Part 23 (1/2)

'OK, Mrs Gizmo!' he called out, in a clogged-up voice. 'I hear you!'

He heaved himself off the bed and went to the door. Mrs Gizmo was standing outside on the landing, but when she saw that he was wearing only a droopy red sweats.h.i.+rt she immediately turned her back to present him with her iron-gray braids and her narrow widow's shoulders in her floral-print ap.r.o.n.

'You have a visitor,' she told him.

'A visitor? At this time of the morning?'

'He says he's an old Army friend of yours.'

John puffed out his cheeks. He might have known it. Dean Brunswick III - Deano. The late Dean Brunswick III, aka Springer.

'Do you think you could tell him to come back in maybe an hour?' John asked Mrs Gizmo. 'I seriously need some sustenance first. Like, some buckwheat pancakes would be good. Do you have any maple syrup left? That Coombs Family Farm stuff, I could pour that over everything. I could pour it over broccoli, even.'

But before Mrs Gizmo could reply, a familiar voice called out, 'Hi - iai, John! Good to see you again so soon! How's it hanging? Well, I can see for myself!'

Dean Brunswick III came bounding up the stairs. The young Dean Brunswick III. He beamed flirtatiously at Mrs Gizmo as he pa.s.sed her on the landing, and then he came up to John and gave him an affectionate back-slapping hug.

John said, 'You'd better come in. Thanks a million, Mrs Gizmo.'

'Quite all right, John,' said Mrs Gizmo, and went downstairs without turning back.

John led Springer into his bedroom. 'You'll pardon me if I put on some pants.'

'Oh, sure. Wow, it smells like mozzarella in here. That's not your feet, is it?'

John was pulling on a pair of comfort-fit Levis. 'Just because you can make yourself look like my old dead Army buddy, that doesn't give you the license to talk to me the way he used to. That's the leftovers from a pepperoni pizza, if you must know.'

Springer sniffed and said, 'Mmm. Appetizing. Not.'

John sat down on the bed and rolled on a pair of bright green Argyle socks. 'What happened last night, that was a fiasco. We could have gotten ourselves permanently trapped in that dream, like forever and ever, amen, and then what?'

'I still can't understand what went wrong,' said Springer. 'You had Brother Albrecht in your sights, didn't you, at point-blank range? I've never known an Absence Gun to misfire before.'

'I don't think it did misfire,' John told him. 'Only a short time afterward, I zapped that meat-packing plant, didn't I? And the gun worked perfect.'

Springer went to the window and looked out over Mrs Gizmo's scruffy back yard, with her was.h.i.+ng hanging sadly on the line. 'Maybe it wasn't a weapons failure at all,' he suggested. 'Maybe Brother Albrecht has some way of protecting himself.'

'Oh, you mean like a force field, from Star Trek?'

'No, nothing like that. Nothing technical. Whenever you Night Warriors enter other people's dreams, you may be trespa.s.sing inside their minds, so to speak, but there's nothing they can do to s.h.i.+eld themselves against your weapons, any more than you can s.h.i.+eld yourselves against their weapons, if they happen to have any.'

'All the same, the Absence Gun didn't work on Brother Albrecht, did it?' said John. 'It was his dream, right? Maybe he simply dreamed that it wouldn't work.'

'He couldn't have done that,' Springer told him. 'The whole carnival set-up - the clowns and the freaks and the acrobats - yes, those are all Brother Albrecht's creation. But being Dom Magator is your dream, and in your dream your Absence Gun never misfires, and there is absolutely nothing that Brother Albrecht could have done to jam it or deflect it.

He pressed the palms of his hands together, as if he were praying. 'I'm talking about some other kind of protection. I don't really know what. Maybe something more spiritual.'

John dragged a Kleenex out of a battered box, and noisily blew his nose. 'The Absence Gun works on a wave function, right?'

'That's right.'

'OK, then - supposing for the sake of argument Brother Albrecht doesn't exist on the same wavelength as anybody else? Supposing he's visible, but not quite there? Like supposing he exists a nanosecond ahead of us, or a nanosecond behind? Or a micromillimeter off to the left, or micromillimeter off to the right?'

'What are you saying?'

'I'm saying that if you fire an Absence Gun at somebody like that, it wouldn't have any effect, would it? If somebody wasn't actually there, you couldn't make them cease to exist, could you?'

Springer turned away from the window. 'It's a theory, I suppose,' he said, doubtfully. 'I don't know what Einstein would make of it.'

'Screw Einstein, it makes sense to me. Kind of, anyhow. Do you have a better idea?'

'I don't know, John. I have the feeling that there's a whole lot more to Brother Albrecht than meets the eye. He's so bitter, you know? So angry, and so cruel, and he hasn't stopped railing against G.o.d for eight hundred years. How can anybody stay so vengeful for so many centuries?'

'Well - that's a question we have to answer asap,' John told him. 'But there's no future in us going back into Brother Albrecht's dream unless we work out a way to effectively bust his a.s.s, is there?'

'I agree with you, John, one hundred and ten percent. But the situation is critical. From what Mago Verde said, it's going to take only one more sacrifice before Brother Albrecht can break the sacred sanction that Pope Eugene placed on him, and then he'll be able to lead his circus back here into the waking world. That poor girl who had her arms cut off, she was the eighth sacrifice. We have to find a way to stop Brother Albrecht before Mago Verde finds him a ninth.'

John blew his nose again and thought about it. It came as no surprise to him that Springer knew every detail of what had happened in Brother Albrecht's nightmare last night. Springer had a cerebral connection to everything that the Night Warriors experienced when they entered other people's dreams. When they returned to their bodies in the morning, all of their impressions flowed into Springer's consciousness as if he were living through them himself - a kind of psychic debriefing, with sights and sounds and smells and conversations and even emotions. He had shared their elation when the fire breather exploded. He had also known how frightened they were when they thought that the clowns had barred their way back through the portal.

John said, 'I think the answer is for us to go looking for Mago Verde, or Gordon Veitch, or whatever the b.a.s.t.a.r.d calls himself. If we can stop him, we can stop Brother Albrecht getting his final sacrifice, or delay it, anyhow. And we know for sure that we can take him out, because he skedaddled like a jackrabbit when Jekkalon went after him at the circus. If he was invulnerable, the same as Brother Albrecht, he would have stayed put and given us the finger.'

He sniffed. 'The only trouble is, where the h.e.l.l do we find him?'

'The Griffin House Hotel,' said Springer. 'To start with, he attacks his victims in all kinds of random locations. Back in the nineteen-thirties, he went for women in the slums like Kingsbury Run. Later, he went for more upscale neighborhoods like Bratenahl. But no matter where he actually kills them, or mutilates them, where does the evidence always finish up? In the Griffin House Hotel, inside the walls.'

'Well, yes,' John agreed. 'But by the time he dreams his ninth sacrifice into the hotel walls, it's going to be a little too late for his victim, isn't it? She'll have been cut in half already, or set on fire, or had her arms or her legs sawn off, or maybe both.'

'I know, John, but I don't see any other way. Ashapola weeps for all of his children, but the most important thing is to stop Mago Verde from taking this ninth sacrifice through to Brother Albrecht's dream. Once that happens it's going to be ”Chaos and Old Night”. You've seen that circus for yourself, first hand, and you've seen how much it excites people, how it gets them baying for blood. It's frightening.

'We have to stop Brother Albrecht from bringing it back to the waking world. If we allow that to happen, it's going to trail pandemonium behind it, wherever it goes.'

'OK,' said John. 'The Griffin House it is.' He went to his bedroom door and opened it.

Springer blinked at him. 'You're not going to put on your shoes?'

John gave him a long, sober look. If the situation hadn't been so desperate, he probably would have laughed.

Rhodajane had just stepped out of the shower when they knocked at Room 309. She opened the door with a pink towel wrapped around her head like a turban and a pink toweling robe with Griffin House Hotel embroidered on it. Without her false lashes and her make-up, John thought she looked surprisingly young, although her eyes were a little puffy.

'Well, good morning, boys!' she greeted them. 'I was just about to order some breakfast on room service. Want some?'

'Coffee and pancakes would be good,' said John. 'And tell them not to be tight-a.s.sed with the maple syrup.'

Springer said, soberly, 'You did a very brave thing last night, Rhodajane. You saved all of your fellow Night Warriors.'

Rhodajane walked over to her dressing table and sat down in front of the triple mirrors. She pouted at herself and then she said, 'I did what Xyrena is supposed to do. Xyrena's the super s.l.u.t, right? It wasn't difficult. That poor clown didn't know whether he was coming or going, and in the end he did both.'