‘She’s not real. She’s just a dream. You said so yourself.’
‘Right now she is, yes. But people suffer, sweetheart, even in the world of dreams. And if we don’t stop Brother Albrecht from bringing his carnival back to this world, she won’t be a dream any more. She’ll be real, and suffering for real. Brother Albrecht will put her on show, along with all of his other freaks, so that the paying public can come along and gawp at her.’
Kieran said, ‘He’s right, Kiera. We can’t let that happen.’
Kiera sat down at her dressing table again and stared at three reflections of herself in its mirrors. ‘Look at me,’ she said. ‘Selfish Kiera and mean Kiera and uncaring Kiera.’
But Rhodajane came and stood behind her and laid her hands on her shoulders. ‘Honey, all of us are selfish, and all of us are mean, and none of us give a shit. That’s the way I’ve been all of my life — with men, and with money, and with my own dear sisters. But you only have to do one thing for somebody else — just one — for no other reason except that you believe it’s your duty as a human being, and God will forgive you for all of your heartlessness, and you might even find that He gives you a heart by way of saying thank you.’
Kiera wiped tears away from her eyes. Springer came up to stand beside Rhodajane and said, ‘When you walked into that dream last night, Kiera, that wasn’t even your dream. Kieran knew that, didn’t you, Kieran? It was being dreamed by a young girl of eight years old who was staying with her parents in Room Six-Two-Five. Your psychic sensitivity enabled you and Kieran to enter her dream and find out what had happened to your mother.
‘You can see the dead, can’t you — you and Kieran?’
‘You know about that, too?’ said Kieran. ‘Is there anything you don’t know about us?’
‘To Ashapola, Kieran, all human beings are an open book. All I do is turn the pages and read what’s written there.’
‘So you know we saw some bum on Santa Monica Boulevard jumping in front of the traffic and never getting hurt; and some gangster with his throat cut in the barbershop at the Handlery Hotel in San Francisco; and some drowned woman in the Japanese Garden in Portland, just lying under the water in the pond smiling up at us like she was happy at last.’
‘Yes,’ said Springer. ‘And that’s why you can be so useful to us. We suspect that Gordon Veitch could be one of those dead people who won’t lie down. A Dread, we call them. That’s why he can move so easily from the real world to the dream world, and back again. He can appear, he can disappear, whenever he feels like it. But he won’t be able to hide from you two, in either world.’
Kiera reached out and took hold of Kieran’s hand. She briefly closed her eyes and gave him an almost imperceptible nod.
‘OK,’ said Kieran. ‘We’ll do it.’
‘You’re sure about that?’
‘We’re sure,’ Kiera told him. ‘Kieran’s right. If there’s any chance of rescuing our mom — we have to try, at the very least.’
‘The point is, how do we get out of here?’ asked Kieran. ‘Sherwin and Lamar won’t let us out of their sight, even if you turned yourself back into “Lois”. The promoters pay for them, to protect their investment.’
‘Oh, don’t worry,’ said Springer. ‘I’ve already booked a room on the fourth floor, room Four-Three-Nine, directly above this one. All you have to do is climb two stories up the fire escape. I left the balcony doors unlocked. Meantime, I’ll leave here through the front door and tell your bodyguard friends that you’re not to be disturbed.’
Kiera said, ‘So you have everything arranged already. How did you know we were going to say yes?’
Springer was gradually changing his appearance, from Kenny Ballantine back into Lois Schulz. They all found it fascinating to watch, as “Kenny” dwindled down to five feet four and his hair turned dark and his long gangly legs became skinny and bowed, with shiny black pantyhose and black patent shoes with very high heels.
‘How did I know you were going to say yes? You’re natural-born Night Warriors, that’s why. You’re Jekkalon and Jemexxa, the acrobat and the acrobat’s twin. That’s who you are, even more than Kieran and Kiera Kaiser. It’s your destiny.’
TWELVE
Night Flight
By midnight, David was snoring softly with his green mask over his eyes. Katie eased herself out of bed and went through to her dressing room. She opened up her white satin-covered jewelry box and took out the folded slip of paper that Springer had given her. Before she opened it, she looked at herself in her dressing-table mirror.
‘You don’t have to do this, Katie,’ she told herself. ‘If you’d rather take a rain check, what can he do to you? He’s just a young guy who happens to look a whole lot like Mr Flight, that’s all.’
Actually, she wasn’t so sure about that. If Springer was capable of showing her what she looked like when she was all dressed up in her Night Warriors suit, maybe he was capable of making sure that she wore it, and that she went out hunting for this Gordon Veitch character, and Brother Albrecht’s carnival, whether she wanted to or not.
She held up the piece of paper. To her surprise, the words on it seemed to be written in her own handwriting. Very softly, she read them out.
‘“Now, when the face of the world is hidden in darkness, let us be conveyed to the place of our meeting, armed and armored; and let us be nourished by the power that is dedicated to the cleaving of darkness, the settling of all black matters, and the dissipation of all evil. So be it.”’
Katie thought that the words sounded rather pompous and medieval, but in spite of that she still found them stirring, and she particularly liked the phrase about ‘the place of our meeting, armed and armored’, which reassured her that she was not going to be alone, but part of a fighting force with other Night Warriors.
She crept back into the bedroom and slid herself under the covers. David was lying on his right side now, and talking to himself. As far as she could make out, he was giving a lecture, but it all sounded like nonsense. ‘Not psychotic, no. Umbrellas. And everybody has to go now.’
He was talking so loudly that she was afraid that she wouldn’t be able to fall asleep, but somehow the words that Springer had given her to read had affected her as if she had taken a strong sedative, and after only a few minutes her eyes began to close. The illuminated clock on the nightstand beside her read twelve twenty-seven.
Darkness flooded into her mind; and at the same time she began to feel lighter and lighter. With the abrupt buoyancy of a helium balloon caught by a gust of wind, she bobbed up from her bed and floated upward, toward the ceiling. Startled, she rolled around in mid air, and as she did so she looked down and there she was, her own sleeping self. Her short brunette hair was already tousled, and she was touching her cheek with one hand as if she were making sure that she was real.
She rolled around again, so that she was facing upward, just as she reached the ceiling. She held up both hands to prevent herself from being pressed up against it, but her hands disappeared right into the plaster as if it were nothing but the softest of fine white sand. The rest of her followed, with a thick shushing sound, and she found that she was rising through the attic, where all of their suitcases and their books and their old furniture was stored. She saw the carved pine headboard from Daisy’s bed, the bed in which poor little Daisy had died, and somehow that gave her all the more determination to carry on. Even if she hadn’t been able to save Daisy, she could save other innocent children.
She kept on rising, and passed through the attic ceiling as easily as she had passed through the bedroom ceiling; and then the roof shingles; and in a few seconds she was high above the house. To the south she could see the glittering lights of Miami Beach, and to the west she could see clear across Biscayne Bay to Morningside Park. To the north, on the far side of the Surprise Waterway, she could see La Gorce Country Club, and an endless red stream of tail lights on Collins Avenue, like blood corpuscles flowing through the darkness.