John Saul - Perfect Nightmare

As the voice whispered to him, and Patrick felt the bliss of unconsciousness wrap him in its comforting darkness, he was barely aware of yanking from the wall the heavy iron poker that Kara Marshall had swung at him a moment earlier.

Kara could hear Patrick’s voice, but the words made no sense. Who was he talking to? Since he’d let her tumble to the floor, he hadn’t looked at her. Now, with the poker gripped in his right hand, he was gazing around the room as if he didn’t know where he was. And when he spoke, the words didn’t make any sense. Deal with what? What was he talking about?

Then she saw something in his eyes change, and it was as if she was looking at a completely different person. This wasn’t the Patrick Shields she knew. This wasn’t the man who had been at her side so much of the last two weeks, lending her the strength to cope with everything that had happened to her. His features were the same, but this wasn’t Patrick. It couldn’t be!

“Patrick!” she screamed again. “Patrick, for God’s sake, help us! Help me!”

The face looming above her winced as if something had struck it, and then she saw something different in the eyes again.

She saw Patrick…

As Kara’s voice pulled him back again from the brink of the blissful oblivion of unconsciousness, Patrick saw the macabre scene around him in terrible clarity, but this time he shut out the dark whisperings inside his head and let the images — and the memories they called up — speak for themselves.

The memories he’d buried so deep and for so long that he’d forgotten they were there suddenly leaped up at him, dancing and weaving in the flickering candlelight in a dark ballet he wished he could turn away from but knew he could not.

In his mind, he went back to the last birthday party he could remember being held in this playhouse. He’d been six, and his real birthday party — the one his mother held for him — had ended hours ago. He’d been in his room when Claire came to tell him she had a special present for him — a present she and her best friend had in the playhouse.

He’d followed her eagerly, wondering what the present was, and when they were in the playhouse, there were candles burning.

Just like now.

And Claire’s friend had been lying on the table.

Just like Lindsay Marshall was lying on the table now.

“We’re going to play house,” Claire explained as she locked the door with the key, then put the key in her pocket. “Only we’re going to play it the way real grown-ups play it.”

He hadn’t understood at first, but then, when Claire started taking his clothes off, he began to understand.

Then Claire started touching him, and so did her friend, and then—

He didn’t want to remember any more of it, didn’t want to remember all the things they’d done to him, the way they’d tied him to the table so he couldn’t fight back, or even move. It wasn’t just his arms and legs they’d tied. No. They’d tied thick twine in places they shouldn’t have touched him, and then pulled it tight.

So tight he could still feel the agony in his groin.

But they hadn’t stopped even then.

They’d put things in him, too — a broom handle and pop bottles and—

He wanted to shut it out, but he couldn’t. As the terrible memories of what had happened in the playhouse so many years ago — not only on his birthday, but so many times afterward — began to unwind in his mind, Patrick felt his sanity beginning to unwind as well. And now the voice was whispering in his mind again, telling him things he didn’t want to hear. But he could no more stop listening to it than he could stop remembering everything that had happened now that the memories had returned. “We liked it,” the voice whispered. “Didn’t we like it?”

“No!” Patrick howled. “It was wrong! It was all wrong!”

“But we didn’t stop!”

“She made me,” Patrick whimpered, cowering back from the kaleidoscope of images and memories that were not only all around him, but exploding in his mind as well. “Claire made me! She and—”

“We liked it!” the voice screamed. “We loved it!”

“It was wrong!” Patrick howled. “Mommy should have—”

“ ‘Mommy’ didn’t care,” the voice snarled. “Look at her — she’s sitting right there, but she’s not doing anything, is she? She’s just smiling and being happy!”

The voice was right! The woman bound to the chair, who looked almost exactly like his mother when he’d been a little boy, was just watching silently, smiling at what was happening.

But she wasn’t smiling, not really! The smile was just painted onto the tape that covered her mouth.

“Kill her,” the voice in his head commanded. “She wouldn’t help you then, so kill her. Kill her now!”

Patrick’s fingers tightened on something in his hand, and he looked down curiously at the poker he was gripping. Where had it come from?

“Patrick! Why are you doing this?”

He looked down at the woman on the floor. What was she doing here? Her face seemed vaguely familiar, but in the confusion whirling in his mind, he couldn’t quite place her. Was she a friend of his parents?

Or had Claire brought her?

But it didn’t matter who she was — if she was a friend of Claire's, she was going to do the same terrible things to him that Claire and Susanna did, and even if she didn’t, she would know.

She would know all the terrible things that had happened.

He raised the poker high.

“Patrick, listen to me!” the woman on the floor shouted. “It’s Kara!”

Kara… Kara… Kara. The name echoed through Patrick’s mind and seemed to bounce off the walls of the tiny playhouse. Suddenly he felt as if he were suffocating. The ceiling was way too low, and there wasn’t enough air, and there were too many candles, too much fire.

Too much fire, like—

Now a new memory burst out of his subconscious.

Last Christmas, in the house in Vermont, the house that had burned.

And now, in the flickering glow of the candlelit playhouse, he could see it all. His girls — Jenna and Chrissie. In their rooms, lying in their beds, deep in sleep. He’d stood at their doors watching them in the moonlight as they slept.

“We had to do it,” the voice whispered in his head. “They were going to tell on us. They were going to tell their mother what we were doing to them—”

“Not us !” Patrick bellowed as the full memory of what he’d done to his daughters exploded in his mind. “ You! It was you !”

“I am you!” the voice taunted. “I’ve always been you, doing all the things you wanted to do but were too afraid to do! You’re a coward, Patrick! You’ve always been a coward!”

And finally all the confusion in his mind cleared away, and the playhouse seemed to fade around him. He was back in Vermont, watching as his house and his family were consumed by flames.

Flames from the fire he himself had set.

Flames that had been smoldering inside him ever since he was a boy, and Claire had brought him here, and his nightmare had begun.

His perfect nightmare.

A nightmare so perfect he’d shut it out completely, even while he’d lived it.

All because of—

“We have to kill them,” the voice commanded him. “If we don’t, they’re going to tell, just like Jenna and Chrissie were going to tell! We have to, Patrick! Do it!”

Patrick raised the poker high, its spur hovering over the head of the woman on the floor.

“Kill her!” the voice howled.

And the poker started its downward arc…