Storm Dreams (The Cycle of Somnium Book 1) (28 page)

There were no fighters this time. No battle. No blood. Only the castle. It rose above him, its twisting spires wrapping into the sky. Inside, Richthofen stood waiting. He leaned on a cane as if standing by will alone. He wore royal robes, though the fabric looked threadbare, and Cassidy saw the flight uniform beneath it. Dirty bandages poked out from beneath a tattered crown and the Baron seemed to be pleading with him. His mouth gaped, but no sound came out.

The dream faded. Cassidy awoke to Shea’s sleeping breath on his neck. She stirred as he sat up. “I’ll have to get back to work soon,” Shea said. “Spending the night costs money.”

Cassidy gave a reluctant nod. “I’ll pay,” he said. “I’ll pay for a few nights.”

Shea gave a sardonic laugh. “You don’t have that much money. And you wouldn’t be getting anything for it. We didn’t even...”

Cassidy stared at the green of the sheets. “I don’t have anybody left.”

Shea rested her chin on his shoulder and wrapped her arms around his trunk. “You don’t love me, John,” she said, in a far-off tone. “And I wouldn’t know love if it crawled in bed and bit me in the eye.”

Cassidy gave a deep sigh. “I know why Banner kept going back to his grave.”

“Hmmm?”

“Nothing,” Cassidy said, shaking his head. “I’m scared to go to the
real
world alone, but I have to.”

Shea lay back across the bed, exposing her round breasts and the spot where leaves vanished as they made it past her navel. She wasn’t trying to seduce him. It was just how she moved. She was more natural nude than clothed, and didn’t think about it. “You’ll always have a room here,” she said, to the ceiling, not so much to Cassidy, as if it was just something she’d realized and accepted.

“It seems so far away,” he said. “The
real
world, I mean.”

“You’ll die outside the storm.”

“Maybe not,” he said. “I’ve learned things.”

Shea sat up again. “What will you do there?”

Cassidy shrugged. “Fly.”

“For who?”

“Whomever pays me,” he said. “There must be things a pilot can do.”

“I hear there’s still a war going on. They’d pay a fortune for a fighter pilot like you.”

“No,” Cassidy said. “There’s got to be something else.”

“There’s a
lot
of jobs for pilots here in the Twilight. You could have your own ship.”

Cassidy kissed her again. “Thanks,” he said, and ran his hand down her cheek. “But I can’t.”

Shea nodded. “I know. You think you owe it to the others because you’re the only one who survived.” She smiled. “Next time, then.” Shea slipped into a robe that looked as if someone had turned clear water into fabric. It hid nothing and only accentuated her curves and the delicate tone of her skin.

Cassidy watched her go. She used her hips to say good-bye and was gone. It wasn’t just what he owed the crew. It was also the pleading in his dreamer’s eyes. Richthofen.

He washed and dressed. Returned his Mauser to its wooden holster. He added Brewster’s Webley to his belt, as well, sliding the naked steel behind his buckle.

The Fokker had been fuelled and tuned, and the chains in his Spandaus replaced. He didn’t look back as he throttled the fighter away from Arcadia, but imagined it vanishing into a dot behind him. Perhaps Shea watched from her window. Perhaps even waved. Perhaps she hadn’t.

He looked for gates, and again the potential windows appeared. His heartbeat quickened as he concentrated on finding a storm. One in Europe, hopefully near Richthofen. His dream had been clear and he had to find his dreamer soon. The only thing he knew for certain was that he would have to face this gate alone.

Green energy crackled. Cassidy gave the Fokker full throttle. Electricity hopped and skipped over the fighter and its instruments. His hair stood out as the window flashed and the world changed, and he was once again riding the storm.

The air was fresh and full of ozone. Blue lightning forked around him and the thunder followed as if welcoming him to the chaos. As if by instinct, he caught the currents and made his way into the raging clouds like an eel through tremulous water.

He did want to be here. As guilty as he felt arriving without anyone but himself, Cassidy couldn’t deny how good the air felt. The scents and odours. The rain. The feeling of existing in a far more solid and
real
way than he’d ever been in the Twilight.

The ground below looked like an open field with a barn big enough to be a hanger. He landed with little trouble and guided the Fokker to within a few yards of the wooden building.

Dropping from the cockpit, his combat boots sank into the moist earth. Rain poured. The wind gusted and he felt it running down through his clothes and across his skin. He felt the cold and the wet. Some of the water stayed on him now instead of flecking off like it had before.

As the raging storm moved overhead, the moment of truth had come. Part of him wanted to leap inside his fighter and be prepared for the worst. Be ready to re-enter the storm if he began to fade.

Part of him knew that would defeat his ability to fight the dispersal of whatever it was that kept him solid. This would be a mental fight, not a physical one. He gripped Brewster’s Webley in his hand. Felt the firmness and density of its steel.

Brewster should have been there standing next to him. He’d imagined them facing the harsh dissolving condition of the
real
world together.

The rain lightened and the air thinned as the storm moved overhead with the incredible gale of wind. The wild energy still flowed in him, rushing out his arms and legs, but it wasn’t around him anymore. The energy was fading fast, spiralling through like trillions of microscopic bees flooding through his system, but trying to find a way free.

There were holes for them to escape. Always holes. They slipped away. Leaked out slowly. As they did, Cassidy’s skin chilled. His muscles constricted and his head became light and airy. There was little difference between him and the air around him. In fact, he was less than the air. Rice paper on water. Ash in the wind.

John Cassidy didn’t really exist. Had never really existed. He was just a dream. A nightmare. The transient fear of an actual flesh and blood man. The sleeper had awoken. Awoken a very long time ago and John Cassidy had just forgotten he didn’t exist anymore. Thoughts were supposed to come and go. Ideas were meant to spark and burn and die as quickly as they’d come.

The steel on the handle of Brewster’s Webley was still cold from the storm. Cassidy noticed it a thousand miles away where it dangled from someone else’s arm. It was clutched in someone else’s fingers. Whose fingers?

Oblivion rose up out of the ether, black and huge and everywhere. He was sinking into it, a rock in an ocean of tar.  He knew this blackness. This void. He’d been here before. Perhaps he’d never left. Where does a man exist anyway? In his own mind? In the mind of others? Did the universe itself remember anything of its inhabitants?

There was still the handle of a cold pistol somewhere. It had a name. It had belonged to a friend.

Brewster.

Banner.

The
Nubigena
.

John Cassidy, he thought. A man named John Cassidy. A man who had lived, and fought, and... Had he died? What happened to John Cassidy? Had the man been a story? The dream of a man? What happened at the end?

Cassidy looked down at hands and feet that wavered in and out of existence. They faded and returned, and faded again, like an elusive radio signal. The Webley felt firm, though he didn’t feel the same density in the hand that held it.

“I exist, dammit. I exist,” he shouted, as the air tried to sift him away and smear his body across the face of time and space. “I don’t care if I can’t remember how I was born. I don’t care if I don’t have parents.” He was crying again, but at least he felt the tears as he screamed into the storm-vacant sky. “I don’t care if don’t know if I’ve ever loved anyone or not. And it doesn’t matter that everyone I’ve ever known is gone or dead. I still exist.”

The Webley was in his hand, and his hand was almost as solid as the pistol now. At least, it had a similar quality. With his other hand he reached deep into his pocket for the coin. Gripped it tight, trying to squeeze any remaining drops of April’s pain into this skin. The love and thoughts and fears of a woman who had seemed more
real
to him than any other person he’d ever met in the
real
world.

And there was a little. A drip or two of residual tears that eked into his flesh and nerves.

Cassidy glanced around. He took in the grey sky. Streaks of light poked through as the clouds moved on. His body gave out and he collapsed. His limbs felt like rubber, but at least he
could
feel them. The struggle had sapped his energy, though, and he yearned for the electricity of the storm to return and energize him.

A young woman walked towards him from the distance. Her green dress with white apron looked damp as if she’d been caught in the storm for a few minutes before making it to cover. She had probably been sheltering in the barn and was coming out now only because she’d seen him fall.

She inched closer. He fought to toss the pistol away now, afraid of how holding a weapon made him look, but his arm wouldn’t move. “Your uniform is English or American?” she asked, still twenty feet away and poised, ready to run back to the barn. “You are Allied?”

Cassidy closed his eyes for several seconds and reopened them. She was speaking German. Her accent, Austrian. He understood her perfectly and wondered if he could return the German here in the
real
world. Instead, he nodded.

The Austrian girl took a step back. “Are you here to kill me?”

Cassidy gathered what strength remained in him. “Nein,” he said. “Just trying to find a friend.”

The young girl hesitated. “Friend?”

“A pilot,” Cassidy rasped. “A German.” He paused, collecting enough energy to form another sentence. “He’s—” He wasn’t sure what to call Richthofen. “I just need to find him.”

The young girl pried Cassidy from the ground and helped him to the barn. Cassidy collapsed again, this time onto a warm bed of hay. He lay panting and sweating.

“My name is Ilsa. You will have to get your plane inside the barn before they see you from the sky.”

“Where’s your family?” Cassidy asked.

“The war,” she said. “Albert is a soldier. Mother and father are dead.”

“I’m sorry,” Cassidy said.

“I just want it to end,” Ilsa said. “I don’t care who wins anymore.”

Cassidy gave a partial nod. “I promise, I don’t care either.”

“You speak Deutsch,” she said. “Are you a spy?”

“Long story,” he sighed, trying to remember what she’d said about the plane. In moments he was asleep.

***

Cassidy dreamed of the castle again, but this time it looked as if it had gone through a week of constant bombardment. The grey walls were pocked with deep gashes and several of the spires lay in shattered heaps around the wounded structure.

The giant door had been blasted open and, from inside, a muffled scream called his name. Cassidy ran inside. Richthofen lay trapped beneath a giant iron cross. “Cassidy,” he pleaded. “John, please.”

Cassidy woke in panic. He glanced around the barn, trying to remember how he’d gotten there. The sound of shouting men came from outside. They were soldiers, speaking German, and Ilsa’s frightened voice pleaded with them. “I don’t know who he is. He said he was a pilot.”

Panic rose in Cassidy’s chest. He gripped both pistols, pinned himself against the wall and waited for the soldiers to enter.

“He’s not here now,” Ilsa said.

“He left without his plane?” one of the soldiers asked.

The barn door opened and the soldiers stepped in, weapons level. Cassidy tried to press himself into the wall, as if he might become part of it. As the officer shouted orders to check various sections of the barn, Cassidy trained the Mauser and the Webley in the direction the soldiers would have to come.

I’m a dream, Cassidy thought. Am I still enough of one? He concentrated on his body. Talked to the dreamstuff that had hardened enough to enable him to sustain his form in the
real
world. He tried to soften. Let up on the
realness
enough so they couldn’t see him. His arms phased a little. He fell through the wall and onto the ground outside.

Ilsa turned from where she stood outside the doorway and looked up as if to see where he’d fallen from. Her eyes were wide, but she didn’t speak.

The shock of falling through the wall brought his body back to being solid. He hadn’t known he could do that. Wondered if he always could have, or if it was only his new control over his body that allowed him to pass through something solid.

Ilsa shooed him away with her hands.

Cassidy nodded a quick thank you and ran for the Fokker. The men sounded as if they were tearing the barn apart. One of them had left his rifle leaning against the plane. Cassidy grabbed it and leapt into the cockpit. An extra weapon never hurt and this looked like a formidable Mauser .303 rifle.

The engine started without trouble. Over his shoulder the soldiers ran from the barn, aiming and shooting. Cassidy throttled forward and pulled his fighter into the air as bullets flashed by. He hoped they wouldn’t hurt Ilsa. She could say anything, including that he’d had a gun pointed at her, or that he’d threatened any number of other things. He hoped she would.

It was tempting to return and kill the men with his Spandaus, but Ilsa had been kind to him and the thought of murdering the soldiers in front of her turned his stomach. She wouldn’t understand that he was only trying to protect her. And besides, the thought of killing a dreamer did something weird to his stomach. It felt wrong, like murdering a god.

Cassidy pulled back hard on the stick and banked the fighter into the clouds before levelling out. He had to do something, but didn’t know what. Something to do with Richthofen. He was in trouble in some way. Needed something. Needed Cassidy, his accidental creation.

Both Allied and German planes flew the skies around him as he entered what had to be contested territory. Allied fighters tried to engage, while the Germans ignored him. He might be invisible, but his Fokker wasn’t, forcing him to flee several dogfights. How had Banner kept the
Nubigena
from being noticed? Cassidy tried to escape into the clouds but several Sopwiths flying French markings tried to sandwich him in a crossfire of streaking shells.

He rolled. He dodged. Didn’t want to engage, but the French gave him little choice. They dove after him as he tried to out-manoeuvre the nimble crafts, but he was forced to bank and engage them both.

The first he hit with a volley of Spandau bursts to the tail section. The Sopwith lost stability and broke off. The second he crippled by destroying one of its bi-wings. The fighter limped away. They would both live if they didn’t enter anymore fighting.

“I’m sorry,” Cassidy said, though there was no one to hear him. Another two Allied fighters engaged him and he disabled them as best he could. Hopefully they’d survive a forced landing as well. He found he hardly had to think to out-fight these men. They were simple compared to the pilots in his dream and the Armada Albatrosses who had seemed to fight with a hive-mind ability.

Still, he had to get out of the air. This wasn’t his fight. Wasn’t his war. He had no right to kill pilots merely because they
thought
he was the enemy. Only months ago he would have turned his guns on the Germans. Used his markings to get close and shoot them out of the sky. But he’d come to grips with not being American, and as he watched them fight and kill each other, he knew for certain he was something else. Something outside. Still an alien. A visitor from another world who only looked like them. The vision of an American pilot in a German Fokker, riding the lines of war.

Cassidy’s throat went dry as a red fighter broke from beneath a ridge. A tri-plane with black iron crosses. Richthofen. All fighters of the Baron’s Jagdstaffel flew red planes, but without even seeing the pilot, he knew this was his dreamer.

Something was wrong though. The Baron’s flying. The red Fokker appeared to be in pursuit of a Sopwith Camel with Canadian markings. It wasn’t like Richthofen. Cassidy knew the codes the German flew by. They were burned into his mind as sure as if they’d been his own. The Baron never chased fighters alone and across enemy lines near gunners.  A barrage of ground guns tore at the air around the scarlet Fokker.

Another fighter, also bearing Canadian markings, dove from far above. As the fighter neared, Richthofen broke off for a moment to dodge the attacking plane.

Cassidy went to fire his Spandaus, but only got three rounds off before the chains ran dry. No one had noticed him yet, and it needed to stay that way. Once again, he concentrated on his body and then reached out to the plane. He’d already bonded himself to the Fokker, making it easier, but he had to move his awareness through the fighter itself. The wings, the fuselage, the engine and props. He felt them all as he did his own body and he pushed the fighter to fade a little as he drew closer.

The diving Canadian fighter missed the red Fokker and was forced to pull up hard to avoid hitting the ground. Cassidy couldn’t believe how close to the ground they were flying. The gunners couldn’t seem to see Cassidy’s Fokker, but they were laying down a wall of fire around the Baron.

What was he doing now? Richthofen should have broken off long ago. Not only did he have a code about ground fire, but about not following another fighter once it put him in danger.
Survive to kill more enemies.
Why would he break that code now? Richthofen fired sporadically in odd bursts. Only one gun was working. The other had to be jammed or broken.

What the hell is he doing? Cassidy thought. The image of the Baron from his dream came back in blinding colour. The stricken look on his face. The wound and the bloody wrappings beneath his crown. What had he been pleading?

The gunners continued their wall of fire. The fleeing Sopwith continued at full throttle. The red Fokker was still trying to choke out a few shots with the misfiring Spandau.

Like a shot through his own head, Cassidy realized what Richthofen was trying to do. Tired, wounded and broken by war, the Baron wanted to die. Needed to die. Was pleading for it from anyone willing to give it. He didn’t just want death, but a hero’s death. A death of blood and honour.

Tears welled in Cassidy’s eyes as he skimmed just above the gunners’ heads, looking up at the bright red Fokker as it dared and begged for anyone to take it down. None of them had the right, though. These gunners. The Sopwith Richthofen pursued. None of them. And no one seemed capable.

Cassidy lifted the Mauser rifle to his shoulder and chambered a round. He aimed through the fuselage to where Richthofen sat. The red Fokker wobbled side to side. As it tilted right Cassidy squeezed the trigger. For a moment, nothing happened, then the tri-plane slowed. The nose tipped down.

Cassidy followed Richthofen as he limped his fighter to a landing. The Baron brought it to a halt with amazing grace for whatever wound he’d sustained. Cassidy landed beside him and leapt out. He ran, jumped up to the centre wing and brought himself up to the cockpit.

Richthofen didn’t move. His head lay back staring up at the blue sky. Blood blossomed beneath his flight coat. The bullet had passed through the plane, through the Baron and exited his chest. The hole lay just beside the coat’s lapel. “Did you do that?” Richthofen asked, still staring past Cassidy at the sky.

Cassidy nodded. He couldn’t speak. His throat was too tight.

“Danke,” Richthofen said. “No one here can shoot.”

“I may fade away now,” Cassidy finally got past his trembling lips. “Banner wasn’t a real dream, so I don’t know what will happen.”

Richthofen still didn’t move, as if saving all his strength to speak. “I dreamed you to kill me,” he said, and rolled his head to look at Cassidy. “It’s what you were always meant to do. I knew it the moment I saw you standing there in Arcadia. I knew you would kill me.”

“I’m sorry,” Cassidy said. Men shouted in the distance. They were coming.

“It’s honour. It’s right,” Richthofen said. He lifted his shaking hand off the control stick where it had been glued, and gripped Cassidy by the arm. “I have accomplished my purpose in life. Now, so have you. What men can say that?”

Cassidy gripped him back. “Where do I go now?”

“Home,” Richthofen said. “I did give you a home country.”

Another man stared at the Baron now. A soldier had run up on the opposite side and propped himself up on one of the wings. Cassidy was a ghost to him. The soldier only watched the Bloody Baron staring off at nothing.

“Kaput,” Richthofen said. As he finished the word, the razor tip of an umbrella popped out of his forehead and withdrew. The soldier was still oblivious.

Cassidy jumped down off the plane and ran around to the other side.

Tamelicus grinned as he wiped the umbrella tip with a white handkerchief. “My paper shadow,” the dandy demon said. “Never thought we’d cross paths again, but the world is indeed an intriguing place.”

Soldiers with Australian flags on their uniforms crowded around the plane. They didn’t notice Cassidy, or his Fokker, as they swarmed the scarlet fighter.

Cassidy wiped his eyes. “Don’t think for a moment you killed him with that damned umbrella.
I
killed him.
Me
. He wanted it that way.”

The demon scoffed. “You’re just a cherry seed.”

“I’m no cherry seed and you’re nothing. A shadow that walks around sticking his blade in things already dead.”

Tamelicus tsked. “I could cut
you
up like Christmas turkey.”

Cassidy drew closer so he was eye to eye with the creature. “I don’t think you can. Perhaps before, but not now. I’m
real
. And you’ll just have to wait around for my time to come so you can show up and pretend, shoving that piece of nothing you carry into my cold dead corpse.”

“If only you could stop whining,” Tamelicus sighed, cutting over his words. “You’re still a shadow,” he said putting the umbrella’s tip to Cassidy’s throat. “And this will never be your world.” He tipped his bowler. “You’ll need more than mental determination to make you a
real
boy. But believe what you will. They all do.” The dandy demon turned, and was gone.

Soldiers dragged Richthofen’s body from his fighter and began stripping the tri-wing for souvenirs. Cassidy walked to where they laid the body and looked down at his dreamer. “Guess I didn’t fade,” he said to the still unclosed eyes. “If this was my purpose, what do I do now?” Cassidy reached down and removed the Baron’s scarf. He tied it around his own neck and returned to his Fokker.

The Australian soldiers continued dismantling the red plane as Cassidy turned the engine over, taxied over the bumpy ground and lifted off. No one glanced his way. Home. Richthofen had told him to go home.