Deadtown (2 page)

“Oops.”

A howling began in the distance, from somewhere outside the dream. The noise got louder and louder, and the dreamscape bounced around like an earthquake redefining the Richter scale. The howling shaped itself into a word: “Mama!
Mamaaaa!
” Outside, George was moaning and shaking his head—signs he was waking up. If that happened, Tina and I would be trapped forever inside this freak-show circus or, worse, locked in the basement that stored the symbols and themes of George Funderburk’s subconscious. I’d seen enough topside to know that was
not
a place I wanted to be.

“Mama!” George’s heartbeat thundered through the dreamscape. Sleeping pill or no sleeping pill, he was working himself into a state that would catapult him out of his dream—the way it happens when you wake up suddenly, your heart pounding and a scream dying on your lips. We had ten, maybe fifteen seconds left. I shoved Tina, hard.

“Get through the portal! No more screwing around!”

This time, Tina listened. She scrambled, half-crawling, to the dream portal, a doorway of shimmering, multicolored light, then jumped into the beam. Immediately she bounced backward, like she’d tried to hurl herself through a trampoline.

All around us, the circus tent was going up in flames, roaring and popping, throwing lights and shadows across Tina’s terrified face. George was screaming now; in here, it sounded like a million fingernails screeching down a million blackboards. Tina put her hands over her ears and again tried to shoulder her way into the portal.

“Vicky! I can’t get through!”

I caught up with her. “There’s an exit password. Keeps the Drudes in.” I mouthed the secret word and shoved Tina into the portal. Her body shimmered for a second, dissolving into a Tina-shaped outline of sparkling colors. Then she disappeared, sucked back into the real world.

Damn, how I wanted to follow her. But I couldn’t. Not until I’d finished the job.

With Tina gone, the place was shaking a little less, so maybe George was settling back down and I could—

An explosion ripped through the air, knocking me to the ground in a shower of sparks and hot ash. I scrambled for cover, then checked out the situation from behind an abandoned clown car. Fire raged through the big top as, one by one, the boxes blew up. That would get rid of some Drudes—and God knew what other dream figures were hiding in there—but I couldn’t let the flames destroy George’s whole dreamscape. If that happened, he’d never dream again, and that meant a one-way ticket to insanity. Not to mention the fact that I’d burn to cinders along with everything else.

Think, Vicky, think.
Dreams don’t follow the same rules as reality. I had to use dream logic to put out the fire, then try to repair the dreamscape—if the chaos in here didn’t jolt George into waking up first. It was a plan, or the closest I could come to one at the moment.

I tried wishing the fire away. Sometimes that works in dreams. Closing my eyes, I pictured a bright, happy circus scene: a bright, happy tent (flame-retardant) filled with bright, happy people. “Make it real,” I whispered. “When I open my eyes, this is what I’ll see.” Taking a deep breath, I opened my eyes.

The ringmaster ran past me, screaming, his top hat on fire. To my right, a snack cart exploded, showering flaming cotton candy over the stands as spectators trampled each other while trying to find an exit. So much for bright and happy.

Time for dream logic, take two. I tried free association. Fire. Out. Water. Lots of water. As soon as I thought water, I thought of elephants—don’t ask me why. It made perfect sense at the time. A line of elephants pedaled into the ring, each on its own tricycle, trumpeting sirenlike wails. It sounded a little bit like a brigade of off-key fire engines, and I crossed my fingers. The elephants triked over to the pool at the foot of the high-dive platform, then stopped. Each elephant rolled off its tricycle, did a ballerina-style pirouette, then began using its trunk to siphon up water and spray it on the flames. Sizzling sounds hissed through the air. Within seconds, the fire was out.

“Thanks, guys,” I called, waving as the elephants floated skyward, then disappeared. Their trikes turned around and pedaled themselves out of the ring. Everything was back to normal, or as normal as it gets in a dream.

Except that all around me, everywhere I looked, George Funderburk’s dreamscape lay in ruins. Steam rose from piles of wet, stinking ashes. The circus tent was three quarters gone; here and there, a few singed ribbons drooped. Beyond them, a charred, dreary landscape stretched out in all directions, the kind of dreamscape that brought depression and despair to waking life. Gray, gray, and more gray—the fire had burned out all the colors. Don’t let anyone tell you that people dream in black and white; that’s a severely damaged dreamscape. Dreams are supposed to be in hi-def, razor-sharp color. No way could I leave the place like this—the poor guy would be worse off than before he hired me.

Years ago during my training I learned a technique for re-booting a person’s dreamscape, but I’d never actually tried it in the field. Today would be my chance—if I could remember what to do. It was the only hope I had of putting things right.

First things first, though. I couldn’t attempt a reboot until I’d flushed out all the demons. Otherwise, they’d reinfest the place and we’d be back to square one. So before I did anything else, I’d finish the job I’d been hired to do. I pulled out the InDetect I wear on a cord around my neck and turned it on. It hummed to life, then was silent. Turning in a slow circle, I held it at arm’s length and listened. After a quarter turn it clicked, softly at first, but as I took a few steps, sweeping the InDetect back and forth, the volume and the speed of the clicking picked up. Drude, dead ahead.

Following the clicking, I pulled out my pistol. I’d gone forward about a dozen feet when a demon leaped in front of me, gnashing its teeth and snarling. No more evil clowns. This one was in typical demon guise: long, pointed tongue and cloven hooves, bristling with sharp things—horns, fangs, claws—and spewing bad breath. It howled—whoa, make that
really
bad breath—then charged. I shot. One bronze bullet from my pistol, and the thing dissolved into a murky cloud and a whiff of rotten eggs.

I scoped out the rest of the dreamscape and blasted three more Drudes back into the ether. When the InDetect didn’t pick up any more, I holstered my pistol, put my hands on my hips, and tried to remember the reboot technique. If I did it right, George would wake up demon free, with a vague memory of pleasant dreams. Tina’s trespassing, Mama’s live cremation, the trashing of his dreamscape—all of that would be gone. Overwritten. Not even a trace lingering downstairs in his subconscious.

If
I did it right.

This much I remembered: to reboot somebody’s dreams, you had to use the dream portal as a conduit to import, from the real world outside, the raw materials to rebuild the ruined dreamscape. Essences, not actual objects. I didn’t want to pull in the bedroom dresser or, God forbid, Tina. Instead, I needed colors, emotions, thoughts, memories—the ingredients we all use in an infinite variety of recipes to cook up our dreams.

There was a spell to pull in those essences. A word, a phrase maybe, that summoned the raw materials of dreams. What was it? Aunt Mab made me memorize it when she taught me how to use the dream portal, but damned if I could remember it now. I tried
essence
in English, then in Welsh. The dream portal sat there, empty, doing nothing but sparkling in shades of white and gray in this colorless world. Raw materials—I was sure the spell had something to do with that, so I tried all the synonyms I could think of:
ingredients
,
core
,
infrastructure
,
primary elements
,
source
. I also tried the Welsh equivalent when I knew it. I thought I’d had it when I tried
dream-stuff
, but nothing happened. Nothing worked.

Beneath my feet, the ground trembled and shifted. A sigh blew through the dreamscape like a gust of wind. George was stirring. I checked my watch, then shook it. The damn thing said it was 4:37 on Wednesday, February 1, 1792. The guy who’d sold it to me said it would work in here, and, like an idiot, I’d believed him. Time has no meaning in dreams, even though it keeps ticking away relentlessly in the real world. I must’ve been in here for hours by now; George’s sleeping pill would wear off soon.

“Work, damn you!” I shouted at the portal, kicking it and causing a shower of sparks. My voice echoed, and the trembling intensified.

What was the magic phrase? I needed Aunt Mab’s help. I’d have to try calling her on the dream phone. The Cerddorion, the race of Welsh shapeshifters to which I belong, have a psychic link to others of their kind that they can use while sleeping. All you have to do is concentrate on the person you want to connect with, and you open the connection. In your dream, the air begins to swirl and shimmer with that person’s colors—all souls have their own colors—and, if they’re willing to talk to you, you can have a conversation. Sometimes it worked when you called from inside another person’s dreams. And Mab was powerful enough to answer even if she was awake.

I pictured her, a straight-backed, iron-haired woman sitting in the library of her house in North Wales. Like an out-of-focus black-and-white photo, the scene was blurred and Mab’s usually sharp features were indistinct. I concentrated harder, envisioning her baggy cardigan, her long black dress, her sensible lace-up shoes. Her face was set in its familiar, you-can-do-better scowl. I watched for her colors, blue and silver, to emerge. Nothing. Just flat, blurry gray. And then I realized—I was in a place where there were no colors.

Now what? If Mab’s colors couldn’t get through, was I cut off from Mab? I had no clue. It had never been an issue before.

Mostly because I couldn’t think of a plan B, I kept picturing my aunt. I took concentration to a whole new level, squeezing my eyes shut and scrunching up my forehead. I tried adding other senses: her sharp voice that contrasted so strangely with the softness of her accent, her scent of lavender water and mothballs. Gradually the image sharpened, like a figure emerging from the fog. Mab sat in her favorite wing chair by the fireplace, a book open on her lap.

“Mab, thank God you’re there! I need to reboot this dreamscape, now.”

Her mouth moved, but there was no sound. Damn. Bad connection. No wonder, since I was calling from someone else’s damaged dreamscape. But I didn’t have time to try again. Next time, the connection might be even worse.

She seemed to be able to hear me, so I asked, “What’s the magic word?” She smiled, closed her book, and turned it so I could read the cover.
The Tempest
, by William Shakespeare. Something literary. It figured.

“For heaven’s sake, Mab, I don’t have time for English class! Just tell me. Write it on a piece of paper.”

Mab tapped the side of her head, the gesture that meant, “Think, child.” Her image began to fade. The book-lined walls of the room where she sat wavered and thinned. In a moment, all that remained was the damned book, floating in the air.

I remembered when Mab had made me read that play. I hated it—the language was old and hard to understand, and the story didn’t make sense. A bunch of weird spirits and castaways running around on some island—it figured a book like that would hold the key to re-creating a dreamscape. There was something important in that play, something I needed to remember.

The ground convulsed, knocking me to my hands and knees, and a snort ricocheted around me. I was doomed. George was waking up, and Mab wanted me to read Shakespeare. Another snort, louder, knocked the book from the air. It whacked me hard on the back of the head, bounced, and landed on the ground in front of me. I sat back on my knees, rubbing my head. Jeez, if Mab could send a book through the dream phone, why couldn’t she just send herself and get me out of this mess? But that wasn’t how my aunt operated—never had been.

The book was open to a scene near the end, where the magician Prospero speaks to Ferdinand and Miranda. I scanned the words.
“Our revels now are ended. These our actors,”
blah blah blah.
“The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,”
yadda yadda yadda. I’d never find it. I kept reading, faster, skimming over the words. Suddenly, my eyes hit the brakes. A phrase glowed and lifted itself off the page.
“We are such stuff as dreams are made on.”
That was it. That was the spell. No wonder I’d felt close with
dream-stuff
.

“Such stuff as dreams are made on!” I shouted.

Immediately the portal expanded and a rainbow of colors poured in. Multihued streams of light shot around the dreamscape, touching things, washing them with color, bringing them to life. The portal widened further, and a strong wind entered, pushing me backward. Squinting through watering eyes, I peered into it. Dozens, hundreds of shadowy figures flew in, whirling through the dreamscape, breaking off into tornadoes that spun and leaped as far as I could see. Here and there, figures would jump out and strike a pose or sink down into the ground to wait their turn down cellar, in George’s subconscious.

The lights and colors intensified, growing so bright I had to close my eyes. Next, sounds blasted their way in: voices, clanging, music, drumbeats, screeches, whistles, wails, chirping, sobbing—you name it. When every sound you might ever hear in a dream lets loose all at once, the din is unbelievable. I pressed my hands over my ears and crouched beside the portal. Blinded, deafened, pinned down by gale-force winds, I was helpless until the reboot was complete.
Don’t wake up now, George,
I thought.
Please don’t wake up now
. This dreamscape wasn’t even such a great place to visit—I definitely did not want to live here.

The vortex of sounds, lights, and colors swirled and roared. Then, gradually, the chaos subsided, until a single sound emerged:
thumpa thumpa thumpa.
Fear tickled my spine. Was that George’s about-to-wake-up heartbeat? No, it was too even for that. More like some kind of drumbeat. A rhythm track. Cautiously, I lifted my hands from my ears. Music—it was music. Not the calliope melody of before, this was dance music—loud, insistent, pulsing with a heavy bass line. I opened my eyes, then blinked. Spots flashed by in random patterns. It took me a minute to realize that they came from a mirror ball rotating overhead. The circus tent was gone. I now stood on the dance floor of the tackiest seventies-style disco you could imagine—raised dance floor, mirrored walls, a light show to make you seasick.