Nightmare Man (6 page)

I shrug, hammering the tip of the screw into the door frame before I put the drill to it. “I feel like I’ve made it past this initial hurdle of getting in the mindset and going to all these damn doctors, so if this issue is fixable, the time is now. I might as well see it through.”

I put the final screw into the door. The wood is thin, but there’s nothing I can do about that right now. I wave Shannon over into the hallway from where she sprawls on the bed, shut the door, flip both of the latches and then slap on the padlocks.

“Jesus, those are big locks. Kind of overestimating your own strength there, Hulk.”

They are really big.

“Dad is super strong like the Hulk,” Logan says. I didn’t hear him wander over. The sound of the drill had kept him in the living room with his sister playing video games. He doesn’t like the vacuum either. He doesn’t think it’s going to get him or anything. He just doesn’t like the sound. I don’t either.

I smile at him and flex a bicep. It’s actually pretty beefy. I’ve got a chin-up bar in the basement and work out a few times a week. Whenever I reach a combination of heavy and weak, unable to do a set of ten chin-ups, I do a starvation/exercise combo.

Logan grabs my arm and squeezes. I used to let him hang from it, but he’s gotten way too big.

“Mom doesn’t know the power of Dad-Man, does she?”

“Nope!”

I hesitate to go over the lock system with Shannon while Logan is standing there, not knowing if it will scare him or make him feel safer. I decide not knowing what the setup is for will probably scare him more than knowing.

Because we came to opposite conclusions at the exact same time, Shannon says, “Go back and play with your sister for a few minutes.”

I nod at him, and he drifts off. He moves quietly for a nine-year-old boy.

Giving the key to Shannon, I gesture toward the locks. She unlocks and removes them with no problem.

I say, “This means you should try to make it to bed before five, or I’ll have to call you.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Mom’s going to lock you up?” Logan peeks around the corner into the hall. I wave him over, then squat down to him.

“Just for the couple of hours when I do my running-around thing. This way, I won’t come out and scare you again.”

“But what about the shadow man?”

Everything stops. Everything goes silent and still.

“Shadow man?”

“The one you chased. The one you protected me from.”

“That’s just a nightmare I have. That’s not real.”

“But I saw him.”

Shannon starts to talk, but I raise a hand and she doesn’t. For once she doesn’t.

“What did you see?”

“At first, I didn’t know it was you who grabbed me, but then Mom turned on the light and I saw it was you.”

“That’s right. It was me, not a shadow man.”

“But then I looked over your shoulder and I saw him. Will the locks keep him in your room?”

* * *

The combination of being locked in my room and a lack of my usual tranquilizer has me lying awake, staring up at the dark ceiling. I keep nervously testing my bladder, expecting to feel the need to pee but then being unable to open my door.

Running through my memories, I search for a time when I might have mentioned the subject of my night terrors to Logan. I can’t find one where I described a man in black. He knows I have a nightmare problem—there’s no way to keep that from him what with the screaming and thrashing—but I’m not sick enough to describe the living shadow that emerges from the darkness almost every night to torment me. Shannon didn’t believe me, shouted at me as best she could without letting Logan or Madison hear. But I swear I never discussed the nightmare man in front of either of them.

“Then how does he know?” she asked.

How does he know?

Shannon reminded me that I said, “The nightmare man was here,” after she threw me off of Logan.

Then there’s the fact that he described him as a man in a black robe. Asking him what he meant, he explained that the man wore a black robe with a black hood. That perfectly describes the nightmare man. That says to me this is something Logan experienced firsthand rather than heard me talk about.

But that’s crazy. Toying with the idea of his having more of an existence than a dream is one thing. Believing he is a fully separate entity capable of interacting with my son is another.

I don’t know exactly what I’ve thought the nightmare man is. So much of my interaction with him is on a subconscious level that he defies my attempts at logical analysis. Attempting to solidify my thoughts on him now, maybe one way to describe him would be as an independent creation of my mind. He’s my Lucifer. I made him. I make him, every second he’s alive, I’m making him. But he’s otherwise independent of me, and intent on making me miserable.

So I think a part of my brain is intent on making my life more miserable? Why would I do that?

Regardless, though I’ve always thought of the nightmare man as having more substance than your average dream, I never imagined him as being so real as to interact with others.

I try to imagine how I would feel if I discovered that I were simply a dream. How would I feel toward the dreamer? If I hated my existence, and found out someone was responsible for every miserable aspect of it, would I thank him for creating me, or hate him for creating me as I am?

If I were the nightmare man, I think I would hate me. How do Christians not end up hating God?

I’m not conscious of drifting off, but then I get the little jolt that warns me of trouble. I try to convince myself I just heard some noise from elsewhere in the house, that it startled me and I can go back to sleep, but I can’t stop myself from listening harder. I can’t stop my traitorous mind from trying to put the pieces together, from trying to create a cohesive story of existence out of the twisted phenomena it’s receiving.

He rises. He hurls himself from the shadows, and I shriek and throw myself from my bed. I collide with Shannon’s nightstand as I search for the wall with my back, stumbling but keeping my feet.

I feel the cold blast of the nightmare man’s gaze, but then he turns away and runs for the door.

For a moment I’m relieved. Then I try to figure out his scheme. I know what he’s doing, but I can’t seem to remember. He can’t flank me. He might be trying to lure me into the open.

Logan.

Shannon’s side of the bed is opposite the door, and I’m clambering over the mattress as the trailing edge of the nightmare man’s cloak disappears into the thin bar of light.

I fight through blankets that suddenly seem like razor wire on a WWI battlefield, tangling me up, dragging me into slow motion while terrible things happen around me in rapid fire. I get one foot to the floor and lunge for the door handle, but my other foot is caught up and I fall. I land on my hands, but on the fist of my left hand instead of the palm, and it rolls until the back of my hand is pressed into the floor and a spike of pain in my wrist blasts my dark vision white.

Left hand clutched to my chest, I keep going, but the door doesn’t open. I yank, then again, again, again, again. I bellow. Is he holding the door shut? Does the fact that I can’t open the door mean Logan is safe, because the nightmare man is standing on the other side? No, he’s somehow jammed the door shut. He’s probably in Logan’s room already.

I wrap my left hand over my right for a better grip and pull again, and the pain hits me so hard I gasp like a fish flopping in the bottom of a boat.

Cradling my left hand in my right, I back up, then slam forward, putting my right shoulder into the door. The room resounds like a bass drum, the wall vibrating like a skin. I slam again, again, again.

The door falls forward, and for a moment I’m blind, motionless, silent.

Logan shrieks at such a high pitch it sounds inhuman. It sounds like the pure auditory transmission of terror, and it galvanizes me into motion.

The door didn’t land flat on the floor, but propped against the opposite wall. I scramble over, trying not to use my left hand but finding it unavoidable as I slip and scrabble over the slick lacquered plywood that’s lying at an awkward angle and shifting beneath my weight.

I make it across, fall, rise and run. As I press Logan’s door open, I see movement at the end of the hall. Shannon hits the wall, unable to change her momentum.

“No!” she shouts. She presses off, redirecting.

I turn back to Logan’s room. There, at the end of the bed, glowing in black light stands the nightmare man. His cold beam illuminates Logan’s face, which is twisted into a mask of such horror that he’s almost unrecognizable. And his eyes, God, his eyes reflect the dark light blackly. His eyes glow solid black, showing me the true face of the nightmare man who stands still as an ebony statue at the foot of Logan’s bed.

A battering ram slams into my left side and I’m knocked into the room, bouncing between the wall and Logan’s big wooden dresser until I settle on the ground, pressed down by a snarling, warm bulk. I struggle, try to whip out the elbow pinned to my side, try to push myself up from an incredibly painful position from which I have absolutely no leverage.

“Wake up!” the thing growls at me, and from the voice and weight and smell I understand it’s Shannon.

“I’m awake. Goddamn it, I’m awake. Let me up.”

But she drags in ragged gasps of breath and squeezes me tighter, not letting me get any leverage.

I crane my neck just far enough to see past the dresser and find the nightmare man is gone. The struggle must have scared him away. Logan stands in the corner sobbing.

Then the lights come on.

Shannon doesn’t relinquish her grip a bit, but we both turn to the doorway. Madison stands there wide-eyed, one hand still on the light switch, one clutching a stuffed Hello Kitty.

“I’m awake, goddamn it.” I try to control my voice. It comes out as a weird grumble whisper instead of the shout I feel rising in me with the panic of being trapped with my spine torqued, my shoulder pressed into the wall, my face into the dresser.

“You’re awake?” She pulls back her head and looks at me, going almost cross-eyed trying to focus on me from inches away, trying to see the truth in my eyes.

“Shannon, please get off me. I’m awake, and this really hurts.”

She can’t get up without pushing off me. I try not to curse in front of the kids, but I do. She helps drag me up.

“He was here,” Logan says through blubbering pink lips. “The nightmare man. He was right there.” He points to the end of the bed. “He said it’s my fault!” and the wailing takes him too hard for him to speak any more. Then Madison starts crying, and suddenly, despite all the panic and chaos of moments before, Shannon’s and my ultimate priority is to comfort them.

“I heard him screaming,” I say, kneeling and clutching Logan to my chest. He pulls himself against me just as hard, and his heaving pulses through my body, breaking my heart.

Shannon glares at me as she hugs Madison, who keeps looking at her older brother and then crying harder. But Shannon’s glare is confused, unfocused. It’s anger that wants desperately to find a place to land, but can’t. Because she doesn’t know what I know.

The nightmare man is after our son.

I stand, picking Logan up, though holding my left hand limply against his back.

“Oh my God, Jessie, you’re bleeding.”

I set Logan down and then look myself over. I don’t expect to see the amount of blood that’s smeared across and flowing down my legs from beneath my boxers; the world goes warm and fuzzy and I taste copper as I almost faint.

* * *

Because of the wrist injury I’m getting extra consideration at work. Extra post-call time, since my typing is off. Extra smoke breaks, which I wouldn’t have expected. I guess they value me more than I thought.

I stare up at the late fall sky, watching my sad little stream of smoke disperse and join that iron gray canopy, and I think of last night. I think of the nightmare my life has become. I think of the emergency room.

My left wrist is sprained. They strapped a brace on it. Other than that, all I can do is occasionally ice it, and try to keep it higher than my heart.

Remembering this, I lift my left arm into the air until my shoulder burns, then drop it.

The ER doctors were more concerned with my leg. What I didn’t notice in the chaos the nightmare man had created was that I hadn’t knocked the door out of its frame, I’d knocked the frame out of the wall with the door still shut in it. It came out whole, pulling the nails with it, nails that pointed straight up, that I dragged myself across, and without even noticing puncturing and scratching my legs.

The worst was my left leg. I must have landed directly on a nail when I straddled the door, driving it straight into my inner thigh, then dragging it sideways as I slid over, ripping the hole. The doctor noted that I’d missed my femoral artery by inches, and that a ragged puncture wound in an artery was next to impossible to fix and I would have bled to death. He advised I not do that again.

I cringe thinking of what could have happened to my testicles had I landed on the nail differently. The cringe sets off a spasm in my neck, which seems to have fused solid overnight from Shannon’s tackle.