but still the room seemed to grow hotter and hotter. He unsnapped his pajama bottoms. They dropped unnoticed to the floor. And still the air was stifling. His lungs were about to explode. The agony intensified as he writhed against the volatile air; his body would combust in an instant and incinerate himself and his room and Daniel and the house and…
Something moved in the closet.
His heart thumping with panic, Miles watched as absolute darkness-within-darkness swirled and coalesced into the shadowy dream-figure. This time he knew immediately that it was male, knew it was old-older than himself, older than Daniel.
And he knew it was evil.
The figure glided like a shroud into the room. Miles stood naked before it, his body a sheen of greenish light as the shadow figure moved closer. It was taller than Miles, bulkier, dark with dread and horror.
It carried the knife.
Faster than thought, the blade slashed toward him. This time, the dream-Miles saw the blade coming. No Daniel lay atop him to intercept its deadly edge. The tip caught the flesh on his upper arm and sliced to his elbow. The wound, while not especially deep, was deep enough that the blood flowed freely and the pain coursed like an electric current through his body.
He tried to jerk back, tried to raise his other arm and cradle the wound, but he could not move. The blade returned.
Swish.
It sliced like liquid fire the length of his other arm.
Again. His belly this time. Then his thighs. And then…
He closed his eyes, expecting the fatal thrust…and a distant, abstracted part of his mind wondered absently-with the objectivity of a scientist observing the progress of a particularly interesting lab experiment- whether the real-time Miles would die at the same instant the dream-Miles died.
The point of the blade touched his chest, directly over his heart. The metal was icy; his blood was hot. The point touched, pressed. He felt it puncture the top layers of flesh, felt the first drops of blood as they wandered like errant streams down the contours of his chest and abdomen. He waited for the final thrust.
That never came.
He waited, waited, and finally opened his eyes.
The shadow-man stood so close that Miles could see the horror that remained of its face. The flesh heaved and writhed with a life of its own. His cheeks were flayed away to reveal twisted knots of muscle and blackened stumps where teeth might once have been. Light burned through the shadow-man’s eyes, a green and baleful and poisonous light that reflected on the sheening blade.
So abruptly that Miles felt as if the breath were being ripped out of his own body, the blade tip withdrew. The shadow-man deliberately reversed the knife, mesmerizing the boy with the flickering of light across its blood-stained metal until finally Miles realized that the haft was pointing at him, that the shadow-man held the gory tip pinioned against his own rotting chest.
For an eternal instant, Miles stared into the hollows where putrescent remnants of eyes glittered coldly, invitingly at him
And somewhere deep in the horror-stricken, fear-raddled recesses of his mind, the boy understood the hideous offer. Tears streaming down his cheeks, he understood and he accepted the final gift and closed his eyes again-willingly descending deeper deeper into the bottomless abyss of the dream-world-and with a sharp intake of breath that rippled pain through his own lungs and heart, he gripped the blood-slick haft with all his strength and thrust the blade home.
10
Daniel Warren usually slept lightly. Unlike Elayne, who could rarely be raised by anything less than a 10.0 earthquake once she fell asleep (assisted, as always, by a pill or three), Daniel roused easily. And he never dreamed.
Which was why he was so startled when he suddenly became aware that he was dreaming of a ghostly hand clamped tightly over his mouth and nose, suffocating him.
Eyes wild and staring, he struggled to sit up and wrench himself from the grip of the nightmare. Then the nightmare took on entirely new orders of terror for Daniel Warren, when he understood that it was not a dream at all. And that he hadn’t wakened when the bedroom door had opened, in spite of the slight squeal that always always awakened him. His mind spun for a second, then his eyes flew even more widely open and his breath caught in a painful, ragged gasp that left him reeling. Even in the near darkness of the bedroom, he knew at once what he was seeing. He just couldn’t believe it.
He saw the hot blood streaming from wounds all over his stepson’s naked body-arms, shoulders, chest, gut, thighs. He saw with a shudder that threatened to twist his spine the hideous light in Miles’ staring eyes, the flicker of hideous light on black-stained blade, and the single eye of brilliant white that was the tip of the knife as it slid into his belly as easily and as wetly as a red-hot branding iron would slide into a block of ice, consuming as it destroyed.
11
The instant he finished what had to be done in the master bedroom, Miles’ body began to shake with an intensity that jarred his teeth and blurred his vision.
This is no dream!
He stared at the blade hanging limply from his outstretched hand, at the carnage of what had only moments before been a chastely intimate bedroom scene, husband and wife sleeping side by side. They still lay side by side. But no longer sleeping.
Hardly registering that fact that he was covered with gore-not all of it his own-and naked and bleeding from a dozen wounds ranging from superficial to near-fatal, the boy fled the room, throwing the knife away from him with such force that it spun dervish-like through the open bathroom door and shattered the mirror over the medicine chest.
He ran through the silent house. His feet left a trail of moistness blacker than black behind him. In the kitchen, he paused only long enough to grab a set of keys from the homemade key rack next to the garage door-a cunning bit of his own work in the shape of a large key cut from plywood and painstakingly stained redwood and polished to a flawless gloss as a Mother’s Day gift nearly four years before.
Then without realizing what he was doing or where he was heading, he found himself in the garage and jerking open the door to Daniel’s Corvette. He sank into the seat, numbly registering the icy coldness of leather against the blistering heat of his naked back and legs. In the darkness his right hand scrabbled in the storage compartment between the seats, blindly, frantically, for a long moment before he felt a flood of relief as his hand struck something small and oblong, with two studs protruding from one end. He grabbed it and aimed it over his shoulder and hit the left stud, grateful that Daniel had at least taught him that bit of technological magic.
The garage door whined as the heavy plywood doors ascended on their well-oiled hinges. Cold night air billowed into the garage. There was no fog, not even any clouds. The sterile stars prickled coldly, malevolently against a midnight sky.
The boy jabbed the key viciously into the ignition and cranked it so hard that the key nearly broke in his hand. The engine turned over once, twice, coughed ominously, then with a screaming roar, caught. He jammed the gear into what he hoped was reverse and hit the gas pedal, hoping against hope that all of the time spent watching Daniel manipulate the gears would help him now. The engine roared unevenly and the car jackrabbited out of the garage, tires squealing against the concrete driveway as the boy struggled with the wheel, finally managing to spin the car around on the circle of pavement directly in front of the house, until the ’Vette was facing directly down
