Night Warriors, page 20
‘I don’t think so, grandma. I’ll just get some sleep.’
‘Okay, then. I’ll see you in the morning.’
Susan finished undressing, rummaged around in her drawer for a clean tee-shirt, put it on, and jumped into bed. It was twenty after ten. In ten minutes or so, her grandfather would reach over and lay his hand on her grandmother’s knee, and say, ‘Well, then, Dolly, I think it’s time to strangle the chickens.’ That was what he always said, when he was suggesting that they turn off the television and retire to bed. Why going to bed should have anything to do with strangling chickens, Susan never found out, but then she never asked, either, just in case it referred to something personal, like the noise that her grandmother made, once or twice a month, when her grandfather fulfilled his conjugal duties.
Susan lay in bed with the light on for a while, her hands clasped behind her head. Then she switched off the light, and lay in the dark. She could hear the traffic along Camino del Mar, and the cicadas chirping, and the steady blowing of the air-conditioning through the vent in the celling. After a while, the television in the living-room was switched off, and she heard her grandmother and grandfather walking past her door. They were murmuring something about doctors, and hepatitis, and how Hispanics never washed their hands after going to the bathroom.
‘One hamburger out of every ten will make you ill. An old friend of mine proved that. He ate nine hamburgers and he was perfectly okay, but when he tried to eat the tenth, he was violently sick.’
‘You and your silly stories,’ Susan’s grandmother complained.
The old couple took a long time getting to bed. There were teeth to be taken out, corns to be planed, curls to be wound up in heated rollers. By the time the toilet had flushed for the very last time, it was almost quarter of eleven, and Susan was growing anxious that she would miss the rendezvous with Henry and Gil.
At last, however, the house was silent and dark. She lay back on the pillow, looking up at the ceiling, and she repeated the words that Springer had given her to memorise. They were strange and simple words. Springer had said that they were translated from Latin and carried to the New World in 1601 by the first of the Night Warriors.
‘Now when the face of the world is hidden in darkness, let us be conveyed to the place of our meeting, armed and armoured; and let us be nourished by the power that is dedicated to the cleaving of darkness, the settling of all black matters, and the dissipation of all evil, so be it.’
Susan repeated the words three times, as Springer had told her to, and then she closed her eyes and lay perfectly still on her bed. I’ll never get to sleep in time, she thought to herself. I’m going to be late, and then the others will go off without me. The luminous hands of her bedside clock said six minutes of eleven. How can I possibly get to sleep in six minutes? Curiously, though, her eyes began to close, and even when she wanted to open them again to look at the clock, she found that she couldn’t. Her body slowly began to relax, all the way through, as if it were a building in which all the lights were being extinguished, floor by floor. Her heartbeat slowed, her respiration became flat and shallow, and she began to feel as if she were slowly moving backward, inside her head, backward into the darkness that all of us carry inside of ourselves. She went back faster and faster, deeper into inner space, and she heard a high-pitched metallic singing sound, an inanimate choir.
She rose now, dark and invisible, through the ceiling of her room, through the attic, and up into the night above Del Mar. To the south, she could see the dim surf gleaming as far as La Jolla, and the lights of San Diego sparkling beyond. To the north, she could see the long curve of Cardiff and San Elijo Lagoon and Encinitas. The traffic poured along 1–5 like streams of fireflies. Beyond the highway, the inland hills were wrapped in shadows, and crowned with condominiums.
Susan didn’t feel as if she were flying. The sensation was more like being absorbed through the evening air, as if she were no more substantial than ink that was quickly being absorbed by blotting-paper. She felt as if the molecules of her personality were mingling with the molecules of the night through which she was passing; as if nobody could tell where the night ended and Susan began, a girt of shadows. But she could see the landscape below her quite clearly and as she spun slowly down towards the house on Camino del Mar, and passed through its roof-shingles and into the upstairs room, she was aware of an extraordinary friction.
The room was lit by a single naked bulb, which threw stark shadows in all directions, as if a black box had exploded in the centre of the room. Springer was already there, in his male manifestation, dressed in a plain black suit. Gil had arrived, too, but as yet there was no sign of Henry.
Susan went straight to the mirror and looked at herself. She had not yet taken on the guise of Samena: she was still wearing her tee-shirt. But she was delighted and frightened and fascinated to see that she was transparent, that she could see the opposite side of the room right through the outlines of her body. Gil was the same. Substantial enough to recognise and to talk to, but unreal. A dream-figure, a living memory of himself.
Springer said, with a small nod of his head, ‘You are both to be congratulated. It is not easy to leave one’s body for the first time.’
‘Will we be safe?’ asked Susan. ‘Our actual bodies, I mean. I was worried that my grandmother might try to wake me up.’
Springer smiled. ‘All you need worry about is someone destroying your body. That would give you nowhere to go back to. But I don’t think your grandmother is likely to do that, do you?’
‘I feel like I’m dreaming,’ said Susan.
‘You are dreaming,’ Springer told her, coming up behind her and laying a hand on her semi-transparent shoulder. ‘Your mind is here, your spirit is here, but your material substance remains at home, sleeping.’
Gil said, ‘There’s no sign of Henry yet.’
‘Henry will be here,’ Springer assured her.
‘I hope he wasn’t doing any more – you know,’ Susan remarked, making a drinking gesture with her hand.
Springer ignored what she had said, and held out his hands to the two of them. ‘Now is the time for you to prepare yourselves, Tebulot and Samena, for your first training as Night Warriors. Come here, both of you, and kneel in front of me.’
A little hesitantly they knelt side by side. Springer raised both of his hands, with the palms facing outwards, and chanted the ancient words of the Night Warriors. ‘Now, when the face of the world is covered in darkness, let us prepare ourselves here at this place of our meeting, let us arm and armour ourselves; and let us be nourished by the power that is dedicated to the cleaving of darkness, the settling of all black matters, and the dissipation of evil. So be it.’
‘So be it,’ Gil and Susan repeated.
‘You are Night Warriors now,’ said Springer. ‘You are members of that great and glorious host who captured and chained all nine hundred and ninety-nine manifestations of the Devil, and who earned for all time the gratitude of Ashapola and of the Council of Messengers. You have dedicated your dream selves to the extinction of evil, and in particular to the pursuit and capture of Yaomauitl, the Deadly Enemy.’
Springer circled his hands in the air, and over their heads two golden circles of light appeared, then slowly faded.
‘Tebulot! Stand,’ Springer instructed Gil, and Gil rose to his feet and found as he did so that he was mantled in the hard gleaming white armour of the machine-carrier, and that in his arms he was carrying the huge weapon with which he would protect himself from harm, and which he would use to track down Yaomauitl. This time, the armour felt solid, although it wasn’t excessively heavy: it was fashioned out of a thick, lightweight alloy, and brightly enamelled. The machine, though, was a different matter. It weighed at least thirty pounds, and even though its odd horn-shaped handles made it easy to hold, it was not the most manoeuvrable of devices.
‘Whoever dreamed this up, could have dreamed it up lighter,’ complained Tebulot.
‘Its weight is necessary, in order to stabilise it when it fires,’ Springer explained. ‘At full strength, it can vaporise the walls of a fortress.’
He turned now to Susan, and said, ‘Samena! Stand,’ and Susan rose to her feet to assume the identity of Samena, the finger-archer. Her plumed hat gleamed in the light of the naked bulb, and the arrowheads hooked around her briefs jangled as she turned around.
Now that her costume had materialised fully, she could see that the soft leather had been perfectly tailored to fit her snugly, and that it was elaborately decorated with semi-precious stones, opals and turquoises and jet.
Springer said, ‘The design of these costumes and armour stretches back hundreds of years. They are the combination of many men’s dreams, and many women’s dreams, too. Parts of Tebulot’s armour can be seen in the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci; some of Samena’s jewelled decorations are exactly the same as decorations seen at the Kandariya Mahadeva temple at Khajuraho, in Bundelkhand, dating from one thousand AD.’
Tebulot said, ‘What time is it now? Henry’s late.’
‘Give him the chance to leave his body,’ said Springer. ‘Remember that he is older than you, and much more set in his attitudes. It is not at all easy for a man of his age and his demeanour to leave his body while he sleeps. There are many chains which have to be broken first. Chains of habit, chains of doubt, chains of apprehension. The mind argues, why should I take the risk of facing the Devil, when I would much rather stay asleep, in the safety of my own bed?’
But Springer had hardly finished speaking when there was a soft noise like someone dragging the hem of a silk cape along a polished wooden floor; and Henry slid into the room through the ceiling, wearing a pair of pale blue pyjamas.
‘I couldn’t get to sleep,’ he told them, apologetically. ‘I tried and I tried, but my brain was free-wheeling so fast I thought I was going to burn out my cortex. Even after I repeated the incantation, I stayed awake. I’m sorry.’
Springer said, ‘It was not your fault, my friend. Your difficulty was quite understandable. But, we should hurry now. The quicker we prepare, the longer we will have to train you. Kneel, please, Henry, and I will recite the words which will transform you into Kasyx.’
Samena touched Henry’s arm. Under her plumed hat, her eyes were bright and serious. ‘Henry?’ she said. ‘Are you all right?’
Henry shook his head. ‘If you mean, am I drunk, the answer is no. I spent the whole evening staring at a bottle of vodka, but I didn’t open it once. I remembered what you told me about your parents. Then I looked around my house and remembered what Gil had told me when we first decided to be Night Warriors. He said that I had nothing to lose, and he was right. So I thought to myself this evening, I’ve been alive for nearly half a century, and to have nothing to lose at the age of fifty is not much of an achievement. In fact, it’s a pretty miserable thing to have to admit. So – even if I have no real duty to you two, or to that girl who died on the beach – at least I have a duty to myself.’
Springer was waiting patiently, so Henry said, ‘That’s all of it,’ and knelt down where Springer had told him to.
Springer repeated the ancient words of the Night Warriors. He swept his hand around, and drew the golden halo over Henry’s head. ‘Stand, Kasyx,’ he said, more quietly than he had before; and Henry stood up in the full armoured paraphernalia of the charge-keeper, the source of all righteous energy. Kasyx’s armour was a dull metallic crimson, and fingers of electrical energy played repeatedly across his chest and around his shoulders, crackling fire-creatures of sheer hair-raising voltage.
Instinctively, Kasyx laid his left hand on Tebulot’s right shoulder; and his right hand on Samena’s left shoulder, and for a moment they stood in silence as the vast amounts of power which Kasyx had been given by the god-of-gods Ashapola coursed through their bodies. At last, the charging was complete, and the three of them saw now that they were no longer transparent, that their flesh and muscle was as real as any waking human’s.
Springer said, ‘I will take you first into a nightmare, so that you may see and feel and hear for yourselves what the landscape of dreams can often be like. I have scanned the sleeping minds of thousands of people in Del Mar – children and old people, blacks and whites – and I have found for you a nightmare which will challenge your abilities, but which will not be too dangerous.’
‘We’re going to do that now?’ asked Samena, nervously. ‘I thought we were just going to train. You know – like learning to use our weapons.’ ‘In the landscape of dreams,’ smiled Springer, ‘the only useful training is through practical experience. I can tell you anything you like. I can tell you about nightmares in which terrible monsters appear, and absolutely refuse to die, no matter what you do to them. I can tell you about nightmares in which you can be torn apart, or in which you think that you’ve been torn apart. I can tell you about tortures and spiders and drowning and fire. But I can never recreate for you in words what you would ultimately have to face in the real world of dreams.’
Springer walked around them, and showed them how to grip their hands together, so that as they passed from dream to dream, they would be inseparable.
‘The night is full of dreams; it is like a huge invisible palace, of a million rooms, one room for every dream. It is not difficult to lose one of your warriors as you move from one dream to another. Sometimes, this can be perilous. Occasionally, it can be fatal. It takes a long time to trace your way through to any one particular dream, and by the time you have returned to where you left your stray warrior ... well, dreams change and many dreams are more frightful than you can possibly imagine.’
He faced them one last time, and said, ‘I have asked you to take up the task of being Night Warriors because each of you has inherited something of those mystic qualities which make you a natural hunter of Devils. But, you may still choose not to take up your dream identity; you may still return to your sleeping body, even now, and never again wear this armour and never again carry these weapons. It is yours to decide. There is much terror ahead of you, and much struggle. But, if you succeed in your adventures, you will know the ecstasy of great achievement, and you will become exalted.’
Kasyx raised the visor of his helmet, and said, ‘I’m going to continue, thanks. I didn’t spend the whole evening staring at a bottle to back out now.’
Samena said, ‘I want to go on.’
There was a pause. They all turned and looked at Tebulot. ‘You have the most to lose, Tebulot,’ said Springer, gently.
‘Yes,’ replied Tebulot. ‘But also the most to gain. I’m coming.’
They stood close together and clasped hands. Only Springer stayed apart. He looked at the three of them, one by one; his eyes were frightening and remarkable, as dark as windows which looked out into infinite space. Beyond his eyes there were galaxies, and spinning star systems, and light-years of impossible distance.
‘Follow me,’ Springer said, simply. ‘Be wary, trust nothing – for nothing will be as it seems.’
Springer began to rise into the air and to fade. For a moment, the three Night Warriors hesitated, uncertain how they were going to follow him. But then Kasyx heard the clear words inside his head, words as bright and sharp as slices of fresh-cut lemon: Rise up, Kasyx! Use your power and rise up!
Kasyx closed his eyes, and concentrated on rising up. His concentration was far more Intense than it needed to be; the Night Warriors rocketed up through the roof of the house and soared high into the night, hundreds of feet up above Del Mar, spinning off to the right as they did so because Samena was so much lighter than the other two.
Springer came looping up to join them. Kasyx noticed that as Springer passed through the air he seemed to leave behind him a trail of absolute darkness, which took several seconds to dissipate. The thought occurred to him for one jagged half-second that they had not yet been given any proof that Springer was actually what he or she claimed to be; that for all they knew, Ashapola could be the Lord of Darkness, instead of the Lord of Light. Quite innocently, all three of them could have been recruited to help the Devil, instead of fighting against him.
But the words of Springer cut into his mind again, this time speaking in the lighter tones of a woman. You will always question; you will always doubt. Ashapola expects you to. Faith should never be blind, as it is in Christianity and so many other religions. Faith should come through questioning and criticism, through the proof of intellect and the proof of experience. Gods should be tested, as well as men. The moment of religious ecstasy comes when you know for certain that your God is infallible.
They hung high in the air, like four dark kites. Below them, traffic twinkled, surf gleamed, and Southern California edged closer to midnight.
Springer said, ‘To enter a dream, you must first encounter the dreamer. Follow close behind me. I am going down now to that apartment block on 101. You see it? The one with the roof-garden. On the fourth floor of that apartment block, a man is sleeping. He is exhausted. He has been working hard to keep his business from bankruptcy. Two years ago, his wife divorced him because of his adultery with his secretary. He has a son, whom he sees only twice a month. He is haunted again and again by guilt and by responsibilities which are not even his.’
They sank slowly through the warm evening wind. Kasyx found that he was able to control the movements of all three of them quite easily, with only a minimal consumption of power. Together, they soared and circled, descending all the time, until at last they faded through the walls of the apartment block, and into the bedroom of the man whose dreams they were going to penetrate.
His room was in darkness. The windows were closed and the air-conditioning was set to sixty-five degrees, so that after the warmth of the night outside, it felt distinctly chilly. The man lay on his back on a crumpled and twisted sheet, wearing nothing but jockey shorts. He was dark, with a bald patch that shone white in the darkness, and a dark hairy body. By the side of the bed there was a copy of Reader’s Digest, a bottle of Nytol sleeping tablets and a glass of mineral water.
