MILES TO GO BEFORE I SLEEP

Bentley Little

ONE

In the dream he was whole again, and as he walked down the sunny street, head high, thinking of his wife, he felt good, proud, and he knew with a certainty borne of security that Barbara was all his, that she would never even look at another man.

He looked down at his fingers. They were long, extraordinarily so, unnaturally so, but they curved gracefully in a way that seemed somehow sensuous. He wiggled the fingers of his left hand. They responded to the commands of his brain, but they did so on a delay, a beat or two behind his thoughts.

He glanced up, and there was Barbara. She was standing in the middle of the sidewalk wearing the swimsuit he had bought for her on their honeymoon in California. To the left he could see a house, a two-story house, white with green trim. He had never seen the house before, but there was something about it that he liked, that made him feel good.

“I love you,” Barbara said. Her voice was a throaty sexy whisper.

He hugged her, his long fingers caressing the skin of her back, and she pressed against him as their lips met and they kissed.

Ed awoke frustrated, his body tense and sweating. He looked at Barbara, lying next to him on the bed, her bare shoulder peeking out from beneath the blanket. He breathed heavily for a moment, then leaned back against the pillow, closed his eyes and tried to will away the feelings within him. For the millionth time he cursed the accident that had cost him his . . . manhood. He took a deep breath and reached for Barbara, but she pulled away from him, mumbling in her sleep, frowning. He stared at the back of her head, and against his will, alone on the far side of the bed, a tear escaped from underneath his eyelid, and he began to cry.

At breakfast everything was fine.

Ed awoke first, showered and shaved, and by the time he had made the orange juice and started the eggs, both Barbara and Lisa had awakened and come into the kitchen. Barbara gave him a kiss on the cheek and a happy smile, and Lisa gave him a quick hug before sitting down at the table and fishing through the pile of newspaper for the entertainment section.

It felt good being with his family like this, and at these moments he could almost convince himself that this was what was important. Being close. Being together. Caring. He could almost convince himself that sex was, after all, only a minor part of life.

Almost.

He looked at Barbara, staring out the window, drinking her juice. She was as beautiful now as she had been the day he’d married her. More beautiful, perhaps. There were a few wrinkles around the eyes, a few extra pounds around the thighs, but those were the natural results of life experience, and they added character and maturity to the superficial good looks of her youth. He would not be rationalizing if he said that her beauty now was deeper and more real than it ever had been before.

That worried him sometimes.

His eyes moved over to his daughter, sitting on the opposite side of the table. Lisa knew of the accident, of course, but she did not know of his problem, and he doubted that she ever would. They had discussed it at length, he and Barbara, although they had never arrived at a decision. Based on past experience, however, based on how difficult it had been for either of them to discuss even the basics of sex with their child, he did not think it likely that they would ever get around to broaching the subject of his . . . physical inadequacy.

Not that she needed to know. After all, he had never known any details of his own parents’ intimate lives, and he did not feel that it was something he should know. Some things were meant to be private.

Lisa looked up from her newspaper, caught his eye and smiled. “What is it, Daddy?”

He shook his head. “Nothing.”

“Can I ride to school today with Keith and Elena?”

He stared at her with an expression of mock hurt. “You’re ashamed of me, aren’t you? You’re ashamed to be seen with your poor old father—”

“Knock it off, Daddy.”

He chuckled. “It’s okay by me, if it’s okay with your mother.”

“Mom?”

Barbara nodded distractedly. “Fine, dear.”

“All right!”

Ed slid the spatula under the eggs on the frying pan, placed the eggs on a plate and handed the plate to Lisa. "I’ll be there early today, though. And if you’re even a minute late, that’s it. You ride with me for the rest of the year.”

She shook her head. “Don’t be crazy.”

“Ed,” Barbara said. “Don’t be overprotective.”

His comment was supposed to have been lighthearted, a joke, but although Lisa seemed to have understood the facetiousness of his remark, Barbara was taking it at face value. He frowned. She’d been doing that a lot lately, misunderstanding things, not seeing humor where it was intended. He had not changed since the accident, but she had, and it was as if the rhythm they had built up over the last twenty years had been thrown off. Comments he made that she would have previously understood, he now found himself having to explain.

He shook his head. Maybe it was him. Maybe he was just overreacting, reading into events interpretations that simply were not there.

“I’m not overprotective,” he found himself saying.

Barbara looked up at him, smiled, and he suddenly felt foolish. “It was a joke,” she said.

“Oh.” He turned back toward the stove and cracked another egg into the frying pan. The yolk broke, and he watched as the yellow slid into the white in tentacled rivulets that for some reason reminded him of blood.

Maintenance supervisor.

Janitor.

“Maintenance supervisor” was technically the title of his job, the one that appeared on the tops of his annual reviews and on the single sheet of his job description, but he liked “janitor” better. It seemed more honest, more real, more descriptive of his actual duties. He was not sure which term Barbara or Lisa preferred. He had never asked them. He had the feeling that his wife and daughter were slightly ashamed of what he did. They had never said so, had never even indicated in any way that this was how they felt, but it was a persistent suspicion and one which he could not seem to shake.

Although he enjoyed his job, although he liked working at the school, being around the kids, he himself felt slightly guilty about his occupation. It seemed to him that his position was one that was supposed to be a way-station, a temporary spot filled by young kids on their way up and old men on their way down, not the way to make a living for a middle-class middle-aged man with a wife and daughter.

But he liked his job. It was fun, did not require a great deal of thought or effort, and for a man of his age and education, it provided security, good benefits and a decent living. What more could a person ask for?

He rifled through his ring of keys until he found the one that opened the maintenance supply office. He walked into the underlit office, moving past the newspaper-covered desk to the bent shelf in the back where the fluorescent lighting tubes were kept. One of the lights had burned out in the art classroom yesterday, and the resultant shadows made it difficult for some of the beginning students to differentiate between closely related color shadings. He had not had time to get to the classroom after school and before his shift ended, so he’d promised the teacher he’d fix the problem this morning before school started.

Ed found a box with the proper-sized lighting tube, carried it into the hall, closed and locked the supply office behind him. He turned around and almost ran into Cathy Epstein, one of his daughter’s best friends and the only one who still lived on their street.

“Sorry, Cathy,” he said. “Didn’t see you there.”

The girl looked at him and her eyes widened. Her eyes darted from his chest to his face and back again. “Where did you get that sweater?” she asked. Her voice was high, shaky, and it sounded to him as though she was frightened.

He looked down at the clothes he was wearing and saw that he had put on a red-and-green-striped sweater. He could not recall making a decision to wear the sweater this morning and could not recall where or when he’d bought it. He looked at Cathy, shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess my wife must’ve bought it for me. Why?”

She said nothing, only backed away, shaking her head, her face pale.

He frowned. “Cathy?” he said. “Are you all right?”

She held up a hand to stop his progress, tried to smile. “I’m fine,” she said, but he could tell by her tone of voice that she was lying. “I, uh, have to go, Mr. Williams. I’ll see you later.”

He watched her continue down the hall, then looked down again at his sweater. Was this what had frightened her? It hardly seemed possible. A sweater? He tugged on the material, pulling it tighter. He could not remember ever wearing the sweater before, but it looked good on him, and it felt comfortable.

He shrugged, then continued down the hall toward the art room.

TWO

Cathy Epstein did not breathe easily until she was safely out of the hallway and in her seat in Algebra. She put her books on the rack under her seat, and only then did she realize that her hands were shaking.

What was wrong with her?

She had never before been so frightened by a nightmare that the elements of its composition retained their horror in the waking world.

But she had never before had a nightmare like the one she’d had last night.

Goose bumps appeared on her arms even now as she thought of it. In the dream, she’d been going to a party at Lisa’s house. She’d strode confidently up the walkway, opened the door and stepped into the house. Inside, the party was in full swing. But there was no furniture in the house save a low ugly table covered with a variety of drinking glasses: expensive crystal, average tumblers, empty jelly jars. She didn’t recognize any of the people in the living room, so she walked through the crowd of party-goers into another room, and another, and another. The house was bigger than it was supposed to be, and she continued moving backward, as the number of guests dwindled. Finally, she found herself in a small white room where Lisa was sitting in front of a computer terminal.

The figure turned around, but it was not Lisa. It was a life-sized Barbie doll.

The doll grinned at her.

Cathy turned and ran back the way she had come. In the living room again, at the front of the house, everyone was standing in a circle, cheering and clapping, while in the center of the circle an upright dead body spun like a top, blood flying outward and splattering against the walls, dripping into the drinking glasses on the table.

Then the clapping and cheering stopped, the room grew silent, the lights dimmed. The only sound in the room was the whirling body and the falling blood.

And he stepped into the room.

Cathy could not remember having ever been so frightened in her entire life. The figure did nothing but stand there, in the doorway, but his mere presence caused the temperature in the room to drop a good twenty degrees, and made even the partygoers, who a moment before had been celebrating the fall of blood from the spinning corpse, stand still and silent with terror. She stared at the figure, unable to look away. There was something so evil, so fundamentally wrong about his being, that she felt unclean and corrupt merely looking at him. His face was in the dark, hidden both by shadows and by the hat he wore low on his head, but she had the feeling that he was hideously deformed. Her eyes moved down. His fingers were long, unnaturally long, and curved. She could see them silhouetted against the lighter night outside the door, and somehow those fingers scared her most of all.

In the second before she had awakened, screaming, the figure had turned, and she had been able to see the thick red and green stripes of his old sweater.

The same sweater Mr. Williams had been wearing.

Cathy looked around the room, reassuring herself with its light, with its people, with the concreteness of its existence. How could she let herself be so scared by a dream? So scared that she was frightened of a sweater worn by a man she’d known since she was a baby. Maybe she needed help. Psychiatric help. Did teenagers go to psychiatrists?

She shook her head. She wanted to put the nightmare behind her, to forget about it the way she usually did when she had a bad dream, but she didn’t seem to be able to do so.

Because it seemed more like the remembrance of a real event than the memory of a dream.

That was stupid, she told herself. She was behaving like a little child.

But the thought would not go away, and she spent the rest of the day moving carefully between classes, avoiding Mr. Williams.

THREE

A kid puked at lunch in the cafeteria, and though he quickly mopped it up with the soap and water that was already in his bucket, Ed knew he’d have to go back later with some heavy-duty Lysol and really scrub the spot clean.

It was a busy day. In addition to his regular duties, he had to take over the work of Rudy Martinez, the other day janitor, because Rudy had called in sick, and it was after the bell rang and fifth period began before he finally had a chance to head over to the supply office.

The way things were going, he’d probably be here until six tonight.

The Lysol was not where it was supposed to be, on the floor next to the desk (he’d have to talk to the night workers about that), so he moved back into the stock shelves to look for it. Walking past the tools, he scanned the middle cleaning shelf for the familiar bottle and his eyes alighted on the strange half-hidden object he had found last week.

A leather glove fitted with long steel razor fingers.

He stepped back as though shocked. He had forgotten all about the glove. He had come across it in the basement, buried amongst a pile of old rags near the corner of the incinerator, and he remembered now that he’d intended to talk to the principal about his discovery, to ask what should be done with the object.

But somehow he’d forgotten.

He picked up the glove, holding it gingerly. The razor fingers, hanging limp, clicked together, making a satisfyingly martial sound. This, no doubt, had been the inspiration for his dream. His dream of long fingers. His dream of potency. He pulled on the glove. The fit was tight but it was comfortable, and the long steel fingers did indeed make him feel more strong, more manly somehow.

More powerful.

From somewhere he heard the sound of a child humming, a vaguely familiar nursery rhyme tune which seemed at once innocent and chilling. He slashed the fingers once through the air and the humming disappeared, replaced by a gratifying silence. He tapped the razors on the metal shelf. They clicked loudly and pleasantly, making a drumroll sound. He looked around, saw a sealed box on the top shelf above him. He reached up, and the fingers, long enough to reach the box, sliced cleanly and easily through the cardboard, causing a flood of pencils to spill out and onto his head.

Ed smiled and took off the glove. The steel fingers, which had been extensions of his own shorter flesh-and-blood fingers, drooped impotently down as he replaced the glove on the shelf.

The smile faded from his face. The happiness he had felt seconds before fled, replaced by an unsettling empty feeling. He stared at the glove, at the brown-lined leather and the faded brilliance of the razors. The glove had fit him, had felt good on his hand, but looking at it now, it seemed wrong somehow. It looked like a weapon. Who would make a glove with razors for fingers? Who would even think of something like that? Some kid in shop class? He didn’t think so.

He’d stick to his original plan, tell the principal about the glove, let him decide what to do with it.

Ed found the bottle of Lysol, took it from the shelf and carried it out of the room. He stopped in the hallway, closed and locked the door behind him, then stood there for a moment, slightly puzzled. He knew he’d intended to go to Mr. Kinney’s office and tell the principal something, but now for the life of him he could not remember what it was.

He looked down at his hand, wiggled his fingers, and the missing information almost came to him. But then whatever he had been thinking faded away, receding into nothing.

Oh well. It would come to him eventually.

He picked up his mop and his Lysol and started down the hallway toward the cafeteria.

FOUR

Lisa awoke in the hospital. Around her, she could hear the rhythmic pulsing beeping sounds of modern medicine in action. But she heard no voices, no people. She sat up and looked around and found herself in a long white room filled with sympathy flowers lined up by order of size along the wall. Aside from her bed and a bank of miniature television screens, all of which showed a solid red pattern, the room was devoid of furniture or medical instruments. She blinked. This did not look like any hospital room she had ever seen.

She climbed out of bed, feeling slightly dizzy. Behind her bed, she saw, was a window. She walked over to the window and looked out, but behind the glass square she saw another hospital room, identical to her own save for the fact that the walls and bed were red and the bank of miniature televisions showed a solid white.

In the bed was a life-sized Barbie doll.

She turned away from the window and ran the length of the long room toward the door. She pulled open the door and dashed into the hallway, but immediately had to steady herself against the wall. Everything here was eerily off-center, sharply angular, wrong. Floor and wall and ceiling met in strangely peaked lines, the checkerboard floor tile a shifting optical illusion. A gurney sat in the center of the hallway, its metal joints held together in crooked junctions that should not have been possible.

“Help!” Lisa cried. Her voice echoed, changing as it moved away from her, growing deeper and more assured instead of dimmer and faint, until it was coming back toward her in a mode and manner that was truly terrifying.

She ran down the hospital corridor, away from her echoing voice; she passed a glass-walled room. It had been a nursery, but the cribs and cradles had been broken and overturned, the bedding shredded. The lights were off, but even with only a quick glance, she could see small unmoving bodies thrown about on the floor. Along the shelf next to the window were six or seven infants lined naked in a tow, facing away from the glass. Bloody triangle eyes and noses, wickedly grinning jack-o’-lantern mouths, had been carved into the backs of their bald baby heads.

She ran faster, turned the corner, and there, standing before her, was the most terrifying creature she had ever seen, a monster in the shape of a man.

Freddy.

Freddy.

She didn’t know how she knew his name, but she did.

And, even worse, she knew what he wanted.

She wanted to scream, wanted to cry, wanted to run away, wanted to disappear, but she could only remain rooted in place, staring at the . . . thing in front of her. Her heart pumped crazily in her chest, pounding so furiously that she thought it was going to burst.

She almost wished it would burst.

Freddy stood there, rocking slightly on his heels, hands clasped behind his back. His face was a grotesque patchwork of interlocking scar tissue. He stared at her with small cold eyes and smiled, revealing uneven rows of small strange baby teeth, browned from rot, blackened from fire. His thick tongue, rough below the surface sliminess, was blood red in the black hole of his mouth, and it slid suggestively over the flat patch of melted skin that should have been his lips. “Lisa,” he said, and his voice was a low inhuman growl. “I’ve been waiting for you. What took you so long?”

He stepped forward, taking his hands from behind his back, and now she could see that the fingers of one hand were made out of razors, long shiny razors that glinted in the cold antiseptic hospital light. They clicked together with deadly precision. “I knew we’d run into each other one of these nights. One of these crazy old nights.”

She smelled blood as he approached, blood and rot, and it was the smell more than anything else that gave her the courage to turn away from him and run.

He laughed, a grating sound like sandpaper on steel wool, which built in intensity and echoed through the halls.

She ran down one corridor, then another. Turned right, turned left. She sped around a blind corner—

—and found herself in a huge room filled with metal pipes and rusty tanks and staggered rows of industrial machinery. She stopped running. The air was cold, damp, filled with a heavily oppressive atmosphere that owed nothing to the physical elements of its surroundings. Above her, from the cavernous ceiling, hung scores of clanking chains.

Many of which ended in hooks.

There was the sound of rhythmic pounding, a thunderous noise which increased in intensity, approaching, growing louder, getting closer, and beneath that another, quieter, yet far more frightening sound. The high-pitched screech of metal on metal.

Razor fingers scratching against pipe.

She wanted to run, wanted to hide, but the rows between the machines all looked the same, and she knew that Freddy could be hiding down any one of them. She took a deep breath and screamed as loud and long as she could.

She was still screaming when she awoke from the dream.

The nightmare was still with her when she walked out to breakfast. Ordinarily she forgot her dreams instantly upon awakening. Even the good ones, the ones she wanted to remember, the ones about Phil Hogan and the bear rug and the cabin in the pines, she could not seem to recall except in the vaguest possible way. But this nightmare was lodged in her consciousness and could not be displaced. She had even felt it returning last night as she’d started to drift back into sleep, and she’d forced herself to stay awake for the rest of the night to make sure she would not dream it again.

Freddy.

Before this, the name would probably have seemed goofy to her, slightly comical. She would have thought of the Flintstones, or perhaps that old record of her mother’s by Freddy and the Dreamers. But this morning the name seemed as ominous as it had in her nightmare, carrying with it connotations of violent perversity and death.

She slid into her chair, took a sip from the glass of orange juice her father put in front of her, and started digging through the paper for the entertainment section.

“Are you okay?” her father asked, concerned. It had been he who had arrived in her room first last night, he who had given her the first reassuring hug.

She nodded tiredly. “Yeah.”

“You didn’t have any more nightmares, did you?”

She thought of telling him the truth, telling him that she hadn’t gone back to sleep again, but decided that she didn’t want to worry him. “No.”

“That’s good.” He put a bowl, spoon, and box of cereal in front of her. “It’s catch as catch can this morning. I have to get to work early today. Do you want to come with me, or are Keith and Elena going to give you a ride again?”

“I thought I’d ride with Cathy. Her mom’s going to let her borrow the T-Bird today.”

“T-Bird, huh? You two better not go cruising for guys.”

“At seven in the morning? Be serious, Daddy.”

He grinned. “I’ll still be timing you.”

Lisa poured herself some cereal, doused it with Sweet ’N’ Low and added some milk. Her father left the kitchen, and she found herself listening to the news on the radio. There was another flare-up in the Mideast, a failed coup in Latin America. Locally, six infants had died overnight at Lutheran General Hospital.

She stopped chewing, remembering her dream.

Jack-o’-lantern faces carved on round baby heads.

The kitchen felt suddenly cold. She sat still, listening. The babies had died from what was being diagnosed as Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. However, the odds of six infants dying in one night from this mysterious killer were so astronomical as to be suspicious, and an investigation was being conducted.

Lisa looked up and saw her father standing in the doorway. His face was pale and his mouth was hanging open as if in shock. The way in which he was standing, his posture, reminded her of something or someone, though she couldn’t quite—

Freddy.

Her breath caught in her throat. She looked up at her father’s face. Their eyes met, and she saw something in his glance that didn’t look familiar and that she didn’t like.

She suddenly felt uncomfortable being alone with him in the kitchen, and was grateful when her mother walked in a moment later. She excused herself as quickly as possible, and after putting on her shoes and makeup and brushing her teeth, she hurried over to Cathy’s house.

FIVE

Ed sat in the maintenance office and stared at the blank wall before him.

He was worried. He had heard the story about the infants on the news, and while he didn’t honestly think that crib deaths in a hospital on the other side of town had anything to do with him, he could not help thinking about the dream he’d had last night. He recalled with sickening clarity the details of his dream, the way he’d had fingers, long fingers, sharp fingers, and the way he’d happily demolished a hospital, joyously carving pumpkin faces on plump baby flesh. In the dream it had seemed fun, exciting, but he had been disgusted with himself upon awakening, frightened at the gruesomely morbid potential of his own imagination. It was as if he had been another person in the dream, not himself, although perhaps that was just his attempt to rationalize the brutality of his subconscious thoughts. He wondered what a psychiatrist would say about it.

He continued to stare at the wall. There was something else too. Something that had to do with the dream. Something that was eluding the grasp of his waking mind. A girl? One of the high school students? He couldn’t recall. But there was a nagging note in the back of his brain, a feeling that the information he had forgotten was more important than what he had remembered.

He thought of the expression he’d seen on Lisa’s face as they’d both listened to the news report, and that, more than anything else, worried and concerned him. She had looked at him as if she was afraid of him, as if she knew what he had dreamed and somehow blamed him for the deaths of the babies.

But that was stupid, wasn’t it?

Wasn’t it?

There was a beep and a hiss of static as the intercom above the desk clicked into life. It was Nora Holman, the principal’s secretary. “Ed?” she said. “Are you there?”

He pushed the speak button. “I’m here, Nora.”

“There’s been some vandalism in Mr. Kinney’s office. Someone, I assume it was kids, threw a rock through his window last night. I already called the district and they’ll send someone out to replace the window sometime this morning, but I was wondering if you or Rudy could come in and clean up a little before the principal gets here. There’s glass everywhere, all over the floor, all over the desk, and the rock is lying on one of the chairs. You know how Mr. Kinney is . . .”

Ed smiled. He knew how Mr. Kinney was, and he knew that if that office wasn’t in perfect shape before he arrived, or as near perfect as possible under the circumstances, he would take it out on Nora and whomever else he came into contact with during the day. “Don’t worry, Nora. I’ll be there in a minute.”

“Thanks, Ed.”

He stood up, pushed from his mind all thoughts of last night, and grabbed his broom.

After work he found himself driving through the industrial section of town, maneuvering easily through the maze of rutted railroad-crossed streets as though he knew the area, as though he had been here before. He had not been here before, had never really seen this area at all except as a dirty series of blocks to the right of the freeway, but now he traveled down the roads and alleys between the massive buildings, driving back and forth, forth and back, looking for something.

He did not know what he was looking for, but he knew he’d recognize it when he came to it.

He drove past an aluminum recycling plant and what looked like a wrecking yard, then pulled the car over to the edge of the curb and stopped. He stared out the window at the building next to him. It was new, recently constructed, not yet in use, but the contours of its form against the gradually setting sun seemed somehow familiar. Familiar and friendly.

He got out of the car, stretched his legs. There was something welcoming about the structure, something that made him feel warm and good, and he found himself walking up the unfinished and partially paved walkway toward the entrance. The front doors, smoked glass with the factory stickers still on them, were locked, but he’d expected that, and he walked through the small side parking lot, turned the corner of the building and found what he was looking for—a small metal door deep set in the concrete wall. He tried the door, and it opened.

Inside, the building was dark, but his feet propelled him forward, moving instinctively through the huge open room and down a short flight of stairs. He walked through an empty room with white walls; through another, smaller room piled high with unopened crates; past a working air-conditioning unit bolted to the floor; then up a series of metal steps, where he stopped.

Here.

Ed looked around. He was in a boiler room, a cavernous chamber filled with hissing steam and rumbling equipment. Everything about him was familiar, the smells, the sounds, the way the shrouded sun shone through the dirty skylight. The building was new, recently constructed, but the boiler room looked old, seemed worn-in, and he thought that he had never seen a place that was at once so forbiddingly industrial and so cozily intimate. He looked around, feeling happy, feeling good.

He walked around a propane storage tank and stopped in front of a trash incinerator. He touched the warm metal lovingly. It felt just the way he remembered. His fingers sought and found a series of crude indentations. It was here, he remembered, that he had carved his name with the fingers: Freddy.

And the names of the little children he had loved.

Ed stepped back, shook his head, frowning. What was this crap? His name was not Freddy. And he had never been here before in his life.

He glanced around, confused. What the hell was he doing inside this building? If someone caught him here, he could be arrested for breaking and entering. How would he explain that to Barbara and Lisa?

He turned, intending to leave, to get out as quickly as possible, but his eyes alighted on a hook hanging from a chain attached to a metal crossbeam in the ceiling. He reached out, touched the hook, felt a delicious shiver pass through his body.

He wished he’d brought the glove.

He blinked. The glove. What the hell had he done with that thing? Hadn’t he turned it in to Mr. Kinney? He had intended to give it to the principal, but he could not remember having actually done so. He looked about him. Why was he still here? Why was he still inside this building?

He hurried out of the boiler room and, through a quick trial-and-error process, found his way out of the factory. He stepped into the cool night air.

Cool night air?

Sure enough, the sun was down, the moon was up, the stars were twinkling. He looked down at his watch and was startled to see that it was eight forty-five.

He’d been in the building for three hours.

He ran around the corner of the building and across the small parking lot toward the street, frightened.

Barbara was waiting for him when he arrived. Twin expressions of anger and worry were mingled on her face, but at the moment she saw him, anger gained the upper hand. “Where the hell have you been?” she demanded. “I was about to call the police.”

He’d been thinking of an answer all the way home, a believable answer, but had come up with nothing. “I was out driving,” he said.

“Driving?”

“Yeah.”

“You couldn’t call and tell me where you were or why you were going to be late?” She did not wait for him to answer. “Driving where?”

“Around.” He looked over her shoulder, saw Lisa standing in the living room. She was staring at him strangely, frowning, her face worried. He smiled at her reassuringly.

“Daddy?” she said.

“Mmmm?”

“Where did you get that sweater?”

The sweater again. He looked down at his chest, smoothed the bunched material. He hadn’t realized that he was wearing the sweater. He didn’t usually wear the same clothes two days in a row. “I think your mother bought it for me. Why?”

“I never bought it,” Barbara said.

He looked at her, then turned back toward his daughter. “Why?” he repeated.

“I don’t know. It just . . . reminds me of something.”

“What?”

She shook her head, tried to smile, failed. “Nothing.”

“I never bought that ugly sweater,” Barbara said. “I wouldn’t let you buy that ugly sweater. You must’ve had it before you met me.” She glared at him. “So why were you ‘driving around’?”

He pushed tiredly past her. “Let’s talk about it inside. I’m hungry. I need something to eat.”

Barbara slammed the door behind him.

Both Barbara and Lisa went to sleep early, Barbara angry, Lisa afraid. He sat alone in the living room, watching TV. Something was happening here. Something wasn’t right. He could understand Barbara’s anger. It was legitimate and totally justified. But he could not understand his own bizarre behavior, and Lisa’s fear frightened him. She seemed to be afraid to stay in the same room with him. What the hell was this?

A commercial came on, and he walked into the kitchen to get himself something to drink. He took a glass from the cupboard and looked down at the top of the counter next to the sink. Lisa had come in here earlier and apparently made herself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. There was a peanut-butter-smeared knife lying on the counter next to three parallel lines of strawberry jelly which had obviously dripped over the edge of the bread.

He stood there unmoving, glass in hand, staring at the jelly. Those lines on the counter reminded him of something, something that hovered just below the tip of his consciousness, something he could almost but not quite remember. He stared at the lines. They looked like—

—bloody slashes on skin.

He frowned. Why had he thought of that? He swallowed hard and wondered for the first time if there might really be something wrong with him. Violent dreams, violent thoughts, blackouts? This sure as hell seemed serious. He thought of Barbara’s uncle Joseph, who had thought that aliens were spying on him from inside of his television. They’d thought that he was crazy, that he might have to be committed, but the doctor said that Uncle Joseph’s delusions were caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, and he had prescribed medicine that had taken care of the problem.

He hoped there was an explanation that simple for what was happening to him.

He looked down again at the jelly on the counter and saw—

—razor cuts.

What the hell was the matter with him? He forced himself to stare at the lines, trying to see them in a different light, a more innocent light, but the horrible image was in his brain and he could not make it go away. Angrily, he wiped up the jelly and threw the dishrag into the sink. He got his drink and walked back out to the living room, troubled.

SIX

After band practice Cathy drove home, turning off Lincoln onto Elm.

But her house wasn’t there.

She slowed the car, peering out the windshield. Her house might be there, but she sure as heck couldn’t find it because all of the homes on the street looked exactly the same: white two-story wood-frame structures with green trim and picket fences. She drove slowly down the street, looking for mailboxes, for children’s toys, for house numbers, for something that would allow her to differentiate one from another, but the similarities seemed to be exact.

She began to feel afraid. Outside, the houses looked cheerful, but underneath that surface brightness lay something dark and defiantly wild, something that made her feel nervous and profoundly uncomfortable. She stared at the houses as she drove past, and their facades suddenly seemed to her like false fronts, pretty pictures covering sites of rot and decay.

She was certain that eyes were watching her from behind the windows of the houses.

Now she was very definitely afraid, and she noticed for the first time that there were no other cars on the street, no sign at all of other people. She felt trapped in the neighborhood, cornered. She knew she had to escape, even if it meant returning to school, and she sped up, turning onto Washington, but here again the houses looked exactly the same, cookie-cutter copies of those on Elm. She turned onto Birch, onto Jackson, onto Cedar, but the houses were all alike, and soon she lost track of where she was. Now there were no street signs on the corners and the sky was a brilliant unshadowed white. Down each street were the twin rows of identical houses.

She stopped the car and saw one house that did not look like the others. It was low, one-story, and had been painted a gaudy pink that had long since faded into off-white. She got out of the car and ran toward the house, taking the porch steps two at a time and pushing open the torn screen door as she dashed inside.

The inside of the house was one room, a huge, darkly panelled room filled with beautiful antiques. Against the far wall an old woman sat in a high-backed leather chair. She beckoned to Cathy. “Come here, child,” she said. Her voice was old and kind, filled with the warm tones of a loving grandmother.

Cathy moved forward through the room. Halfway to the old woman, she began to see that the beautiful antiques were not quite as beautiful as she’d originally thought. The framed prints on the wall detailed acts of torture and perversity. The lace-covered tables were host to fetters and branding irons and wicked knives. The chairs had nails protruding points upward from their seats.

The old woman smiled. Next to her, Cathy saw, was a metal seat on which a filled porcelain bedpan was balanced.

The bedpan was dripping slowly onto the floor.

“Hi,” Cathy said tentatively.

“Hello,” the old woman said. This close, she no longer looked so grandmotherly, her voice no longer seemed so kind. “Would you like a doll?”

She gestured to the right, and Cathy saw a young girl wearing a white dress seated on the carpet. The girl giggled, a corrupt, knowing giggle. She smiled slyly. “One, two, Freddy’s coming for you,” she sang in a strangely seductive voice. There was something about the child’s emphasis on the word “coming” that made Cathy’s blood run cold.

“Where’s the doll?” Cathy asked.

“I’m the doll,” the girl said, lowering her eyes shyly.

“Freddy is coming,” the old woman said, and she seemed to take pleasure in the statement.

Cathy ran back the way she had come, past the depraved antiques and out the door.

And there he was.

She stopped in the doorway. It was suddenly hard to breathe. She stared at the monster on the porch. The deep shadows and refracted illumination which before had served to keep his features in at least partial darkness, were gone, and she could clearly see the smooth interconnected ridges of burn scars that crisscrossed his face, the repulsive network of melted discolored skin reshaped and reformed to match the musculature of his thin, hairless head. He grinned cruelly, small teeth charred and misshapen inside the lipless gash of a mouth.

“Cathy,” he whispered. “I came for you.”

Freddy, she thought. His name is Freddy.

Before she could move, jump, get out of his way, the monster was on her. A rough hand whipped around her chest and razors sliced into her stomach, long sharp blades that indiscriminately pierced both organs and arteries as his fingers rammed joyously upward through her midsection. Grinning, Freddy thrust his fingers harder, higher, faster.

Again.

And again.

And again.

She felt the blood spurt out from the line of identical wounds in hot rhythmic jets that mirrored the slow beating of her dying heart. She tasted the sickening salty flavor of blood in her mouth, smelled the rank odor of bile in her nostrils. Through the swirling haze of pain that enveloped her, she stared into the small hard eyes of Freddy Krueger.

“Pleasant dreams,” he whispered, smiling.

SEVEN

He was traveling now, moving outward, going far. Minnesota. Idaho. Nevada. Arizona. Driving in his van, stopping in small towns, killing, moving on. He kept a memento from each child. An ear. A tooth. A finger. He kept them in the small refrigerator in the back of the van.

He would dry them and string them up later.

He also kept, in identical boxes in the back of the van, a supply of Barbie dolls and a supply of Tonka trucks. These he used to attract the kids, offering them the toys if they would take a ride with him. So far the Barbie dolls had been working better; he’d taken down more girls than boys.

He drove all the way to California, all the way to the coast, where he slipped on the glove and slashed open a blond teenage surfer, gutting him like a fish and leaving him on the sand.

He worked his way backward—Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Idaho—collecting toes and noses and kneecaps.

He returned home happy, using his key to open the door unannounced, and he looked into the living room and saw Barbara, on the floor, on her back, while a muscular young jock writhed on top of her, kissing her neck. “Finally a man!” she cried, and her voice was throaty, passionate, a voice he remembered from the past, from before the accident. “Finally a real man!” Ed dropped the glove, fingers clanking discordantly as they hit the ground.

He woke up sweating.

He felt guilty in the morning, ashamed of the dream he’d had, and he was almost glad that Lisa left early and did not stay for breakfast. Barbara came out, gave him a kiss and sat down at the table as always, but for some reason he could not shake the emotional residue of his dream, and he found himself feeling angry with her, slightly hostile, as though she had betrayed him in real life instead of just in his mind. Again he noticed how attractive she was, how beautiful she looked, and he remembered the intensity of their lovemaking in the past.

Could she really give that up?

Stop it, he told himself. You’re just being paranoid.

But he found it hard to meet her eyes, and the two of them ate breakfast in silence.

Before going to school he hosed down the car to get the dew off the windows, and wiped the front and back windshields with a paper towel. He opened the front door of the car and was about to toss the soggy paper towel on the floor in the backseat when he saw something that made his heart lurch in his chest.

In the backseat, on the seat itself, were two boxes.

One was filled with Barbie dolls.

The other was filled with Tonka trucks.

No, he thought. It’s not possible.

But it was possible. The boxes were there. They were real. He opened the back door and was about to pick up the Barbie box and take it into the garage when he thought of Barbara. What if she saw the box? How would he explain that? How could he explain that?

He thought for a moment, then slammed the back door shut. He got into the car, pulled out of the driveway and headed down the street toward school. He tried to ignore the boxes, tried not to think of them, tried to pretend that they had nothing to do with his dream, but he saw the brown cardboard and the piled toys each time he looked in the rearview mirror.

The Barbie dolls appeared to be smiling at him.

The mood at school was different than usual. The kids, when they came in, were more subdued, quieter, and many of them seemed cowed, scared somehow. The normal hallway horseplay was absent, replaced by a quiet solemnity. Something had happened, and he soon found out from one of the teachers what it was.

Cathy Epstein had died in her sleep last night.

Ed’s first thought was for Lisa. Had his daughter been planning to ride with Cathy this morning? He wasn’t sure, but he didn’t think so. He would have heard by now, she would have run back home.

“It’s always a shock when someone dies this young,” the teacher said. “It’s especially shocking to students, who don't think that something like this can happen to them. It’s always sobering.”

“Yeah,” Ed admitted. He felt a tap on his shoulder, and he turned around to see Lisa standing behind him. Her eyes were red and puffy, tears rolling down her cheeks. “Oh Daddy!” she said, and the tense awkwardness that had existed between them for the past few days was gone. “Cathy’s dead!”

He put his arms around her, hugged her. “I know, sweetie.”

“She was only sixteen!”

He patted her back. “I know.”

A group of football players walked by. One of them, the biggest—Hogan? Was that his name?—grinned. “Incest,” he said. His buddies laughed.

Lisa cried even harder, burying her face in his shoulder, and Ed felt like smacking the kid across the face. Damn punk. He glared at the kid, who looked quickly away.

He found himself thinking of Cathy, of the last time he’d seen her—

Where did you get that sweater?

—and he suddenly remembered that he had dreamed about Cathy last night, that he had dreamed of stalking her, wearing the fingers and stalking her.

He had dreamed of killing her.

He swallowed hard, feeling cold. Lisa continued to cry against him, but his reassurances were on auto-pilot now, automatic, unthinking.

He found himself wondering if other kids had died last night in their sleep.

Kids in Minnesota, Idaho, Arizona . . .

EIGHT

Lisa had not slept well since Cathy’s funeral. Her nights had been taken up with snatches of sleep caught between portions of old movies, her days with dozing in the classroom. Her parents had been concerned, but understanding. She had simply said that she was too disturbed to sleep, that the television helped soothe her mind, made her feel better, and they had allowed her some slack. She did not dare tell them the truth.

She did not dare tell them that she was afraid to fall asleep.

That she was afraid to dream.

A month ago, two weeks ago, even, she would have shared everything with her parents. Or at least with her father—she had always been closer to him than to her mother. But something had happened, something had changed, and she now found herself spending more and more time alone. Other people, she noticed, other students at school, had been avoiding her father as well. He had always been one of the more popular staff members, one of the few adults who didn’t talk down to students in a condescending manner, but lately he’d been working alone, without his usual retinue of admirers.

That worried her a lot.

What worried her more was the fact that she’d heard her father talking in his sleep the other night. His voice had sounded different, lower, rougher. It had reminded her of—

Freddy.

She shivered. Several times during the past week she had considered discussing her dreams with her friends—Keith and Elena, as well as several other students, had looked tired lately, as though they weren’t getting enough sleep— but she’d felt too embarrassed, had not known how to bring up the subject.

“Lisa!”

She looked up from the sidewalk to see Keith’s car, cruising slowly next to her on the street. She squinted against the sun, waved.

“Can we talk to you?” Elena called.

Lisa walked over to the car, leaned against the passenger window. “Sure. What?”

Elena looked at Keith, then looked back. Her voice when she spoke was hesitant, unsure. “You look kind of tired,” she said.

Lisa nodded. “I haven’t been sleeping much lately.”

“Who has?” Keith said.

Elena licked her lips. “I don’t know how to say this,” she said. “It sounds so stupid . . .”

Lisa’s pulse quickened. “Say it.”

“Keith and I have talked about this, and we’ve both been having . . . nightmares. I know that doesn’t sound like anything, but . . . Well, we’ve both been dreaming about the same thing—”

“Freddy,” Lisa said quietly.

Keith and Elena looked at each other. “I told you,” Elena said.

Keith nodded. “Get in the car,” he told Lisa. “We have something to show you.”

“Does it have something to do with this?”

“Get in the car.”

Fifteen minutes later Keith’s Honda pulled in front of a large empty factory in the middle of the industrial section of town. “We’re here,” he said.

The three of them got out of the car. Lisa shivered, cold, though the temperature this afternoon was well into the eighties. She stared at the newly built structure before them. She had never seen the building before, knew nothing about it, but there was something about the place that frightened her, that made her feel dirty and unclean and desperately in need of a bath. It was an almost physical sensation, and she had to force herself to look at it and not turn away. “Okay,” she said. “We’re here. What’s all this about?”

“This was where he was killed,” Elena said.

“Who?”

Keith looked at her. “Freddy.”

Now she had a reason for the fear, and as she looked at the recently painted facade, she saw it for what it was—a whitewashing of the past, an attempt to put a happy face on a place that wasn’t happy at all. The building might be merely brick and mortar, glass and metal, construction materials, but there was something of him in here too, Freddy, and that was what made the place seem wrong, evil. She stared at one of the front windows, squinting her eyes against the glare of the late afternoon sun, and she thought she could see an older building behind this new one, a decrepit factory, burned and razed.

She turned toward Keith, facing him. “What happened?” she asked.

He swallowed. “Well, first of all, I guess I should tell you how we found out about this—”

“I don’t care how you found out about it. Just tell me what happened.”

“Okay. I know this sounds like TV movie territory, but Freddy was a child molester—”

“A child killer,” Elena corrected.

“—who was freed on a technicality in the early seventies. The kids’ parents must’ve seen too many Charles Bronson flicks or something, because after he was released, they followed him. They followed him here. He was up in the boiler room, supposedly playing with the bloody clothes of one of the kids he’d killed, talking to himself. He had on, you know, his glove, his fingers, and he was like shredding the clothes. The parents . . . well, they’d brought along some gasoline . . .” He cleared his throat. “They burned down the building. They killed him.”

“Oh my God,” Lisa breathed.

“The scary part is that he didn’t seem to care. He didn’t fight back or anything. I don’t know if this part is true or not, but his last words were supposed to be: ‘I have promises to keep. And miles to go before I sleep.’ ” Keith took a deep breath. “He said this while he was on fire, while he was burning up.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“And then he started laughing.”

“Why here? Why did he come here?”

“This was where he took all his victims. This was where he killed them.”

“Yeah, but I mean why did he take them here?”

“He had the keys. He was a janitor.”

A janitor.

The goose bumps sped down Lisa’s arms. She thought of her father, of the strange look she had seen lately on his face.

They were silent for a moment, looking at each other.

And though none of them said anything, they each felt scared and suddenly very vulnerable.

“Can we go inside?” Lisa asked. “I want to see something.”

Elena nodded. “You want to see if it looks like your dream.”

“Yes.”

“Me too.”

Keith walked across the unlandscaped ground and picked up a chunk of concrete that was lying amidst the detritus of leftover construction materials. “That’s why we’re here,” he said. He started walking toward the side of the building. “Come on. There has to be a back door or a window or something. We’ll break in.”

They didn’t have to break in. One of the side doors was unlocked, and they opened it surreptitiously, checking to make sure they weren’t seen, then darted inside. There were no lights in the building, but a diffused illumination came from somewhere—windows, skylights—and they wandered through a series of empty rooms.

“Wait a minute,” Lisa said, cocking her head. “I hear something.”

“I don’t—”

“Shh!”

Now they all heard it. A pumping or pounding, a rhythmic mechanical sound coming from the floor above them.

“Upstairs,” Keith said.

They followed his lead, down a series of steps, then up.

And then they were in the boiler room.

Lisa recognized it from her dream, and she could tell from the expressions on their faces that Keith and Elena did too. She stood in place, unmoving. The air smelled of coal and chemicals and heavy copper, of fires and smelting, with an undercurrent of something sweeter, something slightly sickening that made her want to gag. Around her were the machines, their rhythmic pumping loud, even faintly hypnotic. Above her ran a series of catwalks that followed the straight paths of the huge pipes. The ground beneath her feet was slippery black concrete.

She took a tentative step forward. The air here was hot and humid, dripping with condensation. Steam hissed from various pipes and gauges. Even if she had not known what had happened here, she would have sensed that something was not right about this place. There was something frightening in this room, an undeniable sense of wrongness that could not be hidden or disguised, to which even the most insensitive individual would have responded. This was where the living Freddy had murdered a host of innocent children, where he had slowly and lovingly slit their throats, playing his hideous bloodgames.

This was where the dead Freddy now took children in their dreams.

“Let’s get out of here,” Elena said. Her voice was high, terrified.

Keith took a step forward. “Wait a minute. I want to—”

“Let’s get out of here!” Elena screamed. Her voice echoed, disappearing into the rumble of the machinery.

Lisa looked around the edge of a boiler. The concrete here was darker than everywhere else, but she saw against the blackness a wisp of white.

She bent down to look, frowning, and she leaped back as though shocked.

Her father’s handkerchief. It was her father’s handkerchief. One of the set she had given him last year for Father’s Day.

No, it just looked like her father’s handkerchief. It wasn’t really. It couldn’t be . . .

“What is it?” Keith demanded, coming up behind her.

Lisa turned around, shaking her head, trying to quell the panic in her breast. “Nothing,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”

“What did you see?”

“Nothing!”

He pushed past her, picked up the small square of white cloth. “This? What is it?”

Don’t tell! a part of her brain warned. You don’t know for sure!

“It’s my father’s,” she said. “It’s my father’s handkerchief.”

NINE

Ed felt strange this evening. It was not merely the way Lisa looked at him with that snotty suspicious expression she’d been putting on the past week. It was not merely the fact that he had gotten rid of the boxes in his car and they had come back again.

And again.

No, it was something else, something different, and it made him restless. He sped through dinner, wolfing down his food, ignoring the shared glances of his wife and daughter. He tried to read, tried to watch TV, but always he found himself walking anxiously through the house, prowling about.

Then he realized what was wrong.

He was bored with being awake.

He wanted to sleep.

He should have been frightened, and he knew he should have been frightened, but he wasn’t and he didn’t care. He glanced over at Barbara, sitting on the couch, watching a cable movie. Did she look different today? She did. She looked happier or healthier or something. Her skin looked flush, like she’d gotten a tan.

Or had sex.

Could that be possible? For the first time in nearly a week he felt apprehensive, unsure of himself. The cocky, almost arrogant self-confidence that had been his since he’d started dreaming he was—

Freddy

—whole again, had left, replaced by the old self-doubts. He studied Barbara’s face. God, she was pretty. And she was still young. It was only natural for her to want—

No, a part of his mind said, a cold strong part that would brook no argument. It was not natural for her to want anything. And if she even thought about another man, she deserved to—

He cut that thought off before it was finished. He still felt restless, ill at ease, but he forced himself to sit down in his chair. He stared blankly for a few moments at the tripe on the television, then looked at Barbara and Lisa out of the corner of his eye.

God, he wanted to sleep.

He faked a yawn, a loud melodramatic yawn that quickly got both Barbara’s and Lisa’s attention. “I’m tired,” he said. “I think I’ll hit the hay.”

“Okay,” Barbara said.

Lisa simply stared at him.

Before, he would have kissed them both good night, but tonight he didn’t feel like kissing anybody. He walked down the hallway to the bedroom, where he took from the closet his sweater and the hat he’d purchased the other day.

He put them both on and crawled into bed, closing his eyes, smiling.

He couldn’t wait to sleep.

He couldn’t wait to dream.

TEN

The clerk at the hardware store had the face of a trout.

It was like something out of Ripley’s.

Elena tried not to stare as she made her way past the cash register toward the gardening section, but she could not help glancing to the side as she passed the clerk. Above the white-collared neck of his shirt protruded an elongated head, shiny with gray scales. Beneath carefully parted hair bulged two huge gelatinous eyes. The man had no nose, but his lipless O-shaped mouth opened and closed in rhythmic counterpoint to the sound of her footsteps on the tile.

Elena hurried down an aisle, desperate to hide herself as far from the clerk as possible. She should have turned around and walked out the instant she had seen him, but in an extension of the polite pity she felt for the handicapped, she had not wanted to hurt his feelings and had decided to pretend she hadn’t noticed his deformity.

It was a decision she now regretted. The hardware store was quiet, apparently empty of customers save for her, and there was no way she could walk back outside without attracting the clerk’s attention.

She stared at the shelves before her, but where there should have been nuts and bolts, pipes and plumbing fixtures, she saw only row after row of different-sized Barbie dolls.

Her heart started pounding. She was suddenly afraid of something much worse than the fish-headed clerk.

She ran back down the aisle the way she had come. Her footsteps were loud, but they were not loud enough to cover the heavy awkward thud of the work boots behind her. She was being chased.

By Freddy.

She did not dare turn around. If she saw him, her legs would turn to jelly and she would not be able to run. The aisle opened out. She could see the doorway up ahead.

And Freddy was standing behind the cash register.

Impaled on his razor fingers was the bloody trout head of the sales clerk.

The monster licked one of the fish eyeballs, bit down. Green juice squirted out. He grinned at her, his rotted teeth square and crooked and somehow too small for his head. “Delicious,” he said. “Want to try a bite?”

She found herself shaking her head.

Run! she told herself. Run! But her body would not obey.

Freddy walked slowly around the register counter. His arm dropped to his side, the fish head fell to the floor with a muted squish. He beckoned to her with a bloody razor finger. The metal clicked loudly in the silent store. “I like all kinds of fish,” he said.

And then he was standing next to her, and then his arms were around her, and then she was screaming.

Keith was at a Mexican restaurant with Hogan and his buddies from the football team. That was weird. Ordinarily Hogan, the most popular and successful jock at school, would not give him the time of day. But now they were seated at the biggest table in the restaurant, talking like old buddies.

It must have been the holiday season, for a Christmas tree was prominently displayed in the center of the room. The tree was lit by multicolored lights and decorated with rodent heads and dried beetles.

Rodent heads? Beetles? Keith frowned. There was something wrong with that, but he could not quite put his finger on what made it seem out of place. He turned his head to look at the booth behind him, and he saw one man, naked, lying flat on the table while two seated men used steak knives to carve pieces out of his flesh.

“. . . but something’s different about him,” Hogan was saying. “He doesn’t seem like Mr. Williams. I passed by him the other day in the hall, and just looking at him gave me the creeps.”

The waiter arrived and placed before them large plates on which were perched Tonka trucks. “Be careful,” the waiter said. “The plates are hot.”

Keith looked down at the truck on his plate, then looked up—

—and he was in the bathroom near the boy’s locker room at school. Hogan and the other football players were standing around him, but they were all silent. He realized that they were scared.

There was a low rumble, a deep Sensurround sound, and the door to the bathroom flew open with a loud crash.

“It’s the coach,” Hogan said. His face was bleached white.

Keith turned to face the door.

And it was Freddy.

“Today we learn about hygiene,” Freddy said. Grinning, he held up a toothbrush, only instead of bristles, hundreds of tiny pins and needles were embedded in the red plastic of the handle. He pointed toward Jimmy Heath, the smallest football player on the team. “Take it,” he said.

He chuckled as the frightened boy took the toothbrush from his hand.

“You have to brush after every meal,” he said. “It’s the only way to get rid of that plaque. And that enamel. And those gums.”

Jimmy began to brush. The needles scraped loudly against his teeth. Blood began to flow from his mouth down his chin.

Laughing, Freddy moved forward and put an arm around Keith. Razor fingers dangled suggestively over Keith’s shoulder. “I’m going to show you how to take a shower.”

Keith wanted to escape, wanted to run, but he could do nothing as Freddy led him across the bathroom into the locker room and over to the showers. He felt his clothes being ripped off, felt himself pushed onto the tile, and then painful jets of scalding water were hitting him in the face.

He screamed in agony.

“Scrub good,” Freddy said. He speared a bar of soap with one of his razor fingers and began scraping the soap and the fingers across Keith’s chest.

The blood flowed thickly onto the tile and slowly, swirlingly, down the drain.

ELEVEN

“Ed.”

Louder: “Ed!”

He awoke, jerking up and opening his eyes at the sound of the voice. For a brief, baffling second he wasn’t sure where he was. He thought he might still be in the boiler room. Then the fog cleared and he saw that he was in the maintenance supply office. Mr. Kinney was standing in the doorway.

“Haven’t been getting enough sleep lately, eh, Ed?” The principal smiled, walking into the office. “Listen, Ed, I’d like to talk to you about . . .” His voice trailed off and a look of stern hardness came over his features. “Where did you get that?” he asked, pointing.

Ed looked down at the glove. He was wearing it, and the razor fingers clanked awkwardly as he tried to take it off. “It’s nothing,” he said.

“I know what it is,” Mr. Kinney responded, “and I want you to give it to me now.” His voice was shaking a little. “I don’t know if this is a joke or what, but if it is a joke, it’s in very bad taste. I don’t know what you think you’re doing, Ed, but . . .” He held out his hand.

Ed pulled away. “It’s mine.”

“Ed.”

“It’s mine.” He picked up his hat and put it on. The fingers snapped loudly as he did so. He felt suddenly angry, and he realized with surprise that he hated the principal.

“Ed, I don’t know what you’re—”

“Shut up, Kinney.” He spat the words out. “I don’t have to listen to you. I don’t have to do what you say. I don’t work for you anymore, you son of a bitch.”

“What—”

He pushed past the principal and walked out into the hallway.

“You’re crazy!” Mr. Kinney called after him. “I’m calling the district! I’m calling the police!”

Ed whirled around. “You do and I’ll kill you.” He turned his back on the principal and walked down the hallway, out of the building. In the open air he felt better, more like his normal self, and he stood dizzily on the steps for a moment, taking a deep breath as he squinted against the sun. He looked down at his hand, at the shiny razors dangling limply there, and he felt stupid, foolish. He took the glove off as he walked across the parking lot. It slipped easily from his hand, and he blinked, unable to remember why a few moments before he had been so angry at the principal, why he had hated the man so much. He opened the door of his car, dropping the razor fingers inside.

“You bastard!”

Ed turned to see the football star (Logan? Hogan?) and a group of fellow jocks storming across the parking lot toward him. They were obviously stirred up, and just as obviously after him. He could see the clenched jaws, the clenched fists. He could both sense and see the rage in their movements. But before he could get in the car and safely lock the doors, the ball players had surrounded him in a rough semicircle.

“You murdering bastard,” Hogan said.

The jocks crowded closer.

Ed feigned puzzlement. “What?”

“I know what you did. I saw you in my nightmare.”

“Me too!” another boy shouted.

“Me too!”

“Listen,” Ed said, backing against the car. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You killed Cathy and you killed Keith and you killed Elena!” Hogan pushed him. “Now we’re going to make sure you can’t hurt anyone else!”

“Do you hear what you’re saying? Do you realize how crazy that is?” He looked at them wide-eyed. Part of him believed his protestations, meant every word he said, but somewhere in his mind he also remembered Hogan from his dream the night before. He recalled Keith and Elena. He recalled Hogan’s little friend and the pincushion toothbrush.

Ed glanced quickly toward the smallest boy in the gang.

He saw the bandages around the kid’s strangely swollen mouth.

“You don’t—” he began.

They fell upon him, the entire team. He could only raise his arm to ward off the blows, and then he was down, able to see only red fists and redder faces and dirty white kicking sneakers. Fighting against the tide, he forced himself to rise, and with a supreme effort he opened the car door and grabbed the glove.

The punching stopped.

“I’ll kill you,” Ed said. His voice was quiet and low and did not sound like his normal voice. The kids looked at him with fear, and he felt good, strong, powerful. He put on the glove, fanned the fingers at them. He grinned. “Remember these, boys?”

The jocks, so brave a moment ago, looked at him, looked at each other, and took off running.

He laughed as he watched them flee.

He was still laughing as he got in the car and pulled out of the parking lot.

TWELVE

Lisa tapped her foot nervously against the floor of the phone booth. Keith and Elena. Dead. Both dead. She wiped her forehead. She was hot, sweating. Her top stuck to her body, her bra felt too tight, and she could smell the sour stench of her own sweat. She wiped her cheeks. The phone rang. Again. And again. On the fourth ring the answering machine kicked in. She heard a recording of her mother’s slow, patient voice.

Please Mom, she thought. Pick up the phone.

But the message ended without anyone answering, and Lisa said what she had to say, talking fast, the words spilling out. “Mom,” she said breathlessly. “It’s me. I want you to get out of the house. Now. Before Daddy gets home. I can’t explain, but you have to get out of there. Don’t tell Daddy where you’re going. I have some money and I’m taking the bus to Chicago. Grandma’s. Call me or meet me there. But don’t tell Daddy. He’s dangerous.”

In her mind, as she spoke, she saw the burned man of last night’s dream. Freddy. He had not seen her, had been making his way toward a hardware store and had not noticed her sitting in one of the cars on the busy street, but she had seen him. His face had been different, more angular, more cruel, but the way he moved, the way he walked, reminded her of her father.

He had been wearing her father's red and green sweater.

And her father’s hat.

She had known then, for sure.

She closed her eyes before hanging up the phone. “I love you, Mom,” she said. She closed her eyes, swallowing hard, leaning against the half-glass of the booth.

She prayed. For the first time since she had stopped going to Sunday school in fourth grade, she prayed.

She hoped God heard her.

THIRTEEN

Home was only a five-minute drive from school, but it took Ed nearly an hour to make the trip. He kept turning off on side streets, wanting to get away, wanting to stop himself from hurting Barbara.

But why would he hurt Barbara?

Because she was an unfaithful, lying slut.

But he loved her.

But she didn't love him.

Once, he nearly drove into the lane of an oncoming truck, and for a brief flash of a second he felt good, felt as though he had made the right decision. Then reason reasserted itself and he swerved out of the way, ignoring the honks and screams coming from the other cars around him.

Finally he grew tired, though. Finally he arrived home. He shut off the car, took the key from the ignition and sat there for a moment, staring at the empty face of the garage door. He looked down at the seat next to him. He saw the glove. He saw the hat. Slowly, he put them on.

He got out of the car.

He killed Barbara while she slept. She was lying in bed, taking an afternoon nap, smiling as she dozed, dreaming no doubt of some meaty young stud, and he pulled the glove tight and with a rattle of razor fingers slashed across the thin soft flesh of her stomach, the skin parting cleanly and absurdly easily, red blood welling from the evenly spaced slashes and streaming over her body onto the bed. She tried to scream, opening her eyes and mouth in shocked terrorized tandem, but he cut off her face and then the blood was everywhere.

He backed out, closed the bedroom door, then walked calmly into the kitchen, where he washed off his razor fingers in the sink, the red blood turning pink as it dissipated in the water.

He took a bottle of sleeping pills from the medicine cabinet next to the spice rack and put it in his pocket for later.

Returning to the bedroom, he withdrew his battered hat and his red and green sweater from the closet. He put them both on, then again pulled on his glove. He saw the red light flashing on the answering machine, and with one pointed razor tip punched the Message Play button. He heard the frightened voice of his daughter, and he couldn’t help chuckling. She sounded so damn scared.

But he was wasting time. They would be after him soon, searching for him. He knew that. It always happened that way.

He walked outside and got into the car. In the backseat, right where they were supposed to be, were the two boxes: the Barbies and the Tonka trucks. That made him feel good. He liked to be prepared.

Now all he needed to do was get out of here, find a place to lie low.

He smiled to himself as he thought of the football team and the boiler room and Mr. Kinney.

He would have his fun. He would get them all.

But that would come later. First would come Chicago.

And Lisa.

And maybe some children.

He started the car, backed out of the driveway. For I have promises to keep, he thought. And miles to go before I sleep.

And miles to go before I sleep.

He caught up with the Greyhound an hour out of town. He followed it, grinning to himself, tapping his fingers against the steering wheel all the way to the Windy City.

A Pagesofdeath ebook. 9/12/2011