Melancholy could have been a typical mid-West farming community except for the its purple sky and the fact that its perspective was all wrong and everything about it was out of proportion. An-Gryferai caught sight of a German Shepherd at the far end of the street that was almost twice the size of its owner, but as they came nearer, the German Shepherd shrank and its owner grew taller. At the other end of the street, the church was no bigger than a doll’s house.
She circled around the township twice, and then she angled her wings and wheeled toward Brother Albrecht’s circus. The big top and all of the other tents had been erected in the same pattern as last night’s dream, with the animal cages in a line between the caravans. The site was teeming with circus hands and clowns and freaks, as well as scores of ordinary, bewildered-looking people who must have been dreamers. She was sure she glimpsed Mickey Veralnik amongst them, but she could have been mistaken.
‘D.M? I don’t think the show’s started yet,’ she told Dom Magator. ‘Everybody’s milling around outside. But there are ten times more dreamers here than there were last night. It looks like Brother Albrecht is really pulling them in.’
‘No sign of Mago Verde?’
‘Not so far. I’m going to go round one more time, lower this time. I don’t think anybody’s noticed me yet. Maybe they think I’m a turkey buzzard.’
She swooped around the big top once again. She could hear the organ music playing, and the braying of a distressed donkey. As she circled over the caravans, however, she heard a high voice screaming out, ‘Lookit! Up there! Up in the sky! It’s that bird-woman!’
She twisted her head around and saw a midget clown in red suspenders jumping up and down and frantically pointing up at her. ‘There! It’s that bird-woman! The one who blew up Flammo!’
Another clown tossed a tent peg up at her, which hit her on the left thigh. Then a circus hand threw a mallet, and another clown tossed up a bucket. A whole shower of tent pegs flew up, as well as throwing knives and more buckets. She urgently beat her wings to gain more height, so that none of the missiles could reach her. Then she tilted herself back toward the west, so that she could rejoin the rest of the Night Warriors.
As she flew over the main entrance to the big top, past the sign which read Albrecht’s Traveling Circus & Freak Show, a man stepped out from underneath the archway. A man in a dusty black tuxedo, with ragged white hair and a pale gray face and a sharp green grin.
He looked up at her, his arms folded, but because of his make-up she couldn’t tell if he was really grinning or not. She guessed that he was probably scowling.
‘He’s here!’ she told Dom Magator. ‘Mago Verde is already here! I just saw him standing outside the big top!’
‘In that case, we’ll have to go in right now. You keep circling around, An-Gryferai. I need you to be ready to dive down and grab Mago Verde’s victim, if she’s here. The rest of us will have to try a full-frontal assault.’
An-Gryferai wheeled around again. Below her, the circus hands and the clowns and the freaks were already picking up pitchforks and tent pegs and machetes and beginning to pour between the tents toward the western side of the circus site, where the Night Warriors would be coming from. They were whooping and howling and calling out, ‘No more nightmare! No more nightmare! Real! Real! Real!’
Out in the wheat field, Dom Magator lifted a heavy chrome-plated carbine from the rack on his back. He unhooked a long magazine from his belt and clicked it into the carbine’s rear handgrip.
‘What’s that?’ asked Zebenjo’Yyx. ‘Not another one of your pansy-assed Knock-’Em-Off-Balance-But-Don’t-Hurt-’Em Guns?’
‘Not this time,’ Dom Magator told him. ‘This time I’ve brought something seriously lethal. A Scythe Rifle.’
‘A what do you say?’
‘You’ll see. And pretty soon, too. Here they come.’
Through the heat-distorted wheat field, trampling down the crops as they came, over a hundred clowns and circus hands and freaks came storming toward them.
‘Oh my God,’ said Xyrena. ‘We don’t stand a cat in hell’s chance.’
‘Yes, we do,’ Dom Magator retorted. ‘So long as we don’t lose our nerve. What are they? Clowns, OK? Clowns and tent riggers and midgets. And what are we? Natural born highly-skilled warriors. Absolutely no contest. Now remember — don’t fire until you see the reds of their noses.’
‘We’re about to get ourselves slaughtered to death and you’re makin’ a joke out of it?’ Zebenjo’Yxx protested. ‘You’re really somethin’, man!’
‘What do you want me and Jemexxa to do?’ Jekkalon asked.
‘Hit as many of the clowns as you can. But don’t use up all of your energy, Jemexxa. I want to see that circus razed to the ground before we leave this dream.’
‘You got it, dude.’
By now the howling rabble of circus folk was almost on them. Dom Magator stood in the center, with Zebenjo’Yyx on his left-hand side and Jekkalon and Jemexxa on his right. Xyrena stood back behind them. She knew that her time would come, but it wasn’t yet.
‘No more nightmare! No more nightmare!’ screamed the clowns and the freaks. ‘Real! Real! Real!’
Up above them, the huge white cumulus clouds boiled up, taking on the shapes of skulls and phantoms and human faces with their mouths dragged down in agony. The whole of Brother Albrecht’s dream was thirsting for battle.
TWENTY-TWO
Full Circle
The circus folk were less than a hundred yards away. ‘No more nightmare! No more nightmare! Real! Real! Real!’
Dom Magator waited until the last possible moment, and then he said, very quietly, ‘OK, everybody. Let ’em have it.’
Zebenjo’Yyx released a blizzard of arrows from both hands. They clattered and whistled as they flew from the release mechanisms on his forearms, and the clowns collapsed into the wheat by the score, their bodies bristling like porcupines.
Jemexxa kept her back to the circus folk, so that she could raise the palm of one hand and reflect a bolt of lightning into Jekkalon’s hand. The lightning jumped from one twin to the other with an ear-splitting crack, and Jekkalon aimed it into the thickest part of the crowd. It exploded with such force that they could see a visible shock-wave ripple across the field, and fragments of clown and clothing were blasted high up into the purple sky.
Now Dom Magator hefted his Scythe Rifle up to his hip. He squeezed the trigger and it uttered a piercing, continuous scream. A stream of liquid lead poured out of the muzzle like water from a high-pressure hose, cutting the circus folk into pieces as he slowly swung the rifle from left to right. Soon the field in front of them was heaped with bodies and the wheat was stained rusty with blood.
Within minutes, fewer than a dozen clowns and circus hands were left standing, apart from three or four freaks — one of them a boy with six legs, like a huge spider.
‘You want some more, you bastards?’ Dom Magator yelled at them, and he shocked himself by the harshness of his own voice. ‘There’s plenty more where this came from!’
The circus folk hesitated for a moment, and then they turned around and began to scamper and hobble back toward the black tents.
‘Come on,’ said Dom Magator. ‘No time to waste. This is where we go for the Grand Freak himself.’
They stepped gingerly through the scattered bodies. Xyrena kept saying, ‘My God, my God, what have we done?’ but Dom Magator didn’t answer her. He remembered the first time that he had fought a battle in a nightmare, and inflicted casualties, and he remembered how shocked he had been, even when he had woken up the following morning.