Chapter 25
“Where are we?”
The mummy had been replaced by the same young man that I had met earlier. His uniform had gone from dusty rags to a neat olive drab. His skin was normal instead of a dried-out husk, where before there had been splits in his scalp there was thick dark hair. This was how he saw himself, or, more likely, how the Nachtmar ensured he saw himself. The mummified corpse was all that really remained.
I knew that our bodies were still in Las Vegas. This place was real enough, but we weren’t. This was incredibly dangerous. As Mordechai had warned me long ago, when you leave a perfectly good body empty for long enough, something would come along and live in it.
“Where are we?” the ghost of Marcus Kitashima repeated.
“Look around. You tell me where we are.”
Much like how the mummy had been replaced by what looked like a normal human being, the fog-filled casino had been replaced by a wide-open desert of scrub brush. In the near distance were the shadows of mountains. It didn’t seem that different from the terrain I’d been in earlier in Dugway. After all, in terms of actual miles, we weren’t really that far away. Marcus had been buried not very far from his last earthly home.
“It seems…familiar. Why are we here?”
“Because I need you to understand that truth.”
It was freezing cold, but not from the strange energy-siphoning effect of the Nachtmar. This place really was that miserably cold in real life. The wind was howling. There was a dusting of snow on the sand. It was a barren, ugly place.
“Where have you taken me?” he asked, suspicious.
“You brought us here. This is what you’ve been looking for all along. I don’t know how to get here, but you’ve known all along, and he’s been leading you astray. The only thing I’ve done is help you get out from under the demon’s thumb. I’m like you.” I didn’t understand a fraction of what the Old Ones’ artifact had done to me, and I hated letting someone else tap into that strength. As I’d been told, everything from the other side came with a price, and I was going to have to pay for this somehow. “The Nachtmar isn’t strong enough to stop us both.”
He studied the horizon. It didn’t matter that it was dark. It wasn’t like his eyes were real anyway. He could see our surroundings just fine. “It does look familiar.” Marcus walked forward a few feet, squatted down, and poked at something in the sand. It was a chunk of an old bottle. Nearby were a few scraps of lumber rotting back into the ground. “But this…This can’t be…I know this place. There was a town here. Well, not really a town…They were only shacks, but…”
“They’re gone. They’ve been gone for a really long time. I tried to tell you before.”
Marcus went to his knees and laid his hands flat on the sand. “This feels like the place. I lived here. This isn’t another of his lies, is it?”
“I’m sorry. This is now. This is real.”
“This is where I left her. My wife…I promised her I’d come back.”
“But that was over sixty years ago. You’ve been asleep a long time.”
“It can’t be. That means…” he trailed off.
“Yeah.” It meant that everyone he’d ever know was probably dead, or so old that he wouldn’t be able to recognize them anyway. The world had passed him by. He was quiet for a long time as the terrible ramifications set in. “This isn’t your time anymore.”
“We’d only been married a year. She was going to have a baby.” The dead man’s voice cracked. “I promised her I’d come back when the war was over.”
“You have. Not making it in time isn’t your fault.”
The clock was ticking, but I needed the host to come to terms with reality.
Marcus stared at the ground, deflated. “They came here and asked for volunteers. Really? After throwing us out of the house I built with my own hands, after taking my father’s orchard away, and putting us out here in a shack that wasn’t even fit for pigs, where the wind blew right through the walls, and I was supposed to leave my wife in that damned shack, and they wanted me to go fight their war?” The ghost stood up and stared off into the distance. “But I did, because I was born in this country. It’s all I’d ever known. I felt like it was my responsibility…Did we win?”
“Yes, we did, because of guys like you. Now listen to me. I need you to do something—”
“No, you listen to me, stranger.” I could hear the anger creeping in. “When those doctors interviewed me, said they had a special assignment, said I could help end the war faster, and then we could all go home…I believed them. Then they drilled a hole in my head and filled it in with evil. Every time it tried to take over more of me, I fought it off, but then they’d just drill another hole.” He curled his hands into fists. “They’ve got to pay for this.”
“They are all gone. They’re either long dead or about to be. The only people paying now are a bunch of innocents that had nothing to do with any of this. Your wife was pregnant? Well, so is mine. And she’s in danger right now. Some of those people dying out there might even be your grandkids for all you know.”
That thought took him by surprise, but this was a lot for a ghost to digest. “But how—”
“I need you to call off your monster. I need you to take him and go back to the dream world.”
“But I can’t. He’s become too strong. I was trying to keep him in check back when I first met you, but while we were asleep, it’s like he got stronger while I got weaker.”
“Then we’ve got no choice,” I said slowly. “I need you to die.”
Marcus stared at me, incredulous. “What?”
“You’re already dead. I just need you to accept it and move on. If you don’t, he’ll just keep on using you. You need to move somewhere beyond his grasp. You need to move on to the place where he can’t follow. Without your power, the Nachtmar will become weak, vulnerable. It’ll try to take someone else over…Probably me. But if it does, they can put me to sleep before it gets too strong, just like they did to you before.”
“That’s nuts. You don’t know what you’re asking for. The dreams. They never stop. They get worse and worse until you can’t tell what’s real. Don’t volunteer for that.”
“You volunteered for a tough job knowing damn well you might die, but you got stuck with something even worse. At least I know what I’m getting myself into. I need you to die. We all need you to die, Marcus.”
“I can’t…” he stammered.
I slowly drew my kukri from its sheath. “Yes, you can. Problem is, if you want to live, you’ll just come back. I don’t understand how this works exactly, but for men like us, our will makes a big difference, and if you give us an inch we’ll take a mile. You need to move on willingly. If you don’t, the Nachtmar will just keep using you, and more innocent people will die. They killed you before, but between your desire and the Nachtmar’s magic, you came back. That’s why they put you to sleep, but the Nachtmar’s done sleeping. You need to die and stay dead.”
Marcus watched my knife, but he didn’t move away or try to defend himself. He was pondering what I had said. There was steel in his response. “What do I need to do?”
“Just don’t come back.”
He slowly nodded, finally understanding what was at stake, and he stood there bravely, awaiting his fate.
I raised the kukri. “She’ll still be waiting for you,” I assured him.
Marcus kept his eyes open. “Do it.”
I struck.