The Nightmare Within

by Glen Krisch

  He originally carried the Christmas picture because of the happy memory of opening the gift. Now, he kept the picture close at all times because his dad was off to one side, stooped over to kiss his grandma on the cheek as she clapped in excitement over her grandson's reaction. The picture was perfect, capturing a perfect moment. It had become one of his oddities. Something that represented something else. It stirred something deep inside him that he wouldn't fully grasp until he was older. Just like the rubber band and black bird feather.

  When he turned his attention back to the pond, a few coins glimmered in the sunlight. He had only seven dollars in his pocket, so he hiked up his pants to his knees and took off his windbreaker. The water was refreshing on his skin but was deeper than he expected. It licked at his rolled jeans and he nearly slipped on the slick bottom. He scooped up a handful of mud, and when he sifted it, he counted seventy-four cents. Not a bad haul. He dried the coins on his shirt and pitched them into his pocket. He kicked at the mud, trying to unearth more booty.

  After about half an hour, Kevin climbed out of the pond. His clothes were soaked, but his pockets were weighed down with what felt like a limitless treasure. He gathered up his belongings, and went behind the fountain to change into a dry shirt. He had his new gym shirt with him, and it would have to do. He didn't have a change of pants, so he squeezed as much water out of his pant legs as possible.

  He wanted to count his money, but knew he should at least wait until his clothes were dry and he was clear of the park. As Kevin left the park, he noticed the traffic had thickened on both the roads and sidewalks. People seemed on edge, even more so than any normal morning.

  "Can I help you son?"

  A hand grasped Kevin's shoulder and he knew that when he turned around he would see the unstable eyes and slathered mouth of Mr. Freakshow.

  Actually, it turned out to be a policeman, but a policeman was almost as scary as Mr. Freakshow. The policeman could have seen him take the coins from the fountain. A policeman would ask questions. A policeman would take him home to his grandma's house, making his whole family sitting ducks. Kevin's chest constricted.

  "I'm fine, sir." Kevin tried to turn away, but the policeman's hand seemed as firm as Mr. Freakshow's claws.

  "Where's your mom? Did she go into one of the shops?" The officer looked around to see if any stray parent was coming to claim him. Kevin could see the man was just trying to be a nice guy. "You know, it's not safe out, especially this morning, all that shit going on."

  "What's going on?"

  The policeman looked at him as if Kevin had just crawled out of a cave. "That damned museum. They let wild animals out, or whatever they had displayed. Been all over the news. Been causing all kinds of havoc."

  "I turned in early last night. We left early to shop. We don't even own a TV," Kevin rambled. He didn't need to hear anymore. He thought Mr. Freakshow would have escaped alone, but it made even more sense to let all the dreams loose. It provided him with a perfect cover.

  "Where did you say your mom is?"

  "Well… I think she's…" Kevin had never been good at lying, so he did what he had seen in any number of kid movies--he stomped on the policeman's foot. To his surprise, it worked and the policeman went down to one knee and his hands went to his injured foot as he cried out in pain. Kevin didn't think twice. He charged between two women, and after nearly stumbling over a baby stroller, turned a corner and was in an alley. His backpack jostled around on his shoulders and his back started to ache, but he kept sprinting down the alley, across an intersecting street and through to another alley, dodging errant garbage and dumpsters, before he allowed himself to look back. He took a deep breath. It had worked.

  The city was strangely quiet, as if it had collectively paused to ponder Kevin's indiscretion with the officer. Then he noticed the sour smell of the alley. Spilled beer and spoiled food. He approached the next cross street cautiously, just in case the cops had set up a roadblock for him. He felt like a fugitive, but that wasn't necessarily a bad thing in his mind.

  When he figured the coast was clear, Kevin casually walked out of the alley, his hands in his pockets, jingling his stolen coins. He felt like an adult, or maybe an older kid, like Reid--doing bad things just because he could. He felt like he could pass for twelve years old.

  Sophie noticed Kevin from a block away. There was no way she would forget his face, not after seeing him just after Maury Bennett had taken that monster from the boy's mind. He'd been woozy and unsteady on his feet, and his poor mother had barely been able to keep him upright. Seeing him now, he no longer had dark circles under his eyes. At the museum he had looked half-dead, now he looked half-scared to death.

  He looped his thumbs through the straps of his backpack as he gawked at the skyscrapers. He looked entirely vulnerable, either to Mr. Freakshow, or anyone else who might prey on a child's weakness. She closed in on him, gripping her purse tightly. With him still looking to the sky, she let him run into her.

  "Excuse me--" a woman called out after Kevin had run into her.

  "I'm sorry, ma'am." Kevin wanted to get by the old lady, but she pinched the sleeve of his gym shirt with her doll-sized hands. He probably hadn't seen her as he walked since she was barely bigger than him and was out of view when he was staring at the buildings. He noticed her small canvas bag was heavy with canned goods. Her gray hair fell out from the corners of her wide-billed summer hat.

  "It's perfectly okay young man, but you might want to be careful walking around like that. People will think you've never seen the city before. Some people would want to take advantage of that."

  "I've been to the city before." Kevin felt like he was lying to his grandma.

  "I didn't say you haven't. I've just been around a while and I've seen the bad side of people. Since you're a big strapping fellow, would you mind walking with me? I would feel safer that way."

  Kevin didn't know this woman, but he already liked her. She had called him young man, and she thought he was strapping, whatever that meant. She also had a friendly, inviting face.

  "Sure I will."

  "If you need to be somewhere, I don't want to take you away from it."

  "I don't have any plans 'til tomorrow," Kevin said, trying to sound like he had any control over the direction of his life.

  "I guess that's good for me. I would greatly appreciate it, especially with all the happenings in the city," she said, staring at him. "There's been all sorts of fires and looting on the far side of town. Even heard of rioting tearing apart whole city blocks."

  "Sounds bad. Must be that museum I've been hearing about," Kevin said.

  "Yeah, that's what I heard, too." They walked for a while before the woman spoke again. "You know, I once read a newspaper article about a group of forty monkey's escaping from a zoo in Austria."

  "Really? What happened?"

  "Well, I can't remember what kind of monkey they were, but just that they didn't come from that part of the world. They only recaptured about a dozen of them. Another dozen died because they couldn't adapt to their surroundings."

  "What about the rest?"

  "That's the interesting part. They didn't come from that part of the world, but that also meant they didn't have any natural enemies. They adapted to their new surroundings. They blended in, and now they're thriving."

  "Wow. That's cool. I wonder if that's going to happen to the dreams that escaped…"

  "Looks like we're going to find out soon enough."

  "By the way, I'm Sophie Marigold."

  They continued walking, and Kevin apprised this woman from the corner of his eye. His grandma had told him that she trusted her instincts when it came to people. Sophie could well be Mr. Freakshow in disguise. But his instincts told him that she was just a nice old lady. He concentrated on the outlines of her face, waiting to see the illusive "hidden color" that his grandma had mentioned. He didn't know why he trusted Sophie, but he did know he felt safe in her presence.

  Eventually,
Mr. Freakshow found the house. The city was larger than it appeared and he strolled up the front walk with the sun already warming away the morning dew. He had been cautious with his route; he made sure he wasn't near any of the chaos inflicted by the other dreams. He would have enjoyed watching the humans struggle with the dreams, but the boy was priority number one.

  The house was an old ranch. He knew the layout intimately from the boy's memory. He went to the front door and glanced around, before twisting the doorknob apart in his hand. It was made of brass, but it crumpled under his grip like tin foil.

  Knock, knock, anyone home? he thought, chuckling to himself.

  The boy's room was at the end of a hall, and he immediately headed in that direction. He could smell one human in the house, but it wasn't his prey. He stopped and listened to the sounds of the house.

  "Carin, that you?" a voice called from the kitchen.

  The Freak could hear clinking noises, and then the smell of coffee hit him.

  "I made extra coffee for when the officers get here, do you want any?" The voice was closer, in the hall.

  The Freak turned toward the brittle old woman. "No thank you. I don't like coffee. It gives me heartburn." He closed the gap with the woman. She was acting strangely--as if she were straining her ears for every nuance of his voice.

  The old lady almost fell over as she backed away. "It's you… How did you get here?"

  "My, my. You know me, but we haven't been formally introduced. Let me guess, you must be the boy's grandma? He sure is kind to you in his dreams. You don't look nearly so broken down and old when he dreams of you. That boy of yours, so kind to his dear, dear grandmother."

  "I want you out of this house, now!" she raised her voice, but there was little conviction behind her words.

  "Oh, I will. But I just need to know where to find the boy." Mr. Freakshow towered over her as he cut the distance between them with every stride. She stood with her arthritic hands clenched at her sides. He could see her vacant eyes.

  "You will not touch a hair on his head."

  "If you insist. I've always tried to respect the old and near dead, so I won't touch a hair on his head. Now, the rest of him… the rest of him will probably have to bleed some. How else am I going to kill him?"

  "God damn you," Agnes said under her breath.

  The Freak stooped low and turned toward her ear, and growled, "No, Grandma, God damn you!"

  She flailed forward as she tried to cover her ears. "Just leave him alone… he's such a nice boy. And he's been through so much." Agnes fell to her knees and started rocking forward and back.

  "He's been through so much because I have demanded it of him." He paused to let his words seep into her head. "I will leave him alone when he is good and dead." He pushed her over with his heel. She fell as easily as a bag of autumn leaves.

  "No…" the old lady moaned. "Kevin… You'll never find him. He's too clever, and you… you're nothing more than a bully."

  "Hmm, interesting. I never knew that. A bully? Okay. I'll accept that, as long as I get what I want. And you know what I want, right? You have information in that sweet gray head of yours. I just have a few questions for you, and then you can go back to your coffee. Agreed?"

  "Go to hell…" Agnes said.

  It took a few minutes to get any real information out of the old lady, but true to human nature, she eventually reached the point where she was babbling on senselessly about her grandson. Mr. Freakshow learned that she had given the boy a baseball glove for Christmas last year. The most interesting tidbit came when she blurted out the information of the boy's father cheating on her daughter. Of course, Mr. Freakshow already knew this information, but she explained the details with such passion and unveiled anger toward her dead son-in-law. She obviously needed to get the information off her chest before she died.

  He pressed her for more dirt on the boy, and he pushed long after she had anything more to give. The Freak enjoyed watching how a human would break under enough pain. At least she had given him a lead or two to follow up before her heart gave out. With the information so tantalizing and dancing through Mr. Freakshow's mind, he headed for the back door. The piercing sirens of two squad cars cut through his contentment as the cars whipped into the old lady's driveway.

  He headed toward a baseball field down the street, having left a little present inside the house for the cops. Mr. Freakshow was glad he wasn't a cop; he was too easily squeamish. He cut through a yard three houses down, returning to the sidewalk. He was practically skipping when he heard the cries of horror coming from inside the house. He patted the inner pocket of his drab human coat. The old lady's skull, cleaned of its withered skin, hung heavily near his heart. The first building block in his mighty throne. Mr. Freakshow smiled.

  Not long after Carin went charging from her mother's house screaming Kevin's name, she turned her Explorer around. It all hit her at once.

  She was a handful of blocks from the house when she realized she would never find Kevin like this, screaming his name from the open window, searching dark corners and through the windows of cars parked on the street. She didn't know where he was, but she was wasting her breath. She let the car idle through a sleepy intersection. The mixture of terror and parental instinct that had sent her half-crazed in search of Kevin had weakened to glowing coals simmering in her belly. The urge to find and protect and love him was still inside, gnawing at her. She decided she would go back and talk with her mother while they waited for the police to arrive.

  Carin's throat was scratchy and she felt like she had eaten something rotten. The morning was quickly warming, but Carin rubbed her hands across her arms as if she were trying to keep out a chill. Not all that far away from home, a number of sirens gathered, wailing awake the rest of the neighborhood.

  She sped down the residential streets leading to her mother's house. The block was blanketed by men in blue. There wouldn't be nearly so many police cars responding to call about a missing child. And from the sickened expressions on the faces of the officers lingering near the opened front door, something was horrifically wrong.

  Chapter 17

  A chain of police cars came barreling down the street with their lights flashing and their sirens crying their desperate cries, weaving through the shocked morning traffic. Maury hoped the policemen would sweep up to the curb where he walked, storm from their patrol cars, and throw him against the wall of the nearest building. Blame him. Arrest him. Take him away from this mess that wouldn't have happened if he hadn't been so mind-fucked, love-struck, whatever you wanted to call it.

  It's all my fault. My fuck up. Without me, it would be any other Saturday morning.

  Prying drunks off the sidewalks, chasing away the panhandlers, busting the speeders, the swervers, the road-ragers. But now it was a new day, totally new, a new city, a new land. The cops kept on barreling down the street, around the corner and away.

  His mind was a mixture of guilt--for his stupidity at letting loose the Freak, one more stupid decision in a seemingly endless stream--and of desperation. He needed to find Juliet. He imagined finding her, lost, unsure of her surroundings, skittish at the slightest unfamiliar noise, and wondered if he would tell her right away, before any other words could slip from his lips to mess that up too, I love you. But that reaction would only fuck up the situation like everything else. When he found Juliet, if he found her, he would hold her, say little or nothing, let his emotions and the closeness of his heartbeat speak for him.

  Where would an eccentric dream-woman venture if given her freedom? She would gravitate to humans similar to her. She would seek comfort in those who would understand her human-like qualities. A library. Used bookstores. A coffee house. Head shops. There were so many possibilities. And she had no family. Her dreamer lived near Milwaukee. She respected Barbara as she would a parent, but Maury didn't think she would leave her immediate surroundings to track her down. At least not right away. She would want to understand what was around her, the wa
ys people acted, what they talked about, how they lived. She wouldn't move on until she achieved this. Or so he hoped. He had barely met her when she invited him into her enclosure. His guesses were only that. Guesses.

  He scrutinized every woman who walked by, looking at their clothes, seeing their faces, and not finding Juliet. He felt like he had lost all control of his life.

  The thought of family made him realize that he had his own family to think about. Robert and Eliza Unger. His adoptive parents.

  He began searching the street for a payphone. People were pushing by him, palpable tension stiffening their movements, tightening the skin of their faces. Everyone was in a hurry, and the morning had just begun. He realized everyone was seeking out their families.

  In times of trouble, our family bonds strengthen. Little conviction accompanied the thought.

  Maury crossed the street, navigating through the teeming intersection to a bank of payphones. Just before he could make it to the other curb, the driver of some foreign luxury sedan gave him the finger, and for a brief moment, he thought the driver realized the city was in upheaval because of him. But the driver honked his horn, turned his abusive finger in the direction of the too-slow driver in front of him, and then sped off as traffic picked up. Maury quickened his pace to beat a haggard-looking woman to the phone. She hissed at him like an angered cat, then folded her arms and tapping her foot.