The Dream Trap | By : Flynnparadox Category: M through R > Nightmare on Elm Street Views: 2490 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0 |
Disclaimer: I do not own A Nightmare on Elm Street, nor the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story. |
Chapter Five: Krueger
1
Eric knew he was asleep.
That was worst part: knowing but having no power to do anything about it. The last thing he remembered before sleep overtook him was that it was almost two and he was trying to watch television to stay awake. Obviously, it hadn't worked.
In the dream, he was standing in front of a little nowhere motel. In fact, it looked like the Bates Motel, right out of the movies. The flashing neon sign read:
SPRINGWOOD
And nothing else. Not "Springwood Motel" or "Vacancy" but just "Springwood." The neon sing flashed red but everything else was in black & white, just like an upper-tier Hitchcock movie. Or, at least, one of the better episodes of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents."
Eric walked towards the motel, feeling he didn't have any other choice. He had already tried his usual techniques for waking himself up. None had worked.
It started to rain and Eric quickened his pace, reached the wooden landing around the motel, got in under the awning. The first door was the office and Eric knocked on the door, which was standing open. A tall, thin man snapped up from behind the desk. He munched on Halloween candy out of a bag in one hand.
"Great," Eric said, "Anthony Perkins. Hey, loved the last one, man."
"What?" Perkins - or perhaps it was Norman Bates - said.
"Nothing. Got a room?"
"Of course we do, sir."
He turned the register book towards Eric, handed him a pen. He turned to get a key as he spoke.
"Just sign the register there," he said, "and I'll get you a key. Going to stay long?"
"No," Eric said.
He went to sign the register and saw the names already written there before him:
Jesse Walsh
Charlie Doyle
Bobby Garfield
Drake James
And this was just on the page that he was currently on. Eric thumbed through the previous pages and found many names he had some vague memory of. Almost all Elm Street kids, he was sure.
"Sir?" Perkins said.
Eric looked up to find the man holding out a key to him. Perkins had that half-crazy, half-charming smile that he always did in these kind of movies.
"Cabin one," he said.
Eric signed the register - I.P. Freely - and took the key from Perkins. He made to leave, then turned back, pointed at the man.
"I better not catch you spying on me," he said.
"Oh, no, sir," Perkins said. "No offense, but you're no Janet Leigh. Or Meg Tilly, for that matter. Diana Scarwid..."
Both he and Eric made "so-so" gestures with their hands. They shared a laugh then Eric nodded, satisfied. He headed to his cabin, unlocked the door and went inside. It was Janet Leigh's motel room, down to the purse full of money on the nightstand. Eric chuckled and grabbed the money out of the purse, tossed it onto the bed. He laid down on the bed among the bills, let himself feel like a big shot for a moment or two.
There was a knock on the door. Eric sighed and got up to answer it.
He opened the door to the massive, atmospheric rain storm outside, a high, whistling wind, and a girl standing in the doorway, drenched. Eric smiled. She might not have been Janet Leigh but she was a looker. Young - Eric guessed maybe fifteen or sixteen - with what appeared to be blonde hair. It was hard to tell in black & white: it might have been red or light brown.
"Can I come in?" the girl asked.
"Why do you want to come in?" Eric asked.
The girl shrugged. She looked desperate. Her eyes looked weary, paranoid.
"It's wet out," she said.
"Okay," Eric said.
She came in, sat on the bed. Eric turned the chair at the desk to face her and sat in it.
"My name's Tina," the girl said.
"Eric."
"Nice to meet you, Eric."
"Same to you, dream girl."
Tina smiled.
"Am I the girl of your dreams?" she said.
"Well, I don't know about that," Eric said. "There's this one girl I know, Steph, she--"
"Oh, yeah, I know her."
"You do?"
"Sure. He's gonna get her, too."
"What?"
"Let's not dwell on terrible things."
"Whoa, whoa, whoa, you brought it up. 'He'? He who? Freddy?"
Tina nodded.
"Okay," Eric said. "That's what I thought. Now we're getting somewhere. Is this his place?"
"What do you mean?" Tina asked.
"This place, this motel? Did he dream this up?"
"I don't understand."
"This motel?! Come on."
"But..."
"But what?"
"This is Springwood."
"I know what Springwood is, babe, I live there. But I'm talking about this motel. What is this place?"
"It's Springwood."
"Now I don't understand. What are you talking about?"
"This is all Springwood. The cabins, the office, the rain outside. It's all Springwood."
"I... What... What about anything past the motel?"
"There's nothing past this building," Tina said. "Just the rain."
"So you're telling me that there's no way out of Springwood?" Eric said. "Is that what you're saying?"
"Yes. This is all there is. Every once and while, Freddy adds another one of us here but, other than that, there's nothing."
"Yeah, right."
He got up from his chair, paced the room. He threw up his hands.
"Come on, Freddy!" he said. "You're kind of reaching for a metaphor here, aren't you? Yeah, okay, I'm afraid of being stuck in Springwood all my life. True. So what? Think this is gonna scare me? I like Psycho, it's one of my favorites. Think I can't have a good time talking to Anthony Perkins? Or this girl? Sure, I would have preferred Janet Leigh - or, Hell, Steph - but she's a looker, too. Come on, try harder!"
"I wouldn't taunt him like that," Tina said.
"Ah, fuck him! He's got nothing!"
The floor dropped out from under him. Eric fell into darkness.
And screamed.
2
Maria Ramirez couldn't sleep. It was around two in the morning and it didn't look like she would be getting any sleep tonight. And when she couldn't sleep, she baked.
Cookies.
They were her real passion. She tried every new recipe she could get her hands on, as well as experiments that were all her own. Tonight's batch was nothing too experimental - white chocolate macadamia nut - but delicious, nonetheless. She took another bite of a cookie, savored the scrumptious taste.
She sat at her dining room table, took a book with her. She drank coffee, ate a few cookies and her read her book.
It started off normally - one of her trashy romance novels - but started to get strange as she progressed through it. The story was set in an unnamed, normal, small Middle America town. The protagonist was a strong-willed young Latina woman who was married to her rather unsavory work but loved a man she wasn't supposed to love: Frank Kramer, a local foundry worker who was hunky, beautiful and a little dangerous.
Maria liked it, liked the understated sexiness of it. However, a quarter of the way through it, a strange subplot was added, something that one normally didn't see in these kind of books. There was a serial killer on the loose in the town, a particularly nasty one who preyed on children.
Frank was accused of these horrible crimes but the heroine stuck by his side, defending him all the while. Maria, however, was not convinced of the character's innocence. There was too much evidence. And when Frank got off on a technicality, the book treated it like a triumph but it raised Maria's eyebrows.
Another worrying aspect about the book was that it all seemed eerily familiar. Maria seemed to recall a case similar to the one described in the book, one that had occured right here in town when she was a child.
Around this time in the book, the plot up to this point was suddenly revealed to be a book-within-a-book, which was being read by a young woman suffering from insomnia and trying to pass the time in the middle of the night. A woman who liked cookies.
Maria threw the book down and stood up from the dining room table. The cover of the book illustrated a woman who looked like herself. She was draped in the arms of a strong man, a man with rippling muscles and a firm ass. A man whose face was horribly burned. The background of the illustration was a striped red and green pattern.
As Maria watched, blood flowed out of the book and onto the table. Maria backed away further. She was still holding a cookie.
Sensing movement from the cookie, she looked at it. Maggots crawled through the meat of the savory treat. Maria screamed and threw it across the room.
Maria turned to leave the dining room and saw the front page of a newspaper stuck to one of her walls. The headline proclaimed:
LOCAL GIRL CLAIMS: "I SURVIVED FREDDY"
The picture under the headline was a picture of herself when she was about ten years old. Maria tore the page down, looked at it more closely.
"What the fuck?" she said.
The story went on to describe how Maria Ramirez, age 10, had claimed, shortly after Fred Krueger was taken into custody, that she was picked up by Freddy in his ice cream truck. When he attempted to restrain her and take her to his boiler room, she jumped from the vehicle, sustaining some minor injuries but escaping with her life. Her testimony, along with several other children, was the meat of the prosecution's case.
It all started to come back to Maria. She had pushed it out of her mind, with the help of her parents, and had sealed it away. But now she remembered. Remembered that car ride. But an ice cream truck? That didn't seem right. When she thought of it now, she pictured a white van. Maybe she had got it wrong as a child. Not the identification of the driver but of the vehicle itself. She had never liked ice cream trucks.
"You're not going to get away from me again," a voice said.
Freddy came running out of the kitchen, a demon in a red and green sweater, clawed hand raised above his head. He roared, his mouth open, face a shadowed terror. Steam came flowing out of the kitchen in his wake, billowing up to the ceiling, as if the house had caught fire. Maria thought it looked like he had emerged from the gates of Hell itself.
She screamed and ran back towards the dining room table. Instinctively, she grabbed the cup of hot coffee and deliberately spilled it onto her free hand. The pain was intense and she instantly awoke, still sitting at the table.
She had survived. Again.
3
Ann ran.
It was all she could do, her only true skill. She had tried her hand at acting, when she was a Freshman, but hadn't taken to it. Track was where her skills lay. So she could run. Boy, could she run.
And she did. She ran down a long corridor, lights flickering on and off, horrific wailing coming from seemingly everywhere. The corridor was green, sickly-looking. The smell was horrendous.
There were people up ahead. A whole group of people, huddled together, trying to stay warm. Ann darted towards them.
Around her, the corridor began to change. The walls suddenly grew shelves, which were sooned lined with canned goods and bottles of water. Ann was almost on top of the huddled group of people, could see them better now.
They wore drab, brown rags, and all of them were hunched over. Ann reached them, stopped. She looked around.
Now she understood where she was. It all came to her, like information always does in dreams. It all made sense.
This was a bomb shelter. The bombs had dropped and now she was sealed in here, doomed to live the rest of her life in a living nightmare, half-alive, half-dead.
"Oh, God," she said. "Help me."
The group of people turned around. They were horrible, mutated creatures, radiation having changed them, twisted their bodies. Ann screamed and backed away from them.
The bomb shelter was now so small. Claustrophobia pushed in on her at the same time that the mutants did the same. They reached out for her, mouths open in silent screams.
There was an inhumanly loud ringing sound. It pierced Ann's ears.
She sat up, awake.
She was at her desk, in her room. She had fallen asleep, despite all her attempts to stay awake. The ringing was her alarm clock. She had been smart enough to set it every hour, just in case she went to sleep. Seems as if it had paid off.
She put her head in her hands and cried. It had just been a nightmare, but it was all so plausible. The whole world was going to Hell. America and the USSR were going to bomb the shit out of each other and the rest of the world was going to follow.
There was no way out. So what did it matter if she died in her sleep?
4
The Witching Hour. Springwood.
It seemed like everyone that Wednesday night had nightmares. All across town, people woke in their beds, covered in sweat, musing on half-remembered images of terror. Children, especially, had it rough that night. More than three-quarters of the children under the age of ten had a nightmare during this time.
Freddy Krueger stood tall above Springwood tonight. His evil spread across the town like a shroud, covering it in a blanket infested with maggots.
In a dive bar downtown, Donald Thompson - former chief of police and now a lowly security guard - awoke from a drunken stupor, shaking off the image of a burned woman descending into a void that had once been her bed. Was it his ex-wife, now deceased? He couldn't remember.
In the corner of an alley near Joe's Bar, a teenage runaway named Taryn White woke up, as much from the cold rain that had begun to fall and soak her as from her nightmare. She cried for a few moments then got up, trying to see if she could score dope off someone. She tried not to think about what she would have to do to get her fix.
At Beefy Boy, Bryan - who always seemed be working the graveyard shift these days - tried to put his nightmare out of his mind: a biker driving up to the drive-thru window and shooting him. It proved hard to shake.
At the college, a young woman butchered three co-eds and later claimed that she had dreamed it all before it happened. She was commited some time later.
Freddy reigned, Freddy rocked.
Those events that he didn't directly have a hand in were still a result of his evil. It was something primal, something that existed in everyone. Some people just needed a little push to go over the edge.
People like Tiffany.
5
Gale and Tiffany lay in bed together, both naked, both holding onto each other, limbs entangled as if they were one person. Gale knew that she would have to leave soon, would have to go over to Tiffany's house and fake an accident. She had no idea if she would be able to pull this off but she had to try. For the sake of the young woman currently in her arms.
Gale looked at Tiffany, who looked at her back. They didn't speak at first. A kiss came and went, fast but sincere.
"That just happened, didn't it?" Tiffany said.
"Yes," Gale said. "Did you like it?"
"Yeah!"
"Me, too."
"I wanna do it again."
Gale sadly shook her head. She kissed the tip of Tiffany's nose.
"Not tonight," she said. "I have to go to your house soon."
"Fuck, that was tonight," Tiffany said. "Seems like ages ago."
"It'll be okay."
"I know. The cops in this town aren't exactly what you'd call competent. But I just can't get it out of my head. I lost it. He lost it. It was like we were both crazy. I felt I'd lost my mind."
"It's not your fault. You were defending yourself."
"I was. But I wasn't myself."
"Somehow this all seems like Freddy."
"What?"
"All of this. More than just the dreams. This street. This town. It's like it's all Freddy."
"A big red and green sweater made out of about fifteen thousand people."
"Had to be us, didn't it?" Gale said.
"Naturally," Tiffany said.
"Couldn't have been a generation earlier or later."
"Think we'll make it?"
"I don't know."
"Be honest."
"I don't think we will," Gale said.
"Thanks for being honest," Tiffany said.
"Of course. I better get ready to go."
She made to get out of bed but Tiffany grabbed her by the ass and dragged her back into bed, back into a kiss. Her hands explored Gale's body as they kissed.
"Okay," Gale said when the kiss broke, "maybe we have time to do it once more."
Tiffany smiled and they tumbled into bed together.
6High.
It was a wonderful word - beautiful, even. Drake thought that maybe - just maybe - it was the greatest word in the English language. Three thousand bucks could buy a Hell of a lot of smack.
Just an hour or so earlier he had ridden the needle, all the way down to that deep place somewhere below him, that hazy world of pleasure, that funk that no other drug could quite equal. He was coming down from it now, which was annoying but okay, he supposed.
He and Steph lived in a shithole house far down Elm Street: it was a little place, one storey, which connected to a dark back alley. It was late, nearly one in the morning. Drake lay on the couch in the living room and watched a cockroach crawl up his leg. Steph sat on the floor in the front of the couch, watching television. Drake couldn't quite make out the image on the screen. It looked like accident footage: violent, gruesome stuff.
"Steph," Drake said. "What are you watching?"
She didn't move: was like a zombie, in fact, just watching the screen in silence. Annoyed, he swatted the cockroach away and leaned over to get a better look at her. She stared at the television screen, eyes unblinking. He waved a hand in front of her face. Nothing.
Abruptly, the channel on the television changed. There was a whine of static, then a picture developed. A news anchor sat a news desk.
"Breaking news from Springwood," he said, all blonde hair and professionalism, with extra added fake empathy. "A local young couple was found murdered in their homes tonight. Authorities have not released their names but it is known that they lived on Elm Street. What's the matter with that street, anyway?"
Drake frowned. He sat up fully on the couch, eyes glued to the screen.
"Authorities say that the house was, quote, painted in blood," the newscaster continued. "The couples' organs were stacked neatly in the middle of their living room, as if arranged to watch the television, which had been left on when police made the discovery. A large stash of heroin was found in the house. Fucking druggies."
Drake laughed, shook his head in disbelief. This guy was totally getting fired tomorrow.
"Over to Jessica, for the weather," the newscaster said.
The camera panned out, revealing a gorgeous redhead with large breasts that were practically spilling out of her low-cut dress. The redhead leaned forward, providing an even better view of her cleavage.
"Look out, Springwood residents!" she said. "Today's forecast calls for severe thunderstorms, earthquakes, wild fires, corpses raining from the sky, acid rain, and Apocalypse. Oh, and Drake?"
Drake fell off the couch in shock, landing on the ground next to Steph, who still didn't move an inch. The TV vixen climbed over the news desk, pressed her face and breasts against the screen.
"Do you know what the last thing your father saw before he blew his brains out was?" she asked.
Drake shook his head. On screen, the vixen changed - in a flurry of static - into the visage of a badly burned, terrifying figure.
"Me!" the boogeyman said.
Drake covered his eyes like a five-year-old. The television channel changed again. The program now was a painting instruction show. A pleasant man with a large afro talked softly, comfortingly while painting a benign landscape.
Slowy, Drake dropped his hands to eye the screen. Nothing out of the ordinary now. It was the drugs. Of course it was. Playing tricks on his mind. Absently, he scratched at his left inner elbow, where he shot up. His veins itched something fierce.
What the Hell?
Now it felt as if something were moving through his veins, something alive and with real substance. It was painful, excruciating even.
Drake got up and ran - tripping and falling more than once on his way - to the small table off the kitchen. On the table were the baggies of heroin he had bought from Maria a few days back. As quick as he could, considering the pain, he prepared and cooked up a batch. He drew the hot liquid into the needle, then brought the needle with him into the kitchen, turned on the light. Wincing at the pain in his body - it had started to spread throughout him - he held the needle up to the harsh light. There was something foreign swimming in the liquid.
He squinted and it was as if his eyes suddenly had a zoom function. He could see the tiny particles close-up now. They almost looked like sperm, little wriggling tadpole-things. But each one of them had a face. A hideous, grinning face.
The face of the boogeyman from the newscast.
Drake dropped the needle in terror. Those things were in him now.
Growing.
Now the pain in his body was unbearable. The things inside him felt like large snakes, wriggling through his insides. His stomach churned and he looked down. Sure enough, snake-like forms sloshed through him, just under his skin.
As he watched, one of them popped through his stomach. He screamed in pain and blood sprayed out of the wound. The snake-like thing smiled up at him. Then it spoke.
"What's the matter, Drake?" it said. "Bad trip?"
Then it writhed out of his body, dropping to the floor. More followed. It felt like his whole body was emptying out. He felt as if he were sinking into the floor and the kitchen disappeared, replaced by a brownish liquid environment, in which he floated. The snake-like things surrounded him.
His body began to break up. He watched as his hands seperated from his body. Then his feet, then his legs and arms. Then his pelvis. Then his chest. Each part formed into a good-sized ball and joined the liquid.
Now he was just a head, yet he could still feel pain throughout his entire body. He floated and floated, until his head ran into something. It appeared to be plastic. Translucent plastic.
Through it, he could see a vast, dizzying boiler room, red hot. Then a figure came into view.
It was him. The boogeyman.
Freddy.
He was gargantuan and whatever Drake was floating in, Freddy held in one hand. Freddy's other arm had a sleeve rolled up and Drake saw that he had tied off the arm near the shoulder.
That was when Drake realized what it was that he was floating in. It was a syringe. A needle.
And he was about to be shot into Freddy's arm.
Krueger stuck the needle into his arm, pushed the plunger forward. Drake surged forward, going about a thousand miles an hour. Multple G-forces pressed against his face. He screamed as his skin was torn away. Horrendous pain, followed by death.
By the time he reached Krueger's arm, he was nothing but an empty skull tumbling around the boogeyman's veins. Freddy laughed, low and scary.
In the real world, on the couch, in front of the television, Drake coughed, choked. Steph snapped around, saw that Drake was vomiting, on his back, choking. She tried to do what she could but it was no good.
Drake had overdosed on nightmare.
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