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 to his gasping breaths. His hands flared liquid flame, a beam of living fire that scored the blade just as it severed his flesh. His hands flew apart and the raging flames spilled over him, over the rotting remains of the dream-Daniel’s body, over the blood-stained carpet.
He felt tongues of flames licking at his flesh. He twisted his head in anguish as the fire consumed him. Above it all, beyond all the pain and the terror and the torment, the nightmare figure retreated, laughing silently.
Noooo! the dream-Miles screamed, one final burst of life…
…and Miles shuddered violently awake, his skin soaked and sticky with his own sweat, and his arms and legs as rigidly cold as blocks of ice. For an instant he heard the lingering dream-scream. Then he rolled slightly and felt the stiff nap of carpet against his back-even stiffer where his blood had soaked into the fibers and was now part of the carpet itself, perhaps had even filtered through the pad beneath and oozed thickly into the crack and from there descended to the waiting bowels of the earth itself.
He sat up. Big Ben said 2:15. Barely half an hour since Daniel-the real, flesh-and-blood Daniel-had left. Miles struggled to his feet, his body stiff with cold and pain. He shuffled over to his bed and dropped heavily onto the mattress. Still awash with sweat that stank of fear, still naked but for once uncaring, he burrowed into the covers and slept as if dead.
8
From then on until the end, that nightmare repeated itself nearly every night regardless of whether Daniel visited or not, regardless of whether Miles lay asleep in his bed or (as happened more frequently) curled fetus-like on the carpet. As bedtime approached, Miles would shower, dry off, and dress in his long pajamas, brush his teeth, and then-irregularly at first but with an increasing consistency that even he realized bordered on sheer obsessiveness-walk through the kitchen and the living room before going to his bed.
“What’s the matter?” Daniel asked as Miles walked through the living room early in November. Daniel and Elayne were sitting side by side, his arm over her shoulder, reading. Elayne was reading a Harlequin romance. Miles couldn’t see the cover of Daniel’s book but the volume was thick and the open page crowded with print.
Miles ignored him. He saw in Daniel’s darting glance something that might have been an unspoken threat, might have been a burgeoning fear as the bastard looked up into the eyes of his stepson and perhaps saw intimations of the man Miles was rapidly becoming. Miles straightened his shoulders. After all, he was nearly fifteen, and he already had a couple of inches and possibly even a few pounds on Daniel. Maybe after all this time, Daniel was beginning to worry. The thought was pleasantly exciting.
“Yes, honey,” his mother added. “You’ve been wandering around like this every night for a while now. Is something wrong?”
“No,” Miles said. “Just checking. Making sure I turned the stove off after dinner.” It wasn’t a lie. Dinner had been over for three hours already, the dishes washed and dried and stacked away, the counters and cabinets cleared. But Miles knew that he would not be able to sleep (if he slept at all) until he was sure that the four rings of blue flame were safely extinguished. Until he was sure that the house was safe from a sudden fire that might tear through its bowels burning and destroying and consuming.
“But…,” his mother began. Daniel laid his arm on hers and she fell quiet. Miles stared at the two of them for a moment, then left. As he turned the corner into the hallway, he heard Daniel say, in a voice he probably assumed Miles would not be able to hear, “It’s just a phase. You know, teenage jitters. I was just like that, always wandering around when I should have been in bed. Worrying about nothing.”
Miles waited in the hall for a moment to see if he could hear anything more.
“Elayne,” Daniel said suddenly, softly, “you almost forgot your medicine.”
“I don’t think I need to…”
“You know you do. I think that if you ever really did forget to take it, you’d have as much trouble sleeping as Miles does.”
The boy heard Daniel get up. He hurried down the hall, reaching his bedroom only an instant before he heard the click of the bathroom light and then Daniel opening and closing the medicine chest.
Standing in the darkness, his back again his door, he watched and listened until he heard the bathroom light flick off and then the unintelligible rumble of Daniel’s voice from the living room.
That night (and every night thereafter), Miles did not even look at his bed. He walked into his room, careful not to touch the light switch. Feeling his way in the dark, he meticulously unplugged every electrical appliance in the room: stereo, lamp, even the electric clock his mother had given him for Christmas when she decided that the loud tick tick tick of the Big Ben might be keeping him from sleeping. Satisfied that nothing remained that could be a fire hazard-remembering even in waking the intense pain as flames blossomed from his hands-he pulled the cast-off Big Ben from the nightstand drawer, wound it as tightly as he could with fingers that felt corpse-like, cold and stiff and awkward. He wound it so tightly that he could feel the tension in the spring. He sat it on the nightstand and dropped to the floor, curling up on the carpet and hoping not to sleep.