Nightmare

My feet pounded the cobblestones of Covent Garden. Moonlight, and the certainty I would find him this time were my only guides as I ran.

Archer’s life depended on my speed and my determination. Panic had replaced the bone-deep sadness that had taken root deep inside me, and I was almost glad for something different to feel.

The London streets were empty and unnaturally silent, and the silver light threw the scene into the high contrast glare of a video game. The shadows were endlessly black and full of menace. I knew I wasn’t alone. In fact, everything about this place was a gamer’s nightmare. Every wrong move stopped me in my tracks or worse, until I finally learned to navigate each fresh horror and move on to the next.

I kept going though, pushing harder and faster. I knew in my soul that if I could just find Archer this time, I’d beat the game and wake up with him next to me.

I rounded the corner as The Ripper stepped from the shadows. Moonlight glinted on his raised blade. Jack the Ripper, dead by Ringo’s knife a lifetime ago, smiled, a horrible grin full of rotten teeth.

“Ah, Pet, ye can’t stay away, can ye?” he snarled.

I put on a burst of speed, but he was in front of me again. “Ye’ll not escape me this time.” He lunged, but I leapt to the side before his knife could slash down and bury itself in my back. No amount of anticipation could erase the fear that coursed through me at the sight of The Ripper. I had died at that corner the first time I saw him there, and woken up with the echo of a searing pain between my shoulder blades.

His snarl lingered behind me as I sprinted down the next street, away from his lethal menace. The pounding of my feet began to match the rhythm of a distant hum. I knew the sound and I hated it, but still I flew toward it like a shard of iron to a magnet.

There, down the next street and tucked into an alcove, was the Seer bodyguard who had murdered young Henry Grayson in medieval France. He had threatened me with rape and death then, and now his knife hung loosely in his hand as if I was no danger to him at all. “Ye came back fer more, did ye, lass?” His voice was oily, and the stench of him hadn’t improved in death.

A dozen snarky comebacks flashed through my brain, mostly having to do with the crushed nutsack I’d inflicted on him when he threatened to cut my windpipe. But cleverness was wasted in nightmares, and my fear of him had long-since turned to anger.

So I charged at him.

I ducked down, put my shoulder into it, and rammed him up against the wall. He tried to get the knife up, but like most cowards who attack women, he didn’t anticipate that I would be the aggressor. I smacked his knife hand against the bricks and thrust my elbow so hard into his solar plexus that a cloud of hot, stinky air rushed from his lungs. He doubled over with a sucking gasp.

I bolted.

Now the landscape had the eerie quiet of a ghost town, and there was no joy in hurdling broken guardrails or scaling crumbling walls. It was the silence that drove panic into my throat. Silence curled its fist around my heart where memories of Archer lived.

I sensed someone with Monger blood waiting in the wings like a deadly Greek chorus, ready to step out and flay the flesh from my bones. He stayed hidden as long as I continued down the cobblestone road that ended at an alley between a pub and an old theater. I entered the black passageway, and dread wound its way around my lungs.

This was Wilder’s place, and no matter which way I ran, I had to enter his rooms at the end of the passage. The door was always open, the table was always set for two, and the sharp scent of my own fear filled my nose as I stepped across the threshold.

“You came,” he said in a deep bass voice that still had the power to freeze my blood. He stood and held out the chair for me. My heart slammed in my chest from the running, and from pure, raw terror. I had tried to escape Wilder’s invitation, but the door had always locked behind me or the windows wouldn’t break, and every object I weaponized against him slipped from my hands.

So I sat at Wilder’s table and he pushed in my chair. He bent his head and whispered into my ear, inhaling the scent of my skin as he did. “You belong to me now.”

I had tried to break a glass in his face the first time he said that to me. Now I just waited until he finally stood straight and returned to his seat.

Wilder indicated my plate, which had filled with food. “You will eat.”

On the plate was a slab of fresh meat sitting in a pool of congealed blood. Wilder had the only knife, so even if I’d wanted to eat the barely-cooked flesh, which I emphatically did not, I’d have had to pick it up in my bare hands to do so. The metallic smell of blood made my stomach roil in disgust, and when I began to retch, I pushed back from the table.

I was still gripping the table when Wilder stabbed my hand to it.

Stabbed. A knife. Embedded in the table through the back of my hand.

White-hot, the pain was like the shot of adrenaline I’d been waiting for. I yanked the knife out of my hand and lunged. The forward momentum carried me into him and buried the knife in his chest. It also knocked him to the floor and revealed a trap door under his chair.

Wilder’s roar of rage filled the room as he struggled to right himself. I used my good hand to haul the trap door open, and I dropped down into the blackness below. The trap slammed shut above me. The bellowing sounds of rage went instantly, eerily quiet.

The tunnel had a dirt floor, brick walls, and dank air that coated my skin like wet wool. My left hand burned with pain, but I ignored it and used my right hand to fumble with the Maglite in my pocket. Even here I knew I wasn’t alone. With just enough light to see the dangers ahead of me, I took off at a dead sprint.

Rats skittered away from the light, but not before I caught sight of their eyes glittering at me from the edges of the tunnel. A brick wall sent me down a branch to the left, and I braced myself.

Slick stepped out of the shadows, hatred naked in his face. The Monger ring glinted ominously on his finger. I steeled my will against the impulse to hide.

“The Sucker is already dead. You will fail.” The first time I had heard those words, my will had crumbled and I had broken down in tears. Now though, I had finally faced this scene enough times that I could stand my ground against the despair his words induced.

I squared my shoulders. “Out of my way, Slick.”

A gun appeared in his hand, and his finger twitched on the trigger. His smile said he looked forward to shooting me. “The power is already mine.”

The first few times, it was the gun that held all my attention. Getting shot in a dream felt like getting punched in the chest. All the air whooshed out of me and I woke up gasping. But when I ignored the gun and listened to his voice, the words made me bold. I was determined to prove him wrong – the power wasn’t his, and I could change this. But, like any bully, he wasn’t alone. Slick’s goons had surrounded me – two behind and one more with Slick blocking my way forward.

I lunged at Slick. He shot reflexively, but I anticipated and spun into a tucked roll at the last minute. The shot hit one of the goons behind me, and I heard the wet smack of a bullet entering flesh. Momentum carried me right into Slick’s kneecaps. I had rolled so tightly that his body sailed over mine, and he hit the ground knees-first.

I sprang to my feet just beyond Slick and the goons and bolted forward without a backward glance.

I turned right at the next fork in the tunnel, and found an opening in the wall. Holborn Underground station yawned in front of me, and I hurdled the track to sprint down the center line toward the British Museum ghost station where I’d last seen Archer – in 1944, before a bomb exploded and time split.

I was getting close to the end of the game, and adrenaline fueled the burst of power I sent to my legs. The deep, throbbing hum in my ears grew louder the closer I got to Archer. Just around the bend was the spur to the ghost station, and beyond that was a wall of rubble. I’d long since stopped crying at the sight of that wall. Tearing away at it with my bare hands didn’t work – I’d tried it and ended up with nothing more than torn nails and bleeding fingers. When Wilder stabbed my hand, moving rocks became impossible.

So I did the only thing I could do – I picked up a piece of chalky rock and began to draw a spiral. It was the source of the humming sound that had pervaded my dream, so I surrendered to it and let my mind choose the way in this time.

Other times I’d tried to imagine the platform where I’d left Archer. I’d pictured it as it had been, and I’d pictured it collapsed and covered in rubble. But the explosion had changed the landscape of the ghost station so drastically that no amount of imagination could open the portal to find him. I had never gone beyond this impenetrable wall of rocks.

This time, I tried something different. I pictured Archer’s face. I filled my mind with the planes of his cheekbones, his jaw, the black of his hair, the length of his eyelashes. I had drawn that face on paper so many times, now I drew it in my mind.

And for the first time since the nightmares had begun, I could see him as clearly as if I’d been standing in front of him. The image of Archer, skin as pale and waxy as death, propped brokenly and utterly unmoving against the passage wall filled my brain.

I closed my eyes and drew the final spiral on the tunnel wall. I felt the stretching and falling and humming take me to him, and then I saw Archer’s eyes. They weren’t closed in pain or healing, his eyelashes didn’t flutter against his cheek, and his pulse didn’t beat in his throat. His eyes were open and unseeing – as empty as the glass eyes of a porcelain doll.

The eyes of a dead man.

And then I screamed.