that Daniel Warren was preparing to leave. Elayne toyed with a wedge of toast in front of her. Miles’ Cheerios were drowned beyond redemption, but he forced himself to eat a soggy spoonful anyway.
The garage door opener whined again as the door dropped, and the tiger roar of Daniel’s brand-new electric blue Corvette died away down Oleander before Elayne spoke again.
“We’re so lucky, Miles.” She concentrated on stirring her cooling coffee. “Daniel takes such good care of us.”
Considering what Miles had been about to say to her, he could only stare at his mother. She lifted her eyes and looked directly into his.
“I don’t know if I could take it…you know, having to be alone like that again. Working all the time. Wondering if we were going to go hungry next week, or where the rent payment was coming from. If I thought something, or someone was coming between us”-meaning herself and Daniel, Miles understood at once-“I’d do anything, anything to keep him. Anything. ”
She rose and set her empty plate and coffee mug in the sink. Her jelly-and-butter-smudged knife rattled a long, clattering dirge as it fell onto the porcelain. When she turned and stared at her son, her eyes held a strange expression that struck Miles as coldly across the face as a physical blow.
“What did you want to say to me, Miles?” she asked sweetly.
“Mom…,” he began. Then: “Nothing. I’m all right.” They never spoke of his looking tired again.
But as his fourteen year closed-the fifth since they had moved into the house on Oleander Place-Miles slept less and less.
7
The real dream-the dream beneath the dream, the one that nearly drove Miles mad with terror each time it began-started shortly after that discussion with Elayne, in late October of 1997.
The first time it came, Miles was not asleep in his bed. He lay naked on the floor of his room, his body curled into a tight ball, with his knees touching his chest, nearly touching his chin. His hands were clasped tightly over his shins, as if by holding on to each other they could create a lock against pain and fear and self-hatred and despair.
Daniel had just left. Miles knew that he should get back into his bed, that he should pull on his crumpled flannel pajamas and climb between the sheets that for almost every other fifteen-year-old in the world would mean warmth and comfort and peace but that for him had become synonymous with horror. He knew that if Daniel found him lying naked on the carpet in the morning, the next visit would be worse-Daniel had already warned him about such things.
No use taking any chances that your mother might happen to drop in early and see something she shouldn’t and get worried, right.
Miles knew that Daniel was capable of inflicting exquisite pain without leaving visible marks. The thought of punishment from that man chilled the boy. But tonight, the coldness sweeping over his spine felt uniquely right. Maybe he would catch pneumonia and burn with fever and cough his bloody lungs out and die. Maybe…
He lay with his head against the rough carpet. A thin line of blood trickled from the side of his mouth. Tell your mother you slipped going to the bathroom and hit the door jamb, Daniel had warned just before he left, She’ll believe that. She knows you’re a clumsy little shit.
It wasn’t the first time that Daniel’s visits had left Miles bleeding, but such occurrences were blissfully rare. Usually Miles tried to remove any evidence of blood-and so far Elayne had not noticed anything untoward. Tonight, though, he simply didn’t care. Let the bastard find me like this and kill me. Let her come in and see me naked and bloody on the flood and then try to pretend that everything’s just hunky-dory, her and Mr. Perfect.
His anger warmed him, even as he realized with a distant, almost disconnected part of his mind that the temperature in the room was dropping precipitously. His exposed skin crawled into goose bumps and he shivered violently. The movement caused a ripple of pain through him.
The blood thinned to a viscous drop that hung suspended at the corner of his mouth before dropping heavily to the carpet. Already the thick pile of the dark brown shag had absorbed most of the blood. Miles realized dimly that no one would even notice the stain by the time the blood dried.
No one but him.
His tongue brushed a cut in the inside of his cheek. The movement stung, but he chose to ignore it. For a moment, he stiffened. He thought he heard something in the hall. He raised his head an inch or two from the carpet and listened. It could be Daniel returning to make sure Miles was “safely in bed.” It might be his mother, although he could count on the fingers of one hand the times she had awakened during the night and come in to check on him. He wasn’t sure which prospect was the more inviting, which the more terrifying.
After a long moment, he decided that there had been no sound. He must have imagined it. He dropped his head to the carpet again. His ear rested on a rough, slight, unseen ridge only partially buffered by the thickness of carpet and pad.
The crack in the slab started in the corner of his room and arced across the center to disappear beneath the closet door. Miles had discovered the irregular edge only a few weeks after they had moved in. He spoke to no one about it. Sometimes he would spend long hours running his fingers along the phantom crack; sometimes he half believed that he could see the precise place where the floor started angling oh so marginally downward toward the far wall.
Tonight, he felt an odd comfort in lying against the crack, feeling its shadowy reality as a jagged line beneath his body. He lay without moving, his eyes closed, his heart thumping.
And finally he fell asleep.
The nightmare intruded almost immediately. It began like all of the others-a phantom Daniel silently opening a phantom door. The phantom-not-phantom hands. The roving and clutching and groping, and the pain. But then… suddenly there was someone else with them in the darkened room. At first Miles couldn’t tell anything about the shadowy figure-not its age or its sex or its size. He just knew without knowing how that someone stood behind Daniel.
At the critical moment in the dream-Daniel’s frenzy, the dream-Miles saw something glistening in a white- lightning arc, and Daniel’s head jerked back as a soundless scream of unutterable agony exploded from between his teeth. A jet of burning blood followed. Daniel threw his head forward, eyes wild with a terror that kindled joy like a raging flame throughout Miles’ whole being. For an instant. Then the dream-Daniel’s head struck the dream-Miles’ forehead, and there was an eternity of exquisite pain and Miles thought he would die for certain, and then Daniel’s head exploded, nearly suffocating Miles in a flood of red blood and grey tissue.
The dream-Miles felt Daniel’s body twisting on top of him, writhing in an intensity of bleak sensation that had nothing to do with sexual passion. Out of one blood-curtained eye, Miles saw a glinting, silver-white thing rise and sweep downward again. Daniel’s body quivered. Another rise and fall. Another quiver, like the legs of the dead frogs Miles galvanized for an experiment in science class earlier that fall. Another sickening rise and fall-this time less silvery white than mottled red…and now Miles felt the first slice of pain across his abdomen.
The dream-Daniel fell away like two halves of a dead, rotten husk, parts of his body propped bloodily on each side of Miles. Now the boy could see clearly the curve of the long knife suspended at the apex of its swing directly above his groin. And he could see the thing that held it.
The blade descended with a deliberateness that must have been the dream equivalent of slow motion but that served only to prolong the terror, the anticipation of the sharp pain it must bring. Miles brought his hands together. They moved in normal time, two fluttering white-stained-red birds rubbing wing to wing as his dream-self pleaded with the monster above him…pleaded for one more minute, one more second of life.
The blade continued inexorably downward. The movement was still horrifyingly slow, but the dream-Miles intuited at once the hideous force behind blow. His dream-hands flew faster and faster, his skin abrading as his palms scored each other, as his fingers flickered long and white, in and out of shadows.
The blade was almost to his groin. The steel glinted wickedly in a light that seemed to come from everywhere at once. Then the light transformed from silver to red and he screamed in an agony that transcended any he had ever imagined-his throat tore open with the intensity and blood washed into his lungs and added its fire
