Perfect Nightmare

would be nothing wrong at all.

Except she still didn’t want to go up to her room, and found herself gazing at the stairs with the same feeling of dread with which she’d looked at the house itself only a few minutes ago.

And she felt even colder than when she’d been out standing in the chill and drear of the rainy afternoon.

“Stop it!” she commanded herself again, barely realizing she was speaking out loud to an empty room. “You’re just freaking yourself out.” The sound of her own voice somehow making her feel better, she got a Diet Pepsi from the refrigerator, and then mounted the stairs.

Her room looked exactly as she had left it. She sniffed, and thought she could still smell traces of the strange odor that had hung in her room on Wednesday.

No, she told herself. You’re just imagining it!

She went to her underwear drawer and slowly opened it. The tiny scrap of paper she’d left balanced on the front edge was still there.

Undisturbed.

Her drawer had not been opened.

See? she told herself. Nobody went through my stuff.

She picked up the fragment of paper with a wet fingertip, shook it off into her wastebasket, and felt much better as it dropped away.

The closet door was closed tightly, as she always left it. When she was little, she had always been afraid that the bogeyman was in the closet, and whenever she called out to her parents to tell them how afraid she was of the person in the closet, her father would march right to the door and pull it wide open while she cowered in the big mahogany bed, clutching the covers around her neck.

And of course there had never been anyone — or anything—in the closet.

Now, as she stared at the door, those childhood terrors came flooding back, but she forced them aside, took a deep breath, and did as her father had always done. She walked right over and opened the closet door wide.

And, as always, there was nothing there.

No bogeyman, or anything else, either. She smiled then, realizing how silly her fears had been.

And still were! That was it — she’d been afraid that somehow the bogeyman — who had never been anything more than a figment of her own childish imagination — had somehow gotten into the house when it was open.

Stupid! Stupid, stupid, stupid! There was nothing to be afraid of, and never had been. She was older now — almost grown up. How could she have been so dumb as to let herself be afraid of the bogeyman?

Suddenly, things were back to normal, her fears fell away, and she felt so good, she almost wanted to dance. Flipping on the CD player, she took a drink of the soda, then did a couple of pirouettes that weren’t quite in time to the music. But who cared? Everything was fine again.

She perched on the edge of her bed and rested one of her feet on the step stool that still stood next to the mahogany four-poster, even though she hadn’t had to use it to climb into the high bed for years. She untied her shoes, pulled off her socks, and dangled her feet for a moment, then slid off the bed and took the socks to the laundry hamper.

A second later her shorts and T-shirt joined the socks.

Clad only in her sports bra and bikini panties, she stuck one foot in a slipper that lay by the bed, then looked for the other one, fishing around under the bed with her bare foot, feeling for it. How far could she have kicked it last night?

She got down on her knees and was about to reach under the bed for the wayward slipper when her cell phone rang. It startled her, and she banged her knuckles against the hard mahogany of the bed frame as she jerked her hand back. With one slipper on, and sucking at her stinging knuckle, she flopped onto the bed and reached over to pick up the phone from the nightstand.

“Hey,” Dawn said before she’d even spoken. “You okay?”

“I guess so,” Lindsay replied, shaking her hand, then pressing it against the pillow to try and ease the stinging. “Are you at your dad's?”

“Yeah, we just got here. Sheila’s making dinner and Robert isn’t up from his nap yet.” She hesitated, then: “You sure you’re all right?”

“I’m fine,” Lindsay insisted. “I just banged my hand, that’s all. At least it’s the same one I twisted my wrist on last week.” She gazed dolefully at her knuckle, which was already turning black and blue. “So what’s your dad doing? How come you’re not having ‘quality time'?”

Dawn groaned. “He’s working, of course. Said he had reports he had to e-mail in before tomorrow morning. He’ll be finished by dinner, and then we’ll eat, watch 60 Minutes, and then I’ll go home. It’s so totally stupid. I wish we both could have just gone to my house.”

“I do, too,” Lindsay confessed. “Ever since Mom and Dad decided to sell it, I hate it here. I—”

“Oops,” Dawn interrupted. “I’ve got another call. Want to hold?”

Lindsay hesitated, then: “I guess not — I need to change and figure out what to do till Mom and Dad get home. I just wish—”

“Okay,” Dawn said, and Lindsay could tell by her voice that she was already thinking about the other call. “See you tomorrow.” Dawn clicked off, and the cell phone went dead in Lindsay’s hand. She put it back onto the charger on her nightstand, feeling bleak at how far away they were moving and the difference that would make in her friendships with Dawn and everyone else.

She looked down at her feet. One slipper on, one slipper off. Somehow, the lost slipper suddenly seemed appropriate — one of her slippers was just as lost as she felt, and the other was right where it was supposed to be.

Just like her. Supposed to be right here in Camden Green, but half of her already feeling lost in New York.

Sighing, she knelt down once more to fish the other slipper out from under the bed.

And smelled it again.

That awful, disgusting, musky odor that had filled her room on Wednesday, but that her mother hadn’t been able to smell.

Now it was back, and stronger than—

With sudden, horrifying certainty she knew, and all her terror came crashing back in on her.

He was in her room.

Now.

Under her bed — the bed that had always been her final refuge, the one place where she felt utterly safe.

And he was there.

Waiting.

Paralyzed, Lindsay knew she had to move, knew she had to scream, to run, to get out.

Get out!

Now she could hear him breathing.

Her heart pounded so hard, she thought it was going to explode, and her mind raced. But panic was already overwhelming reason, and her terror seemed to have utterly sapped her of the ability to move or even cry out…

Chapter Sixteen

“I liked the place on West Eighty-eighth,” Kara said as Steve pulled onto Route 25A and headed out to the north shore of the Island.

“What wasn’t to like?” Steve asked, turning on the windshield wipers as rain began to dribble from the clouds that had been gathering. When the wipers did little more than smear the city grime across the windshield, he