Dreamwalker (7 page)

Chapter Twelve

A throne commanded the palace room opposite where the dreamwalkers wove Cauquemere's nightmares. Against the universally gray walls, the gilded chair shimmered in the torchlight. Long, padded leather arms stretched past the edge of the seat, each end carved into the head of a spitting snake. The back rose over six feet from the chair's elevated dais, and twin snakes adorned the top like two reptilian bookends. Between them a single, unblinking eye within a crystal ball scanned the room, Cauquemere's viewing port while he masqueraded as St. Croix in the tactile world.

Cauquemere sat on the throne, his long, leather coat open, twin snake medallion exposed. His peaked cap left his eyes in shadow. Two heavy, wooden doors flew open at the end of the room. A pair of decaying zombies entered, dragging Waikiki Simon forward by the armpits. The toes of his bare, blackened feet scraped behind him. His eyes darted back and forth across the floor. A new damp, red stain colored Simon's dirty flowered shirt, the overflow from the dried blood caked below his nose. He apparently hadn't embraced Cauquemere's invitation.

The hunters dropped Simon like a sack of dirty laundry at the foot of the throne. They took two steps back, wide-eyed, as if awaiting a reward.

Cauquemere uncrossed his legs and grasped the end of the throne's armrests. His fingers settled in the eyes of the carved snakes. He stood and looked down at the two anxious hunters.

“Outside.”

The two nodded repeatedly, accompanied by a light manic twitter, and backed out the doorway. The thud of the closing doors echoed in the room.

Cauquemere reached up and removed his peaked cap and placed it on the throne's seat. He adopted a compassionate look and sidestepped down the throne.

“Simon, my friend,” he effused. “I am so glad they found you. There has been such a terrible mistake. Mindless brutes. Did they hurt you on the way in?”

Simon looked up from the floor. He gave the room and Cauquemere a wary inspection. Drool dripped from the corner of his open mouth.

Cauquemere guessed about half of what was going on filtered through to Simon. He would have to go slowly. He cradled the man's arm.

“Here, friend, stand up.”

Simon rose cautiously, leaning away from the Prince of Nightmares.

“Cauquemere?” he sputtered.

“Yes, Simon, I am Cauquemere,” he replied in a soothing tone. “I assure you that my reputation is unwarranted. I apologize about your treatment. You really shouldn't be here at all. We'll get this all straightened out.”

Cauquemere brushed some dirt off of the front of Simon's Hawaiian shirt. Simon flinched. No harm came. He broke into a hesitant smile.

“You are a mess, my friend. We have to get you into something fresh and let you get clean. Again I apologize about your escorts. It is hell finding decent help.”

Somewhere deep in Simon's tortured psyche, Cauquemere sensed a dormant seed split its casing and expose a thin, tender green shoot amidst a sea of gray ash. Hope. Excellent.

“First on our agenda,” Cauquemere said, “we must reunite you with your wife. She will be worried sick.”

A spark of life lit Simon's dull eyes. The sprout in the ash unfurled a small, bright green leaf.

“Karen?” Simon said.

“Yes!” Cauquemere said. “Karen. I'm sure that you would love to see Karen again. She is waiting for you to return and finish your vacation on Oahu. We need to make that happen. I have fresh clothes and a fine meal waiting for you in the next room. We'll get you all set before you see Karen. Would you like that?”

Tears of gratitude welled up in Simon's eyes. He grabbed Cauquemere's hand and kissed it, like a pilgrim bussing the Papal ring. Cauquemere patted him on the back like a puppy.

“There, there,” he said. “Nothing is too good for my guest. Let's get you on your way.”

He turned Simon toward the door and then paused. He'd have to coax the information from him. If he rifled through Simon's mind, it would probably collapse.

“Oh,” he said. “One thing you can tell me before you go.”

Simon nodded emphatically.

“You met someone,” Cauquemere said. He could not say “yesterday” since time had no meaning in Twin Moon City. “Out at the edge of the city in an old apartment. He was clean and calm.”

Simon looked puzzled. Somewhere in his maelstrom of confused thought was the bit of information Cauquemere needed. He just had to get Simon to find it.

“Think, Simon,” he said, mimicking patience he'd never mastered. “The gunners were after you. You hid in the apartment. You escaped out the back window, remember? There was someone in there with you. He would have felt different. He would have felt…brighter.” Cauquemere didn't want to explain the psychic difference between dead Simon and the live dreamwalker.

No look of recognition graced Simon's face. Cauquemere wondered if he had erred. Perhaps the essence Simon left on the windowsill had happened before the dreamwalker arrived. If so…

“You mean Pete?” Simon said.

“Yesss,” Cauquemere coaxed. “Pete. Tell me about Pete.”

“He spoke to me. He broke the velvet shield. Will he go to Hawaii?”

Cauquemere didn't have time to sift through the insanity.

“Focus on Pete,” Cauquemere said. He placed his fingertips against Simon's forehead. “Focus on Pete.”

An orb formed in Cauquemere's hand, slowly drawn from Simon's forehead. Like pulling an orange off a tree, he extracted the single memory.

He held the sphere in front of Simon. The softball-sized orb glowed and inside was the Simon's-eye view of Pete Holm in the ravaged apartment. Pete moved toward them, bent down, mouthed something, and then the image reset to start.

“This is Pete?” Cauquemere asked. An edge returned to his voice.

“Yes,” Simon said. He grinned. Several teeth were missing. “Pete.”

“What did you tell Pete?”

“Nothing,” Simon said. “I just ran.”

“Then who was with him?” Cauquemere asked. “Someone helped him if it wasn't you. Who was with Pete?” Cauquemere let the orb rise into the air. It hovered above them.

Simon began to concentrate, then looked confused, and then concentrated again.

“I'm trying,” he struggled to say. “I can't see it. It may be lost.” Simon's breathing went shallow and fast. His eyes danced around like pinballs. “Whirling and swirling. Cascades of timepieces. Catch them like a fogbank.”

Cauquemere grabbed Simon by the shoulders. He shook him and Simon's head bobbed like a boat in rough water.

“Focus on the moment,” Cauquemere commanded. He gave Simon a solid shake to emphasize each word. “Who…was…with…Pete?”

Simon's eyes went still and he closed them.

“A girl,” he said, in a calm, clear voice, in the long-silent voice of Simon Cantwell. “In the shadows. By the window. Dark and dirty. No newcomer.”

Cauquemere raised his hand to Simon's head again. Another sphere emerged, this one dark and cloudy. Inside, a vague, dusky image of a girl, blonde perhaps.

“This is her?” Cauquemere asked.

Simon's eyes drooped as he checked the orb in Cauquemere's hand.

“That's all there is,” he pleaded. “It was so dark. Can I go back with Karen now?”

Cauquemere spun the useless globe of Simon's Rayna memory up into the air. It burst like a soap bubble. His look of disgust morphed into a wolfish smile. He put his hand on Simon's shoulder.

“Why certainly,” he said. “It is reunion time. Here's how we'll do it.”

Cauquemere lifted both hands into the air, and a new larger orb appeared between them. He lowered it in front of Simon. “Here's a love story for you. Watch closely.”

A forest sprouted in the orb, the oak trees bare of leaves. A thick blanket of gray clouds obscured the sun. Heavy black rope bound a woman at the neck, waist, arms, and ankles to a central tree. The statuesque woman wore a familiar set of light blue sweats. Simon's eyes went dreamy.

“Karen,” he whispered.

Near the tree, a blazing pyre of logs sent a plume of smoke and sparks into the air. Two long, black iron rods protruded from the conflagration's base.

A man in a,hooded red cloak appeared. The cloak stretched down to the ground, the hood pulled forward to hide the man's face in shadow. He stood beside Karen.

Karen screamed in a high-pitched wail. Simon shuddered.

“Your wife,” Cauquemere said, “your love, in danger.”

Simon reached for the orb, but an unseen force stopped his grasping fingers inches away.

“No, no!” Karen begged her attacker. Her head wagged back and forth. “Don't touch me. Don't!”

The assailant knelt. His robe spread out across the ground like a pool of velvet blood. He grabbed the leg of her sweat pants with both hands and pulled. The fabric ripped at the seam, all the way to the hem, and exposed a shapely, pale leg.

“Get away!” screeched Karen. She writhed in vain against her bonds. The twisting ropes drew blood at her wrists.

The hooded man reached back to the fire and extracted one of the metal rods. The sharpened end glowed like a desert sun.

“What do you want?” she pleaded. Sweat trickled from her brow. “I'll do whatever you want.”

The hooded figure plunged the smoking steel into her thigh's soft white skin.

Karen shrieked in pain. Simon whimpered. The sickly sweet scent of burning human flesh wafted from the orb. Karen's leg twitched in spasms of pain.

The man yanked out the iron rod. Seared muscle, bonded to the rod, tore from her leg with a rip. Karen's sobbing screams found heights long lost to evolution. The man slid the rod back into the base of the burning kindling. Flames danced higher in roaring approval of the blackened skin offering.

He extracted the second shaft. Two sharpened prongs at the end glowed bright red.

The man pulled the hood from his head. As he turned, Karen recognized the face of her assailant.

“Oh, God, no,” Simon whispered in horror.

The hooded man was Simon.

“Simon, no!” Karen sobbed. “What are you doing?”

Simon's smaller version raised the steaming dual poker to Karen's eyes.

“This orb does not hold just a figment of my imagination,” Cauquemere said. “Or yours. This is a
vision
. A vision what my reality here will force you to become. That creature has been incubating within you since your arrival in Twin Moon City. What a treat to share its birth with your wife.”

Simon sagged with the weight of despair. “My Karen!” he moaned at the orb.

In the orb, two burning prongs burst the eyeballs of the only woman he ever loved. The liquid inside sizzled into steam.

“You see, Simon,” Cauquemere cooed in his ear, “I can't return you to her. After all, you
are
dead. So, I'll bring her to you. I'd guess about two weeks of this show would scare her to death. And there is room for her here in Twin Moon City.”

Cauquemere sensed the hope that sprouted in Simon's mind burn back into ashes. It was the end of Waikiki Simon.

As if he finally got the joke, Simon spouted hysterical laughter, an uncontrolled rolling cackle, the sound of the release of unbearable stress. He sank to his knees and looked around in wonder at a new world, the one seen through the rotating prism of psychosis.

The door at the end of the chamber opened and the two hunters returned. They assumed positions at Simon's sides.

“Go with your brothers, Simon,” Cauquemere commanded.

Simon rose and the three left the room.

Another soul had joined the Twin Moon City payroll.

Cauquemere ascended the throne. He placed his hat back on his head, the brim again low over his eyes. He sat and the orb with Pete's image floated down and hovered before him.

“Young Pete,” Cauquemere said. “Where would you find work in Atlantic City on short notice?”

Casinos required background checks. Major corporations would do the same. This young dreamwalker would try to stay low profile, unsure of the situation he had thrust himself into. St. Croix would have the resources to check the right spots, where workers were paid in cash and few people saw their faces. Finding Pete was well within his grasp, even if he had to do it in the tactile world.

The girl was something else, though. Walking Twin Moon City, she was no hazard. But if she taught Pete of his dreamwalker skills…

He reached out telepathically to the reserve squad running rings around the palace wall and sent them on a search for blonde female teens. If he hacked at both ends of this invading pest, with neither head nor tail, it would be no threat.

Within the glowing orb in his left hand, Hooded Simon punctured the thigh of his pretty wife again. Cauquemere smiled. One task to complete before he returned to the shell of St. Croix.

He had a date with Karen.

Chapter Thirteen

Pete finally drifted off to sleep that night and arrived neither in Twin Moon City (he was grateful) nor in the midst of an epic adventure (for which he lacked the mental energy).

Instead he stood on a crystal-white beach beneath an azure sky. Scattered cumulus clouds refracted the bright sunlight into shades of silver and white. Behind him stretched a tree line of coconut-laden palms. A warm breeze caressed the fronds into a hypnotic, swaying dance. The bay's faded turquoise waters lapped the beach with tiny, languid crashes. He wore shorts and his favorite Buffalo Bills T-shirt. Two wooden lounge chairs faced the sea. Each sported deep, soft cushions and a scallop shell awning that shielded them from the sun and one of the chairs from Pete's view.

Pete gave his subconscious kudos.

Warm sand squished between Pete's toes as he walked to the chairs. He rounded the awning. The lounge on the left was occupied. To the right, at first he just saw a willowly pair of beautiful legs, but he knew who it was before he saw the rest of her.

Rayna.

Her lustrous, blonde hair was down and she was wore a smart, black one-piece that accentuated every curve perfectly. No worse for the wear from last night's foray into Twin Moon City. Pete couldn't help but smile.

“Rayna,” he said. Her name flowed off his tongue.

“Isn't this place beautiful?” she said, looking across the bay. “It's like the Florida Keys.”

“I think it is,” Pete said. “I remember reading about them.”

“It's a universe away from Twin Moon City.”

Pete arched an eyebrow. Characters that bridged his dreams never acknowledged that they did. They only existed in the present reality, like an actor doing a guest shot on two different TV shows. He perched on the edge of her lounge chair.

“You remember Twin Moon City?”

She turned to face Pete.

“And petting the bear at the zoo, the trip to the Grand Canyon. All the welcome breaks from hell. You have no idea.”

Pete rubbed his temples. “What part of all this is real?”

“It's all real,” she said, “and it all isn't. I don't really understand everything, even though I live in it. Near as I know, in another dimension beneath the one we were
born
into, there is a place we
dream
into. The psychic energy we take into it creates our dreams. When we awaken, and remove that energy, that place and time we created vanishes. Sometimes we bring back a bit of that dimension with us, trailing in our slipstream, and remember our dreams. Most of the time we don't.”

Rayna gave Pete a knowing smile.

“But not you,” she said. “You dream every night without fail, and it's always real as real life. It's always been that way, not just the few months that you've seen me.”

Pete never told anyone about his dreaming, and certainly never thought anyone could explain it back to him even better than he understood it.

“It's the same with you?” he said.

“I wish. There are only a few special people with your gift, people who can slip between both worlds equally. They are called dreamwalkers.”

“Wait a minute,” Pete said. “You aren't part of my imagination, are you? You are from the real world, the one I live in, right?”

Rayna flashed an enchanting, dazzling smile.

“Straight from the old US of A.”

“And you know all this stuff how?” Pete asked.

Rayna's smile wilted. Sadness filled her eyes.

“From my sister. She was a dreamwalker and was in touch with others like her, like you.”

“How are you here, then?” Pete said.

Rayna held her breath. She shifted her position on the lounge chair, her eyes unable to meet Pete's for a moment.

“Our dreams fade away when we leave them, but one nightmare place does not. Twin Moon City. Cauquemere, some kind of evil spirit, lives there. He crosses over into our world temporarily at night.”

The puzzle snapped together. The man with the dreadlocks and the peaked Nazi cap. The man whose flowing, black leather duster flashed in the streetlights of Twin Moon City. The man whose essence tried to destroy Pete's mansion.

“He's a sick, twisted creature,” Rayna said. “He travels to the tactile world, stalks victims with nightmares. Twin Moon City's a creation of his screwed up mind.”

“Well,” Pete said, “I was going to blame my subconscious.”

“What's worse,” Rayna said, “because of his power and his gift to transition, the dreams he inspires and the events in Twin Moon City translate over into our dimension.”

“That's why you cut my arm,” Pete said.

“Sorry,” she apologized. “You needed proof. If I just told you, you'd write it off as dreaming, and if I didn't tell you, you might have been killed on your next trip back.”

Next trip?
Pete thought.

“My sister had seen Twin Moon City a number of times over the years. It was growing. New blocks created out of nothing and then torn to shreds by those rotting corpses in the 4X4's. Cauquemere draws power from people's terror as his zombie warriors hunt and torture them. They eventually become Jeep-riding members of the walking dead.”

Pete thought of Simon. More than halfway along that trip from soul to soulless. The poor bastard.

“Cauquemere discovered Estella, that's my sister, and haunted her with horrible nightmares all spring. Fear and anxiety drained her, until she was a wisp of who she used to be.”

A tear rolled down Rayna's cheek. She wiped it away and sniffed.

“I watched her die from the inside out.”

Pete's heart withered for her.

“I stayed with her in her apartment in Philly for months,” Rayna continued. “She was too scared to sleep alone and made me wake her up every hour.

“Then one night I missed my cue. I fell asleep right next to her. I swear it was only for minutes. But when I woke up, it was too late. She was gone. Her body was stone cold.”

Rayna barely choked out the last few words. She took a deep breath to compose herself.

“So I followed her.”

“You followed her?” Pete said.

“I ran to her bathroom and pulled out every anti-anxiety medication doctors had prescribed her. I mashed them into one dusty mess, added water, and drank. My heart stopped minutes later.”

Pete's jaw dropped. He'd assumed his dream girl was, like him, alive, somewhere.

“When I died, I sensed a kind of trail her spirit left,” Rayna continued. “I was pulled hard in another direction, but I followed Estella. Her trail took me to Twin Moon City.”

“Did you find her?” Pete asked.

“No, but I sense her in Cauquemere's palace. She's weak, but she's there. I can't get in there to save her. Not alone.”

“How do you get out of there and into my dreams?”

“I don't know,” Rayna answered. “Honestly, a window kind of opens, I'm drawn through it, and here I am with you somewhere wonderful. It started soon after I arrived in Twin Moon City. I can't say when exactly. Time is hard to measure.”

“I don't see you every night though,” Pete said.

“Some nights you aren't there. Well, you're there, but it's as if you're far away. No, that's not it. You're still close, but it's like there's just an outline of you wrapped in fog. Like before you came out of the tunnel in Twin Moon City. Those nights I can't find you.”

The mansion dream location must have hidden him from her and from Cauquemere.

“But the nights I can open windows to you,” she said, “so can Cauquemere. When you sleep, you play in his sandbox.”

“How can I help you?” Pete asked.

“Come back to Twin Moon City,” she said. “Help me find a way to rescue my sister. Only a dreamwalker has the power to confront Cauquemere.”

He recalled the nightmare of Twin Moon City, the real risks he took in that dark reality. He looked into Rayna's eyes. Alive or not, across any dimension, he'd do anything for her.

“I'll go back,” he said. “We'll rescue your sister. Somehow.”

Rayna's green eyes sparkled like the sun on the sea behind her. She gave his hand a quick squeeze.

“I knew I could count on you.”

Pete opened his eyes. He lay in his bed above DiStephano's. A ruddy dawn tried to force itself through the window. He closed his eyes and felt Rayna's warmth settle over him again. He fell back asleep in her memory's sweet embrace.