chapter TEN
After talking to Queen and Gimble, I looked for Timon, but he was already gone. That surprised me and made me nervous, too, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. I ignored a last come-hither smile from Leticia and a final sneer from Wotan and dragged myself off to bed.
The next thing I knew, I was standing in a hotel room a lot swankier than the one in the Icarus, with a huge canopy bed, and Dom Perignon chilling in a bucket. French doors led to a marble balcony. I stepped out under a night sky glittering with more stars than I’d ever seen, even up in the Pamir Mountains. Smelling of salt water, a cool breeze brushed my face. The sea whispered in the distance, where waves broke to foam on a white sand beach.
Closer in were gardens with paths winding through them. The long building itself reminded me of the palace of Versailles—not that I’d ever seen it, but one of my high school teachers showed slides—and had a big bronze statue of King Neptune with his pitchfork out in front. Distinguished-looking men in dinner jackets and beautiful women in fancy gowns and diamonds strolled in the main entrance while valets parked their Bentleys, Lamborghinis, and Aston Martins.
Something nudged me to look down at myself. When I did, I saw that, for the first time ever, I was wearing a dinner jacket, too. Maybe it meant I was supposed to go eat dinner.
Feeling cautious but curious too, I wandered out into the hotel. But I never made it to the restaurant. The casino sucked me in. I stood and watched the rich guys and their girlfriends play roulette, blackjack, and baccarat until I felt the itch to do it, too. Maybe the same person who’d dressed me for this place had supplied me with cash or credit cards. I started to check my pockets, and then a familiar stink washed over me.
“Jesus Christ,” I said, turning around, “even here?”
“‘Even here?’” Timon asked. The grime on his cheeks had stripes in it where sludge had leaked out of his half-formed eyes. “Do you understand where we are?”
“It’s another ghost world, like the one the Pharaoh dumped me in, only a lot more complicated. I’m guessing this is your world of dreams, and this particular piece of it is somebody dreaming about Monte Carlo. Or maybe a James Bond movie.”
“Very good.” Timon waved his hand. “That’s our host over there.”
He meant a little bald guy in black-rimmed glasses. He was sitting at a roulette table, but it didn’t look like he was placing any bets, talking to anybody, or even sipping the huge margarita that looked like he’d sneaked it in from a Viva Vallarta. His face sweaty and slack, he just stared at the spinning wheel and rattling, tumbling ball.
“Is he dreaming about losing?” I asked. “He doesn’t look like he’s having any fun.”
“His unconscious wanted to dream about something else entirely. But I thought a fellow gambler would enjoy these surroundings.”
“If you want me to enjoy my surroundings, just do something about your BO. You can cut that poor bastard loose.”
Timon scowled. “Your attitude… but that’s what we’re here to work on, isn’t it? All right, if you like, we’ll go to the permanent part of this place. That’s easier anyway.”
The casino spun away like water swirling down a toilet. For a moment, in the center of the whirl, the guy with the ugly glasses was standing on a driveway in front of the basketball hoop mounted on the garage. His mouth moved, though I couldn’t hear the words, and he pretended to shoot. A little girl was actually holding the ball, and, her round face squinting with concentration, she did her awkward best to copy the motion. But it all blinked away before I could see if she scored.
Now Timon and I were standing in a supermarket parking lot at the east end of Ybor City. There was marching-band music—a brassy version of some Latin pop song—playing somewhere down Seventh Avenue, and a different marching band in green and white uniforms forming up a few feet away from us. The band members all had the same build and the same face, like toy soldiers. It was only their instruments that made one different from the next.
“Climb aboard,” Timon said.
I looked around. He was clambering onto a gold and purple parade float. It didn’t seem possible that I’d missed it before. Maybe it really hadn’t been there.
I climbed up after him. He sat in the throne at the highest point on the thing. I found a place to stand beside the chair.
The drummers pounded out a cadence, and the marching band tramped out into the street. The float followed. It was the last thing in the parade. The big finish, like Santa on Thanksgiving. And as it neared the spectators crowded onto the sidewalks, they started going down on their knees.
“I thought,” said Timon, raising his voice so I could hear him over the band, “that perhaps you didn’t respect me as you should because you’d never seen the real me. You didn’t understand when I told you I’m a god.”
“First off,” I said, “I do respect you.” Well, his powers, anyway. “But that doesn’t mean I’m going to do everything you say, even when my own judgment tells me different.”
“If you wanted my help to deceive the other players, you should have let me in on the scheme.”
“Is that what this is about? If we’d gone off somewhere private and talked, then staged an argument, the others would have been suspicious. Besides, the way we did it, you didn’t have to act. When you got upset, it was real.”
“It wasn’t your decision to make.”
I took a deep breath. Not a great idea since, even out in the open air, I was still inside his cloud of funk. “Look, I know you hate not being in total control. And I’m sorry if the way things happened worried you or made you feel dumb. But the trick worked. Gimble’s history. Isn’t that what’s important?”
“It’s not just the trick,” he said. “It’s everything.” He looked back out at the kneeling crowds. “I’m bored with this. Let’s make them livelier.”
The spectators jumped to their feet, stretched out their arms, and howled for his attention. Girls pulled up their shirts and flashed. Timon now had plastic beads in his hands, and he tossed them right and left. Jostling and shoving one another, people snatched them out of the air.
Timon turned his milky, seeping eyes on me and waited for a reaction.
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” I told him. “It’s impressive. But it’s basically just an illusion.” I didn’t exactly believe that, but I couldn’t very well tell him I’d already made a trip to dreamland and set Rufino free.
Timon scowled. “If that’s what you truly think, then you haven’t learned anything. It’s true, I built this interlude from a single human’s dream. But I’ve pulled a number of people inside it. Look carefully and you can pick them out.”
He was right. The people in the crowd weren’t as identical as the rows of guys in the marching band, but for the most part, several characters repeated over and over. Mixed in with all that sameness, a few unique faces stood out. Most were human, but a couple were Old People. Forked tongue flickering, a huge black snake swayed its head back and forth. Sylvester the weeping willow loomed over everybody else. Or maybe it was just one of his kind. With all the hair hanging over his face, it was hard to tell.
What I could tell—or at least I thought I could—was that none of the real people wanted to be there. They screamed, shoved, and grabbed for Timon’s stupid beads with the same crazy eagerness as everybody else. But, like the bald guy in the fake Monte Carlo, they had something dazed and sick in their eyes.
“I’m still bored,” Timon said. “Let’s kick it up another notch.”
He chucked a string of red beads. The spectators shoved even harder to get within reach of it. Somebody knocked down a little kid—one of the real ones—in a Transformers T-shirt. And then people trampled him, mashing his squirming body against the pavement.
I wanted to jump off the float and run over there, but my gut told me that wasn’t the way to help him. I turned back to Timon just as he lobbed blue beads at the people on the other side of the street.
Another real person, a girl with a pierced nose and sleeve tattoos, grabbed them. And probably expected to keep them, because up until now, when somebody got a string in his hand, it ended the struggle for that particular prize.
Not anymore. Sylvester—if it was him—reached over her shoulder with one of his long weeping-willow branch arms, grabbed a dangling loop, and tried to rip them away.
The pull spun her around to face him. In real life, the sight of him probably would have frozen her in amazement and fear, but not here. Not in a dream, and not with Timon yanking her strings. She hung on to the beads and then it was a tug of war.
That would have snapped a real string of cheap plastic beads, but again, no such luck here. Sylvester clenched his other knobby-knuckled, long-fingered hand into a fist and bashed her across the face with it. She fell down, and in a split second, people were trampling her, too, as they scrambled to try and get the beads away from him.
That wasn’t the only brutal all-out fight. By now, people were throwing punches, wrestling, and gouging eyes up and down both sides of the street. A cop unholstered his M&P. But nobody rushed the float to get beads at the source. With Timon making the rules, it probably never even occurred to anybody.
“Make it stop!” I said.
Timon smirked. “Really, that’s the best part. It doesn’t ever have to stop. If I really want to put the energy into it, I can keep a dreamer trapped in this moment indefinitely, long after you and I have moved on to other things.”
As I’d seen.
“You can but you won’t,” I said, as the cop’s automatic began to bang, and the people near him started screaming. “I’ve already seen what you wanted me to, so what would be the point?”
“Well,” Timon said, “I have been known to do it just because it’s funny. Or to remind the chattels who I am. But since I am still recuperating… ” He waved his hand with its ragged, filthy nails.
And then we were flying, with the lights and roofs of Tampa far below us and bright stars above.
It wasn’t like rocketing across the sky in my spirit body. It was peaceful and joyful at the same time, like getting lost in great music. It was perfect, and despite the nastiness I’d seen just a second ago, I had to struggle to remember that I needed to watch what I said.
“Do you like this better?” Timon asked.
“Much. If you can do this and feel this anytime you want, why even bother with hurting people?”
His ragged clothes fluttering, Timon looped the loop. Just for fun, I guessed. “Why do you take such pleasure in defeating your opponents in a game?” he asked.
“It’s not the same thing,” I said. “It’s a rush because it’s a fair contest. I don’t know if I’ll win, and if I do, it’s because I worked for it. It’s not just bullying and meanness.”
Timon surprised me by smiling. “You have a point. The pleasure of competition is real and keen. I’m certainly addicted to it. But what I did to the people in the crowd is something different and greater.”
“What?” I asked.
“Kingship. Godhood. Ecstasy that’s purest when you put people through something agonizing, degrading, and unforgivable, and yet they have no choice but to forgive.”
“You should apply for a job with the CIA,” I said. “You’d fit right in.”
“It makes you squeamish because you still think like a human. Let me show you how it can be. Let’s find this Victoria of yours. Or little A’marie. Or how about both of them together?”
“Jesus Christ! No!”
“Someone else, then. Anyone you want, to do and feel whatever you want.”
“Are you even listening to me? I told you, I don’t want any part of it.”
He scowled. “Damn you! I know destiny brought us together. You’re the weapon it put in my hand when I needed you most. We’re meant to do great things. And that’s why I’ve tried so hard to bind you to me with kindness.”
I snorted. “Is that what it was?”
“Yes, you ungrateful idiot, it was! I made you my champion—”
“Because no one else would take the job.”
“—I taught you magic—”
“Because I need it to save your ass.”
“—I paid your human girl’s ransom, and I offered to share the greatest pleasure I know. But you still won’t give me your loyalty.”
“I’m loyal to the terms of our deal. I’m going to win the tournament for you. And that will have to be enough, because I’m never going to kiss your ass.”
“Believe it or not,” Timon said, “I’m sorry about this. But a horse is useless until you break it to the saddle.”
Since he’d warned me what was coming, I flew at him with my hands stretched out to grab him by the throat. But before I could close the distance, he ripped the ability to fly away from me. And then, of course, I fell.
Everything went black, and then I landed with nothing more than a bump, like I’d dropped three feet instead of hundreds. A second later, a little light came back into the world. Some of it was flickering in front of me, as AK47’s cracked and chattered. The air stank of cordite, blood, and shit.
I was back in Afghanistan, crouching behind a rock with al-Qaeda, Taliban, or some heroin warlord’s thugs shooting at me. I tried to lift my M16. My hands were empty.
I looked around for the rifle. I didn’t find it. Instead, I saw the rest of my platoon, all lying on the ground. It was their blood and shit I smelled. I gasped in shock and grief. Then the need to survive pushed those feelings down, and I looked for my buddies’ weapons. They didn’t have any, either.
Panic surged inside me. I strained to control it, and that was when my thinking cleared a little. I remembered I was dreaming, and seeing what Timon wanted me to see.
That might mean I could make an M16, like I had in the Pharaoh’s temple. It might even mean I could flash the Thunderbird and tear the whole nightmare apart.
But would that be the smart play?
Since Timon really did need me, he wasn’t going to leave me trapped here for days, weeks, or months like Rufino, or do me any permanent damage. Not tonight. But maybe sometime. And beating him then might mean making moves he didn’t know I had, or at least didn’t know would work against him in his own special playground.
I decided to tough it out.
But that didn’t mean just curling up into the fetal position and taking whatever the dream dumped on my head. Even if I wanted to, the fear that was still on the verge of boiling over inside wouldn’t let me. As the enemy started forward, I jumped up and ran.
It was dark, I kept low, and for a few seconds, I thought that maybe they didn’t see me. Then something slammed into my back. I staggered, and got hit two more times before I finished pitching forward onto my face.
After a moment, the wounds started burning, like somebody was pressing red-hot metal into them. I had blood in my throat, and I coughed and retched as I struggled to breathe. I had the feeling that everything was moving in slow motion even though, with my face in the sand, I couldn’t really see anything moving. Nothing but a dark stain spreading as the life leaked out of me.
Suddenly my decision not to use magic didn’t feel so smart. Hell, I already knew that a person could die from what happened in Timon’s dream world, and I didn’t really know that he still needed me. Maybe his eyes were healing faster than I thought. Maybe he’d be okay to play when the poker game resumed.
But no. That couldn’t be right. The son of a bitch had said he was just training the horse or whatever it was. So I clenched myself and refused to bust out my power even when I felt the hard little ring of a rifle muzzle dig into the back of my head.
A blast of blackness and pain ripped everything away. Then I was sitting naked in a hard chair, with loops of rope tying my wrists and ankles to the wood. There were also wires, pinching—except that that word doesn’t do the feeling justice—where the alligator clips attached them to my groin. Someone had clipped the other end of one to the negative post of a Delco car battery. The other one was lying in the dirt near the positive post.
Electric lanterns lit up the inside of the cave. The harsh white light shined on the people moving around me. They weren’t Afghans. They wore fatigues, and their hair was high and tight.
“What is this?” I asked. It was one of the moments when the dream really had its claws in me, and I thought everything was real.
A big guy with white hair and a cheek bulging with chaw stepped in front of me. ‘Well,” he said, his jaws grinding away, “awake at last.”
“What is this?” I repeated.
He grinned. “What does it look like?”
“I’m on your side,” I said.
“If you were on our side,” he answered, “you wouldn’t whine like a little bitch about what we do.” He bent down and picked up the loose end of the second wire.
“You can’t do this!” I said. “I’m an American!”
“You were an American,” he said. “Now you’re an example.” He clipped the wire to the positive post.
After that, there wasn’t much but pain and screaming myself hoarse, or if there was, I can’t remember it. At one point, I felt my mojo trying to hit back, or put an end to the torture somehow. It was like a big dog yanking on a leash, and I think that at that moment, it and Shadow were the same thing. Somehow, despite everything, I held them back, and felt, like the shock wave from a grenade, the glare of rage and hate my dark self turned on the rest of me.
Eventually I blacked out. When I woke up the next time, I was in a soft, clean hospital bed, with white privacy curtains all around, and an IV sticking in me. It would have seemed like an improvement, except for the bandaged stumps where my arms and legs used to be.
So I had to gut my way through the wave of panic that came from seeing that. Afterward, I lay and panted while I waited for my heartbeat to slow down. Even though it wasn’t even there anymore, the big toe of my right foot gave me a twinge.
“We can do this all day,” I croaked. “But it might not be a great idea if you want me fresh and rested at the poker table.”
A grubby hand pulled open the curtains. “You’re still oriented,” Timon said.
“If that means I still know I’m dreaming, then yeah. It doesn’t mean it’s fun. You made your point.”
He leaned over me, maybe so his damaged eyes could see my face more clearly. A teardrop of slime plopped onto my cheek. He sniffed twice, then straightened up again. “I still smell defiance,” he said.
“As long as I win,” I answered, “what’s the difference? In another day or two, I can go back in my old life. You’ll never have to deal with me again.”
“It’s not that easy,” Timon said. “We Old People can let your Victoria go and just watch her for a while, because she only caught a glimpse of us. But you’ve seen a lot.”
“A lot that no one would believe.”
“There’s also the matter of your power, unlocked and potential. You’re like money I found lying in the street. If I were fool enough to let you drop back onto the pavement, somebody else would only pick you up.”
I glared up at him. “You’re telling me I’m never going to be free to live the way I please?”
He sighed like a parent trying to talk sense to a stubborn kid. “No one has unlimited options. Not even a lord. I’m telling you that a life of privilege and pleasure is opening up for you. But you won’t be able to enjoy it until you adopt the proper mindset.”
I felt another jab of pain in my missing foot.
“How about if we just focus on the tournament for now?” I said. “We can figure out my future after we take care of yours.”
“But I need to be sure of you,” he said. “I need to know you know just how bad it can get for people who cross me.”
Everything went black, and I thought I felt the bed getting bigger, the sides and foot stretching away from me. My body felt different, and not just because I had arms and legs again. I touched my face. My chin and cheeks were soft and smooth, with no stubble at all.
The bed hadn’t grown. I’d shrunk. I was a little kid again.
I guessed Timon thought that would make it harder for me to keep my cool and remember that none of this shit was real. Since he was the expert, he was probably right. But I promised myself I’d hang on anyway.
Then I rolled over and saw the skull.
In the daylight, it was just an old-fashioned cut-glass doorknob on the closet door. But when the moon shined through the window, it changed it and made it glow. Then I had to lie awake and stare at it, even though watching it made me feel stretched tight with fear. Because if I looked away, that was when it would move.
This meant I was really little, so young that grown-up me could barely even remember living in this shabby little house. So young that my mom was still alive. And the skull was the scariest thing I’d ever seen or ever would.
But only scary to a tiny kid, right? It would be ridiculous if it spooked me now.
But it was happening. I tried to fight the fear with adult thinking, with knowledge and common sense. Unfortunately, it was like the little-kid part of me didn’t speak the same language as the part that had placed bets, had sex, shot people, and finally stumbled into a world of bug people and mechanical men.
So the little boy could only stare like always, with his eyes wide and his body shivering, like his attention could nail the skull in place. As long as it didn’t float or jump around—I didn’t know exactly how it would move and prayed I never would—then maybe I’d be safe.
But I couldn’t keep a perfect watch. From time to time, and despite the fear, my attention wavered. Or, even worse, sleepiness smothered me, and I drifted off. Then I felt a jolt of terror when I snapped awake and realized what had happened.
Was the skull exactly where it had been before, or had it moved a little? I could never tell.
Until the moment when I could.
The skull’s grin spread wider. Then it rose straight up into the air like the head of a man getting up out of a chair, though I still couldn’t see even a hint of a body underneath it.
It shouldn’t have seemed all that horrible to somebody who’d dealt with Georgie and Lorenzo. After all, as zombies went, they were the total package, with cold, slimy hands to grab you and magic tricks to trip you up. While it wasn’t even obvious what the skull could actually do to you. Bite you, maybe.
But that was just a flicker of grown-up thinking that didn’t mean anything to little-boy me. I tried to scream, but my throat was clogged, and the cry came out as a whimper. I wanted to move but couldn’t.
Then the skull floated toward me. As you can probably guess, that didn’t make me any less scared. But it flipped my fear from the kind that paralyzes you to the kind that makes you run like hell.
I dived out of bed. My feet tangled in the covers and I fell down hard enough to jolt some of my toys off the shelves. Others—plastic ThunderCats and a stuffed Scooby Doo—turned their heads to watch as I scrambled up again. I could feel that they were laughing at me. That they wanted the skull to get me.
I tore open my bedroom door. A lightless hallway stretched away in front of me with doorways like black mouths yawning on either side. Though this was nothing like the layout of the real house where I’d been a little kid, in the dream, it was my home. But for some reason, I’d forgotten my way around, which meant I didn’t know how to find my mom and dad.
So I ran and looked in one dark room after another. The house stretched on endlessly, space after space, hall after hall, without ever showing me a window or a door to the outside world. The skull floated along right behind me. I couldn’t look around to see it. That would slow me down. But I heard its teeth go click-click-click, like it was practicing its bite, or nipping and falling short by inches.
There were still moments when grown-up me bobbed to the surface, and I knew what was happening was a nightmare. Then Shadow roared for me to turn him loose.
And God, did I want to. I wanted it even worse than when the interrogator had me hooked up to the battery. But I held evil me back until the fear sucked us both back down, and I forgot I was anything but a child.
Where were Mommy and Daddy? From time to time, I tried to scream for them. But it’s hard to run and yell at the same time, especially when you’re mostly out of breath. Each time, the call came out as a tiny wheeze.
I started to think they’d gone away. Given me to the skull. And while it hardly seemed possible for me to get any more scared, that idea did the trick.
Then I spotted Daddy’s oxygen tank covered in cobwebs in a shadowy corner.
It didn’t make sense. The tank belonged years in the future. But the terrified kid I’d become didn’t think about that. He just took the tank as a signpost to point the way to his father. He staggered into the room where it stood and on through the doorway in the far wall.
There were more doorways after that, until I wondered if I’d gotten lost, or maybe never really seen the tank at all. Then, at the far end of the darkest room yet, I spotted two murky grown-up figures, one woman and one man.
They didn’t see me. They couldn’t have, because they turned and headed for a different doorway. I somehow knew that if they went through, I’d lose them forever.
I tried to call to them. Even through they were now just a few feet away, they still couldn’t hear my strangled little cry.
I ran toward them, but they only got farther away, like the room was getting longer. The skull’s teeth clicked louder as it narrowed the gap between us.
I dredged up the energy for one last burst of speed. I sprinted until I smacked right into my father’s legs and threw my arms around them. And was sure I’d done what I needed to do to make everything all right.
Fingers tousled my sweaty hair. But they were rougher than they’d ever been before, so rough that it almost hurt. Surprised, I looked up, and that was when I finally managed to get off a real scream.
Because Daddy and Mommy weren’t Daddy and Mommy anymore. They were the skull, too, and their fleshless, glowing faces leered down at me.
I tried to break away, but I was too slow. They grabbed me, shoved me to the floor, and bent over me. The first skull floated down to join them. Then they all opened their jaws wide and started biting me. They ripped away chunks and strips of me and gobbled them up.
It went on and on, while I shrieked and thrashed, straining uselessly to break free. I didn’t have to strain anymore to hold Shadow back. He was gone now, along with any flashes of understanding that what was happening wasn’t real. The nightmare had finally crushed all that out of me.
Then, suddenly, the pain and all the rest of it stopped. I was soaring over Ybor again. Timon was maybe ten feet away. I couldn’t see him clearly. The tears in my eyes blurred everything.
“Now do you understand?” he asked. “Now will you mind your manners and behave?”
“Yes.” I gasped.
It would be nice to think I was just bullshitting him to make the torture stop. That, even at that moment, I hadn’t really broken. But I’m not sure it’s true. At best, it was probably half-and-half.
“Good,” he said, and I felt pathetically grateful. “But let’s make absolutely sure.”
Then I was back on the floor in the dark, with strong hands holding me down. The thing that had been my mommy sank her teeth into my cheek.