by J. R. Rain
Blinding light.
Behind me, Mrs. Shine gasped. I didn’t gasp, but my jaw did drop open.
Chapter Nine
Three people jumped in unison.
One of the guys who jumped was unfortunately working under what appeared to be a massive propeller. As he leaped, he slammed his head hard, instantly opening a gash along his hairline. Blood poured freely from his skull and he cursed. Before I could stop myself, I licked my lips.
“Jesus H. Christ!” he shouted, holding his head.
We seemed to have caught the young woman, who had been kneeling next to him, in the act of handing him a tool. Holding a wrench, she gasped and spun around. She was, of course, the baker’s assistant. Apparently, she was also a mechanic’s assistant, too.
The baker himself had been lying on a tarp and painting the hull of what I could see now was a good-sized boat. In his alarm, he had kicked over the can of paint which spilled across the tarp and over onto the oil-stained cement floor.
The young guy holding his bleeding head marched over to us, holding his wrench rather threateningly. I was still stunned, still soaking in the scene, still realizing I had made an egregious error.
So had Gertrude Shine.
The young man with the wrench said, “What the hell’s going on here?”
Blood had found its way between his fingers. I was too alarmed to pay much attention to it. Well, not too much. I did notice how the overhead lights reflected dully off it. Perfectly off it. He was looking around wildly, trying, no doubt, to figure out how we had gotten in. He walked briefly outside and saw his destroyed garage.
“What the fuck?”
I said nothing. There was nothing to say. Something like this could cost me my private investigator’s license. I hadn’t been thinking. I hadn’t been thinking for a few days now. Hell, even longer. After all, Orange County was being stalked by a sick son-of-a-bitch, and I had found myself in the thick of it.
But I couldn’t think about that now.
I blinked. Coming back to my senses. What had I done? Sure, I might have talked my way out of something like this, but it was impossible with Gertrude next to me. Her husband, CS Shine, came over to her, equally stunned. There was a big blotch of cream-colored paint on his hip where the pail had been knocked over and washed over him.
“Trudy?” he said, looking from her, to me, to the broken door, to his bleeding mechanic friend. “Trudy, what’s going on?”
I looked at her and saw that she was crying, holding her hands over her face. She was looking up at the stern, the back of the boat where the massive propeller was mounted. Although most of the boat was covered in a blue tarp, the stern was exposed, perhaps so the mechanic could have a go at the engine. Painted in fancy black script above the propeller were the words “Gertrude Forever.”
“I don’t understand,” she said, but she was crying so of course she understood. Perfectly.
He smiled at her patiently, and I saw the love radiating from him. Literally. I could see the warm, violet waves emanating from the light field that surrounded him, reaching out to her. “You always wanted to travel the world, honey, and now we can. We’ve been overhauling it. Al, Becky’s boyfriend, has been letting me use his shop and helping me rebuild the engine.”
She buried her face in her hands. “I thought you were...” But she couldn’t finish her words.
“Having an affair?”
He smiled warmly, and instead of defending himself or laughing off her insecurity, Mr. CS Shine went over to his wife and gave her a big, smothering hug, and I heard the intimate words he whispered softly into her ear, “Ah, my sweetheart. Don’t you know by now you’re my precious girl?”
“I’m so sorry—”
But he shushed her and held her, and his words hit me hard. I fought my own tears and mostly won.
Just then the young mechanic appeared in front of me. “Someone’s paying for my door and for this.” He pointed to the gash in his forehead.
I told him I would. I told him I would do anything he needed. I gave him my card and he nodded, and I could see the questioning look in his eyes, even though he didn’t voice his thoughts:
How the hell had we broken his door?
But I only smiled weakly at him, told him to send me any bills. Mr. and Mrs. Shine were pressed tightly in each other’s arms and the mechanic bled into a dew rag pressed tightly to his head.
Okay, I conceded. Some men weren’t assholes.
Some men were angels.
I slipped away from the embracing couple. Into the night. Where I belonged.
The End
~~~~~~~~~~
Nightmare
Nightmares.
We all have them. We all wake up in a cold sweat, bolting upright in bed, praying like hell that we were only dreaming. The relief that it had all been just a bad dream is nearly overwhelming. For the lucky few, they might only experience such nightmares, once, twice a month.
For other like me...and Susan, well, our nightmares would never end. Ever.
Until now.
Until we did something about it.
* * *
I watched her turn the page, then scratch her crotch.
Very unattractive. Her name was Susan, and in her defense she thought she was alone in her apartment. I drifted over and peered down at my book—yes, my book. Fifty years ago, I had printed and bound only four copies of it. Now here she was, attentively reading it.
She was nearing the end, I could see. I followed her eyes as she read, wondering how much she was absorbing. When she finally finished with the last page, she sat back and looked through me, thinking hard.
For her sake, I could only pray that my words had, indeed, sunk in.
She rubbed her face and looked generally shaken. She should look shaken. Here be demons. Real, honest-to-God demons.
Finally, she stood and stretched in front of me. I admired her beauty with an empty, ghostly heart. I next followed her into her bedroom, repressing the memories of what this would have meant back when I had been alive: the bedroom of a beautiful woman and her in it. Ah. She dropped the book on her bed and disappeared into the bathroom.
Ghosts can’t do much physically except spy on the natural world, and I did so now, enthusiastically. As I watched her peel away her clothes, I suddenly realized that it had been over fifty years since I last made love.
Fifty long, shitty years.
I am quite dead, having died tragically and instantly in front of a large school bus. Once dead, two beings had come for me, both tall and shining, and they had promptly scared the shit out of me. I backed away in fear, and they let me be, leaving quietly. I sensed they would be back. And they had been. Three times, once for each time thus far that I had located my book and attempted to connect with its reader. But always I refused their advances.
After all, my work here wasn’t done. There was Susan, the fourth and final reader of my book.
Susan made me want to live again. She was soft. She was vulnerable. She was young. Beautiful. Her bangs were in need of a trim and just as she swept them out of her eyes with a graceful hand, I recognized the poetry of her in delicate motion, like the unveiling of a sonnet, line by line. If I could have sighed, I would have. As she showered, the most amazing and cursed thing happened: I felt a surge of guilt for leering at her like a peeping Tom. Who knew that ghosts could feel shame and guilt?
Sighing, I left the bathroom and headed back to her bedroom, where I waited, feeling like a perverted old man. And I was old, too. At least, I had been when I died. Now, I was ancient.
Like I said, there are only four copies of my book, Scare That Nightmare Right Back, in the world, the very book Susan had just been reading. Not exactly a bestseller but the book served a very important purpose. After all, I only needed one person to find it.
And she had.
Fifty years after I wrote it. Susan was my last chance.
Back when I completed it, I managed to talk only three libraries into stocking the bo
ok. The fourth went to the Library of Congress, keeper of all books.
This was before the digital age, before the advent of all those damned reading devices that I see folks using all the time. I say damned because had those devices been around in my time, many more good people would have found my book...and thus, many more would have found peace, too.
Peace and sanity.
Now, I haunt all four places where my books reside—and only those four places, although I must say, the Library of Congress is the most interesting of the places I haunt, with its millions of documents and a layer of government that wields a mighty power, perhaps as the Library of Alexandria once did. Ghosts are funny. We generally attach ourselves to the place of our deaths, unless such places are in the open, as had been my situation. So, instead of being attached to a place, I found myself attached to objects. Four objects, in fact. My four books. Interestingly, I always know when someone touches any one of my books. It’s a nice trick that I don’t pretend to understand.
My work here isn’t finished, I thought. It’s as simple as that.
And what was my work? Easy. Banishing Nightmare forever.
Anyway, earlier today I had watched as Susan removed the book from the shelf, flipped it open. I could see immediately that she was one of Nightmare’s victims. The dark bags under her eyes. The drooping of her shoulders. Her grayish aura which reeked of exhaustion.
Yes, Nightmare, the psychic vampire of the dream world, was eating this one alive. Unlike physical vampires that suck blood, Nightmare stole away pleasant dreams and replaced them with the horror and the terror of whatever each human feared the most. I pitied her greatly, seeing the fatigue and anxiety that had worn her down during sleep.
But then I saw something else as she continued reading through my book. Hope. Not much, granted, but a glimmering. Enough to make her stand a little straighter. Enough to make her take a long, deep, shuddering breath.
Enough to make her check out the book.
I was filled with hope, too. Perhaps now I could finally end this madness.
I knew exactly what she was going through, and I hated Nightmare for doing this to her and to others like her. Hated him with all my ghostly heart. You see, I myself had confronted Nightmare, and nearly destroyed him.
Nearly.
But the bastard had slipped through my fingers, literally.
And I wouldn’t rest, either in this world or the next, until he was destroyed forever.
Soon enough the bathroom door opened, filling the bedroom with golden light, and as she walked out, her incredible form silhouetted in the door frame, she could have easily been an angel taking me away from this world and my haunted books.
To my slight dismay, she quickly donned a pair of sweats and slipped into bed.
Bed.
Sleep.
Nightmare would be here soon.
The son-of-a-bitch.
She kept a reading light on, and was re-reading the sleep preparations outlined in my book.
The most important procedure to rid oneself of the demon, the psychic vampire called Nightmare, are the sleep preparations. I sidled up next to her, and just as I did so, the hair along her forearms shot up. Ah, the living always know we spirits are near. At least, they do on a very deep level. Perhaps too deep for most.
As she read, I drifted back into the far corner, waiting for what I was certain would come.
I wasn’t surprised.
As soon as the book fell to her lap and her head nodded off to one side, Nightmare appeared.
* * *
Nightmare was massive.
In the physical world, Nightmare is seen only as a shimmering substance, like a sheet of water suspended in the air. Now that I could see him with new eyes, so to speak, I saw what he really was, and he was penultimately terrifying.
Sweet Jesus. What have I gotten myself into?
The thing that had materialized near her bedroom window was easily seven feet tall. It had broad shoulders and a narrow waist. His head, long and thin, looked like a horse’s head. The pointy things just missing the ceiling were short horns. His skin was translucent, and I wasn’t entirely sure that I wasn’t seeing through him.
Sweet Jesus.
What he was, I didn’t know. Actually, I did know. He was a parasite. A spiritual parasite, a dream twister, a psychic vampire who sucked away pleasant dreams, and turned sleep into night terrors. I hoped that Susan would never know what was truly standing over her. But that was up to her, wasn’t it? That was up to how seriously she had heeded my advice in the book.
Yes, I had seen Nightmare once before. Years ago, and it had scared the hell out of me. That’s when he had escaped me.
But not this time, dammit.
I wondered with some fear if the massive entity could see me in return. Possibly. But so far he gave no indication, so intent was he on tormenting Susan.
Then again, what could he do to me? Kill me more? I was already as dead as I would ever be.
I didn’t know why, but Nightmare was visibly shaking. Perhaps with anticipation. I didn’t know. I didn’t know what drove him to do what he did, or it did, since it appeared sexless.
Looking back at Susan, I saw that she was the picture of sleep. I hoped so. I hoped she could pull this off...and I would certainly help in any way I could.
I went back to staring at the entity that had haunted me most of my adult life, that had stolen so much from me. The entity that had destroyed my marriage and made my existence a living nightmare. The entity that even now kept me earthbound, unable to move on. Unwilling to move on.
Fascinated, I watched as he approached her bed warily. A hideous, foul creature, yes, but he was also extremely cautious. Did he sense a trap?
The instructions in my book were clear. One problem: I had been unable to follow them. I had faltered at the last possible moment, and Nightmare had escaped me.
So how did I know how to destroy him?
I didn’t, not precisely, but I had some very good ideas. Some of which were based on my research. You see, Nightmare has been here for a long, long time. I wasn’t his first victim, and Susan wouldn’t be his last...unless we destroyed him now and forever.
I had written about my mistake. Would Susan heed my warning?
I didn’t know, but I watched as Nightmare lowered his horse head towards her, simultaneously reaching out with impossibly long fingers with jagged, filthy, blackened nails. Now inches from her forehead, his twisted fingers waved in the air as if he were playing a ghostly piano.
But no. Not quite. He was doing something else entirely. Sweet Jesus, what was coming out of her? It looked like red tendrils. Glowing red tendrils. Ethereal, wispy fibers. He looked like a demonic spinster spinning wool into yarn.
When he had gathered enough of the glowing material, he opened his ghastly maw and shoved it inside. I had a brief, flashing childhood memory of the Cookie Monster.
Unbelievable. He was eating her pleasant dreams! I was terrified for her.
He seemed about to reach for her again, but paused. From my position behind him, I could just catch a glimpse of his elongated face. He cocked his head slightly as if listening for something.
I would have held my breath if I had breath to hold.
Nightmare seemed satisfied and lowered his long face down towards hers again, and as he did so, Susan’s hand lashed out and grabbed the bastard by the throat.
* * *
Susan Smith lay alone and utterly terrified.
She knew with all her heart that the book was right, and that the thing coming for her was evil. If only she could just run...
But she had before, hadn’t she? And it didn’t work. The nightmares had followed wherever she went. The nightmares and everything that went with it: the lack of sleep, the lack of energy. All of which cut into her personal and professional life.
The book had been a godsend. She had searched everywhere for relief from the nightmares, from hypnotherapy to aromatherapy to prescripti
on drugs to changing her diet to one that was devoid of spices.
Nothing had worked.
And then just today, after Googling the subject and perusing page after page of quackery, she came upon a Los Angeles County Library book about nightmares and how to beat them. The book sounded promising, and she had dashed off to the main branch. With library card in hand, she had located the book, read through it with growing excitement, as the hair on her arms and neck stood on end, and promptly checked it out.
Admittedly, the book had been disappointingly slender, just a few ounces in her lovely, feminine hand. But she quickly got over her dismay; indeed, the author had summarized his own experiences—experiences that had precisely mirrored her own. Sweet Jesus, he had gone through exactly what she was going through!
And, most important, he had beat it.
Yes, it. For the author, one James Randall, now apparently deceased, claimed that this wasn’t an emotional enemy. No, sleepers were facing an actual enemy. A demonic enemy. Something alive. Something that fed on humanity like a damned vampire. A vampire of pleasant dreams who stole them away and left in their place, nightmares of unspeakable terror that would torment the sleeper every time they hit the REM stage of sleep.
It’s not my imagination, she had kept telling herself as she read. It’s real. I knew it was real.
The nightmares that had plagued her for most of her adult life had, in fact, seemed like a personal assault. Except that she could never get anyone to believe her. Yes, she had thought she was going insane. That is, until today. Until this book.
Mercifully, blessedly, the author not only described how to beat the creature...but to destroy it once and for all.
She thought about that now as she sat back in bed and closed her eyes. As she did so, the familiar dread overcame her. Dread to close her eyes. Dread to let her mind go. Dread to let sleep overtake her.