'What are you going to do?'

The fire breather was close to asphyxiating now, and thrashing his arms and legs even more violently. It was only because An-Gryferai's claws were buried so deep in his muscles that she was able to hold on to him. The wind shrieked in through the cuts in the canvas and made her dip and spin in mid-air.

'I'm going to drop him, but as soon as I let go of him, I want you to zap him!'

'You got it! Jekkalon?'

Jekkalon said, 'Got you!' He pushed his way through to the rear of the stage and mounted the ladder that would take him back up to the trapeze platform. None of the clowns or freaks made any attempt to stop him. They were too busy dragging Brother Albrecht off the stage, and out of Dom Magator's line of fire. They were even shouting out a ragged chorus of, 'Heave!' and, 'Heave!' Dom Magator kept trying to get a clear shot, but even though Brother Albrecht no longer had his fire breather to keep the Night Warriors at bay, he still couldn't manage it, not without the risk of hitting an innocent performer.

'I swear to G.o.d, man!' Zebenjo'Yyx shouted at him. 'You just need to total the whole frickin' lot of them!'

Dom Magator was almost beginning to believe that he was right, and that firing indiscriminately into the crowd was going to be the only way to ensure that the Grand Freak was eliminated for ever. But at that moment, high above their heads, An-Gryferai released her grip on the fire breather, and Jekkalon launched himself off the trapeze platform and performed a triple backflip to intercept the fire breather as he came down.

It was all over in a fraction of a second, but it seemed as if it took for ever, like a slow-motion ballet. As soon as An-Gryferai released her mechanical claws from his shoulder muscles, the fire breather dropped toward the stage, his arms flailing as if he were trying to swim. Jekkalon was tumbling over and over in mid-air, and as he did so, he extended his right hand, rotating his wrist so that his reflective palm would line up with Jemexxa's.

Jemexxa fired a dazzling lance of lightning out of her right hand. It hit Jekkalon's hand with a deafening crack, and instantly ricocheted upward. The fire breather exploded still thirty feet up in the air, the lamp oil in his lungs detonating in a ma.s.sive orange fireball bigger than those he had breathed out over the Night Warriors.

Fragments of flesh sprayed all across the audience, as well as bones that whirled over and over as if somebody were juggling with them, and surrealistic loops and skeins of skin. As Jekkalon reached the next trapeze, and deftly caught hold of it, the whole of the big top was already in an uproar, with men roaring in disbelief and women screaming in horror, and performers and circus hands running in all directions.

The clowns and the freaks who were dragging Brother Albrecht's contraption off the stage were momentarily dazed with shock. They stood staring at the fine drizzle of blood which drifted across the auditorium, and the scorched tatters of orange clothing which were the very last to come see-sawing down to the ground.

For the first time, as the girl with the dog's paws and the old woman with the blood-red eyes watched the smoke from the explosion curl away, Dom Magator had an un.o.bstructed line of fire. He aimed his Absence Gun until he saw Brother Albrecht in his sights, tousle-haired, impossibly handsome but still frowning in fury, and he pulled the three-stage trigger. The ceramic barrels whirred around, and the air in front of the gun appeared to ripple, as if he were looking at Brother Albrecht through the hot rising fumes of a c.o.ke-fired brazier.

SIXTEEN.

Send In The Clowns Dom Magator had fired an Absence Gun only once before, at an elderly man who had appeared in a small boy's recurrent nightmares about being abused. In reality, the boy had never been abused, and the man in his dreams was long dead, but the only way to rid him of his nightmare was to make sure that the man had never existed at all. The thunderclap when the man had vanished had been the most exhilarating sound that Dom Magator had ever heard, and had left him deafened for several hours afterward - even in the waking world.

He pressed the first of the three sequential triggers, but tonight nothing happened. No hum, no thunderclap. Nothing at all. Brother Albrecht slowly turned around to frown at him, but even when he realized that Dom Magator was aiming his Absence Gun at him, he gave him nothing but a contemptuous shake of his head.

Dom Magator fired another wave, and then another, stopping only when the little girl with the dog's feet stepped into this line. But they had no effect on Brother Albrecht at all.

'What's wrong, bro?' asked Zebenjo'Yyx, in frustration. 'You had him, you totally had him! Don't tell me you missed?'

Dom Magator looked down at the Absence Gun in bewilderment. 'You can't miss with this baby. It's soul searching. It knows who you want to hit, and it always. .h.i.ts them, even if it hits a few other people who happen to be standing in the way.'

'Then what the h.e.l.l happened?'

Brother Albrecht's black contraption had now been pulled right to the very back of the stage, and the ringmaster was furiously winding the handle that operated its black leather canopy. Just before the canopy folded down over his head, Brother Albrecht gave Dom Magator a sloping, sardonic smile. A few seconds later the heavy velvet curtains were jerked across the stage and the contraption and all of its attendants disappeared.

'What do we do now?' asked Xyrena. 'We've blown it, haven't we?'

'Where's our mom?' said Jekkalon. 'Kiera - did you see what happened to Mom?'

Dom Magator looked up. Up above them, An-Gryferai was slowly circling down to the stage.

'Are we going to try and save this poor girl here?' said Xyrena. Maria Fortales was still lying on the gurney, her left shoulder exposed. She was shuddering slightly, but it looked as if she was unconscious.

Xyrena walked across the stage toward her, but she was immediately surrounded by more clowns and freaks and little people, all of them with threatening scowls on their faces.

'Where's our mom, for Chrissakes?' said Jekkalon. 'She was here a few minutes ago.'

The big top was filled with people talking and shouting and milling around. Although the clowns and the freaks looked hostile, and kept crowding around them and barring their way, they didn't seem to be making any attempt to attack them. They had killed Doctor Friendly and two circus hands and the fire breather, but none of the performers seemed to be interested in exacting revenge.

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.

'c.r.a.p!' 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 G.o.dd.a.m.ned nightmare with no way of getting out of it until he dreams it again! If he ever dreams it again - 'cause I sure as h.e.l.l 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 a.s.shole'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 h.e.l.l 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 cla.s.sic 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 ma.s.sacre.'

'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 b.u.mp 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.

'Let's back off!' shouted Dom Magator. 'If we go back through that settlement maybe we can outflank them - approach the portal from the other side!'

He locked his Acoustic Carbine back into its rack, and selected a squat black handgun from the weapons that were swinging from his belt. It was a Sonic Blinder, which used very low level sound-waves to increase the pressure of the optic fluid in its target's eyeb.a.l.l.s until they burst. For dream people, the blinding was permanent - at least until the dream was over, and they vanished into oblivion. Real people suffered nothing worse than temporary blurring of their eyesight, when they woke up.

Dom Magator fired at the nearest group of clowns, and they immediately spun around and dropped to their knees, clamping their hands over their eyes and wailing in distress. As they went down, Zebenjo'Yyx let off another storm of arrows, more than a hundred of them, and scores of clowns behind them fell into the gra.s.s.

Dom Magator took Xyrena's hand and started to jog toward the settlement, his weapons and his equipment clanking and jingling with every step. Jekkalon and Jemexxa followed close behind, and Zebenjo'Yyx brought up the rear, turning around every few yards to fire off another volley of arrows.

As Dom Magator had expected the clowns stopped chasing after them directly, and instead turned toward the hilltop. They knew that the Night Warriors would have to return to the portal through which they had entered George Roussos' dream, and they clearly thought that they could cut them off before they could get there. Dom Magator prayed that George Roussos would stay asleep long enough for them to circle around and reach the portal from the opposite side of the hill.

Just before the Night Warriors reached the settlement, he looked around and saw the clowns sweeping up the hillside, hundreds of them, a dark clamorous tide.

The settlement was a rundown collection of shacks and barns and what looked like workshops. Dim lamps were burning in some of the windows, and Dom Magator could hear hammering and sawing, people shouting to each other, and singing. The wind had died down and the thunder had cleared away, but it was still raining, a steady downpour that seemed to have been dreamed up by Brother Albrecht to make them feel hopeless and dejected.

They splashed through the puddles between the shacks and the workshops. A small boy of about nine years old was sitting on the porch of one of the shacks, wearing only a tattered brown shirt and britches, and brown boots without laces that were two sizes too big for him. He looked up at them as they approached, his short hair sticking up on the crown of his head, his eyes wide. His face was smudged with dirt as if he hadn't washed in weeks.

Xyrena went up to him and hunkered down beside him, her golden cloak flapping in the mud.

'Hi, honey. What's your name?'

'Michael.'

'That's a very fine name. What are you doing out here in the rain, Michael? You look so cold, and you're soaked right through!'

'I don't have anyplace to go.'

'Isn't this your folks' house?'

The boy shook his head. 'I can't find my folks.'

'Don't they live here?'

He shook his head again. 'No. They're awake.'

Dom Magator came up. 'Hey, kid,' he said. 'Don't I know you? I've met you before, haven't I? You're the boy they call Michael-Row-The-Boat-Ash.o.r.e-Hallelujah. I didn't recognize you with your face so dirty.'

'Are you hungry, little boy?' asked Xyrena. 'You sure look hungry.'

'Xyrena,' said Dom Magator, 'we really have to hit the bricks. If George Roussos wakes up we're going to be trapped here just like little Michael.'

'Can't we take him with us? Look at him.'

Dom Magator took off his glove and scruffed Michael's hair. 'I wish we could. But we both know why we can't, don't we, Michael?'

'I liked my other dream better,' said Michael, wiping his nose with the back of his hand. 'In my other dream they gave me Cheerios and milk and cookies and sometimes they gave me ice cream.

He blinked, and Dom Magator could see tears in his eyes. 'In my other dream, my mom came to visit me. But now she doesn't and I don't think she knows where I am.'

'Let's just take him,' urged Xyrena. 'We can do that, can't we?'

Dom Magator helped her to stand up and drew her aside. Jemexxa and Jekkalon went up to Michael and said, 'How are you doing, buddy? Pretty darn miserable out here, on a night like this.'

'I had a puppy but I don't know where it's gone,' said Michael. 'I think the Packers took it.'

'The Packers? Who are they?'

Michael pointed to the nearest ramshackle workshop. 'They're in there. They're always chopping. Chopping and sawing.'

Xyrena said to Dom Magator, 'Why can't we take him with us? It's technically possible, isn't it?'

'Of course it is,' Dom Magator told her. 'But in real life Michael has Mobius Syndrome. It's a rare congenital birth defect. In real life, Michael can't walk, or talk, or eat. He can't even suck a bottle of formula. He spends most of his time asleep, and dreaming. I don't know how he got himself into this dream. Maybe Brother Albrecht wanted to display him in his freak show, but then realized how serious his disability actually was. I guess there isn't a whole lot of entertainment value in watching some poor kid just lying there, drooling.'

Jekkalon came over. 'Are we going to take him with us or not? We can't very well leave him here.'

Xyrena said, 'We have to. Dom Magator will tell you why.'

Jekkalon frowned at Dom Magator. 'We really can't?'

'No. I'm sorry. And we really have to get moving.'

'Can't we just find his puppy for him? He said that some people called the Packers took it. They're in that workshop. We only have to ask them politely if they'll give it back to him, and tell them that we'll blow their heads off if they don't.'

Dom Magator checked the instruments on his wrist. 'OK. You can try. But you have thirty seconds flat.'

Jekkalon jogged across to the workshop, followed by Jemexxa and Zebenjo'Yyx. The workshop had a sagging roof and windows that were opaque with grime. Its guttering was crowded with clumps of moss so that the rainwater clattered noisily down the outside walls. For the first time, Dom Magator saw a faded sign over the door that said Roussos Meat Packers.

'You see that?' he said. 'This has to be the reason why Brother Albrecht wanted George Roussos to share in this nightmare. He needed his expertise in meat-packing.'

'Oh my G.o.d,' said Xyrena. 'You're not telling me what I think you're telling me?'

'We should go,' Dom Magator told them. 'If those G.o.dd.a.m.n clowns reach our portal before us-'

But Jekkalon went up to the workshop door and tried the handle. Inside, they could see dazzling lights shining and they could distinctly hear chopping noises, but the door was locked.