Ed Gorman - Nightmare Child

It was all so crazy. Diane wasn't even sure she was quite awake yet. Wind slammed at the windows. The digital clock made faint ratcheting sounds as it turned over its big luminous numbers. Diane reached out for Jenny and started to speak; but then a voice that could not possibly be Jenny's issued from the young girl's mouth.

"It's too late," the voice said. "It's too late."

And then a sound not unlike throaty laughter issued from Jenny's mouth, and Diane, screaming, fell back on the bed.

After beating him, they put him in the closet, promising him that he would prove useful later. The naked Mindy, touching her breasts as she spoke, seemed especially eager to see Clark again. It had been she who'd stopped Jeff from stabbing the police Chief to death.

The closet: utter, unyielding darkness, except for a thin line of moonlight between door and floor; dust motes that made him sneeze a few times; the hems of women's dresses brushing his shoulders.

He had no idea how long he'd been in there. Twenty minutes…two hours. It could easily be either.

He wondered where they had gone, shuddering as he thought about them: their open sores, their crazed eyes, their psychotic laughter. He knew now that whatever Diane had told him about this house was true…

Down the hall he heard distant, muffled sounds, but what they were he could not tell from there.

He sat forward, the clothesline binding his wrists and ankles together, pulling tight, cutting into his skin.

He slammed his head against the louvered closet door. It was the only way he was going to get it open. He had slammed his head three times when he heard the wailing start…

At first, it sounded as if an animal had been mortally wounded. The one thing that kept Clark from being a hunter was the suffering he'd seen animals go through. This sound was like that…an animal on a tightrope across the dark abyss of death…Only gradually did he learn that the sound was human.

Moonlight fell through the louvered door, casting faint bars on his face. Sweat in beads stood on his forehead. His bulky jaw muscles contracted as he listened to the wailing and the shrieking grow even worse.

Abruptly, footsteps began slapping down the hall toward this room, toward this closet…

"Oh, God! Help me! Help me!" A female voice screamed over and over.

He heard her fall through the door, cracking bones as she slammed to the floor.

"Oh, God!" She said, again and again, helpless curse, helpless prayer.

She began sobbing then, and all he could liken it to was the mother he'd had to inform one lovely July afternoon that both her young sons had drowned in a sandpit. He hadn't thought he'd ever get the woman to stop crying-she had literally torn out handfuls of her own hair-or to sit inside the squad car while he summoned an ambulance as much for her as for the dead boys…

She flung herself against the closet door, shattering it.

"Help me! Help me!" she cried.

Mindy tore the door away in pieces and stood there before him, naked, her body still covered with wounds and sores, but her ghoulishness was gone.

"Help me!" She screamed.

"I can't." He tried to show her the clothesline they'd lashed to his body.

"Oh, God!" she said, and fell to the floor, starting to untie him immediately.

She smelled so badly that he had to hold his breath. He cringed when some of the juices from her wounds sprayed across his face.

"I'm sorry we did this to you," she said. "It wasn't…us. It was Jenny."

"Jenny?"

"I know you don't believe that right now. But you will, you will."

Finished untying him, she helped him to his feet. They stood in a bedroom made silver by moonlight. When he stood away from her, he could smell sweet sachet on a dressing table.

"I don't know what to do," she said, walking around in frustrated circles. "I can't call the emergency ward. They'll send somebody out and-"

"You need to calm down and tell me what's wrong."

"It's Jeff. He's…going into one of his seizures she puts him in."

"Who puts him in?"

She glared at him as if he were the crazy one. "Why, Jenny, of course."

"Little Jenny-the one I saw tonight?"

She laughed bitterly. "Little Jenny. Oh, that's a good one. You'll have to tell that one to Jeff."

Just then there was a scream from down the hall that raised goose bumps on Clark's arms.

"Jeff!" she cried.

"Come on," Clark said, and ran out of the room and into the dark hall.

Mindy, sobbing, said, "We've got to help him before Jenny gets back here. She plans to kill us tonight-including you."

Her words only made Clark run that much faster.

It began as spasms, Jenny shaking uncontrollably as she stood in the dim light coming through the curtains.

Diane, dressed now in jeans and a sweat shirt and Reeboks, went immediately to Jenny and started to put her arms around her.

"Jenny, let me help you."

The voice that came from the small girl's mouth was no longer her own. It was masculine and throaty and ugly. "It's starting, Aunt Diane. The demon-"

Despite the warning, Diane threw her arms around Jenny and drew the girl to her. Even though her voice had changed, her frail body was familiar, and Diane hugged her.

"Do you remember when you used to come over and watch me make cookies?" Diane said, hoping that her recollection of more pleasant times would help Jenny. "And when you used to come over and sit on my lap and I'd read you Nancy Drew? I don't think you really understood Nancy, but you wanted me to keep on reading anyway. Do you remember that, Jenny?"

Diane had started to cry, the tears warm and full on her cheeks, because she could feel, there in her arms, a terrible transformation take place.

The demon was taking Jenny.

Diane, holding all the tighter, said, "Is there anything I can do, Jenny?"

"Pray for me, pray for me," Jenny said in her terrible, deep voice.

Before, her flesh had been cold. Now it was warm, almost fever-hot.

Diane began praying, random Hail Mary's, Our Fathers, holding Jenny as hard as she could.

"I don't want to kill Mindy and Jeff, even though they killed me," Jenny said. "Please don't let me kill them, Aunt Diane. Please stop me."

A powerful hand gripped Diane's shoulder suddenly and she was flung across the bedroom.

In Jenny's place stood a miniature crone, a witchlike creature of seething red eyes and stubby black teeth and crooked limbs. She had the shriveled, naked body of a very old woman, her breasts drooping sacks, her back bent, her fingers twisted arthritically.

She leaped at Diane now, slapping her with incredible force directly across the face, then pressing her gnarled hands to her shoulders and burning her in some method Diane did not understand. Screaming, reeling from pain, Diane smelled her own flesh sear from the witch's touch.

In the deep voice, but now grown even deeper, the witch said, "Only because the little girl loves you so much will I spare you. But don't try to stop me in any way or you will die. Do you understand?"

The hag moved toward the window, a grotesque shape in silhouette against the moonlit curtains.

She turned back toward Diane once and said, in a voice curiously softer now, "The little girl is struggling to take control again. She wants you to know how much she loves you."

Then the hag threw herself against the window, glass falling in shattered, silver pieces to the snowy ground below, and was gone in the whipping wind that came in through the smashed window frame.

Diane, sobbing now, pulled herself to her feet and began running down the stairs to the ground floor.

All she could think about was the witch's pledge to kill. And that could easily mean she would kill Robert Clark as well.

She ran out into the bitterly cold, but surprisingly bright, night, and kept on running until she reached the McCay house.