It was in the middle of a long uncomfortable silence that Amanda suddenly said, “What was that?”
“What was what?” David said.
“Shh. Listen.”
They all heard it then, even over the whine of the wind—a raspy clicking noise that obviously was coming from the direction of the kitchen.
“It’s probably just Esther raiding the cookie jar,” David whispered.
They were still listening tensely when suddenly there was a loud thud that seemed to shake the windows all over the house, and the door to the back hall flew open and banged against the wall. A rush of cold air flowed into the room, rustling the edges of the newspapers on the coffee table. They all sat very still, staring at the door.
“I’m going to see,” David said, finally. When he reached the door, he looked back, and Amanda and Pete were right behind him.
The rush of wind got stronger in the hall. The kitchen was like a wind tunnel. And the back door was wide open. The back door that they’d carefully locked and double-locked only a short time before.
David took a step back and bumped into Pete and Amanda. The wind roared in through the open door, and a bunch of paper napkins flew off the table and fluttered around the room like frightened birds.
A high voice that David didn’t immediately recognize as Pete’s said, “It was locked. You locked it.”
“They must have picked it,” Amanda whispered. “That’s what I heard—them picking it.”
“God almighty!” Pete said.
David turned around and looked behind him just as Pete and Amanda did the same thing. Pushing between them, David stepped into the hall and looked up—up the stairs to where the little kids were alone on the second floor. Afterwards he didn’t remember what he thought or how he felt at all, or even deciding to do what he did. He just remembered stopping outside Esther and Janie’s room for just a second before he opened the door. They were all right—sleeping quietly. He ran down the hall and into his own room and then quickly into and out of all the other upstairs rooms and then back down the stairs. Pete and Amanda were still standing at the hall door.
“It’s Blair,” David said. “He’s gone.”
Outside it was pitch black. David stood for a second on the porch in the rushing darkness. Remembering the flashlight Molly kept in the pantry, he dashed back into the kitchen, shoving Pete out of his way as he went in, and again on his way out.
He stopped again on the porch and tried to call, but his voice came out weak and high, and the wind snatched the sound and swallowed it into its constant roar. As he ran down the walk, the darkness around him was alive and moving, as if the wind was a flowing black torrent that caught at his breath and seemed to blur and bend the narrow beam of the flashlight. He looked in the garage and up and down the drive before it came to him—suddenly and with frightening certainty—where he should look next.
In the backyard he glanced toward the swing tree and stopped with a gasp as a swirling shadowy form seemed to rise up from the ground and drift toward him. But as he swung around, the ghostly form moved into the beam of light and disintegrated into particles, a whirling mass of dust and dead leaves. He went on, toward the gate to the garden.
He caught sight of Blair’s hair the moment he opened the gate. He stopped the swing of the flashlight’s beam, brought it back and focused it on Blair’s blond head. He seemed to be crouching down close to the ground. Something, a vague movement in the darkness, made David move the light a little to the left—a little to the left and up directly above Blair’s head—where two gleaming red eyes turned to stare in his direction. Something—it felt like his heart—rose up and seemed to explode somewhere near the bottom of his throat. The light, moving in his shaking hand, revealed a shadowy outline—an enormous shaggy head and, silvery in the sliding light, the bulk of an enormous body.
“Blair,” David’s voice broke and quavered. “Come here.”
It growled then, a deep threatening rumble, and white fangs glinted beneath the gleaming eyes. As David moved forward, Blair jumped to his feet.
“Don’t, David,” Blair called. “Stop.”
Behind David a voice said, “God almighty.”
Chapter Ten
WHEN BLAIR TOLD DAVID TO stop, he did. For just a second he stood perfectly still, but then the thing growled louder and moved closer. Now the white teeth gleamed only a few inches from Blair’s face. David moved slowly forward.
“Blair,” he called softly. “Back away from him. Move slowly.”
David was almost to where he could touch Blair when the low rumble of the growl suddenly rose to a terrifying roar, and the monster lunged forward. Behind David someone screamed. As the enormous animal headed straight for David, Blair threw his arms around the thick neck.
“No, Nightmare,” he said. “No. Down. Lie down.” It stopped then, and with a growl still rumbling in its throat, it slowly lowered its huge body to the ground. Blair didn’t take his arms from around its neck until it was lying down and he was sitting beside it on the ground. With his face close to its ear, he began to talk. The howl of the wind drowned out most of what he was saying, but David heard enough to know that Blair was telling the shaggy monster that it was a good dog and that David was good, and that everything was all right. Then Blair got up again and tugged on the dog’s collar, and it got up too.
“Okay, David.” Blair’s smile glowed in the flashlight’s beam. “He knows now. You can pat him now.”
David’s heart hadn’t stopped thundering against his ribs, but suddenly he wasn’t at all afraid anymore. In fact the terrible fear he’d been feeling just a moment before was suddenly gone, replaced by a sudden rush of mixed-up emotions—relief and surprise and a really great flash of amazed excitement. Blair’s dog was real. A real flesh and blood, warm and alive, and absolutely unbelievably enormous—dog. It didn’t seem possible, but it was true. Very slowly he put out his hand—down low and with the palm up.
“Hi, Nightmare,” he said in the most calm and reassuring tone of voice he could manage. “Good dog, Nightmare.”
The shaggy muzzle moved down and forward until it almost touched David’s fingers, and then the long tail stirred slightly in what looked almost like a wag.
A hand grabbed David’s arm, and Amanda leaned over his shoulder and said, “Tell him I’m okay, Blair. And Pete. Tell him we’re friends, too.”
Tipping his head, the way he always did when he was thinking, Blair looked from Amanda to Pete and back again. “Are you going to tell?” he said at last. “Janie says if we tell, they’ll take Nightmare away. To the pound, Janie says. You won’t tell, will you?”
“Me?” Amanda said. “No. I won’t tell. I promise. Absolutely. Totally to the max. What a great, huge, totally outrageous secret! Bleeper honey, I absolutely can’t wait not to tell.”
“Me too,” Pete said. “I don’t snitch. Not on dogs or nobody.”
Blair nodded slowly. Then he turned his back and put his hand on the side of the dog’s head and pulled it around. Standing there, flat-footed, on all four feet, the dog’s head was on a level with Blair’s. Putting his mouth close to the dog’s ear, Blair talked for a while and then turned around to point at Amanda. Then he whispered some more and pointed at Pete. Then he crooked his finger at them. “Come on,” he said.
When Nightmare sniffed Amanda’s fingers, his tail again stirred slightly. But when Pete stuck his hand out, he only looked at him and growled softly. Pete took his hand away quickly. The dog was still inspecting Amanda and Pete when the garden gate banged open and shut and something ran into David from the rear. It was Janie and Esther, breathless with excitement and, in Janie’s case at least, anger.
“Blair,” she hissed, “you told. Why did you tell? Now the pound will get him for sure.” Janie’s face was about an inch from Blair’s, and her voice outscreeched the wind. A low rumbling sound came from somewhere deep inside Nightmare’s huge chest.
“Shh,” Blair said to the dog, and th
en to Janie, “I didn’t tell. I just brought Nightmare his dinner, and then they came too.”
Janie turned to glare at David. “It’s the truth,” he said. “The wind blew the door open after Blair went out, and we came looking for him. So calm down. And besides, we aren’t going to tell. Nobody is.”
“Relax, wimp,” Amanda said. “We’ve all promised not to tell. But how on earth have you little wimps managed to hide him all this time?”
“Well,” Janie said, “I’ve been kind of the mastermind. I’ve been making all the plans about keeping him hidden. Haven’t I, Blair?”
Blair nodded. “Janie’s been making lots of plans. But we don’t hide Nightmare. He hides himself.”
Amanda looked at David and grinned. “And what have you been doing?” she said to Esther.
“I’m freezing to death,” Esther said. “Let’s go inside.”
It wasn’t until Esther mentioned it that David realized he was cold, too. Very cold, in fact. He’d run outside without a coat or sweater, and now the chill wind seemed to have blown right through his skin and flesh and clear to the center of his bones. “Esther,” he said through chattering teeth, “that’s the best idea anyone’s had yet. Come on, everybody. Come on, Nightmare. Will he come in the house, Blair?”
“I don’t know,” Blair said. “I’ll ask him.”
He wouldn’t come at first. When they all bunched around him telling him to “come” and “heel” and “Here, boy,” he just stood there staring at them. But then Blair tugged at David’s arm and whispered that the rest of them should all go on ahead. When David reached the steps, he looked back to see Blair and Nightmare coming across the yard. Blair was holding the dog’s collar. They walked side by side across the backyard and up the steps into the kitchen.
In the kitchen Nightmare started growling again until everyone crowded together across the table from him and Blair. In the bright light he looked bigger than ever. Less like a weird shaggy monster, perhaps, and more like a dog, but maybe for that very reason, definitely bigger. The thing was, you don’t really know what size to expect in a monster, but you do in a dog, and this dog was definitely beyond all expectations. In some ways it resembled a Great Dane, except it was taller than any Dane David had ever seen, and instead of being smooth-coated, it was covered by a heavy coat of shaggy bristly gray-brown hair. Tufts of gray-brown hair stood up over its large dark eyes in shaggy eyebrows and surrounded its gigantic muzzle like a frizzled beard.
“Wow,” David said. “That’s some dog.”
“That,” Amanda said, “is, without a doubt, the biggest dog in the whole world.”
“Lordy,” Pete said. “What a mutt! I’d sure like to have a mutt like that.” He started around the table, but when Nightmare lifted his lip on one side just enough to show a few huge teeth, Pete stopped and backed up.
Blair looked worried. He took hold of Nightmare’s lip and pulled it down over the tooth. “He’s just nervous,” he said. “He’s not very used to houses.” He cupped his hands over the dog’s ear and whispered, and the dog immediately lay down.
“See,” Janie said. “Blair talks dog language.”
“What did you say to him, Bleeper?” Amanda asked.
“I said ‘lie down,’ ” Blair said.
“Some dog language,” Amanda said. “Blair doesn’t speak dog language. The dog speaks English.”
“Well, he’s been trained, anyway,” David said.
Eventually, they all settled down where they were, with everyone sitting around one side of the table, except for Blair and Nightmare. Janie and Esther, and now and then Blair, began to tell everything they knew about Nightmare, which turned out to be not a whole lot.
How it started was particularly vague because that part depended on Blair for the telling, and he had never been the greatest at explaining things. It was all pretty confusing, but the gist of the story seemed to be that Blair looked out of the window one night and the dog was in the garden and he was hungry, so Blair went down and found something for him to eat.
Actually what Blair said was, “We went down and found something . . .”
“We?” David asked. “I thought that was before Janie and Esther knew about him.”
“Yes,” Blair said.
“Then who . . . ,” David started to ask, when he suddenly knew the answer, even before Esther leaned over and whispered in his ear. Esther was famous for mushy-mouthed whispers, but this time there wasn’t much doubt about what she’d said. It was, “Harriette.”
David decided Harriette was a complication they didn’t need to get into at the moment. “Okay, okay,” he said. “What does he eat?”
“Everything,” Blair said.
“Lots of everything,” Esther burst out. “We feed him lots and lots. Blair told me first, and then we told Janie, and Janie and me been finding lots of stuff for him to eat.”
“And I named him,” Janie said. “When Blair told me about him, I said he sounded like a nightmare, and Blair thought I meant that was the kind of dog he was, so he started calling him Nightmare. But what he really is, is an Irish wolfhound. I looked him up in the encyclopedia at school. He’s an Irish wolfhound, and they’re the tallest dogs in the world, and they’re supposed to look shaggy and kind of bristly like that.”
“Hey,” Amanda said suddenly, “the bread. Remember David? That’s what Blair was doing with the bread. What else have you kids been feeding him? He must eat an awful lot.”
“He does,” Esther said. “He eats an awful lot of everything. We’ve been feeding him leftovers and stuff Molly burns and lunches and dog food.”
“Lunches?” David asked.
“Sure,” Janie broke in. “At school I told everybody our father lost his job and we’re very poor now, so everybody’s been saving stuff they don’t want from their lunches for us.”
“Ye gods,” David said.
“And once,” Janie went on, “when we had enough money, I went to the grocery store during lunch hour and bought a big bag of dog food. Only we couldn’t let anybody see it, so we tore the bag open and poured it into our lunch pails.”
David vaguely remembered Molly making a fuss about the kids lunch pails a week or so before. “That rings a bell. Wasn’t that when Molly kept asking you why your lunch pails smelled like dead fish?”
“Yes. You’re right, David.” Janie sounded as if he’d just answered the winning question on a quiz show. “And how about the spring house? Does that ring a bell, too?”
“The spring house?” David was bewildered.
“Yes. Why I wouldn’t tell you what I saw there?”
“Don’t tell me . . . ,” David said.
Janie nodded hard. “It was toenail scratches. I was really looking for clues about the escaped prisoners, but when I saw toenail scratches near the latch and along the edge of the shelves, I knew it was Nightmare who took the stuff. Mr. Golanski probably would have guessed, too, except he thought everything was too high up for an animal to reach. But he hasn’t seen Nightmare.”
“But I still don’t understand why you wouldn’t tell me,” David said.
“Because I thought you’d tell. You always tell Dad everything.”
“No, I don’t,” David said.
“Yes, you do. At least you tell him if he asks,” Janie said.
David grinned. “Okay then. We’ll just have to make sure he doesn’t ask. What we’ll have to do is, be sure Dad doesn’t just happen to ask if anybody is hiding the world’s biggest dog on the premises.”
“Real cute, Davey,” Amanda said, “but you’d better not tell, no matter what. You know what he said about no more pets. I mean, if your dad wouldn’t even consider a few ounces of hamster, what’s he going to say about a half-ton of dog? And besides, if Nightmare really did steal all that stuff from Golanski, he’s really in trouble if he gets caught. Golanski will probably insist on shooting him.”
Amanda was right. There didn’t seem to be any solution except to keep Nightmare a
complete secret. Which might have seemed pretty impossible, considering his size, except for the fact that Blair had already been doing it for three or four weeks.
“Where have you been hiding him?” David asked.
“I told you,” Blair said. “He hides himself. Janie hid him once, but he didn’t stay.”
“I put him in the tool shed,” Janie said. “But he scratched the door open.”
“But how did you keep him from hanging around during the daytime?”
“I just told him,” Blair said. “I said not to.”
Apparently Nightmare had been coming to the house every night to be fed and then disappearing back into the hills and not showing up again until the next night.
“I don’t get it,” Pete said. “We get strays around our place sometimes, and if you feed them—man, you got ’em. I mean for good. They don’t go off and hide for a minute, leave alone a whole day.”
“Hey, I got it,” Amanda said. “I’ll bet he belongs to somebody else and he goes back there every day. Only they don’t feed him enough or something so he comes over here every night to pig out.”
Blair shook his head.
“Well,” David said, “I don’t know. If anybody around here had a dog like that, we’d know about it, wouldn’t we?”
“Yeah,” Pete said. “I been living out here all my life, and my folks know just about everybody. It don’t seem likely anybody’d get a dog like that and not mention it.”
They kicked around a few more theories about where Nightmare disappeared to during the day time, including one of Janie’s that he was actually a kind of werewolf who turned into a human being as soon as it got light. None of the theories seemed very likely, and by then it was getting dangerously close to the time for Dad and Molly to get home. So when Amanda suggested that they shut Nightmare in the tool shed and padlock the door, everyone more or less agreed.
Blair’s Nightmare Page 8
