John Saul - Perfect Nightmare

The man’s expression seemed to darken. “From where?”

“Down by the… by the mausoleum, I think.”

After a moment, he closed and secured the door behind them. “Shore birds,” he said. “They make all manner of queer sounds in the night. And there are peacocks on the next property. Sometimes it sounds like babies crying, sometimes like—” He hesitated, then his lips curved into what Kara assumed was his idea of a smile. “Sometimes I don’t know what they sound like. And there are stories…” This time his voice faded away, and Kara thought he would go on, but instead he only shrugged. “Birds and animals make strange noises in the night. After a while you stop hearing them at all.”

Birds! All it had been was birds. Kara felt utterly foolish, and hoped the dimness in the conservatory hid the burning flush in her face.

“Will you be needing anything?” Neville asked her.

Kara shook her head, left the conservatory, and hurried up the stairs. Back in the guest room, she closed the door behind her, twisted the key in the lock, slipped off her wet shoes, then slid under the covers of the bed, her robe still wrapped tightly around her. As she lay in the darkness, the servant’s words came back to her.

Birds… birds and animals… After a while you stop hearing them at all.

But if he hadn’t heard them at all, what was he doing, wide-awake, fully dressed, prowling the house in the middle of the night?

Lindsay felt herself fading away, drowning in something she no longer understood. Everything around her had turned surreal — the candles all had halos, grotesque shadows whispered to her in unintelligible words from the dark corners of the ceiling, and sounds reverberated in her head until they were rendered meaningless.

Nothing was real.

All she wanted to do was slip into that blissful unconsciousness where there was no pain, no fear, no terror, where nightmares were something from which she would awaken, and when she awoke, her mother and father would be there to hold her and kiss away her tears.

As the sirens of unconsciousness crooned their song, she began to let herself slip away, singing with them for a while. But whatever words she was singing became as meaningless as the whisperings of the shadows that lurked in the corners. She heard someone yell, but, too tired, too depleted, too exhausted even to respond, she couldn’t even raise her head from where it hung on her chest.

Like Shannon’s had…

Then the dreams started — the bad dreams — and even though she knew she was still awake, she couldn’t move or talk or fend off the red-eyed monsters that were growling at her from the dark.

She twisted against her bonds and tried to rise up through the layers of sleep, to fight the dreams that weren’t dreams at all, but her strength was finally gone.

Now the fear itself began to consume her, the fear she’d been fending off since the moment the nightmare had begun. Was it the red-eyed monster that was stalking her? Was there nothing there at all except fear itself? But if that was all there was, why wouldn’t it go away? She wanted it to go away — she was so tired of being afraid, she couldn’t stand it any longer. She wanted to face things, to ignore the fear, but she didn’t know how to do that anymore.

The world was made of fear.

Thick, impenetrable, suffocating fear.

Fear that was killing her.

She had to get away from it, had to escape from it…

She began closing herself down, drawing back, away from the fear, away from her body, away from everything.

And slowly, as she pulled away from the fear, things changed. Somehow she had escaped her own body, and now she was looking down, gazing down from somewhere high above. Far below, she watched as the black-clothed beast that had imprisoned and tormented her sliced away the gray tape that held her hands and ankles to the chair.

She watched as he lifted her body and lay it with an odd gentleness on the table.

With an almost idle curiosity, she watched him part her legs.

And then, in an instant, the odd sense of detachment ended and she was back in her body, and she knew exactly what was happening, and the terror that had threatened to utterly destroy her moments before flashed into fury, a fury that jerked her out of the lassitude that had held her paralyzed, a fury that filled her with a keen, razor-edged consciousness and a sudden influx of strength.

Adrenaline surging into every fiber of her starved and ravaged body, Lindsay drew a great breath and screamed.

She screamed for Shannon and for Ellen, for her mother and her father, and for whatever god might be listening somewhere. She screamed and howled with every scrap of energy left in her, and heard the sound crash back at her off the ceiling and the walls.

And then a hand was clamped over her mouth and the scream was silenced.

“No one hears it,” a hard voice whispered. “After a while, no one hears the screams at all.”

A scream ripped through Kara’s mind and she jerked bolt upright in bed before she even came fully awake. For a moment she felt disoriented, but as the vestiges of sleep fell away, her mind began to focus. She was still at Cragmont, still wearing the bathrobe Neville had laid out for her. But she no longer felt welcome — now she felt like an intruder, and it was the house itself that made her feel that way.

It was the house that was giving her nightmares.

Yet she had just been awakened by a scream — a scream she could still recall.

Lindsay!

Kara swung her legs off the bed, shoved her feet into her loafers, and went to the bedroom door, listening for a moment before she opened it. Hearing nothing, she cracked the door open.

All was dark and silent, but it wasn’t a comforting darkness or silence.

Rather, it was the kind of silence that told her there was something else — something dangerous — lurking just beyond the range of her senses. Part of her wanted to close the door and go back to bed, but a stronger part told her to find Patrick, to tell him about the scream that had awakened her.

But had it been a scream? Or had it been nothing but a dream? Yet it seemed so real. So real.

She needed to talk.

She needed to talk to Patrick.

Opening the door wider, she turned to the right, walked silently down the corridor to Patrick’s bedroom and knocked softly on the door.

Silence.

She knocked a little louder, and when he still didn’t answer, she hesitated, almost went back to her own room, then changed her mind. Grasping the crystal knob on the door, she twisted it and pushed the heavy door open.

A fire had burned to embers in the fireplace opposite the bed.

A bedside lamp glowed dimly, and the linen in the huge bed had been carefully turned down, just as her own had when Patrick brought her to her room.

But his linens remained untouched. “Patrick?” she whispered, and his name seemed to echo as loudly as if she’d shouted it.

She went to his bathroom door and knocked lightly.

No answer.

She turned the handle and opened the door slowly, but the light was not on and she knew he was not here. Still, she flipped on the light and looked around.

Toiletries laid out, it was as ready for Patrick as the bedroom, and as empty.

The library. Patrick said he’d been sleeping in the library, where only a few hours ago she had sat in front of a fire, sipping a glass of Grand Marnier, the horrors of the world shut out, even if only for a short while. Was that where he’d gone to sleep tonight?

Kara left the bedroom and made her way down the dark hallway, shivering as she passed the closed doors of Patrick’s daughters’ rooms.

Halfway down the stairs, a noise stopped her cold and her heart began to race. But as the big grandfather clock in the foyer began to strike, she realized that the noise had been nothing more than the winding of its gears. Hurrying down the rest of the curving flight of stairs — grateful that whatever noise she might make would be covered by the striking of the clock — she paused on the bottom step until it finished chiming four.