John Saul - Perfect Nightmare

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.

Ellen tried to smile, but the tape on her mouth only tore at the skin of her lips as she moved them. Nor could she speak. Then, out of her desperation to communicate with the girl, an idea came.

And Ellen winked.

For a moment she wasn’t sure Lindsay had even seen it, but then the girl’s eyes flicked toward the black-clad figure for a second, then back to her.

And she winked back.

Ellen felt a surge of hope. She and Lindsay had communicated, and they’d done it in front of their captor, right under his nose. If they could do that, they could find a way to escape. They just had to work together. Her mind began racing. The man in black had referred to her as “Mommy.” So if she was the mother, then he must think of the girls as her children, so it was going to be up to her to take care of them, just as she had to trust that someone else’s mother would take care of Emily until she herself got back. And she would get back. Somehow she’d stay awake and alert, and in spite of everything — in spite of the horrible taste in her mouth, the splitting headache from whatever drug he’d given her, the horrible pain in every part of her body — she’d find a way to prevail.

Maniac though he might be — and obviously was — in the end, he was still a man. And Ellen knew all about men. Reaching deep into the depths of memory, she retrieved the scraps of anger she’d felt toward Danny Golden, every wrong he’d done her. She examined each of them like jewels, then piled them together as if they were a hidden treasure that would renew not only her fury, but her strength as well.