The Nightmare Maker

by Gregory Pettit

  When I was within sight of the gateway, I was huffing and puffing with effort, and I thought that perhaps both Olivia and I could lay off the chocolate if we got out of this alive. Surprisingly, I could see through the gateway, which appeared to be ringed by half a dozen men looking down at me like I was at the bottom of a pool. Also, they had guns, lots of guns—all of which were pointing at me. I slowed down.

  “Jules—get through!” a familiar East London accent said. The sound transiting the portal was muffled, like someone shouting through a thick pane of glass. It was Jack, and Brown was only a dozen yards behind me. I lurched forward.

  “Your ring!” He shouted, “You can use it to reach Dana. Give me the girl, and I’ll show you how to find your wife tonight. Olivia won’t be harmed!” He’d promised me that he could help before; even though I knew what kind of a dastard he was, I had to fight down a sob at the idea that I’d see my wife so soon. At the edge of the portal, I paused and turned to face the Senior Auditor: I’m not sure what I was going to say or what I would have done, but I never got the chance to find out.

  “Move, Jules!” Jack bellowed, and his big, meaty hand landed on my shoulder—my injured shoulder—jerking me backward into the portal like a fish on a line, without any chance to prepare myself. The pain tore through my body like an electric current, shredding my nerves, making my vision tunnel and knees go weak. Brown powered in and snatched Olivia from my weakened grip.

  I shouted in wordless, soul-deep anguish and felt an incredible sense of disorientation as I emerged from the gateway back into the real world, falling onto my ass and taking Jack down with me. That clumsiness saved my life. With Olivia back in his grip to draw on, Brown launched a vicious mystical assault. “H’e Dagon gokaoth ehye h’n’gha!” rebounded off the walls, making my head swim again, and then a jet-black trunk of some gelatinous matter burst from the portal in the floor like a malicious fungus. The growth swelled for a couple of heartbeats, and then, in a burst of motion too fast to follow, it extruded six long, wet-looking hyphae that lanced out to cover the mouths of the Redderton men who were still standing. Jack tried to scramble to his feet to help his men, but I hauled on his arm to keep him down. The men reached up and yanked on the filaments, or kicked, or tried to scream, but to no effect. There was a quiet, slurping sound, the hyphae pulsed a few times, and then it was done. The alien fungus deflated, and the six men, men who had hopes and dreams and people who loved them at home waiting, were reduced to desiccated husks.

  As the lethal mushroom tumbled to the ground, the Senior Auditor emerged from the portal. Olivia, her skin glistening with sweat and tinged yellow, was in his arms, and she wasn’t moving. He had a shark’s grin on his face as he glided on a trail of slime toward the stairs.

  “Well, you bloody, smug son of a bitch. I’ll wipe that smirk off of your freakish face,” Jack Redderton sobbed, picking up his model 1911 pistol and clambering to his feet.

  “You wouldn’t want to hit the girl, would you, Jack?” Brown wheezed. I noticed that his missing arm had stopped bleeding, and it looked like the stump was almost healed over.

  “At this range? The only question is whether I shoot out your eyes individually or try to blow them out at the same time with a double tap to your forehead,” Jack said, his voice rough with emotion as he glanced at the dead men, eyes lingering a moment longer on one particular corpse. He took a step forward and aimed, but I put a hand on his forearm, keeping the gun from pointing at the Senior Auditor.

  “If you do that, then I’ll be forced to draw on the girl to defend myself, and I just don’t know how much more of that she can take,” Brown replied, continuing to glide up the staircase. I glanced up and saw that the flight of stairs that he was on twisted ’round and ’round out of sight. “Oh, gentlemen, I think you’ll have some other pressing issues in a moment. I bid you, ironically, adieu,” the madman quipped, and disappeared around the bend, holding my daughter like a shield.

  “Asshole!” Jack shouted at the sorcerer’s retreating form and shoved my hand off his arm. I stumbled and put a hand on the floor to keep from falling. Looking down, I finally understood exactly where we were: I was standing next to an authentic, 1800 year old, circular, Roman mosaic. The mosaic had been uncovered near the Bank, and was installed at the bottom of a 165 foot tall cantilever staircase, said at one time to be the longest in the world. It was a truly stunning installation. Of course, none of that mattered when the slaughtered Redderton agents started to twitch and moan a few seconds later.

  Jack and I fixed that little problem with a liberal application of red lead paint. A pair of pistols supplied the lead, and the former agents supplied the red, painting the walls all over. Using my trench coat as a sling, we tipped the inert fungus thing into the portal, and it disappeared. Jack’s shoulders shook as we tipped his coworkers, his friends, maybe even his lover in next, and I found an interesting spot on the wall to examine.

  “Well, Jules, now it’s…time to go find the sorcerer. Again,” Jack said, fighting against the catch in his words.

  “Not a hard man to track. Leaves dead men wherever he goes,” I replied in my best Clint Eastwood impression. Jack spat on the ground in reply.

  Chapter 30 2200–2300, Monday, October 5, 2015

  “So let me get this straight—there’s a massive riot outside, and Mia thinks that Brown’s going to use that as cover to force his way in?” I asked, waving my arms in the air.

  “Yup,” Jack replied, huffing as he climbed another flight of stairs and shook his cell phone again; from his frown, I guessed it wasn’t working.

  “But somehow, with all of this going on, even though Badger got a message through, Mia only dispatched you and half a dozen guys to guard the portal?” I shouted incredulously, my voice going up a couple of octaves.

  “Well, I don’t think that she trusted Badger—stupid. She was convinced that the Senior Auditor couldn’t get in through the portal—remember, originally she just had you guarding the Dreamscape, but I insisted on going to defend the gateway. James wouldn’t have called if he wasn’t sure,” Jack said, using the detective inspector’s first name. I hadn’t considered that they might know each other, and I filed that piece of information away.

  “So, everyone else in the know is on the perimeter, trying to make sure that Brown can’t sneak in and disrupt the ceremony Dennis is carrying out?” I asked, leaning against the railing for a moment and sucking wind. I was sore, and tired, and my head hurt, but I couldn’t afford to be weak. I straightened my back and took another step.

  “Got it in one, Jules. And before you ask, no, I don’t know what the ceremony involves. Dennis went into the vault and had us lock the door behind him. Funny door, too. Needed a pair of three-foot-long keys to work the lock, and—” Jack was cut off in midsentence as he slipped on a patch of the slime that the Senior Auditor had left behind him. Somehow I wasn’t surprised that it stank like sewage and seemed to be dissolving the soles of my black loafers. “Damn it, these were £300 shoes!” Jack said, gesturing at his own dissolving footwear.

  We were headed to the vault already, Jack having deduced that Brown would be slithering there to disrupt the Mammonite ceremony. You’d almost think that this guy ran a major detective agency or something. I was worried, though; back in the real world, I was more or less just another guy, and not even a particularly well-trained one. Beyond that, because I’d finally understood that I couldn’t beat the Senior Auditor alone, I’d come here, with Olivia, to find allies instead of fleeing back to the OMG offices. However, here I was, climbing the last few steps of an in-fucking-terminable staircase with only Jack Redderton at my side. His scarred knuckles, flattened nose, and sheer physical bulk testified to the fact that if I had to only have one person at my side, he was a good one, but with the sorcerer powering his spells from my daughter, I didn’t think he’d be enough.

  “Jack, I think we should get some backup,” I said. The big man didn’t reply for nearly a minute as we clomped t
o the top of the staircase, and I started to sing a bit of doggerel. “Jack and Julian went up some stairs to find a monster to slaughter, Jack threw down and broke his crown and Julian came throttling after.”

  “Good God, shut up. How can you sing while your little girl is being carried off by a monster? I’ve got a couple of my guys holding the keys and about two dozen rent-a-cops down there watchin’ the vault. I’m gonna get there before that fuckin’ freak kills all of them. You wanna go get some help, I’m not stoppin’ you,” he said, straightened the carnation in his lapel, and stomped away, following the slime trail that led in the direction of the vault. I stood there, alone and unsure of what to do. When he was just about to pass through an archway and out of the room, Jack looked over his shoulder and shouted, “Brown wasn’t lying when he told you about the ring, or that he could give you Dana back tonight. He was lying about Olivia not being harmed.” He nodded in my direction and disappeared around the corner. Shit.

  **********

  It took me ten minutes of running around like an idiot to get arrested, which was probably a pretty damning indictment of the security situation, considering that the building held hundreds of billions of dollars in gold. Only when I pushed over a display in the museum, shattering a glass case, did a young man, dressed head-to-toe in black combat fatigues and sporting a dark-brown crew cut, appear to check on the noise. To his credit, he pulled a gun, slammed me against the wall, and cuffed me like a pro. I protested that I had vital information, and he “accidentally” put a size-twelve boot into my vitals, but then he started dragging me away with a purpose. I curled around my aching gut and let myself be pulled along like a sack of grain.

  A couple of minutes later, the guard dragged me unceremoniously into the lobby, pausing just in front of the twenty-foot-tall metal front doors. I could see about twenty-five people in the room, mostly big, dangerous-looking men in the same kind of paramilitary gear as my new best friend. There was a booming noise, and the doors shook, held in place only by the larger-than-life statue of King William III, dressed in a toga, that had somehow been pushed up against the entrance. I glanced around a bit more and noticed that there were stacks of office furniture in front of the two smaller side doors—and Mia was sitting on the edge of a desk that made up part of the improvised barricade. As I was drug up to her, she was speaking into a walkie-talkie, issuing rapid-fire orders. She glanced up, did a double take, and slid down from the desk.

  “Mr. Adler?” she said, jaw hanging open and her cool and sophisticated demeanor shattered to the extent that I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a floating red exclamation point over her head. She made a shooing motion to the man holding me, and he dropped me and backed away to join a knot of his compatriots, who were huddled around a security station. “How did you get here?”

  “Portal. Mosaic. Basement. Jack on his own. Senior Auditor here. No time,” I gasped, my face pressed against the cool marble of the floor. Even with everything going on, I was so battered that there was a part of me that didn’t want to get up. But I would. I touched my ring. Come find me.

  I struggled to my feet, and Mia grabbed a shoulder to haul me up. My injured shoulder. Jack had popped it back into socket, but it still stung a bit.

  “Aaaargh!” I screamed, not at all like a little girl, and everyone looked at me, hands moving toward pistols. Mia waved them down and cocked an eyebrow, her well-schooled mask of calm sliding back into place already.

  “This way, Mr. Adler,” she said, and led me away from the door.

  “Umm…shouldn’t we bring some of those guys?” I said, pointing at the gaggle of paramilitary members of the Sons of Perseus.

  “We’ll pick up reinforcements on the way, but they’ll be needed here,” she said, her voice calm as she click-clacked on a pair of beige heels that probably cost as much as my first car. “As should be obvious from that,” she finished, gesturing at the security station. I glanced, through the cluster of nervous men, at the eight small black-and-white monitors.

  Every one of the monitors showed some variation on a general theme: riot. The building was surrounded on every side, from the wide classical columns lining Threadneedle Street to the plain arches on Lothbury, by an angry mob. Little old ladies howled for blood, women with baby buggies flung their bottles, and young men battered at the doors with placards denouncing capitalism. There couldn’t be less than fifty thousand people in total surrounding the building. I looked around in surprise.

  “How can there be so many here? Where are the police?” I asked, remembering the commotion at the station before Badger and I had left for OMG’s former offices.

  Mia shook her head and grabbed my elbow, gently guiding me in the direction of the vault. “I’ll explain on the way,” she said, and then turned to the crowd at the monitors. “Hold the door as long as you can. If they break through, then evacuate to site Bravo.” She pointed at the guy that had roughed me up. “Mike, call through to teams Beta, Gamma, and Epsilon at the other entrances and get them to send half of their squads to join me at the vault.” There was a chorus of assent, and we passed through the archway leading out of the foyer just as the main door juddered under a renewed assault. The statue leaned, and five of the men rushed up and put their shoulders to it, but I didn’t have a chance to see how that turned out.

  “Now to answer your questions. The police have formed a perimeter to keep anyone else from joining the crowd, so we’ve been left to deal with only the infected that were inside the perimeter when the spell was triggered,” Mia explained as we hustled down the hallway at just less than a jog.

  “Infected?” I said, volleying back the question that Mia had served to me. I was developing the impression that as a schoolgirl, she’d have been the class know-it-all because she loved to demonstrate her superior knowledge.

  “Yes, one of our remaining auditors examined a rioter. I had misunderstood what Mr. Brown”—I noted her omission of his title—“was doing. I had thought that the riots were being generated via a simple anti-inhibition suggestion that was tapping into the general antiestablishment mood to undermine Mammon’s power. However, it is obvious now that this was a targeted spell, utilizing the same kind of runic thaumaturgy that we saw from the puca’s victims. Indeed, I wonder now if that operation hadn’t just been a practice run for this. Each and every one of the people out there is marked somewhere by an anarchy symbol incorporating an inverted fehu, or ‘wealth’ rune. It has driven them mad with hatred of the establishment in general and this bank in particular,” she said.

  A couple of the black-clad Sons of Perseus agents joined us, but I still didn’t have all of the information to understand what was going on. “Okay, I get it, he magically infected a bunch of people to get them here tonight, but why have we had weeks and weeks of riots?” I asked.

  Mia pursed her red, bow-like lips, but after trotting another fifty yards, she replied, “I’m only guessing here, but I think it was due to all of the extradimensional energy floating around the city. They all seemed to happen when something else supernatural was going on, so I think the runes were just triggering as a by-product. It makes sense if you consider that it must have taken a long time for this spell to spread so far; at least 10 percent of the capital seems to have been infected,” she finished. My mind boggled at the numbers that represented.

  “And it was all just, what, a diversion?” I queried as we started to slow.

  “No, Julian—it’s a firestorm.” I quirked my eyebrow, and she ploughed on. “The real, understandable anger that people have at the banking system is the ember, and then Mr. Brown stokes that ember with a bit of magic so that it burns hotter, spreads faster, and flares up just when he wants it to. After it reaches a critical mass, like a firestorm, it starts to draw in more fuel—in this case, via mass media covering the riots—and feeds itself,” she finished as we got ready to climb down the staircase to the vault. I looked longingly at the elevator, and when I glanced back at Mia she was staring at me expe
ctantly.

  “Ummm…if we can stop the Senior Audito—” I began to say before Mia cut me off.

  “Don’t call him that,” she interjected.

  “If we can stop Brown”—she nodded in approval at my choice of appellation—“then won’t the riot outside just burn itself out eventually?” I said.

  Mia shook her head and rolled her eyes. “It’ll burn itself out eventually if we stop him, though I don’t want to think about what is happening in the portions of the city that aren’t cordoned off, but that isn’t the important part. Think, Julian—if this isn’t a distraction, then why is Brown doing it?” We started down the stairs side by side, with four big, well-armed, body-armor-clad paramilitaries in front of us and two behind. I wasn’t sure why Mia was so interested in me figuring this out, but my curiosity was running away with me, and, as tired as I was, my intuition spotted the angle in this scheme in the same way that it had so many times before with a dodgy contract.

  “It’s the energy.” The barest hint of a smile turned the corners of Mia’s mouth up, and I realized I could smell her perfume. “Brown is a sorcerer; he has the knowledge, but not the power to put it to use. Therefore, he’s stoked up a huge amount of energy from emotions that are directly antagonistic to the Mammonites. Even if each person contributes only a little, then he’ll still have a huge amount of power to hurl at the creature,” I said, wanting to hurl on my own account at the implication.