Authors: Kim Newman
However, just then the dragon’s head came off. Underneath had been a midget sitting on the shoulders of a tall black man. The midget was smoking a cigar and had a tommy gun. He fired into the air, and a chandelier crashed down. Everybody screamed and tried to get out of range. The wrestlers moved as a team towards the troublemakers, and we circled round behind them. Carradine picked up a sword a Sir Lancelot had dropped, and we ran up the steps towards Macready’s lair. The gun went off again, and chips of marble flew from the steps ahead of us.
We hit the doors at a run, and burst through.
It had, of course, been too easy.
In Macready’s large private office, guns were levelled at us. The gambling king stood to one side, wrapped in a black kimono, a white scarf knotted at his throat. The Nazis had left, but there was a huge portrait of
der Fuhrer
himself, Anton Diffring, over the desk.
‘Mr Quick,’ he rasped, ‘welcome to Noir et Blanc. This gentleman is Captain of Detectives Barton MacLane. He has been most anxious to meet you. And these people with guns are National Guardsmen. I would appreciate it if you gave up without a fight. We’ve only just redecorated.’
MacLane, a flab-faced, mean-eyed boxer type, chomped a cigar. ‘You’re unner arrest, flatfoot.’
Slowly, I took my fists out of my pockets and opened them empty. I spread them in benediction, and reached up for some air.
‘I surrender,’ I said.
‘Whaddya mean, ya bum,’ shouted MacLane, ‘ya resistin’ arrest.’
The guns came up, the safeties came off. Then the action started.
S
omething popped inside John Carradine’s head, and he cartwheeled across the room, dodging bullets. He collided with the Guardsmen, and they went down in a tangle.
Struggling to his feet, he realised he was waving his sword. Things were happening too fast to keep up with. The voice in his head, Yggdrasil, told him what to do. He wasn’t obliged to follow his own scenario any more, but he knew he would have to obey the voice now. This was a crucial stage in the main plot.
Macready raised his stick, cruel mouth curving like a second scar, and a foot-long blade sprang out. The gambling king slashed downwards and, although he stepped back, Carradine could feel the cold trace of the knifepoint parting his clothes, drawing a slice down his skinny ribs. Before Macready could thrust, Carradine parried perfectly. Sparks flew.
Macready unbelted his kimono, Carradine threw off his cloak. They circled each other, making probing moves. Carradine felt he had the measure of his enemy. The two men fought in the centre of the office. Carradine hacked at the other man’s stick, and a length of wood flew away. But there was a steel core, and Macready fenced on, undeterred. He was the more skilled swordsman. With a lucky stroke, Carradine gave his opponent a cut on his left cheek. If it healed, he would have matching scars now. Macready wiped his wound with a sleeve, and radiated hatred.
‘Die, scarecrow popinjay!’
Everyone else in the room was crowded against the walls, out of range of the swinging swords. Carradine vaulted up on the desk and made moves around Macready’s head, while Macready struck at Carradine’s dancing legs, missing repeatedly. Carradine leaped and the two men went down, grappling, weapons lost. Macready pushed Carradine’s chin upwards, fingers digging into his throat. Locked together, they rolled across the carpet. With Macready under him, Carradine felt his enemy go rigid, then limp.
Macready had rolled onto his own blade.
Carradine stood up, bleeding from several cuts. He touched his side, and his hand came away bloody.
‘Look, Richie. It’s…
red
!’
Richie Quick took his hat off and stared. Carradine knew that something momentous was happening. The voice congratulated him.
‘Bring him down,’ sneered the policeman, MacLane.
‘No,’ shouted Richie.
The guns went off again, and Carradine felt the thumps across his chest.
Finally assured that he had been truly alive, he died.
S
usan could have sworn the bullethole in Cook’s forehead turned into an eye and winked at her. It was possible. In Dreams, anything was possible. She should know that.
Still rattled, she walked away from the cab, leaving the remains in the front seat. The taxi hummed in the road, motor idling, meter ticking over. Traffic passed it by. Susan had tagged a uniformed cop on the beat in the distance, and guessed she wouldn’t want to talk to him about the corpse. She was new in the City. She didn’t have any friends yet.
Cook had been Daine’s way of welcoming her, she thought. Just one of those casual I-can-do-anything-I-want-any-time-I-want-and-make-you-like-it gestures so beloved of megalomaniacs, mass murderers and the Gunmint. But if the news item in the
Inquirer
was the literal truth, Daine was dead. That wasn’t likely. Although his brainwaves were doing some interesting things on the printouts, Dr Groome had monitored no major trauma. Susan suspected her quarry had decided to stop wearing his own face for a while, so he could deal with his guests. And Tom Tunney must have been absurdly easy to deal with. In a way, it was perfect: faced with a would-be assassin, Daine had had himself killed and set up his opponent to take the consequences.
She was determined to be less biddable. If she could find somewhere dry, she would be able to go on the offensive. If the psychs were on line, Daine should be losing some of his control. Even if he had been gulped down by the City, Tunney should be making some difference, feeding in his own amendments. And Susan thought she could transform the entire environment once she got a grip on it. After all, she had had more practice at manufacturing realities than Daine. Porno Dreams were of a notoriously low standard, blurry beyond the bedroom, giving the dreamer the feeling he was
dybbukking
a deep-sea diving suit rather than a human body.
She stopped at a newsstand. It was different from the one where she had bought her extra, but it was also manned by Mickey Rooney. He must be a fixture of the cliché. Without pausing for wisecracks, she picked up a cheap map. Down the street a block or two, she found a spot under a grocer’s awning where she could pore over the map. It unfolded from a slim oblong into a sheet-sized square that flapped and fought in the wind and didn’t bear much resemblance to what she’d seen of the City so far. It was particularly vague around the edges. Susan intuited that the Dream was evolving fast, recasting its inhabitants, twisting its externals.
Used to giving in to Dreams, she was learning how to fight back. This was no serial hallucination, in which the dreamer was trapped in the viewpoints of a succession of similies. Here, everyone who entered was free to be Dreamer. Daine needed that flexibility, but he must have been aware of the risks. He had been ready for Tunney. He thought he was ready for her.
Beyond the curtain of rain, strange forms moved. Susan wished Daine would show himself so they could struggle mind to mind and settle this thing. But the City Father would be out there in his maze, sending his cat’s paws into battle, wearing down his enemies, squeezing their minds. In particular, she expected perils out of the flatties – murderous hoodlums, crooked cops, knife-wielding janitors – but she knew that if he stretched his mind a touch, Daine could make anything or anyone in the City into a weapon. Here, she could as easily be killed by Shirley Temple, Elmer Fudd or Lou Costello as by Jack Palance, Freddy Krueger or Anthony Perkins.
She tried to find herself on the map, but the printed boulevards and blocks writhed whenever she looked up at the street, making new patterns. Susan saw Escher mazes and Mobius strips. Annoyed, she crumpled the map and threw it into the gutter. It twisted into an origami boat and sailed off towards a sewer inlet. She heard an echo of the pirates’ chorus from
The Sea Hawk
in the rain.
The awning flew back with a chainsaw rasp, and a cascade of rainwater came down on her head. The raincoat kept most of it off, but her hair got a soaking even under her hood. She thought it dry, and it was, but she could not make a dent in the downpour itself. She reached out across the street and tried to get an idea of the shape of a building she could dimly see. Its dimensions were easy to get a hold on. A brown stone, three storeys tall, derelict, with a squared-off roof, an arch of chimneys, a child’s picture arrangement of windows and an imposing front doorway. The windows were gone entirely or boarded over. She closed her eyes, but could still see the building.
In her mind, she changed the picture. She stripped away the outer shell brick by brick, and massaged the essence of the structure, fashioning a gothic cathedral. Spires raised to the skies, lightning flashing around them, and windows filled with stained glass. The cathedral spread, squashing the buildings on either side like plasticine, then absorbing them entirely. Angels danced in the air and settled reverently into their alcoves. Paving stones stood up and were drawn into the new building.
The process was silent. Susan opened her eyes, and surveyed her handiwork. It was crude, a trifle unfinished and unformed – in any other Dream, she would have researched the externals rather than built on a whim – but it was what she wanted. She willed the great wooden doors open, and crossed the street. Inside, it would at least be dry.
She stepped through the doors, and found herself in total darkness. She had forgotten to imagine an interior. An easy mistake. She was used to fashioning scenery for the background. In Dreams, you always passed by more houses than you explored. There was no rain in the darkness, and she could make even its sound go away by concentrating hard for a few moments. In the darkness, the Dream was raw and formless. She made herself a cathedral, not quite in the spirit of the exterior, but roomy enough. The vast building gave her a feeling of power. Although she knew it must be tiny in comparison with the rest of the City, it
felt
enormous, and it was the feelings that counted. She made herself a pump organ, and Dreamed up a man to play it.
Lord Roger Marshaller, the most nearly decent of Vanessa Vail’s suitors, emerged from the sacristy and walked across the aisle to the organ. Susan had combined the faces of several older men – a teacher, a holomeister, some singers – she had been smitten with between the ages of nine and twelve, then weathered them to make her composite even more appealing. Lord Roger was supposed to be a fantasy for bored romantics. His laughing blue eyes had steely grey flecks in them, and he was wont to pass huge, yet sensitive, fingers through his leonine mane of silver-grey hair. She had Dreamed Lord Roger as a former surgeon, still brooding because of his inability to save the life of his only child. He was also a Nobel laureate, a leading ice sculptor and a master horseman. Now, she gave him an unmatched musical talent too.
She sat down, unnoticed, in a pew, while Lord Roger limbered up. He played scales, flexing his surgeon-sculptor’s hands. Then, he launched into ‘Barbara Allen’.
In Scarlet Town, where I was born
There is a fair maid dwellin’
Made every lad cry “lack-a-day”
For the love of Barbara Allen
…
Susan realised her mistake. A small jazz combo had popped out of nowhere and were arrayed around Lord Roger. A vocalist – Annie Belladonna, the teenage xenobiologist heroine of
The Sewer Thing
– enunciated the lyrics in Rosemary Clooney’s voice. The music was sucking her in…
Twas in the merry month of May,
When green buds they were swellin
’
And on his death-bed Sweet William lay
For the love of Barbara Allen
…
The roof began to fade. Susan felt the rain come in. The music was louder in her mind, louder than anything. More and more instruments took up the melody, drowning out the frail lyric line. A choir appeared behind the altar, offering peculiar harmonies. The children opened too-large mouths in otherwise blank faces. The improvisation stretched on, drawing Susan into it, locking into set patterns of repetition which were as fascinating as the gaze of a cobra. The number might never end, and Susan would be caught for ever.
With a painful effort, she banished the music, and the cathedral fell silent. Annie Belladonna, the musicians, the choir, all were gone. Lord Roger slumped over the organ keyboard, the life whipped out of him. She gave it back, but he could only move jerkily, like an unwieldy puppet. Susan made him climb down from the organ and walk over to her, but his uncoordinated limbs reminded her too much of the zombies in Corin Santangelo’s horror Dream
Eyeball Gougers from Italy
. She didn’t want to see what she had done to his craggy yet handsome face, so she made him go away. He whisped out of his clothes, which hung man-shaped in the air for a second and then drifted to the floor.
She would have to be careful about her overconfidence binges.
Outside the cathedral, there would be a chauffeur-driven skimmer waiting for her. A sports model, with an andrew to pilot it.
She was right, only the anachronisms she tried to wedge into Daine’s Dream didn’t take. The skimmer was a long, black automobile. And the chauffeur was a liveried war veteran with a steel face and leather hands. That would just have to do.
She got into the back of the car, and was glad to see her unconscious had had the foresight to include a bar.
She poured herself a shot and knocked it back. It stung the back of her throat and fired in her belly. Shaking her head at the kick, she lashed out at the whole row of stores opposite her cathedral and dispelled them to dust. Gushers rose from disconnected water pipes, and the Dream matter sludged instantly.
Without being told, the chauffeur drove away. She was back in a vehicle again, but this time it was hers. She wondered how much control she had over the chauffeur. After Lord Roger, she intended to be careful. You couldn’t just make and unmake people at will without working at it.