The Nightmare Maker

by Gregory Pettit

  “Everybody out!” I yelled over the continuing blare of the machine gun and assorted other noises. I opened the door and rolled out onto the concrete floor, wincing as Christian’s black combat boots slammed down next to my head and then grunting as Mia landed on top of me.

  “Not now, hot lips…” I groaned as she scrambled for cover behind a pallet. I managed to hold the car together just long enough for it to absorb an honest-to-God fireball, and then the big automobile popped like a soap bubble as I dove for cover. I was breathing heavily, and my head hurt, but as I cowered—er, gathered myself—behind my own pallet, the expected wave of exhaustion didn’t materialize. So, after half a minute, I summoned up the courage to poke my head out.

  Brown had already made up most of the ground that our assault had cost him, and a globe of the sticky green substance that issued from his mutated left hand flew through the air and impacted the Mammonite driving the forklift. The man, with Chinese features and a gray business suit, went down thrashing as the goo covered his mouth and nose while pinning him to the machine, which ground to a halt. Jack and the remaining men, who I guessed had to be mercenaries of some sort, opened fire with everything they had, giving the underpriests cover as they rushed up to help their fellow.

  “He’s running out of time,” Mia yelled, pointing at her watch. “He needs to reach the portal by midnight.” Almost like the sorcerer had heard her, he redoubled his assault and, with a screech of incomprehensible syllables, sent a blast of red lightning flying across the room to strike a small, wiry mercenary. The man lit up like a Christmas tree bulb for the space of a couple of heartbeats, becoming so bright that I had to shield my eyes. When I looked back, there was nothing left but a charred skeleton.

  “Bastaaardo!” One of the mercenaries, a short woman with the black hair and red-brown skin of a Central American, screamed and tried to rush between two of the pallets. Jack hit her with a flying tackle, and the two of them crashed to the ground in a heap. That only left three of the mercenaries firing a mixed bag of rifles, Christian with his MP5, and Mia popping away with what looked like a .22-caliber pistol. Where people kept getting all of these weapons in gun-free Britain baffled me as I hid behind a pallet with my gladius—I’d literally brought a knife to a gun fight. Well done, Julian.

  Brown made use of the reduced incoming fire to launch an assault. The sorcerer screeched another string of syllables that made my teeth ache, conjuring a gout of flame that sprayed from left to right over the top of the pallets. It didn’t reach the forklift, which dropped one of the ten remaining pallets through the portal, but it did force everyone to duck for cover and stop firing. I’d been at the far left of the semicircle of pallets, so I had the first opportunity to observe the result of Brown’s distraction: what I saw made my heart leap into my throat.

  The sorcerer had dropped the red dome of force that protected him—and Olivia. The sparks and flames that had been erupting from the floor where it intersected with the magic barrier had prevented me from spotting her tiny, blond form pressed against the bulk of the tall, twisted monstrosity that had been the Senior Auditor, but she was pale and trembling, open mouthed with terror that seemed to have passed beyond the point where she could even make a sound commensurate with her emotions.

  A rumble, like millstones grinding, started low down in my chest, and I was on my feet before my conscious mind had even considered the action. When my conscious mind caught up, it concurred, so I drew my gladius and charged the acid-tentacled (yeah, it had grown back), tube-fingered, shark-toothed sorcerer.

  The madman was chanting something that sounded like a frog gargling the contents of an Ikea flat-pack wardrobe, and the spell must have required a lot of his concentration, because I was able to close the distance without having any blasts of extradimensional energy hurled my way. I heard Mia in the background, yelling for me to get out of the way, and I vaguely realized that I must be spoiling everyone else’s aim—but, as I cocked back my arm to stab, I didn’t care. My good right arm pistoned forward at the same instant that Brown finished his incantation, and I screamed in triumph as I rammed the eighteen-inch blade of my gladius up into the monster’s chest, only stopping when the hilt thunked into the bottom of his rib cage, dislodging my daughter from his grasp. Something like thousands of tiny spiders crawled from the wound, and a cloud of blackness shot out of the sorcerer’s mouth, flying over my head as I reached down to grab Olivia.

  Before I could get my arms around my little girl, the Senior Auditor’s tentacle-arm wrapped around my waist and hoisted me into the air, making me choke and thrash as it squeezed the breath out of my lungs. The thing-that-had-been-Brown drew me up to his face level, and I could see that the changes to his body had continued: his skin was a bleached white and glistened like the belly of a snake, and as I hung there in his grasp, I heard a ripping sound and two huge, leathery wings tore out of his back and unfurled in the blink of an eye. I heard shrieks behind me, and gunfire erupted again, but I didn’t hear the tell-tale whine of bullets zinging past my head, so one corner of my brain wondered what the rest of the defenders were shooting at. Most of my brain was much, much more concerned by the sorcerer, staring at me with his brown, still-human eyes, who didn’t seem bothered in the least by a foot-and-a-half of steel stuck through his vitals.

  “You did this to me,” he rasped through jaws that were no longer correctly configured for human speech. “You opened the gate that let that thrice-damned demon Mammon touch me. I realized right away that his touch had destabilized my form, and that any more use of extradimensional power would do this to me. Perhaps he thought that that would be enough to stop me—but it wasn’t. Now I am more powerful than ever. Before you die, I want you to know the depth of what I would sacrifice for my conviction that humanity should be free. Free to forge its own path, free of the influence of creatures from outside of our reality, and free from freaks like you!” As he choked out the last words, he flung me across the room at the kind of speed that people usually associate with a major league fastball.

  Stunned at the utter ineffectuality of my attack, I arced through the air. Time seemed to slow down, and I had a chance to take in the chaos in the vault. The best part of twenty well-armed forms huddled in the arc of the last half-dozen pallets; for a moment, I thought that somehow reinforcements had arrived, but then I understood—the black smoke that Brown had belched had summoned the deceased defenders back into some mockery of life, and I watched in horror as a man with no right arm or left foot hacked into one of the suit-clad Mammonite underpriests, opening her up from groin to sternum with one vicious slash. Then, before I could take in any more of that particular horror show, my left foot clipped the edge of the once-again-functioning forklift, causing me to pinwheel through the air. My trench coat billowed around me as I flailed my arms, and it seemed to actually sap some of my forward momentum.

  The concrete floor grew closer with surprising slowness, so I pondered what the Senior Auditor had said. He’d had no reason to lie and had seemed entirely sincere in his vision of a humanity free to stand or fall on its own. I considered his motivations and compared them to my own. If I understood what was going on, then he’d been plotting, sacrificing for years if not decades, to manufacture the opportunity that he had now, to strike a blow against a creature that, in his mind, had enslaved humanity. On my side of the scales, I’d led a seemingly charmed life until a few months ago. A good job, a loving wife, and a beautiful daughter. Yet, when fate demanded a sacrifice from me, I’d refused to accept it, flailing around to try to get back what had been taken from me. In the process, I’d lost everything. Should I even have opposed him?

  I shook my head. Screw that line of thinking; there was a fundamental difference between us. Maybe his goal was nobler than mine, maybe he’d been willing to give more for it, and maybe he truly believed in what he was doing—yet he’d forgotten something, a lesson that I’d learned long ago: the ends don’t always justify the means. Everything that I’d do
ne might have been selfishly just to get Dana back, but I’d done it on my terms. I’d stuck to the deals that I’d made, I’d protected the weak, and I’d only asked willing allies to venture into harm’s way to do it. John Brown, Senior Auditor of the Sons of Perseus, hadn’t. He’d lied, he’d cheated, he’d kidnapped, he’d murdered and worse to attain this opportunity, and I knew in my heart that nothing good could grow from a seed that rotten. He needed killing, and I had a flash of insight—I knew that, thanks to the Senior Auditor’s own machinations, I had the skill, the knowledge, and the means to do it.

  Then my moment of clarity ended: I slammed into the floor still traveling at least thirty miles per hour and impacted on my left shoulder, which dislocated again with a spike of pain. I think I blacked out from the agony for a moment because, the next thing I knew, my back was resting against a concrete pillar. I heard a sizzling sound and looked down; my trench coat was covered in Brown’s tentacle goo and smoked as the vitriolic substance ate into it. I shivered, guessing that if it had been a normal jacket, then I’d have been melted like the Redderton men that I’d seen outside. I was worried about even touching the buttons to take it off, and with only one arm I wasn’t sure that I could anyhow, so I cheated. I’d used the stuff of dreams to enhance the jacket, seemingly a lifetime ago, in OMG’s offices; now I concentrated on being safe, not needing protection anymore. The coat vanished, taking whatever substance had been on it…somewhere else. I was vaguely smug about my achievement—until the grenades exploded.

  It had been almost deafening when half a dozen guns had been firing in an enclosed vault, but the grenades created a pressure wave that made my nose bleed and burst the capillaries near my fingernails so that my hands dripped blood. I really hoped that wasn’t symbolic. Based on the rain of limbs and gobbets of flesh that flew through the air, it had also blown most of the Mammonite underpriests into tiny pieces. There was a general groan from the defenders; those who weren’t injured were at least stunned. The only positive was that the explosion had slapped my slightly concussed consciousness back onto the ever-so-slightly important matter of slaying the monster who had my daughter.

  Brown glided between two of the remaining five pallets, cradling Olivia, deceptively gently, in the crook of his left arm. My daughter was limp, but I could make out her chest rising and falling. While some of the reanimated corpses restrained the living defenders, the sorcerer leaned down and hoisted something from the ground with his tentacle. I thought that I’d already been written off for dead because neither Brown nor his zombies so much as glanced in my direction as I crawled, slowly, painfully, back toward them—but Mia’s eyes, in a face covered in soot and blood, widened for just a moment.

  “Mammonite slave,” Brown spat as the man in his grip struggled feebly. I realized it was Dennis and wondered if his faith had protected him; everyone else near him had been torn to pieces.

  “Please, don’t—don’t do this. It’ll be a-another Dark Age, worse. M-millions, billions maybe will starve w-when the economy collapses, you can’t—” the high priest stammered out before the sorcerer tightened his grip, cutting off his words.

  “When I kill your god, I will free everyone. No more will a farmer in Iowa work from sunup to sundown to pay a banker most of his money just for privilege of being allowed to do it again next year. No more will a woman work her whole life in a store only to have the billionaire owner use her pension to buy a yacht. No more financial wizards will wave their wands and magic up a billion dollars while children beg for pennies. When Mammon is dead, the spell that he’s woven over mankind will die, and people will look around and realize that they’ve spent their whole lives chasing illusions. They’ll be free to create art, music, beauty. Just like your god will be free to come to this portal when you’re dead.” Brown tossed the high priest of Mammon through the portal, and as soon as the man passed through, his flesh transmuted into gold; he landed on the ground with a metallic clang. There was a sound like a slot machine paying out a jackpot, and I understood that not only had Dennis been throwing in the gold to sever the link to Mammon, but his incantations had also been temporarily keeping the extradimensional entity away while he accomplished the task. The god of greed was coming to London town.

  Brown’s huge wings had unfurled as he ranted, helpfully obscuring my approach, but as he turned his grotesque visage toward Olivia, they began to retract. Mia glanced at me and winked.

  “Daddy—how can you betray everything that we worked for? We swore to defend mankind from the shadows.”

  “How dare you talk to me about betrayal!” Brown roared. “I rescued you from the pits, I treated you like a daughter, and when I needed you, you doubted me, you refused to help me, you forced me to kill more innocent people. Their blood is on your hands, and you—you’ll have to live with that…if you survive this night,” the Senior Auditor continued, his whole posture drooping. He turned away and waved his free tentacle in a dismissive gesture. “Let her go.”

  The animated corpse that had been holding Mia in place tightened its grip on her shoulders and hauled her up, eliciting a groan of pain from the battered young woman. She opened her mouth to speak again, but somehow the sorcerer must have sensed it.

  “Go!” he thundered in a voice that rattled the light fixtures and caused plaster to drift down from the ceiling.

  Mia limped very slowly in the direction of the vault door, so I was only a dozen feet away from Brown when I saw the glint of cold fluorescent lighting on polished steel. The jackpot jangling of the approaching god was growing louder, but I could still hear the madman muttering to himself: “Sweet lamb, I am so sorry for what I am about to do, but your sacrifice spares one who is more dear to me than life, and frees untold millions yet to be born.” Brown raised a knife high into the air. It wasn’t some kind of spiky, black-hilted, skull-festooned dagger—just a regular, straight-bladed implement like you’d find in any chef’s kitchen. A long trail of syllables began to ooze from Brown’s mouth, and Olivia, whimpering, opened her eyes. I had to act now.

  “Help me!” I called to Mia, getting my good hand underneath me and lurching, head spinning, in her direction. She must have been playing up her injuries earlier, because she swept toward me like an enraged lioness.

  Brown was engaged in the ritual; a red, angry nimbus of power built around him as he drew in the rage of the crowd of rioters. He couldn’t break his concentration to try to stop me—but the zombies weren’t going to have that problem. Four of them stumbled toward me, forcing me to put my back to one of the pallets of gold just as Mia grasped my outstretched hand. A tingle of extradimensional energy ran through me as our flesh touched.

  I needed maybe ten seconds, but the sorcerer’s creatures weren’t going to give it to me. I didn’t have a choice—I started to weave together the mental image that I needed. Mia drew her little side arm and popped away ineffectually, only taking down one of the undead. Bloody, mangled hands were inches from my face, but I was stuck in the same trap as Brown and couldn’t let my concentration waver. Mia kicked out, knocking back another creature; there was a roar of sound, and Jack Redderton’s pistol slammed a single bullet through the skull of the closest zombie and into the neck of the next, the deformed chunk of lead making it stumble so that Mia could finish it. Jack only got off the one shot, though, because as soon as he fired, another of the undead dog piled onto him. The P.I. disappeared under an avalanche of mortifying flesh—but that sacrifice wasn’t in vain.

  Like I said, the Senior Auditor had given me everything I needed to stop him:

  When he’d tried to kill Badger, he’d inadvertently helped me see that the holes into oblivion that I’d been creating for years could function as gateways…He’d loaded the gun.

  When he’d murdered the UnAdled tonight, I’d understood how I could control those gateways…He’d pointed the barrel.

  When he’d betrayed his own adopted daughter, he’d given me the aid of the one person who could allow me, ignorant in the wa
ys of sorcery, to open a gate from the real world…He’d disengaged the safety.

  When he’d slowed me down by telling me that I could use my wedding ring to reach Dana, he’d reminded me of a connection that could bring me what I needed to defeat him. Something that he’d helped put inside of me…He’d cocked the hammer.

  Brown’s chanting built to a crescendo. I closed my eyes and searched inside myself for the feeling of oblivion that I’d called up so many times before in the Dreamscape. I found it and held it to one side, putting it in a box in the warehouse of my mind, and then I quested deep inside of myself, searching…searching…and then I had it! My perception locked on to a roiling, amorphous blot in my mind that reeked of hunger and rage, the presence that had tried to overwhelm me tonight, the stain that was what remained of the puca’s infestation of my soul...Now I was going to pull the trigger. Come find me. And I did.

  “BANG!” I screamed as something vital rushed out of me, and a hole of sucking, gray nothingness opened in the air between me and the sorcerer, a wound in time and space that hung there, empty, for three heartbeats—and then Dana stepped out. She looked just like she had when I’d seen her toting a submachine gun while riding a demon to oblivion, dark-brown hair flying in the wind between the worlds and her teeth bared in a fierce rictus.

  “Julian!” she yelled, and ran toward me. I tried to lift my arms to embrace her, but they felt so heavy. I fell to my knees: Mia caught me on one side, and Dana caught me on the other.

  “Help Olivia…” I rasped, and flicked my eyes at the sorcerer as exhaustion trampled my grasp on consciousness like a herd of tap-dancing elephants.

  “Oh my God…” Dana said as she turned and saw the monstrous form of the Senior Auditor limned against the golden glow of the original portal. She froze. There are times when I forget that not everyone receives a daily dose of nightmares. Something huge moved on the other side of the portal, and the knife started to descend, jolting my wife out of her paralysis; she pulled the trigger, aiming low. The bullets leapt out—and slapped into the dead flesh of a walking corpse. The knife stabbed down into our daughter, and her wails abruptly cut off. Dana sobbed and dropped me to the ground, clambering to her feet as the sorcerer cocked his arm back to fling Olivia, her form now bathed in an angry, red glow, through the portal to Mammon’s realm.