Waking Nightmares

by Christopher Golden

  Tonight he would sleep here, right in this chair, or on the sofa. He would give himself over to grief and exhaustion. But tomorrow . . . tomorrow he would start digging. He would talk to Amber, see if she’d had any other visions, and he would do some research. One word had resonated in those visions, and it had stuck in Amber’s mind. Now it echoed in Miles’s thoughts as well.

  Navalica.

  It had to mean something. If he could find out what, perhaps he would learn what had killed his mother.

  And what he had to do to destroy it.

  AMBER woke abruptly, inhaling sharply as though she had stopped breathing for a minute. It took her a few seconds to orient herself to her surroundings. She still lay on the couch, her neck stiff from being propped awkwardly against the sofa arm. Stretching, she gave a soft moan and blinked, trying to focus her vision. The floor lamp in the corner still offered a wan golden light, but most of the illumination in the room came from the infomercials playing at low volume on the television. The clock above the cable box read 12:21 . . . not very late for a girl in college. On campus, there would be parties that were just getting started, or just getting good. But after the day she’d had, Amber was in no mood for a party.

  She swung her legs off the sofa and sat up, rubbing her hands over her eyes. Her throat felt parched and, sleepily, she made a mental checklist of the steps between this moment and crawling into her bed. A glass of water. A visit to the bathroom. Removing the clip from her hair. Undressing. She had some eye makeup on, but she was too tired to clean it off tonight.

  The house creaked with a gust of wind, and she heard the rain against the windows and on the roof and realized that the storm still raged outside. But as she listened, she thought maybe it had eased off just a little. That was something, at least. And you didn’t dream, she thought, before immediately correcting herself. You didn’t have a vision. What a relief to know that she could sleep without those hideous images invading her mind.

  The murmur of the TV drew her attention. She grimaced at the sight of the bearded man on the infomercial. The guy had been dead for years, but they still had him hawking products. It was ghoulish. With a shudder, she dug around the cushions on the sofa for the remote control and clicked off the TV, leaving that dim floor lamp the only source of light in the room, save for the oddly bluish lightning that flickered outside from time to time.

  A glance at the chair in the corner confirmed that Gran had gone to bed. She slept ninety percent of her life now, but Amber figured that she had earned a rest. Her chair was one of the electronic variety that raised itself until its owner was nearly vertical. Some days Gran didn’t really need to use it, but most of the time she did so just for safety. Amber had suggested more than once that they install one of those lifts on the stairs, but Gran always clucked her tongue in irritation at such talk. She needed help getting up, but if she took her time and held the railing, she could navigate the stairs all right.

  Until the day you can’t, Amber always thought but would never say. She worried about that day, when her old Gran would come tumbling down. She had also mentioned many times that her parents might want to turn the back porch into a bedroom for Gran so she wouldn’t need to go upstairs to bed, and even offered her own room on the second floor, so Gran wouldn’t have to walk up to her room in the house’s converted attic. Her parents were all for either option, but the stubborn old woman wouldn’t hear of it. She didn’t want to sleep on the porch or in someone else’s bedroom. She wanted her own room. Amber thought it ridiculous, especially considering that Gran did nothing in that room except sleep, and never returned to it during the day. Once she came downstairs, she was down until bedtime, so she didn’t have to do the stairs any more than absolutely necessary.

  I hope I’m not that stubborn when I’m as old as she is, Amber thought now as she stretched again and then headed for the kitchen. She smiled. Assuming I’m lucky enough to get that old in the first place.

  She filled a glass with ice water and carried it upstairs to her bedroom. Stripping to her underpants, she slipped on an oversized T-shirt that smelled fresh from today’s laundry and then padded across the hall to the bathroom. After she’d relieved herself, she avoided looking at herself in the mirror as she washed her hands. If she saw the little bit of makeup she had on, she’d want to take it off, and she could feel the comfort of her bed calling to her.

  As she stepped back into the hallway, a shudder went through her. The skin on her right arm prickled with gooseflesh and a damp heat that seemed to come from nowhere. She turned in that direction and her heart clenched in her chest.

  In the gap of the partly opened door to her parents’ bedroom stood a familiar, skeletal black figure, all stick limbs and night-dark tatters of fabric or smoke. The curved blades in its hands glinted in the blue light flickering from her parents’ television set inside the room.

  A Reaper. Amber couldn’t breathe. This must be a vision. Of course it had to be. These things existed only when she closed her eyes.

  But she knew it was not a vision. Cold fear burned in her, panic surging. She took two steps back, staring at the impossible and shaking her head. She bumped into the frame of the bathroom door and the Reaper whipped around to stare at her, pinpricks of ice blue leaking mist from the dark pits of its eyes.

  “Out,” she said, surprising herself with the firmness of her voice.

  She shot out a hand, felt around for the switch outside the bathroom that would turn on the hall lights. Her palm brushed against the switch.

  “Get out!” she screamed as she flipped it, bathing the hallway in yellow light.

  The thing glared at her defiantly for a moment, and then a gust of wind struck the house with such force that Amber could feel the wall trembling against her back. The Reaper cocked its head as though listening to some distant call, then darted down the corridor and struck the window at the bottom of the attic stairs, passing right through the glass with a noise like a tremulous sigh.

  “Oh my God,” Amber said. Her hand shook as she raised it up to cover her mouth. Not just my hand. She realized her whole body was shaking.

  The thing had looked exactly like the ones in her visions. The Reaper had been a wraith in the darkness, but when she had turned on the light she had seen it very clearly. It might be an insubstantial thing, almost like a ghost, but there was no denying that it was real.

  “Mom,” she said, realization striking her as she rushed toward their bedroom door. “Dad.”

  The door had been half open, and now she pushed it the rest of the way. It banged off the doorstop screwed into the baseboard, and Amber stood staring at her parents as they slept in the flickering light from the television. Or were they sleeping? Her heart fluttered inside the cage of her chest as she stared.

  Her father stirred. He seemed to sense her standing there and rolled over.

  “Amber?” he asked. “What was that noise? Something wrong?”

  Not just something, she wanted to say. Everything! But how was she supposed to explain what she had seen in the hall? If she told him it came from her dreams, or visions, he would think it had been part of a dream. And could she really be so certain that it hadn’t been some echo from a nightmare? She’d had a seizure this morning and been taken to the emergency room. Her brain had gone on the fritz for a while. How could she be sure this wasn’t a by-product of that?

  It wasn’t. It was real.

  Part of her felt so certain, so insistent. But if she had doubts, and she had seen the thing, what would her parents say? What else could they say, but that monsters—under the bed or in the hallway—weren’t real?

  “Sorry. I banged the door,” she said, trying to hide the whimper of relief that came out with the words, now that she’d seen her parents were all right. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

  “What’s wrong? Gran okay?”

  Amber stared at the two figures in the bed. Her mother—always a notoriously deep sleeper—groaned and turned in the bed, put
ting her back to them, shutting out the disturbance.

  “Yeah. She’s in bed,” Amber said. “I just had a bad dream, I guess. The storm’s got me freaked out.”

  At last, her father turned his tired eyes upon her. His smile made him seem younger than his fifty-one years. The light from the TV made the generous patches of gray stand out against the darker bristle of his hair, but still he looked more tired than old.

  “Just a dream, honey,” he said. “And just a storm. Both’ll pass.”

  “Thanks, Dad. Sorry. Go back to sleep.”

  “Not sleeping that well, actually,” Frank Morrissey replied.

  Amber looked at her father, a little alarm bell going off in her head. “You having bad dreams, too?”

  “Nah. Just stiff,” he said, then illustrated the point by groaning as he stretched. She could hear his joints popping from across the room. He scratched at his right arm. “And itchy as hell. Hope I don’t have the shingles again.”

  Amber nodded. “You’ll be all right. All you need is a good night’s rest, without your daughter waking you up’cause she’s afraid of a thunderstorm.”

  “I’ll tell you a secret,” her father said. “Nights like this, I’m a little afraid, too.”

  She smiled. “Night, Dad.”

  “Good night, sweetheart.”

  Amber turned to leave the room. As she went out into the hall, she heard her father moving around, trying to get comfortable again. He moaned softly, obviously in more discomfort than he had let on. Frank Morrissey often joked with his wife and daughter that once he’d hit fifty years old, the warranty had run out and he had started to fall apart. Her father, it seemed, was getting rusty. Amber wished he would exercise more. She vowed to herself that she would not surrender so willingly to the aging process.

  With a nervous glance around the hall, she went to her room and climbed under the covers, but she had no intention of sleeping. She had left her bedroom door open and now she clicked on her reading lamp and picked up the Jodi Picoult book she’d been reading. Amber didn’t want any more visions, no more bad dreams. And just in case they were more than dreams, she wanted to make sure her family was safe. If the Reaper returned, she would be awake and on guard, and she could at least shout a warning.

  When the sun rose, she would sleep. She would miss most of her Thursday classes, but that seemed a small price to pay to make certain that the darkness in her visions did not infiltrate her real world, her real life.

  Amber glanced out into the hall, then at the rain pattering her darkened window.

  It wasn’t my imagination, she thought. I only wish it were. But she didn’t want to wake her parents again. Tonight, she would read. And tomorrow, when she woke, she would tell them about the things she had seen, both in her mind and in their house, and about the things she feared.

  In daylight, she would tell them. It would feel safer.

  Frowning, she glanced out the window again, thinking of the storm, wondering if there would even be daylight tomorrow.

  Please, let me have some sunshine, she thought, sending the prayer up to a God she had never spent much time thinking about until tonight.

  Forcing herself to look at the pages of her book, she tried to read.

  Please.

  DR. Jenny O’Neil stood at the nurses’ station just outside the secure area of Hawthorne Union Hospital’s psych unit and tried to persuade herself that there was a rational explanation for what had happened tonight. She held an ice pack to the side of her face, waiting for the OD of ibuprofen she’d taken to kick in, and stared at the door to the secure area, which stood propped open. She had never seen it propped open before, and it seemed strange and counterintuitive. The whole ward had gone apeshit. Half a dozen patients and one of the orderlies had experienced simultaneous episodes of psychotic aggression. Logic suggested that maybe leaving the door wide open wasn’t the smartest thing in the world. The view down the corridor should have comforted her. There were eight or nine cops, half a dozen security guards, and at least that many orderlies, not to mention several doctors and a platoon of nurses. It looked like half the hospital had been detached from their normal posts to come and help clean up the mess.

  “You sure you don’t want something stronger than ibuprofen ?”

  Jenny glanced over to find a nurse named Lauren watching her. The woman had been on the job for a quarter century and had confided to Jenny that she had thought she’d seen it all, until tonight. Lauren looked spooked, and Jenny didn’t blame her at all.

  “You think I should prescribe myself some Vicodin?” Jenny said. “I think that’d be counterproductive.”

  Lauren made a valiant attempt at a smile. “Oh, I don’t know. I think we could all use a little Vicodin right about now.”

  Jenny sighed and took the ice pack off her face. One of the patients had thrown her into a wall, but she was fortunate that had been her only injury. Elissa was up in surgery right now having her cheek repaired. It would take several rounds of plastic surgery to get her face looking even close to normal again. The image of that crazy bastard tearing at her with his teeth was stuck in Jenny’s mind, and she knew it would haunt her when she tried to go to sleep. Maybe Vicodin wasn’t a bad idea after all.

  “I’ll tell you this much,” Jenny said, “someone better cover my shift tomorrow night, because I need to blow the cobwebs of this place out of my brain and the only thing that’s going to do that is a little time away.”

  Lauren nodded. “Somehow I doubt that’s going to be a problem,” she said, then nodded toward the secure area. “Looks like you’re wanted.”

  The police lieutenant who was heading up the investigation strode toward the nurses’ station accompanied by a nurse named Franco, the only male among the psych unit’s usual coterie. Sexist as it might be, Franco was often called on when there were unruly patients, a by-product of his being larger and more powerful than most of the orderlies. Tiny as she was, Jenny had never gravitated toward men like Franco, but she’d seen other women on staff swoon over him. The police lieutenant, on the other hand, was exactly her type—gruff and cynical, but also lean and handsome.

  “Dr. O’Neil,” the lieutenant said. “How are you feeling?”

  “I’ll survive,” she said, wishing she could remember his name and wondering if her poor memory suggested a concussion. She ought to have one of the other docs have a look at her. “I don’t suppose you have any idea what happened here?”

  “An act of God?” the lieutenant suggested.

  She knew he meant the death of the murderer, Pinsky, who’d been flash-fried by lightning that had broken through the wall of the building.

  “Maybe it was,” she said. “But I’m not just talking about that. Freak lightning storms aren’t unheard of. I’m talking about the people who went . . .”

  “You don’t want to say crazy,” the lieutenant observed.

  “Let’s say rabid.”

  The lieutenant looked troubled. “Rabid sounds right. As for what happened, I have no more idea than you do. I wish you could tell me that all of the patients who became violent were on the same medication. We’d at least have a starting point.”

  “I already told you, Lieutenant—”

  “I know, I know,” he said, holding up a hand. “I said, ‘I wish.’ ”

  Franco gave her a meaningful look. “I overheard one of the officers saying there was a similar incident at a club downtown.”

  “Really?” Jenny asked, surprised. “Tonight?”

  The lieutenant seemed irritated at Franco—or maybe at whichever officer had let it slip—but he nodded. “It could be. There was a fire at the club and a lot of people were injured, but reports on the scene say there was an outbreak of violence before the fire. It might be nothing but too much alcohol, but . . .”

  “But what?”

  Lauren came out from the nurses’ station and pulled Franco aside, giving him quiet instructions that sent him off toward the room of Sierra Langan, the fiftee
n-year-old girl who enjoyed cutting herself far too much.

  The lieutenant seemed to be rethinking having told Jenny anything to begin with, but he forged ahead.

  “Apparently they kept fighting, even though the building was on fire.”

  Jenny understood, then, why he had told her.

  “Sorry, Lieutenant,” she said.

  “For what?”

  “I take care of crazy people. I mean, the way you see it. But most psychiatric patients are not that complicated when you get to the bottom of it. Some can be helped and some can’t. But each case is different. When it comes to something like this . . . mass psychosis or group irrationality—like the total abandonment of self-preservation required to stay in a burning building and keep fighting—doesn’t fall within the usual parameters of my work.”

  His disappointment was obvious. It troubled Jenny that they were both looking to each other for answers and coming up with nothing. The only thing she could point to as potentially affecting the patients had been the weather. Bad storms were often disturbing to psychiatric patients, and for whatever reasons, she had always felt that the level of their agitation corresponded directly to how many of them were in the psych unit at any given time.

  But weather couldn’t account for this. Not even freaky blue lightning striking the building and blowing in a wall. Yes, it might make the schizophrenics even wilder than usual, but to send half a dozen patients into seemingly homicidal, bestial rage, and doing the same to a member of the hospital staff . . . ridiculous. If it wasn’t the storm or the wrong medication, she couldn’t begin to imagine what could cause something like this. Jenny wished she could leave the investigation to the police, but it wasn’t just their problem. She and her colleagues would be studying the night from every angle, just as the cops would. But Jenny had a feeling they weren’t going to find any easy answers.