The picture above is our first look at Aislin Rourke, heroine of City of Dreams, the novel I am currently writing. What is our heroine getting ready to fight…and why is she looking UP to do it? That would be telling.
City of Dreams is a sequel to Dreams of the Boardwalk, or rather, Dreams of the Boardwalk is a prequel to the series of books that I hope to begin with City of Dreams. In any case, it is a story of the worlds of Dream and Nightmare, and the Dreamwalkers who protect the one and strive against the other…which is which depends on the Dreamwalker.
With that in mind, I decided that instead of starting with Aislin’s very first scene, I would start with her first experience in Nightmare, so I can introduce both at once.
Rated R.
PS – As with all the covers for my major works, this cover is being drawn by the marvelous Ruben de Vela.
*
It happened on the fourth day.
It was late, and she was tired, but that was nothing new. The only times Aislin felt good anymore were when she had an opportunity to stop by Washington Square Park, or Columbia, or Grand Central, or St. Mark’s, or some other place where she could feel the energy of New York welling up beneath her feet or breathe it in from the air around her. And she hadn’t had a chance to do any of that good shit today. A twelve-hour shift at the Capital followed by two pointless visits to apartments at opposite ends of the City had used up the whole day.
She was riding the A line up from Brooklyn, and the plan was for her to switch to the 2 at Times Square to get back to the Bronx. She was at Penn Station and zoning into her iPod when the doors opened and a blinding stink entered the train. Of course, she didn’t really notice it until the doors hissed closed again and the train started moving – which is to say, when it was too late to switch cars.
Whee-oo! Nasty! Good thing I’m getting off at the next stop.
“Aislin?”
Oh, no.
She looked up, and there he was, coming straight for her, black and ragged and shapeless: The Bum Who Knew Too Much.
She got up and immediately headed for the door.
“Aislin, wait!”
The train was crowded. He was having trouble getting through.
“Aislin, don’t go! Don’t get off the train!”
The platform at 42nd Street was coming into sight.
“They’re all done watchin’, now they’re comin’ for you!”
The train was pulling up to the platform, and the bum was getting close.
“Aislin!”
“Hey buddy, why don’t you leave her alone?”
Her Galahad only slowed the bum down for a second, but that was enough. The train came to a stop and the door slid open.
“Aislin!”
She rushed out of the train, but a grimy hand skidded across her sleeve. She swatted it away frantically. “Get away from me! Just get the fuck away!”
To her surprise, he obeyed. As she hurried away, she saw that he wasn’t leaving the train or even trying to hold the doors open. Instead, he just stared after her with a kind of desperate regret and sorrow that made her want to say she was sorry.
“Aislin!” He called. “Beware the jaws that bite and the claws that catch!” Then the doors slid closed and the train pulled away.
She heaved a vast sigh and released the tension she’d been carrying since she realized that she was trapped on a train with The Bum Who Knew Too Much. Thank God that was over.
Then she looked around, and her relief evaporated.
The platform was empty. Both platforms were empty.
How could that be? Sure it was late, but she’d seen this place at four in the morning. It was never empty! Hell, how was it even possible? People had got off the train with her!
…right?
Of course right. They had to have! This was Times Square! The nerve center of New York City!
This was deeply weird. And creepy. It was like some weird low-budget post-apocalyptic science fiction movie, or that episode of The Twilight Zone where Burgess Meredith breaks his glasses.
All the more reason to get out of here fast.
Aislin hurried up the nearest set of stairs (oh god her legs ached, with walking and the standing and the…), and as she climbed it, she felt something change.
It had been hot down on the platform. Leaving the air conditioned cool of the subway car had felt like walking into a wall of swamp water. And it was getting hotter as she climbed the stairs; she could feel the sweat prickling all over her skin and beading on her brow.
But it wasn’t that.
It wasn’t that horrible smell, either, though she was starting to wonder what that was. It smelled like a combination of homeless person, rancid food, and garbage cooking in the heat.
(And did she smell just the faintest hint of sex, too? How could that be? And what was that other smell? The coppery one?)
No, it was something else. Something less tangible. Something had gone wrong.
Danger, yes. All of her internal alarms were screaming. Almost worse, everything somehow felt…unclean. Like there was a layer of slime over everything. She kept wiping her hands on her pants, but nothing came off. But in the end, there was no other word for it but wrong. It was like the whole world was five degrees off.
All of these thoughts and intuitions and vague feelings passed through Aislin’s mind in the time it took her to climb the stairs. When she reached the top, they were all blown away.
The station wasn’t empty and silent like the platform had been. It was less crowded than she might have expected it to be, but still filled with a feverish vitality.
It also looked like Hell had surfaced in the Times Square subway station.
Half of the lights were out, and half of the remainder were flickering, leaving only islands of light in the midst of darkness and shadow.
The walls had been covered with a complex tangle of graffiti, some of it apparently done in some kind of glow-in-the-dark paint. Mostly the tags and obscene slogans you would expect, but some of it hurt her eyes just to look at. And that mural down at the far end of the hall, the one that she could only half-see in the flickering darkness, the one that had never been there before, something about that thing just didn’t look right.
The garbage cans were overflowing. All of them. More than one was a boiling mass of roaches and rats and maggots, while one further down the hall was actually on fire.
Half of the storefronts were empty – windows smashed and boarded up, some covered with police tape and some that actually seemed to be burned out. Half of the remaining storefronts seemed to contain crack dens or makeshift brothels instead of proper stores, while the legitimate stores included a porn shop, a tattoo and piercing parlor that looked like you could get infected just walking in the door, a fetish shop whose wares fell on the wrong side of “safe” and “sane” and made her wonder about “consensual”, and a magazine stand whose snack food stock had been pillaged.
Aislin didn’t realize that she’d been walking forward in a daze until she reached the magazine stand. She wasn’t quite sure why she picked up a newspaper, either – perhaps some part of her thought that it would give her a clue as to just what the fuck was going on.
It was a New York Post, and while the date was right, the front page was all wrong. Instead of something about a body being found in Chinatown, there was a full-page picture of a residential neighborhood in flames, with bodies hanging from lampposts and a mob in the streets waving weapons in the air triumphantly. The headline screamed “PURGED”, and the text underneath it read “Brooklyn Neighborhood Cleansed of Muslim Terrorist Invaders”.
She threw it down on the counter like she’d just realized the ink was poison and hurried away.
Aislin hadn’t gone more than a few steps before she almost ran into a white woman in a tiny tube top, a miniskirt that barely covered her crotch, and spike heels. The woman might have been pretty once, but now she was bone-thin, with missing teeth, visible track-marks, and colorless, dirty hair that hung in lank strings around her face.
“Hey honey,” The woman said. “You buying or selling?”
“Excuse me?”
“I said, ‘Are you buying or selling?’” The woman repeated. “’Cause if you’re buying, honey, I can lick your clit right off for just twenty bucks.”
Aislin made the connection. This woman was a hooker (big surprise), and she was asking if Aislin was customer or competition.
Well, she certainly wasn’t competition – not yet, though she was beginning to develop a terrible fear that she was seeing her own future in this woman – but she definitely wasn’t a customer, either. She tried to think of a way to say that without getting knifed when a voice from across the hall barked “Crystal!”
A huge black man who looked like a parody of a Blacksploitation pimp, complete with sunglasses, purple suit, feathered cap, fur coat (in this heat!) and bejeweled cane, strode across the hall.
“You.” He pointed at the hooker. “Get back to work.” She hurried away, muttering something resentful under her breath.
“You.” He pointed at Aislin. “Answer the question. Are you buying or selling? ‘Cause if you’re buying, then I’m sure we got the right flavor for you. But if you’re selling in my territory without a permit, I’ll – “ He grabbed her arm, and Aislin stopped listening.
Aislin had been manhandled quite enough in her life, thank you, and she had long since made a vow that no one would ever touch her without her permission again. Not without paying for it.
“Get the fuck away from me!” she screamed, giving the pimp a hard shove in the chest. If she’d been thinking – which she wasn’t – she might have hoped that she would startle the big man into letting her go. She certainly wouldn’t have expected to make such a giant budge. And she didn’t.
Instead, he went flying.
He touched down more than twenty feet away, then tumbled across the floor until he came to a stop in a heap of tangled limbs. Aislin thought she might have killed him, but he was up again in an eyeblink. Up on all fours, his sunglasses gone to reveal shining yellow serpent’s eyes with slitted pupils, hissing through a mouthful of hooked teeth.
Holy shit!
Across the hall, the hooker hissed too.
Holy shit!
The hooker’s eyes had gone shiny-yellow as well, and she was lashing the air with a tongue that was at least three feet long and barbed.
“I’ll lick your clit right off”! Holy shit! HOLY SHIT!
At that moment, something fell into place in Aislin’s mind. Or maybe broke. Whatever. In that moment, she stopped wondering what was going on. It didn’t matter. She was in a situation. Deal with it now, figure it out later. She was not going to be the character from the horror movie who stands there screaming “this can’t be happening” until the monster eats them.
By all rights, she should have been terrified. There were a couple of bona fide monsters right there in front of her, after all. But somehow, she wasn’t. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that she had somehow just sent one of them flying across the hall. Regardless, they didn’t seem so much like horrible monsters as…hostile rats. Nothing you’d want to mess with if you could avoid it, but she’d have to be helpless for them to be really dangerous.
And she wasn’t.
She responded to the two monsters in front of her the same way she would have responded to the rats: she stamped at them and shouted “ha!”
They both flinched. Grinning, Aislin got ready to take another step toward them, to see if she could scare them off entirely.
Then someone…something?…marched briskly out of a side entrance at the far end of the hall. It was dressed in bulky black clothes – a robe? A trench coat? It was hard to see in the strobing dimness – and even over the cacophony of the brothels and crack dens, she could hear their bootsteps clocking on the floor and echoing off the tile.
The dark figure stopped and turned sharply in front of that weird, half-seen mural. But before Aislin could get a good at them (him?), the end of the hall went black.
For a moment there was silence as Aislin tried to see into the absolute darkness.
Then she heard the sound of bootheels clocking on the floor. Coming toward her.
All up and down the hall, the lights were dimming and more were starting to flicker. The flames in the trashbarrel fire began to rise, higher and higher until a column of flame was licking the ceiling, the metal cage that contained the barrel was glowing cherry red, and the flame was filling the hall with bloodlight and dancing shadows.
Bootheels clocking on the floor. Coming closer.
The vermin-filled garbage cans began overflowing, their inhabitants spreading across the floor like rising floodwaters.
New graffiti began racing across the wall like a living thing, most of it the glowing stuff, or the stuff that hurt to look at, or both. With it, spreading out from the darkened area, came something else. Something that looked like bloody veins, or maybe some kind of red fungus.
Then, as the clocking bootheels reached the edge of the darkened area, and the walking figure began to resolve out of the darkness, another bank of lights went off.
Right. Time to book.
Aislin gave one last feint, causing the hooker-monster and the pimp-monster – who had just started to grin with toothy confidence and scuttle toward her – to startle and back away, and then she took off running.