Dreamtreaders

  When Duncan pounded home his anchor, the tall shaft became a miniature lighthouse. It was the Southerness Lighthouse in the village of the same name in South West Scotland. Duncan had such fond memories of the place. His granddad had taken young Duncan there, taught him to fish, and told such incredible stories.

  Mesmeera’s anchor shaft became the tall rose trellis her late husband had built for her just before his accident. She leaned close and inhaled. “I miss you,” she whispered.

  Then, intuitively, without another word, the Dreamtreaders split and began to search the room. Duncan tried to ignore some of what he saw there. He failed. There was a table so full of shackles, blades, straps, and chains that he had to turn away lest he imagine their implied use.

  But there were also chests and shelves to explore, and Duncan set to it. One glance over his shoulder at Mesmeera showed him that she was doing the same.

  “Stay away from the corners of the room,” Mesmeera called.

  Duncan looked up. “What? Why?”

  “The smell,” she said. “It’s coming from drains in the corners.”

  “Drains? Drains for what?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “I’ll take your word for it this time,” Duncan said, shuddering. His next step, however, did not find solid stone. His booted foot came down on something that squished. He even heard the squish. “No,” he muttered. “I don’t want to know.”

  But he looked. Beneath his foot, ruined and dead, was a slender eel-like creature. Against his better judgment, Duncan bent down to examine it more closely. It had pale, globular eyes and a sphincter for a mouth, lined with concentric circles of teeth. “This is a scurion!” Duncan exclaimed.

  “What?” Mesmeera called from across the chamber.

  “A dead scurion is here on the floor. I stepped on it.”

  “There are more in the drains,” she said. “Big ones. Disgusting.”

  “Why would the Lurker have scurions here?” Duncan asked, mostly to himself.

  “The Nightmare Lord doesn’t seem to care where the breaches are so long as there are enough of them to keep us busy.”

  “Perhaps that is it,” Duncan said, his mind much like a parked car idling. The engine was running, but the vehicle wasn’t going anywhere. “Remind me, Mesmeera, to mention this to Master Gabriel.”

  “You mean, after he’s finished yelling at us?”

  Duncan shut his eyes tightly. “Yes,” he whispered. “I mean then.”

  He quickly distracted his thoughts with the contents of another cabinet. The variety of oddities in the Lurker’s chests was certainly distracting. There was something that looked like an eggbeater made in the Middle Ages, but its blades seemed far too large and jagged for simply making breakfast. There was also a tool with a gripping vice at one end and saw teeth at the other. Duncan found the grip fit his hand readily, but when he made a fist, the saw teeth snapped shut like the jaws of a shark. He quickly put that aside and hesitated to pick up any of the other sinister-looking implements.

  But a long, segmented tube captured his curiosity. “This looks harmless enough,” he muttered. There was some give to it, and he discovered that it telescoped out, stretching to nearly three feet in length. He pulled on it a little more, heard a faint click, and a stark blue flame flared at one end.

  “Oh,” he whispered. “Oh, dear.” The flame disappeared as he collapsed the tube. Then he saw something and gasped. He snatched up a pewter-gray box. “Mes, come here!”

  She appeared in a breath. “What smells like stir-fry with lime in it?”

  “That would be me,” Duncan said. “But look here.” He held up the box.

  “Is that . . . is that it?” she asked. “It doesn’t look silver.”

  “Tarnished is all,” he said. “There’s a small hand crank here.” He took hold of it and began to turn.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t do that,” Mesmeera warned.

  A faint tinkling tune played as Duncan continued to turn the crank. “Nonsense, Mes, it’s too small to be any real danger—”

  An impossibly large wolf exploded out of the top of the box. Its eyes blazed red. Its sword-sized teeth snapped and gnashed, and hot spittle flew.

  Duncan dropped the box and crashed backward. His hammer was pinned, caught between his back and the floor. He reached for his short sword instead, but it was too late. The mountain of muscle, fur, claws, and teeth was upon him.

  Gaping wolf jaws filled Duncan’s vision. He hopelessly turned his head. He heard a strangling gurgle and thought, at first, that it was his own. He imagined drowning in his own blood as the beast tore into him.

  But suddenly the wolf was yanked away. Mesmeera had some kind of spiked chain around the creature’s neck. She pulled back fiercely, drawing the beast backward with every strained tug.

  “Now would be nice!” Mesmeera yelled.

  Duncan leaped to his feet, started to reach for his hammer, but then thought better of it. “Be ready to stand free,” he warned. He held his hands high and summoned up whirling fistfuls of molten rock.

  Mesmeera released the wolf and dove behind a massive steel chest. Duncan thrust his hands forward, unleashing gouts of lava at the creature. The monstrosity didn’t just catch fire. It became engulfed. Crying out, writhing and shrieking, the wolf seemed to implode on itself. In a fiery blink, the wolf vanished back into the gray box.

  “And you called Archer a loose cannon,” Mesmeera said, dusting off her leather vest.

  “Enough, woman,” Duncan muttered. “And thank you.”

  Mesmeera did not respond but said, “Uh-oh.”

  Duncan followed her line of sight to the opening of the tunnel from which they’d come. It was gone. No tunnel now at all. Just solid stone. “That can’t be good,” he said.

  The chamber exploded with sound: clangs, growls, crashes, screams, plunks, smacks, and shrill cries. It was coming from all four corners of the room.

  “Treader’s oath!” Duncan exclaimed. “What is that calamity?”

  As if in answer, a hollow, high voice rose above the tumult. “You’ve discovered my toy chamber!” it cried. “So it must be playtime!”

  “I’m going to need this,” Duncan muttered, drawing out his great sledgehammer from his back.

  Figures poured into the room from all four corners. Fearsome, terrifying shapes, but no one like the other. There was a giant spider with human hands and a lion’s head. Bats swooped down, but one had a snake’s body. The other, a scorpion’s venomous tail. A crab-clawed rhinoceros charged toward the chamber center, and a great eagle with jellyfish tentacles dragging beneath it wafted down from the ceiling.

  “I knew this was a bad idea,” Mesmeera said.

  “Gloat later,” he shot back. “Fight now!”

  Mesmeera leaped, her daggers flashed, and she shredded one of the bats’ wings. The giant spider-thing grabbed the Dreamtreader’s ankles and tried to draw her down toward its jaws. Two dagger swipes later, the creature found itself missing two of its hands.

  Mesmeera tumbled beneath the spider and thrust her daggers into its bulbous abdomen. She was sorely tempted to yell, “For Frodo!” But in the end, smeared with ichor and gore, she grumbled, “The Lurker has a sick idea of toys.”

  “Tell me about it!” Duncan yelled, grappling to keep the rhino-crab’s claw away from his neck. Duncan thrust the creature away, providing just enough clearance for the hammer. The Dreamtreader turned like a baseball slugger, generating as much force as he could, and slammed the hammer head against the rhino’s shell-covered neck. There was a horrendous Crack! And the beast went down.

  One after the other, they came: creatures, mutated forms, nightmarish monsters. A gigantic centipede with feline limbs and an eagle’s head, an ogre with a shark’s jaws, an entire herd of charging bulls, each with a razorback spine. Mesmeera and Duncan fought them off, but it took its toll on each Dreamtreader’s reservoir of mental energy.

  A bull slammed into Duncan, sending h
im cartwheeling through the air. The Dreamtreader crashed to the chamber floor, rolled to his feet, and threw his will at the creature. A fourteen-foot-tall Spanish matador appeared, but it skipped the flourishing red cape and took the beast out with a series of thin swords.

  Mesmeera called up a tornado full of bricks to neutralize the ogre but found herself wheezing from the exertion.

  “This is so much fun!” the Lurker crowed, still unseen. “What a battle!”

  “Show yourself!” Duncan bellowed.

  “The creation and the artist are one and the same,” the enemy retorted. “I am they, and they are me.”

  “He really is quite mad!” Mesmeera exclaimed over the tumult of battle. She spun and sent more than a hundred rope lassos to hogtie the centipede. But even she, with her seemingly endless will and imagination, found herself drowsy and stumbling.

  The Lurker called out again, “An epic struggle of two titans! Ah, so good. This is like The Rumble in the Jungle!”

  Mesmeera flattened a bull with a concrete fist and sidestepped another just before she would have been gored. The creature disappeared off the edge of a cliff Mesmeera had created.

  “Ali, Foreman, going toe to toe!” the Lurker exulted. “Punching, counterpunching—this is grand!”

  “What is that lunatic babbling about?” Mesmeera yelled, a pronounced wheeze in each word.

  Duncan used a bazooka to take out a pair of dragon-headed gorillas. There was a flash, a hair-sizzling explosion, and then a horrible smell. But it had been a clumsy attack. Duncan had let himself be too close to the explosion. The concussion wave knocked the Dreamtreader off his feet.

  He shook off the cobwebs, clambered to his feet, and shouted, “Boxing! He’s talking about boxing! Big fight back in the 1970s. Heavyweight bout. Muhammad Ali and George Foreman.”

  Mesmeera coughed and wiped the dust out her eyes. “Great,” she said. “He’s a raving mad lunatic and a sports geek.” She took a defensive position right behind Duncan just as the sheep arrived.

  Duncan blinked and tried to focus his weary eyes. From all four corners of the chamber, sheep by the dozen came wandering in, converging on the Dreamtreaders in the center of the room.

  “What is this?” Mesmeera asked.

  “I don’t know.” Duncan stared. They weren’t sheep mutations. Just big, dumb cotton balls with little black faces and bright, innocent eyes.

  The chamber filled with bleats and brays, snorts and grunts. The effect of the cacophony was dizzying. “Can’t get my thoughts to settle,” Duncan said. “Can’t see straight.”

  Mesmeera backed into him. They both startled. “Some foul wizardry,” she muttered. But the sheep were crowding in on them.

  “Wizardry?” the Lurker protested, still unseen. “I do not dabble in witchcraft. I am no warlock. This is the power of the mind. Dreamtreaders should know this above all.”

  “We should defend ourselves!” Duncan exclaimed.

  “Yes,” the Lurker replied, his voice gaining a haunting echo. “Yes, you should.”

  But Duncan couldn’t think of a thing to create. No weapon came to mind. Nothing came to mind at all. There were only those confounded sheep. And, as the Dreamtreader watched them, they stopped their wobbly advance. They stopped bleating as well. The chamber fell silent.

  “I don’t like this,” Mesmeera whispered.

  “Wait,” Duncan hissed. “Something’s happening.” In the shadowy half-light, the fluffy pelts of the sheep seemed to pulse . . . to blend. It was as if their wool became animated, turning to boiling fog. The dark sheep faces and limbs seemed to melt away. The Dreamtreader felt as if he was standing in a sea of churning white.

  What had been the clumpy mounds of sheep began to shred and move independently. Things began to appear in the mist. Skullish, leering faces, vacant socket eyes, and sharkish grins. All at once, the rippling white surged up in a hundred places at once. Ghostly, wraith-like forms shrieked through the air toward the Dreamtreaders.

  At the same moment, blackened figures came shambling across the chamber floor. They were as dark as charred meat, bent and knobby, rigid with muscle and horn. They reminded Duncan of the hunched gargoyles that crouched atop the gothic buildings in Glasgow.

  A jolt of fear stabbed through Duncan’s dazed mind, and just then, he realized that Mesmeera was screaming at him.

  “Fight, you ginger lummox!” she shouted. “Wake up and fight!”

  Several of the dark shamblers slammed into Duncan, but now the Dreamtreader knew his mind. He willed a pair of sawed-off shotguns into his hands and fired, launching the creatures clear across the room. But the tide of shrieking vapor ghosts came rushing in. He reached up and found the cable he’d just imagined. He triggered the pulley system near the ceiling and let it haul him up, off of the ground.

  “That was impressive!” the Lurker crowed. “I thought I had you, but such quick thinking. You live to fight another round. Bravo, Dreamtreaders!”

  Mesmeera was flying now. Not hovering or floating. She flew for her life, racing away from the ghostly shriekers. She needed to pull away, give herself enough room to wheel around and fire . . . something. Bounding from corner to corner, she finally got the clearance she needed. She spun, braced herself against the chamber wall, and unleashed a torrent of . . .

  Piranhas. Big piranhas with exaggerated jaws full of exaggerated teeth. It was an entire school of the creatures, jaws snapping and teeth gnashing as they swam-flew toward the shriekers. But before the first piranha could chomp on an enemy, the whole school began to pulse. One by one, they morphed into something more like giant goldfish.

  “No!” Mesmeera cried out. She extended her will, trying to regain control, but found her reservoir of mental energy all but exhausted.

  The ghostly shriekers batted the fish aside and streaked toward Mesmeera. She raised a hand to ward them off, and, for a flickering moment, a barbed-wire fence kept the creatures at bay. But the Dreamtreader’s will drained away. The fence vanished. Mesmeera slid slowly down the wall.

  And there, on the chamber floor, the ghostly creatures surrounded the Dreamtreader. They whirled around her torso and became massive, ponderous chains. They constricted, and Mesmeera groaned. But there was nothing she could do. She could barely breathe, much less do anything to break the chains. She was stuck tight. Captive.

  From across the chamber, Duncan saw Mesmeera fall. “No!” he roared. He gathered the precious little mental energy he had left and vaulted over a throng of dark shamblers. He almost made it to her side, but a skeletal claw took hold of his shoulder and yanked him off of his feet. He felt himself weightless for a moment and then sprawled hard on the floor. When he looked up, he saw the Southerness Lighthouse . . . his anchor. For a bewildering moment, he was there again, with his granddad. They sat with their fishing poles, lines dangling in the lake. The sun was going down, and mayflies skittered across the surface of the dark water.

  “Precious little time left, eh, Duncan?” his granddad asked.

  But the voice instantly warbled into something unfamiliar. With a jostling start, Duncan woke to the reality. His dear granddad was long dead. This wasn’t the real lighthouse.

  But it was his anchor.

  Duncan watched its small lantern rotate once and then looked away. It was no decision, really. He couldn’t leave Mesmeera. With some effort, he clambered back to his feet. Old Jack tolled out eleven strokes. Only one hour left, Duncan thought through a haze. He wobbled drunkenly for a moment and managed to clear his mind just as two dark shamblers reared up in front of him.

  He had little left, summoning a set of brass knuckles. The metal shaped to fit around his knuckles wasn’t actually brass, but something closer to wrought iron. They felt heavy in his hands. “I’m gonna go old school on you, lads!” he cried. “This is for Granddad!”

  The first shambler clawed for Duncan’s face, but the Dreamtreader ducked and fired a bone-crushing blow beneath the creature’s swiping arm. Duncan had no idea if
the things had ribs, but whatever was there crunched, and the thing went down in a heap.

  “Down he goes!” the Lurker exulted. “What a left uppercut by the challenger!”

  The next shambler came with both clawed hands for Duncan’s throat. The Dreamtreader covered up, defending with his arms and the back of his fists. He felt the shambler’s cold talons rake his arms. The sting was fierce and precisely what Duncan needed to wake up a little. He sidestepped, planted his feet to generate leverage, and then launched a succession of jackhammering jabs. The shambler fell backward but couldn’t escape Duncan’s thunderous right hand. His iron-covered knuckles connected with the creature’s face, and the thing went rigid, toppling like a felled tree.

  “Astounding right hook by the challenger!” the Lurker shouted. “But . . . can . . . he . . . keep . . . it . . . up?”

  The shamblers and shriekers kept coming. Duncan fought on. More jabs, more hooks, more uppercuts, and even a few crosses. Creatures went down left and right. But only for a few moments more.

  Duncan’s heart felt ready to burst. He breathed in wet gasps. His arms felt leaden. That’s when he understood at last what the Lurker was doing to him.

  It was called rope-a-dope. Muhammad Ali used it in the Rumble in the Jungle bout, covering up and leaning against the ropes while the hard-punching George Foreman exhausted himself. As soon as Ali saw that Foreman was spent, he bounced off the ropes and tore into his opponent, knocking him out in the eighth round.

  “That doesn’t bode well for me,” Duncan muttered just as a fist the size of a cement mixer knocked him across the chamber. He landed hard, slamming into the wall and collapsing into a jumbled pile of arms and legs. Before he could take another breath, the shriekers surrounded him and formed massive, restraining chains.

  “Down goes Duncan!” the Lurker yelled. “Down goes Duncan. Down goes Duncan!”

  Duncan could barely keep his eyes open. In his blurry vision, all he saw was a hulking slate-gray mass approaching. The room shook with each heavy footfall. Suddenly a hand thrust outward, and Duncan’s lighthouse anchor instantly flattened. Mesmeera’s trellis was crushed a split second later.