Michael R Collings (15 page)

He felt tongues of flames licking at his flesh. He twisted his head in anguish as the fire consumed him. Above it all, beyond all the pain and the terror and the torment, the nightmare figure retreated, laughing silently.

Noooo
! the dream-Miles screamed, one final burst of life...

…and Miles shuddered violently awake, his skin soaked and sticky with his own sweat, and his arms and legs as rigidly cold as blocks of ice. For an instant he heard the lingering dream-scream. Then he rolled slightly and felt the stiff nap of carpet against his back—even stiffer where his blood had soaked into the fibers and was now part of the carpet itself, perhaps had even filtered through the pad beneath and oozed thickly into the crack and from there descended to the waiting bowels of the earth itself.

He sat up. Big Ben said 2:15. Barely half an hour since Daniel—the real, flesh-and-blood Daniel—had left. Miles struggled to his feet, his body stiff with cold and pain. He shuffled over to his bed and dropped heavily onto the mattress. Still awash with sweat that stank of fear, still naked but for once uncaring, he burrowed into the covers and slept as if dead.

From then on until the end, that nightmare repeated itself nearly every night regardless of whether Daniel visited or not, regardless of whether Miles lay asleep in his bed or (as happened more frequently) curled fetus-like on the carpet. As bedtime approached, Miles would shower, dry off, and dress in his long pajamas, brush his teeth, and then—irregularly at first but with an increasing consistency that even he realized bordered on sheer obsessiveness—walk through the kitchen and the living room before going to his bed.

“What’s the matter?” Daniel asked as Miles walked through the living room early in November. Daniel and Elayne were sitting side by side, his arm over her shoulder, reading. Elayne was reading a Harlequin romance. Miles couldn’t see the cover of Daniel’s book but the volume was thick and the open page crowded with print.

Miles ignored him. He saw in Daniel’s darting glance something that might have been an unspoken threat, might have been a burgeoning fear as the bastard looked up into the eyes of his stepson and perhaps saw intimations of the man Miles was rapidly becoming. Miles straightened his shoulders. After all, he was nearly fifteen, and he already had a couple of inches and possibly even a few pounds on Daniel. Maybe after all this time, Daniel was beginning to worry. The thought was pleasantly exciting.

“Yes, honey,” his mother added. “You’ve been wandering around like this every night for a while now. Is something wrong?”

“No,” Miles said. “Just checking. Making sure I turned the stove off after dinner.” It wasn’t a lie. Dinner had been over for three hours already, the dishes washed and dried and stacked away, the counters and cabinets cleared. But Miles knew that he would not be able to sleep (if he slept at all) until he was sure that the four rings of blue flame were safely extinguished. Until he was sure that the house was safe from a sudden fire that might tear through its bowels burning and destroying and consuming.

“But...,” his mother began. Daniel laid his arm on hers and she fell quiet. Miles stared at the two of them for a moment, then left. As he turned the corner into the hallway, he heard Daniel say, in a voice he probably assumed Miles would not be able to hear, “It’s just a phase. You know, teenage jitters. I was just like that, always wandering around when I should have been in bed. Worrying about nothing.”

Miles waited in the hall for a moment to see if he could hear anything more.

“Elayne,” Daniel said suddenly, softly, “you almost forgot your medicine.”

“I don’t think I need to....”

“You know you do. I think that if you ever really did forget to take it, you’d have as much trouble sleeping as Miles does.”

The boy heard Daniel get up. He hurried down the hall, reaching his bedroom only an instant before he heard the click of the bathroom light and then Daniel opening and closing the medicine chest.

Standing in the darkness, his back again his door, he watched and listened until he heard the bathroom light flick off and then the unintelligible rumble of Daniel’s voice from the living room.

That night (and every night thereafter), Miles did not even look at his bed. He walked into his room, careful not to touch the light switch. Feeling his way in the dark, he meticulously unplugged every electrical appliance in the room: stereo, lamp, even the electric clock his mother had given him for Christmas when she decided that the loud
tick tick tick
of the Big Ben might be keeping him from sleeping. Satisfied that nothing remained that could be a fire hazard—remembering even in waking the intense pain as flames blossomed from his hands—he pulled the cast-off Big Ben from the nightstand drawer, wound it as tightly as he could with fingers that felt corpse-like, cold and stiff and awkward. He wound it so tightly that he could feel the tension in the spring. He sat it on the nightstand and dropped to the floor, curling up on the carpet and hoping not to sleep.

From Daniel’s insistence about the medicine, Miles knew that this would be a hard, difficult night.

The visit was indeed rather longer than usual. And substantially more painful

By November 20, Miles knew that the situation was coming to a head. Daniel was subdued but Miles could detect a smoldering anger in the man, a volcano of violence waiting to erupt. Miles knew now that his mother was deeply asleep each night in the corner room at the far end of the hall, heavily drugged. Daniel was taking no chances.

But Miles also knew that Daniel was not impervious. Daniel was not longer the towering, distanced adult telling the innocent child what to do, how to act, what to say…and what
not
to say. Daniel could be hurt. The dream had told him that.

On the night of November 20, Miles went through his normal ritual. Shower. Dress. Brush teeth. Check stove. Unplug everything in the room. Drop exhausted to the floor and hope against hope that the door would remain closed, that the dream would not come that night.

But in spite of his efforts at staying awake, including stabbing the palm of his hand repeatedly with a needle taken from his mother’s sewing room, he slept.

And, irresistibly, the nightmare came.

This time it was different. This time, the dream-Daniel did not appear. Instead, Miles seemed to awaken to a frightening greenish glow in his room. It made his hands and arms look swollen and dead where they thrust from the long, thick sleeves of his pajamas.

The room was hot. That fact alone startled the dream-Miles. Usually the dream-world was cold, freezing at times, growing steadily colder until he was forced to move his hands faster and faster, and the air heated and burst into flame that consumed and destroyed. But this time, even though it was foggy and cold outside, with the temperature hovering around 40 degrees, Miles dreamed that he was stifling. Sweat furrowed along the crease of his spine, oozed beneath his arms, down his back, and in his groin. He blinked constantly to keep the burning moisture from his eyes. His hair was matted against his forehead and temples and neck, thick curls of heavy, sodden darkness.

He slid the window open. Whispers of fog roiled through and blended with the subtle green glow until the room was awash with light that seemed to have no single source but rather to emanate from every possible surface—walls, ceiling, furniture, even the rough, shadow-dark carpet.

Opening the window made no appreciable difference in the temperature, however. Miles was hot, boiling. He felt as if his brains were frying, his skin curling from his body in long strips like fresh bacon. He ripped his pajama tops off without bothering to unbutton them; the small white, pellet-like buttons shot across the room with the force of bullets and clattered against the wall.

Now the tendrils of greenish fog brushed against his naked chest like icy fingers, burning with their coldness, but still the room seemed to grow hotter and hotter. He unsnapped his pajama bottoms. They dropped unnoticed to the floor. And still the air was stifling. His lungs were about to explode. The agony intensified as he writhed against the volatile air; his body would combust in an instant and incinerate himself and his room and Daniel and the house and....

Something moved in the closet.

His heart thumping with panic, Miles watched as absolute darkness-within-darkness swirled and coalesced into the shadowy dream-figure. This time he knew immediately that it was male, knew it was old—older than himself, older than Daniel.

And he knew it was evil.

The figure glided like a shroud into the room. Miles stood naked before it, his body a sheen of greenish light as the shadow figure moved closer. It was taller than Miles, bulkier, dark with dread and horror.

It carried the knife.

Faster than thought, the blade slashed toward him. This time, the dream-Miles saw the blade coming. No Daniel lay atop him to intercept its deadly edge. The tip caught the flesh on his upper arm and sliced to his elbow. The wound, while not especially deep, was deep enough that the blood flowed freely and the pain coursed like an electric current through his body.

He tried to jerk back, tried to raise his other arm and cradle the wound, but he could not move. The blade returned.

Swish
.

It sliced like liquid fire the length of his other arm.

Again. His belly this time. Then his thighs. And then....

He closed his eyes, expecting the fatal thrust...and a distant, abstracted part of his mind wondered absently—with the objectivity of a scientist observing the progress of a particularly interesting lab experiment—whether the real-time Miles would die at the same instant the dream-Miles died.

The point of the blade touched his chest, directly over his heart. The metal was icy; his blood was hot. The point touched, pressed. He felt it puncture the top layers of flesh, felt the first drops of blood as they wandered like errant streams down the contours of his chest and abdomen. He waited for the final thrust.

That never came.

He waited, waited, and finally opened his eyes.

The shadow-man stood so close that Miles could see the horror that remained of its face. The flesh heaved and writhed with a life of its own. His cheeks were flayed away to reveal twisted knots of muscle and blackened stumps where teeth might once have been. Light burned through the shadow-man’s eyes, a green and baleful and poisonous light that reflected on the sheening blade.

So abruptly that Miles felt as if the breath were being ripped out of his own body, the blade tip withdrew. The shadow-man deliberately reversed the knife, mesmerizing the boy with the flickering of light across its blood-stained metal until finally Miles realized that the haft was pointing at him, that the shadow-man held the gory tip pinioned against his own rotting chest.

For an eternal instant, Miles stared into the hollows where putrescent remnants of eyes glittered coldly, invitingly at him

And somewhere deep in the horror-stricken, fear-raddled recesses of his mind, the boy understood the hideous offer. Tears streaming down his cheeks, he understood and he accepted the final gift and closed his eyes again—willingly descending deeper deeper into the bottomless abyss of the dream-world—and with a sharp intake of breath that rippled pain through his own lungs and heart, he gripped the blood-slick haft with all his strength and thrust the blade home.

10
.

Daniel Warren usually slept lightly. Unlike Elayne, who could rarely be raised by anything less than a 10.0 earthquake once she fell asleep (assisted, as always, by a pill or three), Daniel roused easily. And he never dreamed.

Which was why he was so startled when he suddenly became aware that he was dreaming of a ghostly hand clamped tightly over his mouth and nose, suffocating him.

Eyes wild and staring, he struggled to sit up and wrench himself from the grip of the nightmare. Then the nightmare took on entirely new orders of terror for Daniel Warren, when he understood that it was not a dream at all. And that he hadn’t wakened when the bedroom door had opened, in spite of the slight squeal that always
always
awakened him. His mind spun for a second, then his eyes flew even more widely open and his breath caught in a painful, ragged gasp that left him reeling. Even in the near darkness of the bedroom, he knew at once what he was seeing. He just couldn’t believe it.

He saw the hot blood streaming from wounds all over his stepson’s naked body—arms, shoulders, chest, gut, thighs. He saw with a shudder that threatened to twist his spine the hideous light in Miles’ staring eyes, the flicker of hideous light on black-stained blade, and the single eye of brilliant white that was the tip of the knife as it slid into his belly as easily and as wetly as a red-hot branding iron would slide into a block of ice, consuming as it destroyed.

The instant he finished what had to be done in the master bedroom, Miles’ body began to shake with an intensity that jarred his teeth and blurred his vision.

This is no dream
!

He stared at the blade hanging limply from his outstretched hand, at the carnage of what had only moments before been a chastely intimate bedroom scene, husband and wife sleeping side by side. They still lay side by side. But no longer sleeping.

Hardly registering that fact that he was covered with gore—not all of it his own—and naked and bleeding from a dozen wounds ranging from superficial to near-fatal, the boy fled the room, throwing the knife away from him with such force that it spun dervish-like through the open bathroom door and shattered the mirror over the medicine chest.

He ran through the silent house. His feet left a trail of moistness blacker than black behind him. In the kitchen, he paused only long enough to grab a set of keys from the homemade key rack next to the garage door—a cunning bit of his own work in the shape of a large key cut from plywood and painstakingly stained redwood and polished to a flawless gloss as a Mother’s Day gift nearly four years before.