John Saul - Perfect Nightmare

Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you…

The memory was so vivid she could almost hear it now, more than fifteen years later.

Happy birthday, dear—

Suddenly, it seemed she was actually hearing their voices, and she sat bolt upright in bed, listening.

She turned to the open window.

Nothing but the sound of the surf and a few gulls crying in the night.

As a chilly breeze wafted over her, she lay back down and pulled the comforter close around her body. Of course she hadn’t heard anyone singing “Happy Birthday.” It was a trick played on her by an exhausted mind. If she could just get to sleep…

She closed her eyes and tried to calm her mind.

She breathed slowly and deeply, concentrating on the freshness of the salt air.

Happy birthday to you—

The lyrics rose in her mind again, faint, but not so faint that they didn’t sound real.

She got out of bed and went to the window. The wind had picked up, and she could hear the clatter of rigging from sailboats bobbing on mooring buoys just offshore blending with the sighing of the wind through the trees.

Somewhere, a cat yowled in either fear or fury.

And, all but completely masked by the other sounds, she was certain she could hear what sounded like voices singing.

Could it be? Or was she finally losing her mind?

She stood at the window, trying to sort out the possibilities. Had her mind actually gone around the bend, or was it possible that someone — a neighbor? — was truly having a birthday party in the middle of the night? Impossible.

She listened again, straining to hear, but now all she heard was the wind, and the rigging, and the birds.

But she knew all possibility of sleep was gone.

She pulled on the robe Neville Cavanaugh had left on the bed for her, slipped her feet into her shoes, opened the door and stepped out into the silent hallway.

The immense house nearly overwhelmed her with its massive, solemn presence; the only sound was the steady ticking of the grandfather clock in the great foyer below.

Standing there, her eyes were drawn to the door across from her own.

Jenna’s room.

Crossing the broad hallway, she turned the handle and slipped inside the girl’s room, then closed the door behind her.

When she turned on the light, she saw that it was a mirror image of Chrissie’s room, and not so different from Lindsay's, except for its generous proportions.

Kara moved slowly through the room, looking at all the things a teenage girl values: stuffed animals, CDs, posters of singers.

And books. Like Lindsay, Jenna was a reader.

Kara went to her bookshelf, thinking that if she could find something to read, it might help her sleep.

She scanned the titles until she came to a volume at the very end of the shelf that bore no title at all. She pulled it out and opened it.

A photo fell from the front of the book to the floor. As she bent to pick it up, she realized what the book in her hand was.

Jenna Shields’s diary.

Straightening up, she stared at the script that covered the first page. Jenna’s hand was even and nice. Kara flipped quickly through the pages. Jenna had filled her diary not only with the events of her young life, but with her dreams as well.

Had Lindsay kept a diary? If she had, she’d hidden it well enough that neither she nor the police had been able to find it.

Jenna hadn’t hidden hers at all. In fact, she’d left it right on the bookshelf where anyone could have found it.

And now Kara had.

She bent down again and picked up the photo, and her heart chilled.

She must be wrong, she thought. It had to be a trick of the light. She took the picture over to Jenna’s desk and turned on the study lamp to see the photograph more clearly.

It was of the entire Shields family: Patrick, Renee, Jenna, and Chrissie.

And Jenna Shields looked enough like her own daughter that she and Lindsay could have been twins.

Eyes blurring with tears, Kara looked away, wiped them with the sleeve of her robe, and thinking she must have been mistaken, looked once more at the photograph.

But no. It was almost as if Lindsay herself had somehow slipped into this photograph of a family that was not her own.

Instead of putting the photo back in the journal, Kara slipped it into the pocket of her robe, then replaced the book on the shelf exactly where she’d found it, turned out the lights, and stepped out the door.

Fully awake now, she didn’t want to return to her room, so she slipped as quietly as possible down the massive staircase, through the marble foyer, and into the conservatory.

Hoping the alarm system wasn’t turned on, she unlocked the French doors and went out onto the terrace overlooking the lawn and the Sound. The grounds were bathed in silvery moonlight, the air crisp and clean, and the sky ablaze with stars. A perfect night.

A perfect night that was shattered by a muffled shout.

The shout of a man!

Transfixed, Kara strained her eyes to see into the darkness, searching for the source of the shout.

Then she heard another sound.

Singing?

It was singing.

Once again it sounded like “Happy Birthday.”

Unconsciously clutching the lapels of the robe tightly around her neck, Kara started down the steps toward the lawn.

They were going to die.

Shannon was already dead, and now they were going to die, too, and it was all her fault.

She’d failed!

How could it have happened? When she’d devised the plan — when she’d explained it so carefully to Lindsay and Shannon — she was sure it would work. There were three of them and only one of him, and even though Shannon had already been half starved to death, she and Lindsay should have been able to overpower this man. But they’d failed.

Now, as she watched the surrealistic scene swirling around her, Ellen Fine realized why it had failed.

Their captor was utterly, completely, insane.

A lunatic, waving his arms in the flickering candlelight and demanding that all of them — even Shannon — sing to him.

Sing to him!

How much time had she wasted thinking she was dealing with someone whose mind was even faintly rational?

And now Shannon was dead, Lindsay was on the verge of dying, and if she didn’t do something soon, she herself would die, too. And even if they all died, it still wouldn’t be over. This… miscreant, this lunatic, this monster, would only find new victims to torture in their place.

But he didn’t even know that he was torturing them.

He thought he was loving them. Loving them!

Loving them, as he held them captive in the darkness, barely feeding them, not allowing them to slake their thirst. Maybe none of it was real. Maybe it actually was a nightmare. Maybe this tiny chamber with its undersized furniture and thick coating of filth and stale musty air that was now so smoky her eyes were stinging and running wasn’t real at all.

Maybe it wasn’t the man who was insane. Maybe it was her! Maybe she was hallucinating all this, hallucinating the candles and the cake and the song that seemed to go on endlessly and—

One of the candles on the cake flickered as it burned down to the frosting, and the man abruptly stopped singing. “Wish time,” he said, his voice turning cold as his eyes fixed on her. “And I’m going to wish for the same thing I always wished for.”

He tilted his head toward the ceiling, and Ellen realized he was drawing in a deep breath, puffing up his lungs like a six-year-old boy about to show off at his own birthday party. Finally, when his lungs were full, he bent over and blew on the candles, the ski mask bulging out under the force of his pent-up breath.