by Kate Aeon
She considered her situation as objectively as she could. She might be crazy — that would be the simplest explanation. But the simplest explanation wasn’t always the right one, Occam be damned, and if she wasn’t losing her mind, she also wasn’t going to let Michael win without a fight.
After what seemed like an inordinately long time, the kettle whistled, and she returned to the kitchen and made herself more tea.
She would consider calling the police, but that depended on what the FBI found out.
The Fort Lauderdale detective assigned to her case following the shooting had despised her — had told her bluntly that if she had been a decent wife and had honored her vows by staying with her husband instead of abandoning him, two dead children would still be alive. He’d been cold and harsh, but he’d also been right, and although the couple of uniformed cops who had checked on her while she was recuperating had been kind to her, it didn’t change the fact that her actions had led directly to those two students’ deaths.
By the time she was out of the hospital, the thing she’d wanted most was to move away. To run away from her shame and guilt the way her parents had run from their problems. She hadn’t had the money to flee following her hospitalization; she hadn’t been teaching long enough to be making decent money, or to have become vested in the system, or to have put aside a nest egg.
And her financial situation had only gotten worse. She couldn’t run. But she also couldn’t bear to face the Fort Lauderdale police again unless she had absolutely no other choice.
Phoebe took her tea over to her couch, sat down, and drank it in silence. She had to get to work pretty soon, but she was still too shaky. She was not ready to deal with strangers and their problems — not by a long shot.
The tea proved surprisingly soothing. Phoebe leaned back and put her feet up, snuggling into the couch cushions, sipping slowly. She smiled as she finished the cup, as wonderful calm stole over her. She felt heavy. Soft. And incredibly tired.
She put the empty cup on the end table beside her and told herself, Just a little nap. Five, maybe ten minutes. Then work.
The room swirled around her, and just as she would get her eyes fixed on something, it would slide sideways or turn liquid and dissolve.
She still lay on the couch, but the room wasn’t the same. She couldn’t pinpoint the differences; this was one of those dreams where she couldn’t get a firm grasp on anything.
Except that Michael was with her. Standing over her, smiling at her. Looking perfectly healthy, nothing like a man in a coma. Nothing like the man she’d done her best to kill with her bare hands.
He shifted in and out of focus, too, and slid sideways in the melting room. But his voice in her ears was clear. “Hello, Phoebe,” he said. “Do you want to play with me?”
She tried to scream, or to speak, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t do anything but lie there as he undid the belt of her bathrobe and pulled the terry cloth out of the way, leaving her naked and helpless. She couldn’t even whimper as he started touching her. Started doing things to her, poking and pinching and twisting and invading with his hands — just his hands. Lights exploded silently around her at odd intervals, blinding her. And when they did, the room would slide and dissolve and reform — and then Michael would reappear, doing something else, somewhere else. She could only watch him as he took hold of her injured knee with both hands and twisted it — and she couldn’t actually feel it twisting, but she knew he was hurting her.
More explosions. Lightning? She was trying to make sense of what was going on outside her nightmare, but she couldn’t make the pieces fit. Maybe outside her dream there was a storm.
And then from somewhere Michael produced a knife and smiled at her and said, “Are we ready for this yet, my faithless whore of a wife?” and ran the blade across her breasts and down her belly and between her legs, laughing softly all the while, and finally she found her voice.
Chapter Twelve
It was the cold that woke him, but it was Chick’s face — glowing softly in the dark room and hovering inches above his own — that launched Alan from the bed with heart pounding and skin prickling. Chick looked terrified.
She was pointing towards the west wall.
And then Alan heard the screaming. From next door.
Phoebe.
He didn’t bother with robe, shoes, shirt, pants. In bare feet and a pair of thin cotton pajama bottoms, he raced out of his room, out his front door, and across the few steps to her place, scattering half a dozen Muscovy ducks that had been sleeping on his stoop and the sidewalk in the process.
He hit Phoebe’s door hard and damn near killed his shoulder. “Phoebe!” he shouted.
Inside, she still screamed. At least he knew she was alive.
But how the hell could he get to her? Three deadbolts and God only knew what else stood in his way; the door hadn’t budged when he hit it. Dammit — he could break a shoulder or a foot trying to batter down that door and even if he eventually got through, he was losing time. He might not arrive until he was too late to do any good. Frustrated, he hammered on the door with his fists and bellowed, “PHOEBE!”
Then he realized that if she was being attacked, whoever was in there with her had to have gotten in somehow — and since the front door was still locked, maybe her attacker had gotten in some other way. Phoebe’s townhouse had a tiny fenced patio with sliding glass doors leading onto it from the living room and the downstairs bedroom; perhaps her attacker had gone in through one of those. Alan looked up — Phoebe didn’t have a balcony like the one he had outside his office. He could see her ground-level front window from where he stood. It was closed. He tried it. Locked.
He ran in and tried the sliding glass doors. Locked.
He remembered something about being able to lift sliding doors out of their tracks, even if they were locked, and get in that way — but if that was possible in some cases, it didn’t work this time.
He hit the glass with his shoulder, but like the doors at his place, it was tempered thermal glass, and it didn’t break. Phoebe had nothing on her patio that Alan could use to smash into it — no furniture, no flowerpots, no tools or toys. For just a millisecond he considered running to his place to get a hammer, but he didn’t think Phoebe had time for that. She sounded desperate. He didn’t dare waste a second.
He swore and went back to the front door and started pounding on it again and yelling her name.
Across the quad, lights started coming on.
And then he realized that the screaming had stopped.
He closed his eyes, scared and defeated.
Heard the locks’ tumblers turning over.
The door opened and a pale, but very much alive Phoebe stood in front of him.
“Help me,” she whispered, and grabbed his wrist and dragged him through the door, and closed it behind him, fast, and locked all the locks again. And then, for good measure, she jammed a bar under the doorknob.
“What the hell was going on?” he asked her.
“Michael,” she said. “Nightmare.”
He stared at her. “It can’t have been. Chick woke me up and sent me over here — she was hovering over my bed, pointing, and then I heard you screaming. She wouldn’t have woken me up for you having nightmares.”
“Michael was killing me.” Phoebe’s skin was ash gray, sheened with sweat. Her eyes looked glassy, her pupils were huge, and she was weaving from side to side as she stood there. She licked dry lips.
“You have to lie down,” he said. “Put your feet higher than your head, or you’re going to pass out. C’mon— ” He scooped her up, looked at the couch, and bypassed it for the un-slept-in bed in the next room.
“I can’t go to sleep,” she said. She had her arms wrapped around herself, and she was shaking and staring around wildly. “He’s waiting.”
“Nobody is here,” Alan told her. “Well, nobody but you and me. I’m going to go get you something warm to drink and cover
you up. And then you can tell me about these nightmares.”
She wasn’t all the way out of whatever she’d been through — she thrashed as he tried to arrange pillows under her legs, though he wouldn’t have quite classified her as combative, had he had her in the ER. Restless, though, definitely restless. “I’m thirsty. And I feel like I’m going to throw up,” she said.
He grabbed the wastebasket from the next-door bathroom and put it beside her bed. “In there if you do. I’ll be right back. I’m going to get you something to sip on, and we’re going to see what’s going on.”
She nodded and managed to lie still while he covered her. He didn’t like her color, her quick respirations, or her bounding pulse, and he really didn’t like the way her pupils stayed huge even when he turned on the light in her room.
It looked something like shock to him, but it looked a bit like a drug overdose, too. Phoebe had that bad knee; she probably had some pretty potent pain meds in the house. He decided to do a quick inventory to see if he could turn up anything.
He found her glasses, filled one with ice cubes, and yelled to her that he was going to make her some ice chips if he could find something to crush the ice. It made as good an excuse for rummaging as anything.
And it turned up nothing. She had four cheap stoneware place settings of plates, saucers, and cups, four sets of stainless-steel flatware, a couple of good knives, one large and one small cooking pan, a wok. Tylenol, aspirin, and generic ibuprofen. Frozen peeled bananas and fruit in bags, a lot of vegetables, tofu, raw nut butters, and very dense, hard, dark breads in her fridge, and in her tiny pantry, a few bags of corn chips and a couple of different types of hot salsa. Fresh fruit on the counter. One opened and several unopened boxes of caffeine-free loose-leaf green tea, and a good supply of clover honey. Paranoia pushed him to open the green tea box and check the contents, but the contents were nothing but tea leaves.
Under the sink, cleaning stuff.
He detoured through the bathroom to check out her medicine cabinet and found the usual bathroom things. Combs, brushes. A blow-dryer. A lot of rubber bands for her hair. Cheap shampoo, cheap conditioner. In the toilet tank, nothing but water.
He carried the glass of ice into the bedroom and said, “Couldn’t find anything I could use to crush these.”
“I don’t have much stuff,” she told him, which he thought was a huge understatement. She owned almost nothing. Her bedroom was as bare as the rest of the place — mattress and box spring on a metal frame with wheels, plain sheets, plain blanket. Half of her north wall was bathroom, the other half was closet just like his.
The closet was a walk-in, longer than it was wide, with a bare lightbulb overhead, shelves and racks on the left and the right and a blank wall in the back. Janet would have had that closet filled to the brim and would have been looking for ways to claim whatever space he had for his clothes. Even in his place he’d mostly filled the space; he’d stacked a lot of boxes that he’d never unpacked against the back wall to act as soundproofing, because his north-wall neighbors had a loud stereo that played at all hours. Evidently her north-wall neighbors were quiet.
Phoebe, on the other hand, owned so little that the single closet rack on the left that she was using was mostly bare, even with her clothes spread out. She’d hung up a few pairs of jeans, a couple of dressy-looking skirts a few years out of fashion, sweatshirts, T-shirts, and a handful of dressy blouses, also from a few years back. Folded underwear on the top shelf — not much of that either.
Everything was clean, everything was neat, and everything was well maintained.
Whatever was wrong with Phoebe, it didn’t look like it stemmed from a drug problem.
Alan sat beside her on the bed. “Tell me about your nightmare.” Phoebe seemed a little more with it but her pupils were still large and she was still breathing too fast.
“I’d rather not.”
“I’m here. You don’t want to go to sleep. I don’t want you to go to sleep until your color is better and your pulse settles down and I’m sure you’re going to be all right. And obviously anything that is causing you this sort of distress is something that you need to let someone know about.”
Phoebe turned her face away from him again. “Michael was standing over me. I was on the couch in the dream, wearing the bathrobe. He opened it. Touched me. Did things to me.”
He waited, and after a long, uncomfortable silence, he realized that was all she was going to say. He sighed. “That’s a start. More detail would help.”
With her face turned toward the sliding glass doors that led out onto the patio, she said, “He was hurting me. Twisting my nipples. My knee. He had a knife. He was... it seemed like he was cutting me open, only I couldn’t see that he was making any cuts.” The tonelessness of her voice, her flat affect, her pallor, and the way she wouldn’t look at him while she spoke all created shadows in Alan’s mind — lurking monsters that dragged their claws through the rooms of his thoughts, always just out of sight. He didn’t like the feeling.
“I couldn’t wake up,” she continued. “I tried, but I couldn’t. Michael was right there, but in that sort of hazy way people are in dreams, where they keep changing around, or sliding, or dissolving... I told myself if I could just open my eyes, or scream, or move, I could make the dream end and he would be gone. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t do anything but lie there watching him while he— ” Her voice broke.
“Rape?” Alan whispered.
“Not Michael’s thing,” Phoebe said. “He detested anything sexual— rape would be too messy and distasteful for him. He liked inflicting pain, though. And that was what he was doing. Humiliating me. Hurting me. And then, with the knife...” She closed her eyes and shuddered.
“That was when you screamed?”
“Yes.”
“And what happened?”
“He ran away, vanished. Dissolved. I don’t know. I kept screaming, and I heard you at the door in my dream, but I still couldn’t wake up. And then, at last, I came out of it. Woke up, got to my feet, got the door before the neighbors called the police. And here we are.”
“Here we are,” he said, and took her hand, and the sleeve of her bathrobe slid upward and he looked for needle tracks. But her arms were perfect. “I’m going to check your knee,” Alan told her. “It seems pretty swollen.”
“It hurts a lot.”
It was red-hot, swollen, bruised. Heavy bruising. He would have thought it was from her fall, but she hadn’t fallen on her knee. She shouldn’t have such heavy bruising.
Fear skittered down the back of his neck, but he pushed past it. She had to have been dreaming. He’d been in all the rooms. (Not the upstairs ones, a little voice whispered in the back of his mind.) No one had come in or gone out of the house. Alan had been in a position to see all the possible exits. Everything had been locked, everything was still locked.
“What do you take for the pain?” he asked.
“Mostly nothing. When it gets bad, some Tylenol or, for the worst of it, Tylenol and either aspirin or Motrin at the same time. But I don’t like taking aspirin-related drugs if I can help it. I bruise easily anyway, and they increase bleeding times.”
“They do,” he agreed, trying to imagine getting through every day with that knee and nothing stronger than Tylenol or nonsteroidal anti-inflammatories for the pain. Not even a bit of booze to dull it, he thought, realizing that Phoebe hadn’t had any alcohol in the place, either.
She was a woman with no visible bad habits.
But she might be suffering hallucinations or psychotic episodes. She showed no signs of multiple personality. But the dream she’d described, and her lasting physical reactions, suggested to him that it was more than a simple nightmare.
“I’m going to do a quick run-through of your place,” he said. “Just to make sure it really was a nightmare.”
She smiled weakly. “It was a nightmare. What else could it be?”
He didn’t know. But he started by checkin
g under her bed and in her closet. She had nothing odd under her bed. Nothing odd in her closet.
He went through the rest of the townhouse at a near run, charging up the stairs to her loft — devoid of all furniture; to her furnace closet — empty; to her upstairs bedroom suite — nothing. Bathroom, empty. Closets, empty. Bedroom, empty. She had a window rather than sliding glass doors and a balcony at the front of the upstairs bedroom, and the window had been painted shut ages ago. No one had gone out that way.
Except for the skylight there were no other windows.
No one had used the top floor for anything. The two of them were alone in her townhouse.
He hurried back down the stairs, not liking to leave her alone for too long when she seemed so unstable.
“Have you had anything like this before?” he asked.
“No. Nightmares, yes. For years. But not — not like tonight. Even with the recent ones, I never saw Michael. I heard his voice. Sometimes I dreamed I could feel him touching me. He would say terrible things. But, no.”
“Something was different with the recent ones?”
She nodded, pretty and fragile, and he wanted — God help him — to save her from all her monsters, even as he was beginning to believe that her monsters were living inside her where he wouldn’t be able to slay them.
“The last two, or maybe three weeks, I’ve dreamed about Michael almost every night.”
“And then two days ago the phone calls started.”
“Three days now.”
“And no one can find any proof that these phone calls have been made?”
She looked at him sidelong. “If you’re trying to figure out if I’m going insane, don’t think that you’re alone.”
“You’re wondering the same thing?”
She managed a weak smile. “I could make a pretty good case for it. I’m still giving myself the benefit of the doubt, though. I called the FBI to let them know about the calls and about Michael. Because of his record, they said they would make sure that the person in the hospital bed was really him.”