Night Terrors

by Mark Lukens

  She rubbed at her arms. It was warm outside, but she felt so cold.

  Her phone!

  Jen rushed to the coffee table and picked up her phone and dialed Kelly’s number.

  She paced around the living room as she listened to the phone ringing in her ear. A pit of fear knotted her stomach and her muscles felt weak and shaky. Her eyes kept darting back to the wall of vertical blinds in front of the sliding glass door; they seemed like a thin barrier against what was out there.

  Come on, Kelly, she thought, pick up the phone.

  Finally, Kelly answered. “Hey, Jen. Kevin not there yet?”

  “He’s here,” Jen answered, talking a little too quickly. “He’s outside looking around. He banged on the sliding glass door earlier and scared the hell out of me and then he was inside and I know I closed the sliding glass door but it was open again -”

  “Hold on, Jen. Slow down.”

  Jen took a deep breath. “I’m sorry. I’m just freaking out. I think someone’s outside my house. I told Kevin not to go out there, but he went anyway.”

  As she talked on the phone, Jen felt a little braver; she walked to the vertical blinds and pushed them aside just a bit so she could peek outside. No one out there. No Kevin, either. She let the blinds fall back in place.

  “Maybe Kevin’s just trying to scare you again.”

  “Yeah, maybe.” But Jen didn’t think so.

  Jen looked at the stereo system; even with the sound turned down low she could still hear the static. “Will you do me a favor, Kelly?”

  “What?”

  “Will you check your radio? See if the stations are coming in okay.”

  “Why?”

  “Please, Kelly.”

  “Okay.”

  Jen walked from the vertical blinds to the TV as she waited for Kelly to check her radio. The picture on the TV was distorted, wavy lines interrupted the program. Jen picked up the remote control and flipped through several channels, all of the channels had wavy lines on them like something powerful was interfering with the signal.

  Jen jumped a little when she heard Kelly’s voice on the phone. “All the radio stations are coming in fine here. What’s going on there?”

  Jen just stared at the TV.

  “Jen? Are you still there?”

  Jen could feel the dark and evil presence now; it was like a blanket smothering her. It was so much stronger now. It was the interfering force on the TV and radio, she was sure of it. There was a killer outside. She didn’t know how she knew this, but it was as real as anything she’d ever known in her life. The killer was out there in the darkness and he was coming for her.

  And this killer was familiar to her. She knew him. She’d seen him before – in her dreams.

  “Jen!!”

  “Yeah,” Jen whispered into the phone. “I’m still here.”

  “You’re kind of freaking me out here.”

  “He’s here now.”

  “Who?”

  No answer from Jen.

  “Jen, you’re really starting to scare me.”

  Jen backed away from the TV and its wavy lines. She turned back to the vertical blinds. A blast of static erupted from the cell phone and blared in her eardrum.

  “He’s here,” Jen said into the phone, but she wasn’t sure if Kelly could hear her words anymore. “The Shadow Man I’ve seen in my dreams.”

  “ … Jen … what … Jen … can’t …” Static cut off Kelly’s words.

  A panic gripped Jen now, she wanted to run, but she didn’t know where she could she run to. The Shadow Man would know where she was going; he would know what she was going to do. He would be one step ahead of her.

  Another blast of static squealed in Jen’s ear from her cell phone. It startled her so badly she dropped her phone. She picked up her phone from the carpet, but there was no signal now. The phone was useless; it wasn’t going to work properly, not with him around.

  Jen jumped and screamed when she heard a pounding on the sliding glass door.

  Kevin! He was back!

  Jen ran across the living room to the vertical blinds. She was about to rip them open when a thought occurred to her – it hadn’t been three knocks. What if it wasn’t Kevin on the other side of the glass? What if it was the Shadow Man from her nightmares?

  She hesitated, listening, waiting for more knocks on the glass. “Kevin?” she called out. “Is that you?”

  No answer.

  There was a pounding on the glass; it almost sounded like the glass was reverberating, threatening to shatter.

  “Kevin! If that’s you, then answer me!!”

  Still no answer from Kevin. If it was Kevin, he would’ve said something by now.

  Then she heard three loud knocks on the sliding glass door hidden behind the blinds. Three deliberate knocks.

  “Kevin … please …”

  Jen took a deep breath and tore the vertical blinds to the side. And then she screamed.

  Oh God. It was too late for Kevin.

  Kevin sank down on the other side of the glass door leaving behind a smear of blood.

  Jen backed away from the sliding glass door, shaking her head no, tears streaming down her face. Her mind buzzed with white-hot panic, and her animal instincts took over – she needed to run.

  She raced across the living room towards the front door and then froze when she heard a pounding at the door.

  Jen stifled a scream. She tried to dial 911 on her cell phone, but the phone still wasn’t working.

  The phone in the kitchen!

  She bolted for the kitchen and ran past the counter to the wall where the phone normally hung, but she stopped dead and stared at the spot on the wall where the phone used to be; now there were just some shredded wires hanging out of the wall – the phone was gone.

  Jen turned to the counter and reached for the block of kitchen knives. She needed something to defend herself with. But all of the knives were gone.

  She hurried back around the counter to the kitchen door that led outside, about to reach for the spare keys on a wooden key holder that was shaped like a key. But all of the keys were gone: the keys to the house, the keys to her mom’s car in the garage. All of them gone.

  She backed up a step away from the wall, shaking her head no, praying that this was another one of her nightmares. This couldn’t be real. She just wanted to wake up.

  A scraping noise at the kitchen door grabbed her attention. She saw the shadowy figure of a man right on the other side of the door, just visible through the sheer curtain.

  The lock on the door handle slowly twisted from locked to unlocked. Then the door handle slowly turned.

  Jen bolted from the kitchen in a blind panic; she ran through the living room for the stairs. She rushed up the stairs, stumbling on the last few carpeted steps as she reached the second floor hall. She fell down in the hallway, but she didn’t waste any time, she was back on her feet and running to her bedroom as whimpers of fear escaped her throat.

  She rushed inside her bedroom and slammed the door shut. She had a lock on her door; she had asked her parents for a lock a few years ago and they had installed one. She twisted the lock and backed away from the door. The lock seemed so flimsy right now. Even the door itself didn’t seem like much protection.

  Her phone!

  She turned and ran to the table beside her bed. Her phone was gone; the only thing left was the telephone wire on the table. No, he couldn’t have been up here already. And then her mind slipped back to the muffled noises she had heard when she and Kevin were in her parents’ bedroom.

  The sound of heavy footsteps in the hall drew her attention back to her bedroom door. A shadow crossed the strip of light underneath the door.

  Jen breathed hard as she tried to think of what to do. She couldn’t protect herself up here; she had nothing to fight back with.

  The window? It was only a fifteen or sixteen foot drop to the ground – she could make it.

  A clicking noise at the do
or. She looked back and saw the lock in the door handle twisting, the door handle turning. The door opened slowly. And the man from her nightmares entered. In her dreams she had never seen his face; it had always been hidden in shadows. He had wanted it that way. But she could see him now, she could see his eyes, and there was no mercy in those dark eyes.

  Jen backed up to the wall, slid down, and cried hopeless tears. She shook her head back and forth.

  “No … please,” she sobbed. “What do you want?”

  The killer approached.

  “What is that thing?” she asked when she saw the metal contraption in his gloved hands.

  And that’s when Jen started screaming.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1.

  Tara woke up panicking as she clawed at the air and screamed out a name: “Jen!”

  She sat up and looked around at the bathroom.

  Then she began to relax – she knew where she was now; she was in her guest bathroom, in the bathtub. She had been sleepwalking again. She’d been having a nightmare about a girl being murdered.

  But this wasn’t a nightmare. It had really happened. Some girl she didn’t even know, a girl named Jen, had been murdered by a killer. She could remember Jen’s face, but she couldn’t remember anything about the killer – because it was like she had been watching everything through his eyes.

  He wants it that way, a voice in her mind whispered.

  Tara closed her eyes for a moment, trying to catch her breath. She was dressed in her usual bedtime clothes – pajama bottoms and an oversized T-shirt. She never wore anything too revealing to bed anymore ever since she was a teenager and she’d woken up three blocks from her house in her underwear after a sleepwalking incident.

  She crawled out of the bathtub. There was light coming from some other place in her apartment, but the bathroom was dark, and she couldn’t be in the darkness. She turned on the bathroom light and caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror, her dark hair was disheveled and her blue eyes were haunted by the images she had just seen in her dreams. Her eyes darted for a moment to the thick, four inch long scar on the side of her neck. She turned away from the mirror and hurried out of the bathroom into her living room.

  She went to the spare bedroom which was around the corner from the guest bathroom she had just woken up in – the light was coming from this room which she used as her office. Along one wall was her desk with the computer on top and two battered filing cabinets next to it. Two bookcases crammed with books took up another wall, and in the corner between the desk and bookcases was her art easel.

  Scattered on the floor were three sheets of drawing paper.

  She picked one of them up, then another, and then the last one. They were quick sketches of Jen. She had drawn them in her sleep. She did this every once in a while when she had a terrible nightmare or vision, but it had been a while since she’d had a night terror this bad – years.

  She studied the sketches, the lines were quick and heavy, not too much detail, but Tara could see the terror in Jen’s eyes, her hands held up in defense. But Jen had not been able to defend herself against this monster.

  Tara wanted to shove the papers away in a drawer, maybe even tear them up and throw them away. She didn’t want these reminders that she’d seen the murder of a seventeen year old girl that she could do nothing about, nothing to help her. But something stopped her. At the edges of each drawing were a few numbers and a word: a number three on one drawing, a number five on the next, and one word on the last one – Run.

  What did this word and these numbers mean? She tried to remember if they had anything to do with the dream – but she couldn’t remember. But they had to mean something.

  Run. Maybe something was telling her to run. Hadn’t that been what she’d been doing during her night terror – running away? Running to her bathroom and hiding in the tub? Jen had been running away from the killer, maybe that’s what the word had to do with it. But Tara felt that the word was targeted towards her, that it was meant for her.

  And the numbers: a three and a five. What did they have to do with anything?

  After a dejected sigh, Tara set the sketches on her desk and left the room. She turned off the light and closed the door. She hurried to the front door and checked to make sure the deadbolt was engaged. She checked the windows. Everything was locked – she was safe.

  But she didn’t feel safe. She still couldn’t push away the feeling of dread that had washed over her. A girl had been murdered tonight and there was nothing she could do about it. A sudden sadness and helplessness nearly overwhelmed her.

  And the worst thing was that she felt like she knew this killer, like she’d seen him before.

  I’ve felt him in my dreams before; I’ve seen horrible things through his eyes before.

  Tara grabbed a bottle of water out of the refrigerator and drank half of it down – she was so thirsty. She stood in front of the open door of the refrigerator with the bottle of water in her hand. A tingly feeling of fear danced across her skin on spidery legs; it was the feeling that someone was in the apartment with her, watching her from some shadowy corner, about to whisper her name from the darkness.

  She spun around when the weight of the feeling became too much.

  No one there.

  Of course there wasn’t.

  She was alone in her apartment.

  She closed the refrigerator door and left the light on over the stove. She went to her bedroom with its trusty nightlight still shining from the outlet near the nightstand. She sat down on the edge of her bed and took a deep breath. She reached underneath her bed and pulled out a length of rope that was tied to one of the legs. She tied the other end around her left ankle. She hadn’t had to tie her leg to the bed in a long time, at least two years. But she couldn’t risk another sleepwalking episode.

  She lay down and stared up at the ceiling. This girl she’d seen in her dream, Jen, was dead by now, she was sure of that. She felt like crying. What good were her visions of a murder if it was already too late to help? There wasn’t anything she could do to help this girl now. She could call the police, but she had no idea where this girl lived, or if she even lived here in Tampa. And she had learned her lesson about contacting the police and trying to help them. They all thought she was a fake. Or they thought she was crazy.

  Tara looked at the alarm clock on the table next to her – eleven thirty. She looked back up at the ceiling.

  “Jen,” she whispered and closed her eyes. But she knew it would be a long time before she would be able to fall back asleep.

  2.

  By eleven thirty p.m. there were cop cars and an ambulance parked in front of Jen’s house, some of the vehicles were parked on the lawn. A plain detective’s car pulled up and parked. Detective Ronald Perry, a tough and weathered fifty-two year old man, stepped out of the car. He had short-cropped silver hair and his facial features, which used to look like they’d been chiseled from granite, had now started to become jowly. His belly had gotten a little bigger over the last ten years, but his ice-blue eyes never missed a thing. His movements were slow and methodical, yet it seemed like he could move like lightning if he needed to. His dark suit was a little rumpled, his tie loosened.

  Perry walked up to the front door of the house where Detective Jackson, a gigantic man, waited. Jackson chewed on a wad of bubble gum, his jaw muscles bunching up underneath his dark skin as he chewed. Jackson used to be a linebacker for the Miami Hurricanes in his younger days, but he never made it to the NFL. While in college, he got a liberal arts degree. And even though he was proud of his degree, he had always dreamed of being a cop. He joined the academy, and then started off as a traffic cop. He worked his way up to a homicide detective in record time.

  Jackson watched Perry approach. Jackson already had a pair of blue nitrile gloves on and he handed a pair to Perry.

  “She’s upstairs,” Jackson told Perry. “In her bedroom. We found the other one in the backyard by the pool.” Jackso
n hesitated just a second and then added: “You’re not going to believe this one.”

  Perry looked at Jackson with heavy-lidded eyes that could stare right through a person, eyes that had seen every kind of depravity of human behavior over the years.

  “Have the parents been contacted yet?” Perry asked as he stuffed his large hands into the gloves.

  “Just reached them,” Jackson answered. “They’re on their way here.”

  Perry turned to a police officer who stood near the front door. “You let us know when the parents get here,” he told the officer. “Don’t let them go upstairs.”

  “Yes sir,” the police officer said.

  Perry and Jackson entered the house. Perry followed Jackson up the stairs and down a hall to a bedroom, a girl’s bedroom – Jennifer McGrath’s bedroom. And there was Jennifer; her body was slumped down between the bed and an overturned end table, the lamp and alarm clock pulled down to the floor. Her back was against the wall and her legs splayed out in front of her like she’d been sitting upright against the wall and then slid over to one side. Her clothes were still on her body and they didn’t look disturbed. Her hair was a little messy and her eyes were wide open in her pale face. Her face and body weren’t marred at all, no injuries on her except for the hole in her throat which was about the size of a dime with a ring of dried blood around it.

  Perry squatted down beside Jen’s body and studied it for a moment. “Not much blood from the wound,” he muttered.

  “The M.E. said most of her blood is gone.”

  Perry looked up at Jackson.

  “He thinks some kind of pump was used on her,” Jackson continued. “The killer collected the blood and took it with him.”

  Perry looked back at Jen’s very pale body. “No signs of any other injuries?”

  “No obvious injuries so far.”

  “What about the other one?” Perry asked. He stood up and stared at Jackson with his milky blue eyes. “The one in the backyard. Was the blood pumped out?”