Free The Ninth Nightmare by Graham Masterton Page A

did.
    â€˜We have to go find her,’ he said.
    â€˜What do you mean? Who?’
    â€˜She’s up there. She’s been up there all the time.’
    â€˜I don’t know what you’re talking about. Who’s been up there all the time?’
    Kieran pulled his hands away and started to walk uphill, toward the trees and the tents. Kiera ran after him and caught hold of his arm. ‘Kieran – where are you going? We don’t even know where this place is! This is supposed to be your hotel room, not a field!’
    â€˜It’s a dream,’ said Kieran.
    â€˜How can it be a dream? I can feel it! Look at me – I’m soaked to the skin!’
    â€˜It’s not my dream. It’s not yours, either. It’s somebody else’s. That’s why it feels so real.’
    â€˜What do you mean? How can we both be in somebody else’s dream?’
    â€˜I don’t know, but we are. And I know that she’s up there and we have to go find her.’
    â€˜Who’s up there?’
    Kieran lifted his hand and touched Kiera’s forehead with his fingertips. ‘Can’t you feel her? I can feel her.’
    Kiera looked at him in bewilderment. But she began to feel a rising sense of excitement, too. She thought she knew who he was talking about. It was impossible, but so was this sloping field, and so was this wind and so was this rain.
    â€˜You mean Mom ?’ she said.
    Kieran lowered his hand and nodded. ‘She’s up there someplace. She’s been there all the time, ever since the day that you and me were born.’
    â€˜How can that be? She didn’t go away or anything. She died , Kieran.’
    â€˜How many times have you and I seen dead people? Dozens.’
    â€˜Yes, but none of them was anybody we knew, were they? And we’ve never seen mom.’
    Kieran took hold of Kiera’s hand. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘She’s up there and she needs us.’
    Kiera looked up at the dark, billowing tents, and the strings of red lights that flickered in the wind like blood cells pouring through human arteries. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t like the look of those tents at all. And even if we do find Mom, what then? She’s dead. She won’t be able to come back with us.’
    â€˜Let’s just see if she’s there first.’
    â€˜I don’t know, Kieran. It’s really scary.’
    â€˜Yes, but I’m sure mom knows that we’re here. What is she going to think of us if we turn our backs on her and leave her, just because we’re chickenshit?’
    Kiera took a deep, shivery breath. ‘OK, then. But if we can’t find her we go back through my bedroom door and we close it and we keep it closed.’
    Still holding hands, they struggled up the hill. In some places the grass was waist high, and Kiera felt as if she were wading through a stormy sea. In other places the ground underfoot was rocky and loose, like shale, and they found it difficult to keep their footing.
    Several times Kiera turned back to make sure that her bedroom doorway was still there. It was standing in the middle of the wildly-waving grass, softly lit, an unearthly vision of the real world that they had left behind them. She felt like telling Kieran that they ought to go back. Their mother had been dead for seventeen-and-a-half years, and even if they found her, what could they do to help her? But Kieran kept on pulling her up the hill, and his urgency seemed to increase with every step.
    At last they reached the encampment. More than a dozen tents and small canvas pavilions were clustered around a huge black marquee, as well as seven or eight trailers and old-style horse-drawn caravans, all of them painted in shiny black varnish and beaded with raindrops. The blood-red lights were strung up everywhere, from one tent to the next, and all around the top of the marquee.
    The barrel-organ music was still