Nightmare Child

by Ed Gorman

  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.

  Jeff McCay lay writhing on the hallway floor. Bent over him, his wife, Mindy, kept calling his name.

  Robert Clark knelt down next to her to see if he could help the man. McCay seemed to be choking. His hands were at his throat, as if he were trying to dislodge a piece of trapped food.

  Clark took the man's hands away. Jeff McCay looked up at him with startled, terrified eyes. Clark had seen this kind of panic many times before in 'Nam. A man was injured and all he wanted to know from the medic was, Am I going to live?

  Gasping, grasping at air, thrashing about insanely, Jeff McCay looked over at his wife and started sobbing.

  She leaned past Clark and took her husband in her arms.

  "This is how it's been," Mindy said there in the darkness of the hall. "We know she's going to kill us because we killed her. But she punishes us. She almost made Jeff commit suicide the night he ran out of here naked. She puts spells on us, like this one where he seems to be choking to death. I had a period so bloody I had to sit in the bathtub, and twice my whole body broke out with sores. And you saw how she turns us into ghouls. That's why we could never have company—or go to the police —because every time we tried, she would do something to prevent us. All she's done since she came back is torture us."

  Jeff continued to cry out and gasp in his wife's arms.

  Downstairs, glass smashed in the living room.

  "God, it's her!" Mindy cried, and grabbed Clark with one hand, her other holding her arm. "Please help us! Please!"

  Clark got to his feet and pulled out his service revolver, already sensing that it was going to do him little if any good.

  Even up there, the air was choked, fetid. He could smell the presence of a demon. A disbeliever, he'd once been called to a house where a demonic infestation had taken place. He'd remained skeptical but there was one thing he'd been unable to dismiss, and that was the peculiar and terrible odor of the place. He found himself feeling nauseated as he moved carefully down the hallway to the staircase.

  Footsteps crunched into broken glass somewhere in the living room. Irregular breathing, almost wheezing, could be heard against the whistling sound of the wind.

  Reaching the stairs, Clark put one hand on the banister for support and with the other raised his service revolver, ready for whatever lay ahead.

  The entire house was a deep pool of shadows. He felt he was being submerged, perhaps even drowned, in them. One step at a time, he continued his descent to the first floor.

  Creaking wood made him start. His entire body was instantly bathed in a sticky sweat. He'd had no idea how terrified he'd become.

  Reaching the bottom of the steps, he began to scan the gloom, to see if he could find one thing wrong, one thing that would show him where Jenny might be.

  Shapes of furniture, the fireplace, the heavy, closed drapes appeared. His stomach and bowels were doing terrible things as he pressed deeper into the room. This was not the kind of fear he liked to admit to himself. He felt impossibly young and helpless, as if at any moment he might drop his revolver and begin crying out for help.

  A noise caused him to spin around, drop to one knee and aim his revolver.

  Hammer back, ready to fire, he watched the alcove to the right of the dining room, and it was there that she appeared.

  She was as he remembered her, an innocent-looking little girl with freckles and pigtails. Her prim blue dress touched her knees, and her white anklets and black patent leather shoes were perfectly cared for.

  She moved toward him in the center of a soft blue glow. She put her hand out to him and smiled. "You're afraid, aren't you, Robert?"

  And he heard himself—as if from a great distance—saying, "Yes, Jenny, I am."

  "There's no reason to be. You're with the forces of good now."

  "The forces of good?"

  She raised her lovely eyes to the floor above them. "You saw what the forces of evil do to people. Now you'll be with me and everything will be all right."

  "With you?" He wasn't sure what she meant. All he knew was that her voice had a peculiarly soothing effect on him, almost like a drug.

  "Yes," she said, moving even closer, "with me."

  She put a hand out, touched his face. He still knelt on one knee. The palm of her hand was tender and warm, comforting on his cheek.

  She leaned forward and put her small, damp mouth in to kiss on his forehead.

  "You'll be with me now," she said again.

  And he thought of summer days and lush green foliage and clear blue mountain streams and cardinals and jays that frolicked on the soft clean air.

  "With you," he repeated. "With you."

  Distantly, he heard the revolver fall from his hand and strike the floor.

  There in the darkness, enshrined in the soft blue glow, Jenny reached forward now, to give him an even more intimate kiss, one on the mouth.

  Knowing this was wrong—she was a little girl—he tried to stop her but somehow he could not.

  Feeling her tiny, wriggling tongue inside his mouth, he tried once again to push her away.

  "Jenny, no," he said.

  The cackle was unlike anything he had ever heard. And there could be no doubt from where it cam
e.

  Before his face, innocent little Jenny became the ugliest, bent hag he had ever seen. He thought of the mad women panhandlers of the large cities—this twisted crone was a hundred times uglier.

  "You shouldn't play with little girls." The witch laughed, and then raked her long nails across his face, scoring it.

  Hot blood and almost unbearable pain spread across his cheeks as he fell to the floor, cupping his hands over his face to slow the bleeding.

  His scream followed her up the stairs, up into the even deeper shadows, where the McCay's waited to die.

  It could have been no longer than a minute before their screams started, covering his entirely.

  Several times, he tried to get to his feet, but each attempt ended with his falling back to the floor.

  He was losing blood so quickly that his strength was leaving him. Terror, confusion, and a distant sense of shame also took their toll. He almost prayed for unconsciousness…

  He was not certain when the front door was hurled open. All he knew was that the last thing he saw when he rose up once more on his bloody hands…was the sight of Diane.

  She stood in the doorway shouting, "Jenny! Jenny!" Over and over, almost as if she was transfixed.

  She did not seem to notice as he began dragging his body across the parquet floor toward her.

  She did not seem to notice that his face looked as if a dozen razors had slashed it.

  She did not seem to notice the soft, almost prayerful name—hers--he uttered as he now started to lose consciousness for sure…

  No, she was too busy looking at what was left of the creature on the staircase, the creature that had once been a woman named Mindy.

  Breasts no more than bloody holes, head torn off at the shoulders, and blood coming in geysers from the trunk, the creature grasped uselessly for the banister and then came tumbling down the stairway as, upstairs, Jeff began pleading for mercy and then pleading for help.

  That was the last thing Clark remembered.

  A robin sat on the window ledge. Diane, pouring milk into a clear, tall glass, said, "That's all you're going to eat?"

  Patting her stomach, Jenny said, "Let's see. That's one egg, a bowl of oat bran, a piece of toast, a glass of orange juice, two vitamins, and now a big glass of milk." She grinned. "I'd say that's a pretty healthy breakfast."

  Diane laughed. "You caught me at it again, didn't you?"

  "Overcompensating," Jenny said decisively.

  "Overcompensating," Diane agreed, and sat down. On a talk show they'd both seen together a few weeks before, the host had talked about how people overcompensated for things that worried them. In Diane's case, this meant overcompensating for all that had happened to Jenny. These days, Diane overprotected her shamelessly.

  A robin sat plump and sassy on the window. Cool May air glided into the kitchen. Outside, you could see blue and red and yellow flowers blooming on the new grass of the hill.

  Diane said, "Better hurry, honey. Only five minutes for the school bus."

  Jenny, dressed in a white blouse, blue-denim miniskirt, and black flats, turned away from the counter and said, "I heard you arguing last night, Aunt Diane. You don't have to stick up for me that way."

  Diane felt her cheeks go warm and red. "Honey, we weren't arguing. We were just having a discussion. And I'm sorry if you woke up."

  It seemed such a waste, discussing all this on a morning when birds were singing their fool heads off, when green things were sprouting up so quickly you could practically hear them, and when the air itself was as soft and sweet as a child's kiss.

  "He wants to tell, doesn't he? Chief Clark, I mean."

  Diane sighed. There was no sense in being evasive any longer. "He…just thinks…we should talk to some people at the state university. Some…parapsychologists who used to work with Dr. Rhine at Duke University. He was a very famous—"

  "You know what they'd do to me."

  Diane could not meet Jenny's gaze.

  "I heard you say it yourself last night, Aunt Diane. They'll start examining me and studying me and questioning me and they'll make me tell what happened that night when—"

  Diane put her hand up. Knowing the kind of traumatic response talking about that night still imposed on Jenny, Diane avoided the subject whenever possible. "You're right."

  "Then you won't let him take me to the university?" Diane held out her hands. Jenny came into her embrace. "No, honey, I won't let him."

  Nuzzled against Diane's neck, Jenny said, "You promise?"

  "I promise."

  Jenny put herself at arm's length from Diane. "We can be a family, can't we, Aunt Diane, you and I?"

  "We are a family, honey."

  "And we don't need…him."

  "Honey, he's a—"

  "I know, I know. 'Honey, he's a good friend of mine.' But I heard the way you cried when you went to bed last night. I was so worried I started saying prayers for you. That doesn't sound like he's a very good friend of yours, Aunt Diane."

  Taking the frail girl back in her arms, Diane held her so tightly she was almost afraid she was hurting her. There had never been time for children in her first marriage, and then her husband had died and the prospect of having a child had grown even dimmer. Perhaps that was why she felt this incredible need to nurture and protect Jenny…

  Holding the girl, Diane felt tears well up in her eyes. "Thank you, honey," she said, her voice shaky.

  "For what, Aunt Diane?"

  "For caring about me enough to say prayers for me."

  "But I say prayers for you all the time, Aunt Diane."

  "You do?"

  "Yes. I say prayers for both of us—that we'll always be together."

  A big horn blared outside.

  "Oh, my gosh!" Diane said. "The school bus."

  The next thirty seconds was a mad rush around the kitchen grabbing sweater, lunchbox, milk money, and books.

  Then Diane was hurrying her down the walk to the bus.

  "Look, Aunt Diane," Jenny said, and pointed to a beautiful orange-and-black admiral butterfly. "Isn't it beautiful?"

  "It sure is." Diane laughed. "But the school bus is beautiful, too."

  Jenny, squeezing her hand, said, "Someday when I'm all grown up, I can stay here all day with you. We'll be like sisters. We'll have a great time."

  Then she skipped the rest of the way to the bus, a few kids behind windows waving to her.

  Feeling like a real mother—feeling that Jenny was in fact her real daughter—Diane watched until the bus pulled out of sight around the bend and then walked back to the house, the admiral butterfly still perched on the mailbox.

  She was trying very hard not to think about what was to take place three hours from now. Lunch with Robert…

  Amy's was a holdover from the seventies, when restaurants tried to disguise themselves as terrariums. Diane and Robert sat near the back of the crowded place, placing their orders with a young waitress who looked overwhelmed by the sheer number of diners.

  Diane decided on a roast-beef sandwich on rye with a small salad and a glass of iced tea. Robert chose the same sandwich but asked that it be served with French fries and coffee.

  The waitress gone, Robert said, "You look great." She smiled. "A quick man with the compliment."

  "A quick, sincere man."

  "Well, thanks, I guess I kind of needed that." Obviously sensing the troubled quality of her tone, he said, "Still angry with me?"

  "Angry isn't the right word."

  "What is the right word, then?"

  "More like…confused"

  Sitting back in his chair, he said, "Maybe it's just the cop in me, Diane, but I can't help thinking we did the wrong thing."

  "Even if it means sparing a little girl's sanity—maybe even her life?"

  He stared somberly at her and said, "Are you sure she's a little girl, Diane? There's a very real possibility she's something very different. That's why I'd like the people at the university to—"

  D
iane reached across the table and touched Robert's hand. "Do we have to have the same argument we did last night?"

  Robert sighed. "The fact is, Diane, that two people were murdered. Neither of us saw Jenny do it—but we have a strong suspicion that she did."

  "We were downstairs when it was going on."

  "Downstairs, right. And Jenny was upstairs with Mindy and Jeff. Who else could have killed them? And we're not even talking about…about her…condition…or whatever you want to call it." He glanced around the restaurant, as if watching for eavesdroppers. "She may not even be human, Diane."

  "Of course she's human. She's a sweet little girl who nearly died when her own sister tried to kill her. Don't you think that's enough turmoil in her life?"

  "So you're willing to let her walk away? Even if she's a killer?"

  Diane knew this was not the answer Robert wanted. "Yes."

  Robert shook his head and dropped his gaze.

  "Living with me, she's going to get the love and guidance she's never had," Diane said. She hated the slightly defensive tone that had crept into her voice.

  "How do you know that she won't turn on you?" Robert said. "Even if there isn't anything…supernaturally wrong with her, there's every possibility that she's deeply disturbed, maybe even sociopathic." He kept thinking about the official police version—that Jeff had savagely murdered Mindy, and then killed himself. Even now, Clark wondered what had really gone on there that night.

  "Oh, God, Robert. Saying something like that—" She locked her jaw, and then surprised herself by standing up. "I'm just afraid we shouldn't see each other anymore."

  He grabbed her hand. "Diane, please don't say that. You're upset, but—"

  She saw the grief in his eyes. It was the same kind of grief she felt at this moment. First she'd felt she could never love anyone with the same passion she'd felt for her first husband, and then she'd met Robert and…

  She took her hand away. "I'm sorry, Robert. What you're asking is for me to choose between you and Jenny. And I guess I've given you my answer."