Nightmare Man (8 page)

The king of dreams.

My phone buzzes with a text. I know who it is. Leslie is the only person who texts me.

B
REAK?

N
OT THERE.
F
LIPPED OUT.
S
ENT ME HOME ON SHORT-TERM DISABILITY.

S
ERIOUS?
C
ALL ME!

C
AN’T RIGHT NOW.
W
ILL LATER.

Y
OU BETTER.

* * *

I expected something different from the room I’d be sleeping in overnight at the medical research center. I’d envisioned a large room with one wall dedicated to a one-way mirror. The bed in the center would be a sort of stainless steel pedestal positioned beneath a piece of machinery of unknown purpose dangling down from the ceiling like a fat, albino spider.

In actuality, they showed me to a standard single-bed hospital room and left me to change. In a gown that keeps flapping open in the back, I feel uncomfortable sitting on the bed and slip between the paper-stiff sheets.

It’s only eight PM, but I’m accustomed to an early bed time. I take an issue of
The Demon
, one of my favorite comic book series of the early ’90s, and settle in.

Etrigan is a rhyming demon, and you’d think rhyming dialogue would be obnoxious, but they play it just right and manage to pull it off.

I’m on to the next issue before the nurse returns to wire me up.

“Sorry about the delay,” she says, gluing electrodes to various parts of my body. “We’ve got a lot of people staying over tonight.”

“We should make it a slumber party, do s’mores, a scary movie, truth or dare.”

She maintains her brisk pace, but I manage to get a smile out of her. “You know what? I can’t think of a worse idea than showing you lot a scary movie before bed.”

“Ha, true. You got me there.”

All thoughts of banter leave my mind as she spreads out and then straightens the wires on something that looks like an old leather football helmet sprouting a tangled garden of multicolored wires.

She must see the anxiety on my face, and says, “You’re lucky. We used to have to shave patches of hair. This isn’t as bad as it looks.”

I sit up, and she puts the thing on me. It’s heavier than it looks. All hanging off in the same direction, the wires drag at my head like they want to pull me down to the pillow and into sleep.

Conversely, I had expected to be hooked to a big, beeping machine, but the wires lead to a very small box with an LCD screen. She fiddles with it until she seems satisfied, then unfolds straps from the back and attaches it to my wrist, though it’s much larger than a watch. She takes several Velcro straps and binds the wires to my arm at the forearm, then the upper arm.

Tugging lightly at the wires she says, “There we go. These should stay in place.”

I run my hand along the wires. The straps hold them flush to my arm. It seems like they’ll be safe even if I freak out hard, unless I get it into my head to rip the contraption off.

The nurse says, “Press that button if you need something. The door will be locked for your own safety, but you can, of course, leave whenever you’d like. Any questions?”

“Nope. I think I’m good.”

“Okay then, Jessie, you have a good night.”

I manage to make it through a few more issues of
The Demon
before my eyes start to close. I open them and a few minutes have gone by and I read for a bit longer. Before long, I’m spending more time with my eyes closed than open, so I put the comic on the nightstand and settle down to sleep.

My eyes snap open. My heart pounds as a jolt of adrenaline hits it. He must be here.

The room is very dark. I check for the beam of light that always comes in from the hallway. It’s not there.

I jump out of bed and run for the door and slam into a solid wall. Not only is the door gone, but the wall has moved. And the floor is different. Cold.

I shout, “Shannon!” and then listen. There’s no response. No footsteps.

I spin, and he’s standing there, a pulsing, slightly darker patch of darkness. Limbs and tentacles grow, but are then reabsorbed.

The room is so much darker than usual.

With my hands behind me, I search for the light switch, finding only wall.

He’s done this. He’s finally done it. I was wrong. I didn’t awaken in fear because I sensed him enter the real world. I awoke in fear as he dragged me into the nightmare world.

A flaming wall of adrenaline blasts through my veins like a wildfire at the realization, but when it passes, my fear is scorched away. There is no fear because there is no hope. I can’t run. I can’t turn on the lights. Here there is no light.

I step away from the wall. I walk toward the nightmare man.

“Why are you doing this to me?”

He says nothing. I approach him, and he doesn’t move. No, he moves, he shifts and changes, but he doesn’t run from or at me.

“Who are you? Why are you doing this?”

I’m readying my body to attack when he speaks. “I am a dream of vengeance,” he says.

I hit the cold, smooth ground ass-first and kick away. The voice. He has never spoken before, but I’ve imagined what his voice might sound like. The screech of rusting slabs of metal scraping together. The roar of a winter storm. The hissing of decompressing hydraulics.

But what breaks the quarter century of silence is the soft voice of a child.

A voice I hear every year at Christmas, giving an audio wish list to Santa, with my parents and wife and now kids laughing as I cringe in embarrassment.

It’s my own voice.

My back hits the barrier of whatever prison he has me in. I have to go farther. I have to get farther. I leap to my feet and shriek and pound at the wall. Pain fills my head like white light when my left wrist flexes, but I keep bashing away.

Then light fills existence, jabbing spikes into my brain through my eyes. Squinting, I turn and look for the nightmare man. He’s gone. I find a white room. I’m pressed against a blank wall. On the adjacent wall, a door opens, and in step large men in scrubs.

I bare my teeth, and then I remember where I am.

* * *

“That was quite an episode.” Dr. Turner shows me a night-vision video of myself careening around the room, looking exactly like a mental patient in my flapping gown and padded helmet.

I hear myself scream, “What do you want?” There is no reply, except in my memory.

I am a dream of vengeance.

“The activity in your brain at this point is astounding. The medicine is having the intended effect. On your brain, obviously not on your night terrors. The activity spiked so high we didn’t get an upper-level measurement. The recording is compressed.”

I had spent the rest of that night trying my hardest not to fall asleep again. I seriously considered buzzing the nurse, walking out, quitting the study, but I needed to hear what Dr. Turner thought.

And he seems to think it’s all pretty great.

They run a series of tests, seemingly unrelated to my night terrors. I’m guessing they’re testing for the expression of expected side effects. They let me go in the early afternoon. Before they do, though, Dr. Turner shows up to give me my pill. He gives me two.

* * *

I open the door to the basement and stare down into the musty darkness. It would be a good place for the nightmare man to hide. I flip the lights on and head down the creaking stairs.

Against one wall, stands a second wall, one composed of comic book boxes stacked on two wooden pallets I stole from behind a grocery store. I imagine the reaction the early twenties Jessie would have to this sight: thousands of valuable comics sitting on pallets in a basement that occasionally floods, absorbing moisture from the air, losing all their value as they go from mint to near mint to very good. When would it end? Fine? Poor?

The reaction of the midthirties Jessie is really no different, except that all the anger and sorrow is wrapped up and muffled by resignation.

Earlier in the day I had an appointment with Dr. Gunnar, the shrink. In all the chaos of the past week, I’d completely forgotten about my assignment to figure out what the nightmare man means to me, but we discussed it anyway.

I am a dream of vengeance.

I remembered that line.

When I was a kid, my night terrors got so bad that my parents took me to a child psychologist. Through our discussions, that shrink found out I was big into comic books, which didn’t take much on his part because I’d tell anyone who’d listen. He told me I should create a story for the nightmare man. I should make a comic book about him, but he should be a hero, not a villain.

Dr. Gunnar asked about the details of the story, but it had been so long that I couldn’t remember anything but that it’s where I began calling my cloaked tormentor Nightmare Man. We switched to the topic of my work, my short-term disability, how I plan to cope with the stress when the time comes to return. But what I really wanted to do was get off that couch, head home and find that old
Nightmare Man
comic.

I begin to dig out the N boxes. I was so proud of my comic book that I stored it with my real comics, not with my art stuff.
Nightmare Man
shares a box with
The Night Man
,
Nighthawk
and
Nightwing
. I stored it in one of the solid comic bags used to protect really valuable comics, knowing how much it would be worth once I was a famous comic book creator.

I slide it out. The Mylar case has preserved it almost perfectly. The spine crinkles a bit in protest as I open the book, but the paper is still white and smooth.

A boy sits at a desk drawing a comic book with thought bubbles exclaiming “Brilliant!” and “My best work yet!” sprouting from his head. Then his parents, standing side by side in the doorway, tell him it’s time to do his homework. On the next page it’s the same series of events, except he’s told to clean his room. On the next, it’s time for bed.

The boy is angry and frustrated. If he doesn’t practice, he’ll never become a famous comic book creator, but his parents seem set on killing his dream. He falls asleep on a tear-stained pillow. A panel later, Nightmare Man emerges.

Considering I was just a kid, I’m proud of how artistically I handled
Nightmare Man
. In one panel, the little boy has cried himself to sleep, his closet visible in frame, a black square. In the next, one side of the closet is no longer square, but the humanoid shape of Nightmare Man as he steps out of the nightmare realm, black on black.

He confronts the parents in their bedroom. The father fights back, but Nightmare Man becomes insubstantial at will and his efforts are futile. When he’s finally exhausted himself, Nightmare Man drags him and the mother over to their closet and forces them to look inside. It opens on a nightmare city, the land Nightmare Man rules until he is summoned to our world by the tears of broken dreams. By day, he rules over the broken dreams, twisted into nightmare by sorrow. At night, he enters the real world to punish those who are responsible for the condition of his dream subjects. He is the king of nightmares, but it isn’t an enviable position.

From out of the closet crawls a pale, scrawny man engulfed in a costume and cape that probably fit him tightly before he became so emaciated. Nightmare Man explains this is their son’s dream of being a comic book artist. He’s not yet completely broken. He still lives. But should he die, Nightmare Man would return to drag the parents off to the nightmare realm.

He says, “I am a dream of vengeance.”

When the boy awakens, his parents show him the new drawing desk they’ve bought him, and all the art supplies. They apologize for not understanding how important his work is to him. He hugs them, then immediately sets to work on his latest comic, his parents watching over him. Flash forward, and he’s still working at that desk as an adult. His parents stand in the same place, hunched in geriatric decrepitude, thinking about how proud they are of their son, the rich comic book artist.

I’m having trouble swallowing around a lump in my throat as I return the comic to its Mylar case, then its spot in the N box, and then bury the box beneath others. It must be the mold.

* * *

I pinch the thick, polyester comforter between my index finger and thumb, flexing all the other fingers as far away as I can from the vile thing. The E-Z Inn is exactly the sort of place where gonzo porn directors come to film meth-fueled gangbangs and ugly swingers come to have ugly orgies.

The weird, rough, beige blanket that I’d never let touch my skin even if it weren’t semen encrusted has to go, too. I toss them both into the corner, but find that my tossing ability is hindered by my reluctance to grip the fabric, and I kick them the rest of the way.