Read Online The River of Night's Dreaming by Karl Edward Wagner - Free Book Online

Karl Edward Wagner
    The River of Night's Dreaming
    Karl Edward Wagner trained as a psychiatrist before becoming a full-time writer and editor with his heroic fantasy novel Darkness Weaves With Many Shades (1970). Since then he has continued the brutal exploits of his anti-hero Kane in Death Angel's Shadow, Bloodstone, Dark Crusade, Night Winds and The Book of Kane. A multiple winner of the British Fantasy Award and World Fantasy Award, his intelligent and provocative horror stories have been collected in such volumes as In A Lonely Place, Why Not You and I? and Unthreatened By the Morning Light. He has edited ten volumes of The Year's Best Horror Stories,  and his most recent novel is a medical chiller, The Fourth Seal.
    Fans of The Rocky Horror Show will recognize the title of Wagner's novella from his friend Richard O'Brien's lyrics. Based on a dream which came to the author as an almost complete narrative, this nightmarish tale owes much to Robert W. Chambers' masterpiece The King in Yellow , and was originally rejected by an editor for being too sexually explicit. You have been warned!

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    Everywhere: grayness and rain.
    The activities bus with its uniformed occupants. The wet pavement that crawled along the crest of the high bluff. The storm-fretted waters of the bay far below. The night itself, gauzy with gray mist and traceries of rain, feebly probed by the wan headlights of the bus.
    Grayness and rain merged in a slither of skidding rubber and a protesting bawl of brakes and tearing metal.
    For an instant the activities bus paused upon the broken guardrail, hung half-swallowed by the grayness and rain upon the edge of the precipice. Then, with thirty voices swelling a chorus to the screams of rubber and steel, the bus plunged over the edge.
    Halfway down it struck glancingly against the limestone face, shearing off wheels amidst a shower of glass and bits of metal, its plunge unchecked. Another carom, and the bus began to break apart, tearing open before its final impact onto the wave-frothed jumble of boulders far below. Water and sound surged upward into the night, as metal crumpled and split open, scattering bits of humanity like seeds flung from a bursting melon.
    Briefly, those trapped within the submerging bus made despairing noises—in the night they were no more than the cries of kittens, tied in a sack and thrown into the river. Then the waters closed over the tangle of wreckage, and grayness and rain silenced the torrent of sound.
    *****
    She struggled to the surface and dragged air into her lungs in a shuddering spasm. Treading water, she stared about her—her actions still automatic, for the crushing impact into the dark waters had all but knocked her unconscious. Perhaps for a moment she had lost conciousness; she was too dazed to remember anything very clearly. Anything.
    Fragments of memory returned. The rain and the night, the activities bus carrying them back to their prison. Then the plunge into darkness, the terror of her companions, metal bursting apart. Alone in another instant, flung helplessly into the night, and the stunning embrace of the waves.
    Her thoughts were clearing now. She worked her feet out of her tennis shoes and tugged damp hair away from her face, trying to see where she was. The body of the bus had torn open, she vaguely realized, and she had been thrown out of the wreckage and into the bay. She could see the darker bulk of the cliff looming out of the grayness not far from her, and dimly came the moans and cries of other survivors. She could not see them, but she could imagine their presence, huddled upon the rocks between the water and the vertical bluff.
    Soon the failure of the activities bus to return would cause alarm. The gap in the guardrail would be noticed. Rescuers would come, with lights and ropes and stretchers, to pluck them off the rocks and hurry them away in ambulances to the prison's medical ward.
    She stopped herself. Without thought, she had begun to