Perfect Nightmare

Whatever this was, it wasn’t good. “What was she scared of?” he asked.

“She was scared someone was in the house.”

Ellen Fine had been afraid someone was in the house, and now she was no longer in the house herself. “I’m going to call the police,” Rick said, almost more to himself than to Emily.

The little girl instantly brightened. “They’re nice!”

Rick Mancuso cocked his head. “You know the police?”

Emily nodded again. “They came last night.”

“Because your mommy was scared?”

Emily nodded a third time.

Rick pulled out his cell phone and dialed 911, and in less than two minutes had explained exactly what he’d found when he arrived at Ellen Fine’s house ten minutes earlier.

“An officer will be there in less than ten minutes,” the impersonal voice of the 911 operator said when he was finished.

With Emily clinging to him like a burr in a puppy’s fur, Mancuso pulled the Open House sign from the lawn, then went back inside. He didn’t particularly want to babysit — didn’t know how — but he sure wasn’t going anywhere, at least not until the cops arrived. “Why don’t you show me your room?” he finally asked. It wasn’t going to kill him to play with dolls for a half hour or so, was it?

Besides, there was still the hope — faint though it might be — that Ellen Fine could still show up, clean the kitchen and make the beds, and between the two of them they could save the open house.

Yeah, right.

A nightmare. It had to have been a nightmare. But if it was only a nightmare, why did she feel burning scrapes on her legs as if she’d been dragged over the cracked and pitted asphalt of the alley behind her house?

Why was her nightie still damp from the rain?

And why was the panic that had always before been at its worst at the moment she woke up from a bad dream not now falling away? Why, instead, were its tentacles closing tighter around her with every second that passed as her mind slowly cleared?

Because it hadn’t been a nightmare at all.

As the last vestiges of unconsciousness lifted, Ellen felt not only the stinging abrasions on her legs, but the stinging in her feet, the aching in her joints, and the agony of a headache whose throbbing threatened to overwhelm her with every beat of her heart.

Her neck hurt.

Her wrists hurt.

Her shoulders hurt.

She tried to move, hoping to ease some of the aching.

Then, from somewhere behind her, a voice whispered: “She’s waking up… Mommy’s waking up!”

Ellen’s eyes snapped open to behold a nightmare even more horrifying than the one from which shed thought she just awakened. A strangled scream rose in her throat, but when she opened her mouth to vent it, nothing happened; instead of filling the chamber around her with her howl of anguish, she felt like her mouth — her cheeks, her eardrums, her very head — was about to explode. As the scream crashed against her taped lips, her lungs tried to suck in new air to replace the mass they’d just expelled, and a new panic seized her.

She couldn’t breathe!

She couldn’t breathe, and she was suffocating!

Yet another scream rose in her, but she found one tiny corner of her mind that had not yet given in to the overwhelming panic.

Nose! that tiny fragment of her mind commanded her. Breathe through your nose!

She caught the second scream as it was rising in her throat, and forced it back down into the pit of terror from which it had arisen. Focusing her mind — blanking out the pain, the burning, the terror, even the images she’d seen when she opened her eyes — she focused her mind on a single thing.

Breathing.

Breathing through her nose.

And breathing slowly, so the rhythm could do its part in staving off the mind-numbing panic.

Almost miraculously, air began to fill her lungs.

In… out… in… out…

As the oxygen began to flow through her, Ellen’s mind began to clear and the panic to subside.

Then the memories finally came flooding back.

Real.

It was all real. Waking up… hearing a noise… going downstairs… checking everything, even the basement. And thinking it was all right, thinking she’d been wrong, that there was nothing in the house at all. And then, just as she was going back upstairs—

Even now she could still taste some kind of drug in her mouth, smell it in her nostrils. But there hadn’t been quite enough to keep her completely unconscious. So it had all seemed like a dream. A dream from which she would awaken. But now she was awake, and the reality was even worse than the dream that hadn’t been a dream at all.

She struggled against the bonds that held her hands behind her, struggled against the tape that bound her ankles to the legs of a chair — a chair far too small to hold her body.

Across from her sat two girls. One of them she recognized immediately — the girl from Camden Green who had vanished after—

An open house! An open house just like the one that had been held at her home.

The other girl was younger, emaciated, with a grayish complexion that told Ellen almost as much as the blank look in her eyes. It took Ellen a second or two to realize that the bright smiles on both the girls’ faces were nothing more than lipstick clumsily drawn onto the duct tape that covered their mouths, and each of them was bound to an undersized chair, just as she was.

All three of them were sitting at what looked like a child’s tea table, a table that was already set for tea, though the crockery was stained and cracked, and the silver dented and badly tarnished.

A flicker of movement caught her eye, and Ellen twisted her neck to see another person, a figure clad all in black except for a white surgical mask upon which was drawn an even bigger, redder, and more grotesque smile than those the two girls wore.

Then, as she turned back to the two girls, she remembered her own daughter.

Emily! Oh dear God, Emily!

Emily… Emily… Emily, Ellen chanted in her head. She had to know if Emily was all right. Had this — this monster taken Emily, too? But maybe not — maybe he’d left her at home in bed. Maybe it was just her he wanted, and not her daughter.

That was it — that had to be it. It wasn’t Emily who had interested him in the picture. It had been her.

She had to believe that. She needed to believe that.

Once again her panic subsided and her mind accepted that none of it was a nightmare, that it was all real, and that if anyone was going to do anything to help not only her, but the two girls as well, it would have to be her.

Which meant she had to assess the situation. Telling herself once again — forcing herself to believe — that Emily was at least still safe, she turned her attention first to the blonde. What was her name? Lindsay! That was it. Lindsay Mason, or Merrill, or something that began with an M. The girl looked reasonably healthy, and when their eyes met, Ellen saw a burning anger in them. And when Lindsay’s eyes fixed on the figure in black, Ellen could feel her fury as clearly as if the girl had spoken out loud. I’ll kill him, she seemed to be saying. If I ever get loose, I’ll kill him.

But the other girl — the dark-haired, emaciated child with the dead eyes and gray complexion — seemed not even conscious of her surroundings anymore, let alone of what was happening to her.

Ellen’s gaze returned to Lindsay again, who looked back, her eyes pleading now, and once again Ellen could read their message clearly: Help us… please help us.