SONGS OF DREAMING GODS

By William Meikle

A Macabre Ink Production

Macabre Ink is an imprint of Crossroad Press
Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press
Smashwords edition published at Smashwords by Crossroad Press
Digital Edition Copyright © 2017 William Meikle
Cover design by Zach McCain
 LICENSE NOTES
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 Meet the Author

William Meikle is a Scottish writer, now living in Canada, with over

twenty novels published in the genre press and more than 300 short story
credits in thirteen countries. He has books available from a variety of
publishers and his work has appeared in a large number of professional
anthologies and magazines. He lives in Newfoundland with whales, bald
eagles and icebergs for company. When he’s not writing he drinks beer,
plays guitar, and dreams of fortune and glory.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
NOVELS
Berserker 
Crustaceans
Eldren: The Book of the Dark
Fungoid
Generations
Hound of Night / Veil Knights #2 (as Rowan Casey)
Island Life
Night of the Wendigo
Ramskull
Sherlock Holmes: The Dreaming Man
Songs of Dreaming Gods
The Boathouse
The Creeping Kelp
The Dunfield Terror
The Exiled
The Green and the Black
The Hole
The Invasion
The Midnight Eye Files: The Amulet
The Midnight Eye Files: The Sirens
The Midnight Eye Files: The Skin Game 
The Midnight Eye Files: Omnibus
The Ravine
The Valley
The Concordances of the Red Serpent
Watchers: The Battle for the Throne
Watchers: The Coming of the King
Watchers: Culloden
Watchers: Omnibus edition
NOVELLAS
Broken Sigil
Clockwork Dolls
Pentacle
Professor Challenger: The Island of Terror
Sherlock Holmes: Revenant
Sherlock Holmes: The London Terrors (3 novella omnibus)
The House on the Moor
The Job
The Midnight Eye Files: Deal or No Deal
The Plasm
Tormentor
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS
Carnacki: Heaven and Hell
Carnacki: The Edinburgh Townhouse
Carnacki: The Watcher at the Gate
Dark Melodies
Myth and Monsters
Professor Challenger: The Kew Growths
Samurai and Other Stories
Sherlock Holmes: The Quality of Mercy
The Ghost Club
 DISCOVER CROSSROAD PRESS
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SONGS OF DREAMING GODS
 Table of Contents
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 1

The tall blonde stepped down off the top landing while Inspector John
Green was just halfway up the last set of stairs. She looked dazed, shocked.
It was a look John had seen far too often, and he knew she wouldn’t be
thinking straight, so he stood well to the side, almost right up against the
wall to give her plenty of room to pass. She didn’t even acknowledge his
presence, not that he expected her to. If what he’d been told on the phone
was right, she’d seen more than enough for one day already. The constable
who was leading her away gave him a thin smile.
“It’s bad, boss. As bad as any I’ve seen.”
The dazed look faded, not quite completely, from the blonde’s stare, and
she looked straight at John, as if seeing him for the first time.
“I’ll say it’s fucking bad. I thought it was all Carlos Castaneda,
mescaline medicine man hippie bollocks,” she said as she wiped blood from
her brow. “How was I to know the fucker was telling the truth all along?”
“Excuse me?” John said. “Could you clarify that?”
But the hundred-yard stare was back again and although another trickle
of blood ran from a small tear at her hairline, she didn’t move to wipe it
away this time. What little conversation there was appeared to be over
before it had begun.
The constable raised an eyebrow and shrugged.
“She’s not spoken much sense at all yet, so your guess is as good as
mine, boss,” he said. “She’s had a knock on the head as well as the cuts and
bruises. I’ll get someone to have a look at her.”
He led the woman away. She was still staring, still silent, as they
disappeared out of view down the stairwell.
John let it go. They’d get her statement down at the station after the
medic did his thing. There was little to be gained from questioning her until
that stare started to focus on matters nearer at hand. Besides, he had other
things to worry about.
He’d been at home when he got the call, and the chief sounded almost
apologetic to be contacting him.
“Normally I’d get Jim Hoskins,” he said “You know that, he’s been
covering for you anyway, but he’s on an attempted murder case in Mount
Pearl and I don’t want to drag him off it. You need to know; this is a nasty
one, John. I’ll understand if you don’t think you’re ready just yet.”
 John knew he was far from ready. He wasn’t sure he’d ever be fully
ready again, but he wasn’t going to tell the chief that. He’d been off work
for so long it was driving him nuts, and he couldn’t give them any opening
that might lengthen his absence. So here he was, about to walk in on blood
and gore and folks who’d been alive but now were not, when he was only
recently back from the brink of death himself. He took a deep breath,
wished he’d had a drink before leaving the house, and walked into
Apartment Six.
He had been attending crime scenes for too many years to remember and
thought he was inured against the worst horrors that man could inflict on his
fellow man, but on entering the apartment even his hardened cynicism was
being tested to the maximum. When his gaze landed on one atrocity, and
slid away, finding it too much to bear, there was another to be seen at every
turn. Despite an almost overwhelming panic attack, he had to breathe
shallow, through his mouth—the stench of shit and piss and blood was
almost overpowering. He was glad now that he’d not had that drink before
leaving home; the scene was one of carnage and bloody chaos and he
already knew he had his work cut out for him if he was to make any kind of
sense of it.
There were five, maybe six bodies. It was hard to tell amid the gory mess
that lay strewn all across the floor and furnishings. Two, at least two, lay
sprawled on a sofa, limbs and arms intertwined as if they’d clutched at each
other in fear even as they’d been torn into little more than lumps of wet
meat. Another lay on the floor, face down in a drying puddle of blood and
brain and guts. Yet another was by the door. They, she, if the skirt was any
indication, had nearly made it out, leaving red handprints almost, but not
quite, up as far as the door handle. The last had tried, and failed, to crawl
under the glass-topped coffee table and had only managed to get head and
shoulders underneath; not nearly enough to save them. The body was pulled
up into a defensive ball with the white bone of their spine showing clearly
through rent clothing and torn flesh.
John’s constable on this case, Todd Wiggins, stood in one of the few
spaces clear of the gore, documenting the scene in his notebook. He saw the
inspector looking, and threw a mock salute. John managed a thin smile in
reply, but smiling was the last thing he felt like doing right then.
John’s sergeant, Janis Lodge, was off to one side near the large picture
window, taking notes of her own. She didn’t look up, didn’t acknowledge
his presence, but he knew she’d seen him come in, and was giving him time
and space to ease his way back on the job.
I’m going to need plenty of both.
His first instinct was to look for any spent shell casings, but there were
none visible; no tell-tale holes in walls or windows either. And on closer
inspection, as close as he cared to get anyway, the bodies didn’t look to
have been shot. It looked more like they had been mutilated and some of
them dismembered by someone in a rage, using an as yet unidentified
weapon. At that moment, he was at a loss to think what it might be.
He stood in the center of the room, unsure of his next move. He should
be giving orders, making connections, collecting evidence, but all he could
see was blood and the stuttering flashback running just behind his eyes of a
knife, slashing. The wounds in his belly ached, a deep, almost agonizing
pain that he’d been living with since he got out of hospital but now seemed
worse than it had for weeks.
“You okay, Boss?” Janis asked. She’d taken a step closer to him, and he
noticed she had kept her voice low so that only he could hear. John knew
what she was asking. It had only been two months, and he was supposed to
be taking four, that was the minimum the doctors said he should rest, but he
couldn’t ignore this call. This was his town, and a multiple murder here was
an affront that he felt as deep as any knife wound.
He still hadn’t answered Janis’ question. In truth, he was far from okay.
But like it or not, this is what he was good at; this was all he was good at.
He needed to work, otherwise the bottle might win this round, and once that
started winning, the way back might be even longer still.
He gazed out of the window so Janis couldn’t see his eyes. The wounds
throbbed, hot then cold, and with his every breath he felt the knife again as
it slid into the soft tissue of his belly. Only the fact that he was starting to
run to fat had saved him. He could thank, not blame, the beer for that at
least.
It had been his own fault in a way. The first thing they teach you in
training is make sure a body is really just a body and not some maniac
looking for any excuse to do you harm. He’d been in a hurry that afternoon,
the promise of a dinner date at the end of a long day meant he was eager to
get it done and get off shift, so he hadn’t paid attention. It had snowed, was
still snowing, heavily in town, and the alleyway off George Street was
several inches deep in the stuff, although there was only a slight dusting on
the body. He should have noticed that, should have remembered that dead
men don’t melt snow. Instead he’d stepped forward, bent over, and almost
fallen on his ass when the supposedly dead vagrant woke up and thrust a
knife at him. Maybe if he had actually fallen he might have missed taking
the wounds, but he hadn’t been that lucky.
Now here he was, some new holes in him, ones that he knew would
always be there long after the flesh had healed, and back at work too early,
far too early.
But what else can I do?
At least the bodies strewn around him were most certainly dead, so he
didn’t have that to worry about. And the view from the window was more
than enough to distract him from the scene inside while he took time to
gather his thoughts before responding to Janis.
The building sat on a corner plot on Church Street, the frontage on the
road itself and the eastern side on an alleyway that ran along the hillside.
This apartment, on the top floor, overlooked the shorter house across the
alley and had an open view to the wide expanse of St. John’s harbor and the
mouth of the Narrows. The Atlantic Ocean beyond glistened in sword-like
beams of sun slanting through the clouds and far to his left the high dome of
Signal Hill had a new dusting of late spring snow. Normally the sight would
have lifted John’s spirits. He loved this old town deeply, but today was
looking to be far from normal and it was only just getting started.
He didn’t have time to explain all that to Janis though, and he knew she
was patiently waiting for an answer, so he forced himself to turn away from
the window. He gave her as good a smile as he could manage.
“I’m fine, just a bit tired,” he replied. “The chief got me out of bed
before ten. That’s early for me these days.”
She didn’t smile back at his forced attempt at humor, and looked like she
might want to make something more of it, but John wasn’t ready for a
cross-examination. He nipped any questioning in the bud by none too subtly
reminding her that they were cops on a job.
“What have we got so far, Sergeant?”
She looked him in the eye, and finally managed a smile of her own in
reply.
“If that’s the way you want to play it…”
He understood what she was asking. She’d been more than his Sergeant
these past weeks, she’d been his link back to the real world, a friend when
he needed one, and a nurse when he fucked up and overdid things. But here,
now, he needed to be a cop, and he knew her well enough to know she’d
understand.
“It’s the only way I know,” he said.
She reached across the space between them and touched his arm lightly.
“Welcome back, Boss,” she said, “we missed you around here.”
He thought that things might be getting better already.
He let Janis ease him gently back into the swing of things, the details of
the case doing much to ground him back into a sense of who he was, what
constituted reality, for here and now at least.
“What you see is what you get, boss,” she said. “Six in here, all dead by
method as yet unknown, sometime in the early hours of the morning. A
party gone wrong from what we’ve been able to ascertain so far. The blonde
you must have seen on the way in is the only survivor, but good luck on
getting anything out of her any time soon. I’m pretty sure she’s been on
something hallucinogenic. Mushrooms would be my guess, given the
nonsense she’s spouting about what went down. Whatever it was they’re
taking her to the station to see if they can bring her down enough to be able
to give us a statement.”
“Carlos Castaneda, mescaline medicine man hippie bollocks,” John said,
and Janis looked at him sharply, as if he’d just gone mad. He smiled thinly.
“Just something our survivor said on the stairs. I don’t think it helps us any.
How about some science? Where’s the Forensics team?”
“They got the call same time as you did I believe. They’re on their way
but have been held up near the airport by a crash…a fatality I heard, and
half an hour before they get here I was told. But I don’t know that they’re
going to find much of any use to us. There’s no weapon here that we can
find, and we’ve looked everywhere, and it looks to me like all these deaths
were done by some kind of animal attack, although there’s no prints in the
blood of man nor beast, and no sign of any fur or hair. You chose a bad day
to come back. It’s a weird one, Boss.”
“What do you think? An axe maybe? Or even a chainsaw?”
“That was my first thought too,” Janis said. “But there would be spatter
everywhere in that case, the walls would be covered in it, you know that.
And as you can see, it is puddles that we have here, not spatter. And there’s
something else you need to look at in the kitchen.”
 She led John around an arch, one of those mock things people utilize as
room dividers when they knock down walls. It led into a smaller kitchen-
dining area. There was a small window looking across Church Street
outside to the old church itself. The fixtures and fittings were all old,
nineteen seventies or eighties vintage at a guess, and a naked neon light
tube, currently off, hung somewhat precariously a foot overhead. The
kitchen table was covered in liquor, wine and beer bottles and the linoleum
on the floor felt sticky underfoot where booze, and God knows what else,
had been spilled, but it was the thing that had been hung above the stove
that got most of John’s attention. It was a poster of sorts, two feet tall by
one foot wide, a psychedelic mélange of swirling green, yellow and purple
that had been sketched over in thick black ink with a pair of black circles
enclosing a five-pointed star. The pentacle had been crudely done in thick
red lines that looked wet and sticky. He had to check closely before he
convinced himself that it wasn’t more blood.
“What’s this? Some band’s logo?” he asked.
“If it is, they’re death metal, or whatever they call it these days. No,
boss, I think this is some kind of black magic ritual bullshit.”
John stood looking at the poster for several seconds. It looked like
something a teenage boy might do, and certainly didn’t look capable of
being the cause of the mayhem in the adjoining room.
“So, what?” he said. “Kids like to play mumbo-jumbo games when
they’re stoned, you know that. Sometimes it’s a Ouija board, sometimes a
tarot pack, and sometimes it’s bullshit magic circles and pentacles. It’s not
like we haven’t seen this kind of crap before.”
“But it usually ends with them scaring themselves silly, or else a fist
fight and some cuts and bruises, not the bloody Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”
John studied the makeshift artwork again. He had rarely seen anything
less likely to be magical.
“You really think this is related to what went down next door?”
Janis couldn’t seem to drag herself away from the poster.
“I think it must be, Boss. At least that’s what my gut is telling me.
There’s no rhyme or reason to it, though. But there’s also no doubt that
something kicked it all off. This is as good a place to start as any, isn’t it?
We’ve got to start somewhere.”
John had one last look at the artwork then turned away.
“Okay, it’s your call. Ask the blonde about it when she’s sobered up.”
 As they walked back through to the main room John saw that the view
from the main room window was now obscured by fog, not in itself unusual
in St. John’s at this time of the year. What was unusual was that this fog
was so thick it looked like a gray wall just beyond the window. It had come
out of nowhere, for the harbor had been in bright sunshine just a few
minutes earlier, and you usually saw the gray stuff coming from a long way
off through the Narrows or over Signal Hill.
The room fell dark around them, as gloomy as late evening in a matter of
seconds. Janis flicked a light switch, but nothing happened. John tried the
television, amazingly the sleek flat-screen had survived the mayhem
without even being toppled, but it wasn’t getting any juice. It stayed dark
and black.
“Great,” John said. “No light and no power. Well, there’s no use
stumbling around in the gloom. Best just leave everything to the Forensics
lads. We’ll both talk to the blonde at the station, see what she’s got to say
for herself.”
He didn’t get any argument from Janis, and Constable Wiggins was
already on his way out, heading for the stairs. John followed the other two
down an increasingly dark stairwell. It seemed the power was out in the
whole building, and that the fog outside was getting thicker by the minute.
By the time he reached the bottom hall the constable had already stepped
outside. Janis stood in the doorway, holding the door open.
“It’s as thick as soup out there, Boss. I think we’ll be faster walking than
taking the truck.”
John nodded.
“I’ll be right with you.”
He turned for one last look up the stairwell. There was thin light, high up
there, from a skylight that was gray and opaque, but no sign of any
movement, not any sound in the whole building. He hadn’t asked Janis
about the other occupants and it should have been one of his first questions,
another sign he wasn’t quite up to speed yet.
He turned back to the door to finally ask her, but she had already left,
there was just a wall of fog in the doorway. He couldn’t hear any traffic
noise or any voices. Everything beyond the immediate hallway was silenced
by the gray blanket that had fallen on the town. John stepped forward into
the doorway then one step further, into the fog. He expected to meet cold
air, but the fog felt strangely warm against his face, and as he tried to take
another step it pushed back against him, preventing him from going outside.
“What the fuck is this now?” he said loudly. “Janis? Is this some sort of
coming back to work joke? Because if it is, I am not fucking amused.”
He got no answer, and the fog, or whatever it was for he was no longer
sure that fog was the word for this, pushed harder against him. He wasn’t
making any headway. He could reach six inches or so past the plane of the
door opening itself, but could go no further. It was as if a physical barrier
had been slid into place to prevent him leaving. He stepped back into the
hallway, slightly out of breath with exertion, planning to take stock. As he
did so the heavy wooden door slammed shut with a bang that shook the
whole house, leaving him alone in a hall that was lit only by a small
window above the door itself, a window filled with swirling, thick fog.
He tried the door handle. It turned, but when he tugged it didn’t give, the
door didn’t move in the slightest in its frame, and there was no other
mechanism to open it from the inside. There was a keyhole, but no key. The
door was locked, securely, and from the outside.
“Janis?” he shouted, and beat on the door with his fist. “I’m beyond not
being amused now, now I’m fucking royally annoyed. Open this door right
now.”
There was no answer, no sound of any kind from beyond the door. The
fog continued to swirl in the window above the frame.
What the fuck is going on here?
He tried the door again with the same lack of result. Giving it a hard kick
didn’t help, but it at least let off some of the steam he could feel building up
in him, it was all he could do not to take out his pistol and start blasting at
the handle.
“Sergeant Lodge?” he shouted again, trying to keep his voice calm.
“Okay, you’ve got me. Big joke. We can all go back to the station and
everyone will get their jollies at my expense for a while. But we’ve got a
multiple homicide to deal with here. It’s time to be getting on with it.”
His appeal to her sense of duty should have worked. He knew her well
enough to know that she held her job as being of prime importance. The
door should have opened straight away.
It stayed resolutely shut, and there was still no noise from outside.
John turned three-sixty degrees in the empty hallway.
He was alone in the dark.
 2

Janis stood out on the sidewalk for several seconds after stepping
outside. The fog cleared quickly as a sudden breeze, helped by the return of
strong sunshine, blew it away as if it had never been. She turned, expecting
to see the boss in the doorway. The door in front of her was shut and there
was no sign of the inspector.
She turned the handle, opened the door and looked inside. The dark
hallway beyond was empty and quiet.
“Boss? You still in here?”
Her call echoed up the stairwell and she waited, listening. She got no
reply and the house stayed quiet. She’d been told earlier that the rest of the
rooms were not in use, she’d had a constable check, and he’d reported
nothing but empty rooms that looked like they’d been that way for quite
some time.
“Boss?”
There was still no answer. She closed the door and went back out onto
the street, looking up and down the hill, but she couldn’t see John Green
anywhere. There was an old man walking a dog further up the hill, but
nobody down this end but her and Todd Wiggins.
The constable was standing at her shoulder. She turned to him.
“Did you see the boss? Did he go down or up the hill?”
She saw immediately that the younger officer knew about as much as she
did.
“He didn’t pass me, so he must have gone up, but I thought he was with
you,” he said.
“He was, until a couple of seconds ago.”
“We probably just lost him in the fog,” Wiggins said. “He’ll be on his
way back to the station on foot. We can drive round and pick him up as we
pass him.”
Although Janis couldn’t see how the inspector could have evaded them,
or why he didn’t just turn and come back when the fog lifted so quickly, she
could see the sense of the constable’s plan. She got in the truck as he started
it up, checking up and down the hill one last time first. Wiggins took their
usual route back, the one the boss would normally use if walking, but
although the journey was long enough that they should have caught him
easily, there had still been no sight of John Green by the time they reached
the station. Janis also had a look at the logbook in reception. He had not
checked in at the desk ahead of them.
She wanted to go straight back out to the house again, but Wiggins put a
hand on her shoulder.
“Leave him be for a bit, sarge,” he said softly. “We both saw the look on
his face when he saw the bodies. He came back too early. I’m not sure he
can handle it. Maybe he’s gone home, and is too embarrassed to have us see
him like that?”
Again, that sounded reasonable, knowing what she did of the inspector’s
frame of mind in recent weeks. She’d checked in with him regularly during
his recuperation after he got out of hospital, joining him for coffee and
Scotch, not much for her, too much for him, and had even put him to bed
twice when the booze caught up to him too fast. She had thought then that
the road back might be longer than he hoped. Now she was sure of it.
“Okay,” Janis said, realizing Wiggins was still waiting for a reply. “But
I’m not leaving him to brood. As soon as we’ve talked to the survivor, we’ll
go around to his place and make sure he’s okay. Deal?”
Wiggins nodded and together they headed for the interview room, where
their only witness was waiting for them.

The young constable charged with watching over their witness looked
more than a bit relieved to be allowed out of the room when Janis and
Wiggins entered.
“I don’t know what she’s been on, sergeant,” she said. “But I don’t want
anything to do with it. It’s scary sounding shit, pardon my French.”
The blonde sat slumped on the other side of the table, as loose as a rag
doll that had been discarded and left in the chair. She looked up when the
two cops entered, as if expecting to see someone else, her face falling when
she realized it was only the two officers. She had been crying, long and
hard, black streaks of mascara running down her cheeks, almost
symmetrical in the patterning on either side and giving her the look of a
particularly crazed clown. She wiped some dribble away from her nose with
the back of her hand and sniffed wetly until Janis handed her a box of
tissues they kept on a shelf. People cried a lot in this room, and the cops had
learned to be prepared.
“Can I go home now? I really want to go home now,” the blonde said.
She looked about ready to burst into tears again at any moment.
 There wasn’t any way this woman was going anywhere other than a cell
for the foreseeable future, not while there were still six dead bodies to
account for, but Janis knew that telling her that right now might mean she
wouldn’t get a statement.
And I need that story.
She sat down in the chair opposite the woman and Wiggins sat down on
her right-hand side. He slid a file across to her as he pulled up the chair.
“Just tell us what happened in the apartment last night,” Janis said.
“Then we’ll see what we can do for you.”
Janis read the woman’s rap sheet as she waited for her to decide to talk.
It was a longish list, but all petty misdemeanors, DUI, shoplifting and small
quantity possession, but nothing since she turned twenty-one some five
years ago. There was certainly nothing in the file to indicate a violent
streak, and nothing to say she was capable of the bloody mayhem that had
been visited on the other partygoers.
But drugs make people do crazy shit. It wouldn’t be the first time.
She looked up when the woman finally decided to talk.
“Can’t I just go home? It’s my mam, see,” the girl, Samantha, Janis
noted, said. “She’ll be waiting for me.”
Samantha wasn’t quite bright enough to realize that her sheet also told
Janis that her parents were both deceased, but Janis kept quiet for the time
being. The blonde had started talking, and interrupting her now would only
set things back a step.
“And I don’t know anything, I swear. The big guy, the good looking
bearded one, picked me up in that Irish bar in George Street last night. I’d
had a drink or two…you know…and a smoke, and it was getting late, so I
was going to give him the brush off. But he said he had a party going, it was
just ’round the corner a way and there would be free booze and pizza. So,
Sheila and me went with him and his pals.”
She stopped, as if she’d suddenly remembered that her friend should be
around somewhere.
“You’ve seen Sheila, right? She’s okay, isn’t she?”
Janis guessed that Sheila would turn out to be one of the deceased,
probably the one that died trying to get to the door, but again she kept quiet.
Samantha didn’t need to know that, not yet, maybe not for a long time yet.
“We nearly changed our mind when we saw where he was taking us.
Their apartment was in that big spooky house on the corner halfway up
Church Street, but I guess you guys know that already. Once we got there
everything was cool for a while…we had a smoke…strong stuff, Sheila
barfed…and a drink and none of the guys even tried to grope us or
anything. Like I said, it was cool. Then, just as I was getting a good buzz on
and getting ready to really party, the big beardy guy starts in with the weird
shit, you know, that intellectual late-night meaning of life stuff that the
students like when they’re stoned? Well he went on and on and his pals
seemed to be lapping it up. Sheila had the best of it. She passed out on the
sofa and after a while I was getting desperate for a whiz, so I went to the
little girl’s room.
“The screaming started just as I was doing my business. I thought at first
they’d put on a movie, but it sounded too real, you know, too much like
crying? And then the whole place filled with that warm bloody fog. I
couldn’t see a fucking thing, buggering about in the dark looking for a light
and knocking myself off the fucking walls. I staggered out into the flat and I
could hear them all shouting and screaming and some old bugger singing
about a Sleeping God or some old shit. I did find what I hoped was the front
door and ran out into the hall, where I only went and banged my fucking
head against the guardrail and knocked myself out. I went down like a sack
of bricks. And that was that, until this morning and your man found me,
bleeding like a stuck pig with my panties down around my ankles. Not cool.
Not cool at all.”
It had all come out of her in one fast rush of words, but now she seemed
spent and empty. Her gaze took on the same far way stare they’d seen
before, focused on something over Janis’ shoulder as new heavy tears ran
silently down her cheeks, smearing the mascara further, more black tracks
running down the side of her nose and around her lips.
Janis handed her another tissue but she barely noticed and just sat,
staring into space.
My turn.
“Let’s back up a bit. You went to the lavatory and the screaming started?
There was nothing else? No indication of anything wrong?”
“I think the big beardy guy said something about opening a door? Does
that help?”
Not really.
“Anything else?”
 “Just that…maybe the singing…you know, the old dude and the
Sleeping God…maybe that started first before the screaming but I was
pretty messed up and once that bloody fog came in I was concentrating on
getting the fuck out of there.” She stopped, and smiled, but it only made the
runs of mascara look even more grotesque. “That’s all she wrote. Can I go
now?”
I wish we both could. But we’re just getting started here.
They kept at her until nearly noon. But no matter how much she tried,
Janis could get no more information from the woman than she had already:
a party, some weird shit and thick fog. The talk of fog worried Janis more
than it should have, it was obviously a product of the booze and drugs, but
it also reminded her that John Green still hadn’t shown up, and that the last
time she’d seen him, it had been foggy.
During the questioning, some forensic info turned up that showed that
the other woman at the party, Sheila Durning had indeed been among the
victims, but informing Samantha of this only brought her to unrelenting
weeping, bringing the interview to a rapid end.
They left her with her grief and went out into the corridor, where the
other constable, Malone, the man who’d found the blonde at the scene,
having gone into the building when he found the front door lying open early
in the morning, told them what he had. It wasn’t much more than they
already knew. They got a name, Peter Hines, for the owner of the flat, a big
bearded guy according to Malone, but that didn’t help them much this early
in the case. All they had was the witness statement, and whatever else
Forensics could turn up. Janis wasn’t holding out much hope in that area.
“We’re getting nowhere fast,” she said.
“We need to go back to the scene, find out what we might have missed,”
Wiggins replied.
“Agreed. But let’s swing past the boss’ place first like we said. I want to
be sure he’s okay.”
“Have you tried phoning him?”
“The boss? You’re kidding, right? When have you known him to
remember his phone? But yes, I’ve tried. It’s going straight to Voicemail.
I’ve left two messages but no joy yet.”
They went back out into a crisp, clear, St John’s day.
 3

John stood in the dark hallway for several minutes, unsure as to his next
move. There was still no sound from out on the street, still no sign of the
door being opened and the fog still swirled in the small window above the
door.
He bent down and lifted up the brass letterbox. There was only fog on
the other side.
“Hello?” he shouted. “I’ve had enough of this shit now.”
His voice echoed around him and he waited in vain for a reply. He stood
away from the door again, wondering what to do. He recognized the layout
of the old building, there were many like it in town, three floors, two
apartments to a level, having been converted from a townhouse at some
point in the past. In this case, the past was a relatively long one, the
property was one of the stops on the Historical tourist tours, not for any
architectural significance, but for the people who had lived there and their
stories. The house had been, over the years, a bar, a brothel and the site of a
huge political scandal in the early Twentieth Century, a home for retired
fishermen, and now it was these six apartments, all of which seemed to be
currently unoccupied if the silence was any indication.
The old wood floor in the hall was scuffed and dented from years of use,
but felt solid enough and his footsteps echoed as he walked, emphasizing
yet again how quiet it was; how alone he was. There was a hint in the air of
coffee and bread, but it didn’t smell fresh; old odors in an old house.
He tried the left-hand door. It had been slathered in cheap green paint at
least twenty years ago and there was a tarnished copper number one
screwed on slightly askew at eye level. The heavy brass handle turned in his
hand but it felt too loose and showed no sign of being connected to the lock
mechanism. He put his shoulder into the door, again to no avail beyond
leaving him feeling as if he’d taken a punch in the arm.
This is getting me nowhere.
The right-hand door, red instead of green but much the same, although at
least the number two was screwed on straight, similarly refused to yield to
his attempts to open it.
To one side of the staircase, underneath it, there was a smaller door that
John took to be a storage closet. He was surprised when it opened to reveal
a set of stone steps leading down into the darkness of what was probably a
basement. There was a cord for a light switch but when he pulled it nothing
happened. He remembered that the power seemed to be off all over the
building.
And the box to get it on again is probably down there. I could go down
and look but that’s not going to happen.
Blundering around in the dark after all the strangeness that had happened
already would be a bloody stupid thing to do, and if there was one thing his
recent wounding had taught him, it was that death was always waiting to
take advantage if you let your guard drop. He stood at the closet door for
several seconds, listening, but the basement was as quiet, quieter if that was
possible, as the rest of the building. He closed the door gently. He’d
investigate that later, but only if he had to, and only if he found a flashlight.
He went back out into the hallway and looked up the stairs, then back at
the front door. Going up would feel like admitting defeat, admitting that he
didn’t have a single clue as to what was happening. He was starting to
wonder whether the sight of the crime scene hadn’t perhaps unhinged him
completely, a post-traumatic stress episode sending him off to hide in a
place where he could feel safe. The doctors had warned him that something
might feel off mentally, and had even offered him counseling. At the time
he’d declined, preferring to trust to his inherent cynicism and cop instincts.
But he couldn’t bring himself to believe that he’d fallen into that
particular deep end. This was no tortured dream. He’d had them after the
stabbing, both in the hospital and later while lying in what he’d thought was
the safety of his own bed. While they had been vivid and full of blood and
violence, terror and pain, those dreams hadn’t had the heft and weight of
reality like he felt in this building, this hallway.
This is real, and I’d better start figuring out what the fuck to do about it.
As John saw it, he only had the two choices. He could stand and wait
and hope that Janis, someone, anyone, would eventually open the door and
let him out, or he could go back upstairs and retrace his steps, hoping there
was a way to reverse out of the maze in which he found himself. Given that
he was already feeling twitchy and ready to start climbing the walls, there
was no real choice at all.
He turned for the stairs and headed up.
The doors off the second-floor landing, blue and yellow respectively, were
as firmly closed against him as the ones in the entrance hallway, and the
paint seemed equally as old and flaking. The door on the left side had
another copper number, three, but the door opposite just had a bare patch on
the paint where the “four” had been. There was a third door here at the top
of the stairs, the top half of which was frosted glass. This one opened for
him when he turned the handle, but only to reveal a small lavatory, and a
grimy one at that. It smelled slightly, the way lavatories often do, and
everything looked to be covered in a thin layer of oily dust. He stepped
inside, taking care not to touch anything or let any muck get near his
clothes.
The small window high above the cistern showed only more swirling fog
outside. John stepped up onto the toilet bowl, gingerly, for fear of breaking
it and sending himself tumbling, and tried for a better look out the window.
There was just the fog, thick, almost solid, and swirling as if driven by a
soft breeze.
It was useless. He seemed to be trapped in this empty house, inside a
bubble of fog that sucked all other noise away into silence. Rationally he
knew that the real world was just there, the thickness of the glass away, but
he had no way to reach it short of breaking a window, and he wasn’t at the
stage of resorting to vandalism.
Not yet.
He stepped back out onto the landing and closed the door, shutting the
smell back inside. He took a deep breath, preparing to go up, taking a
second to inure himself against the sights he knew were still up there
waiting for him at the murder scene.
It wasn’t quite as dim here as it had been downstairs. Looking up he saw
fog swirl in the skylight he’d noted earlier, far too high above to be reached.
As he looked, he caught a glimpse of something flickering on the top floor,
blue and gray, like a shorted electrical connection although he couldn’t hear
any sparking. The air seemed to shift, as if a large object, or person, had just
moved overhead.
“Hello?” John said, dismayed to hear the tremor in his voice. He was all
too aware that he was alone at a multiple murder scene without any backup.
He put a hand on his pistol.
“Armed police,” he said. “Come out where I can see you and nobody
will get hurt here.”
There was no repeat of the movement, but the flickering got more
insistent, and the sound of music kicked in. John realized that somebody
had just switched on the television in the apartment above.
 The power’s back on? When did that happen?
The music got louder. It was an old blues tune, one John thought he
might recognize give time, a deep throated male voice and a single slide
guitar. Leadbelly was his first thought, but given the sound quality maybe it
was Elmore James. But this sounded too basic, too earthy, and the guitar
was acoustic rather than amplified. Despite the lack of obvious
amplification, the rhythm boomed around him and vibrated through the
soles of his feet as he started up the stairs, the voice carrying above
everything, as if speaking directly to him.
He sleeps in the deep with the fish far below,
He sleeps in the weeds in the dark,
He dreams as he sleeps in the deep, in the cold,
And the Sleeping God is dreaming where he lies.
Where he lies, where he lies, where he lies, where he lies,
The Dreaming God is singing where he lies.
John wasn’t thinking about the murder scene now. His mind was full of
the old stories surrounding the house, tales of missing fishermen and
darkness, drowning and despair as he reached the top landing.
Across the landing the orange door of number five was firmly shut.
There was more peeling paint, and another copper number, this one a
couple of inches off center, as if deliberately challenging someone to fix it.
But the crime scene door, its copper number a centrally placed, straight six
and the old paint job white and peeling, lay wide open. John tried to
remember whether they’d closed it behind them on the way down, by rights
it should have a taped warning across the entrance to prevent the curious
from disturbing the scene. Then he had another thought: maybe there was
another way in he hadn’t spotted yet. Maybe the Forensics lads had arrived
that way and were already at work inside.
“It’s John Green,” he said loudly, still keeping a hand on the grip of his
pistol. “I’m coming in.”
Nobody replied.
The blues tune continued through a complex chugging instrumental
middle eight on the slide guitar as John stepped through the doorway. As
soon as his foot crossed the threshold the guitar cut off as if a needle had
been lifted from vinyl, and the room fell suddenly still. Fog still swirled and
danced just outside the window but John scarcely noticed. He was looking
around the main room of the apartment in amazement.
 There was no sign of any bodies, no blood, but more than that, beyond it
being obviously the same four walls, it seemed to be a different room
entirely; one from an earlier period of the building’s existence. The
television was indeed switched on and flickering, showing colorless static
from a 1960’s style clunky box with heavy dark wood, battered control
knobs, and rabbit ears enhanced by crumpled strips of tin foil wrapped
around the wire sitting off center on top. The room’s sofa, it had been long,
sleek and leather, was replaced by a single battered recliner that had clearly
seen better days. Ticking escaped from gaps in the upholstery and the seat
looked deep and sunken, as if a heavy person had slumped there over a long
length of time. A small table sat on the left side, containing a bottle of
scotch: J&B, a glass, an ashtray overflowing with stubs, an old Zippo
lighter, and a packet of twenty Camels with only two missing. One of the
stubs, the one resting on the edge of the ashtray, was still glowing at the
end, trailing a thin straight stream of smoke up toward a motionless ceiling
fan.
Somebody was just here. Where the fuck are they now?
John did another three-sixty turn, both to make sure he was alone, and to
check he was indeed in the same room as earlier.
What the fuck is going on here?
He heard a clink, glass against glass, from the kitchen area.
Found you.
“Look, I don’t know what’s going on here, but I mean to find out. Armed
police. Get the fuck out here where I can see you. I won’t tell you twice.”
Once again, he got no response and, anger beginning to build, he stepped
through into the kitchen. He was thinking about that alleyway, the snow,
and the quiet body that he’d been told was dead. His hands shook as he
tried to take his weapon from its holster at his hip. It took him two tries to
unfasten the catch and another before he got the pistol in his hand. Even
then the barrel trembled alarmingly as he raised it and took sight before
scanning the room.
There was no sign of the party of the night before. A clean gingham
tablecloth lay, slightly askew, on the table, with a single vase containing
only a solitary wilted flower in the center.
He went to the window, hoping to look out and see the old familiar sight
of the church, steadfast and dependable above the town, but there was only
more of the same swirling fog.
 There was nothing to show that this was the same place he’d stood
earlier, nothing apart from the same fixtures and fittings, and the multi-
colored poster with the painted black and red star that still hung over the
stove.
He did a second quick scan of the room. There was still no sign of an
occupant and the place was quiet. The poster waved in a breeze that John
couldn’t feel, then he heard the singing again, distant and far off.
Where he lies, where he lies, where he lies, where he lies.
The Dreaming God is singing where he lies.
The poster above the stove rippled, as if the surface was somehow alive.
John backed out into the main room. His heartbeat thudded in his ears and a
throb of pain came from the not-quite healed wound in his gut. He felt
nauseous and light headed, unhinged from anything he knew as reality. The
dizziness threatened to overwhelm him, so he sat down, hard, in the
armchair.
The room spun. He put the pistol in his lap, where it would be in easy
reach if he needed it, and closed his eyes only to open them immediately, it
had only made the spinning worse. He slumped back in the chair. The
wound in his belly complained again until he found a comfortable position.
His left hand came to rest on top of the pack of smokes and it seemed
like the most natural thing in the world to take one out and light it. He
hadn’t smoked for more than ten years, not since Cissie died and not even
after his near-death experience, but it felt like coming home. He savored the
pleasure of the moment.
The blues song kicked in again, coming from inside the hissing, dancing,
static on the television screen.
He dreams where he rests in the deep far below.
And the Sleeping God is dreaming where he lies.
Where he lies, where he lies, where he lies, where he lies
The Sleeping God is dreaming where he lies.
 4

Janis stood on the doorstep on Church Street, wondering if she was

doing the right thing. She’d gone with Wiggins to the inspector’s house at
the foot of Signal Hill but there had been no answer, and on looking
through the windows she was pretty sure nobody was home. She tried his
phone again, leaving another message on his Voicemail, but held out little
hope for any reply. Technology wasn’t the boss’ strong suit.
“He’ll have gone for a drink down Water Street,” Wiggins said. “You
know what he’s like with his beer.”
Janis nodded in reply, but she wasn’t about to give up on the boss yet.
“I’ll see you back in Church Street in an hour,” she said. “I need to go to
the bank, and I’ll grab some lunch Downtown.”
Wiggins smiled.
“Check the Dolphin first. You know that’s his port of call of choice in
the afternoon. I’ll come with if you want the company?”
“No, thanks anyway. He’ll talk to me easier if I’m on my own. See you
in an hour, one way or another.”
She waved Wiggins off as he drove away from outside the house.
But instead of heading down to the boss’ favorite bar, she found herself
drawn straight back to the crime scene, her every instinct telling her that the
inspector hadn’t made it home, that he’d stayed inside instead of venturing
out into the fog.
But why didn’t he answer my call?
She hesitated before going in. The Forensics truck was parked in the
street outside, so the upstairs apartment would be out of bounds for a while
until they were done. The tech team didn’t like C.I.D. cops stomping around
when they were doing delicate work.
But maybe he’s in there already, waiting, or hurting? It wouldn’t take a
minute to look.
When she entered the hallway the silence all around her was somewhat
unnerving—if the Forensics crew were here, they were being bloody quiet
about it. The only sound was of her footsteps echoing away up the stairwell
as she walked through the hall. Even that was too loud and felt somehow
intrusive.
“Sergeant Lodge here,” she shouted. “Anybody at home?”
 She got no answer. She had just turned back to the door when she saw
thick fog swirl beyond it, and felt a chill in her bones and the hair at the
nape of her neck rise. There was trouble here, and a good cop could sense it
coming. She walked toward the door, but didn’t reach it. As if caught in a
sudden breeze, or pulled by a giant hand, the door slammed shut before she
was even halfway back to it, closing with a bang that shook the whole
hallway.
“Bugger,” Janis said, then fell quiet as the echoes whispered around her.
The window above the door showed only fog outside, and it had gone
silent, all traffic noise muffled completely. She turned the handle and
pulled. The door didn’t budge, and there was no mechanism for her to use
on the inside to open it, just a keyhole with no key in it.
She tugged again, harder. There was no give on the door at all, and when
she put her hand on the wood it felt warm to the touch, almost as if it were
alive.
That thought made her take her hand away again quickly. She looked up
at the small window, remembering the fog in which she’d first lost the boss.
There’s something screwy going on here.
After one further unsuccessful tug at the door she turned and headed for
the stairs.
Maybe one of the Forensics guys has the key.
Once more she was aware of just how empty the house felt. The doors to
the two apartments on either side weren’t just shut—it felt like they were
blocked to entry, actively pushing her away if she got close. She knew it
was all in her mind, but that didn’t make it seem any less oppressive. And
on top of that, there was still no sound from above as she climbed the stairs.
Okay. There’s quiet, and there’s downright creepy. I don’t like this.
She shouted out—more to hear a noise, any sound at all, rather than from
any great hope that she’d be answered.
“Boss? Are you there?”
The quiet seemed to thicken, the air getting heavier and making it harder
for her to breathe. The sense of oppression, that something didn’t want her
here, grew stronger still and she had to push, hard, to make any headway on
the way up.
After just the first set of stairs she had to stop, panting for breath as if
she’d been running hard. She rested, leaning on the handrail where it turned
the corner at the first landing, needing to let her heart rate settle before
continuing. She knew she wasn’t out of shape—morning runs around the
lake and squash matches with Todd Wiggins saw to that. A dozen or so
stairs shouldn’t be making her out of breath, but she felt too hot, sweaty
even, and was panting as if she’d just run a fast mile.
Besides there being two more apartments on this floor, also resolutely
shut, a closet door faced her at the top of the stairs, the top half of which
was of thick frosted glass, a crack running diagonally from top left to
bottom right. A bulky shadow moved on the other side of the door.
“Boss? Is that you?”
The shadow moved again, and there was a screech, as of something
heavy being dragged across a wet, tiled floor.
“Boss, is that you? You okay?”
Now Janis was thinking of when she’d found him on his bathroom floor,
too weak to lift himself, too drunk to care. She hoped he hadn’t let himself
get into that state again—not here, not at a crime scene.
The chief would have his badge. And there’d be no argument about it.
She tried the door handle. Once again there was no give in it, although
the brass knob turned easily enough. Janis rapped on the glass with her
knuckles, not too hard for the crack looked like a bad one and she was
afraid she might knock the window out completely.
“Boss? Come on, open up. It’s me.”
She got a groan in reply. It sounded like someone in pain. It came again,
louder this time, and accompanied by the faintest of smells, the
unmistakable odor of piss and shit. Then another groan, and this time it was
more like a moan, and definitely an indication of pain. Then there was a
thud, as if somebody had just slumped, or fallen, on the other side. That got
her thinking again of finding the boss on his bathroom floor.
“That’s it. Stand back, I’m coming in,” Janis shouted. She was about to
put her shoulder to the door when it started to swing open, and it was her
that had to stand back.
It wasn’t the boss. Someone, she didn’t recognize him, sat on the toilet,
his trousers round his ankles, so fat that folds of his belly hung over the
sides of the porcelain and covered his thighs as far as his knees. His face
was almost perfectly round, the nose snout-like and flat, almost porcine and
the eyes set far back behind fatty cheeks that looked ready to burst.
The smell was thick, cloying and made Janis have to push down a gag
reflex. The seated figure smiled showing a mouthful of tombstone green
teeth and a fat, gray tongue that looked dead as any slab of stone. There was
only malice in the smile, no humor at all.
“Dae ye mind, hen,” he said in a thick Scottish accent. “I’m having a
shite here.”
The man reached over and pulled the door shut. Once again, a shadow
shifted behind the frosted glass.
Before Janis could move the door swung open again almost immediately
to show an empty lavatory. There was no sign of the seated figure, and the
only movement was the swirling of fog in the high window above the
cistern. The only clue that there had ever been anyone there was the
lingering odor but even that quickly faded, leaving Janis standing on the
landing, too shaken to even think of moving, wondering what had just
happened. A shadow moved above her, and she looked up, startled, but only
saw more fog swirling in a skylight high above. Looking up had broken her
immobility, and she was able to step away from the closet door, keeping an
eye on it to make sure it didn’t swing open again behind her.
I don’t believe in ghosts.
She kept telling herself that as she headed for the stairs up to the top
floor.
This flight was even harder work than the first. It seemed to go on
forever. Janis started counting steps after the first ten, pushing through air
that felt like thick treacle—when she got to twenty she knew something was
far wrong as she knew, knew for a fucking fact, that there had only been
sixteen steps here earlier. Even at thirty the top landing seemed farther away
than when she’d started, and when she chanced a look back the stairwell
fell away into a dizzying dark abyss behind her, an abyss that was slowly
filling with swirling fog. She had a sudden attack of vertigo, a dizziness that
threatened to overbalance her and send her plunging into that impossible
hole below. She almost had no time to react, for the step on which she stood
was already fading into insubstantial mist. She forced herself to move, to
run, each breath tearing at her lungs, her legs straining, muscles burning,
pumping her arms to keep the rhythm going. It became a marathon she was
determined to finish. Slowly, step by step, painfully slowly, she got closer to
the top of the stairs, even while the abyss crept ever nearer behind her.
She heard a song rise up out of the deep, a deep voice, not Scottish,
almost a bellow, putting everything it had into a song she almost felt she
knew.
 He sleeps in the deep with the fish far below,
He sleeps in the weeds in the dark,
He dreams as he sleeps in the deep, in the cold,
And the Dreaming God is singing where he lies.
The song welled up inside her, filling her with emotion—loss and
despair and blackness. The fog below started to weave cold tendrils around
her ankles. She slowed, faltered, wanting nothing more than to drop into the
fog and be rocked to sleep by the song.
She was still six stairs from the top landing.
It’s now or never.
With one final push, she threw herself up the remaining stairs in a
desperate lunge—and even then, she almost didn’t make it, falling two steps
short and having to throw her hands forward. She grabbed the bottom part
of the banister, and wrapped her fingers round it. Cold wood creaked in her
hand and for a bad second she thought the handrail wasn’t going to hold
before she was finally, breathlessly, able to pull herself fully off the stairs
and onto the landing.
She lay panting for almost a minute before her heart calmed and her
breathing returned to something approaching normal. She turned and
looked back at where she’d been. Sixteen steps led down to the second-
floor landing and she could see the stairwell down to the hallway below
that. There was no abyss, no fog on the stairs. It had gone as quickly as the
vision in the lavatory. All was quiet—whoever had been singing—if he had
ever actually been there at all—had also gone as quiet as the rest of the
house.
What the hell is going on here?
All of Janis’ instincts were now telling her to run, flee back down the
stairs and out, before anything else unbelievable could happen. But there
was still the problem of the locked main door to contend with, and she still
hadn’t found either the boss, or the Forensics team. If they had got caught
up in whatever was going on around here, they might be in even more
trouble than she was. She got to her feet, slowly, not letting go of the
handrail, half expecting the floor to give way to fog below her. She only
headed for number six once she was sure, for the moment at least, of secure
footing.
The apartment door lay open, but there were three strips of yellow crime
scene tape across the doorway. She felt her spirits lift slightly. This was a
sign of normality. The Forensics lads were, or had been, here. She slipped
through the gaps in the tape, taking care not to break the seal and stepped
into the apartment.
The fog still swirled thickly outside the main window, obscuring the
view but the bodies were gone from the floor and sofa—that was something
to be thankful for at least. The scene was puzzling nonetheless. It looked
like Forensics had left in a hurry. Two full briefcases, samples still inside,
sat on the carpet, and there was a fingerprint kit on the coffee table where
somebody had started to take prints, then been interrupted.
The blood stains on floor and doors was still all too evident, and it didn’t
look like they’d been swabbed yet. Her professional eye told her that
whatever had interrupted the team, hadn’t happened that long after their
arrival.
So, where the hell are they? And why did they just leave all their kit
here?
Something moved through in the kitchen area, and she heard the clink of
glass on glass.
Finally, somebody that might know what’s going on.
“Hello? It’s Janis Lodge here. Have you seen the boss?”
She got no answer, so headed through the archway to talk directly to
whoever was there.
The small room was empty. The table had been cleared of all the liquor
and beer bottles and cans, although the strangely enticing poster of swirling
color and red and black painted pentacle still hung above the stove. She
heard the clink again, glass on glass, muffled, but this time definitely
coming from the room at the end of the short hallway off the kitchen, a
bedroom she remembered. It had been empty of anything but discarded
clothes and two sleeping bags on her last visit.
But that doesn’t mean there’s nobody there now.
She walked forward. She had her hand on her pistol grip. She hadn’t
even noticed herself doing it, instinct had kicked in again, a cop’s instinct,
the one that smelled trouble coming. She passed a small washroom to her
left, the one the blonde had been in when the trouble started she guessed.
She’d have to have a look in there again too, now that she’d gotten that part
of the story. But first she had to find out who was in the back room. Maybe
they knew more than she did.
Then again, that wouldn’t be hard.
 The door to the bedroom was shut, but she saw a shadow move in the
gap between the door and the floor.
“Hello?” she said again.
She heard a scrape, something heavy being moved, and smelled shit and
piss again. It was the big man from the lavatory, had to be. Somehow, he’d
gotten upstairs ahead of her. She knew that wasn’t possible. She’d have
seen him, but she had no time to think about it at that moment.
“Look, I’ve had as much of this crap as I’m going to take,” she said.
“Come on out so I can see you.”
The smell got stronger, but nobody replied.
“Right. That’s it. I’m taking you in,” she said. She kicked the door open
and walked into the room, six feet in so that she could put her back to a wall
and see any attack coming. The door swung wide then slammed shut behind
her but she scarcely noticed.
This wasn’t the bedroom she’d been in earlier. There was nobody else
here, and there were four walls and a window—but that’s where any
similarity ended. Where the previous room had been stark, bare walls and
no curtains, this one was opulent. Gloriously colored rugs, Persian at a
guess, lay strewn on a highly polished hardwood floor. Red velvet drapes
hung on the walls, and silk sheets lay, half on and half off an ornately
carved wooden bed. There was a new smell now, thick and cloying but also
somehow sweet—cheap perfume.
Tart in a bottle.
The phrase of Janis’ grandmothers was the first thought that came to
mind. The second came from about the same time frame—from a first
viewing of a childhood favorite.
I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore, Toto.
But no matter how strange the room might be, it was obvious that she
was alone in it.
Somebody’s playing silly beggars.
She stepped back to the door, intending to go back through to the
kitchen. The door handle turned in her hand and refused to give when she
tugged at it. She turned to face the room with her back to the door as an old
wind up gramophone in the far corner slurred and whined into action and a
song echoed, too loud, around the room, the same deep booming voice
she’d heard out on the stairs.
He dreams where he rests in the deep far below.
And the Sleeping God is dreaming where he lies.
Where he lies, where he lies, where he lies, where he lies
The Sleeping God is dreaming where he lies.
Outside the window the fog swirled and danced.
 5

Constable Todd Wiggins was more than annoyed, he was as close to

angry as he ever got. His mood hadn’t been helped by one of the worst
lunchtime sandwiches he’d ever eaten, and coffee that tasted of burnt toast
more than anything resembling a coffee bean. He could still taste it as he
pulled up at the house on the corner of Church Street. He’d given them a
full hour after leaving Sergeant Lodge, but when he got to the crime scene
and stood outside the door the sarge was nowhere to be seen.
I hope you’re not in a bar with the boss, sarge.
As he’d told her earlier, he’d seen the boss’s face all too clearly at the
scene that morning—the inspector had come back too early. All the squad
knew the extent of the wounds he had taken and knew how lucky he was to
be alive. They all even knew that it could have happened to any of them on
any given weekend, given the number of drunks with knives they had on
the streets. But they had expected Green to take the time to recover. To have
him back so early—and on a case this big—was just asking for trouble.
Not that Todd would be mentioning that to the chief any time soon. He
just about felt comfortable talking about it to the sarge, but if he took it any
higher up the chain he was likely to get a nosebleed. The sarge understood,
she was a bit soft for the boss, everybody knew that even if she didn’t
acknowledge it to herself.
But now she’s risking her own job for him, and leaving me to explain it if
anybody asks. That’s just not on.
He stood outside for fifteen minutes before he decided he’d had enough.
He went into the house and stood in the hallway.
“Hello? Sarge? Are you in here?”
He got no answer. The whole house felt cold and empty. The Forensics
boys had been here earlier but it didn’t sound like they were still around. He
went upstairs to the top floor. He had to slip through the crime scene tape to
get in, but it looked like the tech squad had almost, if not fully, finished.
The bodies were gone and there was fingerprint dust over most of the
surfaces, especially around the areas of spatter. Todd knew the team would
probably be back for more after analyzing what they’d found. There was
always more to come back for.
He treaded carefully as he made his way through to the kitchen, empty,
and the back bedroom, also empty save for two sleeping bags and a lot, an
awful lot, of dirty laundry.
There was no sign of the sarge, and no sign she’d been there at all.
He phoned her from the bedroom, but it just rang through to voicemail.
“Sarge? I’m here at Church Street. Where are you? It’s…” he checked
his watch. “Fourteen-twenty. I’ll stay until quarter to the hour then I’ll head
back to the station. I’d better see you before the chief sees me.”
He stood there, waiting to see if she’d answer, but there was only
silence, too much silence in fact, reminding him that bloody murder had
happened just next door not too long ago. He walked out, trying not to turn
it into a run in his hurry. The strangely painted poster above the stove
swung in the air as he passed and he was tempted to tear it down and
crumple it up, but there was a fingerprint in the yellow interior of the inner
design and the Forensics team hadn’t dusted it yet. He made a note to
remind them of it and hurried out onto the landing.
Once outside the apartment he was glad he was on his own. His retreat
hadn’t been measured and calm, but rather like somebody in a hurry to get
out. He’d even broken one of the crime scene tape strands in his rush and
had to stick it back to the doorframe to avoid leaving it trailing in the hall.
He was aware again of just how quiet the house felt. They had found no
evidence that any of the other apartments were currently occupied, and he
suspected that the occupants of number six might even have been squatting
there illegally. He made a mental note to check the utility records and see if
anyone had been paying any bills, it might be another way to get a lead.
He was still thinking of that as he descended the stairs. Just as he turned
to walk past the small communal lavatory, a remnant from one of the
house’s earlier incarnations no doubt, the silence was broken as the cistern
flushed. Old plumbing rattled and creaked throughout the whole property. It
was all Todd could manage not to leap down the stairs and away.
“Hello?” he said when the sounds died away. “Anybody there?”
He couldn’t see anyone, and when he opened the door the small closet
was empty, save for the smell, which was enough to make him back out
quickly and shut the door again. He had noticed one thing though, there was
no water in the white bowl, it was completely dry, if a bit grime-stained.
Whatever had flushed, it wasn’t this unit.
He was still slightly spooked as he went all the way down the stairs and
back outside, and only got his composure back fully when he stood on the
sidewalk in the bright sunshine, feeling the daily life of the town fill in
around him.
It felt as if he’d been away, not a holiday, nothing so pleasant, he felt like
he’d been sent off on an enforced exile and he’d just come back. He didn’t
like the feeling at all.
He stood there for fifteen minutes letting the sun burn the feeling away
and waiting, giving the sarge one last chance to turn up to do her job. When
quarter to the hour came around and there was no sign of her, he gave up,
and drove back to the station. He tasted burnt toast in his mouth, the
remnants of his lunch.
It tasted like ashes.
 6

John woke slowly, confused and disoriented, sitting upright in the

armchair. A cigarette, still smoking, sat on the edge of the ashtray, and at
some point he’d drank some of the whisky. He could taste it in his mouth,
feel it in his head, cheaper stuff than the single malts he was used to,
headache juice. He was still in the dingy, low-rent version of the crime
scene room. The television screen was showing random dancing static but
apart from a low hissing there was no other sound.
At least that bloody singing has stopped. But where the hell am I?
He shouldn’t be drinking, certainly shouldn’t be smoking, not with a
murder enquiry to run and with his head far from straight to start with.
It all came back to him in a rush, the fog, the locked rooms, and this
strange, almost the same, room in which he now found himself. He felt like
he was losing his hold on reality.
Is this what the doctor meant when he said there might be mental
instability? Because I can tell you right now for nothing, I’m feeling pretty
fucking unstable.
He had to talk to someone, anyone, but in particular he had to talk to his
team, to Janis. He’d come to rely on her in the past few weeks, using her as
a sounding board for his hopes, and fears, for his return to work.
And what a great fucking first day back this is turning out to be.
For once he’d remembered his phone and took it from his jacket pocket.
They’ll be wondering where the hell I am. But what do I tell them?
It was a moot point in any case, he was unable to get a signal, and he
guessed that the phone’s batteries were completely flat. Whether it was
something to do with his situation, or whether he’d just forgotten to charge
the bloody thing again, he had no way of knowing.
He put the phone back in his pocket. He was tempted to throw it against
the wall but something had to be brought under control in this situation, and
at least his temper was something he could manage, for now. As he moved
he noticed the weight of the pistol in his lap, another sign that he wasn’t on
form. He’d fallen asleep with a loaded weapon in his lap, at a murder scene.
A bad guy could have walked up, lifted the weapon and shot him in his
sleep and he’d have been caught napping, literally.
Get a grip, Green. Making that mistake once was bad enough. To do it
twice would just be stupidity.
 He holstered the gun and stood from the chair, dismayed to note that he
instinctively lifted the cigarettes and lighter to take with him, old habits,
dying hard. He glanced at the bottle of Scotch; it held no charm for him just
then, something to be thankful for at least. But he gave in to a different
impulse and lit a fresh smoke before stepping over to see if he could see
anything out the window.
It didn’t appear to be any darker in the room, so he couldn’t have slept
long, but the swirling fog continued to block any chance of a view. He put
the rest of the smokes and the lighter in his jacket pocket. He didn’t intend
smoking any more of them, but he wasn’t about to let go of that crutch
completely just yet either.
The only other light source was coming from the dancing static from the
television, the cosmic background radiation hissing and sparking its
incomprehensible messages to anyone who wanted to listen. As yet the
singing hadn’t returned, but the song had already wormed its way into his
brain, and John had to keep concentrating to stop it looping in a repeating
phrase in his head, lyrics that were as meaningless and unknowable as the
random static.
Where he lies, where he lies, where he lies, where he lies,
The Dreaming God is singing where he lies.
Jon had no idea what the song meant, if it meant anything at all, and he
didn’t intend to spend any time more thinking about it. He headed for the
apartment door to go back downstairs and try harder to get back to
something more approaching reality.
Time to go.
But the door leading out to the landing was shut. He was sure he hadn’t
closed it on the way in, so it must have happened while he was out of it.
Maybe a gust of wind, or maybe one of those bad guys he’d just been
thinking about. Whatever the cause, he soon found that he was now locked
inside the apartment. The door had as little give in it as the main one
downstairs, and proved just as stubborn against any attempt to open it.
He banged on it hard with his free hand, slammed into it with his
shoulder, then took out his pistol and started rapping the butt hard against
the handle, but all to no avail. The door stayed shut and all he succeeded in
doing was to tire himself out and raise fresh pain in the not quite fully
healed scars in his belly.
Somebody will be looking for me. Janis will be looking for me.
 But he’d already made enough noise to raise the dead and no one had
come. How was anybody going to find him if he had indeed gone insane
and was locked in his own brain? That particular scenario was something he
was trying hard not to think about as he went back to the chair to put out the
smoldering butt of his smoke. The television cracked and hissed as he
stepped close to it, but thankfully didn’t start up with any more of the
singing. John wasn’t sure his fragile mind would cope at that moment.
He went in search of another exit, heading for the archway to the
kitchen, but before he got there he heard the clink of glass on glass from the
room ahead. His heartbeat immediately shot up, and dizziness threatened to
overwhelm him again, but he steadied himself by leaning against the
archway, and managed to keep a tremor out of his voice as he spoke.
“Hello? Who’s there?”
He got no reply, and standing in the doorway leaning on the wall wasn’t
going to help matters. This time when he removed his weapon from the
holster he got it on the first attempt. His hands didn’t shake, and it was
anger and frustration he felt now rather than fear. And that was something
he knew what to do with.
He had his pistol in hand again as he stepped through into the kitchen.
The room was empty, but it felt as if someone had just left. There was
the faintest hint of a smell, of piss and shit, not strong enough to be really
objectionable but definitely strong enough to be noticed. The poster above
the stove wafted and waved, as if disturbed by someone’s passing, and it
steadied slowly and fell still as John walked over to it. Something had
changed. The red star inside the black circles now had a bright yellow
center area that he was sure had not been there earlier. He put a finger on it,
and left a smudged print, right in the middle. It wasn’t paint, more like
somebody had used a Sharpie, and just seconds ago at that.
There was another corridor beyond the kitchen, and a shadow, a large
shadow, moved just beyond the open door of the room at the end, followed
by a thud, as if somebody had just fallen over.
“Armed police,” John shouted. “Come on out here where I can see you.”
Again, he got no reply. He paused, reining in his temper. The way he was
feeling right now, he was liable to shoot first and ask questions later, and
that was almost as dangerous as being too naïve.
He walked forward, past the open door of an empty washroom where the
smell was much stronger and definitely objectionable. He passed it quickly
and stood at the door of the room at the end of the small hallway.
“I’m coming in,” he said. “Nobody needs to get hurt here if we all just
keep our heads.”
Before he could talk himself out of it, he stepped through the doorway.
Almost immediately the door slammed behind him, but John scarcely
noticed.
He’d expected to walk into a dingy bedroom.
Instead he found himself in a high place, at the topmost point of an
ancient tower, what appeared to be a tall spire of black weathered stone that
fell away below. He had come through to stand on a turret looking over a
parapet and a view that fell down into abyssal depths filled with swirling
fog. Sometimes the fog shifted enough for him to see the main body of the
tower itself, stretching away impossibly far below, a decaying edifice,
seemingly empty of life. There were no lights at the many windows he
could see, no movement, and no sound save a gull-like screeching from
high above.
Far to his left, hugging a distant horizon, a blue-black mountain range
marched across the skyline, tall and snow tipped with jagged peaks like
spearheads piercing the sky. To his right, and stretching away, many miles
distant, a dark sea shimmered like black oil under a pitted yellow moon far
too big for the sky. There was no knowing smile on this satellite, no jolly
man in the moon. Yes, the surface was riddled with craters, but it was also
cracked and split, with long scarred ridges big enough to throw shadows
over the plains. One scar in particular ran across the face of the moon from
pole to pole and must have come close to tearing it asunder in some long,
distant past.
He was so intent, so full of a mixture of bemusement and awe at the
spectacle that he almost didn’t notice when he came under attack. He felt a
tug at his clothes, like an insistent cat trying to get his attention. That
insistence turned quickly to something more forceful. He turned to see what
was there, and found not one, but three, maybe four beasts, too fast to see
properly, pulling at him, tugging at his jacket, and now starting to rend the
material, intent on ripping him limb from limb.
He had no time to think, but John got the message. He had a pistol in his
hand and something to fire at. He got off three rounds as he looked for a
way back toward the door he’d come through. He started to catch glimpses
of the things that attacked him. They had him pinned with his back to the
parapet, all too aware of the drop behind him. Black fluttering wings,
blazing red eyes and claws like iron nails were all that he saw as he pulled
the trigger again and screamed until the things backed away and left him
alone.
The beasts took off. The smell as their wings beat reminded him of old
books in dusty libraries. They soared and circled high above him and he
finally got a good look. They were man-sized, with wide bat wings ten feet
or more across, heads like rodents, and all the charm of an angry polecat.
They had no arms, but their feet seemed to have an opposable toe that let
them grip at their prey, one foot holding while the other raked talons across
flesh. John had three deep welts that had gone through jacket and shirt and
into his left forearm to show for their efficacy. Without the gun, he might
have been torn to shreds or tossed, a discarded toy, down into the swirling
depths below.
A dozen or more of them circled up above, screeching while John
squeezed himself into an alcove in the central turret that seemed to form the
highest point of this strange tower. It provided him a modicum of protection
from the rat-things, though he suspected it was only the weapon that was
keeping them at bay.
Minutes ago, he’d been sitting in an armchair, admittedly not that cozy
an armchair but he’d take it now over this alternative. He’d thought the old
house to be strange, but this place was beyond anything he’d imagined, at
least anything he’d imagined recently, for his presence here wasn’t the
worst thing.
I know them. I’ve seen them before.
Although this place was strange indeed, he recognized these beasts. They
came from a place and time he thought he had mostly forgotten, childhood
days in Mrs. McKennie’s schoolroom overlooking Trinity Bay. He used to
doodle them on notebooks during dull schoolboy lessons, as if the act of
putting them on paper might free them from the nightmares they gave him
several times a week. That had worked, for a while, and John hadn’t
thought about them for many years. But now, here they were.
My Burdens.
A name and a beast from the past were made flesh in the here and now.
Wherever that last doorway had brought him, John thought that his
Burdens might have come here with him.
 The rat-things kept swooping and screeching, sometimes coming almost
within range, trying to get at him, but as long as he paid attention and was
careful to stay in the alcove he was safe.
But he could not stay in that spot forever, and the door through which
he’d come was only yards away. He could see it, white, peeling paint and a
copper number six, the front door of the apartment, somehow here, a slab of
wood that looked as out of place as he did himself. He inched out of the
alcove and started to sidle toward the door, keeping his back to the wall.
The first of the Burdens came at him almost immediately, but it was as if
the pistol anticipated the attack. It came up and fired, shooting the beast in
the breast and sending it, wailing all the way, far down into the foggy deep
beyond the parapet.
That made the others wary, and John was able to reach the doorway
without further mishap. He had a bad moment as he fumbled with the brass
handle and thought that this might be another door that would be locked
against him, but it opened when he tugged at it. He threw himself inside just
as the Burdens launched another attack. Luck and the pistol saved him. He
fired three quick shots and the beasts backed away again as he slammed the
door shut and turned, expecting to have returned to relative safety, but he
was not back in the hallway leading to the kitchen. He was inside the stone
tower, in a narrow passageway, with steps leading away downward into
darkness.
His attempt at escape had only succeeded in imprisoning him further.
He went down several flights of steps and cowered on a small landing,
waiting to see what this place would throw at him next.
Talons scratched like nails on blackboard as the Burdens tried to reach
him through the door above. It was cold here, almost frigidly so, and the
pistol was colder still in his hand, although it felt like it had always been
there. Its weight and heft were comforting, here in this place.
There was something else think about too. Normally pistols didn’t sing,
but this one did, a deep drone, like a bass choir that swelled until it filled his
head, then died to a whisper that was almost soothing, something to remind
him that he might not be quite alone. He recognized the tune, it was the
blues song again, and once more he had the lyrics looping in his head.
Where he lies, where he lies, where he lies, where he lies,
The Dreaming God is singing where he lies.
 After a time, John realized that nothing was going to happen unless he
made it happen. The Burdens still scratched and tore against the door
above, and unfortunately that seemed to be the only way out of the tower
apart from going deeper inside.
He walked down more stairs and found more landings, going down two
levels from the parapet, levels in which he found nothing but dust and cold
stone. The only marks in the dust were the scuffs and footprints he left as he
passed through. He had a feeling that the turret had sat empty for a long,
long time.
By his reckoning, laying the path of his descent over his mental map of
the house, if he were still in the St. John’s townhouse he’d be at the front
door right about now. But here there was only more corridor, more steps,
and a single window that he could just about see out of if he stood on tiptoe.
He took out the smokes and lighter and got a cigarette out of the pack,
then looked out the window, surveying the scene beyond.
To his right, now that he had a chance to spend some time looking, he
saw that the tall pointed tops of the mountains were not rock, but were in
fact fallen ruins of towers, towers that may well have been much like the
one he was in now. A long row of them, one on each peak marched off far
into the distance, having been built in a time immeasurably long past. More
winged things fluttered above the peaks, their screeching cries carrying
across the still night air. There was no vegetation, at last none that John
could see, just black rock. He saw what looked to be a forest, climbing high
up the sides of the nearest peak, but the trees were all black and skeletal,
any leaves they may once have had were long since gone to dust. The sight
of them made John wonder just how long it had been since this place had
seen any daylight, or if indeed it had a sun at all.
There was a blanket of stars overhead, but they did not twinkle, and nor
were they massed in any great profusion, but were dotted in sad little
clumps around the firmament. There were no recognizable constellations.
The main source of any light came from the huge gibbous moon, a sickly
glow that lent everything a pale yellow aspect. Things scudded
intermittently under the moon’s surface, things that must be impossibly
huge to be seen at this distance, leaving trails, worm trails, across the
surface like a crazed roadmap. John was just glad they were up there on the
moon and not here in the turret with him, for the winged rat-things were bad
enough to have to deal with for now.
 He never got a chance to light the smoke, or to take in any more details
of the scenery. He heard it first, a rustle of leathery wings brushing against
stone just outside, then the thing was right there in front of him. One of the
Burdens tried to come through the window. It pulled the bulk of its body
through, but the space was just too narrow to allow its wings easy passage,
and it thrashed and squirmed, then heaved, free and ready to launch itself at
him. It might have managed it too, if the pistol hadn’t warned him with a
pulse of heat in his palm and a swelling chorus of song in his head that gave
him enough time to raise the weapon. The rat-thing screamed, its mouth
open, showing rows of yellowed, chipped teeth, and he smelled its fetid
breath, rotten meat and vomit. The pistol screamed back; the choir raised in
a shout that felt like joy as John pulled the trigger, again, and again,
blowing the thing’s head into a pulpy mess. It fell into the room off the
window ledge and was dead and still even before he stopped pulling the
trigger.
He realized he’d fired many more bullets than he had in the magazine,
but when he checked, the magazine was still full, and the ammo felt warm,
almost tingly in his hand.
A land without sun, winged demons and a magic gun. Well, at least that’s
different.
Madness and hysteria crept close again but he pushed it away.
You’re obviously here, and obviously alive. And you’re still a cop. Deal
with it.
He kicked at the remains of the thing that had come through the window,
but it was all just dead meat, and he had no need to look any closer, it
wasn’t playing dead, not without most of its head. Besides, it gave off the
most awful stench. His foot sank further than it should have into the chest,
and the torso started to bubble and seethe, putrefying at an impossible rate.
He left it where it lay, and headed back to the stairs and cleaner air.
More of the dead thing’s brethren screamed and chattered high above,
and he heard them battering at the door on the parapet. It was only a matter
of time before they broke through, or realized, like the dead one obviously
had, that they could use the windows. He might have a magic gun that
would probably have more bullets than there were Burdens, but he couldn’t
bring himself to trust his life to something so unbelievable. It was just too
far from any concept he had as to the way things worked, should work, in
any normal place but here.
He made for the stairs.
The only way for him to go was down.
 7

Janis stood in the opulent bedroom with her back to the door, breathing
almost as heavily as she had after the experience on the stairs.
This can’t be happening.
It was more than obvious that it was, and that she was way beyond
anything she’d been trained to deal with. But given the details of the crime
scene and the blonde’s witness statement back at the station, Janis now
thought that she might have come into contact with some strange new
hallucinogen, one that closely, but not too closely, mimicked reality. She’d
never heard of such a thing, but that didn’t mean it didn’t exist; new highs
were coming to the streets all the time, each one more potent, and more
dangerous in Janis’ eyes, than the last.
All she could do was keep on keeping on and either ride it out or have
someone come to her aid. She wasn’t holding out much hope for the second
option, for if there had been anyone else in the building, surely, they too
would be suffering similar effects?
The gramophone quickly wound down and the old blues song faded and
died with a last wailing whine that, oddly, seemed like a perfectly fitting
end to the song, leaving the room silent.
I preferred it noisy.
She fought to get her breathing under control and had her first good look
around. She’d noticed the velvet drapes and ornate bed already. Now she
saw that the furniture was of similar vintage and design as the bed itself.
There were two dressers and an armoire, all with a shiny black lacquered
look, inlaid with red, purple and gold flowers that was far too fussy for her
tastes. The gramophone, while of a design that had been old before Janis
was born, looked pristine, like new almost, and the vinyl, or was it Shellac,
78rpm of course, was shiny and unscratched by age. The tops of the two
dressers were covered in small porcelain ornaments. Again they looked
vaguely Japanese in style to Janis, but she wouldn’t know one ornament
from another, apart from the fact that these all looked far too cute—pink
cherubs and angels, Christ figures and tiny neat churches. Whoever lived
here didn’t want for some of that old-time religion.
When she looked at the high shelf at eye level above the furthest dresser
across the room she had to fight to control her breathing again. A row of
china dolls stared back at her from eyes made black by the shadows in
which they sat. The stares were bad enough, but Janis knew these dolls,
knew them of old, just as she knew that their eyes were blue, far too blue.
The six sisters, her grandmother had called them, six witches more like.
Janis had always refused to sleep over at Nana’s place until the dolls were
securely locked in a closet, for she had known that they watched her, with
their beady little too-blue eyes. Even after they were hidden away she felt
those eyes, following her around the room from inside the cupboard, and
watching her as she lay, too scared to sleep, watching even from the
darkness, especially from the darkness.
To see them here, now, made her more sure than ever that she was under
the effects of some kind of drug.
Stop fucking around with my memories.
Although the gramophone had wound down, and there was no one near
it to wind it up again, the turntable started to spin and the song once more
filled the room.
Where he lies, where he lies, where he lies, where he lies
The Sleeping God is dreaming where he lies.
She had turned to look at the gramophone when the sound started, so she
was looking in the wrong place when she heard another noise at the end of
the first chorus, a soft thud as if something had fallen. She looked back to
where she thought the sound had originated. Five dolls looked back at her
from the shelf.
There was no sign of the sixth.
Shadows darkened in the room, threatening to plunge it into darkness.
Something scurried and skittered along the floor at the far baseboard, and
although it was too dim to make out, Janis knew that it wasn’t a rat. It was
too big, too noisy for one thing. It could only be the missing doll, those
scary, staring eyes seeking her out.
You’re not real. This isn’t happening.
Just to prove her wrong, the scurrying noise came again, this time from
the corner between the bed and the armoire. And she knew just which doll it
would be, the one with the blue dress and the slightly badly offset eyeball
that had always seemed like an evil squint. That had always been the one
she thought of when she thought of them at all. And there it was again, a
scurry of tiny porcelain-shoes on the hardwood. It may not be real, but that
didn’t make it any less frightening.
And it’s getting closer.
 She turned, feeling panic rising, and tried the door handle again, almost
crying out in relief as the door opened allowing her to slip out quickly to the
kitchen and close it tight behind her.
She heard more scurrying in the room beyond, then scratching, down at
floor level, where a doll might be. The song from the gramophone wound
down to a last fading bass drone.
The Sleeping God is dreaming where he lies.
The room on the other side of the door fell quiet again now that the song
was done. Janis thought she might be able to open it again, if she only had
the courage. She could look in, just a peek, to see the old dolls, all six now
back together, staring at her from the shelf. It might even persuade her that
the last thirty seconds had all been part of this bad dream, nightmare, she
was locked into. But courage was in short supply at that moment. She stood
there with her hand on the handle holding the door closed until she felt
comfortable letting go.
It took a while before, making sure the door was going to stay firmly
closed, she turned her back on it, walked back through to the kitchen and
opened the fridge door wide. The interior light wasn’t functioning. She
knew that the power had been out at least since much earlier that morning,
but the six-pack of beer she found inside felt cold enough. There was also a
bowl of leftovers, lasagna by the look of it, and a pint of milk that hadn’t
gone off, but it was beer she needed right now, and plenty of it. She took a
bottle out, putting the others back to avoid the risk of being tempted by a
second, cracked it open. She chugged half of it down before she started to
feel like her old self again, although she had not taken an eye off the
bedroom door since walking away from it. She finished the beer off at a
more leisurely pace while leaning back against the kitchen table.
There was no sound apart from the slight gurgle of beer in the bottle, and
the only thing she could see out of the small kitchen window was yet more
of the swirling fog.
Still not in Kansas, Toto.
The lurid poster above the stove wafted and waved as if in a slight
breeze then went still. The whole apartment went still, as if holding its
breath, waiting to see what might come next. There was something different
too, and it took her a second to spot it. The center of the red pentacle had
been colored in yellow, and somebody had left a smudged fingerprint right
in the center.
 The fat man. Had to be.
She carefully ran a fingertip over the new coloring, but it came away dry.
It looked to have been done some time ago, another impossible fact to file
away for future reference over more beer, much more beer.
Once she was sure the bedroom door wasn’t going to open again, Janis
gave in and went back on her decision that one was enough. She took a
second beer from the fridge then went through to the main room. She stood
at the window looking out at the swirling fog. At least there was still plenty
of light, but she knew that it must already be sometime in the mid-
afternoon, and that darkness wasn’t going to be too far away.
She wasn’t sure she was going to survive here in the dark.
Not here. Not like this.
She finished off the beer, took the empty through to the kitchen and
dropped both bottles in a bin by the side of the refrigerator, checking that
the bedroom door was still shut in the process, then went in search of a way
out of the nightmare.
She wasn’t quite ready to face the stairs again yet, so she went across the
landing and rapped on the door of the apartment opposite. If she could only
find someone, anyone, she might have a hope of navigating her way toward
some kind of sanity. But nobody answered, and she could hear no noise
either here on the top landing or from elsewhere in the building.
The light shifted, like clouds scudding overhead, and it got darker,
worryingly quickly. She looked at the stairs, remembering that last frantic
flight up. Going down would be fraught with danger, if only because her
nerves were already jangling just at the thought of it, and vertigo threatened
to send her head spinning.
But if I don’t go down, what do I do?
She wasn’t at all keen on heading back into the crime scene apartment,
not now she knew the dolls were in there, lurking and staring.
She rapped hard on the door of number five again, and to her
astonishment it swung open wide to reveal a short, dark, hallway inside. But
she didn’t get time to check it any further than a cursory glance, for the
darkness thickened further on the landing, making it almost too dim to see
clearly. A door slammed in the crime scene apartment across the landing.
Something, something small, sent hurried, tiny footsteps across the kitchen
floor. The sound carried out into the hallway all too clearly in the still quiet
air, porcelain shoes on hardwood, and the swish of a dress slightly too long
to avoid being dragged on the floor, a blue dress, belonging to a doll with a
wall eye.
She imagined its too blue, too staring, eyes trying to seek her out, the
slight turn of its head to compensate for the bad one. She knew, just knew,
that it was already looking right at her, and she did the only thing she
thought might keep her safe, she stepped quickly in through the open
apartment door of number five. She closed it quietly behind her as the
footsteps got closer, coming through the main room opposite and heading
for the white landing door—a door she had left open.
 8

By three o’clock neither the sarge nor Inspector Green had turned up at
the station. Neither had answered their phones. Todd went to see if the
witness had anything to add to her earlier statement, but the blonde,
Samantha, had fallen asleep with her head in her hands, so he left her to it.
If she was guilty of anything they’d find out soon enough, and if she was
innocent, she’d seen something so terrible that sleep for her would be a
blessed relief that would all too soon be over.
He went back to the office and sat at his desk, sifting the ever-growing
pile of paperwork the case was generating. They’d had cops canvassing the
length of Church Street most of the day, and with no reward to speak of.
Nobody had seen or heard anything untoward. It was as if the mass violence
and mayhem had occurred in a bubble of silence, despite the fact that it had
probably been full of screams and wailing. The dead that Todd had seen had
not died easy.
The lack of any information bothered Todd, and there was also the fact
that Forensics hadn’t turned up a murder weapon. It was beginning to look
like the sarge’s initial prognosis of some kind of animal attack was pretty
close to the truth.
So, where’s the damned beast now? Should we be worrying about
rabies? Do we need an animal control team?
He supposed that, in Inspector Green’s absence, the chief would be the
one asking these questions and making the tough decisions, Todd was just
glad right then that it wasn’t his job. He decided to keep up his head down,
get on with the paperwork and wait it out. Either the sarge would turn up
later, or she’d show up, sheepish and hung-over in the morning with the
boss in tow. Either way, Todd was now past caring. He’d stay small and let
his superiors deal with the shit storm that was inevitably on its way. But just
minutes later the chief shattered any illusion Todd had of getting back to a
quiet life.
Todd got up to fetch himself a coffee and met the bulky Irishman at the
machine. There were no pleasantries.
“So, where are they? I know they’re not here.”
Todd had known the question would come eventually, and had wondered
how he was going to answer it. The least objectionable answer came out
first.
 “They’re following up a lead, sir, over in Quiddi Viddi.”
“What kind of lead?”
“They didn’t tell me, sir.”
Todd knew that was a good enough answer. The chief didn’t expect
constables to know what inspectors were up to, any more than inspectors
kept the lower ranks informed of their movements. He thought that his
answer would be enough to get him off the hook, but the chief had other
ideas.
“You’ll have to do it then.”
“Do what?”
“Inform the next of kin, at least one of them anyway. I'm doing two, the
ones who stayed in the apartment, Peter Hines and Don Gelling. They’ve
both got folks in Foxtrap and I’m off over there now. I need you to do one
of the others, John Phillips was his name, you’ve got his file already on
your desk. He’s got a mam up on Elizabeth Street, just ’round the corner.
Take Williamson with you, in case the woman gets teary. Another woman
always helps. Trust me.”
The chief must have seen the look on Todd’s face.
“Have you done one of these before?”
“Once, traffic accident,” Todd replied. “I didn’t enjoy it much.”
“Nobody ever does, lad,” the chief said softly. “Nobody ever does. Just
get it done and I’ll buy you a drink when we catch the bastard that made us
have to do it at all. Okay?”
Todd nodded, but felt far from okay.
Five minutes later he was back out on the street again, with Constable
Williamson in the passenger seat as they drove the short distance around to
the Phillips’ house. And this time even the bright sunshine did nothing to
improve his mood.

Far from being teary, Ma Phillips took the news with a shrug of the
shoulders, a cigarette and a large slug of rum.
They’d arrived ten minutes earlier, and at first, she’d refused them entry,
thinking they might be debt collectors or church types. Then, after they
were shown in, and Todd, clumsily to his own way of thinking, told her that
her son was dead, she sat down, offered them a drink, and went quiet. She
didn’t look shocked or stunned, or even grief stricken, she just looked like
an elderly woman who wanted more rum.
 In the immediate aftermath of imparting the bad news, Todd wondered
whether he shouldn’t just get up and leave her to it. The house was clean
enough, but it stank, of smoke, rum and cats, he could see four fat tabbies
from where he sat and knew there were at least two more behind the sofa.
Constable Williamson started sniffling as soon as they entered the house
and was forced to excuse herself when a sneezing fit kicked in before she
could even sit down. Going by the rules, Todd shouldn’t be left alone with
the woman, but it didn’t look like Ma Phillips needed tea and sympathy, not
judging by the rate she was getting through the Screech. And the booze was
starting to make her talkative so Todd decided to stay. It was bad form to
quiz a grieving next of kin, but if she volunteered information, he wasn’t
going to pass it up lightly.
“Was it that Hines that did it? He’s an evil sod, right enough and I
wouldn’t put it past him,” she said, lighting another smoke from the butt of
the last. She had one of those almost impenetrable thick accents that older
folks from the island beyond the peninsula often had, one that as an
inveterate Townie, Todd struggled with unless he paid total attention.
“So, John had known Hines for a while? It wasn’t just a random party
that he got invited to when he was out drinking?”
Ma Phillips did something moist and disgusting with her false teeth
before replying, shoving them halfway out before sucking them back into
place again. Todd had to stifle a laugh; it looked so comical, then had to pay
attention as she continued.
“Don’t ye hear me, boy? Of course he knew Hines, knew him since he
were a lad, they went to school together, played together all the time. Like
brothers more than pals they were. And I knew as soon as they started going
’round to that damned house in Church Street that there’d be trouble.
Nothing but trouble ever came out of there.”
Todd wanted to jump in with another question, but kept quiet. If he
pushed too hard here he’d just get shown the door, and it looked like she
could do enough talking of her own volition if he left her to it. Besides, he
had an over affectionate cat to deal with. It had leapt, unbidden, onto his lap
and was nudging his hand, forcibly, demanding to be stroked.
At least having the cat on his lap gave him an excuse to look like he was
doing something as Ma Phillips poured herself another rum, three fingers,
straight up. If Todd had swallowed it at the rate she was getting through it,
he’d be on the floor already, but it hardly seemed to be affecting her at all,
apart from the fact that her accent got even stronger, and her delivery faster.
Todd struggled to keep up with what was being said, but he caught the gist
well enough.
“They used to play ’round that Church Street alley when they were lads,
John and Peter and Don, the three musketeers they called themselves. They
were always getting chased off for banging a ball against the walls—this
was back when the fat man was running the place, years ago, long before
your time. An older copper kept getting sent round to talk to the boys but
they never paid him any notice. I think they just liked to play at being
scared.”
“Scared?” Todd said, then bit his tongue, he hadn’t meant to speak at all,
but she went on as if she hadn’t noticed.
“Everybody knew that house was wrong, this was ten, fifteen year ago,
but it’s been wrong for a lot longer than that, strange folk in and out of there
day and night, and some as went in and never came out. Even when I first
came off the island in seventy-five I heard folks talking about it as a place
to avoid. I told the boys to stay away, but Peter Hines in particular kept
going back, even when they were teenagers and should have been out
smoking and chasing lasses. He couldn’t stop talking about it and making
up daft stories about goblins and demons and dolls and all kinds of soft
shite. But I thought it was just a passing thing, you know how lads get stuff
in their heads for a while, then forget about it for years?”
She stopped to light another smoke, and then delivered the blockbuster
blow that had him rushing back to the station.
“It all flared up again last year when Peter moved into the empty house
and John started hanging around with that blonde tart, Samantha something
or other, I knew she was no good right from the start.”
 
 9

Someone, something, waited for John at the foot of the next flight of
steps.
At first, he couldn’t see much more than a darker shadow and John
thought it was another one of the Burdens, come in through a window and
waiting for him. But it stood there so still, so brazenly, on the landing of the
seventh level down, as if it knew that he would be coming.
Its wings rustled where the leathery skin brushed the walls on either side
of the passageway, and a thin rat-face widened in a grin full of sharp yellow
teeth when it saw John coming. This one was bigger and older than the
other Burdens he’d seen so far, broader across the chest, and gray around
the whiskers and eyes. Its feet were thicker and broader too, allowing it to
stand upright, the outstretched wings helping it to balance. More than that,
this one also had arms. They were currently crossed over his chest but
couldn’t hide the fact that each of its five-fingered hands looked much too
human.
John was not fooled though, there were still talons on those broad toes,
inches long, black as jet and razor sharp. The thing saw John looking and
tapped the toes on the ground in a martial drumbeat that rang and echoed in
the confines of the corridor as it danced a slightly off-balance
accompanying jig. In other circumstances, it might have been almost
comical.
It, he, for the pale thing dangling between its legs could hardly be
ignored, wore a crown of silver, a thin band, intricately carved, on top of his
head, perched somewhat precariously between a pair of pink fleshy ears
that twitched as he spoke.
“Well met, my friend,” he said. His voice was high pitched and whiny,
sounding incongruous, again almost comical, coming from such a great
barrel of a chest. John nearly laughed, but the pistol sent a blast of heat to
his palm and the choir sang louder. He got the message. There was potential
danger here, and he needed to pay attention.
“You’re no friend of mine,” John replied, trying to keep his voice even.
The beast laughed, an even higher pitched thing that sounded almost like
a scream.
“Are you sure of that, John? Where were your friends when you were
lying in that alleyway bleeding your life away? Where were they when your
heart stopped on the operating table? Where were they when you got lost in
the fog? Are they here? Have they come to save you? I think not. Yet here I
am, willing to offer help and advice and all I get is abuse, dismissed out of
turn before I even say anything.”
The fact that this thing knew his name made John’s blood run cold,
bringing another harsh cold shower of reality into what was looking less
and less like a fever dream. The fact that it sounded so cultured and urbane
despite its appearance was also most unsettling. John had no answer to the
thing’s question, for in truth, he wasn’t sure of anything in this place.
The Rat King, John realized he had already given him the label years
before as another blast from the past memory came to him, laughed again,
and moved, only to cross the next landing and stand directly in his path at
the top of the stairs, blocking any passage down.
“I made you,” John said softly.
“Perhaps,” the thing said. “And perhaps I made you. Wheels within
wheels, around and around and around we spin.”
“I have no time to play riddles in the dark. Let me pass, or I’ll unmake
you, right now.”
“Why would you want to go down there?” the Rat-King said. “There is
nothing there for you but sorrow and loss, nothing to find but what you
already know, nothing to see but what you’ve already seen, nowhere to be
where you have not already been.”
John raised the pistol.
“I’ll trust to this, and my own senses, thank you very much,” he said.
The Rat King smiled.
“And how’s that working out for you so far?”
John pointed the pistol between the thing’s eyes. It didn’t flinch, and
John knew he wasn’t going to fire. This was the closest thing to a human
being he’d met since getting here.
“What choices do I have?” John said. “Up here there is only stone and
dust—that and more of your kind, trying to kill me.”
The Rat King laughed again at that.
“I will admit, they can be a bit rowdy at times, this place will do that to a
man after a while. But you have it the wrong way ’round if you think they
are my kind. But I suppose you’ll have to discover that for yourself, along
with everything else. In any case, I can assure you that it is far better up
here than any alternative that faces you below.”
 “What alternative? You haven’t told me a single thing of any worth. If
you know so much about me, you know I’m a cop. Give me solid facts, or
fuck off out of my way. Surely anything is better than this hell. I want to go
home.”
“Where you see hell, I see heaven. It depends on your viewpoint,” the
Rat-King said, as if they were having a chat over a cup of coffee in a café.
“I want no part in your kind of heaven,” John replied.
“Be careful what you wish for, John,” came the reply that was barely
more than a whisper. “It is a bad habit to develop here.”
The incongruity of being in a crumbling stone tower on the edge of
infinity, while having a conversation with a huge winged rat was not lost on
John as the beast spoke again.
“Stay here and I can give you total freedom. Go down too far for too
long, and you will have none at all to speak of.”
John showed him the pistol again. The weapon sent a burst of heat into
his hand and the choir sang loud.
Where he lies, where he lies, where he lies, where he lies.
“I don’t believe you. I believe this.” He shook the gun in the beast’s face.
“And I’ve warned you once already. If you do not stand aside, then I’ll
show you the depth of that belief.”
John’s bluster did not seem to intimidate the other in the slightest, it
seemed to know that John had already decided he would not be firing the
weapon. Once again, the Rat King laughed, louder this time, setting the
stone walls around them ringing. The Burdens high above squealed and
chittered in seeming agreement.
“As you wish. Just remember that I offered you a different path,” the
thing said. “And that the offer will still stand if you decide to return. Go and
ask your questions, go find your grail, just don’t expect to find the answer
you’re after. I’ll be around, waiting to show you that other way, should you
survive to make the decision. I won’t say good luck, for luck has little to do
with it here. But go well, John. May all your dreams be pleasant ones.”
And with that enigmatic remark he broke into a waddling run, heading
for a window. John didn’t have time to raise the pistol again before the Rat
King took a headlong dive through the opening and out into open sky. The
last John saw of him was as a soaring shadow silhouetted against the yellow
moon, wings wide as he whooped and hollered in the joy of his flight.
 Even as the Rat King soared away out of sight, John heard a heavy crash
from higher up the tower. It could only be one thing. The Burdens had
broken through from above. Within seconds a score or more of them filled
the stairwell behind him with the press of their bodies and the stench of
their breath. If the thought of fighting them didn’t give him pause, the smell
certainly did.
He did the wise thing, he turned and fled. Even as he ran, almost too fast
for safety down two flights of stairs he heard them, a floor above in the
chamber where he’d met the King, chittering and chattering and laughing,
too loud and too long. There was no further sign of the Rat King, but if
these were his subjects then his promises of freedom were strange in the
extreme.
And now they were definitely following him, staying a level above as he
descended, but John couldn’t afford them any more consideration. They
showed no sign of wanting to get any closer, or of pressing any kind of
attack. They seemed content to block his passage back to the heights, but as
he had no intention of going that way, he could safely ignore them.
Besides, he soon had other things to worry about.

The first time he saw it was on the twelfth floor of his descent; it
seemed to be a jet-black tear in the fabric of space, no bigger than a sliver
of fingernail. Initially he thought he had a hair near his eye and tried to
brush it away before he realized he was looking at something several yards
away, hanging in space at eye level.
He moved closer, but looking at it straight on hurt his eyes, they
struggled to focus, never quite managing it, so that the only way he could
really see the thing was by turning side on so that it was just on the edge of
his peripheral vision.
It appeared to be spinning slowly in a clockwise direction. As he
watched, it quivered like a struck tuning fork and changed shape, settling
into a new configuration, becoming a black, somewhat oily in appearance
droplet little more than an inch across at the thickest point. It hung there, its
very impossibility taunting him to go over and look for the trick strings that
had to be holding it in place.
It swelled, and now looked like an egg more than anything else, a black,
oily egg from some creature whose nature could only be guessed at. As
John stepped forward, a rainbow aura thickened around it, casting the whole
chamber in dancing washes of soft colors as it continued to spin.
The pistol hummed, hot in his hand as he moved closer.
Danger, Will Robinson.
The egg quivered and pulsed. And now it seemed larger still. The
chamber started to throb, like a heartbeat. The egg pulsed in time. The song
started again, somewhere far below.
He sleeps and he dreams in the deep, in the dark.
The pulsing egg kept time with the song, like a three-dimensional
metronome.
And now it was more than obvious, it was most definitely growing. The
pistol sent a new flash of heat, like a searing burn in his palm as he lifted
the weapon to fire, but before he could pull the trigger the throb became a
rapid thumping; the chamber shook and trembled. The vibration rattled his
teeth and set his guts roiling.
The aura around the egg wavered and trembled, and now there was a
door hanging in space, right there, right ahead of him, a white door, paint
peeling, with a copper number six at eye level.
I can go home!
But the door was already starting to fade and disappear. John lunged
forward, reaching for the handle.
“Wait!”
His hand met only thin air and the act of reaching forward and meeting
nothing made him overbalance and fall flat on his face on the stone slabs
underfoot. When he recovered enough to look above him there was nothing
to be seen hanging there but empty space. The black egg, and the door it
had created, was gone as quickly as it had come. The Burdens up above
shrieked in chorus, but whether it was a laugh or a scream he wasn’t able to
tell.
He still didn’t know where he was or why he was here, but he now knew
something he hadn’t known before.
I was close. I was really close. There’s a way back. I can go home.
He headed for the stairs to continue the descent, in the hope, no longer
quite forlorn, that matters would eventually become clearer.
He reached seventeen floors down with nothing untoward in the last five
before he got another sighting of a black egg. This time there was a sense of
something in development, a wider picture being shown one small piece at
a time.
He saw a rainbow aura ahead of him as he stepped down into a new
chamber and walked away from the stairwell, and moved forward quickly,
hoping for another door, readying himself to react more quickly than he had
on the first encounter.
Two eggs hung in the air at eye level, side by side, just touching, each as
black as the other, twin bubbles only held in check by the dancing rainbow
colors. The whole chamber throbbed like a heartbeat. The singing started up
again downstairs, and the Burdens above joined in on the chorus, making
the whole tower rock and quake in an almost operatic wall of sound. The
eggs pulsed in synchronized agreement and calved.
Four eggs hung in a tight group, all now pulsing in time with the still
rising noise. Colors danced and flowed across the sheer black surface; blues
and greens and shimmering silvers that filled the chamber with washes of
color. The song got louder. The eggs throbbed, beating time like a giant
drum. Soon there were eight, then sixteen.
John’s head pounded with the rhythm, and nausea rose as his gut roiled
and rolled. He started to back away, back toward the stairs he had come
down, hoping for some respite. The Burdens up above squealed in delight,
anticipating his retreat.
Thirty-two now, and the chamber shimmered with dancing aura of
shimmering lights that pulsed and beat in time with the song as the eggs
calved again, and again, everything careening along in a big happy dance.
Where he lies, where he lies, where he lies, where he lies.
The Dreaming God is singing where he lies.
John couldn’t take much more. He stepped forward. The pistol screamed
as he raised it and fired a shot at the growing mass of eggs. The rainbow
aura seemed to breathe in, breathe out, twice. There was a sudden burst of
color; red, blue and shimmering silver filled his head with a glare brighter
than the brightest sun.
And a door hung, once again, right in front of him, white paint peeling,
copper number six seeming to glow, almost golden as he reached for it. He
stepped forward, and once again found nothing but air in his hand. He let
out a wail of frustration, and overhead the Burdens responded, mimicking
and mocking, with a wail of their own that shook the tower again and sent
fine dust falling from the roof.
 The door had gone, there was only the empty chamber. But a degree of
damage had been done in the process of its summoning. The floor buckled,
threatening to throw him to the ground. A crack ran down the far wall. A
portion of the roof collapsed; a block of stone the size of his head fell to the
floor and immediately disintegrated into dust.
He headed for the stairwell down to the next level. The roof was
threatening to come down around him as he threw himself down the stairs.
A pall of dust fell behind him from the ruined chamber, but he quickly
outran it, heading down at full pelt.
Even in his haste he still smelled it, not the Burdens this time, but
something he could recognize that gave him hope. It was a distinctive odor
he had smelled when the door was in front of him, perfume, a cheap yet
heady perfume, the kind his ma used to wear when she and dad were going
out for a dance. The pistol sent some soft heat into his palm and the bass
choir sang softly.
He dreams where he rests in the deep far below.
And the Sleeping God is dreaming where he lies.
Where he lies, where he lies, where he lies, where he lies
The Sleeping God is dreaming where he lies.
High above, the Burdens squealed as he went down, further into the
deep.
Into the black.
 10

Janis stood in the dark in the hallway of Apartment Five, her back to the
door, almost afraid to breathe as more footsteps, small, pattering footsteps,
sounded on the landing outside. She felt the eyes on her, blue eyes, too
dark, almost black in some lights. She remembered her Nana taking great
delight in telling the tale of her princesses that had come across the ocean to
find gentlemen friends, remembered the stories of their adventures. Nana
had many tales of their misadventures and glory, romance and bad luck as
they traveled all the way from Gamages’ factory in England across the
ocean to Newfoundland.
To another child those bedtime stories might even have been captivating,
but Janis knew that the dolls had it in for her. They were jealous of how
much Nana loved her and they weren’t slow in showing it, staring pointedly
at her every move. She’d come to fear even the very mention of them back
then, and lived in terror of every visit to her Nana’s house. She’d suffered
bad dreams over it for years until time and memory finally diminished
them.
But this was worse than any childhood nightmare had ever been.
Yes, they had watched her all through her childhood.
But they never started walking before.
Rationally, Janis knew there wasn’t a doll outside the door, couldn’t be,
just as she’d known that the staircase wasn’t falling into a misty abyss
earlier. That didn’t stop her heart from racing, or the fear from almost
paralyzing her.
The patter of footsteps stopped right outside the door. If it had been
lighter Janis might have hunkered down and looked under the bottom of the
door, but it was too dark, and besides, what if she did actually see a pair of
small feet, porcelain shoes on wooden feet and ankles. What would she do
then?
She felt close to screaming as the silence stretched out into long seconds.
Her eyes were becoming accustomed to the gloom in the hallway and she
could make out a closed door ahead of her some eight feet away, and
another on her left, closer, almost within arm’s reach. But she was too
scared to move for fear of alerting whatever was outside on the landing to
her presence.
 She held her breath for what felt like forever as blue eyes stared at her
even through the door, looking at her with malice and evil intent. She didn’t
have to dredge her memory to bring it clearly to mind; the eyes, one slightly
askew, sat, sunk back in a little smiling face that was only a twist of a lip
away from a grimace. Paint flaked from peach colored cheeks that had
always looked to be filled with blood. A blue, velvet dress, dusty and aged,
completed the look, patched and darned by Nana until there was little of the
original material left, lace underwear below, faded and gray even those
twenty-five years in the past. Janis could see the doll in her mind as clearly
as she knew, just knew, that it could see her.
Is it eyeing me up in the same way? Does it remember the girl it used to
terrorize?
She pushed the thought away, speculation would have to wait, getting as
far away as possible from those pattering feet and staring eyes was the only
thing she should be thinking about.
Another sound came, soft but clear, through the door from the landing, a
sigh of longing and disappointment. Footsteps pattered away, and Janis
heard the unmistakable sound of them receding, not back into the apartment
opposite, but off and away down the stairs until they were too faint to be
heard.
Even then Janis stood, as still as she could manage, back to the door,
fearing that this latest silence might only be a trap designed to draw her out.
But that still wasn’t bringing her escape any closer, and after a long quiet
period that she guessed was at least five minutes, she finally moved, not
back out into the hallway, but deeper into the flat where she had found
refuge.
The door nearest her was as obdurate as the other locked doors she’d
encountered, although the faintest hint of detergent and soap that she
smelled when she tried to open it told her it was probably a washroom.
There was no frosted glass window, so she had no way of knowing if
anyone lurked, just on the other side, waiting to surprise her, and she wasn’t
ready for another encounter with a fat half-naked Scotsman. She passed on,
and walked over to what she hoped was a door to a living area. She was
thinking she might find a kitchen, and, if somehow, magically, the power
was on, the chance of some coffee, strong, black and plenty of it, something
that might wash the drugs from her system and let her think clearly. The
handle turned easily and she walked through, holding the door open with
her left hand so that she could make a quick escape if she needed to.
“Hello?” she said. “Anybody home?”
She stepped into the room, then stopped speaking, her words caught in
her throat.
She smelled the cheap perfume again, and looked around at velvet
drapes, an ornate bed and lacquered dressers. The room beyond looked like
the same tart’s boudoir she’d been in earlier across the hall, exactly the
same, even down to the ornaments and bedding. Either someone had gone
to a great deal of trouble to duplicate the room across the hall, or this was
the same room and the mere act of walking through the door had brought
her back here.
This isn’t possible.
But the more she looked, the more similarities she saw. Five dolls sat on
the high shelf opposite, and the gramophone was in the same place beyond
the bed as where she had seen it before. As she noticed it, the record on the
turntable of the gramophone started to spin and the song echoed through the
room.
He sings with the fish as he sleeps far below
And the Dreaming God is singing where he lies.
There was a soft thud.
When Janis looked over at the high shelf, there were only four dolls
there, all staring, all smiling. Their cheeks looked like they were full of
blood.
There was no sign of the fifth.
 11

“You lied to me.”

“I lie to everybody,” the blonde replied, “so don’t take it as a personal
insult.”
Constable Williamson, now recovered from the cat induced sniffles,
stood in a corner of the room. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes red and
watery, but when he’d told her what Ma Phillips had said she’d insisted on
being in on the interview. Getting a break on a case this big, and being in on
it from the start, was going to help a few careers in the station, especially if
the sarge and the inspector stayed AWOL. It was getting late in the
afternoon now, and if they were in a bar, their session would already have
them too far along to be of any use to anybody even if they returned now.
So, Todd took matters into his own hands. He decided to have another crack
at the witness, armed with the fact that she had obviously not just been a
random pick-up the night of the party.
But the revelation that he knew hadn’t had the desired effect.
Samantha, call me Sam, was no longer crying, dry-eyed and with a grin
now that told Todd she now considered this a game of cunning, and one she
thought she was winning.
We’ll see about that.
He sat down opposite her and immediately realized something else. At
some point in the past few minutes he’d started to enjoy himself. He felt
guilty about it, it being a murder case. But he liked this woman, liked the
sassy demeanor she was showing him now, and the way she carried herself.
In other circumstances, he could see himself asking her out for a drink, or
two. He had to fight to keep a smile from his lips as he started again.
“Now that we know you were John Phillips’ girlfriend, that puts a new
spin on things. You obviously know more, a lot more, than you’ve been
letting on.”
She picked at her fingernails.
“Firstly, I was never his girlfriend, we just hung out, that’s all. He got me
weed and I gave him a mercy fuck or two, no big deal. And secondly, can I
get a smoke?”
“Maybe later,” Todd replied. “First you need to start telling me the
truth.”
She laughed loudly.
 “There’s a good reason I lied, you’ll never believe what really happened,
hell, I’m not sure I believe it, and I was there.”
“Try me.”
She looked him in the eye, and must have seen something she liked.
Todd saw her decide to trust him.
“Okay, just remember, you asked for it.”
“I didn’t lie about being out in George Street last night,” she began. “We
were in that big Irish place, I can never remember its name, the one with the
green mirrors and the shit singers. We were there for a while, a few beers, a
few slammers, you know how it is. And neither Peter or John, or Don for
that matter, had mentioned anything more than a party later with a few
drinks and smokes. I knew Peter was into all that voodoo bullshit crap of
course, we all did. It’s why he started living in that house in the first place.
Peter, and Don too, bought into all that haunted building shit, even said he’d
seen some weird stuff himself, and heard stuff, footsteps on the stairs,
toilets flushing when there’s nobody there, some old fart singing the blues
in an empty room, you know, weird Scooby Doo shit.”
Todd had started at the mention of the self-flushing toilet, he hadn’t
expected his own recent experience to be echoed back at him by a witness,
but forced himself to pay attention as she continued.
“Peter was convinced that the place was some kind of psychic hot spot.
You should have heard him go on about it. Multiple dimensions of reality,
astral projection, dreamlands, spiritualism, you name it, Peter read up about
it. And he believed it all, even when one book would contradict the next he
still found a way to mangle it up into his theory, that the house was a way to
go somewhere else, somewhere better. Somewhere away from all this shit.
And last night, he wanted to try.
“Of course, he didn’t tell us until we were all back in the apartment, and
by the time he mentioned it we were all too stoned to disagree. Besides,
we’d heard it all before, we’d tried seances, Tarot readings and just sitting
around and thinking hard in the past, none of it had got us anything but
bored and sober, and that’s no fun at all.”
She stopped talking and cocked her head to one side, as if listening.
“Did you hear that?”
Todd hadn’t heard anything.
“Hear what?”
She shook her head and tousled her hair.
 “Never mind, probably a flashback. Top tip, never take LSD, it fucks
with your brain. Anyway, where was I?”
“Peter was about to do his thing?”
“Oh, yeah, everybody was pretty stoned by then, you know? So, we just
let him get on with it. He had a new idea, something about a sigil, a drawing
that would act as gateway, some shit like that. I don’t remember all his
spiel, as I say, I was pretty stoned. But it involved him doing a painting, he
said it had to be him. Then all of us were to sing some old song, the one
he’d said he kept hearing coming from the television. We were all too
stoned to argue, and too stoned to be scared.
“So, Peter drew his summoning poster, it looked like an old Seventies
rock album cover to me, and we all sang his song for him, some shit about a
sleeping, or was it dreaming, god? Some blues thing, reminded me of my
dad.”
She went quiet, remembering. Her head tilted to one side again. She
listened for a few seconds before rooting about in her right ear with a finger.
Then she seemed to lose the thread of what she’d been saying and stared
into space.
“And then what?” Todd said.
“And then nothing, at least not right at first. John rolled us up a smoke
and we all got a bit mellow. Peter was pissed of course, I think he really
thought he was onto something. He went through to the kitchen, said
something about hanging the poster up there, about how it would start
working eventually if it was away from our bad vibes.
“He was through there for a while, and when he came back, he brought a
bunch of black eggs trailing along with him, that’s when things really went
to shit.”
“Wait, back up. Eggs?” said Todd. “When did we get on to eggs? Do
you mean he painted them too?”
“No,” she replied, rooting about in her left ear now. “They were eggs,
but they weren’t really, they were something else, shiny. Look, have you
dropped acid? No? I thought not. But if you had, you’d know exactly what
I’m on about. Black eggs, first there, then, pop, we went somewhere else
with them. Somewhere hazy and wavy and dreamy and all fucked up.”
She started crying again, laying fresh tracks of mascara down her
cheeks, but Todd wasn’t even sure she noticed. Her voice had taken on a
dull monotone that he’d seen before, usually in car crash victims. She was
heading deep into shock.
“Then the screaming started. I didn’t really know what was going on,
some big fucking winged thing had Peter by the balls and tore his belly
open, guts and all spilling everywhere. Don tried to help, and the fucker
tore his spine out, I heard it, all wet and sucking and horrible. One of the
other guys, the one that Sheila was after, oh God, I forgot about Sheila.
She…”
The tears got worse, and she couldn’t speak. Todd sent Constable
Williamson to fetch some cigarettes, and when she returned the blonde took
to one as if her life depended on it. She almost had it smoked down to the
filter before she could continue.
“Look, you don’t believe any of this shit anyway, I can see it all over
your face. So, long story short, a big fucking demon with bat wings tore all
my friends to fucking pieces, John Phillips, bless him, got between it and
me and threw me out into the hall before it got him. The last thing I
remember is John screaming and it getting foggy, then it went dark and I
woke up when your man found me. End of story. Good fucking night.”
 12

It seemed to John that he had been descending forever, spiraling ever

deeper into the dark well of the tower with never a sight of any bottom, nor
of any way out.
There were windows on most of the landings on the numerous levels he
had passed, but there was nothing out there that would help him. The last
time he had looked out he had seen nothing but dense swirling fog. It
reminded him all too acutely of the house in St. John’s, the second house as
he had started to think of it. His last sleep in the old battered armchair
seemed very far away now, part of another dream, a dream that was rapidly
being eaten up and consumed by this current reality.
His feet padded along, kicking up swirls of dust from where it had lain
for years, maybe even decades, undisturbed. Most of the time his own
footsteps were the only sounds, although every so often he heard the scratch
of talon on stone or a flutter of leathery wings, reminding him that the
Burdens were still there above him, still following, still blocking any escape
the way he had come.
He reckoned that he must be a dozen levels below the room that nearly
fell in on him now, he had stopped counting a while back, trying to
concentrate on keeping moving, creating a sense of purpose for himself.
But he couldn’t get the vision of those dancing black eggs from his
mind. He was formulating an idea as to what they might be, where he might
be.
Quantum foam.
That’s how he thought of it, a memory from a long-ago class where he
was told that what is perceived as reality consists of many, multiple, maybe
even infinite, universes, each in its own bubble, each connected by the
thinnest of membranes to many of its neighbors. Quantum foam, if you like.
Here, in this place, John preferred to think of the eggs as possibilities,
opportunities even. He’d already seen what happened when one burst—a
gateway had opened, a portal, to somewhere else, somewhere that wasn’t
here, somewhere that wasn’t permanently in the dark.
He guessed that he’d got here in the first place through one such portal,
and if he had crossed over to here, where else could he go? Might he even
be able to go home if he could but crack open the right egg? He was
actually looking forward to his next encounter with the phenomenon, he
needed to study them. More than that, he realized that the possibilities
raised by their presence had strengthened his purpose, giving him a real
reason to continue on this downward path, and his footsteps in the dust are
just that bit quicker and more sure than they had been earlier.
He still had not eaten, nor drank, nor slept, yet did not feel in the least bit
tired, nor had there been any need to pish or shit, and he couldn’t say as that
was not a blessing. There was no demarcation of night and day here, and
now that he had obviously descended to levels that sat in the fog there was
not even the gibbous moon to tell him it might be nighttime. All he knew
was that he had been here for many hours already, with no bottom in sight.
There was just the descent, and his footsteps in the dust.
He went down.
The Burdens seemed to be getting steadily bolder. John had been trying
to ignore them completely, and they took the opportunity to keep closer
order at his back. They were only five yards above and behind him, already
coming down from the previous level as he stepped onto another long run
of steps. As yet they showed no signs of pressing an attack; the pistol stayed
cool in John’s hand. If there was any danger, it wasn’t imminent.
As he looked down, he saw that the Burdens were going to be the least
of his worries for a while. He paused, impressed despite his situation at the
colossal scale of the building enterprise that must have been undertaken in
the construction of the view below him.
A staircase, no more than six feet wide and with no handrail at all, ran
around the inside wall of a hollow chamber that fell down the center of the
spire at this level until reaching a landing that was at least a hundred yards
down. The drop in the middle channel was vertiginous in the extreme,
making him dizzy just contemplating it. A wind blew up the shaft, tugging
at his clothes, and making his already precarious sense of balance far worse.
A wave of nausea hit him at the thought of the drop, and his knees went
weak. He’d never been great with unprotected heights at the best of times,
and this was a long way from the best of times.
But going down was the only option he had, so he made a tentative
move, out of the passageway and onto the open staircase. He hugged the
right-hand side of the steps, his shoulder almost touching the wall as he
made sure he was as far as possible from any fall. One trip, one false move
and he’d be sent tumbling away into the darkness, and even here, where the
laws of nature seemed mutable to say the least, he did not think much of his
chances of surviving it.
He was concentrating so hard on just shuffling one step down at a time
that he didn’t notice that a new group of black eggs hung beyond the stairs,
out in the center of the shaft almost at his eye level, and they were already
calving.
The song started up from below, the bass voice booming.
He sleeps and he dreams where he lies in the deeps.
Sixty-four, each a shimmering pearl of black light.
He dreams and he sings in the dark.
The colors filled the whole height of the shaft, spilled out over the
stairwell, crept around John’s feet, danced in his eyes, in his head, all
through his body. Above him on the steps the Burdens screeched and
danced.
He sleeps and he dreams with the fish in the weeds.
A hundred and twenty-eight now, and already calving into two hundred
and fifty-six. He was doing arithmetic in his head as they calved again, and
again. By the time there were more than two thousand of them he was
coming to the certainty that they would not stop, unless he stopped them.
And the Dreaming God is singing where he lies.
The pistol gave him a blast of fiery heat in his hand as he raised it. The
spinning mass of eggs had now grown large enough to be within the reach
of his arm if he stretched over the chasm. But he was still afraid that even
the slight recoil of firing might be enough to send him tumbling off the edge
and down into the depths below. Four thousand and ninety-six eggs spun
and danced and seemed to mock his cowardice.
Knowing that at the next calving his position on the stairs might well be
engulfed, Jon finally fired. There was indeed a recoil, one that almost
overbalanced him and forced him to drop to one knee to avoid falling
completely down the steps, but he hit his target. An egg, one right at the
edge of the group, popped. The swirling colors blazed in a flash of blinding
light. The mass of eggs broke up and fell apart in wisps of black ash that
drifted down and away into the depths. The Burdens squealed and took
flight, bat wings fluttering like sheets in the wind in the middle column high
above, but John was blind and deaf to everything but the thing that now
stood, rather precariously, six steps below him on the staircase.
 It was impossible, here in this cold tower but equally, here it was, a sleek
black fifty-inch television set, tuned and broadcasting static despite it
having no obvious power source. The picture coagulated and congealed, the
grays thickening until a crude picture showed, grainy and as if seen through
thick fog, but he knew who it was immediately.
It was Janis, standing, eyes wide in terror in an opulently furnished
room, dark shadows, almost too black, swirling and surging around her like
demons attempting to tug at her clothes.
“Janis!”
He rose and stepped forward, bringing the gun up, intending to fire, to
blow that impossible television apart in a wild hope that it might help his
sergeant in her predicament. Just before he pulled the trigger the scene
sharpened and changed to show an old battered recliner chair, a full ashtray,
and a bottle of Scotch.
The song rang out, loud and clear.
Where he lies, where he lies, where he lies, where he lies.
The Sleeping God is dreaming where he lies.
John overbalanced again, and nearly tumbled into the depths, but even
then, he had the luck to pull the trigger. His shot hit the television full in the
center and it too collapsed into black ash, all too quickly gone and dispersed
into a fine dust that was blown off and away down the stairwell in the
breeze.
“Janis?” he whispered. He leaned against the wall to keep his balance,
again only too aware of the dizzying fall just feet away, even more aware
that, if what he had just seen was true, then his Sergeant was in trouble,
somewhere, possibly even somewhere in this endless tower.
More likely, back in St. Johns, back in the strange house. But what
happens if she comes through the bedroom? Will she get here? Could I get
back through the open door?
Another thought.
Is it real or is it Memorex?
He remembered the soft armchair, could almost feel the upholstery fold
around him. That had certainly felt real, as did this place, but neither was
home, neither was his life. And he wanted to get back there, more than ever,
now that he knew Janis needed help.
Above him, the Burdens screeched.
 Some of the black dust lay on the steps at his feet. He kicked at it and it
rose in the air, then was taken into the cavernous stairwell in the breeze,
drifting away down into the deep. He understood now, or at least was
creeping closer to understanding. The shining eggs were indeed
possibilities, but they were impossible possibilities, if there could be such a
thing, not ways for him to get home, but ways back to that other house, the
strange, empty house in the fog. He wasn’t sure what the connection
between the three, seemingly distinct, locales might be, but at least he was
now sure there was a connection.
Whatever the case, that scarcely mattered for now he had another
incentive to find his way back, at least partially.
Janis was there, and she looked terrified.

After what seemed to be another age of inching nervously down the

precarious steps, John finally reached the foot of the huge internal spiral
staircase and walked through a tall archway into an open, almost airy
chamber some twenty feet high, with tall vaulted window openings. Once
upon a time, back in the distant eons during the building of the edifice, they
might have looked out over the yellow moon and black sea below, but now
there was only more of the swirling fog, so dense it almost looked like gray
soup.
At one time, there had been stained glass covering the openings. The
remnants of several pieces clung precariously to the window sides in
several places, only a small amount, but more than enough for John to see
that any iconography on display was definitely not Judeo-Christian in
origin. With the glass gone and fog drifting outside, the windows were now
like opaque eyes. They stared, unblinking, inward to the center of the room,
where eight black eggs hung and spun, throbbing with a bass drone that was
taken up by the choir in his head and in humming from the pistol.
The weapon sent another blast of heat as he stepped forward. Without
hesitation, he fired a shot into the small group of eggs, right in the center. A
blaze of light flared, momentarily blinding him and leaving yellow dancing
blobs obscuring his vision completely. They were still there when he closed
his eyes, slowly fading against the black until finally dissipating. When he
looked again, a new thing stood in the center of the chamber, a nightmare,
and one of the oldest, the same hooded figure that had stood at the foot of
John’s bed on more nights than he cared to remember in his childhood.
 Back then John had thought of him as the evil monk and he’d spent many
a night lying awake, hoping he wouldn’t come. He hadn’t been bothered by
that particular dream since he was eight or nine, yet here it was back again,
and much more solid than it had ever been in the past. The long folds of his
robes seemed to absorb the light, blacker even than the eggs from which he
had just sprung. The hood hung over his face obscuring the features in
deeper blackness. John knew what was in there, what he’d see when the
hood, as it must, fell back, a white skull, black eye sockets and stars,
dancing deep within. There was also no mistaking the tall scythe in the
thing’s bony, almost skeletal right hand. The blade, nearly four feet long,
gleamed and shone, as red as fresh blood. Many, far too many, times, that
same blade had swung in his dreams, separating John’s head from his body
but leaving him still lucid as the head was carried away, still able to see his
body, being left discarded like an old sock. But that wasn’t what he was
thinking now. John remembered the dead in the apartment, where all this
strangeness had started. He wondered if he had just found the murder
weapon, and the murderer.
“I have come to show you the way, pilgrim,” a soft voice said and the
figure moved. The robe hung in folds around his feet, making it seem as if
he flowed forward in a single smooth motion. A high sickly stench of
corruption hung in the air.
“I wouldn’t bet on it,” John said, stepped forward quickly and thrust the
pistol deep into the folds of the robe. His hand went icy cold, but he had
time to pull the trigger, three times in quick succession.
A scream rent the air. More icy cold gripped every inch of John’s body
and his pistol arm went numb all the way from fingers to shoulder, like a
cold stone.
“Well that’s a bit rude. I only wanted to say hello,” an urbane, annoyed,
voice said, but now it came from far off, like an echo in the hills. The robed
figure fell apart into more of the black ash John had seen before, and as
before it was blown into fine dust as it fell. John stood, waiting to see if the
Monk, the Reaper, would come back. But seconds later he could hold the
pistol no longer, it got too heavy for him to keep raised, then too heavy for
him to hold. It fell from his grasp. Dizziness and nausea overwhelmed him
again, and the wound at his belly howled in pain almost as bad as when
he’d taken the stabbing. The gun hit the stone floor with a ringing clang that
echoed around the chamber.
 Overhead the Burdens screeched, as if sensing an opportunity to attack,
an attack that John had no strength left in him to defend. He followed the
pistol to the floor and into blackness, and most welcome it was too. The
only thing that disturbed it was the singing, echoing from everywhere and
nowhere and going along with him into the black.
He sings with the fish as he sleeps far below
And the Dreaming God is singing where he lies.

He woke out of the blackness some time later. He’d been dreaming, at
least he thought it was a dream, of sitting in a comfortable if somewhat
dilapidated armchair, smoking cigarettes and drinking Scotch while white
static hissed and danced on an old television set in front of him. All things
considered, he’d rather be there than here, wherever here was this time.
He lay there for a time, listening. If the Burdens were going to try to
attack, it might be better if he played possum. But there was no sound of
talons on stone, no rustle of wings. The right side of his body felt hot and
burning, while the left was still cold. He heard crackling, fire eating wood
and sparking as it got to a damp patch.
He opened his eyes. He lay on his back in front of the large fireplace,
cold stone slabs beneath him. Someone had draped a cloak over him. He
was relieved to see that it wasn’t black. He tried to sit, but couldn’t quite
find the strength just yet, although he already felt a lot better than he had
immediately before collapsing.
“John?” a voice said softly. It wasn’t the last urbane inflection he’d heard
from the Reaper, this was higher pitched, almost whiny, and he knew
immediately who was here with him. Somebody, something, moved away
from the shadows and came into view. The Rat King bent over John, a
smile on the rodent-like face. “I thought we had lost you for sure.”
John might have struggled, or just backed away, but he was held tight in
the confines of the cloak, and his hand was empty, the pistol was no longer
in his palm. He remembered it falling out of his grip. He tried to speak, but
only a hoarse whisper came out. He finally managed to roll himself out of
the cloak and sat up slowly. His head felt light, as if a puff of wind would
be enough to blow him away.
But I’m alive. For now.
The Rat King smiled.
 “You did well, under the circumstances. But as he said, he only wanted
to say hello, introduce, or reintroduce himself, so to speak.”
“Who was he?” John asked, having to work some spit around in his
mouth and throat before he could even speak.
“You know the answer to that. You brought him here.”
“Not as far as I know,” John muttered, and the rat-thing laughed again.
“As I said, you did well, under the circumstances.”
“Was he Death? Can I die here?”
“Death? You can certainly cease to exist here, as far as that word has any
meaning in this place. Your reckless abandon in coming so deep without
knowledge was almost the end of you.”
“You didn’t answer my question. Who is he?”
“But I did answer it. You just weren’t paying attention at the time.”
“I don’t understand.”
The Rat King laughed.
“That’s the way the game is played. But you have seen your grail now,
haven’t you? You know what guards it. And you know what your choices
are? Or at least you should, if you’ve been paying attention. Have you been
paying attention, John?”
John looked around him. He was still in the high vaulted room with the
tall empty windows. The pistol lay where he had dropped it on the stone
floor, and the Rat King pointedly did not look in that direction.
“So, I was right,” John said. “I can go somewhere else?”
That got him another laugh.
“Haven’t you got it yet?”
“Obviously not.”
The Rat-King smiled.
“Oh well, you’ll have plenty of time on the way down. Are you sure you
won’t take me up on my offer right now? As much fresh air as you can
handle, the freedom of the skies and no pesky nightmares to ever bother
you?”
He tapped at the silver crown. “I’ll even let you have this bauble, it
would look good on you. And with it, your followers, your Burdens as you
call them, would become little helpers, like Christmas elves, just a tad
uglier.”
John was still confused. He knew he was being made an offer of some
kind, but he didn’t yet know what stakes were involved. On top of that, he
couldn’t afford to be tempted. He was thinking about the strange fog bound
house, and Janis trapped and fearful, his grail, for want of a better word, but
certainly the one sure purpose he had.
I have to find her. Find her and help her, and get out. In that order would
be nice.
The Rat-King must have seen the decision in John’s eyes. He sighed.
“Best you be on your way again then, now that you’ve made your mind
up, you’ve got a long way down still to go and many things yet to be seen,
things that only you will understand. You will meet the old fears again, that
much I can tell you. Just don’t let the scythe touch you. If that happens, it’s
all over bar the shouting and all deals are off. Some nightmares build
strength with repetition, and that one has been feeding, and been fed, for a
very long time.”
He stepped, more like waddled, away from John, and once again his
talons tapped a military rhythm on the stone slabs. He turned and looked
over his shoulder. “I’ve asked you twice now. Third time is the charm, after
that there’s no more chances. Go find your grail, and do with it what you
will. You know where to find me when the time comes. All you have to do
is sing. You do know how to sing don’t you?”
And with that he launched himself headlong at the tallest window and
was out and away, lost in the fog in a second. John heard him after he
vanished from sight but only for a second; the fog quickly swallowed the
sound as he let out a long whoop of joy in his flight.
When John stood, fetched the pistol and made for the stairs heading
down, a score of the Burdens chittered and chattered excitedly as they came
into the room behind him and followed him to the stairwell. It seemed he
wasn’t going to be descending into the deep alone.
Santa’s little helpers.
He heard their talons scrape and tap on stone as they followed him down.
 13

Janis backed out of the boudoir bedroom door and slammed it hard, just
as a scurrying shadow came, too fast, across the floor, dead eyes staring,
tiny legs pounding, drum-like footsteps on the polished hardwood floor. She
put a shoulder against the wood, holding it shut. She knew that a foot-high
doll couldn’t reach the door handle, but she also knew that dolls didn’t jump
down off shelves and run across floors.
The doll hit the door a second after she closed it. It felt like a small
boisterous dog was on the other side, beating against the wood with frenzy
that spoke of frustration at being denied. This time Janis could see the
shadow moving in what little light came through below the door. A small
figure scurried from one side to the other and back again, looking for a way
to get through to her, all the while pounding and scratching against the
wood, which by the sound of it was starting to splinter.
In the room beyond, the gramophone kept playing. She was already
coming to hate every beat and chord and word of that bloody song.
Where he lies, where he lies, where he lies, where he lies.
Once it was obvious that the door wasn’t going to be opened easily from
the other side, Janis backed away down the short corridor, one hand on her
pistol, never taking her eyes from the doorway. She had almost reached the
main entrance to the apartment and a possible escape out to the landing
when the pounding and scratching started behind her. Blue eyes were
staring again out there too. The first of the escaped dolls had come back up
the stairs and was now joining the other in a frenzied attempt to get at her.
She was trapped in the hallway between doors that were both under attack,
and the space suddenly seemed much smaller, more cramped.
It started to darken again, in a matter of seconds it would be pitch black
and she’d be left with just the scratching and tearing. She wasn’t about to
hang about to see what happened when the noises stopped in the dark. She
could either let one of the dolls into the hallway and trust her life to her
pistol and her reflexes, or take the door to the side, and hope the fat man
wasn’t in there too, waiting for just that eventuality.
The gramophone beyond the door finally wound down.
The Dreaming God is singing where he lies.
The scratching and pounding at the doors didn’t slow. Janis decided
she’d rather face the fat man than the dolls at this point, so she went quickly
across and turned the handle. She half expected it to be still locked, but the
brass knob turned in her hand and the door started to open. She didn’t look
such a gift horse in the mouth. She pulled the door open and went in.
She was surprised when she stepped through, not into a lavatory but into
the same lavishly furnished and upholstered room where the smell of cheap
perfume threatened to make her gag all over again.
Four dolls looked down at her from the high shelf opposite.
She looked into the room, then back at the hallway outside. The sound of
wood splintering got louder as the two escaped dolls launched themselves at
the doors again and again, sending them rattling in their frames, as if they
knew she was attempting escape. More wood splintered, this time in the
jamb of the hallway door, near the lock. A couple more good hits and the
door would be flying open.
Back in the bedroom, the gramophone started up and the song rang out
again. A dull thud told her there were now only three dolls on the shelf and
another on the floor, already scurrying around the skirting board, hunting
her down.
But Janis was starting to get an idea. Maybe not escape, but at least
respite. She stepped fully into the room and closed the door behind her. The
sound of splintering wood from the hallway was immediately cut off. The
latest escapee from the shelf scurried in the far corner, just out of sight,
porcelain shoes clacking on the hard wood of the floor. Janis wasn’t going
to wait for an attack. She opened the door and walked out again, and
emerged again back into the same room she had just left.
Maybe not quite the same.
Three dolls sat on the shelf, watching her. The gramophone started up as
she closed the door, opened it, and went through again.
Two dolls stared at her.
She repeated the procedure.
One doll sat alone on the shelf. It didn’t look happy, even as the
gramophone started up and it slid off to land with a soft thud on the floor.
Janice ignored it and when she walked through the door the next, and last,
time, there was just an empty shelf where the dolls had been and no sound
of anything scurrying or lurking just out of sight.
She realized that all she’d probably achieved was to let the six dolls out
to roam the wider area of the house beyond, and that she’d have to deal
with them, eventually.
 But at least they’re not in here.
She stood, waiting to see if there would indeed be any attack, but this
time the gramophone stayed quiet, and there were no skittering footsteps in
the shadows. Likewise, the door showed no signs of being attacked from
the other side. It seemed she had found safety and somewhere she could at
least pause and gather her thoughts.
For now.
She sat down on the bed. Old springs creaked below her, and she sank an
alarming depth into what was obviously a very well used mattress. But it
felt comfortable, and comforting, so much so that the desire to just lie down
and sleep was almost overwhelming. She fought the urge and forced herself
upright, with her back against the headboard, and her feet up off the floor.
There might not be any dolls in the room, or, even worse, under the bed, but
she wasn’t about to take any chances.
The last few minutes had passed in a blur. She was breathing heavily
again and the muscles in her wrist hurt from where she’d been gripping too
tightly at the handgrip of her pistol in the holster. She was also tight across
the chest and in the shoulders, and had to force her breathing to calm and
her muscles to relax. It took a lot longer than she might have hoped, but at
least there was no sound apart from her own breathing.
She kept a close eye on the gramophone. She considered going over and
dashing it to pieces on the floor, just in case it started again, but she was
still a cop, and wanton destruction of private property wasn’t in the job
description.
Thinking about the job made her remember procedure. She should be
calling for backup, should have done it a while back, but the thought that
this was all some crazy dream was also confusing her sense of what was
real and what wasn’t.
Maybe calling for backup in my dream is my way out of it? It can’t hurt
to try. Can it?
She took out her phone but it seemed to be completely dead. Either the
batteries were gone or, more likely she thought, something in the properties
of this place, this dream, prevented the technology from working.
You’re in a drug-fueled nightmare, of course the phone doesn’t fucking
work.
As time went on she was having more and more difficulty believing that
theory, but she pushed her doubts aside, they weren’t helpful in her current
predicament. She felt something under her back as she put the phone away
in its hip case, something flat and hard underneath the pillows she was
sitting on. She reached round to pull it free, having to shift position to do
so. The old springs creaked, too loudly, disturbing what had been silence,
and Janis held her breath, listening for the patter of feet. Only when she was
sure that there would be no reaction to the noise did she look down to see
what she’d got.
It was a notebook of sorts, like the ones she remembered using for
lecture notes, but with the outside surface covered in pasted images cut
from a variety of sources and glued on some time ago with paste that was
turning to dry dust.
The images themselves were all of people’s faces. At first, she thought
she didn’t know any of them, then one seemed to jump out from the rest, a
fat man, with an almost perfectly round head and bulging cheeks, so chubby
that his eyes seemed to hide behind them. She almost threw the thing away
from her, as if he could see her from out of the photograph, see what she
was doing, as she had watched him.
Do you mind? I’m having a shite here.
As much as the fat man had frightened, and disgusted, her, she decided
to hold on to the notebook although she turned the back cover, where his
photo was, away from her. There might be something useful between the
pages. She had to look.
The book was obviously of some age given the state of the glue and the
peeling pictures on the cover, but when Janis opened it, the images inside
were crisp and clear, almost too much so, given the subject matter. Whoever
had created the scrapbook —it was full of newspaper clippings inside—had
obviously harbored a morbid fascination with death. All of the clippings
were either obituaries or news items about fatal accidents, murders or
sudden passing. Most of the clippings were from the local papers here on
the island, and most from St. John’s itself, but it was the age of the material
that caught Janis’ eye. The clippings dated from the 1890’s up to the 1970’s,
but after a quick flick through, she found nothing before or since.
So how come the fat man’s picture is there? Riddle me that.
She was about to close the book and put it aside, thinking it merely
another thing that was of no use in her current predicament, when a single
page slid partially out from near the back. It was a thicker piece of card,
spotted and faded with age but the writing, beautiful calligraphy in black
ink, stood out proud and clear.
There are houses like this all over the world. Most people only know of
them from whispered stories over campfires; tall tales told to scare the
unwary. But some, those who suffer, some know better. They are drawn to
the places where what ails them can be eased. If you have the will, the
fortitude, you can peer into another life, where the dead are not gone,
where you can see that they thrive and go on, in the dreams that stuff is
made of.
Unlike the scrapbook itself, Janis had a sense that this was something
important. At the moment, she could imagine how, but it had got her
attention, and it felt like a clue, or even a message. She knew from long
experience to trust her gut in these situations, so she kept the piece of card,
stowing it in the inside pocket of her jacket when she put the scrapbook
back under the pillows.
She immediately put both the book and the card out of her thoughts. It
was something else to think about later. For now her first priority was to get
her head clear and to find a way out of what she had to presume was still a
drug-fueled labyrinth.
Anything else is just too weird to consider.
The bed was definitely too comfortable. Combined with the feeling of
relative safety here in the quiet, doll-free room, she had little inclination to
move. In fact, she felt the urge to sleep again, to just lie down and close her
eyes, in the hope that she’d wake up, clear of drugs, and somewhere else,
somewhere that tiny dolls from her past were not lurking in every shadow.
It was only the thought of John Green, and what kind of predicament he
might be in that kept her upright and awake, and finally got her moving off
the bed.
First, she went to investigate the gramophone. There was a seventy-eight
on the turntable, He Sleeps in the Depths by King Rat and the Burdens.
Neither the title or the name meant anything to her. The cranking handle
hung loose on the side of the box but she already knew that it could start up
at any minute without intervention, and if it did, she might have to change
her job description to include a degree of breakage. She lifted the thick disk
out of the box and put it on the dresser, then put the thick needle back in its
cradle.
 And if the bloody thing starts playing now, I’ll know I’m in la-la land for
sure.
She looked up at the swirling fog in the window. There was still no
chance of seeing anything else outside, but unlike out in the hallway, it had
stayed light in here, at least enough for her to see clearly as she made a
quick survey of the room.
There wasn’t much to find, a perfume bottle and lipstick, some lacy
underwear that made her blush to touch it, a make up brush and a compact,
all of which told that the occupant was probably a woman. The drawers of
the dressers were full of clothes, satins, silks and velvets, long draped
dresses in high contrast colors, and more lacy underwear, with stockings
and garter belts, and, in the bottom of the dresser, handcuffs, chains and
several small flails with sharp tipped ends.
A tart’s boudoir right enough.
There was also a myriad of small china ornaments, the kind of thing that
tourists buy to give away as presents or as small reminders of holidays. As
she’d noted earlier, these were mostly religious in nature, cherub, angels,
virgin Mary and small nativity scenes and churches, all too gaudy, too
cheap in look to have any value beyond sentimentality. She picked up a
particularly ugly cherub to see it was stamped on the bottom end, a present
from Niagara Falls. She turned away so that she didn’t have to look at all
the cheerful little faces, it reminded her again of the dolls, and that she still
had them to deal with.
She did a quick tour of the rest of the room and, much to her surprise,
found another door, in the far corner, she hadn’t spotted before as it lay in
deep, almost black, shadow. It looked more like a closet door than any way
out of the room, and was probably full of more clothes. Or more dolls. She
ignored it. She wasn’t ready to try any door at all just yet, not after the high
weirdness that had brought her to the room in the first place. But she had to
leave sometime, she’d need to eat, drink, pee, although she had no need for
any of the three at the moment.
I’m still high, there’s no other explanation.
That was something that was giving her pause. It must be an hour now at
least since she’d come into the house, she was having trouble gauging the
passage of time though, and couldn’t be sure, but surely she should be
coming down from any effects by now? Or even noticing some bleed back
in of the real life she knew to lie just out of reach? None of that was
happening. This place, this room, seemed solid, and resolutely refused to
diminish or fade.
Janis was just as resolute in her convictions.
I will not, I cannot, yield to it.
She considered her options. She could stay here, wait it out, and hope
that the drug faded and all became right. But that still left the possibility
that the boss, and maybe the forensic team, was in trouble in here
somewhere, lost behind a door she hadn’t tried yet, lost with their own bad
dreams, whatever they might be.
Her own nightmares were out there, but so were her friends.
She headed, not for the main door, she knew what was out there already,
but for the closet door in the dark corner. She put her hand on her pistol,
said a silent prayer, and pulled the door open.
 14

Todd sat at his desk typing up the woman’s, Samantha’s, witness

statement from the transcript on the tape from the interview room. The
interview had affected him deeper than he had expected. He could normally
tell when someone was being deliberately evasive or trying to conceal
something important to the case. But the blonde had seemed all too eager to
get it out of her, as if the telling of it would force it away somewhere she
didn’t have to think about it. It had the ring of truth to it, but that didn’t
make it any the less outlandish.
He listened to it all the way through before starting to type, and again he
felt a cold shiver up his spine.
I believe her, I don’t know why. But I do.
He wasn’t in any hurry to get typing. He wasn’t about to file the report
any time soon if he could get away with it. The chief was in a bad enough
mood already without having anyone bring him a fairy story where there
should have been a confession.
The expected media circus had started, in as much as you could count
one local television and two radio station crews from just around the corner
as a circus. But given the nature of the crime and the body count, it was
only a matter of time before the mainland news got hold of it and sent
people over, they were probably on their way already. Likewise, the phones
hadn’t stopped ringing, questions from the media, and concern from higher
up the ranks, even into political spheres of influence. The chief had enough
on his plate and Todd was going to do his best not to annoy him.
Not any more than I have to anyway.
There was still no news from the sarge or the inspector, and Todd was
starting to get a bad feeling about that. Yes, the blonde’s story was
outlandish, in the extreme, but there was that one fact, that one thing that
lent it verisimilitude. She’d mentioned the lavatory flushing on its own
accord. It was only a small thing, but it had Todd worried, worried for the
sarge, and worried for his own sanity.
After the interview Samantha had pleaded to be allowed home, even
apologizing for lying about her mother waiting for her. But much as Todd
might believe her, and might even consider letting her walk if it was his
decision to make, the chief needed someone he could point the top brass
and the media at to say they were getting somewhere, and like it or not,
Samantha was that someone.
Todd took her down to the cells for the night. Constable Williamson
came with them, but Samantha talked only to him. There was definitely a
bond growing there, and it seemed that Todd wasn’t the only one to feel it.
“Please?” she said, as he showed her inside. “Don’t leave me alone too
long?”
She wasn’t so sassy now, the brash persona from earlier had almost all
gone, now she just looked frightened, and somehow smaller. He promised
to look in on her, a promise he intended to keep, and let her keep the
smokes. The last time he’d seen her she was sitting in the corner of the cell
with her knees tucked up to her chin, staring into space and sucking smoke
as if it was the most important thing in the world.
Constable Williamson had put a hand on Todd’s shoulder as they went
back up stairs.
“Is this shit for real?” she whispered. “Drugs, murder, black magic and
killer demons? The media are going to be all over it when they find out.”
“Not if we don’t tell them,” he said.
She raised an eyebrow at that, but didn’t reply. They both knew how
naïve it had sounded. Reporters got stories from cops all the time, and paid
good money for them. There would be plenty of people in the station,
plenty that knew just enough of the details already and could spin them out
as far as the media’s wallets would last.
That was when he’d come up to his desk to type up the report. He still
didn’t know what he was supposed to do with it when he was finished. He
had just got to the part where she’d stopped talking to listen for something
Todd hadn’t heard.
“We’d tried seances, Tarot readings and just sitting around and thinking
hard in the past, none of it had got us anything but bored and sober, and
that’s no fun at all.”
There was a strange noise on the tape over the end of the sentence, a
buzzing that sounded almost like a voice, at least in rhythm and intonation.
Todd downloaded the section of digitized file to his PC and played around
with the mix, turning up the volume in his headphones to try to isolate the
anomaly.
He managed to drop Samantha’s voice out completely, so that only the
buzzing vibration remained. It still sounded like a person, but now he
spotted it wasn’t talking, it was more like music, although played at the
wrong speed entirely. It was when he slowed it down he heard it properly.
Some old guy singing the blues.
That’s what she’d said, and that’s what Todd heard. And not just singing,
there was what sounded like a slide guitar part accompanying it, pretty slick
playing too, better than Todd could have managed even on his best day.
He sleeps in the depths with the fish far below,
He sleeps in the deep in the dark.
Now that he knew that the buzzing was music, he listened to the rest of
the tape, and found it again, just at the point where she’d stopped and
rummaged in her other ear. Another buzzing, and another piece that yielded
more of the song when he slowed it down.
Where he lies, where he lies, where he lies, where he lies,
The Dreaming God is singing where he lies
He listened to each snippet twice, going backward and forward between
the original version and the slowed down version. There didn’t seem to
have been any manipulation of the tape, couldn’t have been as it had come
straight from the interview room to his computer across the secure internal
network, but he was at a loss as to how the music had gotten in there.
He played it one last time, as loud as he could get it through his
headphones.
Where he lies, where he lies, where he lies, where he lies,
The Dreaming God is singing where he lies.
And right on cue, just as the snippet of song came to an end, the sound
of a woman’s screams rose up from below, coming from the cells.

Todd was second on the scene, just behind the duty sergeant. They
found the blonde, Sam, cowered in the corner, batting at the air with her
hands and screaming loudly.
She stopped screaming when she looked up and saw Todd, but she kept
swiping the air, as if being bothered by a swarm of wasps.
Or one damnable big one.
“Make him stop. Please, make him stop that fucking singing.”
“Calm down, Miss,” the duty sergeant said. “Or we’ll have to sedate
you.”
“Sedate me? Yes, please, as much as you can give me. I can’t take much
more of this bloody song.”
 “There is no song, Miss,” the duty sergeant said, and was about to walk
into the cell when Todd held him back.
“Let me, sarge. She knows me.”
He went inside and hunkered down to be at her level.
“Do you still hear it?” he said.
She looked him in the eye, and nodded.
“Sometimes it’s loud, other times, like now, it’s just soft and quiet like.
But the fucker has followed me here. How could he follow me here?”
She started to bat at the air again, shouting and yelling.
“Fuck off, just fuck the fuck off.”
It proved impossible to get her to calm down in the cell. The duty
sergeant still wanted to call the on-call doctor to administer a sedative, but
Todd talked him into letting her out, into his custody as long as she
remained in the interview room. She came quietly with him up the stairs,
clutching his arm all the way.
He fetched her a strong mug of coffee, and let her smoke until she
seemed calmer, if not quite settled.
“Can you hear him now?” he asked.
“No. The old bastard has gone back to sleep. Thank fuck.”
“Do you know who he is?”
She looked up at that.
“You believe me? You believe I can hear him?”
“Let’s just say I’m starting to come around to your way of thinking.”
Todd nearly told her about the song on the tape, but decided that might
only set her off again. He tried a different tack to get her away from
thinking about the song.
“Now that we’re here and talking, tell me what you know, what Peter
Hines knew, about the history of the house. Did he ever talk about it?”
She laughed at that, and seemed to relax, slightly, but it was a start at
least.
“Ever talk about it? He never fucking stopped, all the time since I met
him. John introduced us, about this time last year, and that was about two
weeks before him and Don broke in and took to sleeping up there, sleeping
and trying to commune with the heart of the house, that’s what he said he
was doing. Old hippie moose crap was what I said then, but I guess he was
right and I was wrong.”
“He was obsessed then?”
 “Day and night, it was all he talked about, even down at the bars when
the rest of us just wanted to get wasted. He went on the history tour every
night for a week until the guides told him to fuck off, and he had the poor
librarians run ragged all over town looking for newspapers, reports and
books about the fucking place. To be fair to him, he seemed to know his
stuff, but once he started I usually tuned him out, it got a bit dull after a
while, you know, all that old shit.”
“Moose crap,” Todd said, and got a smile in return before his next
question. “Do you remember anything at all, anything that might help us
here?”
“Only that I’ve heard stories about that house since I was back in junior
school. It’s been a fucking weird place for a long time. But that doesn’t help
you much, does it?”
It was Todd’s turn to laugh, he couldn’t help it, the situation was just too
far outside his normal terms of reference. He was still laughing when the
woman opposite cocked her head, and started batting at the air again.
And now Todd heard it too, as if it was coming from some invisible
speaker in the top left-hand corner of the room, the same bass voice, the
same silky-smooth guitar accompaniment, cutting through like razor wire.
Where he lies, where he lies, where he lies, where he lies,
The Dreaming God is singing where he lies.
 
 15

Deeper in the depths of the tower, and almost full dark now.
The chill felt intense. He had a feeling that if he stopped moving at all,
he’d be frozen solid within minutes, the cold as biting as any Newfoundland
winter’s night, and the blackness thick, almost palpable, like moving
through heavy velvet curtains.
But the weapon was seemingly more than just a defense against the dark
forces. It glowed, giving off a faint light, but enough to help him at least
avoid walking into walls or off any precipices. It also sent a continual flow
of heat that spread from his palm to his whole body. It continued to sing, the
bass choir humming in a constant drone that echoed the rhythm and flow of
the old blues tune he’d been hearing and made John feel, somehow, less
alone, there in the dark.
It might be cold, but apart from that he felt fine, better than fine, given
the circumstances, the wound in his belly throbbed, but he could deal with
it, and he wasn’t hungry or tired. More than that, he felt alive, more alive
than he had been since the morning of the stabbing. Wherever he was, it
seemed to be good for him.
A change is as good as a rest.
His old mum used to say that often, and John finally understood it.
Maybe shouldn’t have had to come quite so far to reach that
understanding.
The Burdens, his Burdens, were still at his back, emboldened by the lack
of light although none had yet come close enough for him to be able to take
a good shot at it. He could smell their stench though, hear their breath and
the rustling of leathery wings, the scrape of talons on stone, and their
chittering, high and shrill as if in counterpoint to the hum of the choir in his
head. In his childhood drawings, they had always been active, flying
alongside futuristic cars or spaceships, attacking pirate ships, or fighting
among themselves over a scantily clad girl, that one was a personal favorite.
He wondered whether they felt as he did, whether they were invigorated by
this place. If they did, then it might not be too long before it was him they
were fighting over.
He went down, deeper into the black, gripping the gun tighter for
warmth, took two steps more, and another tear in space appeared, right in
front of him, two eggs, four, sixteen before he had time to react, calving in
time with his rising heartbeat. He raised the pistol and fired into the center
of the bunch before they could double again.
Light flashed, and he opened his eyes to look over an all too familiar
hospital room. He’d woken up here once before, coming up out of a
morphine-induced dream that had been a hell of a lot more pleasant than his
current circumstances.
It wasn’t a sad, white-coated doctor carrying the board with his notes on
it on the other side of the bed this time, it was the Reaper again, the long-
hooded robe pulled down over his face, and the blood-red scythe leaning
against the wall behind him. But when he spoke it was in the same deep,
cultured tones John remembered the doctor using that day, and the same
two words that John would never forget.
“You’ll live.”
John sat up in the bed. He wasn’t wearing a hospital gown, he was
dressed as he had been since his arrival, and he had the gun his right hand.
He brought it up and pointed it at the Reaper’s face.
“Now, now, sir,” the Reaper said. “We’ll have none of that in here. You
need to rest.”
“Fuck rest,” John said, almost shouting, aware of the irony even as he
said it. “I’ll rest when I’m dead.”
He fired, but the Reaper was faster, reaching behind him and bringing
the scythe up and round, the bullet hit it and pinged off and away.
“Careful, you could have somebody’s eye out with that,” the Reaper
said.
John leapt from the bed, intending to shoot again, to kill the Reaper,
break the spell. But he wasn’t given the time, the Reaper waved the scythe
in the air and the hospital room wavered, then disappeared entirely.
The background filled in slowly again around them; John stood on a
landing at the bottom of a flight of steps. A small table, two chairs, a candle
and a chess set were there some six feet in front of him, ivory figures, white
winged rat-things on John’s side, black reapers on the far side where the
hooded figure sat between John and the next flight of stairs down. John
doubted that the placing of the seat was accidental. He raised the pistol
again.
“Forgive the cliché,” the cultured voice said from inside the hood. “But I
needed to get your attention. Please don’t shoot me again, it’s most
unpleasant and just wastes both of our time. Okay?”
 The pistol sent John some extra warmth, but there was no flaring heat,
no soaring choir. It seemed that danger was not imminent. John held his
peace, hoping to learn something to his advantage despite everything telling
him to just shoot and keep shooting until this…thing, went away
completely.
But he didn’t move forward, and he didn’t lower his gun, he stood his
ground, staying six feet from the table. The hooded figure sighed, and
started to make moves for both players. John recognized the opening, the
Dragon variation.
“We didn’t get a chance to introduce ourselves earlier,” the Reaper said,
“although I do believe we have met several times, long ago for you, mere
minutes for me.”
The Reaper reached up a too white hand and dropped back the hood. The
head underneath was as white and skeletal as John remembered, and there
were no eyes, just black holes that seemed to sink back forever. Stars
danced, way down in the black depths of the sockets. A thick gray tongue
was the only piece of flesh left, and it slithered, like a fat maggot bloated on
a meal inside a mouth full of tombstone teeth.
John had no words, he could only stare, remembering boyhood terrors
and night sweats, dismayed to see that the barrel of the pistol trembled and
shook as he took aim again at the thing’s skull.
“Do you like what you see?” the Reaper said, still making quick moves
on the board, the pieces seeming to dance under the bony fingers. “This is
what I can offer you, if you insist on your current course of action.”
“Balls,” John said.
“And you won’t be needing them either,” the Reaper replied, deadpan,
“not where you’re headed. Now, are we going to play, or are you just going
to let me win? Because, and I’m doing you a favor telling you this, you
really don’t want me to win. Not yet anyway. Not here.”
John stepped over and sat down.
“What do you mean, not yet?”
“I thought I was perfectly clear. Not yet, too early, sometime later
maybe, not at this time, all that happy shit.”
“You know, you don’t talk the way I thought you would.”
That got John another laugh.
“I can boom with the best of them, I just find it a tad camp and theatrical
if truth be told.”
 It was John’s turn to laugh.
“And the rest of this shit isn’t?”
He put the gun down at the side of the board, and didn’t move his hand
far from it. If the Reaper noticed, he didn’t remark on it.
“Now, are we going to talk or are we going to play chess?” the Reaper
said.
The pieces were all back in their starting positions, although John had
not seen the Reaper move them. John leaned forward and moved his King’s
pawn forward two squares.
“Boring,” the Reaper said, and responded by doing the same with his
own King’s pawn.
John moved out his Queen’s side knight. The piece, a Burden riding a
horse, felt warm in his hand, and seemed to squirm slightly as he put it in
place.
“Smoke them if you’ve got them,” the Reaper said, taking a pipe from
the folds of his cloak. It was only then that John remembered the smokes in
his pocket. They were a bit battered, but he managed to salvage one and lit
up. It was his move again. He reached over and touched the King’s side
knight.
“Ah, it’s about time he came into play again. You’ve met the
gatekeeper,” the Reaper said. It wasn’t a question.
“What does that make me, the fucking key master?”
Without a pause the Reaper replied in a deep throaty voice.
“There is no key master, only Zuul.”
Despite, or maybe because of, the sheer absurdity of it all, John laughed,
long and loud, the sound echoing away and up into the tower where it was
answered by manic cackling from the Burdens.
The Reaper looked up.
“Noisy wee buggers, these things of yours, aren’t they?”
“They’re not mine,” John started, but the Reaper’s laughter stopped the
sentence from finishing.
“Of course, they’re yours,” the cloaked figure said, waving a skeletal
hand over the board, “and you know that already, you drew them, both
literally and figuratively. You have yours and I have mine. That’s the way
the game works.”
“There are rules?”
“It’s chess. Of course, there are rules, the dance is everything.”
 “What are we playing for?”
“Control of the board. Haven’t you got that yet? The board is all there is
for you now. You came over the threshold with your sigil and your pain, the
Dreaming God called, and you answered. You are his now, to dream as he
pleases.”
“No, I’ve seen it, I’ve seen the room with the chair. I can go back.”
“That is not back. Not all the way at least. And seeing and going are two
different things. Could you go everywhere you’ve ever seen in a movie? Or
on television?”
“No. But they weren’t real.”
“They were constructs of someone’s imagination though. And as real as
those screeching friends of yours up above.”
“No. The Rat King controls them. I’ve seen him. I’ve talked to him.”
The Reaper laughed and moved a Knight to block John’s attack before
pointing at the white King.
“Take a closer look,” he said.
John turned the white King round to face him. It had the wings, the
clawed feet and the tail, but the rodent-like face was all too familiar, it was
the face John saw in the mirror in the mornings when he shaved.
“I don’t understand,” John said.
“No. But you’re getting closer now, and you will reach full
understanding when the time is right. We are on the cusp of change and
renewal, a changing of the guard if you will.”
John had to think, and he didn’t like the results much.
“So, you’re saying that I am creating all of this in my mind?”
“No. That’s not what I’m saying,” the Reaper replied, and moved his
Queen out into a menacing position. “The boards exist, although the players
may change.”
“Boards? There are other places like this?”
“Oh yes. There are places like this all over. Most people only know of
them from whispered stories over campfires; tall tales told to scare the
unwary. But some, those who suffer…some know better.
To John’s ears that sounded too pat, like a prepared speech.
“And theses sufferers, what do they know that I don’t?”
The Reaper made another move, hiding his King behind a barrier of
other pieces before replying.
 “They are drawn to the places where what ails them can be eased. As
you have been drawn.”
John made a non-committal move, it strengthened his defense but did
little to put any pressure on his opponent.
“What ails me? Nothing ails me,” he said.
The Reaper smiled, there seemed to be more than a hint of sadness in it.
At the same time John’s belly throbbed, the wounds making themselves felt,
deep cuts that he suspected would never fully heal.
“Your sigil says otherwise, my friend,” the Reaper said.
“My what?”
The Reaper moved his King’s side Bishop so that it joined an attack with
the Queen. John hadn’t been paying too much attention to the game, but it
now looked like his pieces were in danger of being swamped if he didn’t do
something about it soon.
The Reaper waved a hand and the table, board and pieces started to
waver and fade.
“We shall finish this later, you have enough to think on for now.”
The Reaper pulled his cowl over his face, took the scythe in his hand,
and leaned over. For a horrible second John thought he was going to be
kissed. He felt the chair fade from under him and stood up just in time
before its support failed completely.
“Later,” the Reaper whispered, and blew out the candle, plunging John
into darkness.
 16

Janis walked out of the boudoir bedroom and through the closet door.
She emerged, not into a bedroom, but back through the front door of the
house itself to step into the quiet downstairs hallway. She was so astonished
that she did not think to hold the door open, it slammed shut behind her
with a clang that shook the building.
The hallway looked, and felt, different, although she couldn’t put her
finger on how; it was a subtle change in the way the air moved, or a shift in
the color scheme, or the smell, which now reminded her of bread and
coffee. Whatever it might be, it hardly felt like the same place at all.
But if I’m here, maybe I can get out this time.
She tried the main door again, but it was as securely closed as before,
and fog, dense and almost solid, still swirled outside the high window
above the door. No matter how much she tugged and pulled, kicked and
punched the door stayed solid. She considered starting in on the wall to tear
the wallpaper, woodwork, insulation and eventually the outside wall, but
that would need tools, tools she didn’t have.
Maybe I can find some.
She turned away from the main door and looked around. From where she
stood she couldn’t see anything that might be a storeroom.
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t one in the back.
She started down the hallway, but to her great surprise the green door to
the left-hand apartment swung open as she came level with it.
“Hello?” Janis said. “Anybody there?”
She wasn’t thinking about people at that instant, she was thinking about
dolls, blue eyes, staring, porcelain shoes and hardwood floors. Before she
stepped fully forward and exposed herself to the view of whoever might be
inside, she stood to one side, listening. There were no tiny footsteps, no
skittering in shadows, but there was the murmur of low voices in
conversation.
She looked inside to see a small woman standing over a bulky man, who
sat in a kitchen chair. They were both drinking, Scotch, Janis could smell it,
and smoking strong cigarettes, which she could also smell, there was the
faintest hint of aniseed or liquorice wafting through to her.
The woman looked barely five feet tall, the paleness of her face
accentuated by jet-black hair that hung in a single long plait to tickle her
waist. Her clothes were equally black, a floor-length dress giving her the
appearance of a hole in the fabric of reality. She seemed to glide rather than
walk.
“I am the concierge,” Janis heard her say, “but you already know that.
What you don’t know is what that means, here in this place.”
“Hello?” Janis said, trying again to get noticed. “Can somebody help me
out here? Can somebody tell me what’s going on?”
Neither of the room’s occupants took any notice of Janis’ presence, and
when she moved forward to step into the room it was as if there was a
barrier in the doorway, preventing her from entering. As with the main door
itself, no matter how much effort she expended, she could not make any
headway. She could only stand and watch, a spectator watching a scene as if
it were playing in a movie. But she could hear well enough, and started to
pay attention when the small woman spoke again.
“I live here, in number one,” the concierge said. “But you could have
number three if you like. Number six is empty, but you wouldn’t like that.
The last concierge had that one, and he wasn’t as fastidious in his habits as
some, it might be years before it’s ready for somebody else.”
Her apartment seemed to have been transported wholesale from a
previous time period; it was decorated with heavy wood furniture,
mahogany by the looks of it, and polished to within an inch of its life. There
was dark red flock wallpaper, portraits of the long dead, presumably family,
and a thick crimson pile carpet that had seen its best days many decades
before. A gas fitting in the wall provided the only source of light, sending
flickering shadows dancing everywhere. There was no television, no
computer, not even a radio, or a gramophone, just a long wall covered
totally in bookshelves housing leather-bound volumes that looked older still
than the furniture. Dark velvet curtains, deep red, almost purple, covered
the windows that overlooked the street. Janis suspected she knew what
she’d see if she pulled those drapes back, fog, thick swirling fog that would
look almost solid.
“You’ll have questions.” the concierge said to the man.
“I will have questions,” he agreed. “Many of them. Here’s an easy one to
start with. What in blazes is going on here? Something brought me here, I
felt its tug and pull in my head and in my gut, what is it? Is it some kind of
hypnotism, some kind of drug?”
 “There are houses like this all over the world,” she started. Janis realized
that she’d read those same words, just minutes before, words that were on
the card she now carried in her pocket. And the man’s questions were very
close to the same ones she had been asking. She forced herself to pay
attention. The concierge had stopped puffing on her cigarette and was going
on with her reply.
“Most people only know of them from whispered stories over campfires;
tall tales told to scare the unwary,” she went on. “But some of us, those who
suffer…some of us know better. We are drawn to the places, the loci if you
like, where what ails us can be eased. Yes, dead is dead, as it was and
always will be. But there are other worlds than these, other possibilities.
And if we have the will, the fortitude, and a sigil, we can peer into another
life, where the dead are not gone, where we can see that they thrive and go
on. And as we watch, we can, sometimes, gain enough peace for ourselves
that we too can thrive, and go on.
“You will want to know more than why. You will want to know how. I
cannot tell you that. None of us has ever known, only that the place is
important, and a sigil is needed. Those are the two constants here.”
She puffed contentedly again for several seconds. Smoke went in, but
very little, if any, came back out, soaked away and down inside her.
She might be full of it, nothing in there but swirling smoke, like the fog.
That thought made Janis pause.
I don’t believe in ghosts.
That was another long-held belief she was having trouble in maintaining,
just one of an increasingly long list.
The concierge was speaking again.
“If you still want to stay after what you have seen here today, you must
agree to my terms,” she said. It wasn’t a question, and the man nodded in
reply.
“How can I not stay? All I ever wanted is here, somewhere in this house.
I need to be here, with her. It’s all I’ll ever need.”
“Then it’s decided. You’ll take number three. Once we get you settled
and your things moved in, there will be more rules, all of which are for your
own safety while you are here. But first things first. You will need a sigil,
for that is your connection to the Great Beyond, and the way that the
Gatekeeper knows to allow you access.”
The man motioned at his belly. There was plenty of it under his shirt.
 “You mean I’m to get cut? Here?”
She smiled.
“Cut, or tattooed, or even drawn on with a Sharpie. It is the voluntary
marking of the flesh that is the important thing. Don’t ask why. I can’t tell
you. All I know is what I was told myself. Just putting it on paper doesn’t
work, in fact, it could open ways that the Gatekeeper does not control, and
that way lies madness, then death soon after. So, it must be the sigil, and it
must be on flesh. The fact that it works is all I know. It has to be taken on
faith.”
“You do know what I do for a living?” the man said, rather too harshly.
“Faith is not normally a word in my vocabulary.”
“Then learn it,“ she said, raising her voice. “That, or leave right now and
don’t come back. I don’t really care either way. I’m not here to mother you,
or be your confessor. I’m the concierge. If you want to talk, I’ll listen if I
feel like it. But my job is to look after the house and make sure you
continue to have access to the Gatekeeper. That takes up most of my time.
The occupants need to be able to look after themselves.”
“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 getting
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 themselves.”
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?”
“Like this one now you mean?”
“Yes. I believe we’ve always been headed to this room, at this time.”
The blonde smiled.
“Oh good. How does it end?”
The brunette smiled back, but it didn’t reach her eyes.
“Now that I can tell you. It ends with you dead and me pissing in your
face.”
“If that’s the case, I’m not sure I’m keen on this fate shit.”
“That’s the point about fate, isn’t it? The shit just keeps on coming
around and there’s nothing any of us can do about it.”
It was the blonde’s turn for questions.
“And there’s no room in karma, fate, whatever you want to call it, there’s
no room there for free will?”
“Not where fate is concerned. Free will is an illusion, just a way to make
you feel better about the fact that you’re fucked six ways till Sunday
whatever you do.”
The blonde took a deep draw from the cigarette and blew three perfect
smoke rings, each through the other before rubbing the butt between her
fingers and letting the ash fall to the carpet.
“I don’t see how you can live that way,” she said after a pause. “From
my experience, our free will is what drives the universe. See, before we got
here, I made a choice. I decided that I’d let you have the first shot, I owe
you that much if nothing else. That’s not fate, not karma, that’s me, taking
control of the situation.”
“And what if I made the same choice?” the brunette replied.
“Then I guess we’ll be sitting here for a while yet. Did you bring a pack
of cards?”
The pair of them sat there for a while longer. John had another try at
pushing his way through, straining every bone and muscle, but he got
nowhere, and had to give up after less than a minute, already sweating with
the exertion. The wound in his belly throbbed, and as if on cue the brunette
stubbed out her cigarette then spoke again.
“Actually, I don’t believe this is fate. I believe this is karma, your karma,
coming around to bite you on the ass.”
 The blonde laughed, and this time there was no music there, just cold
hard steel.
“I’m a bad person therefore some imaginary thing somewhere I can’t see
is going to punish me? That’s just another fairy story to keep us in line. If
you’re going to use that as an excuse, you’re going to have to define what is
good, what is evil, and the nature of punishment in the cosmic scheme of
things.” She paused to light another cigarette. “I guess we really are going
to be here for a while.”
“Not too long now,” the brunette said. “I just want you to apologize.”
The blonde scratched at her belly again, and red roses of color
blossomed there.
“Apologize for what, for being me? For doing what I want, when I want?
Why should I apologize for that?”
“You ruin lives. You ruined my life that day when you walked into our
shop with that fucking gun. You were always going to shoot, weren’t you?”
“Yeah. What’s your point?”
“And you don’t care? You don’t care about the boy? Or the father?”
“What is there to care about? I’m here. You’re here. As I see it, the only
directive we have is to stay alive for as long as possible, and enjoy
ourselves while we’re at it.”
“Enjoy? You enjoy being a sadistic bitter bitch?”
“Yes, actually, I do. Why don’t you pick up that gun and give it a go?
Maybe you will too.”
“Maybe I will. You need to be punished.”
“If you believe in Karma, as you’ve said, then my punishment is coming
to me anyway. If that’s the case, why are you sitting there with the gun?
Don’t you have the courage of your own convictions?”
“I can wait,” the brunette said, and smiled. “What goes around comes
around.”
The scene faded and wavered, went almost black dark, a single black egg
hung in the space behind the door. It popped and revealed a scene beyond.
Two women sat in the dingy room. The blonde scratched at her belly,
raising red spots of color on her white shirt.
The brunette spoke first.
“Do you believe in fate?”
John stepped back and closed the door softly. There was no way out for
him in that direction.
 It seems someone is trying to tell me something. Maybe its time I started
listening.
Down in the deep, the bass voice sang.
Where he lies, where he lies, where he lies, where he lies,
The Sleeping God is dreaming where he lies.
 18

Sam, at some point that evening he’d started using her name, finally
agreed to go back to the cell after an hour when there was no recurrence of
the singing. Thankfully, Todd hadn’t heard it again either. If he had he
might start questioning his own sanity, even more than he was already
doing.
The station fell relatively quiet around him as full night came on and
shifts changed, or at least as quiet as it could be during the biggest murder
case to hit the town in living memory. The news crews were still camped
out in the main parking area, several from Halifax and Toronto having
joined the local lads when the late afternoon flights came in. It was just as
well it wasn’t full winter or they’d all be freezing. But even now, in what
passed for a Newfie spring, it would be bloody cold out there. Todd hoped
they had plenty of clothes and coffee.
There was still no sign of the sarge or the inspector, and the chief had
long since stopped believing any story about them following up a lead.
Todd had left half a dozen voicemail messages, and a couple of texts, for
both of them, but hadn’t had any replies. He’d also phoned around the bars
that the inspector usually favored, but nobody had seen either him or the
sarge all day.
What with that, and the fact that he was slowly coming around to
believing Sam’s statement, outlandish as it was, he was now worried, he
was very worried.
He’d listened to the tape again too, playing it over and over, part of him
hoping that maybe he’d play it one more time and the singing wouldn’t be
there.
And then he woke up and it had all been a dream.
He never believed that plot if he saw it in a movie though, and wasn’t
holding out much hope for it now. He was still wondering how to write the
music part of it up in the witness statement when he got a call from Doug
Wozniak from Forensics.
“I tried to get Sergeant Lodge but she’s not around so you’ll have to do.
We’ve got a preliminary report, and you’re not going to like it. Come down
for a coffee and I’ll go over it. I’ve put a fresh pot on.”
Normally he’d have waited for Forensics to deliver the full typed up
version so that he could pass it on to the sarge or the inspector, but not
tonight. Besides, Doug, a regular golf partner, knew his coffee and made the
best brew in the station.

Two minutes later he was in the bowels of the station in the Forensics
lab. This wasn’t the open glass and chrome magnificence he’d seen in the
television depictions of a Forensics’ team, but a low-ceilinged converted
basement, crammed with equipment and smelling, more than slightly, of the
tang of acid.
Overhead fans whirred noisily, one with a slight stutter that Todd would
have found more than annoying if he’d had to live with it for any length of
time. But Doug had a broad smile, one that rarely left his face, as he handed
Todd a large mug of black coffee.
“Drink up, you’re going to need it.”
Doug’s white coat was stained with a variety of substances, some of
which looked like food; coffee, ketchup and the like, and others that were
probably a variety of staining reagents or acids. He wiped his hands on the
front, leaving a new reddish-brown smear, then led Todd over to a long
table where the crime scene evidence was laid out in a series of sealed clear
plastic bags.
“The bodies are off to the morgue,” Doug said. “But you saw them
already at the scene. They were mostly clean, all of them infused with
enough weed to knock out a horse, but clean otherwise, nothing harder than
some grass is what I’m saying. There’s certainly no angel dust or acid,
nothing to indicate a frenzied psychosis in any event. We drew some blood
from your witness too, she’s the same as the others, long term cannabis user
at a guess, but if she’s done anything harder it’s been long enough ago to be
cleared out of her system.
He waved a hand over the evidence table.
“And then there’s this lot, no stray fibers on any of the clothing, no bits
of metal filings from any weapon, no prints anywhere in the apartment apart
from those of the dead and your witness.”
“None at all?”
“Well, there’s one,” Doug said. “We found it when we went back for a
second look this afternoon.”
He lifted up an envelope. Inside was a single tall sheet of paper, and
Todd knew what it must be even before he turned it round. It was Hines’
artwork, his summoning spell. There was print powder on the central
yellow part of the painting.
“So, have you run it through the system?” Todd asked.
Doug grimaced.
“This is the bit you’re not going to like, it’s Green’s print, definitely. Our
inspector has managed to corrupt the scene on his first day back on the job.”
Todd now knew why Doug wanted to tell him this in private. If it got to
the chief straight away, Green would be tossed off the case faster than spit.
But Todd didn’t see what other option there was. The inspector had turned
up for ten minutes, gone AWOL and screwed up the scene before he left,
dragging the sarge along with him. If the chief was going to carpet the boss,
Todd would be at his side, cheering him on.
“This is fucked up,” Todd said, and Doug just nodded in agreement.
He lifted his coffee mug to drain the last of it, and heard a distinct voice
in his ear, the old man, singing the blues.
Where he lies, where he lies.
He almost spit coffee all over the evidence bags and Doug looked at him
with a quizzical expression.
“You okay, Todd?”
“Did you hear that?”
That got him another raised eyebrow.
“Hear what, the fan? The request for a new one is in but…”
Todd wasn’t listening, he heard it again, a complex middle eight played
on a slide guitar by somebody that knew what they were doing.
He put the mug down and backed away from the evidence on the table as
the painting inside the clear envelope bulged and stretched. Something
ripped, a tear that seemed to unzip the fabric of reality itself to leave a
single shimmering black egg hanging a foot above the plastic bags. Todd
heard the song come through, loud and clear.
Where he lies, where he lies, where he lies, where he lies.
The Sleeping God is dreaming where he lies.
“Tell me you see that,” Todd said, almost a whisper, but Doug was
already backing away from the table.
“I see it. But what the hell is it?”
Todd remembered the statement he’d typed up earlier.
“They were eggs, but they weren’t really, they were something else,
shiny. Look, have you dropped acid? No? I thought not. But if you had,
you’d know exactly what I’m on about. Black eggs, first there, then, pop,
somewhere else. Somewhere hazy and wavy and dreamy and all fucked up.
“Then the screaming started.”
Doug moved forward again and reached out a hand, as if to investigate
the strange occurrence. Todd pulled him away, rather too urgently for
Doug’s liking.
“What did you do that for?”
“Just don’t touch it,” Todd replied. “For God’s sake don’t do anything
that might cause it to change.”
“Change into what?”
“If I knew that, I wouldn’t be so damned terrified.”
The black egg, Todd saw that it shone with an oily sheen that danced in
an aura around it, red and yellow and gold and blue, like oil on a hot skillet,
thrummed and vibrated with a hum that set his teeth on edge.
The blues song got louder.
He sleeps in the deep, in the dark.
The egg stopped vibrating and seemed to calm, even maybe grow
smaller.
He sleeps, and he dreams, in the deep far below.
Almost gone again, there was now nothing more than a thin, pencil thin,
tear in reality.
And the Sleeping God is dreaming where he lies.
With a sound like a zip being closed the tear disappeared, the song
stopped and the room fell quiet save for the stuttering thump of the busted
fan overhead.
“You said you tested everything for hallucinogens?” Todd said.
Doug hadn’t taken his eyes off the spot above the table where the tear
had been seconds before.
“Yes,” he finally replied. “But I think I’d better test everything again.”
“Probably a good idea,” Todd said, and headed back toward the cells. He
had more questions for Sam, and for himself too.
 19

Janis stood in the hallway at the foot of the main stairs, unsure of her
next move. She was now also unsure of her original diagnosis of having
been drugged. She should definitely be coming down by now, definitely
seeing reality start to bleed in. But what she was seeing, and hearing, from
the rooms, and through every doorway, was just more weirdness, more
confusing images that seemed to have a purpose. It almost seemed as if
someone, or something, was trying to teach her something.
She was almost sure now, this was no drug addled dream, you didn’t feel
hungry in drug addled dreams, and Janis’ stomach rumbled loudly while
she stood there trying to come to a decision. She also hadn’t had a coffee in
several hours, and that was going to turn into a serious problem for
somebody if it wasn’t rectified soon.
And if it wasn’t a drug dream, what could it be? Surely, she’d remember
someone trying to hypnotize her? At some point, she was going to have to
consider the possibility that everything that had happened, was still
happening, was objectively real. She wasn’t there yet.
But I’m getting there, and I’m in no mood for being jerked around. You
wouldn’t like me when I’m cranky.
She decided it was time for more positive action. Opening more doors
inside the house wasn’t going to get her anywhere.
But what about under it? Can I get out that way?
And not just get out, John might be down there, and she still hadn’t
found the Forensics team. Just having that thought was enough to fix her
course of action. She had to look now.
The fat man might also be down there somewhere, she’d heard him
down there the last time she opened the door. Of course, in this place, that
was no guarantee he’d be there next time, but even if he was, she’d dealt
with fat smelly men often enough—the bars in town were full of them on
any given Saturday night. She put a hand on her pistol again, taking some
small comfort just in the fact it was there, and headed for the cellar door.
Yet again she half expected to see a new scene when she opened the
small pine door under the stairs, but like the last time, there was just the
dark passage with stone steps leading down. She tried the light switch again
but as before it just clicked and clicked with no answering flicker of the
single bulb overhead. At least this time the noise was only met by silence.
There were no loud Scottish admonishments from below.
She stepped onto the cramped landing at the top of the steps and looked
down. It was different in another way too this time, it wasn’t quite so dark
down there, diffuse light showed her what looked to be the three bottom
steps of a line of twelve, a clear view if she wanted to descend.
There was still no sound coming up from below, and she tried not to
think about the fat Scotsman hiding in wait in some dark corner as she put
her foot on the first step. Besides, she’d probably smell him before she saw
him.
“Ready or not, here I come,” she shouted, and started down the stairs.
Her eyes adjusted quickly to the gloom, and she went down in silence.
There was no sound from below and no smell. She reached the bottom
without mishap and looked across a high brick cellar that seemed to stretch
the whole width and breadth of the house, and maybe a bit further.
It might be shared with the next building up the hill, there might be
another way out.
The light, what little there was, came in from a row of three windows
about twelve feet off the ground, at or just above street level would be her
guess, although all she could see out of them was more of the dense
swirling fog.
The cellar itself seemed even older than the rest of the house, the
brickwork was crumbling in places, and damp in others. It probably dated
to the first dwelling on the site, which would put it three hundred years back
at least, and maybe more. There looked to be about that number of years
worth of junk down here, filling much of the space with old furniture, piles
of decaying books, magazines, newspapers, and bags, leather, cloth and
plastic depending on the era, full of clothing. The room smelled musty,
appropriate to the age of the stacked junk, but there was no hint of the fat
man. She relaxed slightly and took her hand off the pistol.
“John? Are you down here?”
She got no reply, but having felt the quietness and stillness she didn’t
expect any. There was a thin layer of dust over everything, including what
little floor she could see. No one had been down here for quite some time.
So, how is it that you heard the fat man shouting less than ten minutes
ago?
 She pushed that thought away, just another impossible thing she’d think
about later when she had the time. Just like she had no time to waste
investigating the nooks and crannies, valleys and byways that snaked
between and around the junk piles.
Then she heard it, a distant chanting, getting louder.
At first, she thought it was the bloody song again, but the chanting got
closer, a strange, guttural cacophony that contained no words of any
language she could recognize. At that point, she wasn’t even sure that
human vocal chords were capable of making the sounds she heard, yips and
cries, chirps and whistles intermingled with bass drones and harsh glottal
stops. The whole effect chilled her to the bone and it wasn’t helped by a
sudden blast of cold air that swept through the room like a gale.
It felt like someone had just opened a window.
Maybe I can get out.
Something moved in the left-hand corner of the cellar.
It started small; a tear in the fabric of reality, no bigger than a sliver of
fingernail, appeared and hung there. As she watched it settled into a new
configuration, a black oily droplet held quivering in empty air.
The walls of the cellar throbbed like a heartbeat. The black egg pulsed in
time. And now it was more than obvious. It was growing.
It calved, and calved again.
Four eggs hung in a tight group, pulsing in time with the rising
cacophony of the chanting. Colors danced and flowed across the sheer
black surfaces; blues and greens and shimmering silvers on the eggs.
In the blink of an eye there were eight.
Janis had no thought of escape, lost in contemplation of the beauty
before her.
Sixteen now, all perfect, all dancing.
The chanting grew louder still.
Thirty-two now, and they had started to fill the cellar with dancing
aurora of shimmering lights that pulsed and capered in time with the throb
of magic and the screams of the chant, everything careening along in a big
happy dance.
Sixty-four, each a shimmering pearl of black light.
The colors filled the room, spilled out over the circle, crept around her
feet, danced in her eyes, in her head, all though her body.
She strained to turn her head toward the eggs.
 A hundred and twenty-eight now, and already calving into two hundred
and fifty-six.
As if right at her ear, she heard the fat man’s voice.
“Ye should nae fuck with anybody else’s stuff. The hoose disnae like it.”
And suddenly she remembered where she was.
She lifted her gun and fired into the eggs.
The myriad of bubbles popped, burst and disappeared as if they had
never been there at all with a wail that in itself was enough to set the walls
throbbing and quaking. Swirling clouds seem to come from nowhere to fill
the room with darkness. Everything went black as a pit of hell, and a
thunderous blast rocked the cellar, driving Janis down into a place where
she dreamed of empty spaces filled with oily, glistening bubbles. They
popped and spawned yet more bubbles, then even more, until she swam in a
swirling sea of colors.
She drifted in a blanket of darkness, and she was alone, in a cathedral of
emptiness where nothing existed save the dark and the pounding chant. She
saw more stars, vast swathes of gold and blue and silver, all dancing in
great purple and red clouds that spun webs of grandeur across unending
vistas. Shapes moved in and among the nebulae; dark, wispy shadows
casting a pallor over whole galaxies at a time, shadows that capered and
whirled as the dance grew ever more frenetic. She was buffeted, as if by a
strong, surging tide, but as the beat grew ever stronger she cared little. She
gave herself to it, lost in the dance, lost in the stars.
She didn’t know how long she wandered in the space between. She
forgot herself, forgot John and the Forensic team, lost, dancing in the
vastness where only rhythm mattered.
Lost.
A sudden sound brought her back, reeled in like a hooked fish, tugged
reluctantly through a too tight opening and emerging into the dim light of a
cold cellar that had fallen silent again. But whatever the noise had been, it
had broken whatever strange spell had fallen on her.
I’ve had enough of this.
She turned to head back up the stairs. It was dark up there now, the door
to the hallway up above must have swung closed. She wasn’t worried. Not
until she heard a patter of tiny footsteps in the far corner of the cellar and,
from everywhere and nowhere, a deep voice started to sing again.
Where he lies, where he lies, where he lies, where he lies,
 The Sleeping God is dreaming where he lies.
She turned back to the stairs, but she only got two steps forward when
the door at the top swung open. Whoever was there couldn’t be seen, but
their shadow could, it was only small, doll sized.
I’m trapped.
The shadow up above moved, and she saw a small figure come into the
stairwell before the door swung shut again leaving only darkness.
She heard footsteps, porcelain on stone this time. hen came another
patter, on wood, from the far corner of the cellar.
They’re taunting me.
She raised her pistol and fired two shots up the steps, the sound almost
deafening in the enclosed area, setting her ears ringing for long seconds
afterward.
At least it deadens that bloody singing.
She probably hadn’t hit anything, but she’d made her statement of intent.
She moved away from the stairs and headed into the junk piles. If they were
going to play cat and mouse, she preferred to be the cat.
Her hearing started to come back. The deep voice was still singing, and
now she thought she could pinpoint it. It was coming from a spot
somewhere in the middle of the room, and it sounded slightly more tinny,
more mechanical, than the version she’d heard upstairs when the
gramophone played it. It sounded like it might be coming from a small
radio or cheap tape player. Whatever the case, she had an idea that if she
could find it and stop it, maybe, just maybe, that would also stop the dolls.
It wasn’t much of a plan but it was all she had.
She headed further into the stack of junk, almost knocking over a nest of
dining table chairs as she squeezed into an alleyway made mainly of books,
newspapers and magazines stacked as high as the top of her head. She
didn’t like not being able to see the rest of the cellar, not when footsteps,
two pairs of them now, tapped on the floor somewhere out there.
But if I can’t see them, they can’t see me.
She could feel those blue eyes again though, feel them staring. She knew
they were close, just as she knew that neither of the two dolls prowling in
the shadows was the blue dressed one. Its stare was always fiercer
somehow, and she’d know that when she felt it.
She went deeper into the stacks. The song got louder.
He dreams as he sleeps with the fish far below,
 He dreams in the weeds, in the dark,
He dreams and he sings, in the deep, in the sleep,
And the Dreaming God is singing where he lies.
She had a good idea where it was coming from now, just to the left of
her and beyond the alley of papers and books she was in. Something fell
nearby, a heavy thud and a rustle of paper, then another. Tiny footsteps
pattered. The song went into its chorus.
Where he lies, where he lies, where he lies, where he lies.
The footsteps pattered along in time, and Janis was confused for a
second before it came to her.
They’re dancing. The fucking things are dancing.
She pushed faster through the papers, knocking them aside and toppling
columns, no longer caring about giving away her position. The song kept
going.
No matter how many piles of papers she knocked over, it always seemed
to be just out of her reach.
The Dreaming God is singing where he lies.
Janis forced herself to calm down, she was hyperventilating, close to
panic and feeling exactly like the frightened child she’d once been,
cowering under covers from the scary things in the cupboard. She’d worked
long and hard to get rid of that scared kid, devoted her life to helping
equally scared people in scary situations, and she wasn’t about to let all of
that go because of a couple of dancing dolls and a spooky voice in a cellar.
The source of the song sounded closer than ever now. She pushed over
one last pile of magazines, National Geographic, more than 20 years old
and soggy with damp, and stepped over into a cleared area that seemed to
be in the center of the cellar. An old radio, Sixties vintage by the look of it,
sat on an empty patch of floor. The song was coming from its cracking,
tinny speaker. Janis bent down, intending to switch the machine off. As she
did so, two shadowy figures came at her at knee height, like excited puppies
welcoming a master home. They were at her legs before she could move or
raise her gun. A green dressed doll started to climb and when Janis looked
down all she saw was a face full of pointed teeth and a smile, eyes too blue,
cheeks too red.
It was too close, too tight to her for her to chance a shot, so she clubbed
it, hard across the face with the barrel of the gun, caving the head in all
across the left side and leaving only half the jaw in a lopsided smile.
 The doll kept climbing, and the second one was at her ankles. She felt a
sharp pain in her left heel. She’d been bitten, and was now being chewed
on.
The green doll was now at her waist. She grabbed it with her free hand
and held it out at arm’s length where it struggled and squirmed like an
angry cat. It bent at the waist, trying to reach her hand, teeth clacking in a
loose jaw. Janis put the pistol in its mouth, turned her head away, and blew
the head to glittering fragments that exploded like a bomb. She felt shards
of porcelain spatter on the side of her face but when she turned to look, ears
ringing again, she was holding the still, lifeless, and headless, body of a
tattered old doll.
She tossed it away, and kicked out, hard, at the red-dressed doll at her
feet, catching it full in the body and sending it, like a perfectly struck punt,
soaring high and away over the stacks of papers to hit the brick cellar wall
with a satisfying thud. It fell away out of sight.
The radio still sang.
Where he lies, where he lies, where he lies, where he lies.
The Dreaming God is singing where he lies.
“Dream about this you fucker,” Janis said, and put two shots into the
speaker. The radio died with a crackle and hiss that she put an end to by
stomping on it until it went quiet.
She stood there listening for long seconds but there were no more
pattering feet and no more singing.
“Right,” Janis muttered, “let’s see if we can do something about fixing
this house and finding out what the fuck is going on here.”
She raised her weapon ahead of her and, limping slightly on an ankle
that was sore and bleeding, headed back toward the stairs.
 20

John had no idea how long he had been descending the stairs in the
dark, only that he’d been walking for a long, long time. There was no sense
of tiredness, no hunger. The wounds in his belly throbbed every so often but
that seemed to be the only thing to remind him he was actually alive and not
just locked in some tortured dream.
He did know it was getting colder still, and there was now a dampness in
the air. The dark sea, that had seemed so distant when he had seen it from
atop the tower, must now be close by. He didn’t need to see it to know, for
the walls, and the stone underfoot, were wet and dripping. Green weed,
almost slime, coated sections of it. He was so intent on just putting one foot
ahead of the other and making sure he didn’t slip that he almost walked into
the first obstruction he’d come to in his long descent.
He raised the pistol to let its glow show him what was ahead. He wasn’t
really surprised to find another doorway. His heart rate thudded up through
the scales as he recognized the white, peeling paint, and the number, six, on
the front.
I’ve done it, I’ve found the way home.
He didn’t pause for thought. He stepped forward, turned the handle, and
opened the door, expecting to see the room in the apartment, either the
crime scene, or the battered armchair room, at that point he didn’t care
which.
It was a place he recognized, a place he’d never forget, but it wasn’t the
room in the apartment. It was an alleyway off George Street and it was still
bitterly cold. Snow fell, impossibly, from the ceiling above to drift in a
wind that obviously whistled down the alley, but could not be felt from
where he stood in the doorway.
A darker mound lay slumped against the wall of the left-hand building. It
looked from here like a discarded bag of rubbish, but John knew better. The
wounds in his belly throbbed, remembering the pain, remembering his
mistake.
And I won’t be making that one again.
He had no intention of trying to pass through the door. He’d failed with
all the other doors, and although there hadn’t been a bursting egg in place to
form this one, he was pretty sure the same rules applied.
 More snow fell, and now he could clearly see that the hunched mound
against the wall was warmer than the surroundings. Flakes fell on it, and
immediately started to melt, although it was only a matter of time before
hypothermia set in and the fallen man succumbed to a St. John’s winter.
Still, John stood in the doorway. He knew this wasn’t real, it was some
kind of recorded broadcast, it had to be. He wondered if he was going to be
forced to watch himself being stabbed. He wasn’t sure he was ready for
that.
The wind continued to whistle and snow continued to fall. It started to
lie across the shoulders of the hunched figure, John even remembered the
pattern it made, like white wings on his shoulder blades. At the time, he’d
wondered if the fallen man was already on his way to Heaven. Now he
wondered if maybe he wasn’t being prepared for somewhere else, some
other Burden.
Won’t be long now, I’ll be along any second.
A figure seemed to sidle out of the right-hand wall near John and walk
forward into the alley. Only it wasn’t himself, those months of pain and hurt
in the past, instead it was his sergeant, Janis. She wasn’t dressed for winter.
It looked like she was wearing exactly what he’d last seen her in, just before
he’d lost her in the foggy doorway, however long ago that might have been.
It seemed like an age.
The sergeant stepped forward, weapon raised, at least she’s doing better
than I did, and moved toward the slumped body. John’s wounds throbbed,
hot and red then went cold as a lancing pain, one he remembered only too
well, hit him hard. He stumbled in the doorway; the gun hit the rock of the
wall and was knocked from his hand. It tumbled away somewhere, lost in
the dark, but he had no time to fumble around looking for it. Janis was now
leaning over the hunched body. He knew what would happen next: she was
going to touch the shoulder and tug lightly, and then it would happen: the
knife would flash, blood would flow, hers, not his. He couldn’t let her suffer
what he had suffered.
He pushed forward into the doorway, expecting to meet the same
resistance he had met in the previous encounters, but this time he went
straight through, and was so astonished that he stumbled again, almost fell.
Janis bent closer to the hunched body and tugged at the shoulder. John saw
the supposedly dead man wake, and turn, the blade already in his hand.
Time seemed to stand still and he saw it all again as it had happened the
first time. The man, sleeping, not dead, turned, and his eyes went wide. All
he would have seen would have been a shadowy figure leaning over him,
and he slept with a knife in his hand for just such occasions. He screamed
an incoherent cry of rage and surprise, and his arm tensed, ready to strike.
“No!” John shouted, and threw himself forward, knocking Janis aside
and falling over the moving man just as the knife came around and stabbed,
twice, then sliced, just once, but once was enough.
The pain flared like a bomb going off in his gut and in his head and John
was blown away, down into darkness, into the black.
He blinked and the Reaper was there again, sitting at a table with the
chess set laid out in front of him, but John had no time for studying the lie
of the game. He was looking at the view over the robed figure’s shoulder.
He had reached the bottom of the tower. He stood on a balcony, some ten
feet above the black sea, only now that he was here he could see that it
wasn’t a sea at all, but a throbbing, swelling mass of the black eggs.
Hundreds of millions of them filled the view as far as he could see, all the
way to a distant horizon where they became lost in fog. The mass of black
seemed to quiver and thrum, and there was a distinct, not unpleasant,
vibration that ran through John like a weak flow of electricity. Every so
often one of the eggs floated slightly above the surface and popped. Images
and sounds and muffled voices swam in John’s head, but were quickly
subsumed as the vibration rose to a higher pitch, blocking out the vision and
preventing him from being overwhelmed by it.
“Singing helps too,” the Reaper said casually, but John still wasn’t ready
to pay attention to him, was still taking in the scene around him.
More fog swirled overhead, so close that he thought he might be able to
reach up and touch it. He had a wall at his back, but didn’t turn to look. He
had a feeling there might be a doorway there, and he wasn’t sure he was
ready to go through it yet.
The Reaper motioned to the empty chair at the table.
“I believe we have a game to finish, and you’d better pay closer attention
this time, we’re getting to the sharp end.”
John couldn’t take his eyes off the sea of eggs.
“What is this place?”
The Reaper laughed.
“Everywhere, nowhere, the dreams of a Singing God? Who really
knows? All I know is that I am here and I can go somewhere else, taking
you with me, or leaving you behind depending on the result.”
“My fate depends on a chess game?”
“No, John. Your fate depends on you, same as it ever was.”
John sat down at the table and by instinct fished in his pocket for the
smokes. It was only then that he noticed he no longer carried the pistol. He
looked up in alarm and the Reaper smiled.
“Don’t worry, you only had it as long as you needed it.”
John found the Zippo, but only an empty pack of cigarettes. It didn’t stay
empty for long, the pack swelled in his hand when the Reaper waved a
finger, twenty new coffin nails now filling it snugly.
“I need you relaxed for this next bit,” the Reaper said, lighting his pipe
with a long matchstick as John tapped out a smoke, Camel Filter, his brand
of choice, and lit it.
John looked down at the game, and noticed immediately he was in
trouble.
“Your first instinct is to preserve your Queen,” the Reaper said. “And
you’ve just seen that for yourself, had it proved to you.”
John’s wounds throbbed in agreement as the Reaper continued.
“But that often leaves you, the King as it were, open to attack, open to
someone like me taking advantage of your vulnerability.”
The Reaper moved a pawn forward to directly attack John’s Queen. He
saw that he could save it, but it would indeed leave his King vulnerable, not
immediately, but definitely leaving a gap that his opponent might exploit
later. But not to do it would mean the certain loss of his Queen, his most
powerful piece. He moved a pawn of his own forward in defense.
“You see, don’t you?” the Reaper said. “You’re always defending. That’s
why this decision has been hard for you. If you’d been more proactive at the
start, more willing to take a risk and ask the right questions, you wouldn’t
have had to come all this way, and this game wouldn’t have been
necessary.”
John looked over the Reaper’s shoulder at the bubbling mass of the black
eggs.
“What can I do? I am what I am.”
The Reaper smiled, and moved another pawn forward. John saw that the
black pawns, five of them left on the board, now looked like tiny China
dolls, with velvet dresses, rouged cheeks and blue, unblinking jewels for
eyes. The pawn the Reaper had just moved did a little dance, tapping
porcelain shoes on the board, before settling into place, another attack on
John’s Queen.
“Now we’re getting somewhere,” the Reaper said. An oily black egg
drifted up from the mass and popped no more than a yard beyond the edge
of the stone balcony. Just before the vibration kicked in and dampened the
effect, John saw a man, sitting in a kitchen chair, naked to the waist while a
woman cut a figure into his belly.
The Reaper spoke again while moving a third pawn into the attack.
“We have a leak. And it needs to be plugged.”
 21

Janis was halfway up the dark steps leading out of the cellar when she
heard a noise, not from above, but from below, back in the cellar. Papers
slid and shifted and a pile fell with a thud before something slid noisily over
the fallen magazines. Somehow, she knew exactly what it must be. It was
the doll, the one she’d kicked against the wall, broken now, but still coming
on, either limping or dragging itself by the arms, still driven by its sole
purpose of getting to Janis and scaring the shit out of her.
Well I’ve got news for you, ladies. I’m all out of scared for today. So,
bring it on.
She counted back on her ammo supply, six bullets left. Six bullets, five
dolls.
I’ll manage.
She ignored the noises from below, they were getting louder, but not
quickly enough to say that the doll had any chance of catching her, and
went up as fast as she was able in the dark. Once she got to the top landing,
she stood there, watching the light play in the hallway through the gaps in
the pine slats. There was no indication of any other movement, no other
sound beyond another soft thud from the cellar as more paper towers were
toppled.
Here goes nothing.
She pushed the door open and stepped through. Janis said a silent prayer
that she hadn’t been transported anywhere different this time as she walked
into the silence of the main hallway.
Her ankle hurt where she’d had the close encounter with the doll’s teeth.
Apart from that she seemed none the worse for wear but it would be a cold
day in hell before she could be persuaded to go back down into that cellar
again.
She’d also come to another decision almost exactly at the same moment
as she’d blown the doll’s head to pieces. From now on, this was reality,
until something better came along. In this reality, she was done running,
done hiding.
And I really could use a cup of coffee.
She walked over to Apartment One, turned the handle and pushed. The
door opened. It wasn’t the red room, there was no sign of a concierge, or a
man getting cut. Instead it was a small, neatly decorated sitting room with a
modern galley kitchen unit along the right-hand wall and a long, very
comfortable looking sofa in front of a modern wide screen television. Net
curtains, too thick to see through, covered the window, but there was
enough of a gap to show that fog still swirled outside. But the main thing
that caught Janis’ eye was the coffee machine, and the fact that the clock
timer on it showed blue, flashing 00:00. The LED’s were on, which meant
there was power, which meant there was definitely the chance of a cup of
coffee.
The door shut with a soft click behind her but Janis hardly noticed. She
was already on her way over to the kitchen unit in search of her grail.
Five minutes later she was sitting on the sofa with her hands wrapped
around a hot steaming mug of dark roast. Just the smell of it was enough to
make her much happier with her current situation, but she knew that it
couldn’t possibly be a coincidence that doors had started opening to better
places for her as soon as she’d decided to take charge.
Is that all I need to do? I just have to decide? In that case, I’d like to be
home now please.
The fog kept swirling outside the window, so it didn’t look like it was
going to be that simple.
But I’m getting somewhere.
At least I think I’m getting somewhere.
There was another thing too: if someone had asked her to design a
perfect room for herself, it would turn out pretty close to what she had here.
If the fog ever dissipated there might even be a sea view of sorts from the
window.
It seemed she wasn’t the only one that had started to pay attention.
She had just allowed herself to relax slightly when her phone beeped to
announce she had text messages. She’d resigned herself to the battery being
dead, and the surprise almost made her jump far enough to lose the precious
coffee. With a bit of juggling she ended up with her pistol on her lap, coffee
in her left hand and the phone in her right.
The first message was from Todd. She was dismayed to see it had been
sent eight hours ago, and even more dismayed to note that it was now
midnight, although she was struggling to believe that, as there was plenty of
diffuse light coming in the window through the fog. She forced herself to
concentrate on the text.
“Where hell r u? Chief having kitties.”
 If he was having kittens eight hours ago, he’ll be on to full-grown cats by
now.
She expected the other two messages in the queue to also be from Todd,
or maybe, hopefully, from John Green, but she was to be disappointed on
both counts. Disappointed and close to being scared again as the messages
rolled onto the screen.
“Do ye mind? I’m having a shite here.”
It was followed quickly by the last, sent just thirty seconds before the
phone had beeped at her.
“Ye should nae fuck with anybody else’s stuff. The hoose disnae like it.”
She threw the phone aside onto the cushion next to her, before picking it
back up again almost immediately to check if she had a signal. But it
seemed that incoming texts could get in, but nothing else was getting
through the fog, or back out again.
And now she wasn’t scared. But she was guilty; guilty that she’d
succumbed to the allure of coffee, guilty to having taken a rest when the
boss might still be in trouble, and guilty that she’d run around for eight
hours and more before deciding that she was the one in charge here.
She drained the coffee, put the phone back in the hip case, picked up her
gun, and left the apartment with one wistful look back.
I could be happy here.
But coffee time is definitely over.
She closed the door quietly behind her and went back out into the
hallway.
As soon as the door shut she heard the patter of tiny footsteps, running in
the rooms immediately overhead.
 22

Todd was little the wiser about the situation as midnight clicked over
into a new day. He’d spent another fruitless couple of hours down in the
cells, going over Sam’s statement with her, and then, back at his desk
listening to her earlier version on the tape. He was looking, hoping, for an
inconsistency that would let him convince himself it was all just drugs and
the power of persuasion that was involved. Her story, after her initial lies in
the first interview, never wavered. She was starting to trust Todd, seeing in
him an ally, and had opened up as much as she was able, but Todd didn’t
learn anything new, at least nothing that would help.
And help was most definitely needed. He had heard the song again, once
at his desk, distant, like a choir in a wind, and, more disconcertingly, once
when he went to lavatory. He was standing there, zipping up in an empty
room, when the bass voice broke into song. It had sounded like someone
was bellowing in his ear. He almost knocked the chief over as he hurried,
ran, back out into the corridor, but luckily his superior had bigger worries
on his mind than Todd’s state of mind.
The media had gotten hold of details of the murders, and as Todd could
have predicted, were focusing on the drugs, gore, and black magic angle,
with some hints of kinky sex being added for good measure. Todd had a
quick look at the online news sites; there was little else being talked about,
and it had gone global. The chief suspected somebody in the department
had tipped the media off, and was on the warpath, so everybody was
keeping their heads down, including Todd.
At least Sam was much calmer now. She had gotten through a prodigious
number of cigarettes in the course of the evening but the last time Todd had
checked on her, just after eleven, she was lying along the bench in the cell
and seemed to be sound asleep.
She’s better off out of it.
He was just starting to wonder whether he could get away with snatching
a nap for himself when the main fire alarm for the station went off. He
stopped one of the admin staff as they passed his desk.
“Is this for real or a drill?”
“For real, not fire though. I hear they’ve had a chemical spill down in
Forensics.”
 The station house was in uproar as staff trying to leave one area ran into
people attempting to organize them to go somewhere else. As Todd went
through reception on his way downstairs he saw the chief trying to keep
everyone in the entry area. He obviously didn’t want them getting outside
and mingling with the media. By rights, Todd should have been lined up
there too, answering the roll call. He suspected that if there was an
emergency in Forensics, it had little to do with any chemical spill. If that
was the case, he had to check on it.
He went via the cells. The duty sergeant was about to open Sam’s cell to
get her out. Todd knew that he too had a procedure to follow when the
alarm went off. He caught the sergeant’s arm.
“Can you hold off, sarge, just five minutes? I’ll be back, I promise.”
“The chief won’t like it.”
“What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him. Five minutes. If you get the rest
out first, I’ll be back by the time it’s her turn anyway. Deal?”
The man didn’t look too happy, but he nodded.
“Five, that’s all you get. After that we’re all out the back and gone.”
Todd saw Sam’s frightened features at the small window to the door of
her cell. He gave her a wave that he hoped would indicate that he was doing
something, that there was nothing to worry about, then turned and ran for
the Forensics Lab.

Doug hadn’t gone to attend the roll call. He stood outside the Forensics
lab door, looking in. A red light flashed, heartbeat time, above him, and the
alarm was so loud in the corridor that they had to shout to make each other
heard.
“What is it?” Todd shouted.
“I was hoping you would tell me. I went to get rid of some coffee, and
came back to this.”
He pointed at the door. It was a half-and-half, the top being thick
reinforced glass, but not so thick that you couldn’t see through.
Oh my God, it’s full of eggs!
He felt the vibration again, a beat thrumming through the walls, the floor
and into his guts and bones. The room beyond the door swam in swirling
colors and the black eggs quivered and vibrated, and calved, their number
doubling and swelling, so much so that they started to push up against the
glass of the window.
 “What is that shit?” Doug shouted, but Todd could only stand and look
as an egg popped and the scene seemed to shift, like a video camera that
was moved too fast, one that showed impossible images. He saw the
inspector, sitting at a table playing chess with a skeleton; then the sarge,
sitting on a bed in an opulent room reading a scrapbook. Another shift, to
show a fat man, a huge, fat man, coming out of a lavatory that Todd
recognized immediately. Then Sam, sitting, more like hunched, in the
corner of her cell, eyes wide as she looked up at something in the doorway,
flinching away as the thing came closer.
As soon as he saw that last one, Todd knew he’d made a tactical error.
I shouldn’t be here, this isn’t where the real action is.
He left Doug standing, opened mouthed at the lab door, turned on his
heels and ran back toward the cells.
He feared he was already far, far, too late.
His fears were confirmed even before he reached the cells. He came up
the short flight of stairs and almost tripped over the duty sergeant’s body. It
lay slumped just at the entrance to the corridor and Todd’s left foot slid six
inches in a growing pool of blood when he bent to check for life signs. He
only had to take a quick look down to see that the man was dead and gone.
His spinal column had been ripped out and lay, slightly curled, like a bony
white snake, alongside the back of his head.
The dead man’s face was turned away from Todd, which was just as
well, for he didn’t think he could look at the pain and fear he knew must be
etched in the sarge’s final expression.
He was about to call for help when a loud scream echoed down the cell
block corridor.
Sam!
The scream rose and rose until it was little more than a wash of noise,
like loudspeaker feedback that rose, higher and higher, squealing and
ringing in Todd’s ears as he ran into the cell, and cutting off as he stepped
through the open door.
Sam!
She lay on the ground in a pool of blood that was still spreading, ripped
open from groin to sternum and spread wide, as if the perpetrator had
wanted to examine her thoroughly. There was too much red, glistening and
moist, so much butchery that Todd struggled to take it in.
 Something moved in the corner of the cell, little more than a dark
shadow. He got the impression of huge wings and tensed, expecting an
attack that would leave him dead on the floor beside Sam, but it fell apart in
a shower of black ash that turned to fine dust and was swept away in a light
breeze.
Todd stood over the woman’s body, tears blinding him.
The alarm switched off and silence fell. Todd scarcely noticed. He stood
there for a long time, and didn’t even move when a bass voice started
singing softly in his left ear.
He sleeps in the deep, with the fish, far below.
He sleeps in the deep, in the dark,
He dreams as he sleeps, in the depths, in the deep
And the Sleeping God is dreaming where he lies.
 23

The Reaper took one of John’s pawns off the board and put it to the
side.
John saw that both his queen and his queen’s knight were in serious
danger, and took a while considering his next move. The Reaper seemed to
be placing great import on the outcome of the chess match, and that in itself
was enough to get John’s attention. He had to force himself to concentrate.
The sea of black eggs was just too much of a distraction for one thing. For
another, the Reaper seemed to be flickering in and out, guttering like a
candle, sometimes not even looking like the black-robed figure, but instead
taking on the appearance of the Rat King, with the blood red scythe now,
rather incongruously, turned into an old battered National guitar.
The Reaper hadn’t spoken again after his mention that there had been a
leak, and John was using the time pondering his next move to cover the fact
that he was almost afraid to ask the obvious question. He moved his queen’s
knight out of danger and over to protect his queen, and at the same time
threaten a fork that would both put the black king in check and attack his
rook.
The Reaper smiled.
“We’re definitely getting somewhere now.”
It was time to take the initiative.
“About this leak you mentioned, I presume that’s why I’m here?” John
said.
The Reaper grinned.
“Partly. The leak happened because those pesky kids tried to use a sigil
on paper rather than on flesh and they paid the price. But in doing so they
broke the house rules; broke the house itself.”
John realized he was talking about the murders in the apartment back in
his real world.
“So, I’m here because they screwed up?”
“No, you’re here because of your sigil and your pain. It’s just luck, or
fate, that it coincided with the leakage. A happy accident.”
“I don’t think those kids are all that happy.”
The Reaper didn’t seem concerned.
“Wherever they are now, what happened in number six is but a distant
memory to them. It’s what’s happening now in the house, and beyond, that
you need to concern yourself with. Your queen’s in trouble. Check.”
John thought that the last few sentences weren’t connected, but then he
saw that the white queen wore Janis’ face. She was in danger of being taken
off the board and he had the Reaper’s attack bearing down on his king.
“What do I have to do?” John asked.
“You could try asking your queen,” the Reaper, or rather the Rat King,
for he had flickered again, said.
“That would be a good trick,” John said.
“It certainly would,” his opponent replied.
John’s phone rang.
He recognized the number as he got the phone out from his pocket,
almost dropping it in his fumbled haste to answer.
Janis!
“Hello?” he said.
“Hello? Who’s this?”
“I thought you’d never call, thought I’d never hear you again.”
“Boss? Is that you? How did you get through, there’s no signal here.”
“You called me.”
There was a period of silence on the other end of the line.
“Boss? Is it really you? Or is it this place messing with me again?”
This place. John had a pretty good idea what she was referring to, but he
had to ask.
“It’s me. Where are you?”
“In the house, in Church Street. Looking for you.”
John laughed bitterly.
“I doubt that you’d find me. I’m here too, at least, I think I am, long
story.”
The Reaper leaned forward and made a move, another attack on John’s
queen.
“Look, just trust me on this. I think you’re in big trouble.”
“Tell me about it,” she interrupted, before he hushed her back into
silence.
“There’s some kind of problem with the house. I think it wants me to fix
it.”
“I got that much,” she replied. “I’m getting the same message here.”
“Well then, let’s see if we can do something about it.”
 He saw the Reaper point over his shoulder and turned to look. There was
a door in the wall of the tower, white, peeling paint, with a copper number
six. John nodded. He was starting to see more clearly.
“Meet me in the crime scene apartment if you can. We’ll see what the
two of us together can do.”
Janis didn’t reply, he wasn’t even sure she’d heard him. He heard a
scuffle, a soft ‘oh, shit, not again,’ and the line went quiet. When he tried
again, there was no signal.
He looked up and saw the Reaper smile at him.
“So, what, I can just walk through there and be back?”
“It’s not as simple as that I’m afraid. This is chess, remember. There are
many possible routes to the endgame.”
“So, what are my options?”
The Reaper smiled.
“You come with me, and we see what’s in our dreams,” he said, then
flickered again. The Rat King sat across the table, strumming on the
National guitar. “Or you take my offer, King of all we survey, free to fly.”
“And the third, the door?”
The Reaper was back.
“You do your thing. You protect, you serve, you watch. If you can plug
the leak, but it is by no means certain it is possible, that dream has yet to be
dreamed.”
“But I’d be helping Janis?”
“You’d be helping, at a distance, a lot more than just her. I am bound
now. I have said my piece, made my play. It’s your move.”
 24

“Oh shit, not again.”

Janis had been keeping an eye on the stairwell while she talked,
impossibly, with John Green, and a sudden movement, a shift in the
shadows, startled her and caused her to twitch involuntarily. She dropped
the phone, but ignored it and reached for her weapon. The hallway of the
second floor at the top of the stairs was dark, but something darker still
stood there. She was coming to know the outline only too well. It was
another of the dolls, and it was blocking her passage upward.
She didn’t think it was a coincidence that it had happened as soon as the
boss mentioned meeting her in number six. She had just recently stopped
believing in coincidences.
The phone was lying at her feet. She chanced a look down, hoping to see
the screen still lit, to hear John again but it had gone dark and quiet, as dark
and quiet as the stairs ahead of her. He’d said he’d meet her in the crime
scene apartment and she intended to keep that appointment.
She bent, not taking her eyes off the shadowy figure on the landing
above, and replaced the phone in its hip case before raising her gun, aiming
straight at the doll, and, without hesitation, stepping up onto the first stair.
The darkness above swirled, as if the skylight at the top of the stairwell
had grown dark. The small lavatory at the top of the stairs had some soft
light seeping through the frosted glass from inside, but that too dimmed,
throwing the whole of the landing ahead into darkness. She couldn’t even
see the deeper shadow of the doll, but she knew it hadn’t moved. It was
there, waiting for her, and now the only light Janis had was coming from
behind her, from the small window above the main door. If it too went dark,
she’d be struggling to even see the next step ahead of her, never mind see
any attack coming from above.
Something doesn’t want me going up there.
A whisper came from behind her, Apartment Two judging by the
direction.
The house is broken. Help us.
And maybe, just maybe, something else actually needed her to go up, go
up and help John. Fixing problems was their job, when all was said and
done.
She took another step.
 The darkness lifted, only slightly, but it seemed as if it was retreating
ahead of her, and Janis no longer felt like the hunted;, she felt like the
hunter.
I’m the one in control here.
The darkness lifted further, the light shifting and throwing dancing
shadows across the upper hallway, where two dolls stood at the top of the
stairs, dead blue eyes staring directly at her.
Janis stared right back at them and showed them the gun.
“I’m guessing you know what I did to your sister in the basement,” she
said, “and if you’re still standing there when I reach the top of the stairs,
you’ll get some of the same.”
The dolls danced a little jig, six pattering steps each of porcelain on
wood, then turned and looked at each other. Janis didn’t hear any speech,
but it was obvious there was some kind of communication between the two
of them, for without a sound they joined hands, turned away, and ran off.
She heard their footsteps on the stairs, heading up to the top floor.
Round one to me, then.
She walked up the stairs, they stayed as steps, with none of the
elongating, receding away effect she’d experienced earlier. As she neared
the top a shadow moved behind the frosted glass of the lavatory door.
“If you know what’s good for you, you’ll stay in there,” she said loudly.
A Scottish voice replied, softly.
“Aye, okay then, lass, just leave me in peace. I’ve done my bit, it’s your
turn now.”
The shadow moved again, and she smelled his stink, but the light
softened and the movement stopped, and once again the place fell quiet
around her. She kept a close eye on it, but the door stayed shut as she
stepped up onto the landing.
She was about to turn and start up to the top floor when the door to
Apartment Four swung open.
She took three steps over and looked inside, ready to fire should there be
a sudden attack. But it seemed this was another show and tell. The room
inside was an homage to a certain period of British culture, somewhere
around the mid Sixties. Most of the furniture was bright white, curved,
plastic and shiny; an afghan rug lay sprawled like a heavily laundered dead
sheep on the floor, and a variety of lava lamps bubbled on glass-topped
tables. The only thing that looked remotely comfortable was a hideous
bright red leatherette sofa that dominated the wall under the fog-filled
windows of the small apartment. A woman sat on it, legs curled beneath
her, her miniskirt hoisted up, showing lurid purple tights and an expanse of
wrinkled thigh. In her right hand, she held a long cigarette holder, ebony by
the looks of it, and the air stank of stale tobacco and menthol. She had been
crying, the panda rings of blue eye shadow starting to run down her cheeks.
Her platinum blonde wig had skewed off slightly, giving her a lopsided
look, and her lipstick, purple to match the tights, had been smeared across
much of the lower half of her face.
There was a man in the room too, and Janis recognized him. She’d last
seen him downstairs, cradling a guitar and listening to a tape player. The
seated woman pointed at a long, low coffee table on which sat a reel-to-reel
tape recorder that seemed to be molded from lime green plastic.
“It’s Derek. Something’s wrong with Derek.” The old woman was close
to tears.
“What seems to be the matter?” the man said.
“Something’s wrong with Derek,” she said again, speaking slowly and
enunciating each word as if speaking to a child. “What bit of that don’t you
understand?”
The man went over and switched on the tape player. Another man’s
voice started up, something about a wizard, a dragon and a quest. Two
stanzas in, the noise started in the background. It sounded at first like a flaw
in the tape, a scratch or a tear. Then the noise came again, it sounded like an
animal, a dog perhaps, sniffing and snuffling, like they do when they’re
looking for something. As the tape played on, the noise rose and rose until
it was almost drowning out the bad poetry.
“Switch it off,” the woman shouted from the sofa. “Just switch it off.”
The man did as he was told, but the sound of the snuffling seemed to
continue to echo around the room long after the reels stopped spinning.
“Something’s wrong with Derek,” the woman whispered through fresh
tears. “Fix it. That’s your job, isn’t it? Just get it fixed.”
She looked straight at Janis as the door swung closed.
Janis remembered John’s words from their interrupted phone call.
“There’s some kind of problem with the house, I think it wants me to fix
it.”
Tell me about it.
 It was obvious now to Janis that there was normally someone in charge
of what went on in the house, a concierge, for want of a better word. And
there didn’t seem to be one around now.
Maybe that’s the problem in a nutshell.
Whatever the case, it had sounded like John had at least some kind of
handle on what was happening. And if he was in room six, she intended to
meet him there.
And woe betide anything that gets in my way.
She turned onto the flight of stairs that would take her up to the top floor.
Tiny footsteps, porcelain on wood, tap danced overhead in anticipation.
 25

Todd checked to make sure he still had the plastic envelope and its
contents tucked safely inside his jacket. He walked briskly, almost a jog,
intent on putting as much distance between himself and the station as he
could before his absence was discovered.
He’d known what he had to do almost as soon as he’d got over, for now
at least, the shock of finding Sam dead in the cells. If he’d stayed there until
anyone else came along he’d have to find some way of explaining the
carnage that had been wreaked both on her, and on the duty sergeant in the
corridor.
I don’t have any clue what I could say, I’d be under suspicion, locked
down, unable to do anything. I’ll still be under suspicion if I bail now, but at
least I’ll have a chance to do something about it.
He’d turned away and headed straight back to the Forensic Lab. Doug
was still at the door, still looking in through the window. He turned as Todd
approached.
“What did you do?” he asked.
“Me? I didn’t do a thing.”
“Well, somebody did,” he said, and waved toward the door. “Have a
look.”
Todd looked inside. There was no sign of any infestation of eggs, no sign
at all that anything untoward had happened inside the lab.
“They just popped, a blaze of color, then were gone,” Doug said. “I
thought I heard some old guy singing but I’m not sure. I’m not sure of
anything tonight.”
“Welcome to the club,” Todd said, and opened the door, crossing himself
as he went in. He hadn’t done that since leaving school ten years before, but
old habits die hard, particularly in a situation like this one. He flinched,
expecting an attack, or more singing, more eggs, but there was nothing. The
room seemed to hum and shiver, as if something had just left, but he made
it to the evidence desk without anything attacking him or anyone singing in
his ear.
Ten seconds later he was back out, joining Doug in the corridor. He
carried the plastic envelope with Peter Hines’ painting inside.
“I wasn’t here, I didn’t take this,” he said to Doug, who was still staring,
wide-eyed into the room. “You hear me? I need you to do this for me.”
 Doug finally turned around to look Todd in the eye.
“You know what’s happening here, don’t you?”
“Not yet,” Todd said, “but I’m getting there. Remember, I was never
here.”
With that he’d left Doug in the corridor and taken the back exit out of the
station. It was quiet out there; although he could see flashing lights and hear
the hubbub out front, nobody got in his way as he headed off into the night.

Now here he was, heading for the house on Church Street, with only the
vaguest idea of what he’d do when he got there. He only knew that the
painting he carried was the focus of the whole matter, at least that’s what
Sam had said before. Before… he put that thought away. He couldn’t think
about the blonde right now. Maybe later, when events had a chance to sink
in. For now, his first goal was getting to the house and getting the painting
back inside, before it could spread any more mayhem out here in the town.
He thought he’d got away from the station without being noticed, but
now he wasn’t so sure. It had started to snow again just as he left the rear
parking area, thin stuff and unlikely to lie much beyond sunrise. His were
the only footprints in the fresh fall, it being so late into the night. But his
instincts told him he wasn’t alone here in the dark. At first, he thought it
was more high weirdness seeping from the thing inside his jacket but, twice
now, he thought he’d heard the sound of huge wings beating overhead, and
the second time the snow seemed to swirl and flurry, as if something had
swooped just overhead.
He kept to the sidewalk, hugging as close to the buildings as he could
and scurrying across junctions when he had to step out into the open. Every
second of it he walked in fear of the eggs coming again, inside his jacket,
swelling and bulging and popping and releasing winged demons in a
multitude to terrorize and maim.
He was thinking about Sam again, about her poor, gutted body spread-
eagled on the cell floor.
I failed her. I should have believed her much earlier.
He pushed that away too, it wasn’t helping.
By the time he reached the house he was running full pelt, feet
threatening to slide and slip under him at every step, slightly off balance
due to having a hand inside his jacket, holding the plastic envelope in place.
It felt warm, slightly damp, like a lump of steak fresh from the shop.
 Huge wings beat, directly overhead, as he reached the door, turned the
handle, and leapt into the hallway. The door slammed shut behind him just
as something impossibly heavy hit it on the other side, shaking the whole
house with a thud that echoed up the stairwell before leaving Todd lying on
the floor in the silent dark.
 26

The Reaper looked across the board.

“Well, your knight move has opened up the play, and I’d say our chances
are now just about even. Have you decided? What’s your endgame
strategy?”
John lit a smoke. If it was going to be his last one he intended to enjoy it,
and pushed himself away from the table and board. He looked out over the
vast vista of bubbling black eggs.
“So many possibilities,” he whispered.
“And so few actual choices,” the Reaper replied. “It was ever thus.
You’re going back through then?”
John nodded.
“I always protect my queen, all my pieces really, it’s who I am. That
won’t change, no matter where I go.”
The Reaper stood from the table. He put his hand on the scythe, rippled
again, and it was the Rat King who stepped round to John’s side. It wasn’t a
scythe, but an old battered National guitar that he handed over in his right
hand. In his left he had the pack of Camels and the Zippo lighter.
“You’ll need this, and the smokes too. It’s kind of traditional. And
singing helps, don’t forget that. I may see you again someday, when you
feel you’ve done enough protecting, or maybe sooner, if you fail to plug the
leak. Who knows? Who ever knows anything?”
The Rat King turned away and launched his body off the balcony,
catching a draft and soaring, just above the eggs, as agile as any gull, until
he gained height and disappeared up into the fog. The last John saw was a
pink tail, twitching, and he heard a high voice, singing.
Where he lies, where he lies, where he lies, where he lies.
The Dreaming God is singing where he lies.
When John looked back, the balcony was empty; even the table, chairs,
and chess set were gone. There was just the balcony, the sea of eggs ahead
and the doorway at his back. He dragged his gaze away from the view and
faced the white, peeling paint of the door.
He checked his phone again, but it had gone dark and silent. If he wanted
to help Janis, he had to go through, but now that he was standing here, he
found himself strangely reluctant to do so. The view from the balcony was
enticing, bewitching even, and he felt strangely at peace, here on the edge
of all things. Even the wounds in his belly had dulled to an ache that was
hardly noticeable. Thinking of them made him think of Janis again, and the
house back there. The Reaper had said he’d made it through because of his
wounds, his sigil, and his pain.
Janis had neither. And he hadn’t told her that bit.
He put the smokes and lighter in his pocket, took the guitar in his left
hand and walked up to the door. Without hesitating he pushed it open and
walked though.
He wasn’t at all surprised to be back in number six, the dingy,
dilapidated number six, with the old comfy chair and the static dancing on
the television set. Even the fog swirling outside the window felt comforting
somehow. He thought he’d been content back there on the balcony but this
felt different again. This almost felt like home. He took one last look back
at the balcony and the mass of black eggs; one last look at what was
possible. An egg rose up, right next to the balcony edge, and popped. John
saw a sandy beach, warm sun, and turquoise seas with long days of languid
lounging.
He wasn’t even tempted. He closed the door, gently, and walked over to
the chair, stroking its back as if it was an old friend or a favorite pet. He
eyed the bottle of Scotch, it was full again; he suspected it would always be
full here, but turned his back on it and took out his phone.
He had hoped that, now he was back, at least partially, he’d be able to
talk to Janis again, but the phone stayed dark and silent. The fog continued
to swirl outside the window, and the static kept dancing on the television.
Now what am I supposed to do?
He headed back for the door, but before he got there he heard scratching
on the other side, scratching and the beat of leathery wings, all that waited
for him there were his Burdens, blocking any backward step, the way they
had been since this all started.
He almost leapt when the television stuttered with a hiss of static then
the sound of rapid, small footsteps. A picture started to form: Janis climbing
the stairs, reaching the top landing. John turned and went to the door again.
She must be just outside.
The Burdens only scratched louder against the other side, even when the
picture showed Janis right outside. She tore down the crime scene tape,
opened the door, and walked into the room, the murder room; the one with
the sofa and the bloodstains and the new television, the room where John
should be.
The one place I don’t seem to be able to get to.
 27

Janis was surprised to reach the top landing and not have any of the
dolls try to block her passage, surprised and relieved. She reached the white
door; it was closed, and three strands of crime scene tape were stretched
across the entrance. She tore them down, opened the door and walked
inside. There was no transportation to elsewhere this time. She was indeed
back in the crime scene room, but it was slightly different again than from
her last visit. There was no discarded forensics kit, no indication that the
team had left in a hurry. Instead it looked like she might expect it to if
they’d been, done their jobs, and left.
Else where, else when, is that it?
She stood in the center of the room, weapon still in hand. The dolls were
here somewhere, she could feel their eyes on her, staring, watching. When a
sound finally came, it was from the black flat screen television, and it was
the voice she’d been hoping to hear.
The screen flickered and stuttered then firmed into life. It was John,
sitting in a saggy armchair, with a battered old Dobro in his lap. It was only
when she looked closer that she realized it was the same room again,
elsewhere, else when.
“Janis? Can you hear me. Please tell me you can hear me.”
“Boss? Where the hell are you?”
“Here? There? Somewhere anyway.”
“Elsewhere, else when?” she said.
“Something like that. I think the important thing right now is that we can
talk to each other. I’ve been told that we need to fix this place, fix a leak.”
“I’ve been told the same thing. I think this is some kind of test.”
“More like a job interview,” John said.
The more Janis thought about that, the more it sounded right.
“I think I’m meant to be the new steward, concierge, whatever you want
to call it.”
John nodded.
“Me too, at least at this end, wherever this end is. But it’s too dangerous
for you, especially if you’re not cut.”
“The sigil you mean?”
She saw by John’s face that he was surprised she knew about that, and
she laughed.
 “I’m a fast learner, boss, always was. That’s why you wanted me on your
team in the first place, remember?”
“I remember,” he said, and smiled back, and suddenly Janis didn’t feel
quite so alone. More than that, she felt ready to do whatever needed to be
done.
“So, this leak, where, or what, is it?”
“It’s got to do with the murders. They fucked up by using paper instead
of flesh.”
“That painting in the kitchen? I told you it was hinky, first time I saw it.”
“Yes, I remember that too. But that’s what we have to focus on. I’ll
check my end, you check yours.”
“Then what?”
“First things first. You need a sigil before you go screwing around with
anything else. You need to get cut.”
She remembered the scene she’d watched in room one, the black-haired
concierge and the hefty man.
“Actually boss, all I need to do is mark the skin. A sharpie will do it.”
“Good. Do you have one?” he said, smiling sadly.
She smiled back.
“I see your point. I’ll get a knife, and yes, I’ll be careful, and I’ll get cut
before I go near the painting, if it’s there.”
“Back here in five with it?”
“And the same for you. Be careful boss. This place is weird.”
“You don’t know the half of it.”
Janis realized they both had stories to tell, but they’d have to wait. She
looked away from the television, tiny pattering footsteps again, porcelain on
wood, and they sounded like they’d come from inside the apartment. She
turned back to tell the boss, but although the other room was still there on
the screen, the chair was empty. He’d left the guitar on the seat, but he’d
gone out of view.
To the kitchen, to plug a leak.
Janis took a firm grip on her gun and went through the archway into the
kitchen.
 28

Todd found his way up to the top floor more by touch than sight,
clutching to the handrail all the way and struggling to peer in a darkness
that was almost complete. He was relieved to make it to the landing under
the skylight without tumbling backward or without hearing any leathery
wings beating. The house was empty and dead, and he felt like a burglar,
creeping around in the dark.
He stopped after going up the last step, struck immobile by the memory,
Christ, was it only yesterday?, of climbing the same stairs and seeing the
blonde, Sam, wiping blood from her brow as she was questioned.
I failed her.
The thought came again, and this time he wasn’t able to push it away.
The sense of failure and loss overwhelmed him, washed over him like a
wave and brought sudden, unwanted tears running down his cheeks before
he wiped them away angrily.
If the boss and the sarge aren’t here to sort this mess out, I’ll just have to
do it myself.
He ripped the crime scene tape off the door and walked into the
apartment.
The harbor and docks were laid out beyond the main room window,
shimmering in reds and greens. The reflection of brilliant white spotlights
on the water and the snow continuing to waft slowly down lent the light a
diffuse glow in the room itself that was more than bright enough for Todd to
see by. It didn’t look like anyone had been in the place since his last visit
earlier.
He stood there for a while, listening, but there was no noise, not even the
hum of a refrigerator. He felt inside his jacket. The plastic envelope was
still there, and still with that slightly obscene wet, hot feel to the surface.
The sooner I’m rid of it, the better.
He took it through to the kitchen.
The scene of the crime. But what the hell am I supposed to do with it?
Up till now he’d been operating on instinct and gut feel. It had got him
this far.
But no further it seems.
A cord hung suspended above the stove, one with a clothes peg on the
bottom end, where the painting had hung when he first saw it.
 Here goes nothing.
He slipped the sheet of paper from the envelope and pegged it back
above the stove, then had to step back, almost tripping over his own feet, as
a single black egg oozed out from the center of the pentacle and hung there,
throbbing.
 29

A black egg hung, rotating slightly, three inches in front of the yellow
center of the red pentacle in the painting above the stove. Janis stood there
for long seconds, watching it, waiting to see what might happen, but it
seemed like it was stable, for the moment. She was more worried by the
pattering footsteps that came from everywhere around, back in the main
room, ahead of her down the hallway toward the bedroom, in the bedroom
itself, and even from somewhere in the kitchen. It seemed the band was all
here, all the remaining sisters, all intent on only one thing.
Scaring the shit out of me. Well, I’ve got no time for that.
She kept an eye on the shimmering egg. It was giving out a faint aura of
greens and blues and gold, little more light than a small candle, but enough
for her to find the cutlery drawers. She got a knife in the second drawer, a
small paring blade with a rubber handle. It didn’t look like much, but when
she ran a thumb along the edge it certainly felt sharp enough for the job.
She had to put her gun down for the next part, placing it on the counter
within hand’s reach as she cut. She hadn’t been sure what her sigil would be
before she started, but when she heard the patter of porcelain on wood again
she knew what the final result was going to look like.
Slowly, painstakingly, she started to carve the outline of a doll into her
left palm.
It was slower going than she’d expected, as she had to stop every half an
inch or so to clean the wound, mopping away oozing blood with a batch of
kitchen towels that she found on the counter top. She got halfway round the
outline before she noticed that the black egg was now two black eggs,
throbbing and vibrating with a beat that was getting steadily louder.
Off in the darkness tiny feet danced in time to the rhythm, six taps, then
the expected attack finally came, two from the hallway, two from the main
room, as fast as attack dogs, shadows launching themselves at her out of the
gloom. She just had time to transfer the knife to her left hand, snatch up the
gun with her right, and then they were on her, clambering up her legs like
demented puppies.
“Fuck off,” she shouted and started shooting.
 30

John came back from the kitchen with the painting dangling in his right
hand, expecting to see Janis in the other room holding the same thing, but
his screen showed only an empty room on the other side.
She’s in trouble.
He knew that even before he heard her shout, coming as if from a great
distance.
Fuck off.
Then the gunshots started. He could see the muzzle flashes reflected in a
mirror on the screen.
John was at his wit’s end. He had no way of getting to her. Their plan
had failed even before it begun. He even considered trying the apartment
door again, but as he moved toward it the Burdens scratched and wailed and
threw themselves against the other side. There was going to be no respite
that way. As he turned away from the door, the old guitar in the chair let out
a ringing tone of disapproval, as if annoyed.
Singing helps.
The Reaper’s words came back to him, as clear as if they were being
repeated in his ear. He sat on the chair, picked up the guitar, and, slowly,
clumsily, for it had been years since he last played, tried to find his way into
the song.
He sleeps in the deep, with the fish far below,
He sleeps in the deep, in the dark,
He dreams as he sleeps in the depths, in the deep,
And the Dreaming God is singing where he lies.
 31

Four eggs, eight eggs, sixteen, thirty-two.

Todd had to step back, it was happening again, as it had back in the lab.
The eggs were calving faster than he could count, starting to fill the kitchen
with dancing, throbbing vibration and a rainbow aura of color that seemed
to wash right through him, leaving him light headed and slightly nauseous.
He moved to step back again, through into the main room, but as he
turned he saw the silhouette, framed against the lights of the harbor beyond,
a tall figure, bat wings outspread, blocking any means of escape.
A hundred and twenty-eight eggs now and Todd had nowhere to go.
 32

The first doll was almost to her waist before Janis got a chance to bring
the gun around, but her shot was good enough to blow more than half its
face away and send it to the ground where she was able to finish the job
with her heel. She smacked the pistol grip into the head of the second,
caving it into a thousand splinters before heaving the body aside. By now
the third was almost at her chest, teeth chattering, blue eyes staring,
unblinking. It was trying to get at her throat, and she couldn’t get the gun
round for a clear shot. She started stabbing with the short-bladed knife in
her other hand, but that wasn’t getting her very far.
Then the singing started, John’s voice, slightly tinny, but coming through
loud from the television next door.
He sleeps in the deep, with the fish far below,
He sleeps in the deep, in the dark,
The doll slowed, seemed confused for a second, and that gave her
enough time to club it in the head with the barrel of the gun, slough it off
her body, and put a shot, right between its eyes.
Five down, one to go.
John was still singing.
He dreams as he sleeps in the depths, in the deep,
And the Dreaming God is singing where he lies.
Janis checked the broken doll parts on the floor, as she’d thought, there
was just the one missing, blue dress, squinty eye, her nemesis, somewhere
still out there in the dark, still staring.
She put the gun down on the counter again and went back to cutting.
She finished the outline just as John brought the song to an end.
Where he lies, where he lies, where he lies, where he lies,
The Dreaming God is singing where he lies.
Above the stove two eggs calved into four, and tiny footsteps pattered,
porcelain on wood in a dark corner. Janis ignored it, reached up and took
the painting down from its clothes pin and string above the stove. She
wondered if the eggs would come along with her as she moved, but they
stayed in position hanging above the stove as she went back into the main
room.
She immediately turned to look at the television. John sat there, idly
strumming on the guitar, a cigarette dangling from his mouth and a tall
glass of scotch on a small table near his left hand. He looked happier than
she’d ever seen him, and when he saw her he gave her a mock salute.
She showed him the painting.
“Now what?” she said.
“I’ve got an idea,” he replied.
He lifted the painting. Even as he did so Janis heard the footsteps again,
running, faster, closing. A black shape launched itself at her. She held up
her hand, her newly cut sigil. At the same moment John set fire to the
bottom edge of his painting.
The paper Janis was holding fell apart into ash and the black dressed doll
collapsed in a heap, dust even before it hit the floor. Janis stepped through
into the kitchen, there was no sign of any eggs, or any doll parts, just more
of the black ash that was already disappearing in a light breeze.
She went back through to look at the television. John wiped his hands
and blew away the ash from his palms. He took a long draw at the cigarette,
picked up the guitar again, and sang.
Where he lies, where he lies, where he lies, where he lies,
The Dreaming God is singing where he lies.
 33

It was six weeks later before Todd decided it was time.

He dreamed, almost every night, of that strange minute, standing in the
dark as the eggs first calved, and calved again, almost swamping him. The
beast at his back in the main room, breathing heavy enough to hear, was
already anticipating food. Then the hanging picture burst into flame, the
yellow center the last thing to go as the whole dancing aura of eggs and
rainbow and vibration just fell apart into black ash, leaving him once again
alone in the quiet dark.
He’d stayed there for almost an hour, scarcely daring to breathe, but
once it became obvious that nothing else was going to happen he walked,
slowly, back through the snow to the station.
The inquest was a long one, and even now, a month and a half later,
there was little sign of a conclusion. The media had moved on to more
mundane, political matters, but the whole station was only too aware that
they were further than ever from actually solving the murders. Todd knew
that a cloud hung over his head, a black mark on his record that might never
be cleared.
He didn’t care.
The sarge, and the boss were still AWOL. He didn’t care much about
that either.
What he did care about was Sam, the blonde. He’d gone to her funeral,
one of only four people to do so, and that included the priest. He thought
that might have cured the other dreams, the ones of her, curled up in the
cell, screaming, but they kept coming, over and over, and most nights he
found himself screaming along.
He started drinking, frequenting the kinds of bars and clubs she would
have gone to, dancing and flirting with girls just like her but none were
Sam. He got a tattoo, a winged bat demon that fluttered between his left
thumb and forefinger, he regretted it as soon as he woke up the next day.
He took to walking up and down Church Street, thinking about knocking
on the door but never getting up the courage to do it. He knew there were
people living there again, he’d seen them going in and out, quiet people, sad
people. He recognized the look on their faces. He saw it in the mirror most
mornings.
Finally, he’d had enough.
 One morning, he stepped off the sidewalk, walked across the street and
rapped hard on the door, unsure what he was going to say to whoever
answered.
When the door opened and Janis smiled at him, he found he couldn’t say
much of anything at all.
“You can have number three,” Janis said. “And once you have your sigil,
the house will do the rest for you.”
Fog, thick and swirling, obscured the view outside the window of
Apartment One, but Todd hardly noticed. He was still getting over the
shock, both of seeing the sarge and of being told that he could be with Sam
again, after a fashion. He forced himself to pay attention. Janis was still
speaking, and it sounded like rules.
“There are houses like this all over the world,” she started, and Todd felt
wonder and awe grow in him, and an almost boyish anticipation at the
thought he might see Sam again, as she was, as he needed her to be. When
Janis asked about a sigil, he showed her the bat demon and she smiled.
In the corner of the room the big sleek black television was on, the
volume down low, barely noticeable. The screen was turned such that Todd
couldn’t see it, but he heard the song when it rose up. The guitar part wasn’t
as fluently played as when he’d last heard it, but this time he recognized the
singer.
Janis raised a hand and showed him the doll in her palm as she led him
out into the hallway and up the stairs. As they reached the door to number
three he heard another voice from inside, and he recognized that one too.
“I thought it was all Carlos Castaneda, mescaline medicine man hippie
bollocks. How was I to know the fucker really meant it?”
John brought the song to a rousing end as Todd reached for the door
handle.
Where he lies, where he lies, where he lies, where he lies,
The Dreaming God is singing where he lies.
 
 
 Other books by William Meikle available now or coming soon from
Crossroad Press
Broken Sigil
Clockwork Dolls
Fungoid
Night of the Wendigo
Pentacle
Ramskull
The Boat House
The Dunfield Terror
The Exiled
The Green and the Black
The Hole
The Job
Tormentor