The Nightmare Within

by Glen Krisch

  "Kevin… my baby… please…" Carin sobbed, dragging her twisted leg behind her as she crawled out the front door. His body was a sprawled mess, his eyes open to the final minutes of night. The sun was at the horizon, pushing away fears of the dark, pushing away the dreams and nightmares until tomorrow.

  The pain had woken her rudely. Her face felt like a monster mask of swollen bruises and bleeding lacerations. Her leg was useless and she didn't want to look at it until she found her son. She would never make it up the stairs or into the basement. When she left through the front door, she would crawl to the nearest neighbor's house. Plead for them to call the police.

  But when she looked around when she left the house she saw Kevin's body pressed into the ground like a squashed bug. And his eyes were empty.

  She hobbled to his side, her trembling hands searching his wrist for a pulse. Nothing. She pressed her fingers against his neck, and still found no sign of life. Touching his cheek, she wiped a bloody streak away.

  She sobbed, her tears falling onto Kevin's face. The fact that he didn't react to their wetness made her cry even more.

  "I can't do this… You can't die! Baby…" she screamed, feeling as helpless as she had ever felt.

  Carin didn't hear the sirens of the ambulance or the squad cars as they pulled up in the empty driveway and along the street. She did not recognize Officer Mullens, a man who was not only a Warren Cove police officer, but also a former tax client of Carin's, as he took hold of her shoulders and tried to look into her eyes. The paramedics slid a gurney from the ambulance and joined them in the grass.

  "Mrs. Dvorak? What happened here? Can you tell me what happened? Who called 911?" Carin watched as a paramedic examined her son's body, hearing the officer, but not understanding. Not caring to. "Mrs. Dvorak? Carin? Is this your son? Are you hurt? Oh God. Look at her leg. Guys, get her some attention. The bone's sticking clear through the skin. She's in shock."

  Soon after the paramedics valiantly went to work on a body no one thought would survive, Kevin's heart caught the fleeting spark of life. He took hold of that spark, and held it until he was breathing, shallowly at first but with ever-increasing strength.

  As Kevin took his first breaths, Carin was in an ambulance, getting attention for her own wounds. Being sedated. She didn't know that her son was alive. As the police officers canvassed the house for clues as to what had happened, and wondering who had called 911 from the payphone at the abandoned Michael & Son's service station, no one wondered who Mr. Freakshow was. There was no body to find, no trace that he even existed, but for the battered basement door and scrapes in the floor from his tearing claws. The Freak was gone, vanquished by Kevin's ephemeral death.

  Chapter 25

  The last Indian Summer ended, followed soon after by bitter winds blowing in off Lake Michigan, an angry marauder let loose on the city. Ever since their standoff with Mr. Freakshow, Sophie hadn't felt quite right. She felt drained, utterly exhausted. She spent days on end in bed, watching as Andrew painted a new mural over the old. He painted a red sun low at the horizon, a wisp of cloud skirting the diffuse sunlight, the rolling wheat fields reaped of their summer seed.

  She watched his hands flex as he moved through a brushstroke, his artist's hands--long, agile fingers, the ridged tendons close to the surface. His blood flowing through his veins. Her thin lips spread in a gray-lipped smile.

  "Andrew?"

  "Yeah, hon?"

  "Come to bed. I'm cold."

  "Should I turn up the thermostat?"

  "No, it's fine. Come here."

  Andrew was about to set down the brush, but made one last dabbing stroke. "I was just finishing anyway." He wiped his hands dry on a paint-caked rag and then came over to the bed. "It's done."

  Sophie pulled aside the blankets, and her husband joined her. Andrew fit one arm in the crook of her neck, the other arm on her side. His rough hand rested on the small of her back. She sighed deeply, her eyes closing in contentment.

  Sophie's breaths became shallower, more erratic. She stirred as if dreaming and Andrew held her gently, lovingly.

  At some point, Sophie stopped moving, her lungs at rest for the first time since before they formed while she was still inside her mother. Her breath expired. Such a subtle transfer of energy, of life. So subtle as to be almost unnoticeable.

  But for Andrew. Her husband of so many years, waiting for her in the afterlife for these last twenty years. Finally, they would reunite.

  The Andrew dream faded away, the blankets falling where he once rested next to his dreamer. The beautiful murals, the thousands of brushstrokes covering Sophie's walls, her ceilings, they too faded.

  Carin had three surgeries to fix her leg. After two months, she had graduated from her walker to a cane. Kevin playfully teased her and called her an old lady, but Carin did not care. She had her son again. He had come back to life, by some miracle, he had come back to her.

  Until the end of winter, Kevin had to wear a fitted helmet to guard his broken skull. On impact, he also suffered a broken pelvis, a bruised liver, and a shattered ankle. Pressure had built up in his brain, and shortly after they removed him from the lawn of his old house, he was in surgery at Warren Cove Community Hospital. When he woke, the doctors told him he was lucky to be alive. If he had landed at a slightly different angle, he would have died from any number of his injuries.

  While he called his mom an old lady for walking with a cane, she quickly forgot he was even wearing the helmet. The public was less forgiving. People would stare at him, curious. Some children pointed at him as if he was some kind of freak. Their parents would have to force away the pointing fingers and gawking expressions. It was one of the happiest days of his life when he was able to leave the helmet for good.

  In the springtime, Carin was getting around well enough without her cane, except for particularly damp days, and then she would only use it if she were on her feet for extended periods. Kevin, being so young, had healed almost completely. He still walked with a slight limp as his healing ankle regained strength to match its twin.

  They never returned to live in Agnes's house. They could no more live there than in their old house, or anywhere else in Warren Cove. They needed to find a place to start fresh, where they had no ties, but where they would be happy to start new ones.

  On an early Sunday afternoon, they shared a plateful of warm doughnuts at a coffehouse near Carin's childhood home. The house had recently sold, well under market value because of the stigma of what had happened inside, and they were staying at a nearby hotel. Kevin was gulping down an orange juice chilled with ice cubes. Carin's coffee was getting cold as she searched a stack of newspapers for inspiration for their next move. Should they stay in Chicago? Neither one of them wanted to deal with the traffic or craziness right now. They wanted to live somewhere peaceful. Quiet. Peoria? Too far in the sticks. Out of state--where? Seattle, San Antonio, Philadelphia? She was searching for a clue, a hint that would lead them to the end of this frustrating quest.

  Kevin set down his empty glass, smacked his lips, enjoying his juice. "How about Bakersfield?"

  "You want to move to California?" Carin asked, a grin on her face. "I haven't heard the best of things about that area."

  "Not Bakersfield California, Bakersfield Illinois," he said with exaggeration, as if it were the most obvious place imaginable.

  "There's a Bakersfield in Illinois? I've never heard of it."

  "A friend of mine used to live there. So did her husband."

  Carin gave him a skeptical look. "I'll look into it," Carin said, returning her attention to the newspaper.

  "Mom, can I ask you something?"

  "Sure."

  "I feel bad."

  "About what, dear?"

  "When I was running away from… when I was running, I took money from that friend I was telling you about. The one from Bakersfield. I left a note saying I would pay her back. Now I feel bad."

  "Would you like to pay it back now? We
aren't really doing anything today."

  "Really? We can go now?"

  "I don't see why not. It's not far is it?" Carin packed up her newspapers. She gathered up the bill and her purse, ready to leave. "This old lady can't get around like you kids."

  "Only blocks away, I'm pretty sure."

  "Let's go. Lead the way, young man."

  They could have driven, but Kevin insisted on walking. Carin dropped the newspapers off at the Explorer parked on the street, dropped another quarter in the meter, and followed her son. As they walked, he explained who Sophie and Andrew were, and how they had taken him in. He did not mention that the real reason he wanted to seek them out was to make sure they were okay, to make sure Mr. Freakshow had not harmed them like everyone else Kevin had trusted.

  "Are you sure you know where you're going?"

  "Yeah, it's… here we are. I remember now. It's a couple blocks up at the next intersection. It snuck up on me last time because I was talking with Sophie as we walked."

  Kevin knocked on the heavy door. The metal had gouges, as if attacked by an animal. Or something worse. Kevin's stomach did a little lurch, afraid for what had happened to his friends. After a growing silence, he was about to knock again, but then the locks started unlocking from the other side. Chains were pulled aside. The door opened to the length of the remaining chain.

  "Yes?" It was a woman with green eyes. Kevin could not see much more of her.

  "We… I mean, I wanted to see Sophie."

  "I'm afraid that's not possible."

  In that instant, Kevin knew that the Freak had hurt his friends. No one had been safe.

  "She died in her sleep a couple weeks ago."

  "Oh," Kevin said, somehow relieved. "She helped me out. She lent me money. I wanted to pay her back."

  The woman with the green eyes said nothing.

  "Is Andrew home?"

  "Andrew?"

  "Sophie's husband."

  "My grandfather died in 1983."

  "Okay." Hearing that a man that Kevin had believed to be a real person had died more than twenty years ago did not faze him. The world was a different place. He remembered when he was exhausted, reclining on Sophie's pull-out cot, a homemade quilt covering him with warmth. As he was drifting off to sleep, the room swirled with dream-like qualities. Sophie and Andrew danced an old fashioned dance, and the farm fields from the murals stretched out from the ground on which they stood. The air smelled earthy, freshly turned. It all made sense, and he had no doubt now. Andrew really had been a dream.

  He turned and looked at his mom. "Can we still give her the money, then?" he asked in a quiet voice.

  She nodded.

  Kevin pulled the five twenty dollar bills from his pocket that his mom had given him. "Since you're Sophie's family, I want to give you this."

  The door closed and the last remaining chain scratched aside. The door opened, and Kevin was greeted by a woman who looked remarkably like Sophie, but much, much younger. She was probably about thirty.

  "Is your name Kevin?"

  "Yes."

  "I was instructed to give you something. Come with me."

  Kevin followed immediately, Carin with more hesitation, but the hallway was short. Within a few steps, they were inside the small studio apartment. All of the furnishings were gone. A few moving boxes were stacked by the door; otherwise the apartment was bare walls and clean floors. The white cinderblock walls made the room seem smaller than it actually was.

  "Ma'am?"

  "Oh, I'm sorry. My name's Gretchen," the woman said. She was digging through a moving box, and then pulled it off the stack and opened the one beneath. "It's around here somewhere. Were you going to ask something?"

  Kevin wondered where the murals went, wondered if someone had painted over them, but as soon as he had the urge to ask, he knew the answer. Sophie had taken her memories with her.

  "Oh, nothing. Never mind."

  "Here it is." Gretchen removed a yellowed envelope from the box. She handed it to him. He read his name, written with a frail hand, across the front.

  "A letter?" his mom asked. Kevin shrugged and tore it open.

  He unfolded the letter and read silently:

  Dear Kevin,

  I knew you would come to see me. I could tell the moment I set eyes on you that you have a kind soul. I know you're here to pay back the money you borrowed from us. Trust me, if you receive this note, it's because we no longer need that money. But let me just say, that since you are an honorable person and I know you would feel guilty about not paying back your debt, Andrew and I will consider the debt paid off if you do one thing for us: Help a friend in need. It is the most generous thing you can do. Andrew and I helped you in your time of need. You do the same and we'll be square. Take care, young one.

  Sophie

  "Kevin what is it?"

  "I need to help someone. Sophie wanted me to help a friend."

  "Okay… who might that be?"

  The name came to him, suddenly, and it made perfect sense. "Reid. I can't think of anyone who needs more help."

  Maury Bennett walked through a flowerbed, the trampled, dried husks sounding like breaking bones in the frigid air. His body was healing from his wounds inflicted by Mr. Freakshow. A star-shaped scar bloomed across his cheek, the result of his face crashing through the picture window. When he hit the sidewalk in front of the Dvorak house, he separated his shoulder. Most of the soreness was now behind him. Since he didn't know if he was a wanted man for what happened with the debacle at Lucidity and the ensuing chaos, he avoided going to the hospital. He found a payphone at an abandoned service station. He dialed 911, and told the operator that people were dying on Winfield Street. When the operator asked him what address she should call for the dispatch, he had hung up. For the moment, his conscience had been clear.

  The glowing moon made visible the nighttime clouds. The rain, turning to razors of sleet, pelted the aluminum siding--static drowning out his reckless advance. He stopped at a front window, standing in ankle-deep mud. Peering inside the ground floor bedroom, he was soaked and couldn't help the shivers violently racking his spine. He also couldn't remember a happier time full of so much anticipation.

  His breath condensed on the glass. He swiped his hand across it, not wanting to miss a second. A bare closet light bulb cast a wedge of dirty yellow light on the carpet in the otherwise darkened bedroom. Someone was in bed, the blankets pulled high to ward off the early winter chill. He looked nervously at his wrist, but was not wearing a watch.

  The bedroom door opened a crack, a couple inches, a foot. His pulse seemed to double. The door opened wide, and Juliet entered. She took off her winter cap, stashing it in the pocket of her wool pea coat, her auburn curls falling in a rush to her shoulders. She looked at the window, seemingly right into Maury's eyes, but she would not be able to see him in his hiding place.

  His arm was still in a sling when Juliet had found him. Having given up hope of finding her, he had moved on. He had lived off the cash Nolan Gage had paid him, renting a tiny sleeping room while slipping into a mild depression. He didn't make a concerted effort to hide from authorities, yet somehow he slipped through the cracks during the investigation of the tragedy at Lucidity.

  Of all places for her to find him, he was at a bookstore, rifling through the newest tomes in the psychology section. She tapped him on his shoulder. When he turned to face her, and as realization sunk in, he nearly wept.

  He figured she had been captured with most of the other dreams. But no. She had assimilated. She looked more comfortable in the urban setting than he felt. When he told her he loved her, she didn't laughed at him.

  But now, Juliet walked over to the bed, a hesitance to her steps. She stood at the bedside and didn't move. As the seconds ticked away, Maury's anxiety increased. He looked to the driveway, down the street, as far as he could, but didn't see any sign of anyone approaching. But still, they had a limited amount of time.

  Barbara, Juliet's
dreamer, stirred, rolling over from her side to her back. Juliet's body tensed as she stood there. He wanted to beat on the glass.

  Come on, get moving…

  Barbara must have opened her eyes, must have seen her dream standing before her in embodied form. Her scream pierced the night. Even the rattle of the stinging sleet couldn't hide the sound. Barbara screamed as if screaming would wake her from this dream, but this was real--dreams were no longer just dreams, but snapshots stolen from the mind and given legs with which to walk, hands with which to grasp, a heart with which to pump blood and love.

  Juliet struck with sudden and violent force. She leapt on top of Barbara, her knees on either side of her dreamer's torso. Her hands were at her throat, her slender fingers no longer graceful. Barbara's legs thrashed at the foot of the bed, her hands grasping at Juliet's forearms.

  Barbara's struggle made it go faster, and for this, Maury was grateful. Her movements slowed, as if she were intoxicated, and soon one hand fell from Juliet's arms, fell flat on the blanket that had kept her safe and cozy until only a minute ago. She raked the blanket with her fingers as if in search of something, and then these movements also slowed to a twitch, slowed to nothing. Juliet had just murdered her dreamer.

  Maury couldn't be more elated.

  The sound of car tires grinding gravel jerked away his attention. He ducked--gaining as much cover as the dead flowerbed afforded him--as a Honda sedan pulled to a stop in the driveway. He hoped no one had seen him spying through their daughter's bedroom window. He could only hope that Juliet had seen the headlights flash across the bedroom walls.