Songs of Dreaming Gods Page 12

  “So, at least tell me what this sigil has to look like?”

  She went back to laughing. It suited her better than a frown.

  “It can be anything you like, as long as it’s yours,” she said, lighting a fresh smoke from the butt of the previous one. “As long as it provides the required connection with that which you desire the most.”

  “I want to get cut. That’ll ensure it’s permanent, I want it to be permanent. Do I have to do it myself?”

  She laughed louder at that, and the glass in the light fixture tinkled in sympathy.

  “Oh no. That would be barbarous. Of course, you can if you want to, but think of the potential for you to make a right pig’s ear of it? Others have taken a more artistic approach and, if I may say so, I have a way with a blade myself that would make the experience much more pleasant than other methods you might choose. Would you allow me?”

  She smiled again, but now she looked more like a predatory bird eyeing its prey.

  He stubbed out his cigarette and drained the Scotch.

  “Let’s have at it then. I’m ready.”

  “We’ll see about that,” she replied. She sucked another prodigious draw from her own smoke and stubbed it out before lifting a knife from a counter.

  “What will it be?” she said.

  “You’ve seen that movie, the stuff that dreams are made of? I want, I need, the bird. The black bird. Do you know it?”

  “Oh yes,” the woman replied. “Now you really are dangerous. Are you ready?”

  The man nodded and opened his shirt.

  “Let’s do it.”

  She started to cut.

  The door swung shut, leaving Janis wondering what she’d just seen. She knew it was important in some way, it had to be, but whatever was happening to her mind had just got a whole lot weirder, and somehow even more scary.

  I have to get out of here.

  The longer she stayed locked in the house, locked in her own mind as she saw it, the worse things seemed to be getting; her grasp on what was real and what was delusion was getting ever more tenuous.

  She went back down the hall and tried the main door yet again, remembering the old saying, repeating the same act time and time again in the hope of a different result is one of the first signs of insanity. But she had to try, for insanity felt like it was getting far too close for comfort.

  The door stayed securely shut.

  She tried reaching out through the brass letterbox with her phone in her hand, hoping that the battery failure only happened inside the house, hoping for a signal. But all she got was cold fingers and a strange tingling sensation that was far from pleasant. The phone stayed dead and she stayed alone. She shouted out, holding the letterbox open and putting her mouth as close to it as she could manage.

  “Hello. Police officer requires assistance in here. Can anybody help me?”

  She waited. The fog threatened to creep in through the open letterbox, and her face felt cold, going numb like she’d felt in her hand. She thought of the woman, the concierge, filling up with smoke, and had a vision of the fog surging, pouring through the opening and filling her throat, her lungs, her whole being. Panic rose up in her. She stumbled backward and fell on her backside. The letterbox closed with a clang and there was a soft thud against the far side of the door as if the fog had indeed carried some heft and weight and had thrown itself against the wood.

  It’s disappointed it didn’t get me. It’s just like one of the bloody dolls.

  Frustration and fear welled up inside her, and she felt hot tears at her cheeks that she brushed away angrily.

  Stop it. Just stop it. This is not real.

  She tried to keep telling herself that, it helped, but not much, not while the door stayed resolutely shut behind her and the empty hallway stretched away in the gloom.

  But sitting on her ass in the hallway wasn’t getting her anywhere closer to reality. She got up and walked into the middle of the space, keeping a close eye on the green door. It stayed closed this time. It seemed she had already been shown what someone wanted her to see. The door of number two on the other side of the hallway was also still shut, and stayed that way as she walked past it.

  She reached the foot of the stairs and stood there, looking up. Her last ascent hadn’t gone too well, and she was loath to attempt it again right now. The only place she hadn’t looked was the boxed in area under the stairs. The right-hand side was just a solid wall covered in old, peeling wallpaper, but on the left there was another door, smaller, without a number and rather crudely made of slats of unpainted pine.

  There might be tools I can use. Is it a closet or a cellar?

  She wasn’t sure it mattered. Doors in this place seemed to open to wherever they felt like it at the time. She put a hand on her pistol grip and slowly opened the door. The creak of old hinges sounded far too loud in the silent hall, but the rest of the house stayed silent, no tiny footsteps overhead, which was definitely something to be thankful for.

  She expected to be looking back into the boudoir, or maybe be back in the top floor apartment hallway trapped between the two doors. But beyond the makeshift pine door was only a dark hole, a small landing, and to her right, a flight of stone steps heading down into deeper darkness.

  She stepped inside, onto the landing, but made sure she held the door open. A single light bulb overhead started swinging slightly from side to side. She found a cord switch and pulled. Nothing happened and the bulb didn’t so much as even a flicker; there was just a dull click as the dead switch engaged.

  But the sound had alerted someone, something, to her presence. A voice came up out of the dark, definitely male, and Janis was pretty sure she’d seen the owner, the fat man from the lavatory. His thick Scots bellow sounded far too loud.

  “Ye should nae fuck with anybody else’s stuff. The hoose disnae like it.”

  Something heavy moved below, and the air thickened. She couldn’t see any movement down the steps, but she smelled him again, shit and piss and old, sour, sweat. Heavy footsteps sounded on wood, then, more muffled, on stone.

  “Jist gie me a wee minute, hen,” the voice shouted again. “I’ll be right with ye.”

  He’s coming up the stairs.

  Janis stepped back, slammed the door shut, and backed away.

  As she got within six feet of it, the door to number two swung fully open.

  This room definitely had electricity, there was a modern light fitting in the ceiling, lighting the whole scene, and an electric fire in an old slate fireplace in the far corner. The décor was modern too, or at least relatively so. There were Formica topped kitchen units, striped pine floorboards that had been artificially faded and whitewashed, cheap bookcases full of gaudily colored paperbacks and thin, almost translucent curtains that were partially open and showed the same gray, swirling fog that still hung outside. A television, no more than twenty-inch screen, black plastic, cathode ray, so Janis guessed at Eighties, sat in the other corner, currently showing only silent, dancing static.

  A young man with a mop of unruly black hair sat at a table that was far older than he was, a heavy antique oak that took up most of the available space she could see. He had an old battered acoustic guitar cradled in his lap but he wasn’t playing it, he was listening to something on a cassette tape.

  Janis stepped up and rapped on the doorframe.

  “Hello?”

  She didn’t expect a reply, and didn’t get one, the man didn’t look up, and once again Janis couldn’t step into the room, prevented by an unseen force.

  She turned to look at the cellar door. It was shut, and there was no sound from beyond, and no noise from either outside or upstairs. All she could hear was a soft, Scottish, voice coming from the cassette player inside the apartment.

  “It started three weeks ago, just after the New Year, with the noises in the basement,” an old woman said, almost whispering. “At first it was groaning and rumbling, and we thought it was the old place settling, maybe g
etting disturbed by the road workings up on the Castle Esplanade. But they began coming at night, when the city was sleeping.”

  “Jimmy Fallon in number five noticed it first, in the painting above his fireplace, where he sees his wife.

  “‘There’s too many shadows,’ he said one morning as he joined me for a coffee and a smoke. ‘Too much darkness, and she’s not there.’

  “It wasn’t long before the rest of us took notice. Shadows where there shouldn’t be shadows, weeping where there should be laughing, and that weird snuffling sound every which way you turn, our sigils hurt, our totems failed and the house showed us the full extent of our misery. There has been talk of leaving, but where would we go? We’re here because we have to be here, but there’s something broken, the house is broken.”

  A cultured male voice spoke.

  “And how did you fix it?”

  “We didn’t,” the woman replied, a sob in her voice. “It’s still going on. Help us. You seem to know something about this stuff. You have to help us.”

  The door swung shut, cutting off her view of the young man and the table, but the woman’s voice echoed around her for long seconds afterward.

  The house is broken. Help us. You have to help us.

  17

  John held the pistol out in front of him as if he was carrying a candle. It gave off a soft, blue glow, just enough for him to see one, maybe two steps ahead.

  He’d been going down for several hours since the last meeting with the Reaper, mostly in silence, but he had started to hear the bass voice singing again in the last five minutes.

  He dreams where he sleeps in the depths far below,

  And the Dreaming God is singing where he lies.

  John now suspected he knew where those depths might be, far below indeed. The song was a link though, one between this place and that other house, the one the Reaper had said was part of the way back. If he could go even part way he’d take it, he’d take anything to get off this endless descent into the black.

  But for now, all he could do was keep going down, and hope that he could find a way.

  One thing the Reaper had done was got him thinking, about hope, and about why he might be here. He reached another landing so he stopped for some time to gather his thoughts, and for a smoke, his last. The cigarettes had been another one of those links he needed to hold on to, a token to remind him that there was something back there, up there, that he’d want to go back to when this was over. He’d been putting off having the last, knowing that once it had gone that link would be broken, another part of the thin thread that tethered him to reality frayed and snapped. But he needed to think, and he always did that best when he was smoking, always had. He lit up and took a long draw.

  Now that he had stopped he heard it again, the deep bass voice echoing up through the tower, faint, and seemingly far off.

  He sleeps in the deep with the fish far below,

  He sleeps in the deep, in the dark.

  The singing wormed its way into in John’s head, looping like a broken record. The Burdens joined in with a screeching, but strangely tuneful, accompaniment to the chorus. But John smiled.

  I’m getting closer. Closer to what, I don’t know. But I’m getting there.

  He flicked the lighter idly on and off, an old habit but the click-clack of the Zippo was a sound that always reminded him of happier times spent chewing the fat with old pals in old bars.

  If I’m doing all of this with my mind, why couldn’t I have chosen a waterfront bar. I could have stayed there, and been happy.

  The orange-yellow flare of the flame had temporarily blinded him, but he’d seen something at the corner of his eye in the sudden glare. He puffed at the cigarette, raised the pistol in front of him and, carefully, stepped over to investigate.

  It was a door, on the outside wall of the tower, so John knew that there was nothing through there expect perhaps a small, four feet thick or so, hole in the wall, then a drop, down into blackness through swirling fog.

  But he knew this door. He’d been thinking of links and a way back. Was this one of them? It wasn’t the peeling white of number six, but it was a door from the house on the corner, one he’d seen before, a red door, with a slightly askew copper number, one, at eye level.

  Is this a trick?

  Another thought immediately followed the first.

  Does it matter?

  John didn’t hesitate. If there was a way to avoid going deeper down into the black, he had to try. He turned the handle and pushed the door open, revealing an impossible scene beyond.

  There was no wall of stone, no hole, just an egg, a single black egg hanging in darkness. It popped, and the view swam, then clarified, showing John a view through to another room. He stepped forward, hoping that all he had to do to get home was pass through, but as had happened in the hallway back in the house, he met resistance, so strong that he could not cross the plane of the door.

  He could only watch and listen.

  He had never seen this room, but he knew where it must be. Thick fog swirled outside the window of a dingy, run down room. He was looking into a room in the corner house, probably number one, but he doubted very much if this had happened any time recently.

  The walls had no wallpaper, but had been stripped back to bare board and painted, none too well, in a wash of blue that had dried in patches that made it look like some of it was damp. The only light in the room came from a tall ornate electric lamp, six feet high with a heavy floral shade, sunflowers and grass that cast a diffuse sickly yellow glow over everything. The carpeting, such as it was, was a cheap looking mat made of flax or hemp.

  Neither of the room’s inhabitants looked to be in much of a mood to discuss the décor. Two women sat on battered leather armchairs in the center of the room, facing each other across a gap of no more than four feet. The blonde, the one closest to him, wore a man’s three-piece woolen suit, collar and tie. The woman, the brunette, opposite her wore tight white slacks streaked with oil and grime and a sailor-striped top. The styles made John guess he wasn’t looking at the here and now, but sometime further back, perhaps as far as the Fifties, but it could be as late as the Seventies given the decor.

  Next to each of the women was a small table with a glass of what looked like Scotch on it. And next to each drink sat a pistol, not a modern one like John’s own service weapon, but revolvers, Colt 45’s if John wasn’t mistaken.

  The blonde’s waistcoat was unbuttoned and she scratched at her belly through the white shirt. Every time she did so, red blobs showed in the material, as if she was opening an old wound. The scars in John’s belly throbbed in sympathy.

  The women sat in silence. Fog washed against the window, almost slumped, if anything it looked even more dense than before, thick and almost like thin gruel.

  John was wondering how long they might have been sitting there when the brunette spoke first.

  “Do you believe in fate?”

  The blonde stopped scratching and took a soft pack from her inside pocket. She lit a smoke. John heard the telltale clickity-clack of a Zippo lighter, and wondered if he might have used the very same one just seconds before.

  This isn’t a coincidence. It can’t be.

  “In what way?” the blonde finally replied.

  “I mean, have the two of us always been predestined to end up here, in this room, at this time, smoking, drinking and thinking about shooting each other?”

  The blonde seemed to take the question seriously and thought about it while puffing on the cigarette.

  “The answer to that depends whether you’re thinking like a determinist or not.

  “What do you mean?”

  “A determinist would say that if you throw enough math at it, you could calculate the exact position of every atom in the universe, at any given time, and so know exactly what will happen, also at any given time. And if that can be done, then, yes, we are destined to be here. There’s no other way for the atoms to have arranged them
selves.”

  The brunette lit a smoke of her own, a long dark cheroot that John started to smell seconds later.

  “But knowing the position of every atom is not possible, right?”

  “Right. To be able to predict the future of the universe, we’d need to know its initial state. Any gaps in our knowledge of the initial state limit the accuracy of our predictions; and small errors would become large enough errors that, in effect, the extent of future into which we can predict much at all is limited.”

  “But you’re the one that’s thinking like a determinist now. Surely you’d still be able to calculate something of what might happen?”

  “But every action, every tiny thing, leads to a split in space time, I go left, or I go right, both actions exist, and don’t exist, simultaneously. Look at it too closely, and all you’ve got is a dead cat.”

  “I’m not sure I understand what you’re driving at,” the brunette said.

  “Actually, I’m not either, but at least we’re not shooting at each other.”

  “We could always start now.”

  The blonde laughed.

  “Sure, but why would we want to, when this is just so much fun? Anyway, back to the conjecture. We might be able to calculate some of the future, in our own little bubble, sure, but not much. Quantum physics has pretty much done away with all those notions anyway. Heisenberg showed us that a little uncertainty can drive the whole shebang.”

  The brunette didn’t seem convinced.

  “But that’s all still deterministic rationalism, still science. Let’s start again. What about fate, what about karma?”

  The blonde laughed again.

  “Oh, fairy tales you mean?”

  The brunette ignored the mockery, she seemed to really be getting into the argument now and had got much more animated, although John noticed that her hand never strayed far from being in reach of the gun on the table.

  “No, seriously. Have you never had a moment when you knew, just knew, that you were exactly where you were supposed to be?”