Bad Dreams by Kim Newman Page B

the Lawyer felt for him.
    ‘No,’ she said, holding his hand, ‘I don’t think so. I have other business to…’
    ‘Who is he?’
    She was taller than she had been, her cheekbones more prominent, her eyes brighter.
    ‘My date?’
    He nodded.
    ‘A man of genius, nephew. A lamb among wolves just now, I admit, but a remarkable man. Cameron Nielson.’
    He knew of the young man. A playwright, his first works – a two-handed drama about a prisoner and his psychiatrist, and a family saga called
Father, Son and Holy Terror
– had been successful on Broadway, netting two successive Drama Critics Circle Awards, and were optioned by Mark Hellinger at Universal. Along with Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, he was expected to shake up the American theatre a little.
    The Monster had a taste for geniuses. In his mind, he saw Ariadne opening Nielson’s head, and scooping his genius out in grey lumps.
    ‘Not yet,’ Ariadne said. ‘Later, maybe. But not yet. He has things to do.’
    ‘Why do you care?’
    She smiled again. ‘I’m a patron of the arts.’
    A wind blew by, bringing a chill. Ariadne’s dress clung where the wind pressed, and stirred, flapping on her other side. In the starlight, her skin was as dead white as her hair, but her eyes shone, red under green. She was the adult Giselle might have become in a thousand more years. ‘And you,’ she said, ‘will you ride your crusade?’
    He nodded. She laughed.
    ‘It’ll be interesting. But it’ll be the end of you.’
    It was like a blow. The Elders were always like that, secure in their survival, contemptuous of the rest of the Kind, treating them like children playing at the edge of the precipice, knowing better but doing nothing.
    ‘I don’t think so.’
    ‘Well, maybe not. Maybe you’ll last. But your friends in there are a poor lot.’
    ‘They don’t matter.’
    ‘That’s a dangerous thought. You should be careful about the people you mix with. I prefer the brilliant…’
    ‘So do I, they taste better.’
    ‘Not just for that, nephew. They’re less prone to envy us. Among humans, the brilliant are freaks and sports. It’s mediocrities you should watch. Like your friends back there, arguing about movie stars. When they’ve finished with the Reds, they’ll want to see your head on a pole. Have you read that woman’s books?’
    He was embarrassed, and shrugged.
    ‘I trust you’ve not fed off her. She would be such a feeble meal.’
    They had nothing more to say to each other, but they stayed on the terrace, politely sampling each other’s memories. There were great parts of her experience that she successfully kept him away from. She was much older, much stronger. It was not really new to him, being powerless, but it was hardly relishable.
    All she gave him were a few pictures of the world as it had been for her. And yet, she exhausted him in a single draught. All his ghosts were conjured up for her. It was a wrenching, unpleasant experience, but he submitted to it, hoping to impress her. When it was over, she looked at him with an expression he would never be able to wipe from his memory. There was a nannyish kindliness in it, but also disappointment, and – intolerably – pity. She shrugged, her dress rippling from her shoulders, and smiled.
    ‘No,’ she said again, ‘I don’t think so.’
    His question was only a thought. Some day?
    Her answer was not even that. Maybe, who knows, never…
    She gave him her hand to be kissed – the Kind always found it hard to dispense with the old manners – and left him, the curtains closing after her. On the balcony, he was alone again.
    His fingernails, he realized, were two inches long, and curled into bony barbs. And his mouth was full of blood.
    Inside, he was shaking. She had left something of herself in him, perhaps out of tenderness. He hated her for that gesture, and tried to force the images she had spilled into him out of his mind, erasing the centuries with a burning fury.
    A girl