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"But there are questions I need to ask you," I said. "About my family, and why I was declared a rogue…"
"Yes, yes," said Nathanial. "All in good time. You really can’t appreciate what we’re doing here until you’ve met the Red King."
He and the silent Sister Eliza ushered me politely but firmly through the maze of chemical vats and looping tubes to a door at the back of the chamber, and then through it into a long stone corridor that stretched away before us, sloping down into the earth. Thick pulsing tubing was stapled to the rough stone walls, while from the ceiling hung a series of bare electric bulbs. We followed the tubes down the corridor, descending for some time, until I lost track of just how deep we were under the church and the London streets. The air was chill and damp, and water ran down the walls.
"Don’t you have any security down here?" I said after a while, just to break the silence.
Nathanial shrugged easily. "The uncertainty effect keeps out the riffraff, while the church’s sanctity hides us from the Devil and his disciples. And the Red King dreams he’s safe, so he is…"
"How does this all work?" I said just a little desperately. "This whole…sceneshifting business?"
"It’s really very simple," said Nathanial in that smug kind of way that tells you it isn’t going to be at all simple. "While the Red King sleeps, he dreams. Constantly. And while in that state he is able to see behind the scenes of reality, as it were. How things really work, and how they’re put together. We can influence his dreams and persuade him to make small changes. And the alterations he makes there, affect things here. In reality. We only deal in small changes, never big ones, no matter how tempting. They might be noticed by…You Know Who.
"I often wonder what it is the professor sees, exactly, in his dreams. We can only guess. And whisper the odd suggestion in his ear. He’s in a very suggestive state. Though you have to be very careful what you ask for; very specific. Did you know there used to be pyramids in Scotland? Oh, yes; a huge tourist attraction, in fact. But the Red King dreamed them away, and now they’re gone, and no one remembers them but us. Your family missed that one, which I sometimes think is rather a shame…Still, enough small changes add up, when your family doesn’t interfere. We’re so glad you’ve come to join us, Edwin."
"I haven’t decided anything yet," I said.
"But you will," said Nathanial. "You will."
Sister Eliza chuckled abruptly. The sound she made without a tongue was ugly, disturbing. Even Nathanial flinched a little. The corridor turned around suddenly and spilled us out into a small stone chamber, barely twelve feet in diameter, gloomily lit just enough to be restful on the eyes. The walls had been roughly painted to resemble night skies, with whorls of stars and a procession of moons in all its phases. In the centre of the room stood a marble pedestal, and on top of that, held in place by an ornate latticework of copper wire, was a severed human head. Male, middle-aged, slack features. From the look of the ragged stump of the neck, whoever had cut it off hadn’t had much practice. Someone had placed a fresh laurel wreath around the heavily lined brow. The head wasn’t breathing, but behind the closed eyelids the eyes darted back and forth in the rapid eye movements of the dream state. Around the base of the pedestal someone had drawn a traditional pentagram with mathematical precision. And around that someone had traced a series of ceremonial circles containing signs and pictograms from half a dozen forgotten cultures. Someone had done their homework.
Nathanial gestured for me to examine the back of the head, so I walked around to take a look. Thick rubber tubes had been plugged roughly into the back of the man’s head, trailing away across the floor and out the door into the corridor, presumably all the way back up to the chemical vats. I leaned forward for a better look and winced at the crude holes where the tubes entered. No surgeon had done this. Someone had just drilled into the back of the skull, and then pushed the tubes through into the exposed brain. I came back around to study the face. It didn’t look happy or unhappy. If not for the eye movements, I’d never have known it was still alive.
"Why just a head?" I said finally.
"Well," said Nathanial, "it wasn’t as if we really needed the rest of him, and keeping a whole body alive and preserved would have added greatly to our expenses. We were quite a small operation, when we started out. Just the professor and half a dozen of his finest students…The tubes keep the head going, and the wires trickle a constant slow current across the frontal lobes, ensuring that he remains asleep and deep in the dream state. The tubes feed him certain preservatives and all the necessary drugs. He could last forever, theoretically. Ah, yes, the drugs. We haven’t explained about those yet, have we? We’re feeding the professor a rather special cocktail of powerful psychotropic chemicals, everything from acid to taduki to datura. All according to the professor’s own theories. The drugs push his mind up and out while he dreams, blasting the doors of perception right off their hinges so he can see what lies behind, and beyond."
"Who was he, originally?" I said. "How did he come to this?"
"Well, it was all his own idea, originally," Nathanial said, smiling in a rather self-satisfied way. "He was our professor at Thames University, back then. Remarkable mind; quite remarkable. He became our leader, our inspiration. He gave us these fascinating lectures, you see; all about shamanic drugs, and dream states, and how they could be combined to access different levels of reality. He also talked a lot about something called experimenter’s intent, where the scientist’s intent could actually change the outcome of the experiment he was performing. It wasn’t that great a step to combine those ideas…
"The professor was really quite surprised when we finally went to him, all six of his favourite students, and told him we’d found a way to translate his theories into a workable, practical solution to all the world’s problems. He was even more surprised when we brought him down here, showed him what we’d done, and explained to him that he had been granted the singular honour of being our Red King. The man who would change the world and save us all from the Devil. In fact, when we told him exactly what we intended to do, he reacted very negatively. Actually started to cry when we showed him the bone saw and held him down…
"But that was all long ago. He’s done such good work since, sleeping and dreaming for all these years, without interruption. The longer you sleep, you see, the more deeply you dream, and the further the drugs can take you. He dreams very deeply and very powerfully these days. I just know he’d be so proud of what we’ve done with his help…"
"I wouldn’t bet on it," I said. "After what you did to him, if he ever does wake up, it’ll be the end of your world."
"You don’t know him like we did," said Nathanial. "He’d understand. He was always telling us it was our duty to go out and change the world. And how we always had to be prepared to make sacrifices for the greater good. And we did. We sacrificed him. You know, we’re still struggling to understand the significance of just what it is we’re doing here. We don’t just sit on our laurels, oh no! I sometimes wonder if perhaps the whole world, and everything in it, is just a dream. The Devil’s dream. And that’s why the professor is able to access it and change bits of it. If that is the case, we must be very careful not to disturb the Devil with our changes, in case we wake him…"
"All right," I said. "That’s it. You’re a loony. You people don’t know anything for sure, do you? It’s all theories and guesses and half-baked stolen philosophy."