Waking Nightmares (27 page)
Authors: Christopher Golden
THE
buzzing of her alarm clock invaded Amber’s slumber, insinuating itself into the fog of her sleeping mind and growing in irritation until, at last, her eyes opened into narrow slits. With a frown, she let her brain sift through the sounds around her. Yes, the alarm clock buzzed, which was strange since she had it set to
RADIO
. Instead, it emitted a crackling static drone. The rain still beat down upon the roof and pelted the windows, but now it sounded more like sleet. The storm made the timbers of the house groan, as if its foundations were barely able to stay buried in the ground.
buzzing of her alarm clock invaded Amber’s slumber, insinuating itself into the fog of her sleeping mind and growing in irritation until, at last, her eyes opened into narrow slits. With a frown, she let her brain sift through the sounds around her. Yes, the alarm clock buzzed, which was strange since she had it set to
RADIO
. Instead, it emitted a crackling static drone. The rain still beat down upon the roof and pelted the windows, but now it sounded more like sleet. The storm made the timbers of the house groan, as if its foundations were barely able to stay buried in the ground.
She took a deep breath and glanced at the window, wondering for a moment why everything seemed so off. So wrong. Then she had it—beyond her gauzy white drapes, through the glass, the darkness remained. Her alarm clock showed that 7:30 A.M. had come and gone, but the sky had lightened only a few shades, from night-black to the deepest storm-gray.
The idea of dragging her ass out of bed and going to class made her want to bury her head under the pillows. She had begun to do that very thing when her mind at last reached a state of wakefulness full enough that the details of the previous day returned to her, and she froze. Fragments of her dreams and visions flashed across her mind. She remembered the thing she had seen in her house last night, and her certainty that she would never be able to fall asleep after such a fright. Obviously she had managed it, but doubted she’d had more than four hours’ sleep, all told.
Get up,
she told herself.
Do something.
she told herself.
Do something.
The idea almost made her laugh. She was a college kid. What the hell could one twenty-one-year-old girl do against the kind of evil she knew was brewing in Hawthorne? If the things from her visions were now stalking the real world, all she wanted to do was run and hide, or maybe scream.
But it was here. In my house.
And her family lived in that house. They were all in danger, and so were most of her friends. Something had to be done. If she let fear get in her way, she might as well surrender their lives, and her own life as well, to the ancient evil poisoning Hawthorne.
And her family lived in that house. They were all in danger, and so were most of her friends. Something had to be done. If she let fear get in her way, she might as well surrender their lives, and her own life as well, to the ancient evil poisoning Hawthorne.
She slapped a hand down on the alarm clock, silencing the buzz, and threw back her sheets. Her mother had left a basket of clean and folded laundry next to the bed, and she dug through it and yanked out a pair of blue jeans and a dark red top. Stripping out of her T-shirt and panties, she put on clean underwear and then the clothes she’d selected. She slipped her feet into scuffed black lace-up shoes—in this storm, flip-flops just weren’t going to do the job.
At her bureau, she grabbed an elastic and tied her hair back into a ponytail. A quick glance in the mirror revealed dark circles beneath her eyes, evidence of a night of limited and fitful sleep.
In the midst of the sound of the rain on the window came another sound, a scritch-scratch noise that might have been a branch scraping the glass, bent by the wind, if there had been a tree that close to the house. Amber studied the reflection of her bedroom window in the mirror, seeing only darkness and rivulets of rain sliding down the glass. She realized she had stopped breathing and forced herself to exhale, then inhale. She couldn’t let her fear get the better of her before she even left the house.
In the mirror, she saw something move.
Amber spun and saw the face outside the window, the flat, black, expressionless countenance of a wraith.
Her hand reached out and snatched her hairbrush from the bureau. Instead of fear, rage surged up inside of her and she hurled the brush at the window, screaming at the creature to go away. The brush thunked into the window frame and fell to the carpet, even as the wraith slithered away.
Amber ran to the window and looked out to see it clinging to the outside of the house, the tatters of its clothing half-mist and half-fabric. Where it had hidden its blades she could not tell, but it clung to the siding like a salamander. As she studied it, the wraith glided upward, crawling toward the third floor, where her Gran would be sleeping.
“No,” she said. “No way.”
Her fear returned, but this was not fear for herself. It was fear for the old woman whose words she found so difficult to understand, but whose love for her family had always been in evidence.
Amber bolted from the room, frantic, her heart thudding in her chest as she mounted the steps to her great-grandmother’s attic apartment.
Not Gran,
she thought.
You can’t have her.
Not Gran,
she thought.
You can’t have her.
She thought of all the times Gran had cooked for her, and taken care of her when she was little, and sat in her chair knitting while Amber watched whatever foolish TV show had been her favorite that month. Gran liked soap operas and the Three Stooges, and would laugh at both, which had always made Amber laugh, too. Fear carved into her heart and squeezed the air from her lungs, and she took the stairs two at a time until she burst onto the landing at the top of the stairs and saw that Gran’s bedroom door was slightly ajar.
She nudged it open and hurried in as quietly as she could manage.
Gran snored. Sometimes it annoyed the hell out of Amber, but this morning it was the most beautiful sound she had ever heard. The old woman lay on her bed, deep in slumber, snoring deeply. The gray light of the stormshrouded day filtered through the curtains, but there was no trace of the wraith. Still, it wasn’t until Amber hurried to the window—careful not to tread too heavily for fear of waking Gran—that she managed to exhale. The wraith had been on this side of the house. She saw no sign of the thing now, but was it still out there?
Only one way to know.
She hustled down two flights of stairs, flung open the front door, and ran out into the rain. Turning, she began to scan the outside of the house, but even as she did so, she felt the rain on her face and arms and shuddered in revulsion, as though what poured down out of the storm was the blood of innocents. As in her visions, the rain felt hot. It soaked through her shirt and slid down her skin, and she wanted to run from it.
But first she had to make sure her family was safe, so she made a quick circuit of the house, moving back far enough that she could see all of the windows and even the roof. She saw no sign of the wraith, but now it felt as though there were eyes upon her and she spun around and looked at the roofs of nearby houses and the branches of trees and the power lines that were strung along the street. Nothing.
But in the distance, above the twin spires of the church’s bell tower and city hall’s clock tower, the sky swirled inward and upward, as though the storm were draining into some upper level of the atmosphere. Amber froze, terrified of what she might find if she were to go downtown and approach the clock tower.
No,
she told herself.
I won’t be going there. Not for anything.
she told herself.
I won’t be going there. Not for anything.
There could be no hiding from this now. The whole world knew that real evil existed, and that dark magic could destroy lives and poison whole peoples. But a small town like Hawthorne was used to its own tiny evils, its small bits of dark intention that sprang from human nature. Real evil, the sort that might tear down all of their hopes and dreams and steal their souls, destroy their lives, didn’t happen here. This was Hawthorne, Massachusetts. It just didn’t.
Yet now it had. And Amber knew things about it that she wasn’t sure anyone else knew. Her visions had to mean something, and that meant she had to act. But would people like the mayor and the police chief have admitted to themselves by now that what they faced was dark magic? Real evil? She wasn’t sure. She should call the police, or go to the station, but she realized that the first people with whom she needed to share her fears were her parents.
Skin stinging from the hot rain, she went back into the house and ran up to her room, pulled on a dry shirt, and spent a moment searching her closet for a raincoat, without luck.
Quiet as she had tried to be because of the early hour, she felt sure she had made enough noise to rouse her parents, but when she went to their room she found they had not stirred. Frowning, she approached their bed. Sometime during the night they had moved together, her father spooning her mother from behind, one arm thrown over her, his face nuzzled against the back of her neck. She had a moment to think of this image as sweetly romantic.
And then she narrowed her eyes and studied the arm that her father had around her mother. She had attributed its dark hue to the gloom of the stormy morning filtering through the curtains, but as she moved closer, she saw something that startled her so badly she froze on the spot. The arm had no hair on it. It had become thinner overnight. At the elbow was a visible joint, the skin clinging so tightly to the bone that it seemed more like a shell.
Like the carapace of an insect or a crustacean.
“Daddy?” Amber whispered, feeling like a little girl again . . . a little girl trapped in a nightmare from which her parents could not save her.
She inched closer. Her father’s forearm had turned so dark it was nearly black. And that bruise-black flesh had spread. She saw her mother’s bare foot sticking out from beneath the covers, and it had also changed. Amber’s breath came in tiny, ragged sips and she began to shake her head in denial. Yet she could not accept it, even then.
Not until she saw their faces in profile, and realized that all signs of age had gone away. Their skin had begun to smooth and harden and darken.
And they no longer had mouths.
Amber screamed and staggered away from the bed, turned and fled from the room and the house, thinking of the police. Chief Kramer. He and his cops—some of them people she had known her whole life—wouldn’t be able to do a fucking thing, but the chief would know what to do. Who to call. Dark magic had poisoned Hawthorne—
it’s poisoned me!
—and it had to be stopped before her parents had been transformed completely. That had to be what was happening to them, she knew. There could be no mistaking it—the thinning of the limbs, the coloring, the carapace—they were turning into wraiths, just like the one she had seen slithering on the outside of the house, and the one in the corridor the night before.
it’s poisoned me!
—and it had to be stopped before her parents had been transformed completely. That had to be what was happening to them, she knew. There could be no mistaking it—the thinning of the limbs, the coloring, the carapace—they were turning into wraiths, just like the one she had seen slithering on the outside of the house, and the one in the corridor the night before.
And then it struck her, hardest of all—that in her dream this morning,
she
had been one of those things. Amber thrust her hands out and stared at them, pushed up the sleeves of her jacket and felt her skin. She reached up to feel the contours of her face.
she
had been one of those things. Amber thrust her hands out and stared at them, pushed up the sleeves of her jacket and felt her skin. She reached up to feel the contours of her face.
I’m still me,
she thought. But for how long?
she thought. But for how long?
With a glance upstairs, she wondered how she could help Gran. Her parents were sleeping—her scream hadn’t woken them, so maybe they would keep sleeping until they had been completely changed—but how was she supposed to get Gran out of the house?
Then it struck her that Gran hadn’t woken either. She’d screamed so loud that there was no way the old woman hadn’t heard her, no way that it wouldn’t have roused her from her bed if she had been capable of getting up. Amber hadn’t gotten a good look at her skin beneath that bedspread, but a dreadful certainty filled her now, and she knew what she would find.
“Oh, no,” she whispered to herself, feeling more alone than ever.
She whipped out her cell phone and tried it, but couldn’t get a signal. Running to the kitchen, she picked up the house phone to find it dead, not so much as a busy signal. Just blunt nothingness.
There was nothing else she could do, except run. She tapped her pocket to make sure she had her keys. Her car was still parked back on campus. Ben was supposed to drive her back to pick it up, but she had a key to her father’s Jetta, and he sure as hell wouldn’t be using it today. She raced out into the hot, oily rain for a second time.
She slammed the door behind her, twisted it to make sure it had locked, and then turned to sprint to her father’s car, colliding with someone who grabbed at her as they fell in a tangle of arms and legs, hot breath on her neck. Amber screamed, thinking a wraith had come for her, but then she felt ordinary human skin and the touch of gentle hands, and she focused on the face above her.
“Amber,” Miles Varick said. “It’s all right. It’s me.”
His eyes were red from exhaustion or tears or both, but he was not a wraith. Not a monster. Just a man.
“Professor Varick,” she breathed. “Oh, thank God.”
“You’re okay,” he said, and it sounded like a promise. “But we need to talk.”
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