She was certain that eyes were watching her from behind the windows of the houses.
Now she was very definitely afraid, and she noticed for the first time that there were no other cars on the street, no sign at all of other people. She felt trapped in the neighborhood, cornered. She knew she had to escape, even if it meant returning to school, and she sped up, turning onto Washington, but here again the houses looked exactly the same, cookie-cutter copies of those on Elm. She turned onto Birch, onto Jackson, onto Cedar, but the houses were all alike, and soon she lost track of where she was. Now there were no street signs on the corners and the sky was a brilliant unshadowed white. Down each street were the twin rows of identical houses.
She stopped the car and saw one house that did not look like the others. It was low, one-story, and had been painted a gaudy pink that had long since faded into off-white. She got out of the car and ran toward the house, taking the porch steps two at a time and pushing open the torn screen door as she dashed inside.
The inside of the house was one room, a huge, darkly panelled room filled with beautiful antiques. Against the far wall an old woman sat in a high-backed leather chair. She beckoned to Cathy. “Come here, child,” she said. Her voice was old and kind, filled with the warm tones of a loving grandmother.
Cathy moved forward through the room. Halfway to the old woman, she began to see that the beautiful antiques were not quite as beautiful as she’d originally thought. The framed prints on the wall detailed acts of torture and perversity. The lace-covered tables were host to fetters and branding irons and wicked knives. The chairs had nails protruding points upward from their seats.
The old woman smiled. Next to her, Cathy saw, was a metal seat on which a filled porcelain bedpan was balanced.
The bedpan was dripping slowly onto the floor.
“Hi,” Cathy said tentatively.
“Hello,” the old woman said. This close, she no longer looked so grandmotherly, her voice no longer seemed so kind. “Would you like a doll?”
She gestured to the right, and Cathy saw a young girl wearing a white dress seated on the carpet. The girl giggled, a corrupt, knowing giggle. She smiled slyly. “One, two, Freddy’s coming for you,” she sang in a strangely seductive voice. There was something about the child’s emphasis on the word “coming” that made Cathy’s blood run cold.
“Where’s the doll?” Cathy asked.
“I’m the doll,” the girl said, lowering her eyes shyly.
“Freddy is coming,” the old woman said, and she seemed to take pleasure in the statement.
Cathy ran back the way she had come, past the depraved antiques and out the door.
And there he was.
She stopped in the doorway. It was suddenly hard to breathe. She stared at the monster on the porch. The deep shadows and refracted illumination which before had served to keep his features in at least partial darkness, were gone, and she could clearly see the smooth interconnected ridges of burn scars that crisscrossed his face, the repulsive network of melted discolored skin reshaped and reformed to match the musculature of his thin, hairless head. He grinned cruelly, small teeth charred and misshapen inside the lipless gash of a mouth.
“Cathy,” he whispered. “I came for you.”
Freddy, she thought. His name is Freddy.
Before she could move, jump, get out of his way, the monster was on her. A rough hand whipped around her chest and razors sliced into her stomach, long sharp blades that indiscriminately pierced both organs and arteries as his fingers rammed joyously upward through her midsection. Grinning, Freddy thrust his fingers harder, higher, faster.
Again.
And again.
And again.
She felt the blood spurt out from the line of identical wounds in hot rhythmic jets that mirrored the slow beating of her dying heart. She tasted the sickening salty flavor of blood in her mouth, smelled the rank odor of bile in her nostrils. Through the swirling haze of pain that enveloped her, she stared into the small hard eyes of Freddy Krueger.
“Pleasant dreams,” he whispered, smiling.
SEVEN
He was traveling now, moving outward, going far. Minnesota. Idaho. Nevada. Arizona. Driving in his van, stopping in small towns, killing, moving on. He kept a memento from each child. An ear. A tooth. A finger. He kept them in the small refrigerator in the back of the van.
He would dry them and string them up later.
He also kept, in identical boxes in the back of the van, a supply of Barbie dolls and a supply of Tonka trucks. These he used to attract the kids, offering them the toys if they would take a ride with him. So far the Barbie dolls had been working better; he’d taken down more girls than boys.
He drove all the way to California, all the way to the coast, where he slipped on the glove and slashed open a blond teenage surfer, gutting him like a fish and leaving him on the sand.
He worked his way backward—Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Idaho—collecting toes and noses and kneecaps.
He returned home happy, using his key to open the door unannounced, and he looked into the living room and saw Barbara, on the floor, on her back, while a muscular young jock writhed on top of her, kissing her neck. “Finally a man!” she cried, and her voice was throaty, passionate, a voice he remembered from the past, from before the accident. “Finally a real man!” Ed dropped the glove, fingers clanking discordantly as they hit the ground.
He woke up sweating.
He felt guilty in the morning, ashamed of the dream he’d had, and he was almost glad that Lisa left early and did not stay for breakfast. Barbara came out, gave him a kiss and sat down at the table as always, but for some reason he could not shake the emotional residue of his dream, and he found himself feeling angry with her, slightly hostile, as though she had betrayed him in real life instead of just in his mind. Again he noticed how attractive she was, how beautiful she looked, and he remembered the intensity of their lovemaking in the past.
Could she really give that up?
Stop it, he told himself. You’re just being paranoid.
But he found it hard to meet her eyes, and the two of them ate breakfast in silence.
Before going to school he hosed down the car to get the dew off the windows, and wiped the front and back windshields with a paper towel. He opened the front door of the car and was about to toss the soggy paper towel on the floor in the backseat when he saw something that made his heart lurch in his chest.
In the backseat, on the seat itself, were two boxes.
One was filled with Barbie dolls.
The other was filled with Tonka trucks.
No, he thought. It’s not possible.
But it was possible. The boxes were there. They were real. He opened the back door and was about to pick up the Barbie box and take it into the garage when he thought of Barbara. What if she saw the box? How would he explain that? How could he explain that?
He thought for a moment, then slammed the back door shut. He got into the car, pulled out of the driveway and headed down the street toward school. He tried to ignore the boxes, tried not to think of them, tried to pretend that they had nothing to do with his dream, but he saw the brown cardboard and the piled toys each time he looked in the rearview mirror.
The Barbie dolls appeared to be smiling at him.
The mood at school was different than usual. The kids, when they came in, were more subdued, quieter, and many of them seemed cowed, scared somehow. The normal hallway horseplay was absent, replaced by a quiet solemnity. Something had happened, and he soon found out from one of the teachers what it was.
Cathy Epstein had died in her sleep last night.
Ed’s first thought was for Lisa. Had his daughter been planning to ride with Cathy this morning? He wasn’t sure, but he didn’t think so. He would have heard by now, she would have run back home.
“It’s always a shock when someone dies this young,” the teacher said. “It’s especially shocking to students, who don't thi
nk that something like this can happen to them. It’s always sobering.”
“Yeah,” Ed admitted. He felt a tap on his shoulder, and he turned around to see Lisa standing behind him. Her eyes were red and puffy, tears rolling down her cheeks. “Oh Daddy!” she said, and the tense awkwardness that had existed between them for the past few days was gone. “Cathy’s dead!”
He put his arms around her, hugged her. “I know, sweetie.”
“She was only sixteen!”
He patted her back. “I know.”
A group of football players walked by. One of them, the biggest—Hogan? Was that his name?—grinned. “Incest,” he said. His buddies laughed.
Lisa cried even harder, burying her face in his shoulder, and Ed felt like smacking the kid across the face. Damn punk. He glared at the kid, who looked quickly away.
He found himself thinking of Cathy, of the last time he’d seen her—
Where did you get that sweater?
—and he suddenly remembered that he had dreamed about Cathy last night, that he had dreamed of stalking her, wearing the fingers and stalking her.
He had dreamed of killing her.
He swallowed hard, feeling cold. Lisa continued to cry against him, but his reassurances were on auto-pilot now, automatic, unthinking.
He found himself wondering if other kids had died last night in their sleep.
Kids in Minnesota, Idaho, Arizona . . .
EIGHT
Lisa had not slept well since Cathy’s funeral. Her nights had been taken up with snatches of sleep caught between portions of old movies, her days with dozing in the classroom. Her parents had been concerned, but understanding. She had simply said that she was too disturbed to sleep, that the television helped soothe her mind, made her feel better, and they had allowed her some slack. She did not dare tell them the truth.
She did not dare tell them that she was afraid to fall asleep.
That she was afraid to dream.
A month ago, two weeks ago, even, she would have shared everything with her parents. Or at least with her father—she had always been closer to him than to her mother. But something had happened, something had changed, and she now found herself spending more and more time alone. Other people, she noticed, other students at school, had been avoiding her father as well. He had always been one of the more popular staff members, one of the few adults who didn’t talk down to students in a condescending manner, but lately he’d been working alone, without his usual retinue of admirers.
That worried her a lot.
What worried her more was the fact that she’d heard her father talking in his sleep the other night. His voice had sounded different, lower, rougher. It had reminded her of—
Freddy.
She shivered. Several times during the past week she had considered discussing her dreams with her friends—Keith and Elena, as well as several other students, had looked tired lately, as though they weren’t getting enough sleep— but she’d felt too embarrassed, had not known how to bring up the subject.
“Lisa!”
She looked up from the sidewalk to see Keith’s car, cruising slowly next to her on the street. She squinted against the sun, waved.
“Can we talk to you?” Elena called.
Lisa walked over to the car, leaned against the passenger window. “Sure. What?”
Elena looked at Keith, then looked back. Her voice when she spoke was hesitant, unsure. “You look kind of tired,” she said.
Lisa nodded. “I haven’t been sleeping much lately.”
“Who has?” Keith said.
Elena licked her lips. “I don’t know how to say this,” she said. “It sounds so stupid . . .”
Lisa’s pulse quickened. “Say it.”
“Keith and I have talked about this, and we’ve both been having . . . nightmares. I know that doesn’t sound like anything, but . . . Well, we’ve both been dreaming about the same thing—”
“Freddy,” Lisa said quietly.
Keith and Elena looked at each other. “I told you,” Elena said.
Keith nodded. “Get in the car,” he told Lisa. “We have something to show you.”
“Does it have something to do with this?”
“Get in the car.”
Fifteen minutes later Keith’s Honda pulled in front of a large empty factory in the middle of the industrial section of town. “We’re here,” he said.
The three of them got out of the car. Lisa shivered, cold, though the temperature this afternoon was well into the eighties. She stared at the newly built structure before them. She had never seen the building before, knew nothing about it, but there was something about the place that frightened her, that made her feel dirty and unclean and desperately in need of a bath. It was an almost physical sensation, and she had to force herself to look at it and not turn away. “Okay,” she said. “We’re here. What’s all this about?”
“This was where he was killed,” Elena said.
“Who?”
Keith looked at her. “Freddy.”
Now she had a reason for the fear, and as she looked at the recently painted facade, she saw it for what it was—a whitewashing of the past, an attempt to put a happy face on a place that wasn’t happy at all. The building might be merely brick and mortar, glass and metal, construction materials, but there was something of him in here too, Freddy, and that was what made the place seem wrong, evil. She stared at one of the front windows, squinting her eyes against the glare of the late afternoon sun, and she thought she could see an older building behind this new one, a decrepit factory, burned and razed.
She turned toward Keith, facing him. “What happened?” she asked.
He swallowed. “Well, first of all, I guess I should tell you how we found out about this—”
“I don’t care how you found out about it. Just tell me what happened.”
“Okay. I know this sounds like TV movie territory, but Freddy was a child molester—”
“A child killer,” Elena corrected.
“—who was freed on a technicality in the early seventies. The kids’ parents must’ve seen too many Charles Bronson flicks or something, because after he was released, they followed him. They followed him here. He was up in the boiler room, supposedly playing with the bloody clothes of one of the kids he’d killed, talking to himself. He had on, you know, his glove, his fingers, and he was like shredding the clothes. The parents . . . well, they’d brought along some gasoline . . .” He cleared his throat. “They burned down the building. They killed him.”
“Oh my God,” Lisa breathed.
“The scary part is that he didn’t seem to care. He didn’t fight back or anything. I don’t know if this part is true or not, but his last words were supposed to be: ‘I have promises to keep. And miles to go before I sleep.’ ” Keith took a deep breath. “He said this while he was on fire, while he was burning up.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“And then he started laughing.”
“Why here? Why did he come here?”
“This was where he took all his victims. This was where he killed them.”
“Yeah, but I mean why did he take them here?”
“He had the keys. He was a janitor.”
A janitor.
The goose bumps sped down Lisa’s arms. She thought of her father, of the strange look she had seen lately on his face.
They were silent for a moment, looking at each other.
And though none of them said anything, they each felt scared and suddenly very vulnerable.
“Can we go inside?” Lisa asked. “I want to see something.”
Elena nodded. “You want to see if it looks like your dream.”
“Yes.”
“Me too.”
Keith walked across the unlandscaped ground and picked up a chunk of concrete that was lying amidst the detritus of leftover construction materials. “That’s why we’re here,” he said. He started walking toward the side of the building. “Come on. T
here has to be a back door or a window or something. We’ll break in.”
They didn’t have to break in. One of the side doors was unlocked, and they opened it surreptitiously, checking to make sure they weren’t seen, then darted inside. There were no lights in the building, but a diffused illumination came from somewhere—windows, skylights—and they wandered through a series of empty rooms.
“Wait a minute,” Lisa said, cocking her head. “I hear something.”
“I don’t—”
“Shh!”
Now they all heard it. A pumping or pounding, a rhythmic mechanical sound coming from the floor above them.
“Upstairs,” Keith said.
They followed his lead, down a series of steps, then up.
And then they were in the boiler room.
Lisa recognized it from her dream, and she could tell from the expressions on their faces that Keith and Elena did too. She stood in place, unmoving. The air smelled of coal and chemicals and heavy copper, of fires and smelting, with an undercurrent of something sweeter, something slightly sickening that made her want to gag. Around her were the machines, their rhythmic pumping loud, even faintly hypnotic. Above her ran a series of catwalks that followed the straight paths of the huge pipes. The ground beneath her feet was slippery black concrete.
She took a tentative step forward. The air here was hot and humid, dripping with condensation. Steam hissed from various pipes and gauges. Even if she had not known what had happened here, she would have sensed that something was not right about this place. There was something frightening in this room, an undeniable sense of wrongness that could not be hidden or disguised, to which even the most insensitive individual would have responded. This was where the living Freddy had murdered a host of innocent children, where he had slowly and lovingly slit their throats, playing his hideous bloodgames.
This was where the dead Freddy now took children in their dreams.
“Let’s get out of here,” Elena said. Her voice was high, terrified.
Miles To Go Before I Sleep Page 3
