Last night made me remember some accounts of similarly haunted towns that the Agency has on file. One thing I always found interesting was the remarks locals made about how the town was somehow wrong or how there was something cruel and wicked just beneath the surface. It's hard to consider those remarks in such an academic manner when I find myself in the middle of such a town. And what happened when I finally got to sleep didn't help.
I don't know if I had any normal dreams before it started, or if there was more to the nightmare before my recollection begins. All I know is my memory begins with waking up in the hotel bed in a room that was empty except for myself and Cynthia. She was standing in the doorway, and when she saw that I was up she started to say something. Before she could utter a syllable, a cluster of spindly, grey hands snatched her up and yanked her out of view. The door slammed behind her.
I ran after her, and when I found the door locked I started pounding on it and then slamming myself against it. I ran around the room, trying the windows and finding them just as secure. I shouted for her. I shouted for my compatriots. I should for anyone to help me escape.
"Don't worry about the girl," said a child's voice coming from the vent.
"She's gone to see Mr. Ash," said a similar voice from the bathroom sink. "You'll go too, Underhill. You'll go to see Mr. Ash too. Mr. Ash loves visitors."
I backed up to the opposite end of the room and ran at the door as hard as I could.
"You'll meet Mr. Ash before too long."
I charged the door again. This time I thought I heard it start to give.
"The little morsel will meet him, too."
I charged again.
"And the old man can come along."
I hurled myself against the door.
"And Tommy's bitch, too."
I charged again.
"Mr. Ash can hardly wait to meet you all."
The door gave way, and I ran out as fast as I could. I kept running until I was out on the street. Then I wound down to a slow jog as I looked around. The sky was completely grey, and the streetlights shone with stale, yellow light. Many of the buildings were distorted, built to bizarre and cartoonish proportions. And along the sidewalk there stood the dead, the killers, and the nightmare beasts. I knew many of them from Tom's notes and others from our more recent research. I knew the Jewish boy who had been beaten to death, and the old woman barbecuing a human arm on her front lawn, and the little girl who had drowned one spring. I was slowing to a stop when I heard Cynthia scream and saw the sheriff shoving her in the trunk of his car. He turned to look at me, and I saw that his face was grey, his eyes were yellow, and his teeth were like needles. I broke into another sprint as he drove away.
Some part of me knew it was a dream, but I didn't care. Panic had taken hold and it wasn't letting go. I kept on running, feeling the grim atmosphere filling my lungs, infecting me just as it had infected the whole town. I needed to break free.
"A thousand years or more ago when Hogwarts school began,"
I sang. I reached into the ancient relics of my childhood and pulled out the song. I kept going until I felt the panic start to recede. The dead people and the nightmare beasts snarled at me as the whole street trembled with the music. Something hairy and ghoulish crawled toward me and opened its enormous maw.
"Old Tomnoddy, all big body, old Tomnoddy can't spy me-e..."
I belted out the songs with which Bilbo had distracted the spiders, and the thing scampered away. I kept on going with the songs of Tolkien and those of Redwall and Harry Potter and anything else I could remember. I saw the ghoulish thing and a handful of other horrors form a wide circle around me even as they winced at each note. I wasn't sure what would happen when I ran out of tunes.
Then they were all cut to pieces by falcons made of painted glass.
"You're on my turf now, bitch!" shouted the Yemeni psychic as rode up to the street on the back of a steampunk saber-toothed tiger robot. Then he seemed to notice me there and said, "Hey, Jack."
"Hi," I said. "So...uh...you're used to this kind of thing."
Yosef smiled brightly and said, "It's probably the first time this thing has gone mind-to-mind with an expert."
"So...now what?" I asked.
"Now you wake up," said Yosef a moment before the street broke open before me.
I don't know how long I had to fall through that jumble of images and lights before I woke back up. It could have been seconds or it could have been hours. Not too many hours, though, because there was only a five hour difference between when I fell asleep and when I woke up again. What I do know is that my companions and I all woke up rather shaken. Roland in particular looked pale. Through the whole job thus far I've been shifting between seeing him as a kindly grandfather and a hulking thug, and in that moment it occurred to me to wonder if he actually did have any grandchildren. If he did...I don't want to know what our enemy showed him.
"I am really sick of this thing," said Michelle. Then she looked at me and asked, "How do we stop playing around and finally kill it?"
I got up and went to my luggage. I spent a few moments shifting through books before I answered her.
"If we went up against it right now I don't think we'd stand a chance," I said. "Which is why I think we should stick with the same idea we had before. We take advantage of the creature's ability to inhabit forms other than its own. We confront it in those other forms and we beat it in those other forms until we've hurt the thing enough that we can go after it for real."
"So we're just supposed to wait for it take cheap shots at us and hope we keep coming out on top?" asked Michelle.
"No," I said. "So I spend the day putting together a summoning ritual that will force it to manifest in all its guises. Then we kill the bastard."
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