The Nightmare Maker

by Gregory Pettit

  I thought back to my youth and recalled the massive tanker trucks rumbling down the narrow country lane that passed in front of my parents’ house. I brought to mind the roar of their engines, the rattling of gravel as it shot out from under their wheels, and the smell of diesel. I focused on all of those aspects and…pushed.

  Hooooonk! Hoooonk! A big air horn sounded, snapping me out of my reverie. I looked up and grinned as the Dreamscape bent to my will. A tanker truck that must have weighed twenty tons shimmered into existence fifty yards away, closing fast. I poured out a sliver of will and bounded clear of the portcullis. I ducked behind a parked car and plugged my ears; there was an almighty crash as the truck plowed into the gate, making the iron screech in torment. Oh—and milk rained down from the sky. Lots of milk. I’m from Wisconsin. What kind of tanker truck would you think I’d be familiar with?

  I took a deep breath and cleared my mind, waiting for the pressure of Brown’s dreaming to press against it. I couldn’t feel the glow of his mind but rather sensed his presence coming from all sides like a kind of mental static—presumably a mystical defense of some kind, although I didn’t know how he’d done it. I was going to have to track him down floor by floor, but still I was feeling pretty smug as I sauntered toward the now-open gate. That lasted until right around the time that I lifted my right leg over the jagged ribbon of metal that my improvised battering ram had left at knee height.

  “Grxlnrgarch!” At least I think that’s what the seven-foot-long, green, rippling maggot screeched at me from a mouth at the tip of its body that had no business looking so human. Of course, the other three mouths spaced evenly around it overcompensated by displaying double rows of serrated teeth that somehow rotated like organic wood chippers. I guessed that it was used to grinding up more than plant matter, and I felt a wave of revulsion and took an involuntary step backward.

  The creature churned up dust and debris as it pulsed toward me in a series of rapid jerks. I drew my gladius and stumbled back out of the building, trying to pull together enough concentration to summon a wall of flame (from the memory of a homecoming bonfire) to cover my retreat, but before more than a wisp of smoke could form, a siren started to blare.

  I jumped at the unexpected noise and lost my focus. I followed that up by almost losing my life as the buzz-saw maggot drew in on itself and then, with a rippling convulsion, hurtled through the air. A ton of hideous, jiggling flesh impacted my shoulder, sending a jolt of pain down my right side and causing me to grit my teeth as I flew through the air, ass-over-tip. As I landed, I rolled with the blow and came up on one knee as the monstrosity skidded to a halt in the middle of Temple Avenue. My shoulder throbbed; glancing down, I saw that my trench coat was shredded in two places, and blood welled up from a shallow cut on my shoulder. I suspected that if I hadn’t been wearing the coat, I would have been staring at the spot where my arm used to be. I applied my will, and the jacket knitted back together.

  While I clambered back to my feet and the maggot turned in my direction, the alarm kept blaring. I thought that it sounded like an old air-raid siren, and I wondered if the Senior Auditor could really be old enough to have experienced one in action. I pushed that thought to the back of my mind—I needed to dispatch my adversary quickly, before he had time to marshal all of the defenses of his mind. I was pretty sure that the Senior Auditor was going to come down hard on the “fight” side of the “fight or flight” spectrum of reaction that my overt assault had triggered.

  Of course, the Senior Auditor hadn’t spent years trapped in a cyclopean realm of terror and death with only his wits and will to keep him alive. Come find me. I fingered my ring and pointed my sword at the creature as it gathered its bulk for another attack. I marshaled my hatred, focusing on the revulsion that I’d felt at Brown’s perversion of Dreamwalking while simultaneously imagining a coruscation of verdant flame engulfing my opponent. The maggot-thing leapt, mucus gleaming on its leathery hide as it howled at me. I howled back and slammed my two mental constructs together—green flames lanced out, striking my target almost exactly dead-center in its humanlike mouth, and the monster juddered and convulsed, corkscrewing through the air and missing me by a dozen feet.

  There was a crunch of fallen masonry being pulverized under the giant maggot’s weight, a sound that was almost drowned out by the wet squelch of the damned thing rupturing like ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag. Sizzling, sticky, black ichor rained down, and I covered my face with one arm—but when I lowered it, I couldn’t stop a grin from spreading across my visage as I realized that the biggest chunk of the ugly bastard would fit in my pocket. Top of the food chain, baby.

  I still had a mission to complete, so I sprinted across the broken pavement and across the threshold of the building. Without any kind of intelligence on the layout, I skipped up the first flight of stairs that I came to. Yes, I said skipped—it had been ages since I had been able to cut loose and really slay the shit out of something, and it felt good.

  At the top of the stairs, I looked left and right. Nondescript hallways with gray institutional carpet, white plasterboard walls, and rows of cheap-looking wooden doors stretched out fifty yards on each side. I was a bit disappointed; based on the towering exterior, I had expected something a bit more baroque or ostentatious. I guess you didn’t get to be a Senior Auditor, even in a supernatural secret society, by having an excess of imagination. I mentally flipped a coin, didn’t like the result, and turned right, sighing.

  An hour later, I had cleared three floors of the seemingly deserted building and was on the verge of gouging my ears out. The cursed (I knew it was cursed because I cursed it) air-raid siren had never quit howling. I’d managed to ignore it for a few minutes after the fight with the maggot, but the constant wailing was fraying my nerves. I could have exerted just the slightest whisper of power and blocked the sound, but that would have made me more vulnerable to a sneak attack. In fact, I thought, that could be the whole reason for the alarm in the first place, or…

  I thought back to my Physics 101 course back in Madison, envisioning an oscilloscope’s display of the sound waves being produced by the siren. I studied it for a moment and then, concentrating until sweat broke out on my brow, I imagined a counterwave and gave a mental heave. If the alarm had been verbal or white noise, I never would have been able to accomplish it. But as I sank to my knees, the steady, predictable wail faded and then cut out entirely.

  “No! I won’t do it!”

  I heard the words coming from above me, delivered in the petulant tones of a little girl, who then burst into chest-rending screams.

  My face flushed, and my heart started to hammer as I gripped my gladius so hard that my knuckles popped. How long had that little girl been screaming? Anyone who attacks little girls is disgusting.

  I bellowed at the top of my lungs, “Brown! Brown! You slimy, slug-assed, murdering pile of crap! Come face me, you dickless wonder!” The force of my emotion inadvertently made the building quiver, and a window behind me cracked. The shrieks above me cut off with ominous abruptness. Brown might have been a conniving, deranged sociopath, but he’d so far not lacked for personal courage, so when the first bullet spanged off of the wall next to my head, I assumed that he’d come to meet my challenge.

  I grabbed the nearest doorknob. Locked. Another bullet buzzed past my ear like an angry hornet, and the sound of a dozen people pounding down the stairwell, twenty yards away, added more urgency. I ducked my head into my trench coat for protection, cocked my leg, and delivered a thunderous kick to the door. There was a metallic ping, the bolt sheared, and I used my momentum to stumble into the room. My timing was pretty good because a second later, someone opened up with a Tommy gun, spraying .45-caliber slugs into the same space that I’d just occupied, sending chunks of wood and particleboard flying.

  The room I was in was one of a seemingly endless number of nondescript offices, and it only had the one entrance, so Brown probably thought that he had me trapped. I confide
ntly reached into my pocket and found, just as I had expected, a small angled mirror on a stick. I poked the tool around the edge of the door to get a look at the bad guys. I got one glimpse before someone blew the mirror into a million tiny pieces.

  “While I considered what I’d seen during my glimpse around the corner, I scuttled backward, upended the desk, and took cover behind it.

  The muscles in my legs twitched with the need to propel me back into action, and my hands tingled with the desire to destroy the little girl’s tormentor, but I needed to think. I took a couple of deep breaths; my previous experiences with the Anarchist led me to expect Brown to be leading the attack on me personally, but I had only spotted a squad of machine gun-toting goons in the hallway. My first reaction was another surge of panic at the idea that the Senior Auditor was still with the girl, but then I almost leapt to my feet as a sudden hope welled up. It was a good thing that I kept my head down, though, because a line of fire stitched the air over my head, blasting a window into tiny, jewel-like fragments. I had a plan, and these guys weren’t going to get anything like seven years to reap their misfortune.

  Have you ever been watching a superhero or fantasy movie and wondered why they spend lots of time and energy throwing around enormous blasts of energy or flinging cars at each other? I mean, it looks awesome, but I’ve always wondered why Hermione or Jean Grey don’t just use a sliver of telekinesis to cause give an opponent’s aorta just the tiniest pinch or to create just the smallest bubble in someone’s carotid artery? Now, I don’t usually do that in a dream because that’s the sort of thing that’s likely to jolt a normal person into wakefulness, and half the things that I fight either heal too fast (thanks, vampires) or are too alien to attack that way (here’s lookin’ at you, giant maggot). If Brown had been there, he’d almost certainly have been able to counter my attacks—but he wasn’t.

  I imagined a heavy steel shield, concentrated, and then stood up. A barrage of bullets spanged off of it, but as soon as the shots slackened, I poked my head around the side. I snapped my fingers—the gunman collapsed like a marionette with his strings cut. I smiled.

  There were more gunmen on either side of the door: identical Caucasians, all a shade under six feet tall, bald, with dead, sharklike eyes. Also, completely impotent. Brown had shown that he could stop others from waking up, and I guessed that he couldn’t wake up without losing his opportunity to do whatever he was planning tonight. So, without him to marshal the resistance, I could throw whatever I could imagine at his defenses.

  I started singing, off key, the finale of the 1812 Overture (you know, the one with the cannons) as I slid into the hallway, holding my shield behind me. “Da da da da da da da Da, bang!” The gunmen were ready, but even a trigger finger isn’t faster than thought, and the eight to my left crumpled as I imagined a few lovely little aneurysms for each of them. They disappeared before they hit the ground. I stayed down behind my shield as the gunmen to my right unloaded their magazines in a maelstrom of lead, which tinkled harmlessly to the floor. Then I stood up, pointed my finger at them, and cocked my thumb.

  “Da da da da da Da, bang!,” I shouted and stepped forward. Heart attack.

  “Da da da Bang!,” I said with a skip. Massive stroke.

  “BANG!” I roared, spinning on my heels. Deep-vein thrombosis.

  “BANG!” I screamed so hard that spittle flew out of my mouth, and I dropped to my knees in a slide, spreading my hands wide like Sammy Davis Jr. during a big finish. The last guy’s head just exploded. Maybe I’d watched Scanners one time too many? Fuck ’em.

  **********

  “Brown, come out, you weasel! Show yourself!” I yelled. After annihilating his mental defenses, I’d tried once again to open my senses and locate the glowing ember of his mind, but the mental static that I’d sensed before still pervaded the psychic aether. Therefore, I was stuck wandering the halls again. I’d managed to cover four more floors, but I wasn’t sure how much longer I’d have before Brown managed to do whatever it was he was doing to move between dreams.

  “No—” The shout was cut off before she could even finish, but it was enough for me to home in on. Trench coat flaring, I sprinted up two more flights of stairs and turned right.

  This close, I could hear a little girl’s whimpers, and then the Senior Auditor spoke. “Please, sweetheart, Adler is coming. He’s gone over to the Anarchist. You must open the way for me. It’s my only chance to catch that murderous madman! If I have to fight Adler, I won’t have a chance. Don’t make me punish you anymore…”

  The little girl on the other side of the door broke into full-throated sobbing, but as much as I wanted to swoop into the room like an avenging angel, I needed to prepare. Senior Auditor Brown had wiped the floor with me every time I’d met him in a fair fight, so I needed to get in the first punch.

  I envisioned the best fireworks display that I’d ever seen, a massive extravaganza called Rhythm and Booms that made the night glow purple and green like the inside of an opium addict’s nightmares (I know what I’m talking about), and kicked the door in. Instead of a bland office like all of the others, I entered a large, square, low-ceilinged room. The door opposite my entrance was missing, and through it I could see a long, gray corridor lined with institutional beds. The Senior Auditor, looking entirely human, was positioned in front of a writing desk, and a little girl, her long blond hair obscuring her face, was curled into a ball in the corner. I was in the girl’s dream—yet somehow in the Senior Auditor’s dream at the same time. My mind spun, but I didn’t have time to consider what this meant.

  Brown had been expecting me, and he lashed out with a blast of crimson light that sizzled when it hit the wall, but I imposed my will on the Dreamscape, and the room exploded with color and sound, making my enemy cringe and the little girl shriek with fear. I’d bought myself a few seconds, so I dashed forward and dredged up a memory of cold winters in Wisconsin—and an industrial-sized bag of sidewalk salt. Salt has been a symbol of purity since ancient times; indeed, it is believed that Judas Iscariot spilled salt at the last supper, and holy water traditionally includes salt. It also plays hell with slugs.

  I emptied the bag on the floor, drawing a line across the room with me and the girl on one side and the vicious, murdering rat bastard on the other. I unsheathed my gladius. “Get away from her, you bitch!”

  Brown’s face was still obscured by the same smog that had hidden his identity before, but his voice was unmistakable as he replied, “That doesn’t even make sense. If you’re going to throw some pithy quote at me, you filthy-blooded degenerate, then at least get it right. How about this one, Julian?” he asked, gliding forward. I glanced down at the line of salt. He only had to move forward a few more feet to touch it, but he stopped and intoned in a stentorian voice: “In your filthiness is lewdness. Because I would have cleansed you, Yet you are not clean, You will not be cleansed from your filthiness again Until I have spent My wrath on you.” When he finished speaking, there was a crackling, and a nimbus of red light played over his outstretched left hand.

  He had called me filthy, and recently people had referred to me as a freak. Coupled with Jack’s confirmation that there were other people out there who were also touched by energies not of this world, I grasped an insight into the Senior Auditor’s world view. He loomed toward me, so I placed myself between the monster and the little girl whimpering in the corner. The energy engulfing his hand swirled more rapidly, and he opened his mouth to speak. My trench coat flapped in a sudden gust of wind. I planted my feet, hefted my shield, and taunted my nemesis, “Hey, Senator Kelly, even the Devil can cite scripture for his purpose. How does it feel to be one of us n—”

  “You came into my dream. My dream, my rules, fool!” Brown roared, and a crimson beam shot from his outstretched palm. In dreams symbols have power; protective wall of yellow flame issued from the line of salt and rushed up to meet the angry blast hurtling toward me. There was a flash of light, heat washed over me and, the next th
ing I knew, I was looking up from the floor. The back of my head hurt and felt damp; I had to hope that nothing too important was broken because I didn’t have time to check. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of the steel shield I’d sheltered behind; there was a hole the size of my fist through the middle. If the salt hadn’t attenuated the beam, then the hole would have been through me. I shivered at the realization and sat up.

  My gaze moved up to where the Senior Auditor stood trembling, still on the other side of the salt. There was a look of slack-jawed horror on his face; he was staring at his left hand. Or at least at the five fleshy, sucker-covered tubes that dangled limply off the end of his wrist in its place.

  I braced my gladius against the cheap carpet and levered myself up onto my knees, putting myself between Brown and the little girl; it felt like a rib might be cracked, and my whole right side would probably be one big bruise, but I didn’t fall over. Brown grasped his wrist, making a high-pitched keening noise like a wounded dog, and the air shimmered as his hand became human again. I managed to get a leg under me, but then he surged forward…over the salt. Most of the sodium chloride had blackened when it protected me from Brown’s sorcerous blast, but there was still a dusting of white sprinkled in among the soot. As he touched the line, there was a popping noise and a burst of light, like the flash from an old-fashioned camera, and I was forced to cover my eyes.

  When I opened them, Brown was unharmed…but unmasked. The seeming normality that he’d cloaked himself with had been stripped away, and I could see, with perfect clarity, the writhing tentacle, nine-foot height, glistening white skin, slug legs, and freshly changed left hand that had been revealed—and so could the little girl.