—” I started.

  “Call me Miranda, lad,” she interrupted.

  I nodded and tried to explain the situation: “Miranda, I’m going to try to help you. What we need is for you to wake up, but the Anarchist is stopping that somehow. I think I know how to wake you, but it is going to require moving you, and it’s not safe for me to try carrying you in your current condition. I’m going to need to concentrate, so please try to stay calm. This is going to hurt,” I huffed out in a staccato burst. I wasn’t sure where the other Dreamwatcher was, and I didn’t want to wait around to find out. As my grandpa always said, “Make hay while the sun shines.” Of course that was usually his way of telling me that it was time to mow the lawn.

  While some of the other abuses were more humiliating or more painful, the only immediately life-threatening injury was the perforation to Miranda’s abdomen. I considered digging out the money for a moment, but then I decided that it was just paper and would dissolve on its own. I marshaled my thoughts and concentrated on the mental image of Miranda whole and enjoying a meal yesterday evening. I lifted my jacket off of her torso enough to see the wound, put my hand on her torn stomach, and knew that the organ was healing, knitting back together at an astonishing rate. I was so sure of it that I didn’t even check as I gently eased it back into her thoracic cavity, and then, like a faith healer I’d seen on TV back in the States, I put my hands over the jagged tear.

  “Be healed!” I yelled and pushed mentally.

&n
bsp; I braced myself for the backlash, but no pain came. Unfortunately, when I took my hands away there hadn’t been any change in her injuries. Her stomach was back inside of her, but blood still trickled from the cut, and she shuddered. I’d been lucky to have this long to work, and I racked my brain for something that might succeed in healing her.

  “Mr. Adler, if you think that there is a way out, then go. Tell Dennis that we aren’t that sheep-fucking Anarchist’s target. Tell him Miranda thinks he needs to invoke plan C and that ‘the cuffs need to be opened.’ He’ll know what that means and that you tried your best. It is vital that you give him that message. It’ll be a rough patch, but we’ll be able to rebuild someday. Someday our vision of a new world will be realized…” She panted. I didn’t know how long she’d been holding herself together through sheer stubbornness, but…then her words gave me an idea. A ridiculous, absurd, fantastic idea.

  “Mrs. Jenkins, did you ever watch Star Trek?” I asked excitedly.

  “The Original Series or Next Generation?” she said, her voice coming out utterly bewildered.

  “The original,” I replied. “You see, this nightmare is coming from you. It is anchored in your mind. I know that because, if I concentrate, I can pick out information about you. But what if it could go the other way? Like a Vulcan mind-meld,” I offered.. It had been a long time since the show had been on the air, but I had to hope that the upcoming movie had brought it back into the collective consciousness. The last time I’d tapped into the collective unconscious, people had died, but I was tapped out—I wasn’t getting out of here on my own, and I couldn’t think of how this could hurt anyone.

  “I don’t have any mental horsepower of my own left, but knowledge is its own kind of power, and I can share that with you. Since this is your dream, if I show you what to do, then I think that you should be able to heal yourself,” I explained, intuition telling me that my idea was a good one.

  “All right, Mr. Adler, but if I stop concentrating on holding myself together, I don’t know what will happen,” she said, a note of apprehension creeping into her voice. I nodded and got to work. I closed my eyes and put my right hand on her face, cupping her chin. Then I gathered my will but instead of pushing, I imagined mental barriers coming down, providing access to a gleaming ball of blue light that represented my experiences, my trial and error, my triumphs and defeats as a Dreamwatcher.

  “My mind to your mind, my thoughts to your thoughts…” I murmured calmly. A mystical thrum filled my mind, and a tide of thoughts and emotions that weren’t my own washed in, trying to permeate my being, but I held on to the tableau that I’d built in my mind, using it to channel Miranda’s consciousness…

  “Ahh! I understand…” I heard Miranda’s voice inside my head, and then her presence retreated.

  I felt a great emptiness, and a wave of weariness engulfed me. I sank to the floor, my eyes going dim like I’d just stood up too quickly. I went away for a while, but then I was roused by a high-pitched scream that I thought would never end but that I could do nothing about.

  Eventually, time started flowing normally again. I found my feet and was able to focus on my surroundings. A gurney in the middle of the room supported Miranda, who was resting in a hospital gown. Where her arms had previously ended in hooks and her feet had been jagged stumps, she had perfectly formed limbs of gold. Her chest rose steadily, and her eyes, presumably back in their sockets, were covered with bandages.

  “Miranda, we need to get going,” I said, tottering toward her.

  “Julian?” she said groggily, using my name for the first time and sliding her legs off of the gurney. “You magnificent bastard! Jack told us that you were something special, but I’m not sure that I believed it until now. If we get back to the real world, I’ll make sure that you never lack for anything again, but we still must get my message back to Dennis!” she said excitedly.

  I began to unwrap the bandages from her eyes as she continued speaking. “How can you call what you do Dreamwatching? You’re more than a watcher. I’d call you a Dreamwalker—” She stopped speaking just as I unwound the last bandage, revealing piercing hazel eyes. Eyes that were suddenly wide with fear as she looked over my shoulder. Shit.

  “Julian, Julian, Julian. I thought you were smarter than this, but to be honest, I sort of hoped you weren’t,” said a familiar robotic voice. “I could have killed you just now as you swooned on the floor, but I have to admit that I was curious to see whether or not you could pull off this little trick. Really, though, is 60s TV the best that you can do? I thought you’d just Twitter her back together or something.”

  I turned slowly, wracking my brain in a desperate attempt to find some way out of this situation. The Anarchist towered over me, swollen to at least nine feet tall. His features were still covered by the cheap Guy Fawkes mask, and one arm was still replaced by a writhing tentacle. He was dressed like a priest, but not of any god with which I was familiar. He flowed toward me, his cassock swaying as though it were draped over a frame no longer wholly human, bulging and twitching in the wrong places.

  My skin crawled as I imagined what foulness might be approaching me, and in defiance I growled and tried to summon my gladius. The air rippled around my hand, but I felt a sharp pain in my left arm and collapsed onto my side—the sword winked out of existence. Dark spots danced in front of my eyes, and I gasped as something hard collided with my gut.

  “Stay down,” he barked, punctuating the command with a thumping whack of his free hand against my chest, making me wheeze and retch. His robes swished, and when I could see again, he had backed Miranda into a corner. The priestess of Mammon had set her jaw and was staring directly at the Anarchist, but she couldn’t stop her recently reattached hands from trembling.

  “First, Miranda—” he started to say, but the priestess cut him off.

  “That’s Magistra Jenkins to you, you abomination, you wretched thing, you thrice-damned sheep-shit maggot,” she hissed.

  The Anarchist straightened and loomed over Miranda. The room darkened, and I could sense his rage as slime dripped off his tentacle, sizzling on the carpet and raising wisps of smoke. I tried to get up but could only manage to roll over onto my belly before waves of dizziness pinned me to the floor.

  A fleeting smile touched Miranda’s lips, and she continued her verbal assault. “Come on, you freak, you pervert. I took all of your sick little games the first time around. Did they make your tiny little pecker hard? Did—” The Anarchist rushed forward and wrapped his human hand around her throat, slamming her head against oak paneling and hoisting her six feet into the air.

  A snarl of incoherent rage escaped the Anarchist’s lips, but then he visibly vibrated as he mastered himself, “Nice try, Miranda, but you aren’t going to get out of this that easily. Or are you hoping to save him? Doesn’t matter. You’re going to watch, pinned to the wall like the bug you are, as I rip poor, stupid, ignorant Julian here limb from twitching limb before I consume him, mind and soul.”

  As I watched helplessly, the man fit actions to words and reached out with his tentacle for a tall, freestanding brass lamp tucked into one corner of the room. Wrapping the pulsing appendage around the lamp, he squeezed and, with a noise of tearing metal that set my teeth on edge, snapped the lamp in two. With a deft rippling of suckers, the Anarchist spun the jagged edge of the lamp to point toward Miranda and whipped it through the air with inhuman strength. The metal rod whistled through the air, there was a thunk, and it bored through flesh and bone to pierce her directly through the sternum.

  Fountaining thick, golden blood from her mouth, Miranda screamed; the Dreamscape wobbled, fuzzing at the edges. The Anarchist took a deep breath and spoke in a voice that rolled like thunder, cutting through the impaled woman’s throat-tearing wail. “TSOGGUTH AI TSOGGUTHA P’TAK HESUXA!” Miranda made a choking noise; her shout cut off abruptly, and the Dreamscape brightened, sharpening to crystal clarity. The Anarchist turned to face me.

  “I asked for
your help, and you rejected me. I begged you to stay out of the way, and you mocked me. I threatened you, and you defied me.” I couldn’t see his face through the obscuring glamour, but as he stalked toward me, his voice dripped lip-sizzling amounts of vitriol, and I was in no doubt that he was entirely serious when he said, “I had to commit horrible acts to set up this little ambush, Julian. So in a way, I’m glad that you didn’t heed my threats. Now you die, and I’ll consume you, and I’ll be the stronger for it. I just wish I had thought of this sooner…the idea just came to me…”

  I’d hoped that he’d spend some more time monologuing, but he raised the other end of the lamp high above my head. I had no doubt that it’d pierce my skull like an eggshell when it came down. I couldn’t let the Anarchist win, but I’d overreached when I helped Miranda—I had nothing left. Still, I gritted my teeth, got my hands underneath me, and heaved just as the lamp slammed down. The rod of brass missed its target, shattering, but a chunk still clipped me just behind the ear, and stars went supernova inside of my skull.

  I flopped over onto my back and tried to stare death in the eyes as it came for me. This was made considerably difficult by my attacker’s lack of a face and my own rebellious ocular nerves refusing to focus. My enemy reached into his robe and, with a vicious snarl, pulled out a claw hammer and put his weight on my chest. I thought of Dana, lost in the void. I thought of Olivia, lost in a world that wouldn’t care about one more orphan. I thought of London, lost to whatever depraved vision the monster looming over me had. I thought of a plan. I did the only thing I could—I begged.

  “Please…my little girl…” The Anarchist hawked a gobbet of phlegm that hit me in the face. I wanted to rip his blurry head off, but instead I swallowed my pride and abased myself some more. “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand how serious you were. I can help you,” I blubbered. The pressure on my chest increased, and he drew back the hammer. “I can get in to see Dennis,” I whinged. His arm paused, and I felt the weight on my chest decrease.