Part 7 (1/2)

'Daisy never told a soul about those circus nightmares. She never told anybody! Only me.'

'I realize that. But like I told you - knowing about nightmares, that's my job. And Daisy's nightmare about the circus is the reason why I'm here today. Your nightmare - the nightmare you had at the Griffin House Hotel - that was part of the same nightmare, believe it or not.'

'How could that be?'

'Because the circus doesn't vanish when you wake up. It exists in its own reality. It's going on right now - even during the day, when there's n.o.body asleep and dreaming about it. Do you understand that? The barrel-organ music is still playing. The clowns are still tumbling. The circus has a terrible unstoppable life of its own, in the world of dreams.'

'You said that my nightmare was part of it, too,' said Katie. She felt badly shaken, and she had to sit down on the opposite end of the couch.

Springer nodded. 'That's because Daisy was the same as you, descended from the same line. If the meningitis hadn't taken her when she was so young, I would have been talking to her today, too, and asking her to help us.'

'What line? I don't understand any of this.'

Springer said, 'I know you're not very religious, Katie, but the forces of good are embodied in a spirit which is known in the waking world by many different names, and in dream world by the name of Ashapola.

'Ashapola is light. Ashapola is purity. Ashapola protects us from the forces of darkness and destruction, and everything which would jeopardize our civilization and our sanity. Over the millennia, Ashapola has constantly battled to defend our world from being torn apart at the seams.'

'But what does any of this have to do with my nightmare?'

'Everything - because the woman you encountered in your nightmare had deliberately been mutilated so that she could be presented as an attraction at the circus. The selfsame circus which your sister Daisy used to dream about.'

'Go on.'

'This circus has survived in the world of dreams for nearly nine centuries, believe it or not. Circus and freak show, I should say, because it has always had giants and dwarves and monkey women and babies with two heads. Until nineteen-thirty-six, it was in hibernation, its freaks and its clowns and its animals all deeply asleep, as if they were dead.

'In nineteen-thirty-six, however, Gordon Veitch found out how to rouse it, although we don't know how, and more to the point we don't really know why. He was stopped before he could revive it completely, but he woke it up, and now it seems as if either he or somebody else is trying to finish what he began. For the past seventy-five years the circus has been making itself felt in the consciousness of thousands upon thousands of people, in their dreams. Maybe millions. So far, when we dream about it, the music is still very faint and far away, thank Ashapola. But if this latest attempt to bring it back to life is successful, there is a very real risk that the entire world is going to be plunged into darkness and brutality and chaos like nothing that you could ever imagine.'

Katie said nothing, but waited for Springer to carry on. She felt a complete sense of unreality, as if she were dreaming this, too; but however outlandish his story was, Springer had to be telling her the truth. Daisy had told her all about the freaks that had frightened her so much in her nightmares; especially the woman with one eye in the middle of her forehead, and a small creature that was half human and half rat, which used to gibber and curse in all kinds of different languages.

'The story goes that the circus was originally created in the middle of the twelfth century by a Cistercian monk from the Maulbronn monastery in Germany. His name was Brother Albrecht, and he was supposed to have been so handsome that some of the villagers in the Salzbach Valley believed that he was a saint. Maybe he was a saint, but if he was, he was a tainted saint, because he had a pa.s.sionate affair with one of the prettiest girls in the village.

'Unfortunately for Brother Albrecht, she was already married, and her husband came home one day and found them in bed together. After he had beaten Brother Albrecht almost senseless, her husband tied him up and sawed off his arms at the elbows, so that he would never be able to touch another woman. Then he sawed off his legs at the knees, so that he would permanently have to be kneeling on the floor to pray for forgiveness. He daubed the stumps of Brother Albrecht's arms and legs with scalding pitch to prevent him from bleeding to death. I won't tell you what he forced his wife to do, as punishment for her infidelity.'

'That's a horrible story,' said Katie. 'That's absolutely horrible.'

'Yes, it is. But I wish it were only a story.'

SIX.

Avenging Claw Katie didn't know what to say. She felt as if she ought to tell Springer to get out of her house, right now, and never come back. But she also felt that he had arrived here this morning with the key to the rest of her life. She had to hear him out, no matter what he was going to say to her. If she didn't, she would never discover what she really was, or what Daisy could have been, and why she had dreamed or hallucinated about that mutilated woman in the Griffin House Hotel. For some reason that she couldn't understand, she also felt a sense of obligation, as if it was her duty to listen to him. Maybe 'recruitment' was the right word.

Springer said, 'I know that none of this is easy, Katie. It's sickening, most of it, and very scary. But you and all of the others who are like you have no real choice. It is what you were born to do, if you were ever called.'

'Just tell me about the circus.'

Springer stood up and walked across to the window. Outside, over the rooftops of the houses opposite, Katie could see a thick bank of orange c.u.mulus clouds rising up, like the clouds of dust raised by a vast approaching army - still many miles away, but approaching them relentlessly. There would be a thunderstorm by the middle of the afternoon.

'The Cistercian monks came to the village and took Brother Albrecht back to the monastery. He spent months recovering from his mutilation, but according to monastery records he never prayed again. Not for forgiveness, not for the glory of G.o.d, not for anything. In fact he swore and blasphemed so much that after less than a year the monks forced him to leave the monastery, and he had to survive by begging in the village square and showing himself off as a freak.

'He had his entire body tattooed with ill.u.s.trations of demons having s.e.x with women, and he advertised himself as der Ursprungliche Sohn des Teufels - the Original Son of the Devil. He persuaded a local carpenter to construct him a small mechanical cart in which he could push himself around, using the stumps of his elbows to propel himself. There are woodcuts of him in several medieval books about German mythology.'

Springer turned away from the window. 'It wasn't long before he became well known throughout the southern part of Germany, and he was joined by other freaks who wanted to profit from his notoriety. By the spring of the year eleven-fifty-two, he had established a traveling sideshow with more than twenty-five VSPs.'

'VSPs?'

'Very Special People. That's what we're supposed to call them these days. And it's right that we do. They are very special. As if it isn't hard enough surviving in this world without suffering from some hideous deformity. But of course Brother Albrecht wasn't born without arms and legs. He couldn't rail against his parents, or against G.o.d. All he wanted was revenge for its own sake - especially against those who had once admired him so much for his angelic looks and now crowded around him to stare at him in horror.

'His avowed aim was to drag down the whole world to the level of a freak show. He wanted to turn it all into a circus - a world in which art and beauty were either derided or ignored, and the ugliest and the loudest and the most obscene were applauded by all.'

Katie said, 'Seems like he's nearly succeeded, doesn't it? You only have to watch daytime TV.'

Springer looked at her steadily and said, 'Yes. You're right. That's where it all comes from. The reality shows, the hideous art, the raucous music, the wors.h.i.+p of trashy celebrities. It all comes from Brother Albrecht and his traveling freak show.'

'But that was - what? - nine hundred years ago. How could the circus have survived all of that time?'

'That was the mistake of the Pope at the time, Eugene III. He was horrified by the way in which Brother Albrecht was glorifying Satan and mocking great art and music, which, in the High Middle Ages, was almost all religious. But Eugene III was also the first ever Cistercian Pope, and he was gravely concerned that Brother Albrecht's circus was bringing the Cistercian Order into serious disrepute.

'Eugene III heard that Brother Albrecht's circus was settled for the winter in a small town called Kempten-im-Allgau, in Swabia, and he asked his friend the Duke of Swabia to kill Brother Albrecht and scatter the rest of his freaks and burn down all of their tents.

'When the duke's soldiers arrived at the circus encampment, however, they found only nine s.h.i.+vering freaks hiding in a nearby wood. The rest of the circus had vanished. There was no trace of it anywhere. No tents, no wagons, no horses, no caravans, no Brother Albrecht and none of the other VSPs. Not only that, none of the townspeople had seen them leave and there were no tracks in the snow. Only a few hoof prints, and some scattered ashes.'

'So where had the circus gone?' asked Katie.

'The duke's men tortured three of the VSPs they had found in the wood, and eventually they told him what had happened. The circus had been taken away in the same way that the woman in your hallucination was taken away. Brother Albrecht had been tipped off that the Pope was out to destroy his circus so he had taken a sleeping draft and dreamed about it - all of its tents and all of its trappings, all of its lions and its tigers and its dancing bears and its scores of a.s.sorted freaks - except those nine VSPs who hadn't wanted to go with him. He had dreamed about it so that it disappeared from the real world.'

'An entire circus? How was that possible?'

'Because of the strength of Brother Albrecht's hatred for what the real world had done to him. Because, Katie, the laws of nature are very different in the world of dreams.'

Springer paused, and then he said, 'There was nothing that Pope Eugene could do but place a holy sanction on the circus, so that Brother Albrecht would never be able to wake up and bring it back to the world of reality. A kind of exile, if you like.

'As of now, the circus still hasn't been restored to its full terrible ingloriousness, but somebody is trying to bring it back to life, so that very soon we will all be dreaming about it, every one of us, every night. That hallucination you experienced at the Griffin House Hotel makes me sure of it.'

'But what can I do about it?' Katie asked him. 'You said that you needed me, but how can I possibly help you?'

Springer came across and sat down on the couch next to her. No man had ever looked at her like this before. He seemed to be trying to show her that he was proud of her, but at the same time his expression was one of sympathy, even of pity.

'Your grandmother, who used to sing that you that bird song, was a Night Warrior.'

'Awhat?'

'A Night Warrior. She could rise out of her physical body when she was asleep, and enter other people's dreams.'

'Now I know you're pulling my chain. Come on, you've upset me. I think it's time you left.'

'But you, too, are a Night Warrior. You can enter other people's dreams.'