Dom Magator turned around and looked at the audience, and then he suddenly knew why. The rows of seats were emptying fast — not because the dreamers were walking out, but because they were vanishing. They had probably been jolted out of REM sleep by the grisly spectacle of the fire breather being blown apart, and one by one they were waking up.
‘Crap!’ he said. ‘Is George Roussos still here? Quick!’
An-Gryferai switched on her sensors and scanned the remaining members of the audience, from one side of the big top to the other, and back again. But even as she did so, more of them simply vanished, and the auditorium was beginning to take on the appearance of a checkers board, with counters being taken faster and faster.
‘Jesus, An-Gryferai!’ Dom Magator shouted at her. ‘Is George Roussos still here or not? If he’s woken up already, we’re screwed! We’re going to be stuck here in this goddamned nightmare with no way of getting out of it until he dreams it again! If he ever dreams it again — ’cause I sure as hell wouldn’t want to, if I were him!’
‘I don’t see him!’ said An-Gryferai. ‘I don’t see him anywhere!’
‘Sheeit!’ said Zebenjo’Yyx. ‘How much worse luck can any one person get, man? I’m crippled by day and stuck in some asshole’s nightmare by night!’
‘No — no, wait a minute!’ An-Gryferai interrupted him. ‘I see him now! George Roussos! He’s sitting right at the end of the sixteenth row, talking to some woman. It looks like the woman’s upset, and he’s trying to comfort her.’
‘Then let’s get the hell out of here, right now!’ said Dom Magator.
‘What about our mom?’ Jekkalon begged him. ‘We can’t just leave her here!’
‘We’ll be back, Jekkalon!’ Dom Magator told him. ‘We have to come back! We still haven’t finished off Brother Albrecht yet!’
Dom Magator took hold of Xyrena’s arm and helped her to climb down from the stage. The clowns and the freaks nudged them and pushed them, but none of them made any serious effort to stop them, especially when Zebenjo’Yyx pointed his finger at them, and Dom Magator unholstered a large nickel-plated handgun.
‘You know what this is?’ he demanded, waving it from side to side. ‘It’s called a Jangle Pistol. You know what they call it that? Because it jangles, and when it jangles it shakes your teeth out, that’s what it does. All of your teeth — incisors, canines and molars, so you end up as gummy as a geriatric. Now, get out of my fricking way, unless you want to be sucking rusks for the next eight hundred years.’
The clowns and the freaks lifted their hands in mocking surrender, and some of them jeered, and pursed their lips to pretend that they had no teeth already, but they stayed well back. The Night Warriors jostled their way out through the main entrance of the big top and emerged into the wild and windy darkness. As An-Gryferai had warned them, it was stormier than ever, and a blizzard of leaves and twigs were flying through the air. A wooden chicken-coop was being blown between the caravans, over and over, with three black chickens squawking inside it.
They started to head back the way they had come, toward the hill. But before they had reached the last of the tents, An-Gryferai saw what looked at first like a long line of fir bushes waving in the field up ahead of them. She said, ‘Hold it, everybody! Wait up just a second!’ and focused on the bushes more closely. They had pointed tops but they weren’t swaying in the same way that bushes would sway. When she switched on her night-vision clarifier, she realized that they weren’t bushes at all, but clowns — clowns wearing black and white and blood-red suits, and that all of them were wielding knives or clubs or sickles or catapults. Their faces were painted in a variety of classic clown expressions — dead white and expressionless, or scowling in exaggerated hostility, or madly grinning.
‘Clowns,’ warned An-Gryferai. ‘And it looks like they seriously don’t want us to escape from this dream.’
Dom Magator reached over his shoulder to the rack on his back and unfastened one of his rifles. ‘Acoustic Carbine,’ he said, pulling back a chrome lever at the side to arm it. ‘It resonates in your enemy’s inner ear and throws him off balance.’
‘What about your Absence Gun, man?’ asked Zebenjo’Yyx. ‘That would wipe the smiles off of their faces — and for ever, too.’
‘Unh-hunh,’ Dom Magator told him. ‘You only use an Absence Gun as an absolute last resort. Think about it. If a person never existed, then their children never existed, neither. So their grandchildren never existed, nor their great-grandchildren, all the way down the line. You understand me? Some of these clowns could be hundreds of years old, right, and have literally thousands of descendants. It could be a twenty-generation massacre.’
‘OK, man. I get it. But if you’re going to throw them off balance, then you’d better do it, like, now! It looks like they’re heading this way!’
He was right. The long ragged line of clowns was marching toward them, all with that bustling, exaggerated walk that clowns use in their circus acts. They were brandishing their clubs and their sickles and their knives were flashing in the darkness, and as they came hurrying nearer, the Night Warriors began to hear them hooting and howling.
Dom Magator lifted his Acoustic Carbine and fired into the thick of them. The shot from the carbine was ultrasound, high above the range of human hearing, so that at first the other Night Warriors thought that nothing had happened until over a dozen of the clowns started to stagger and stumble and bump into each other. The resonance from Dom Magator’s rifle was vibrating the vestibular nerves inside their ears beyond all human tolerance, and they simply couldn’t keep their balance.
Dom Magator fired again, and again, and more clowns tumbled and fell. But Jemexxa said, ‘There are hundreds of them! Where are they all coming from?’
She was right. Even as the front ranks of clowns collided with each other and fell to the ground, more of them came surging out of the darkness, with white faces and silvery-green faces and faces fixed in greasepaint grimaces.
‘This is a nightmare, don’t forget!’ Dom Magator reminded her, aiming at a tall clown with a ghostly white face and pouting black lips. ‘Just about anything can happen in a nightmare!’
He kept on firing, but it was rapidly becoming obvious that even with his Acoustic Carbine he wasn’t going to be able to bring down all of the clowns on his own — not before the clowns managed to get close enough to attack them hand-to-hand.
‘Zebenjo’Yyx!’ he shouted. ‘Give ’em a quick burst, will you?’
Dom Magator was always reluctant to kill the people he encountered in dreams, no matter how aggressive they were, because there was no way of telling if they were a figment of some dreamer’s imagination, or real people dreaming about themselves. If they were real, their real selves might not actually die, but so much of their consciousness was involved in creating their dream that there was a high risk that they could suffer severe brain damage. If that happened, they could remain in a comatose state for the rest of their lives, unable to wake up, ever.
But now the clowns were swarming so thick and so fast that even Dom Magator’s Absence Gun wouldn’t be able to annihilate them all. The clowns rose ceaselessly out of the ground like the army of skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts, grown from the Hydra’s teeth. Their howlings and their hootings began to develop a terrible rhythm of their own, ha! ha! ha! ha! like derisory laughter.