The beast laughed, an even higher pitched thing that sounded almost like a scream.
“Are you sure of that, John? Where were your friends when you were lying in that alleyway bleeding your life away? Where were they when your heart stopped on the operating table? Where were they when you got lost in the fog? Are they here? Have they come to save you? I think not. Yet here I am, willing to offer help and advice and all I get is abuse, dismissed out of turn before I even say anything.”
The fact that this thing knew his name made John’s blood run cold, bringing another harsh cold shower of reality into what was looking less and less like a fever dream. The fact that it sounded so cultured and urbane despite its appearance was also most unsettling. John had no answer to the thing’s question, for in truth, he wasn’t sure of anything in this place.
The Rat King, John realized he had already given him the label years before as another blast from the past memory came to him, laughed again, and moved, only to cross the next landing and stand directly in his path at the top of the stairs, blocking any passage down.
“I made you,” John said softly.
“Perhaps,” the thing said. “And perhaps I made you. Wheels within wheels, around and around and around we spin.”
“I have no time to play riddles in the dark. Let me pass, or I’ll unmake you, right now.”
“Why would you want to go down there?” the Rat-King said. “There is nothing there for you but sorrow and loss, nothing to find but what you already know, nothing to see but what you’ve already seen, nowhere to be where you have not already been.”
John raised the pistol.
“I’ll trust to this, and my own senses, thank you very much,” he said.
The Rat King smiled.
“And how’s that working out for you so far?”
John pointed the pistol between the thing’s eyes. It didn’t flinch, and John knew he wasn’t going to fire. This was the closest thing to a human being he’d met since getting here.
“What choices do I have?” John said. “Up here there is only stone and dust—that and more of your kind, trying to kill me.”
The Rat King laughed again at that.
“I will admit, they can be a bit rowdy at times, this place will do that to a man after a while. But you have it the wrong way ’round if you think they are my kind. But I suppose you’ll have to discover that for yourself, along with everything else. In any case, I can assure you that it is far better up here than any alternative that faces you below.”
“What alternative? You haven’t told me a single thing of any worth. If you know so much about me, you know I’m a cop. Give me solid facts, or fuck off out of my way. Surely anything is better than this hell. I want to go home.”
“Where you see hell, I see heaven. It depends on your viewpoint,” the Rat-King said, as if they were having a chat over a cup of coffee in a café.
“I want no part in your kind of heaven,” John replied.
“Be careful what you wish for, John,” came the reply that was barely more than a whisper. “It is a bad habit to develop here.”
The incongruity of being in a crumbling stone tower on the edge of infinity, while having a conversation with a huge winged rat was not lost on John as the beast spoke again.
“Stay here and I can give you total freedom. Go down too far for too long, and you will have none at all to speak of.”
John showed him the pistol again. The weapon sent a burst of heat into his hand and the choir sang loud.
Where he lies, where he lies, where he lies, where he lies.
“I don’t believe you. I believe this.” He shook the gun in the beast’s face. “And I’ve warned you once already. If you do not stand aside, then I’ll show you the depth of that belief.”
John’s bluster did not seem to intimidate the other in the slightest, it seemed to know that John had already decided he would not be firing the weapon. Once again, the Rat King laughed, louder this time, setting the stone walls around them ringing. The Burdens high above squealed and chittered in seeming agreement.
“As you wish. Just remember that I offered you a different path,” the thing said. “And that the offer will still stand if you decide to return. Go and ask your questions, go find your grail, just don’t expect to find the answer you’re after. I’ll be around, waiting to show you that other way, should you survive to make the decision. I won’t say good luck, for luck has little to do with it here. But go well, John. May all your dreams be pleasant ones.”
And with that enigmatic remark he broke into a waddling run, heading for a window. John didn’t have time to raise the pistol again before the Rat King took a headlong dive through the opening and out into open sky. The last John saw of him was as a soaring shadow silhouetted against the yellow moon, wings wide as he whooped and hollered in the joy of his flight.
Even as the Rat King soared away out of sight, John heard a heavy crash from higher up the tower. It could only be one thing. The Burdens had broken through from above. Within seconds a score or more of them filled the stairwell behind him with the press of their bodies and the stench of their breath. If the thought of fighting them didn’t give him pause, the smell certainly did.
He did the wise thing, he turned and fled. Even as he ran, almost too fast for safety down two flights of stairs he heard them, a floor above in the chamber where he’d met the King, chittering and chattering and laughing, too loud and too long. There was no further sign of the Rat King, but if these were his subjects then his promises of freedom were strange in the extreme.
And now they were definitely following him, staying a level above as he descended, but John couldn’t afford them any more consideration. They showed no sign of wanting to get any closer, or of pressing any kind of attack. They seemed content to block his passage back to the heights, but as he had no intention of going that way, he could safely ignore them.
Besides, he soon had other things to worry about.
The first time he saw it was on the twelfth floor of his descent; it seemed to be a jet-black tear in the fabric of space, no bigger than a sliver of fingernail. Initially he thought he had a hair near his eye and tried to brush it away before he realized he was looking at something several yards away, hanging in space at eye level.
He moved closer, but looking at it straight on hurt his eyes, they struggled to focus, never quite managing it, so that the only way he could really see the thing was by turning side on so that it was just on the edge of his peripheral vision.
It appeared to be spinning slowly in a clockwise direction. As he watched, it quivered like a struck tuning fork and changed shape, settling into a new configuration, becoming a black, somewhat oily in appearance droplet little more than an inch across at the thickest point. It hung there, its very impossibility taunting him to go over and look for the trick strings that had to be holding it in place.
It swelled, and now looked like an egg more than anything else, a black, oily egg from some creature whose nature could only be guessed at. As John stepped forward, a rainbow aura thickened around it, casting the whole chamber in dancing washes of soft colors as it continued to spin.
The pistol hummed, hot in his hand as he moved closer.
Danger, Will Robinson.
The egg quivered and pulsed. And now it seemed larger still. The chamber started to throb, like a heartbeat. The egg pulsed in time. The song started again, somewhere far below.
He sleeps and he dreams in the deep, in the dark.
The pulsing egg kept time with the song, like a three-dimensional metronome.
And now it was more than obvious, it was most definitely growing. The pistol sent a new flash of heat, like a searing burn in his palm as he lifted the weapon to fire, but before he could pull the trigger the throb became a rapid thumping; the chamber shook and trembled. The vibration rattled his teeth and set his guts roiling.
The aura around the egg wavered and trembled, and now there was a door hanging in space, right there, right
ahead of him, a white door, paint peeling, with a copper number six at eye level.
I can go home!
But the door was already starting to fade and disappear. John lunged forward, reaching for the handle.
“Wait!”
His hand met only thin air and the act of reaching forward and meeting nothing made him overbalance and fall flat on his face on the stone slabs underfoot. When he recovered enough to look above him there was nothing to be seen hanging there but empty space. The black egg, and the door it had created, was gone as quickly as it had come. The Burdens up above shrieked in chorus, but whether it was a laugh or a scream he wasn’t able to tell.
He still didn’t know where he was or why he was here, but he now knew something he hadn’t known before.
I was close. I was really close. There’s a way back. I can go home.
He headed for the stairs to continue the descent, in the hope, no longer quite forlorn, that matters would eventually become clearer.
He reached seventeen floors down with nothing untoward in the last five before he got another sighting of a black egg. This time there was a sense of something in development, a wider picture being shown one small piece at a time.
He saw a rainbow aura ahead of him as he stepped down into a new chamber and walked away from the stairwell, and moved forward quickly, hoping for another door, readying himself to react more quickly than he had on the first encounter.
Two eggs hung in the air at eye level, side by side, just touching, each as black as the other, twin bubbles only held in check by the dancing rainbow colors. The whole chamber throbbed like a heartbeat. The singing started up again downstairs, and the Burdens above joined in on the chorus, making the whole tower rock and quake in an almost operatic wall of sound. The eggs pulsed in synchronized agreement and calved.
Four eggs hung in a tight group, all now pulsing in time with the still rising noise. Colors danced and flowed across the sheer black surface; blues and greens and shimmering silvers that filled the chamber with washes of color. The song got louder. The eggs throbbed, beating time like a giant drum. Soon there were eight, then sixteen.
John’s head pounded with the rhythm, and nausea rose as his gut roiled and rolled. He started to back away, back toward the stairs he had come down, hoping for some respite. The Burdens up above squealed in delight, anticipating his retreat.
Thirty-two now, and the chamber shimmered with dancing aura of shimmering lights that pulsed and beat in time with the song as the eggs calved again, and again, everything careening along in a big happy dance.
Where he lies, where he lies, where he lies, where he lies.
The Dreaming God is singing where he lies.
John couldn’t take much more. He stepped forward. The pistol screamed as he raised it and fired a shot at the growing mass of eggs. The rainbow aura seemed to breathe in, breathe out, twice. There was a sudden burst of color; red, blue and shimmering silver filled his head with a glare brighter than the brightest sun.
And a door hung, once again, right in front of him, white paint peeling, copper number six seeming to glow, almost golden as he reached for it. He stepped forward, and once again found nothing but air in his hand. He let out a wail of frustration, and overhead the Burdens responded, mimicking and mocking, with a wail of their own that shook the tower again and sent fine dust falling from the roof.
The door had gone, there was only the empty chamber. But a degree of damage had been done in the process of its summoning. The floor buckled, threatening to throw him to the ground. A crack ran down the far wall. A portion of the roof collapsed; a block of stone the size of his head fell to the floor and immediately disintegrated into dust.
He headed for the stairwell down to the next level. The roof was threatening to come down around him as he threw himself down the stairs. A pall of dust fell behind him from the ruined chamber, but he quickly outran it, heading down at full pelt.
Even in his haste he still smelled it, not the Burdens this time, but something he could recognize that gave him hope. It was a distinctive odor he had smelled when the door was in front of him, perfume, a cheap yet heady perfume, the kind his ma used to wear when she and dad were going out for a dance. The pistol sent some soft heat into his palm and the bass choir sang softly.
He dreams where he rests in the deep far below.
And the Sleeping God is dreaming where he lies.
Where he lies, where he lies, where he lies, where he lies
The Sleeping God is dreaming where he lies.
High above, the Burdens squealed as he went down, further into the deep.
Into the black.
10
Janis stood in the dark in the hallway of Apartment Five, her back to the door, almost afraid to breathe as more footsteps, small, pattering footsteps, sounded on the landing outside. She felt the eyes on her, blue eyes, too dark, almost black in some lights. She remembered her Nana taking great delight in telling the tale of her princesses that had come across the ocean to find gentlemen friends, remembered the stories of their adventures. Nana had many tales of their misadventures and glory, romance and bad luck as they traveled all the way from Gamages’ factory in England across the ocean to Newfoundland.
To another child those bedtime stories might even have been captivating, but Janis knew that the dolls had it in for her. They were jealous of how much Nana loved her and they weren’t slow in showing it, staring pointedly at her every move. She’d come to fear even the very mention of them back then, and lived in terror of every visit to her Nana’s house. She’d suffered bad dreams over it for years until time and memory finally diminished them.
But this was worse than any childhood nightmare had ever been.
Yes, they had watched her all through her childhood.
But they never started walking before.
Rationally, Janis knew there wasn’t a doll outside the door, couldn’t be, just as she’d known that the staircase wasn’t falling into a misty abyss earlier. That didn’t stop her heart from racing, or the fear from almost paralyzing her.
The patter of footsteps stopped right outside the door. If it had been lighter Janis might have hunkered down and looked under the bottom of the door, but it was too dark, and besides, what if she did actually see a pair of small feet, porcelain shoes on wooden feet and ankles. What would she do then?
She felt close to screaming as the silence stretched out into long seconds. Her eyes were becoming accustomed to the gloom in the hallway and she could make out a closed door ahead of her some eight feet away, and another on her left, closer, almost within arm’s reach. But she was too scared to move for fear of alerting whatever was outside on the landing to her presence.
She held her breath for what felt like forever as blue eyes stared at her even through the door, looking at her with malice and evil intent. She didn’t have to dredge her memory to bring it clearly to mind; the eyes, one slightly askew, sat, sunk back in a little smiling face that was only a twist of a lip away from a grimace. Paint flaked from peach colored cheeks that had always looked to be filled with blood. A blue, velvet dress, dusty and aged, completed the look, patched and darned by Nana until there was little of the original material left, lace underwear below, faded and gray even those twenty-five years in the past. Janis could see the doll in her mind as clearly as she knew, just knew, that it could see her.
Is it eyeing me up in the same way? Does it remember the girl it used to terrorize?
She pushed the thought away, speculation would have to wait, getting as far away as possible from those pattering feet and staring eyes was the only thing she should be thinking about.
Another sound came, soft but clear, through the door from the landing, a sigh of longing and disappointment. Footsteps pattered away, and Janis heard the unmistakable sound of them receding, not back into the apartment opposite, but off and away down the stairs until they were too faint to be heard.
Even then Janis stood, as still as she could
manage, back to the door, fearing that this latest silence might only be a trap designed to draw her out. But that still wasn’t bringing her escape any closer, and after a long quiet period that she guessed was at least five minutes, she finally moved, not back out into the hallway, but deeper into the flat where she had found refuge.
The door nearest her was as obdurate as the other locked doors she’d encountered, although the faintest hint of detergent and soap that she smelled when she tried to open it told her it was probably a washroom. There was no frosted glass window, so she had no way of knowing if anyone lurked, just on the other side, waiting to surprise her, and she wasn’t ready for another encounter with a fat half-naked Scotsman. She passed on, and walked over to what she hoped was a door to a living area. She was thinking she might find a kitchen, and, if somehow, magically, the power was on, the chance of some coffee, strong, black and plenty of it, something that might wash the drugs from her system and let her think clearly. The handle turned easily and she walked through, holding the door open with her left hand so that she could make a quick escape if she needed to.
“Hello?” she said. “Anybody home?”
She stepped into the room, then stopped speaking, her words caught in her throat.
She smelled the cheap perfume again, and looked around at velvet drapes, an ornate bed and lacquered dressers. The room beyond looked like the same tart’s boudoir she’d been in earlier across the hall, exactly the same, even down to the ornaments and bedding. Either someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to duplicate the room across the hall, or this was the same room and the mere act of walking through the door had brought her back here.
This isn’t possible.
But the more she looked, the more similarities she saw. Five dolls sat on the high shelf opposite, and the gramophone was in the same place beyond the bed as where she had seen it before. As she noticed it, the record on the turntable of the gramophone started to spin and the song echoed through the room.
He sings with the fish as he sleeps far below
Songs of Dreaming Gods Page 7