“Maybe I’m not real,” she whispered in my ear. “Just another figment of your imagination. You are dreaming, aren’t you?”
“No. I’ve dreamwalked with other people before. You’re really here. Why are you doing this to me?”
“Nightmares are gifts. They can show you the problems in the waking world you’ve failed to correct, or don’t even know that you’re struggling with. Tell me the core of your fear.”
“I don’t understand the question.”
We slipped sideways. Sideways into a room with white peeling paint and a barred window and a locked door. No furniture but a bare mattress on a wire frame, and there was me, fifteen years old, naked, facedown with my arms and legs in hospital restraints.
The orderly, a kid in his early twenties with long, greasy hair and a jackal’s eyes, lit a cigarette.
“The fuck is it with you, Faust?” he asked in a lazy drawl. “We only have a few simple rules around here, and you can’t go three days without starting a fight.”
“I didn’t start it,” younger me snarled, yanking hard enough to make the bed frame rattle. “Syd and his asshole buddies were shaking down that new kid. It was three against one and he’s half their size. It wasn’t fair.”
“Everybody says you threw the first punch. And now you gotta be segregated, and I gotta work more unpaid overtime and fill out an incident report. And every time reviews come around, we get graded on how many incident reports we had to fill out, you get me? So not only did you make me cancel a date tonight, you’re directly fucking with my chances of getting a raise.”
I tried to turn around, didn’t want to see this, didn’t want to go back, but the Lady’s grip was made of iron.
“Watch,” she hissed in my ear.
I watched the orderly shove a knotted rag in my mouth. Then I watched him put his cigarette out on the small of my back.
“Maybe this time you’ll listen,” he said as my teenage self screamed through the dirty rag and thrashed on the mattress. The flesh under the cigarette, when he finally pulled it away, was beet-red and blistering. It would leave a fresh scar to join the other three.
“Oh, and that new little shit, the one you were ‘protecting’?” the orderly said. “He’s two rooms down. And I’m going to go down there now and give him the same treatment, and then I’m going to tell him it’s your fault.”
“What are you feeling?” the Lady whispered.
I tried to shut my eyes but my body wouldn’t do it. I was feeling the cigarette sear into my back like it was happening all over again, the plastic restraints cutting off the flow of blood in my hands and feet, the rage coursing through my veins like gasoline.
Mostly the rage.
“I want to kill him.”
“Why don’t you?” she asked.
The restraints pinned me to the soiled mattress. My younger self was still screaming through the knotted rag—not in pain, not now—as the orderly sauntered out of the room and the door slammed shut.
“I can’t.”
“What are you feeling?”
My rage splashed like fire against a wall of iron, pinning me in, trapping me. I couldn’t move, couldn’t change anything, couldn’t save anyone.
“Helpless,” I tried to scream.
The word came out in a brittle whisper, then turned to ash. The world turned to ash, cascading, spinning, a snow globe from a mausoleum.
I was on my knees, in darkness. Head bowed, shoulders slumped, all of my rage gone cold and turned to sludge inside of me.
The Lady in Red crouched down, and her fingertips gently lifted my chin.
“It’s good to know the things we fear most,” she told me, “and the wellspring that birthed them. The things that can be used against us.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“You will, when the time is right. I’m not often cruel without reason. And there’s one last thing to see. Come.”
She took me by the hand. We walked through darkness, into darkness, something soft and loamy under our feet. Then, up ahead, a single gray spotlight captured our destination.
“You aren’t the only one sleeping right now,” the Lady said. “Though he denies her freedom, even in her dreams.”
Under the spotlight, Fleiss hung suspended from a column of liquid iron. Her torso dangled from the molten black pillar, her arms behind her and her hands and feet trapped inside the goo. The iron burbled as it slowly flowed, like a living blob of soot-stained mucus. Her eyes were closed and her head lolled from side to side.
“Mother,” she whimpered.
The Lady reached for her. As her pale hand brushed the edge of the light, the entire column rippled. The iron went rigid, yanking Fleiss’s arms tighter, wrenching her shoulders. The trapped woman groaned in pain. As she lifted her head, I realized her eyes weren’t only closed: dribbles of the liquid iron had welded them shut.
“I try to comfort her as best I can,” the Lady said, “but the Enemy is a diligent warden.”
“So…I was right.” I stood at the edge of the light, careful not to cross it, as I looked between them. “The real her, before the Enemy twisted her around his finger—she’s still in there, somewhere.”
“And aware.” The Lady folded her arms, storms behind her eyes as she stared at the pillar of iron. “I promise you that. Every vile thing he forces her to do, every waking second of being under his dominion—part of her is aware. And screaming, but no one can hear her voice. Those memories I just walked you through, the helplessness you felt? That’s what my daughter feels, awake or dreaming, every moment of her life.”
I knew what she was going to ask me next. She didn’t even have to say it. I sealed the pact between us with six words.
“Tell me how to save her.”
She favored me with the faintest smile.
“You’ve already started the work. She has to be forced to confront the contradictions that surround her. She’ll dig her heels in, no doubt; he’s grafted a mask to her face. Push her until it shatters. Here’s something you can use: she’s an accomplished witch.”
“Well, I knew that much,” I said. “How does that help?”
The Lady wore a faint twinkle in her eyes.
“Ask her who her teacher was. And remember what I teach all of my daughters: that freedom is a witch’s creed.”
Her fingertips brushed my cheek.
“I’ll be watching you, Daniel.”
20.
Morning in Las Vegas was a weird place to be, even if you hadn’t spent the night in the hands of a goddess. The free-floating party on Fremont Street started early, although the real show didn’t begin until the sun went down. I moved among packs of wandering tourists, most of them bleary-eyed and clutching plastic cups of cheap beer to stave off the hangovers they’d worked so hard to earn last night. Elderly gamblers roamed under open casino archways, queuing up for the penny slots. Off to my left, by a sound stage that wouldn’t see any action for another twelve hours or so, a busker dressed as Gandalf the Grey was trying to get sightseers to pay for a photograph.
Fremont felt wrong by daylight. It had the self-destructive earnestness of a guy in his forties at a frat party, egging everyone on to keep drinking past dawn just to prove he could still hang. I wasn’t here for the crowds, anyway, or the penny slots or the two-dollar margaritas for that matter. I let my mind go blank as I strolled, thoughts drifting on an aimless sea—
—and a copper bell chimed as I crossed a stained, worn-out carpet, suddenly surrounded by cool air and the aroma of Indian food. The Tiger’s Garden had sensed me on its street, decided I was worthy, and pulled me in like a fish on a line. Past the three-seater bar, lit by dangling paper lanterns from a ’70s garage sale, the tiny dining room only had three occupants. Jennifer was already here along with Bentley and Corman, and all three were starting the day off with a proper magician’s breakfast: greasy food and alcohol.
Jennifer tore off a hunk of tandoori chicken, waving the bright scarlet meat at me in greeting. “Hey, sleepyhead. I was just tellin’ the guys about your entomological adventure.”