

NIGHTMARE

By: Ashton C. Simpson

Based on Wes Craven's _'A Nightmare On Elm Street'_

© Ashton Simpson 2014

Published at Smashwords

## 1.

She had her arms wrapped around him, her hands feeling the strong, toned muscles in his back under his sweat-dampened skin. She let out weak whimpers as he nibbled and sucked on the skin of the base of her neck just the way she liked it. Then suddenly, his body's temperature grew warmer and warmer, until he was almost scorching hot, nearly burning her with his touch. When her hands ran across his shoulder blades, his skin felt wet in a different way. Her hand lifted, and his skin peeled off into it, the flesh melting between her fingers.

Marge Thompson awoke in her bed, alone and with a pounding headache. She stood up from her bed and walked into the bathroom of her one-bedroom apartment. She turned on the sink, her eyes half-open, rubbing her neck as she did so. It felt a little sore. She brushed it off, assuming she must have slept on it wrong, and thought nothing more of it. That was until she saw herself in the mirror.

Marge reached over to the toothbrush holder beside the sink and took out her brush and the tube of Colgate. She squeezed a small glob of paste onto the bristles of her brush when she looked up at the mirror, and she dropped the brush and tube both into the sink with a gasp. Her quaking fingers touched the forming hickey at the base of her neck, feeling the moisture on it.

She left the sink and dashed into the kitchen, where she opened her freezer and took out a bottle of Schnapps. She barely was able to unscrew the cap with her unstable fingers before she took a heavy swig from it, the icy mint liquid burning down her esophagus, then filling her with a soothing warmth as it poured into the pit of her stomach. The help herself calm even further, she reached over to grab the carton of cigarettes on the counter and fished one out, holding the filtered end between her lips as she lit it with a match, which was no easy task because of how badly her hands were shaking.

_This isn't possible,_ she thought to herself, _It's not. It was just a dream... Wasn't it?_

## 2.

It was so dark. All she could make out through the darkness was the network of copper pipes as she ran down the catwalks of some old boiler room. She had no idea where she was, or even how she got there; all she knew was that she needed to get away. But get away from what exactly? If only she could find her way through this labyrinth of pipes.

Screeeeeee

Behind her came a sharp screeching sound, like something sharp scratching against metal, sounding like nails on a chalkboard. She quickened her pace and ran and ran, until she came to a dead-end.

"Nancy..."

She spun around as she heard a voice calling her name, so distant it sounded like a whisper, but saw no one there.

_"Nancy,"_ the voice whispered, now right beside her head.

A hand grabbed her shoulder, and her eyes finally opened, awakening to the sight of being back in her classroom. It seemed biology had put her to sleep once again.

Every other one of her classmates were rising from their seats and leaving. Class had ended. Nancy looked over to see that the hand on her shoulder belonged to her friend, Lance.

"You fell asleep again," he said to her with a small smile on his face, one that showed him trying his best not a laugh at her.

"Thank you Captain Obvious," she responded, rolling her eyes at his continued ability to point out the apparent. "I'm just glad this was the last class of the day," she then said as she pulled the strap of her backpack over her shoulder, "Not to mention the last day of the week."

"TGIF," Lance chuckled like the geek he was.

Nancy scooped her textbook and binder up from her table and joined Lance as they both exited the classroom.

Nancy Thompson was always a rather introverted kind of girl, always letting her long dark brown hair fall over her face, hiding her from view. She usually avoided being around people, or otherwise did her best to just blend in; a true wallflower. For some reason they just made her really nervous, especially the guys. Besides, not many kids want to be friends with the daughter of a police officer. Lance, however, was the only exception.

Lance was a genuinely great guy, as sweet as they come, a regular boy-next-door. He was also as geeky as they come too. Every day he would dress in preppy pastel-colored polo shirts he always had tucked into his cargo pants, his short ginger-brown hair always gelled and combed nice and straight, and loafers on his feet, his socks always folded neatly over his ankles. As good as he was with keeping a neat wardrobe, he was even better with his schoolwork. He was such a model student, in fact, that he was bumped up a whole grade, now being a high school freshman instead of an eighth grader. This, naturally, came in handy for Nancy during class, since she was hardly an A-student herself. Because of this, and because of his non-threatening, good-natured personality, they both ended up becoming good friends over the school year.

As the two packed up their books into their lockers, which were only two spaces apart from each other, Nancy's mouth involuntarily widened in a yawn.

"Was biology really that boring?" Lance asked, zipping up his jacket.

"Yes," Nancy answered in an almost matter-of-fact tone as they both made their way down the hall towards the exit, "But it doesn't help that I already have trouble sleeping at night. Nightmares."

"Boogeyman trying to get you?" Lance teased, tickling her ear. Nancy rolled her eyes and brushed his hand away.

"No," she said, shrugging her shoulders, "I don't know."

The two friends walked out through the front doors along with the herd of a thousand or so other students bustling through, all eager to leave so they could get to their weekend festivities. They then separated as Lance shuffled towards his moped, while Nancy meandered towards her bicycle.

While she was unwrapping the chain, a small, yet bright, light glimmer off of something on the ground. She crouched down, and found it to be a solid silver marble. She pinched it up, brushed off the dirt with her fingertips, and tucked it into her pocket, happy to have a new one to add to her collection.

Nancy put the rolled up bike chain into the basket attached to the front of the handlebars, then hopped onto the seat and wheeled onward towards home on it.

Her house was actually only about a ten block distance from the school, which made a bike ride of only a couple minutes to and from it. When she arrived, the garage door was wide open, as it usually was when Nancy came home, with her father's trooper cruiser parked inside it next to his old gray Volvo, which he owned since before Nancy was even born and refused to have traded in.

As Nancy cruised up the driveway and rolled her bike into the garage, she could hear her father's voice shouting angrily from inside.

' _Oh no, what is it now?'_ she wondered.

She quietly stepped into the house, closing the door behind her, and tip-toed into the kitchen from where she heard her father's voice.

"Don't you give me that bullshit! We agreed that you would be taking her on weekends!"

Nancy peeked around the doorframe and saw her father, still dressed in his dark purple police uniform. His back was turned to her as he continued to shout into the phone, slamming his fist against the counter.

"You have a responsibility!"

Even from her distance, Nancy could hear the person on the other line yelling something, and Donald yelled back, "Yes you do! You owe it to me, and you owe it to her after everything she was put through!"

Another series of yelling came from the other end before Donald finally growled through snarled teeth, "I hope you burn in hell you selfish bitch!"

He then slammed the phone onto the hook, slamming it with such force it caused Nancy to jump.

Donald turned, seething through clenched teeth, his head hung, rubbing his meaty fingers against his red forehead. He then looked up and saw Nancy standing there, a look of concern in her eyes, and his color cooled.

"Sorry about that Nancy," he sighed, "That wasn't something that I wanted you to hear."

"What was that all about?" Nancy asked, stepping meekly into the kitchen.

"That was your mother," he grumbled through his teeth. "Apparently," he spat, "you're not going to be able to go stay with her this weekend."

Nancy rolled her eyes let out an irritated sigh and tossed her backpack down, the bag sliding across the tile floor until it hit one of the chairs pushed against the dining table. It wasn't the first time this had happened. Donald walked up to her and pulled her into a hug.

"I'm sorry princess," he muttered into the crown of her head. He pulled back so they were arm's length apart and looked down at her with a sympathetic smile. He started to push a stray hair out of her face, but she shook her head away.

"Dad," she protested, "you know I hate that!"

"You have such a pretty face, though," he said, "I don't understand why you don't let people see it more often."

Nancy merely shrugged and they both shared a light laugh. At that moment, Donald's phone rang from in his pocket. He stepped out of the kitchen to answer, while Nancy went over to the fridge and looked inside for something to eat. She reached into the cardboard box of leftover Hawaiian pizza and bit into a cold slice when her father walked back in.

"Bad news keeps coming," he said, "Roman just called. There's a robbery and I need to go out there. I may be gone for a while. Will you be okay by yourself tonight?"

Nancy nodded her head. "Sure Dad."

"Do you remember the security code?"

"Yes dad," she answered, rolling her eyes, "like the back of my hand."

Her father was so paranoid over her safety, ever since his and Marge's divorce. As soon as he got custody of her he had a deadbolt and chain lock put in the front and back doors, plus a brand new security system. To make the house even more secure, he had iron bars installed on every window on both floors, making the house into a suburban fortress.

"Alright," Donald said, walking up to her and kissing her on the forehead. "I love you sweetheart."

"I love you too, Dad."

With that, Donald walked out the front door, locking it behind him. Nancy secured the deadbolt and chain from habit before she typed in the security code into the keypad by the door. The device sounded a beep with each digit, then a series of multiple beeps, signaling it was secure.

She then walked into the living room and parked on the couch, turning on the TV and flipping through channels while munching on her pizza.

Nancy spent the next half-hour or so watching TV, feeling bored out of her skull. She couldn't believe she was stuck by herself at her dad's for who knows how long. She then pulled her cell phone out of her pocket and dialed a number. Her foot tapped impatiently against the leg of the coffee table as it rang. Her thumb of her free hand picked at the remainder of the paint on her fingers. It was time for a fresh layer.

After about four rings, the line finally picked up.

"Hello?" that friendly voice answered.

"Hey Lance," Nancy sighed.

"Hey Nancy," Lance said, his voice going a pitch higher, "What's going on?"

"Nothing. Nothing at all. I'm staying at my dad's this weekend and he's gone, probably for, like, the next few hours. I'm just sitting here watching TV, bored as hell."

"Well that doesn't sound fun. But I thought you stayed weekends with your mom."

"I do," Nancy said bitterly, "but she can't take me this weekend. So, I was calling 'cause..." She took in a deep breath and sighed, "you want to come over and hang out or something? I could really use some company."

"Sure!" he answered, his voice sounding elated, "I'll just have to tell my parents, and then I'll come over."

"Alrighty. See you soon."

"See ya."

Nancy heard the click from the other line signaling the line ended and she hung up her own phone.

-

It was another half-hour after Nancy called that Lance finally arrived. When the doorbell rang, she looked in the peephole, glad to see Lance there. She undid the lock and opened the door wide, greeting him with a smile.

His mouth widened in a grin. "I brought snacks," he said, raising his hands level with his head, "And movies." In one hand was a six-pack of Pepsi cans, in the other, a bags of chips and popcorn and DVDs.

"Yay," Nancy said, holding her arm out towards the inside of her home, "Come on in."

Lance then entered and walked into the living room to set the snacks down on the coffee table. Nancy shut the door and locked it before joining Lance in the living room, who dumped the snacks on the coffee table. She plopped down on the couch as Lance started taking out the DVDs.

"So what'll it be?" Lance asked, "Romance? Horror? or comedy?"

"Comedy." Nancy answered. Lance popped in _'The Hangover'_ and sat beside Nancy on the couch, who popped open a can of Pepsi and began slurping it down.

"Your dad's real big on security, isn't he?" Lance remarked as he looked at the barred windows.

"Yeah," Nancy replied with a gulp of her soda, "I guess so. Just wants to keep me safe I suppose."

"I think 'caged up' would be a better term."

Nancy just shrugged and ripped open a bag of chips and popped one in her mouth. As she leaned back, Lance leaned back as well.

Halfway through the movie, his arm was fell over her shoulder. She raised an eyebrow, and slid out from under his arm to sit a cushion further away.

"What?" Lance asked innocently, "What's wrong?"

"You're getting a little bit too close there cowboy," Nancy answered.

"I was just putting my arm around you."

"Just keep your hands to yourself, okay?"

"Okay then," Lance grumbled, tossing a chip in his mouth.

Nancy, trying to lighten the suddenly tensed mood, held her thumb and forefinger out, each hand making an 'L' shape, and held the thumbs together, making a football goal in front of her open mouth. Lance held a chip between his fingers and flicked it, sending it flying towards Nancy's face. It missed and hit her hand.

"Pff, lame," Nancy scoffed, picking up the chip and holding it between her fingers.

Lance held a goal in front of his face. Nancy flicked it out from between her fingers and the chip flew directly into Lance's mouth.

"Score!" Nancy shouted triumphantly.

"Beginner's luck," Lance said while munching on his chip.

"We'll see," Nancy chuckled.

They shot chips back and forth to each other, half of them landing on the couch and the floor. After Nancy had won, sinking in twelve shots versus Lance's five, and after they cleaned up the mess they had left all over the sofa and floor, they laid out across the floor as they watched the next movie.

As Lance reached back to grab another soda, he noticed the tail of Nancy's shirt was raised a little, showing a bit of skin of the small of her back. On that slip of skin, he could see what looked like scars, four parallel thick white lines.

"What's this?" Lance asked lightly touching her skin.

Nancy shivered at the feel of Lance's touch. She reached behind her and pulled down her shirt back down.

"Nothing," Nancy answered, "Just some scars I got from a long time ago."

"Where did you get them?"

"I don't know," Nancy answered with a shrug, "I got them before I can remember. My dad said it was from a dog that attacked me when I was little, or something."

"Vicious," Lance hissed. Nancy grabbed herself a soda and took a brooding drink.

A full six-pack of soda and two bags of popcorn and three films later, they both finally saw how late it had gotten.

"Crap, it's almost eleven," Lance groaned, getting up to his feet, "My parents are gonna be ticked off."

"You're just lucky my dad hasn't shown up yet," Nancy remarked, "He does not like me being alone with the opposite sex, even if they are of the nerdy bookworm persuasion."

"I better hurry then," said Lance as he collected his things, then made his way for the door, "See you on Monday."

"See ya."

With their words of farewell exchanged, Lance was off to return home to face the inevitable chew-out from his parents.

Sure enough, barely ten minutes later, Donald came in from the garage, returning home at last.

His arrival was met with, "Welcome back," from his daughter as she lied on the living room floor.

"I know, I'm late," Donald huffed as he sat on the bottom step of the stairs and unlaced his boots, "The robbery ended up turning into a chase. Took us over two hours to finally catch up with them. Then sure enough, on the way back, I had to pull over a drunk driver, and he did not want to go quietly."

"TGIF, huh?" Nancy remarked before turning back to the TV.

"Heh, yeah," Donald chuckled mirthlessly, dropping his shoes by the front door. Then as he made his way up the stairs, he sighed, "I'm calling it a day. Try not to make too much noise if you're gonna be up late, 'kay?"

"You got it."

"Good night," he called out to Nancy from the second floor.

"Good night," Nancy hollered back.

Then came the sound of Donald's bedroom door closing as the man got ready for bed. Nancy, however, was not ready at all to retire to her bed yet. Like all normal kids, Nancy liked to take advantage of the weekends by staying up as late as possible, sometimes all night long, or even not at all if possible, though she would get in trouble for her dad for doing so.

But a late night wasn't in the cards for her. She indulged in another hour or so of Adult Swim cartoons before turning in.

Nancy shut off the TV and all the lights, and then walked upstairs into her room. There, she changed out into a pair of boxers and a tank top for bed.

As she shed her jeans, she felt the tiny ball inside the pocket, reminding her of the marble that she had almost forgotten. She took it out and dropped it into the glass jar inside which she kept all of the marbles she collected. Some people collect stamps, others coins, others baseball cards, but Nancy liked to collect marbles. She used to love playing with them as a child. She loved them so much that whenever she found one on the ground, she couldn't resist keeping it. Even though she had grown out of playing with them, she never fell out of the habit of taking ones she happened to discover; randomly coming across a marble on the ground is such a rare occasion that's too good to pass. Nancy had no idea for sure how many she had in her jar now. If she had to guess, she'd say there were several hundred.

After she finished changing, Nancy turned out the lights and crawled under the blankets, staring out the windows as she laid on her pillow.

The full moon's light was casting eerie-looking shadows of the branches from the tree in the backyard against the curtains. As her eyes slowly fell shut, the branches appeared to morph into clawed hands, scratching at the glass, trying to reach her as she drifted into sleep.

## 3.

There were only two shots' worth left in the bottle, maybe three. Her vision had long since gone out of whack, so it was extremely difficult for her to tell for sure, but it hardly mattered. She was good and trashed now.

Marge tilted her head back as she gulped down another swig. She reclined back against the headboard of her bed, nursing the bottle of bourbon from her left held while smoking a cigarette from her right. This was exactly what she was aiming for, to get as drunk as she possibly could. That way, she could sleep nice and deep for a good, long time. Her dreams of him were coming more frequently, regularly now, and she wanted this night to last. It had been such a long time since she had been with him. She missed him; even after all this time, she could never forget how good he made her feel.

Marge tossed the bottle back one final time, guzzling down the last of her alcohol, relishing in the cool burn radiating from within her gut. She reached over to set the now-empty bottle on her bedside table, too tired and too drunk to care that she missed and dropped it. Then she clumsily extended her other arm and put out her cigarette into the ashtray. She shut off the lamp, and laid back, waiting for sleep to come.

## 4.

She was in the boiler room again. Once again, she had no idea what she was running from. All she knew was that she had a desperate need to run as quickly as her feet could carry her. Nancy ran down the catwalks, ducking under steaming pipes, looking throughout the dark, dungeon-like boiler.

Then she heard a scream. It was a pained, frightened scream that echoed throughout the boiler. Following the scream was a man's laughter, dark and cruel.

Nancy walked down a set of spiral steps into a narrow hallway. At the end was a room illuminated by flickering yellow light. Once she entered, she saw in the center of the floor was a mattress, and the light was coming from a furnace in the far corner.

"Mom?" Nancy gasped.

Her mother was tied down to the mattress, both her wrists chained together above her head, her nightclothes shredded to ribbons. A large male figure was crouched over Marge. The fingers of his right hand were long and curved with razor edges, gleaming under the fire's light. The man's body blocked the furnace, causing him to appear as a dark silhouette, making him look even more like a monster.

With his razor-claws, the man slowly and systematically sliced apart Marge's clothing, cutting through her flesh in the process. The more she cried out, the more he laughed. Marge whimpered helplessly and turned her head away, looking straight in Nancy's direction.

"N-Nancy?" she whispered.

The man raised his head and looked towards Nancy. His face remained obscured, but Nancy could still see the demented grin spreading across his face.

_"Nancy,"_ he hissed, his voice hoarse and raspy, smoke seeping out from between his lips.

He then grabbed Marge's jaw in his claws and crushed his mouth against hers in a rough open-mouthed kiss. Marge's eyes widened and she started gagging. Smoke began to rise from between her and the man's lips as they pressed together. Dark red blotches blossomed through the whites of her eyes. Drops of blood beaded from the corners and ran down her cheeks like tears. More smoke began to rise from her nostrils. Her whole body began to quake as she suffocated, squirming to break free. All too soon, her flesh began to sizzle, melting as blisters bubbled forth and busted until finally, her entire body exploded into flame. Even as she burned, the man kept Marge locked in his kiss, not bothered by the fire while he was swallowed up in them as well. Actually, he didn't seem to be affected by it at all. The flames licked at his body, not catching onto his clothing, but only passing across him. But the same could not be said for Marge, for she had become a human bonfire, her body convulsing in agony as her body was being roasted, her flesh blackening and chipping away, layer by layer.

Nancy almost shot right out of her bed, gasping for breath. She looked out her window. The morning sunlight shone through it. She sighed and wiped the sweat off her forehead with the back of her hand, still shaking from the nightmare she just had. It was the worst one she ever experienced thus far.

With a groan, she crawled out of bed and headed straight downstairs. Just as expected, her father was gone, already out on duty. After going to the bathroom to use the toilet and un-tangle her hair, Nancy went straight for the kitchen, hoping that there would still be some coffee left. Just her luck, there wasn't.

She filled the pot with water and poured it into the maker before putting the grounds in the filter and sticking it in and flipping the red switch. While she waited for pot to fill, she put a couple toaster strudels into the toaster. Once there was enough coffee inside the pot, Nancy poured herself a piping cup with a couple scoops of sugar. After the strudels popped up, she drizzled on the icing and sat at the table to eat her breakfast, though she more or less picked at it than ate it.

She just couldn't get the memory of last night's dream out of her head. It all seemed so real; the boiler, her mother burning, the "boogeyman" with the claws. She could still feel the heat from the fire. Just thinking about him and the sound of his voice when he said her name sent a shiver through her back, causing her scars to tingle. The whole thing made her feel too ill to eat. She was only able to force herself to eat half of one strudel before she placed the plate inside the freezer to finish later.

"They're always better frozen, anyway," she muttered to herself.

Nancy returned to her seat, staring into space, resting her chin in her hand, her eyes drooping as she stared on. Her vision drifted onto the coffeepot, which was still lightly dripping. As she did, the dripping seemed to grow slower and slower. Her head snapped back up when a fly buzzed by right in front of her. Nancy shook her head to jar herself, her hand waving through the air to swat away the bug, and then gulped down her coffee, hoping the shot of caffeine would help her fully wake.

When she brought the cup back down, her gaze fell to the bracelet around the wrist of her right arm. It was one made of brown leather braided into a band. Two years ago, her mother gave it to her for her birthday to match one Marge herself wore. The sentiment was that both of them wearing it would "keep them close". This was convenient, since they spent so much time apart.

Worn on that same arm was her wristwatch. According to its face, it was near a quarter until eleven. Her mother was certainly awake by now. Nancy crossed the room to reach the phone and dialed in her mother's number. She knew that it was dumb, but after the dream she had, she just needed to make sure that her mom was alright. She waited and waited as the line rang and ran and rang, but the only answer came from Marge's voicemail. Nancy didn't leave a message, instead hanging up and redialing. Still nothing.

This did not repeal any of Nancy's worries. Her next act was automatic, her instincts taking control. Nancy went straight from the kitchen to the garage and wheeled out her bicycle.

Her mother's apartment was on the opposite side of town, so it was a long trip, but one that she knew she needed to make.

-

In about thirty minutes, she arrived at Marge's apartment complex, only there was something seriously wrong with this picture. Parked by the curb outside was ambulance, a trio of squad cars, and a fire truck. Police officers were busy keeping the mob of curious bystanders clear of the entrance. One of the windows on the third floor was open and a cloud of smoke was pouring out.

Nancy threw her bicycle aside, letting it topple and fall to the pavement, and dashed towards the building. She shoved and cut through the thick crowd of people. When she tried to get inside the building, one of the cops pushed her back. She persisted to get past him, but he kept a hold of her shoulders, keeping her pushed back.

"Sorry miss," he told her, "You can't go in."

"What happened?" she asked him, trying to look past him to get a peak at what could have been the source of all this commotion.

"A woman died here last night," he answered her, "Now if you would step back please."

' _No, please, don't let it be so,'_ Nancy's mind pleaded.

She tried even harder to get past the officer, begging him, "Please, just let me in. My mother is in there, please!"

But no matter how much she persisted, he still refused to let her pass, telling her again and again, "You cannot go in. Please, stay back."

He started pushing her back into the crowd, when a voice called out to her, "Nancy?"

The man who called out to her came out from inside the building. Her father. He moved aside the officer who was pushing Nancy back.

"Nancy, what are you doing here?" Donald asked his daughter.

"I wanted to see Mom," she answered, "What happened here Dad?"

Donald's jaw tightened, as if containing himself. His voice came out strained as he said, "You should go home princess. We need to talk, but not here, not now."

"Why Dad? What's going on?"

"I said, not now. Later."

As Donald spoke to his daughter, behind him, the paramedics were carrying a gurney out from inside the building. On the bed was what appeared to be a human body, the tenant who had died, covered by a white sheet so that nobody could see who it was. As they made their way through the doors, the paramedic carrying the head hit his foot against the frame, causing his grip on the gurney to loosen. It fell for a brief second, but he caught it again before the corpse could fall to the ground for all to see.

However, the dead person's arm fell out from under the sheet, dangling over the edge of the cot. But something about that person's arm caused Nancy's breath to catch in her throat. The limb was merely blackened bone, all flesh and muscle burned away. But that wasn't all that shocked her. Tied around the wrist were the remains of a braided leather bracelet.

Nancy shoved her father away and ran through the crowd. When the officers tried to apprehend her, she elbowed them, knocking them down on their butts, and ran up to the cot, her father coming behind her to bring her away, but he wasn't fast enough. Nancy ran up to the gurney and ripped the sheet off, and she screamed.

## 5.

Even though Nancy had seen it with her own eyes, she still couldn't believe it. She hoped and prayed that it wasn't true, that it was just another nightmare like last night. But this wasn't so. This was no dream. Her mother was dead.

She sat Indian-style in the center of her bed, changed out into a long sleeved white shirt with her thumbs hooked through the holes she slit into the ends of the sleeves and grey sweats, staring vacantly with wet eyes at the dozen crumpled used tissues scattered in front of her all over the bed.

After Nancy had ripped the sheet off of the gurney, revealing to the world her mother's charred skeleton of a corpse, her dad pulled her away, holding her close against his chest and covering her eyes. He dragged her out to his car and drove her straight home.

It happened in her sleep, according to Donald. She was passed out drunk, and had apparently fallen asleep with a lit cigarette in her hand and her clothes caught fire. She was too heavily intoxicated to wake up, and she burned to death. A pedestrian was walking by across the street early in the morning and saw the smoke coming out through her open window and called 911. But by the time the fire department had gotten there, her bed had become an inferno.

Much like in Nancy's dream. It was probably just a coincidence, but it was a rather peculiar one. That image was glued into her brain. Her mother, being held captive in that dark boiler, and that man, or boogeyman for lack of a better term, on top of her, touching her in the most disgusting ways, then watching her being roasted alive. It was all positively mortifying. She just couldn't put it out of her mind.

And so, Nancy had boarded herself up in her room for the rest of the day, crying her eyes out. She didn't come out for her dad, to eat, or anything except for the bathroom.

Nancy wiped the last few tears from her eyes and blew her nose one last time, then picked up the rest of the tissue wads off her bed. She balled them all up together and dumped the heap of tissues into the trash bin, then stepped out of her bedroom into the bathroom across the hall. When she entered, she saw herself in the medicine cabinet mirror. Her eyes were bloodshot and puffy and her nose was as red and puffy as her eyes were, all tell-tale signs of someone who's been spending their time crying their eyes out.

Nancy suddenly winced and pressed her fingers against her forehead. A sudden sharp ache rang through her cranium. She opened the medicine cabinet and fished out a bottle of Advil, unscrewed the cap, and popped two of the little blue pills into her mouth. She washed the pills down with water straight from the tap, then exited back out into the hallway.

She was just at her door, but stopped when she noticed a light coming from downstairs. She leaned forward over the handrail of the stairs in an effort to get a look at where the light was coming from. It was coming from the kitchen. From where she was standing, she could see her father sitting at the table, his back to her, dressed in his striped blue bathrobe. It looked like he had trouble sleeping himself.

Nancy walked down the stairs and through the living room into the kitchen, coming up to her dad from behind. He didn't finally take notice of her presence until she gently placed her hand on his shoulder. His head lazily turned up to face her. His eyes were as red and puffy as hers. "Oh, hey princess," he said, his voice groggy, "What are you doing up?"

"Couldn't sleep," Nancy replied. She then noticed the half-empty glass in her father's hand and the frosty bottle sitting in front of him.

"Me either," Donald grumbled, his eyes looking morosely at the remainder of the clear liquid in his glass. The rim of the glass came to his lips and the remaining alcohol was gulped down in a single deep swig.

"I thought you quit," said Nancy, almost in a whisper.

"I did," Donald sniffed, his head hung down to hide the wetness in his eyes. His thumb stroked along the rim of his empty glass. He reached for the bottle to give himself a refill, but Nancy took the bottle out of his hand before he could.

"I think you've had enough," she said to him as she screwed the cap back on.

Donald sighed and pressed his fingers into his eyeballs. He then got to his feet and walked over to the sink to rinse out his glass. Once it was rinsed enough, he set the wet glass in the dish rack beside the sink. The water droplets ran down its smooth surface and dripped off of the rim.

Nancy looked at her dad as he stood with his hands propped against the edge of the sink. She could see the muscles in his shoulders and arms tense as he fought back a sob. She wanted to say something, to give some words of comfort, but she didn't know what to say. She had never seen her father like this before, hurting and vulnerable. She was so used to seeing her father being the strong protector that he was.

So instead she walked up to him and draped her arm around his shoulder, pulling him into a one-armed hug. Finally, she felt his body relax under her arm as he released the breath that he had been holding in. His hand raised to wipe away the tear that rolled freely down his cheek with his knuckle, then patted his daughter's hand that rested on his shoulder.

"I'll be fine," he sighed, squeezing Nancy's hand, "Everything'll be fine."

Whether he was trying to himself or his daughter, Nancy wasn't sure, but she nodded anyway, hoping that her father was right.

"Well," he sighed, "it's late. I think I'm gonna go back to bed now." Donald removed Nancy's hand from his shoulder and started to walk through the living room towards the stairs. Nancy, however, stayed where she was, standing in the kitchen with her arms crossed over her chest.

"Aren't you going to bed?" her dad asked from the foot of the stairs.

Nancy stepped into the doorframe and called back, "Maybe in a little while. I'm just gonna fix myself a little snack to eat, then I'll be right up."

"Alright," she heard her dad say. He wished her good night, then walked up the stairs into his bedroom.

Once she heard her father's bedroom door click shut, she released her breath and walked over to the refrigerator, taking out the bag of white bread, followed by the jars of Peter Pan peanut butter and Smucker's grape jelly. She smeared the peanut butter on one bread slice, jelly on the other, then put the two together.

Nancy put the jars back in their spots on the inside of the refrigerator door, and then took a bite out of her PB&J sandwich. Her eyes rolled down to the bottle that was left on the table. Her palm rested on the cap as she looked down at the condensation-soaked label in disdain.

Back in the day, both of Nancy's parents were regular party animals. They had in fact first met at a bar during a party celebrating Donald's graduation from the police academy. From then on, they had been inseparable. They would go out on the town and get hammered on a regular basis. Of course, when Nancy came around, they had to slow down. But after Donald and Marge divorced when Nancy was around five, Nancy's father never drank again. At least, not until tonight.

Nancy heaved a sigh, feeling a sense of disappointment. Her fingertips glided down wet glass surface of the bottle, wiping away the layer of condensation. Nancy released another sigh and walked into the living room, leaving the bottle where it was.

Once in the living room, she sat back comfortably onto the middle cushion of the couch in front of the TV, then reached for the remote and started flipping through channels. At this late hour, the only thing on was news, sports, and Adult Swim. It was either that or "Halloween". She wasn't exactly a big fan of horror, so she settled on Adult Swim. Nancy dropped the remote onto the table and sat back comfortably, munching down on her PB&J and watching 'Family Guy'.

Her eyelids drooped shut a couple of times, but she snapped her head back up at attention. She was so tired, but she was just not feeling up to dealing with any nightmares at the moment. The day has been hard enough already.

Nancy shook her head, trying to shake off her sleepiness, and sat up, straight and erect, not wanting to get too cozy and accidentally doze off. She brought her sandwich up to her mouth to take another bite, but stopped when she noticed the bread wriggle in her hands. The slices twitched, like there was something living caught in between them trying to escape. Then the edges of the bread around Nancy's bite marks split open and suddenly, out from between the separated globs of jelly and peanut butter rose... a fly, a little black fly about the size of Nancy's pinky nail.

The fly's six black legs crawled over the edges of the bite marks and onto the roof of the white bread. Nancy only stared at the little fly as it shook its head and rubbed its legs together, cleaning off the bits of peanut butter and jelly stuck to its body. She almost couldn't believe it; she had actually caught a fly in her PB&J sandwich.

The fly then crawled its way onto Nancy index finger. Nancy lifted her hand off the sandwich and shook her hand back and forth loosely, shaking the fly off of her hand. It buzzed around in circles under the ceiling before landing on the television screen.

Nancy looked down at her sandwich, thinking how there was a fly in her PB&J. Needless to say, it kind of killed her appetite.

"Ugh, gross," Nancy groaned, sickened. She then stood up from the couch and went into the kitchen, carrying her sandwich between her thumb and forefinger, and dropped the insect-tainted jelly sandwich in the trash can.

That fly had apparently followed her, as it was now buzzing in rapid circles just inches in front of her face. It flew right at her, hitting her nose and forehead again and again. She tried to swat at it, but it dodged her hand at every attempt and continued to attack her. She clapped her hands together, hoping to squish the annoying insect, but it still continued to evade her.

"Shoo, damn it!" Nancy hissed at the irritating insect. She then made her way towards the kitchen door that led out into the backyard. While her right hand was still trying to swat the fly away, her other hand reached back to undo the chain and deadbolt on the door. She used this same hand to turn the knob and pull the door open, and used her swatting hand to shoo the fly out. Nancy let out a sigh of relief as she watched the fly buzz into the sky, out of sight and out of mind.

Outside it was dead silent. The nighttime darkness made everything appear grey and lifeless. As she looked about, the rosebush that was in the farthest corner of the white picket fence lining the perimeter of the yard shook, its leaves and rosebuds rustling against each other. It was probably just a stray cat or dog or something, yet something in her was telling her to move forward.

And so she did. Step by step she made her way across the yard, the cold, stiff grass blades crunching under the soles of her bare feet. As she got closer, the bush rustled more and more anxiously, like it wanted her to come closer. Once she was just inches away from it, she saw the soil underneath was shifting. It was rising up, like something was trying to push its way up through the earth from beneath the surface.

Nancy got down to her knees in the grass, then reached forward and used her fingers to rake away the soil that was bubbling up. She then heard the faint noise of a cry of a child. She looked around, seeing no one else around. Then she realized that the sound was coming from the ground. Through some sudden earnestness that came over her almost out of nowhere, she rolled her sleeves up past her elbows and began sinking her hands into the dirt and was frantically shoveling it out, like a dog that was trying to unearth some bone it had buried long ago. Whatever was under there, she knew had to dig it out.

Deeper and deeper into the ground she went, shoveling away fistful after fistful of soil. She was getting closer. In the middle of her digging, when she had dug a hole about two feet deep, something shoved its way through the surface and grabbed Nancy by her wrist on her right arm: a hand, about the size of a five-year-old, its pale-white skin caked with dirt. The little grey fingernails were torn and dirty, like it had been trying to dig its way out. Its weeping grew, loud and wheezy and desperate, so loud it nearly ruptured Nancy's eardrums and hurt her head to hear.

With her free hand, Nancy worked at prying off the fingers clasped around her wrists. After a few straining tugs, she succeeded, and was able to pull her arm free from the hand's bruising grip. Nancy got to her feet and turned on her heels to sprint towards the open door that led into the sanctuary of her home, but when her right foot pushed against the ground to propel herself forward, it sank into the ground up to her ankle. She put her left foot forward to push herself up as she pulled her foot back out. When she did this, her left foot plunged into the earth up past her ankle, nearly halfway up her calf. She attempted her previous move again, using her right foot, but that foot too became submerged almost up to her calf. She pulled and pulled on her legs, trying to break free, but her feet were sinking deeper and deeper into the ground, as if the ground were quicksand. In a matter of seconds, her legs were submerged up to her calves. Nancy tried grabbing fistfuls of grass to help pull herself out, but the blades just slipped between her fingers like wax and she was sucked deeper and deeper down.

It wasn't long until her legs, hips, and waist had sunk into the earth. She continued to try and grab the grass, to dig her fingers into the soil to try and pull herself out, but to no avail.

Soon, the ground had come up to her chest, creating a nearly unbearable pressure around her ribcage. She opened her mouth to scream for help, but the pressure of the earth crushing her ribs cut off her breath, leaving her unable to breathe so that all that came out was a pathetic, weak hiss of air. She tried pushing against the ground to pull herself up and out and free herself, but that only caused her arms to sink below the surface and be sucked under along with the rest of her body.

By now she was buried up to her clavicles. Her body below was encased in soil, leaving her completely immobile. Tears began to well up in Nancy's eyes, both out of frustration and panic.

The door to safety was only just a couple yards ahead of her. Through her clouded, teary vision she could see a small figure standing just inside the doorway. The kitchen light made their body appear as nothing more than a dark silhouette, but Nancy could still tell by their short stature that whoever that was, they were a young child, the size of a four or five-year-old. Nancy uttered weak, strangled pleas for help, praying that whoever that was who was standing there would come to her rescue. Her time was running out. She was already sunken up to her neck and was almost up to her jaw. She only had a few seconds before the ground swallowed her whole.

_'Oh god, please, HELP ME!'_ she tried to scream at that person just standing there watching her sinking into the earth, but when she opened her mouth, it became filled with dirt. Her mouth, nose, and ears had sunk into the ground, leaving her unable to even breathe now. Only the top of her head and her eyes remained above the surface. It wouldn't be long until those were gone too, and she would be sucked under the ground, buried alive.

While her eyes still remained above the surface, she was able to see the figure finally step through the door, down the steps, and onto the grass, allowing Nancy to see them in perfect clarity. It was a little girl, an adorable five-year-old dressed in a grungy pair of white flannel pajamas that hung loose over her frail body, making her appear even tinier than she already was. The girl's stringy dark clung to her tear-soaked cheeks. Dangling from her hand was a doll, held by its ankle, its plastic flesh charred to a charcoal black and crackled in a spider web-like pattern, looking as if it was just rescued from an unrelenting fire. The long sleeves of her pajamas were rolled up, revealing bracelets of purple bruises around both of her wrists. Nancy then noticed the little girl's hands were caked with dirt, her fingernails torn, and the skin of her fingers bloody and raw, as if she had been spending a whole day feverishly digging with her bare hands. Her hands reminded Nancy of the hand that had just a few moments ago reached up from under the ground to grab her.

The little girl then walked across the yard, her feet remaining above the ground, stopping just a foot short of Nancy's head. _'Please, for God's sakes,'_ she wanted to scream, _'please help me, I can't breathe, please!'_ But the little girl just stood over her, looking down at Nancy with wet, sorrowful eyes.

Then suddenly, wrapping around the small girl's right shoulder, came a hand with long, curved, shining claws on its four fingers. From behind her raised the large figure of a man, his height colossal and imposing, especially from Nancy's point of view. On his head was a hat, its brim casting a shadow that covered his face like a mask. Even though she couldn't make out the details of his face, she could still see his mouth curling up into a grin. His claws tightened their grip on the girl's shoulder, and more tears rolled down her cheeks, though her face remained stoic. Her round blue eyes were the last thing Nancy saw before the earth finally gulped her down.

With heaving, gasping breaths, Nancy shot straight up from the couch, her feet kicking madly. Her body rolled and toppled over the cushion, landing on a solid surface. Under the skin of her cheek, she could feel the scratchy texture of carpet. Her eyelids drew open to the sight of her living room floor. Her gaze lowered, relieved to see her body free again. Nancy rolled over onto her back and sat upright. She was back in her own living room. The TV remained on with the same episode of Family Guy still playing on the screen. Her half-eaten PB&J sandwich was still on the coffee table just as she left it when she had put it down earlier. It was like none of the events that just occurred had ever really happened.

Nancy wiped the beads of sweat from her forehead and breathed a relaxed sigh. It was all just a dream. Nancy's ear turned towards the stairs to listen out for any noises coming from her father's bedroom showing that her fall off the sofa had woken him. His room remained silent; he was still sleeping soundly.

Nancy's lips smacked together dryly. The bitter, gristly taste of dirt still remained on her tongue. She reached over and plucked her sandwich off the table surface and brought it to her mouth, but her hand froze before it could get between her teeth. Even though she knew the fly in her sandwich was just part of her dream, the thought of that buzzing little insect in her food kind of killed her appetite.

So, Nancy rose to her feet and walked into the kitchen to toss out her sandwich, and get something to get this taste out of her mouth. Once she had dumped the PB&J into the trash can, she opened the fridge to find herself something to drink. Inside the refrigerator door was a tall can of Monster. She took it out, popped open the tab, and took a good, long sip. She let the energizing liquid slosh around the inside of her mouth, over her tongue, between her teeth, then gulped it all down at once, flushing that nasty taste along with it.

Monster in hand, Nancy walked back into the living room to sit back on the sofa, this time sitting on the edge, leaned forward with her elbows propped up against her knees. Nancy continued sitting in this manner, leaned forward and sipping her energy drink, remaining focused on the TV. After what had just happened, Nancy wasn't exactly ready to go back to sleep anytime soon.

## 6.

Nancy had added the sixth and last pancake to the stack when her father walked into the kitchen, fully dressed in his uniform. His eyes were half-lidded from sleepiness and bloodshot, the whites of his eyeballs containing a deep pinkish hue.

"Morning," she said to her dad as she started scrubbing out the pan under the sink.

"Morning," her dad echoed, his drowsy eyes gazing down at her curiously. "It's seven in the morning. What are you doing up so early?"

Nancy shrugged and set the cleaned pan aside in the dish rack to dry, then moved the tower of pancakes onto the dining table, which had the plates and utensils already arranged.

"I made breakfast," she answered, setting out the bottle of maple syrup.

Nancy's father poured himself a glass of orange juice and pulled out a chair and sat down. He stuck the prongs of his fork through the top two pancakes on the stack and dropped them on his plate. He then took the bottle and drowned his plate in syrup and started cutting up his pancakes and shoveled them into his mouth. Nancy followed suit and slapped herself a cake onto her own plate and began feeding herself syrup-soaked bites.

"Mmph, these are really good Nancy," Donald mumbled between chews before he swallowed. "Thank you."

Nancy couldn't help but cracking a smile at her dad's complimenting of her cooking.

"What time did you get up?" Donald asked his daughter.

Nancy just shrugged. "Pretty early," she answered simply.

Her voice seemed to give away her facade to her dad, because his fork with a syrupy-soaked morsel impaled onto it froze, hovering just in front of his mouth.

He then asked her, "You didn't get any sleep at all, did you."

Nancy couldn't answer that to her dad. She just couldn't bring herself to explain to him the dread of sleep she had felt after her nightmare about sinking into the ground in their backyard like she was caught in quicksand, incapable of pulling herself free. She had just felt so weak and helpless, a feeling that she did not like, not at all. Not to mention that little girl with the burned doll and sad blue eyes. Saying it all aloud would make her sound nuts, and that was not the way she wanted her own father to think of her.

So, Nancy just stared down at her plate and meekly shook her head 'no'. She heard her dad sigh her name heavily in the way many parents do when they are disappointed by their child's actions.

"I'm sorry, I just..." Nancy tried to explain, pressing her fork down on her pancake so the syrup it absorbed was secreted out, "I just couldn't go to sleep."

Her dad sighed again, looking somberly down at his plate as he shoveled down the rest of his breakfast, washing his pancakes down with the rest of his juice. "I know how ya feel," he said, "I didn't sleep to soundly either. Nightmares."

Hearing her dad use that word, "nightmares", sent an icy chill down Nancy's spine. He had nightmares too?

"Well, what did you dream about?" Nancy asked, trying not to let her fright show through her voice.

"Well, it was about your mother," he told her, running his thumb along the rim of his glass, "It was about the last time I spoke to. I kept yelling at her how selfish she was and how I wished she would go and die, then she just up and vanished right before my eyes. I kept looking all over for her, calling out for her, but I couldn't find her anywhere. She was gone before I ever got the chance to tell her I was sorry."

The hand gripping his glass began shaking, despite how firm he tried to keep it. It was looking like the dam was about to break. Nancy extended her hand to touch her dad's, but he pulled back and collected his dishes and rinsed them off in the sink before she could make contact.

"I gotta go to work now," he sighed, raising his fist to inconspicuously wipe his eyes, then reaching out to grab his gun belt hanging on the hook by the door and fastened the strap around his waist. Nancy felt a hindrance of a smile as he did this; she suddenly remembered how, as a child, she had thought of her father as like a "superhero", because of how he took down bad guys and even had a "cool utility belt".

Donald took a thermos from one of the cupboards and emptied the pot of coffee inside. "You think you'll be okay holding down the fort kiddo?" he asked Nancy as he screwed the thermos back shut. Nancy nodded as she bit off another forkful of pancake.

"You could always come down to the station with me, ya know," her dad suggested with a humored smirk.

But Nancy just laughed half-heartedly and rolled her eyes with a, "Thanks dad, but I think I'd rather spend a whole day doing housework."

When she was little and would have to stay with her dad, she would often go with him to spend the day at the station. Back in those days, being a little kid, she had always found ways of amusing herself, but after a while she got rather bored with making donut castles and playing cards with herself. It was in fact on one of those days that she learned how to play Solitaire, which she often still played whenever she otherwise had nothing better to occupy her time with.

Her dad then bid his farewell by telling her, "And try and get some chores done today, would ya?" before giving her a quick kiss on the head. He then walked out the front door to his squad car, leaving Nancy in the house to herself.

By the time she heard her dad's car roaring away down the street, Nancy finished off her plate, then proceeded to lock the house back up the way she always had to if ever she were left alone in the house.

Nancy then spent the next few minutes scrubbing, rinsing, and drying her and her father's dishes. After she had put the now clean plates and silverware onto the drying rack, Nancy paused to rub her right wrist. Her arm was still sore after last night. It had been ever since she had woken up from that nightmare and had practically flown off the couch like a lunatic. The dull pain in her arm made her think of her dream, of the hand that sprang out from the ground and grabbed her, but she knew when she had hit the floor she landed on her arm, so she thought nothing more of it.

She then took a mug out from the cupboard and decided to give herself a dose of caffeine. When she reached for the coffee pot, though, it was empty.

Nancy scoffed to herself, "Huh, thanks dad," and went to work on making a fresh pot. As soon as the pot was full, Nancy poured herself a cupful, promptly taking a sip, drinking it straight black. She didn't care if it tasted good or not; all she wanted was the caffeine. She winced when the piping hot liquid singed her tongue, but she recovered quickly and blew onto her coffee to help cool it down before she took another, more careful, sip.

Through the window came the bright shine of the arriving morning. Nancy gazed out through the Venetian blinds at the sky, now devoid of the nighttime's stars. As she was looking out, her eyes drifted down to the row of rosebushes that ran along the white fence until coming to an end against the white tool shed standing in the corner. Her arm began to throb at the memory of the little hand's vice-like grip on her wrist. Nancy took a few more deep sips of her coffee at the thought of it.

Leaving her mug by the sink, Nancy went upstairs to the bathroom and made her way over to the toilet. Once her bladder was emptied and flushed, she walked back over to the sink. She scrubbed her hands clean with the cold spray, then splashed some on her face, the sharp, icy chill of the water helping to snap her out of any sleepiness she had left. She wiped her face off with her wet hands, then reached for a towel to dry herself on.

As she did, she noticed something peculiar about her arm. Around the wrist of her right arm were what looked to be a bracelet of bruises forming under her skin. She gently tapped them with her fingers, hissing at their sensitivity. Once again, she was reminded of her nightmare. She had to admit, it was rather coincidental that her arm should be bruised in the exact same place which she had been grabbed in her dream. But coincidence was all she allowed herself to believe it to be.

She winced again as she felt a sudden pain surge through her cranium. Nancy pushed it from her thoughts and moved on to brushing her teeth, afterwards taking a good, long shower, hoping it would pass on its own. But it didn't. After she was finished showering, she got out the bottle of Advil from the medicine cabinet and swallowed a couple of the little blue pills, chasing them down with water drunken from the tap, waiting for them to dissolve in her stomach and work their magic on her head.

After drying and dressing herself, Nancy did what her father suggested she do: chores. First she briskly fixed and straightened her bed sheets, then moved on to laundry. Nancy gathered up all of her unclean clothes into a basket, then carried them downstairs into the laundry room connected to the garage and dumped them into the washing machine. In the time she waited for her clothes to get done getting tossed around in the washer, she picked up her somewhat messy room and vacuumed the carpeted floor. Then after she dumped her damp clothes into the dryer, she went upstairs to do what she really wanted: download music.

The room that was next door to her dad's was made into an office with a computer to be used by both her and her father for work that either of them had to do. Plugging her MP3 into the USB outlet, Nancy pulled up her iTunes and began searching for new albums for her to listen to.

She loved music, its power to help take her mind off of things she would otherwise rather not dwell on and helped her days pass by so much more smoothly. She tried to learn how to play herself, but she didn't have the patience, and being tone deaf prevented her from ever singing, but she didn't mind; listening did it enough for her.

After getting some more works by Nirvana and Joan Jett, Nancy went back down into the laundry room to fetch her freshly cleaned clothes. She then brought them back up to her room and went to putting them all up into her closet, listening to her newly acquired music and singing along with the lyrics while she did so. After she was done, she vacuumed up her floor.

All of this took up all her morning hours. By the time she was done, it was shortly past noon. She was getting a little hungry, so she figured it was time to fix some lunch.

In the refrigerator, there was still several slices left of that pizza from a couple nights before. She stacked them onto a plate and nuked them in the microwave until they were good and hot. She took her plate into the living room and ate while watching TV. On one channel was the Maury show. It was a heated confrontation about a woman accusing her ex-husband of molesting their daughter. The movie "Gladiator" was playing on another. Then there was "Texas Chainsaw Massacre", a documentary about Mesopotamia, CNN, and kids' shows. She settled on the latter.

When her dad came home a few hours later, Nancy was on the couch still, now painting a fresh coat of neon green onto her fingernails.

"Hi, Dad," she said while she blew her nails dry as Donald came into the living room.

"Hey, princess," said Donald, "How have you been?"

"Fine," she answered plainly with a shrug, continuing her nail-blowing.

"Have you eaten yet?" he then inquired.

"I had some Ramen noodles," she answered.

"Good, 'cause Roman invited me and you for dinner at his house," Donald informed her.

"Awesome," said Nancy as she got up to her feet.

Donald changed out of his uniform while Nancy put on her shoes and a jacket, and they were off. After a short drive, they were parked by the curb in front of the home of Roman Campbell, Donald's partner on the police force.

When they knocked, Roman's wife, Candice, answered.

"Hi, you guys," she greeted them, then standing aside, "Come on in."

In went Donald with Nancy in tow. Candice closed the door, and then they all went into the dining room.

"Go ahead and grab a seat," Candice told them, pointing to the rectangular table.

The meal was already prepared and laid out. There was a plate with a pile of pork loins stacked on it, along with servings of beans, potato salad, and a bowl of salad. Nancy was glad to see that Candice remembered that Nancy was a vegetarian.

Then in came Roman from a room in the main hallway.

"Hey, you guys made it," he said upon seeing Donald and Nancy present, "Now we can eat."

Roman immediately took his seat at the table. Candice, Donald, and Nancy followed suit, ending with Roman and Candice on one side of the table sitting side by side and Donald and Nancy on the opposite.

"Were you able to get Timothy to go to sleep?" asked Candice as she scooped herself a helping of potato salad, then passed it along to her husband.

"Yeah," Roman sighed, taking the bowl and giving himself a helping from it, "Finally. It took me forever to find his pacifier, but I did. Kid went out like a light."

Everyone at the table soon filled their plates. They ate in silence for the first couple minutes, until Roman broke the quiet.

"What time did you say the funeral was again?" he asked.

After swallowing his bite of pork, washing it down with a gulp of water, Donald answered, "At eleven, tomorrow morning."

Nancy was a little taken back by this information. Marge had only died just yesterday and she was already getting buried in no time flat.

"Is it going to be a, you know, casket funeral?" then asked Candice.

"Yes," answered Donald, "It wouldn't feel right to... to cremate her."

"I get it," nodded Roman. Then he asked to both Donald and Nancy, "How have you guys been holding up?"

"Doing well," answered Donald, "Considering."

He then turned to Nancy, waiting for her to answer as well.

What she wanted to say was, _'I just saw my mother's roasted fucking corpse getting cartedaway the other day, and tomorrow I get to watch her get dumped into the dirt. How the hell do you_ think _I'm doing?!'_

But she bit her tongue and gave the proper response, "I'm fine," and continued eating mute.

Then came a moment of awkward silence, one interrupted by Candice telling Roman and Donald about an apparently amusing something that had happened with her and Roman's sixteen-month-old son, Timothy, but Nancy wasn't paying attention to a single word. She tuned out everything else around her and focused solely on finishing her meal. It was perfectly delicious, but each morsel was like swallowing wet cement which hardened inside the pit of her stomach.

After the dinner was over, Donald decided that it was time for him and Nancy to return home. Goodbyes were exchanged, and even a store-bought chocolate pie was given to Donald and Nancy, before they went on their way.

"What happened to you arm?" Donald asked Nancy as he was staring up the car. She had pulled up her sleeve to scratch an itch on her elbow, causing the bruise on her arm to be revealed.

"Oh, I dozed off on the couch and rolled off," answered Nancy as she poked at the spotting on her skin, "I fell and hit my arm."

Donald merely responded with, "Try and be more careful, 'kay?" before they drove home.

## 7.

The English teacher, Mr. Bronson, was boring as a stick, and being as exhausted as Nancy already was didn't help her to pay any attention at all. Nancy sat in her desk in the far back row of the classroom, her elbow propping her arm up so she could rest her heavy head against her fist.

She shouldn't have even been in school; she was in no condition. But she would much rather have been in class than surrounded by mournful relatives in black, having to watch her mother being put into the ground six feet below, buried out of sight forever.

It looked like all the other teens in the room were having about as much luck as she did in keeping awake through Bronson's oh-so boring lecture. Everyone either had their chin held up in their propped up arms or had their heads resting on their desk, their eyes half-lidded and drowsy. Despite her best efforts, Nancy felt her eyes beginning to droop, and when her eyes opened once again, she was stunned by the sudden change in scenery.

The gorgeous light from the morning that had lit up the whole room had darkened to a bleak, dim grey. Not only that, but every single other person and desk had vanished, leaving the room barren and vacant, leaving only Nancy sitting inside it.

Nancy got up from her seat, noticing then how the linoleum had been stripped bare, now a floor of cold, hard sand.

"Nancy."

There was a voice, wispy and soft, like a breeze, and it was coming from just outside the classroom, calling for her. Nancy stepped out into the hallway, seeing nothing but the gleaming, waxed linoleum and black metal doors of the lockers that lined the walls on either side of the hall. The fluorescent lights above were flickering, giving the already dim corridor an even more macabre chill.

"Nancy."

There was that voice again, faintly calling out to her from beyond.

"H-hello?" Nancy called back, not getting any answer.

So, Nancy bravely ventured forward, searching through the dark halls for the source of the voice. In her search, she poked her head into all the other classrooms in the building, finding them all as stripped and vacant as the one she had come from.

"Nancy!"

This time it came loud and sharp, sounding almost like a hiss, and it was coming from right behind her.

Nancy spun around on her heels one-eighty to face down a pitch black hallway.

"Who's there?" she called out to the person standing there, but got no answer.

The fluorescent ceiling bulbs in the ceiling of the hall flickered to life, revealing it to be something truly bizarre. It was a white sheet, hovering in midair four feet above the ground. The sheet was draped over what was clearly a human body. It was like witnessing a magician's act, only there weren't any illusionists around, at least none that she could see.

Nancy took couple steps forward to get a closer look. When she did, the sheet suddenly slid off of the body and fell to the floor.

"Mom?" Nancy gasped.

As impossible as it might have been, it was indeed Marge. What was left of her, at least. She was in the same condition in which Nancy had seen her in. Her flesh was charred and black and was mostly burned off, leaving only her crispy skeletal remains. Smoke was even still rising off of her.

As Nancy gawked at her mother's corpse, Marge's head fell to the side as if looking at her, even though her eyes were long gone, leaving only empty black sockets. Her jaw creaked open, as if to speak, but no words came from her mouth. Marge's arm then fell, dangling limply. Then, and her body glided away, floating off into an open doorway and taking her out of sight.

"Mom!" Nancy hollered out to her, running towards the doorway where she saw her mother being dragged away into. She stood in the door's frame, peering inside, seeing nothing but pitch darkness. She tried squinting her eyes to help focus her vision, like if she focused hard enough her eyes could somehow pierce through the dark, but she still couldn't make out a thing. Nothing but the infinite blackness.

Just as Nancy took a step back away from the door, something sprang forth from inside the dark. An arm, a left arm apparently, grabbed hold Nancy's left wrist, not letting her go anywhere. The rest of the owner of the arm's body still remained concealed in the shadows, but Nancy could see the hand holding onto her perfectly under the light. The hand was burned, bad, its flesh a mere layer of melted tissue over bones, the rest of it covered by the sleeve of a sweater. The knitted wool fabric was badly frayed and singed, but the stripes of red and green were still visible.

Nancy tried pulling free, but the arm would not let up its bone-crushing grip. The hand was hot, scorching hot, so much that it felt it was burning her own skin off.

A deep, raspy voice hissed, _"Got you,"_ and laughed monstrously as Nancy was sucked head-first into the darkness.

Just as soon as Nancy had gotten enveloped in the eternally vacant blackness, Nancy realized that her eyelids were actually closed. When she opened them, she was welcomed to the comforting sight of her bedroom, flooded with white morning sunlight pouring through the white curtains draped over her windows.

Standing in the frame of her bedroom door was Nancy's dad. His face was clean-shaven and he was already dressed in a crisp white dress shirt tucked into a pair of black slacks.

"Hey, come on Nancy, it's time to get up," he was saying as he was fixing his tie.

She looked over at her alarm clock on her bedside table, seeing that it was now shortly after nine o' clock. She had never gone to school at all. It was all just one bad dream.

"Come on now, time to get dressed," he continued, "We have to be at the cemetery by ten-thirty. Let's go."

Nancy's dad then left her bedroom to return to his own to finish getting ready.

Just as Nancy's feet touched to the floor as she started crawling out of her bed to start getting ready herself, she stopped dead in her tracks, wincing and hissing at the sharp pain that pulsated through her forehead. Her headache was back again. She rubbed her fingers into her temples in circular motions. It helped relieve the pressure a little, but only so well.

Nancy then arose, ignoring the throbbing in her head, and walked over to her closet, rubbing her right arm; her wrist still contained a tingling phantom soreness from her dream. She reached inside, grabbing the farthest hanger hanging on the rod and bringing it out into the open air. It was a plain sleeveless black frock, both the only dress and only piece of black clothing that Nancy possessed.

Nancy draped her funeral dress over her right arm, carrying it with her into the bathroom to change into after her shower. She hung the dress up on the bathrobe hook on the inside of the door as she locked it, leaving it hanging there as she made her way across the tiled floor to the shower.

She extended her right arm past the plastic curtain, reaching for the knobs, but froze, her blood running cold when she saw the skin on her arm. On it was a set of blotches wrapping around her wrist, creating a bracelet of freshly forming bruises that were almost identical to the ones on her other arm. She tentatively touched her skin, and gasped.

Instantly she thought of her dream, her nightmare, of the burned hand that had grabbed her from inside the darkness and pulled her in. Nancy gulped and turned the knobs, allowing the warm water to spray forth from the shower head.

## 8.

For the first time in her life, Nancy wished she was still asleep, that she was only dreaming it all. At least that would mean that she would wake up and all this would go away, she'd be back at home in her own bed, her mother would be alive and well, everything would be okay. Through the whole service she sat in her chair next to her dad, staring at the white oak coffin, the glare of the sun bouncing off it and stinging her eyes, praying for nothing else than to wake up.

'Please God, just let me wake up. Just please, let my mom be okay. Let this all just be a dream. Wake me up, please, just wake me up!'

But her prayers went unanswered. She was still there, in the cemetery amongst people in black, watching the coffin as it slowly sank down, down into the earth. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. It was over.

Now that the ordeal was over, everybody in the audience rose to their feet. She and Donald then became subject to tearful, sympathetic handshakes and hugs from fellow crowd members. One of the first was Roman and Candice. They both came up to Donald and Nancy to give them empathetic hugs and give their condolences.

Before anybody else could get the chance to make any contact with her, Nancy separated, meandering around the crowd amongst the gothic-looking stone grave markers.

She stopped once she was a good distance away, about halfway to the parking lot, and plopped down onto the grass, resting back against the foot of a statue, sitting in the shadow facing away from the crowd. Her dad would probably notice her absence soon enough, but she didn't care. She just needed solitude, not awkward embraces from sobbing relatives that she barely knew.

Her knees came up to her chest and her head turned to look up at the stone figure standing six feet tall over her. It was an angel, its stone body cloud-white with spider-web patterns of hair-thin cracks. She stood with her head lowered and her hands overlapped over her knee, her face chiseled into a permanent expression of sorrow.

"I know how you feel," Nancy murmured morosely up at the sad-faced angel above her.

She began to wrap her arms around her knees, but gasped when her right arm made contact with her shin. Carefully, Nancy rolled up her right sleeve of her jacket to her elbow. Her wrist was still in pretty bad shape. The blotches had now darkened into deep violet bruises, the outer layer of skin a deep pink color. It looked almost like she had been given one doozy of an Indian burn.

She touched a tentative finger to her wrist, and hissed an, "Ouch!" through her teeth from the sharp pain in her tender skin.

"Hey."

Nancy's heart nearly burst right through her chest when she heard someone's voice coming from right behind her. Much to her relief, it was only Lance, fully dressed in his best monkey suit.

"Jeez, Lance," Nancy huffed, waiting for her heart to slow down, "you scared the crap out of me!"

"Oh, I'm sorry Nance," he said as he knelt on the grass beside Nancy. Once he was down, he then noticed the marks on her arms. "Woah!" he proclaimed, "what did you do to your arm?"

Nancy, almost ashamedly, quickly began rolling her sleeve back down over her wrist.

"I bruised it in my sleep," she answered with a shrug. Lance's eyebrows creased as he looked at her curiously, but he didn't ask any more.

"I didn't know you were here," said Nancy.

"I was a couple rows back," Lance replied, "I convinced my parents that we should come. I couldn't abandon my friend at a time like this, now could I?"

And that made Nancy smile a little. It made her feel a little bit better to know that she had at least one friend there with her through it all.

Lance then asked the golden question, "How are you doing?"

Nancy wasn't sure if she could answer that. First her mom died, in a way rather eerily similar to what Nancy had dreamed of, then came the nightmares that didn't seem to give her any piece. The skin on her arm tingled at the memory of her dream, of the burned hand, crushing her arm. There was no way it could be possible, but the whole day she had been pondering.

"Hey, Lance," Nancy began, "do you think it's possible for someone to, like, dream about what's _going_ to happen?"

Lance gave her another curious look, but then laughed and shook his head. "No way."

Nancy, feeling only slightly deterred, then asked, "Well, is it possible for dreams to, like, actually affect you in real life?"

"No," Lance answered, "In fact it's usually the other way around; it's what happens to you in reality that affects what you dream."

"Oh. Okay," Nancy mumbled, scratching her arm through her sleeve.

"What's with all the dream questions?"

Nancy just shrugged, answering, "Just wondering."

Before Lance could inquire any further, the voice of Nancy's dad called out from the distance. "Nancy!"

"That's my dad," Nancy huffed, rising to her feet, her hands wiping off the dead grass blades from her backside, "I better go."

"Okay," Lance grunted as he pushed himself up off the ground as well, "Are you going to the after-party?"

Nancy snorted at the term "after-party". Hardly an appropriate term for an event following one such as this, but she accepted it as Lance's attempt at humor and let it slide.

"No," she answered, "Me and dad have to go to my mom's place to box up her stuff."

"Today?" Lance blurted, "Right after your mom's funeral? That's a little messed up Nance."

"Yeah, well," Nancy began to explain with a sigh, "Dad wanted it done as soon as possible. Better now than never I guess."

"Alright. Well take care, okay?"

"Okay."

The two friends said their farewells, then went their separate ways, Lance towards his parents' car, and Nancy towards the crowd which her father was searching for her in. Nancy came up behind her father, tapping on his shoulder to gain his attention.

"Finally! There you are," Donald declared, relieved to turn and find his daughter just behind him, "Now come on, we got to go."

With that, Donald trudged across the grass, past the rows of other grave-markers to his vehicle, Nancy following beside him.

## 9.

After Nancy and her dad had gone home to change out of their funeral clothes, the two arrived at Marge's apartment building in the truck borrowed from Roman. The two rode up to the third floor in the elevator with armfuls of folded boxes and rolls of bubble wrap and packing tape under their arms. At the apartment door, Donald had to tear down the yellow CAUTION ribbons taped in an X inside the door's frame before using his copy of the key to unlock it, allowing them entry.

Inside, everything had remained exactly as it had been left. The TV set against the wall with the two recliners and pull-out sofa, on which Nancy had been so accustomed to sleeping, in the center of the living room facing it; the framed photographs, snow globes, and other assorted knickknacks still placed without any real organization along the shelves that were on either side of the TV, the fruit bowl on the kitchen counter with the untouched bananas and oranges already shriveled with forming black blotches of rot. All of it, completely untouched. The only thing that was different was the bedroom. The mattress had been removed from the bed, leaving just a vacant wooden frame. On the wall and ceiling above the bed was a blackened patch of singed drywall.

"Nancy."

She awakened from the trance she had slumbered into, snapping her gaze from the scene of her mother's death and turning it to her father.

"Yeah dad?" Nancy grunted as she dumped the gargantuan roll of bubble wrap from under arm onto the carpet floor.

"You can pack up in here," he told her, taking a box cutter out from his pocket and using it to sever the tape binding the plastic wrapping together, allowing it to unravel for their use, "I'll take the bedroom."

She had no idea why, but when she saw the cutter's blade extend from the handle, its triangle-pointed razor edge slicing so very cleanly through the tape, her whole body froze, the muscles in her stomach coiling like a wet towel being wrung dry.

Donald then collected a couple of folded boxes and carried them with him into Marge's bedroom, leaving Nancy standing alone in the living room, her father's box cutter left lying on the floor beside the bubble wrap and roll of tape. She reached down to pick it up, but her hand recoiled. That queasy feeling still lingered at the sight of it. It scared her. Bladed instruments always had, for some reason. Turning away from the cutter, Nancy walked into the kitchen and searched through one of the drawers, which, like everything else, had its contents intact. Her fingers fumbled through pens, unsharpened pencils, sticky notes, and old receipts until she found a pair of scissors.

She turned to return to the living room to resume her task, but stopped in her tracks when she saw her father. He was sitting on the edge of the bed frame, an open, empty box by his feet. He sat hunched over, his face buried in his fists, which he had a couple of Marge's shirts bunched up in. He was crying, or was trying to stifle it. Though she couldn't hear him, she could easily tell by the way his back shuddered with each exhalation. The cop looked like he was right on the edge of a total emotional breakdown. It pained Nancy to see her father, the strongest man she knew, this way.

So, Nancy set the scissors down and walked up to her father, who hadn't even noticed her presence, not until she squeezed his shoulder. His head turned up then, his eyes wet and his cheeks puffed, and in an instant he stood up on his feet, casually clearing his throat and dropping the shirts into the open box like nothing had just happened.

Just before Donald could reach for more clothes, Nancy touched his arm, stopping him. "Let's switch," Nancy suggested, "Okay?"

Donald didn't say anything. He merely nodded and turned to move to the living room, not allowing his daughter to see his face in case she would see him cry any more.

As Donald went to work on folding the boxes from their two-dimensional to three-dimensional forms, Nancy picked up where her dad left off, scooping out folded clothes from the dresser drawers and packing them into the box. She passively wished that she had brought her MP3 with her, or that there were at least a radio around. The silence of the apartment as it was being vacated made the situation seem all the more morbid; having some music could have helped take her mind off of things.

After the first box was full, Nancy moved into the closet, which was really no bigger than the size of a kitchen pantry, barely big enough for Nancy to even fit into, and it only contained some of Marge's clothing and her shoes. One by one, Nancy pulled the clothes free from their wire hangers and draped them over her arm, folding them in half, then placed them into a new box. The shoes then followed.

Nancy took a moment to look at the emptiness that had just held her mother's possessions in it. Now there was nothing in there but a light bulb and the newly freed hangers. It all seemed so unreal. She only wished it was.

She was just about to walk back out of the closet, when she noticed something tucked into the far corner of the shelf space above: a tiny book. Even standing on her toes, it was too high up for her to reach; even as she hopped up the best she could do was hit the shelf with her hand. So, Nancy took one of the wire hangers and used it as she stood on her toes to push the book closer and closer towards the shelf edge while she held her other hand open to catch it, only to have it slip right out of her reach and fall straight to the floor.

Nancy cursed herself and crouched to pick the book up. She started flipping through the pages and saw that it wasn't just a book; it was a photo album, barely larger than the size of her hand. Nancy parked her butt on the floor and pulled her legs out in front of her so that she could sit Indian style and started looking through the old photographs.

The first was a picture of Marge in the hospital on the day of Nancy's birth. She sat leaned back in her hospital cot, dressed in a flowery paper dress with a newborn Nancy cradled in her arms, smiling at the camera. The next was of Nancy and her dad at the park when she was barely a year old. Nancy was standing upright on her feet while Donald held her hands up, helping her to walk forward across the sand. Next was Nancy's first birthday. Baby Nancy sat at the dining room table, shoveling fistfuls of yellow-and-blue cake in, and on, her face. Next was Nancy at about age three or four, her long brown hair clipped back with pink flowery berets, sitting on a rug playing with giant building blocks that were scattered around her. Then came her at Christmas, Easter, and a few of her with her grandparents, who had passed away before she could even remember them, and some aunts and uncles that she hadn't seen again until an hour ago at the funeral. There was even one of Nancy sleeping, curled up under a Hello Kitty blanket with a doll held against her chest. The doll wore a soft blue dress and had her golden blonde hair braided in pigtails. On the back was written: _'Nancy & Tina.'_

Nancy flipped on to the next page to see if there were any more photographs. There was just one. And it made Nancy's heart stop in her chest.

The photo was of Nancy, at about age five, in a white dress with her hair tied back in a ponytail with a blue ribbon, her doll held in her arms. In it she was cradled in the arms of a tall, handsome man who looked to be in his mid-to-late twenties standing in the grass. The man was dressed in a coal-black sweatshirt that fit rather flatteringly to his muscular frame. On his head he wore a dark brown fedora, which cast a shadow over his eyes like a mask, with a few curly blonde locks peaking out from under the brim.

Nancy pulled the photograph from its page and turned it over, hoping that it would have something written that would give some indication to his identity. And it did. On the bottom left corner, it was written, _'Nancy & Freddy.'_

"Nancy?"

Her concentration was broken when she heard her father calling for her from the other room. Nancy folded the picture and tucked it away into her back pocket, then dropped the photo book into the box before sealing it up.

"Yeah Dad?" she said as she reentered the living room.

"I'm just about done in here," said Donald as he sealed up a stuffed cardboard box with a strip of tape, "How about you?"

"Yeah, I'm done."

"Let's get this stuff out of here then."

Taking one, sometimes two or three boxes at a time, they carted all of Marge's possessions into the vehicle, and Nancy departed from her mother's apartment for the last time as she and her father drove back to their home.

On the way, they made a quick detour through a drive-thru so that they could grab a quick meal, a garden burger for Nancy and a fat, greasy cheeseburger for Donald. Once they arrived, they unloaded all the boxes, carrying them inside. Donald carried box after box down into the basement, not wanting Nancy to risk falling down the old, rickety stairs.

"I'm gonna take Roman's truck back," said Donald when he returned from the basement as went straight for the front door, "I'll be back."

The door pulled shut behind him as he walked out, leaving Nancy standing alone in the middle of the living room. She sat down on the couch and passively nibbled on a couple French fries, then stopped to pull the photograph out of her pocket.

As Nancy dwelt on the image of her younger self, she came to realize that she had no memory of that time of her life. The farthest back she could remember was her first year of kindergarten. Everything before then was a complete and utter blank. She never could remember that far back, but she had never given that any notice before. Now that she did, she found it kind of... odd.

Then she remembered that in the basement was a collection of old memorabilia from her childhood. If there were any answer to this little mystery of hers, it would be down there. So, Nancy rose from the couch, tucking the picture in her hand back into her jeans, and walked over to the door beneath the stairs. She flipped the light switch that was to the right of the door's frame and descended down.

All of the boxes filled with Marge's things were stacked against the left side of the room by the water heater. In the far right corner was an old furnace, which had long since rusted black from ages of nonuse. Along the right wall was a set of shelves that expanded across the whole length of the wall, each row filled with more, older boxes with dates drawn onto the sides.

As Nancy crossed the room towards them, her knee ended up knocking against an old barbecue grill, causing it to topple over and crash to the floor. The lid came undone in the impact, sending free a box of matches and a bottle of lighter fluid. Nancy stood with her hand leaning against the old furnace, the metal cold freezing her with its touch, while her other rubbed her bruised leg. Once the hurt subsided, she pulled the grill back up onto its legs, putting the fluid and matches back into it before refastening the lid.

Then she returned to the business at hand. Nancy skimmed across the rows until she found the approximate years she was searching for. She then took out the boxes and carried them back upstairs so she could investigate under more proper light.

When Donald returned home just fifteen minutes later, he entered to the sight of dozens of scrapbooks, photographs, and hollowed out cardboard boxes littered all over the living room, with Nancy sitting on the couch in the center of it all, flipping rather intently through the pages of another photo album.

"What's all this Nancy?" asked Donald.

"Oh, hey Dad," Nancy said, looking up at her father, finally noticing his presence, "I was just looking through some stuff."

Nancy thumbed through the last few pages, then huffed, disappointed, and slammed the book shut.

"Cleaning out the whole basement, looks like," Donald asked as he tread very carefully through the living room, tip-toeing over the objects scattered all over the place.

"I'll put this all back Dad, don't worry," Nancy told him as she got to stacking the books and started putting them back into their box.

"Hey Dad?" Nancy called out to her father as she folded her box shut.

"Yeah Nancy?" he called back as he got a glass out of the cabinet and filled it with cold water from the sink.

"How come there aren't any pictures of me when I was little?"

"What are you talking about?" her dad asked, now standing in the frame of the kitchen entrance, "There's plenty."

"Well yeah, there's stuff of me as a baby and when I was a toddler, but then it all just skips to me in elementary school. I couldn't find anything from when I was around, like, five. No photographs or anything."

Donald's body seemed to stiffen for a brief moment, but then loosened when he gulped out his response, "Well, that was around the time me and your mom split up, you know? It wasn't a happy time for any of us then, so you can imagine there weren't exactly many Kodak moments in the Thompson house at that point. Why don't you put that stuff back up now? It's been a long day."

Nancy nodded in mute agreement, accepting her dad's explanation, and began putting everything back into its place. But her instincts were telling her there was something more that her father wasn't telling her.

## 10.

Nancy sat in her bed, staring at the photograph in her hand, at the blonde-haired, green eyed man standing in the picture with her younger, five-year-old self. She had been focusing on that man's name and face the whole day, ever since she found the picture in her mother's apartment, probing the confines of her mind for some memory of him, but she came up with a blank. She had only seen one person similar to him: the silver-clawed "boogeyman" from her nightmares. This guy Freddy and her nightmare-man had to be somehow correlated, she figured, but how?

She ran her thumb over the photograph's label Sharpied on the back, _"Nancy & Freddy",_ then set the photograph on her bedside table before turning off her lamp and curling over comfortably on her right side, allowing her eyes to fall shut.

Just as she began to doze off, Nancy then felt a large body pressing against her back, and a hand rubbing up her stomach. His body was unbearably hot. His heat sank through Nancy's clothes, burning her skin through the fabric. She grabbed his wrist and tried to pry his hand away, muttering sleepily, "Stop it," but it wouldn't budge.

His hand ran up her stomach and started groping her breast. She yelled in protest and tried with all her might to pull his hand off her, but he only laughed and tightened his hold on her. She then felt his lips brush against her ear and she heard him inhale deeply through his nose.

_"Mmmmm,"_ he moaned, _"You still smell so fucking_ sweet!"

Nancy groaned as his scorching hot tongue licked up her ear.

But then, all of a sudden, the pressure on her body was lifted and Nancy found herself, not in her own bed, but on the mattress of a pull-out sofa bed in the middle of a sunlit living room. Not just any living room, but her mother's living room, with everything back in its place, exactly as it always was.

"What the-"

"Honey."

Nancy practically flew right off the bed when she felt a hand and a voice at her shoulder. When she saw who it was, her heart stopped dead in her chest.

"Mom?"

Mom; that's exactly who it was, in the flesh, alive and well. No charred flesh, but golden blonde curls and glittery blue eyes, the same kind as Nancy's. Nancy's mother was alive.

"Woah," Marge exclaimed in a half-giggle of surprise, her hand reaching out to smooth down a couple strands of Nancy's unkempt hair, "Everything okay Nancy? You don't look so well."

"I-" Nancy began to stammer out, staring at her mother's outstretched hand, at the pink buffed and manicured nails and the tanned flesh over the veins in her mother's arm.

"Bad dream baby?" her mother then asked, resting a reassuring hand on her daughter's right arm, rubbing her palm up and down the wrist.

It took a moment for Nancy to realize that, despite her mother's hand on her wrist, it didn't hurt her in the least. Nancy looked down to see... there were no bruises; her arm was perfectly intact again.

"Yeah," Nancy said, her left hand rubbing her right forearm, no longer feeling any sting there, "I guess so."

It was all a dream? Her mother's death? That burned man with claws? All of it? She almost couldn't believe it, but it looked that way.

"Well, tell you what," Marge said with a pat on her daughter's knee before rising and walking into the kitchen, "I'll make us some coffee, then we can have a nice breakfast. How's that sound?"

"Sounds great," Nancy spoke in a half-whisper.

While her mother was busy scooping the coffee grounds into the filter, Nancy stood and came up behind her mother, wrapping her arms around her to pull her into a close, tight hug.

"Ohoho, now what's that for?" Marge chortled, half-surprised and half-amused by her daughter's spontaneous show of affection.

"I'm just glad you're here is all," Nancy murmured into her mother's shoulder, not relenting her bear-grip hug quite yet. She didn't want to let go. She had just awoken from feeling what it was like without her mother around, so she wanted to enjoy feeling her in her arms as long as she could.

Marge smiled and patted her daughter's hand that was over her chest, and gently pried it free. Nancy allowed her arms to drop loose from her hold on her mother and turned around to pick an orange out from the fruit bowl on the counter.

"I had the most craziest dream Mom," Nancy said as she worked on peeling off the orange rind with her thumbnail.

"Tell me about it," she heard her mom say.

"Well, I dreamed you had... died," Nancy started, "and there was this guy, with these weird claws..."

She turned so she could face her mother, and she stopped mid-sentence when she saw that her mother was longer even standing there anymore. She looked around the kitchen and living room, but Marge wasn't around. With her half-peeled orange still in hand, Nancy walked from the kitchen into her mother's bedroom, looking all around. Not in there. Nancy continued on into the bathroom, even the closet, but she could not find her mom anywhere. Her thumbnail picked at the orange rind nervously as she exited back out into the living room.

That's when she noticed that the front door was wide open.

"Mom?" Nancy hollered as she put her orange back down on the counter before rushing out to the door, poking her head out, looking left and right. Her mother wasn't anywhere in sight. But where could she have gone?

Squee-eeee

The sound of a rusty metallic creaking came from the end of the hall. It was the door to the stairs, opening by itself.

"Mom?" Nancy called out as she jogged towards the door, "Is that you?"

From below Nancy could hear the thunk-thunk-thunk sound of someone stomping down the stairs, or something being dragged down them. As she looked down, she saw a smeared trail of blood that led down the steps.

Fearful for her mother's safe-being, Nancy dashed down the stairway, following the trail that continued on down, down, down so far it seemed like she had gone down more floors than the building even had. Eventually, the stairs finally ended at the entrance to the basement. The trail of blood continued on underneath the door. Marge had to be on the other side.

Nancy had to tighten her hand into a fist to stop its shaking, then grabbed a hold of the doorknob and pushed, opening it into a long, dark corridor that seemed to go on forever, like some medieval dungeon. She walked down it, looking around her, seeing nothing but concrete. The only sound in there was the sound of her own breath.

Behind her came a loud metal creak. Nancy hesitantly turned around, and saw the silhuoette a large goat in the open doorway at the end. The goat sounded a loud, "BAA-AA-AA-AGH!"

The sound echoed down the concrete walls, causing Nancy to jump, and she ran through another corridor to her left.

She then found herself going down a catwalk above a fiery boiler room. All around her were steaming metal pipes, forming thick metal walls of pipe works on either sides of the walkway. Nancy looked down and saw that the trail of blood continued on in front of her. Crimson droplets dripped from the underneath of the metal grates to the ground below. She followed it and turned onto another pathway that led to her right, then continued to follow down a set of stairs that spiraled down the concrete ground below and into another long corridor. The walls were made up of webs of pipes. She followed the trail down until it stopped in front of a solid concrete wall.

Nancy turned her head up, and to her horror, she saw her mother's body, hanging from one of the pipes by her wrists tied together above her head. Her head, which was just a blackened skull with shriveled strings of hair in its cranium, was tilted to the side, her jaws opened as if frozen in a permanent scream left from her final moments.

Then she heard the loud _'scrreeeee'_ noise coming from behind her.

She turned, and she saw the man of her nightmares standing there, waiting for her. The man laughed, his cruel voice echoing off the pipes.

The man's arms reached out to his sides. His bare fingers on his left hand stroked against the pipes, his flesh sizzling against the metal surface, while his metal claws rested with its edges on the pipes on that side. He then started walking towards Nancy, running his hands down the pipes, the knives making that horrendous screeching sound. Bright orange sparks sprayed from the blades edges as they scratched down the metal surface.

Nancy turned about, frantically trying to find another exit, but there was none. All that was there was the wall of pipes. She was trapped.

Nancy then felt the man grab her by her shoulder, and he forcibly turned her body around to face him.

Now she finally saw him, face to face in full, vivid, gruesome detail. His flesh was melted with fresh burns, raw, reddish-pink and charred brown and black in certain places, still sizzling, stretched taut over his skull. His eyes were a pale, foggy white, his pupils mere dots in the center of his eyeballs, the skin around his eyeballs sunken deep into his sockets. His clothes, a sweater with horizontal red and green stripes, dark slacks, and boots, were singed and frayed, burned as badly as the rest of him. On his head was a dark brown fedora hat with the brim pulled down slightly over his eyes, casting a shadow over them. Altogether, he looked as if he had somehow survived some horrible fire.

The man's melted lips curled up in the most devilish grin ever seen.

_"Little Nancy,"_ he said, his eyes looking down and up her body, his voice a rough and deep hiss, like even the inside of his throat was burned, _"All grown up now, huh?"_

"Freddy," Nancy gasped, her voice a shaky whisper. Though he looked nothing like his photograph, she could instantly recognize him, by his hat, and by that smile on his face.

_"So you do remember?"_ he then asked, cocking his head, his hideous face seeming to beam at the recognition Nancy had just given him. But Nancy answered by shaking her head 'no'.

_"No?"_ his voice boomed, moving in closer, his body towering over hers like Goliath.

"I- I think I'd remember seeing something like you," Nancy snapped back at him, eyeballing him in a similar manner in which he did to her, only instead, she looked over his burned body with disgust; she felt like she would puke just looking at him.

Despite the strong tone she was trying to display, her voice seemed to crack frailly, almost like a child, which she did not understand. She never in her life allowed herself to be intimidated by anyone, so why was this "Freddy" guy able to instill such a strong sense of... fear within her?

_"Hmph, well, I remember you,"_ he continued to say, pressing his body close to Nancy's, his hands on the wall on either side of her head. It was then that she saw that his "claws" were not really claws at all. They were blades welded onto strips of metal attached to a glove, something he had obviously crafted himself to impersonate claws.

"Who could forget those pretty little baby-blue eyes?"

His left hand rested on her cheek, his thumb caressing the skin under her eye. His skin was hot like a furnace. His hand then ran down her collarbone and over her chest.

_"But I sure don't remember these,"_ he chuckled as he felt her breast, _"You've sure filled out haven't you baby girl?"_

She squeezed her eyes shut and turned her head away, refusing to look at him. He then wrapped his hand around her waist and pulled her to him. He brushed her damp hair out of her face with his finger-blade and tucked it behind her ear.

"Please," she whimpered helplessly, still turning away from him, "Stop it."

_"You know you like it,"_ he growled in her ear, _"Your mother sure did."_

"You killed my mom," Nancy whispered harshly.

The man, Freddy, smiled and chuckled, _"She loved it."_

He traced his index blade under her jaw and raised her chin with the tip, tilting her face up so that her eyes would meet his, then ran his blade back up her cheek to brush her hair across her forehead, then tucked her hair behind her ear.

"Just like you did."

His tongue then extended and licked up her neck, up her cheek and over her eye, moaning as he did so.

Nancy's eyes squeezed shut and her jaw clenched. Her throat burned as bile rose up from the pit of her stomach. Her fists trembled at her sides as she tried to work up the courage to beat this guy down like she normally would have, yet that fear in her kept her whole body paralyzed from head to toe. She felt so vulnerable and frightened, like a helpless little child.

A warm tear slipped down her cheek as she silently chanted, "Wake up, wake up, wake up!"

As her eyes remained shut, the heat from the boiler, and from Freddy, had faded. One eye cautiously peeped open, and through the parted lids, she saw that she was once again back in the comfort of her own soft bed.

"Ohh," she shuddered, "Thank. God."

Outside it was still pitch dark. According to her clock, it was still in the middle of the night. The wind was causing the scraggly branches from that tree to scrape against her window, creating a screeching noise that sounded way too similar to her nightmare.

Glad to be safe in her home again at last, Nancy crawled out of her bed and strode across the room so she could go down to the kitchen and get herself a drink of water.

Halfway across the room, she was stopped when she heard a particularly sharp screeching noise come from her window. She at first thought it was the tree branches scraping the glass some more, but when she turned, she instead saw that it was not. It was that hideous boogeyman Freddy standing there, just outside her window, his finger-knives scratching against the glass, emanating that hideous screeching noise.

Nancy screamed, and he flew in through the window, his body phasing through the bars and glass in his way, just like a ghost. He tackled her down to the floor, but when they both hit the ground, Nancy flipped them over so she was on top and kneed him hard in the groin before running away towards the door.

Before she could accomplish her escape, Freddy grabbed her by the back of her shirt and threw her back onto the bed. As he came upon her again, Nancy clutched onto the first object she could, her pillow, and leapt swinging at Freddy's head. But Freddy was faster. His blades ripped through the pillow, spilling its feathery insides, as he yanked the pillow out from Nancy's hands and whacked it across her face, the feathers blinding her vision.

The next thing she knew, Freddy was on top of her, holding her arms above her head, her wrists grasped together in his bare left hand. She struggled to break free, but she could not escape his grasp.

Freddy, meanwhile, hovered laughing in her face above her, tracing the back edge of his index knife down her cheek. His blade continued down the valley of her chest to her navel, then snaked up under the tail of Nancy's shirt to pull it up past her ribs. Nancy groaned as the tip of the blade pressed into one of her left rib.

_"You. Are all. Mine,"_ he hissed in her ear as the knife sank into her skin. Nancy screamed as she felt the sting of his razor-claws slicing through her flesh.

Nancy shot upright in her bed, gasping for her breath. According to her bedside alarm clock, it was barely four in the morning. She let out a groan, still absolutely terrified by what she had just experienced, but grateful to finally be awake, for real this time. She ran her hands through her thick, shaggy mess of hair as she got up out of bed and walked into the bathroom.

Nancy flipped on the light and almost jumped at the sight of her appearance in the mirror. Her lazy eyes were ringed with heavy bags, the lids lined with fresh crust, and her hair stuck out in all directions in a thick dark poof.

"The bride of Frankenstein called, she wants her hairdo back," she remarked to her own reflection before she rubbed the crust out of her eyes.

As she raised her arms, she felt a sharp sting in her stomach. She looked down at herself to see a dark red spot forming on the front of her shirt. She lifted up her shirt and looked in the mirror. Her hand flew to her mouth to cover her scream as she saw it.

On her stomach, just to the left of her navel, was a cut approximately two inches long with two cuts across it, shaping a deep red " **F** " carved into her flesh.

## 11.

Nine hours later, Nancy stood outside in the school courtyard during lunch hour, gulping down the last of her second can of Monster she had that day. She crushed the can between the palms of her hands and tossed it for the trash can, but it only hit the brick wall behind it and landed on the concrete. Nancy cursed herself and picked the can back up and slammed it down into the bin, then resumed standing leaned against the wall, gazing up at the bleak cloudy sky that threatened rainfall.

The brisk chill in the air made Nancy zip up her jacket and keep her hood pulled over her head. Even in her jacket, Nancy still continued to shiver. It was so cold out that she was actually the only person that was outside; all the other students remained indoors too keep warm, but not Nancy. She needed the cold, because it kept her nerves raw, kept her on edge, kept her awake.

"Nance."

She turned and saw, of course, Lance standing there. He was dressed appropriately for today's weather; two layers of jackets, mittens, and a gray and black striped wool scarf. The sight of the stripes made Nancy wince and the cut under her shirt sting as they reminded her of where, and who, she had gotten the wound from in the first place.

"Hey," Nancy gulped, "What's up?"

"I was gonna ask the same thing," Lance said, pulling his jackets tighter against his body, "What are you doing out here anyway? It's freezing."

"I like it," Nancy replied with a shrug.

"So... how are you holding up?" Lance then asked, bumping Nancy's arm with his elbow as his hands remained stuffed in his jacket pockets.

_'Horribly,'_ Nancy had wanted to say.

But instead, she just answered, "Fine," sniffing and wiping her sleeve under her nostril to wipe up the runny nose that the coldness was giving her.

"If I were you," Lance then said, "I would've taken an extra day off."

"Heh, that's what my dad suggested," Nancy smirked, "But I said no. I just need to keep myself busy; keep my mind off of things, ya know?" And most importantly, keep _awake_.

"How did things go, by the way?" Lance then asked, "At your mom's place?"

"I had to empty my mother's home and box up all her things after watching her being buried," Nancy snapped, sniffing into her sleeve, "How do you think it went?"

"I'm guessing not well," Lance responded, taking a step back, wanting to stay a good distance from Nancy while she was in this clearly hostile mood.

"I'm sorry," Nancy grumbled, kicking away a small pebble, "I'm just crabby. Didn't exactly sleep well last night."

"Nightmares?"

Nancy's heart skipped a beat when she heard that. "Yeah, how did you know?"

"Anyone who's been going through what you have would have some gnarly dreams."

"You have no idea," Nancy whispered under her breath, so lowly that Lance could barely hear.

"What was that?"

"Nothing," Nancy muttered, wincing and rubbing her forehead, "Nothing."

"Got a headache?"

"Yeah, I've been getting them a lot lately," Nancy groaned, "They seem to be getting worse."

"Maybe you should go to the nurse and lie down."

"No!" Nancy shrieked, so loud and shrill it made Lance jump. "I-I mean... no, I'll... I'll be fine," she stammered, shaking her head, "I'm sure it'll pass eventually."

And just then, the bell signaling the end of lunch hour rang, causing Nancy to whine as the shrill noise aggravated her aching head.

"Oh fun, now time for History," she sighed, massaging her temple, as she and Lance made their way inside, "It just keeps getting better."

During the time that she gathered her bags from her locker and made it into her seat, Nancy was aching tell him the whole truth, but self-doubt kept her from doing so. What if, no matter how much she testified, he refused to believe all this was true? He was her friend, the only friend she ever made, but something in her told her that the logical, rational Lance would not listen, because what was happening to her defied all kinds of logic. She would have to go through this alone.

## 12.

Four homework assignments and twenty rounds of Solitaire later from arriving home from school, and still no sign of her dad. Nancy had been killing time on the living room couch in front of the TV, drinking cup after cup of coffee and playing endless rounds of Solitaire over the coffee table.

It was past midnight, hours after Donald's usual arrival time, when the front door unlocked and the man himself burst through. He took a couple steps forward before stumbling forward and leaning against the railing of the stairs, groaning under his breath. He was drunk. After Donald followed Roman.

"Hey Nancy," he said to Nancy, giving her a small awkward wave, "How you doing?"

"Fine," she answered, her gaze still on her father hunched and rubbing his head with the knuckles of his fist. The current situation made an otherwise friendly meeting tense and uncomfortable.

After a moment, Donald finally took notice of the alarm system beeping from the front door being opened. He stumbled over to the keypad and squinted his eyes to help focus them, though it didn't seem to help as he kept punching the wrong numbers. So, Nancy rose up from the couch and strode over beside her dad and punched in the numbers for him, disarming it. After she did so, Donald turned to her, glaring at her with blood-shot eyes.

"What the hell're you still doin' up?" he slurred.

"I just," Nancy answered with a shrug of her shoulders, "thought I'd wait up for you."

"Well, uh'm home now," Donald slurred some more, "s'now we can both get our butts to bed."

With that, Donald began to work his way up the stairs. When he set foot on the first step, Roman moved to assist him, but Donald shrugged him off him. "I don' need yer help walkin' up some damn stairs," he snarled, continuing to trek up the stairs, moving on into the bathroom.

"Thanks for giving my dad a ride," Nancy said to Roman, who was standing leaned back against the wall with his arms crossed over his chest.

"No problem," he told her. "He's taking all this pretty hard," he said as he watched Donald continue onward up the stairs.

"You sure you two'll be okay?" he then asked her.

"We'll be fine," she answered, not looking at him but down at her bare feet, "Good night Roman."

She then began to walk towards the stairs so she could go up herself.

"Hey, wait," Roman then said, stopping Nancy in her tracks. "You know, if you ever need anything, like help or anything," he told her, placing a reassuring hand on her shoulder, "I'm always here, for you and your dad."

As much as she appreciated his kindness, his touch, though purely innocent and friendly, made her skin crawl. She pulled her shoulder out from under his hand and took a step back, moving one step up the stairs.

"Thanks Roman," she said meekly, rubbing her forearm, scratching the handprint bruised into her skin through her sleeve, "I'll see you around."

"See ya," Roman said before exiting through the front door.

After he was gone, Nancy reset the alarm, then collected her playing cards and mug from off the coffee table before taking them and herself up to her room. As she passed the bathroom, she could hear her father heaving and retching into the toilet through the door. She had one long night ahead of her.

## 13.

Biology, the final class of the day, and Nancy was grateful for that. She had long finished off her bottle of NOS, and was beginning to feel the effects of her exhaustion weighing on her.

After she had helped her dad into his bed to sleep it off last night, she herself stayed up the whole rest of the night in her room for the second night in a row now. It made her feel more worn than a tire on a racecar, but she wouldn't sleep another night for the rest of her life as long as it meant she could stay out of Freddy's reach.

It still took quite a toll on her, physically and mentally. The worst was during third period P.E. when they were playing tennis and Nancy ended up missing every hit. It was like her reflexes were delayed by several seconds and she always either swung too late or just plain missed. Then in algebra, she couldn't even formulate the simplest equations inside her own head. She could not keep her thoughts together in a straight line and had to draw out every minor step on paper to figure it out, and even then she would get the wrong answer.

Now she sat at her lab table, hunched over with her fingers massaging her temples, waiting for class to begin, even more eager for it to end so she could return home where a supply of caffeine awaited her. After the bell signaling to beginning of the period sounded, the loudness of which aggravated Nancy's poor aching head, Nancy turned her head up to gaze up at the clock so she could begin counting down the minutes. However, when she did, she could have sworn that the minute hand was slowly moving in reverse. She blinked and rubbed her eyes and when she opened them again, the clock was ticking normally again.

A heavy backpack landed with a bang on the table's surface, Lance's bag. This was the only class they had together, and it comforted Nancy to have her one and only friend here with her now.

"You look tired," Lance said to her as he dropped into his chair.

Nancy couldn't help but heave out a choked laugh. "Captain Obvious to the rescue. That must be one hell of a superpower," she joked, "Pointing out obvious stuff all the time like that."

"Oh yeah. Captain Obvious," Lance tittered in response, "I'd kick Spider-Man's butt any day."

After a short laugh, Nancy then said, "I just had a long night is all."

Before Lance could inquire any further, the teacher, Mr. Gryffon, entered the room with his teacher's aid, Lindsey, right behind him, both of them carrying in stacks of lidded aluminum trays in their arms.

"Today's the day," Gryffon announced as he and Lindsey set the trays atop the tables at the front of the class. "Dissections! Everyone come up and get a frog. Lindsey, pass these around please."

Mr. Gryffon handed Lindsey a stack of worksheets to accompany the dissections, while one person from each table, including Lance, went up to the front to fetch their frog trays. Nancy looked over her paper, at the diagram of the frog on which they were meant to label each internal organ and write about their functions. Her attention then turned to her and Lance's frog as he set it on the table between them and removed the lid. Already she began to feel nauseated by the sight of the amphibian's carcass spread eagle on its back, its hands and feet crucified to the base.

"You okay to do this?" Lance asked her as he took up the scalpel, noticing the color draining from Nancy's face.

"Yeah, yeah, I'm fine," she said to him, "Go ahead."

With that, Lance lowered the scalpel, touching the tip to the frog's throat. Nancy felt the hairs on her neck and arms rising like porcupine needles and beads of perspiration form on her forehead as the light shined off of the steel, reflecting straight into her eyes. The blade pierced the thin green flesh, which opened as it sliced cleanly down the frog's belly. Nancy's stomach churned and bubbled and her throat burned as bile rose up in it. Anticipating what was about to come, Nancy bounded out of her seat and ran out of the classroom, her hand covering her mouth as she raced down the halls straight for the nearest bathroom.

She barged into one of the empty stalls and immediately fell to her knees over the toilet as the vomit began pouring out of her. Lunch, breakfast, and possibly even last night's dinner was heaved out in thick, acidic flows that left her with wet tears running down her cheeks and her esophagus burning.

The ordeal of barfing was exhausting on her already tired out self. Nancy had to sit with her head resting against the edge of the toilet seat and give herself a minute to relax and catch her breath. Once she collected herself, she wiped her eyes and mouth dry (being sure to do it in that order) with the toilet paper before flushing and exiting the stall.

She walked over to the sink and started up the flow, cupping her hands to collect the ice-cold water and washed her face with it, hoping the cold would help give her an extra jolt. When she lifted her head, she saw something in the reflection of the mirror that made her nearly scream, though her breath caught in her chest before she could. He was there, Freddy, standing right behind her. Before she could even react, he gripped her by the hair on the back of her head in his fist, pulling her head back so that she was looking back up into his glassy eyes.

_"You can't stay awake forever,"_ he growled menacingly before shoving her forward, smashing her head into the mirror.

When her skull met with the glass, Nancy rose up from the rim of the toilet that she had been resting on, jumping back so quick that the back of her head banged against the wall of the stall, hitting it so hard that her vision swam. Once her eyes straightened, she saw that she was still in the stall. She had fallen asleep while she was resting.

Nancy flushed the toilet, then quickly got back up to her feet, stumbling slightly as she stepped out from the stall, gripping a sore spot on the back of her head. When she pulled her hand away, it came back filled with a clump of hair.

"What the...?"

As Nancy was staring down at the fistful of hair in her hand, a drop of blood landed on her palm. She touched the tips of her fingers to her nostrils, assuming she was having a nosebleed, but her nose was dry. She turned to look at herself in the mirror, seeing a thin trail of blood running down the side of her nose from underneath her hair. She reached up and, wincing at a sharp, stinging pain that she had assumed was just another headache, she pushed her hair out of her face to find the source of the bleeding: a deep inch-long cut on her forehead above her left eyebrow, just below the hairline, from where her head hit the mirror.

## 14.

After her incident in the bathroom, Nancy had gone to the nurse's office to get her head cleaned up and bandaged with a pair of butterfly stitches, saying that she had merely tripped and hit her head on the corner of a table. Because of her reaction in class, Mr. Gryffon allowed her the chance to complete the assignment via internet instead of actual dissection.

So Nancy, upon arriving home, parked herself in front of her computer and pulled up the website to get all the information she needed. Even the image of the digital opened-up frog on the site made her stomach churn, but she powered through since she didn't have much of a choice.

Nancy spent the next two or three hours writing up an extremely detailed report as long as her arm. Not that she needed to get overly detailed or anything; she just wanted to spend as much time as possible on it.

Once she had completed and printed her assignment, she decided to use this opportunity to do some extra research. She looked all over the World Wide Web, trying to find if there were ever any experiences similar to hers. The best piece of information she found was an occurrence that took place in the 1970s. Several Cambodian immigrants living in America suffered nightmares so terrifying that they refused to sleep. One person in particular, a teenage boy, actually went so far as to hide a coffee maker in his closet connected by several extension cords. After several days of self-induced insomnia, they finally fell asleep. When they did, they died from "unknown causes", many of them while asleep and experiencing screaming hysterical fits. This was all the information she had, and it was of no comfort to her.

Just as she was shutting down the web browser, her father returned home. He ended up passing her in the hallway just as she exited the office room, her bag with her completed assignment inside held in her hand.

"Hey Dad," she said, scratching her forehead around the bandages there.

Donald was just about to say hello himself, but instead reached out and pushed Nancy's hair out of her face.

"What the hell happened to your head?" he asked.

Shaking her head free from her father's hand, she replied, "I fell and hit my head against a table corner. It's no big deal."

"It looks pretty bad," Donald then said.

Nancy just shrugged and replied, "I'll survive," and continued on to her room, where she parked in front of her desk to work on the assignments she already received from her other classes.

It was past eight o'clock by the time she had completed all of her work. She then thought it odd that she hadn't heard from her father in the time she had been in her room, not once. Not to let her know it was time for dinner, not to check on her, nothing.

Nancy exited her bedroom, deciding it was now her turn to check on him. He wasn't in his room, in the office, or even the bathroom, so logic dictated he must have been downstairs. She walked down the stairwell, and sure enough, there he was, lying on the couch with the TV playing. Even while looking at it from behind, she could see the top of her father's subtly balding head hanging on the edge of the arm.

When Nancy stepped around the couch, she saw that he was sound asleep, still in his uniform pants and wearing a white t-shirt. But he wasn't just asleep, he was passed out; she knew from the hollow bottle of whiskey sitting on the coffee table.

It made her seethe to see her father getting wasted on a regular basis like this. Her mother, and his former wife, had just died because of being passed out drunk, and now he was practically doing the same thing. Nancy wasn't sure who should have been more insulted, her, or her mother. If it wasn't already empty, Nancy would have poured it all down the sink. Instead, she settled for slamming it into the trash can. She shut off the lights and the television before she marched back up to her room.

She spent the rest of her night busying herself with all kinds of menial tasks, like straightening and re-straightening her room, taking out, re-folding, then sorting the clothes in her closet, even counting, double-counting, and triple-counting all the marbles in her marble jar; there were three-hundred and eighty-four. She even played a few rounds of marbles with herself, something she hadn't done for years, but it was something to do now.

Now it was five o'clock in the morning and Nancy was sitting in the middle of her bed, cleaning and repainting her nails. As she was finishing applying the second layer of paint to her toenails, a fly appeared out of nowhere and started buzzing annoyingly right in her face. Nancy set the brush back in the bottle so she could swat the obnoxious insect away. As it flew out of sight, she saw something rather strange: the wall behind her bed seemed to... shift. It was only for a second or two, but it definitely seemed to be rippling, as if something living was moving around inside.

Nancy leaned in closer, reaching out a hand, examining it. When her fingers met with the wall, she felt only the rough texture of the pale wallpaper and the solid plaster beneath. Nothing at all out of the ordinary, just a regular solid wall.

As she was checking the wall, the fly returned, landing on the back of her hand that was touching the wall. Just as she was about to squish it with her other hand, the fly suddenly disappeared. It didn't just fly away, it vanished into thin air! Nancy rubbed her hand where the fly had been, where she thought it had been, looking all around as if she could find some sign as to where it had disappeared to, but finding none.

## 15.

Things were getting weird, and Nancy needed to find out why. Ever since the night before, she had been seeing strange things, including more disappearing flies and morphing walls. So she took advantage of her study hall period and went down to the library, picking as many books as she could off the shelves that could help her find some answers. She ended up at a table with a stack of books a mile high and was going through one after another. Her fingernails were between her teeth, getting gnawed down to the root as she flipped through page after page.

Finally, within the second or third book, she found something that explained things for her: Within two to three days of sleep deprivation, a person will begin to experience hallucinations referred to as "micro-dreams". Because of the lack of necessary rest, the person's exhausted brain will force itself into a dream state while still conscious in a desperate attempt to recharge itself, creating vivid hallucinatory visions that can easily be mistaken as being real. This meant that Nancy could still dream, even while awake, which spelled out all kinds of danger for her.

A hand touched her right shoulder from behind, and Nancy instantly reacted, her body acting on pure reflex. She grabbed the person by the wrist and heaved their body forward, twisting their arm behind their back and pinning their body against the table.

"Ow! Nance," Lance choked out, his ribs getting crushed painfully against the table's edge, "What the hell?!"

Realizing that this was her friend that she had pinned down, Nancy released her grip, allowing Lance to get back to his feet.

"Oh god, Lance, I'm so sorry," Nancy apologized in a flurried stammer, "It's just... I just... I-I thought you were, well, somebody else."

"Urgh, I feel sorry for that guy then," Lance groaned as he rubbed his ribs, rolling his arm around in his socket to try and pop it back into place.

"Jeez, you look terrible," he blatantly told her, to which she sighed because she knew this was true. Her lack of sleep was already taking quite a toll on her appearance. Her long brown hair was becoming reduced to greasy strings hanging like a veil over her face. Her skin had begun turning pale and ashen, her eyes sunken into dark shadows; she was becoming more skeleton than girl.

"So what's with all the books?" Lance then asked, noticing Nancy's stack.

"Sleep & Dreams, Studies of Sleep, Your Dreams And You; interesting selection you've got there," he then pointed out as he read the books' titles.

"Just doing some research," Nancy told him as she returned to her chair and continued reading.

"What's with the sudden interest?" Lance asked her as he took a seat in the chair beside hers, taking one of the books and began absently thumbing through the pages.

"I just... needed some answers."

"There something you need to tell me Nancy?" Lance then asked, looking at her in a perplexed manner.

Nancy sat, chewing on her thumbnail and staring at her shoelaces, trying to find the best words that could explain her current predicament without making her sound totally nuts.

"I'm having these dreams, these... nightmares," she began, dropping her voice down to a low and frightened whisper, forcing Lance to lean in so as to hear her better, "And they're always about this... this guy. He's ugly and burned, and he wears this glove with knives on his fingers, like claws, and he's always after me, trying to... attack me. I haven't slept for about three nights now. I'm too scared to fall asleep, because every time I do, he's right there!"

After Nancy had finished, Lance just sat there, completely silent, taking it all in. After what seemed to Nancy like an eternity, Lance finally leaned back and sighed, wide-eyed, "Wow, that's some crazy stuff Nance."

Exactly what Nancy was afraid of hearing. Angry with Lance, the one person she thought she could turn to, and angry with herself for confiding in him at all, she began stuffing her bags with the remainder of her collection of books while the librarian wasn't looking and rose to leave.

"I got to go," she huffed.

"Wait, where are you going?" Lance called after her.

"Look, if you're not going to take me seriously," she snapped back over her shoulder at him, "then I'm just gonna have to figure this out by myself, okay?"

"Who said I wasn't taking you seriously?" he retorted, "Maybe I can help."

This made Nancy turn back face front towards her friend. "What makes you think you can help me?"

"Come on, how much do you really know about dreams?"

Nancy sneered down at her now extremely heavy book-filled backpack. "Not much of anything, I guess."

"You're my best friend Nancy. And if things are getting this bad for you, you're gonna need all the help you can get. Besides, I'm good at research; straight A student bumped up a whole grade, remember, Miss C average?"

"Don't remind me," Nancy grumbled, rolling her eyes at his superior scholarly skills.

"Fine," she then sighed, strolling back over to him, upturning her bag so that the books were dumped back all over the table's surface, "Let's see what we can find out."

It wasn't long before Lance was finally able to find something of genuine relevance.

"You said this guy is in just about every nightmare of yours, right?" he asked her.

"Yep," she replied, "Every single fucking one of them. Why?"

"Well according to this," Lance said, his finger running down the lines of the page he was now reading from, "Dreams are like a mental filing system. It's your brain's way of sorting out and putting away memories into your subconscious, some new, some old. Now, reoccurring dreams are created by something buried deep inside fighting to some to the surface. These dreams feel threatening to the dreamer and can feel very frightening, especially if the memory is of something painful or traumatizing, thus creating a "nightmare". Does that mean anything to you?"

As soon as Lance mentioned dreams coming from old memories, she immediately thought of what she had found at her mother's apartment: that old photograph of her when she was small, standing next to the guy with the sweater and hat. The guy from her nightmares, the man called Freddy.

"Yes," she told him, "Yes, it does."

## 16.

Once Nancy had returned home later that afternoon, the house was empty. She quickly ran up to her bedroom, tearing the whole room apart in a mad search. It was after she had finally found what she had been looking for that she heard the front door open below.

"Nancy?" she heard her dad calling out, "I'm home! I just got back from the store! Come help me put this stuff away, please!"

Nancy stuffed it into her jean pocket, then hurried downstairs to join her father in the kitchen as he carried in armfuls of brown paper grocery bags.

"Hey," he greeted her. "Hand me some of the stuff on the table there, would you?" he asked her, nodding towards the bags he had already brought in as he rearranged the inside of the fridge to make room for the new items.

"So, how was school?" he asked, making an attempt at cordial small-talk.

"Good," Nancy answered flatly as she began handing him the jugs of milk and juice. "Dad, there's something I've got to ask you about."

"Shoot," he said as she passed over the carton of eggs to him.

"Who is Freddy?"

Upon hearing her speak that name, the carton slipped from his fingers. The eggs inside were smashed, their yellow yolk innards splattered across the white linoleum.

"Where did you hear that name?" he gasped, his face pale like a ghost. Never in her whole life had Nancy seen her father as scared stiff as he was now.

She answered him by reaching into her pocket and pulling forth the photograph she had gotten from her mother's apartment. Donald snatched it from her and stared down at it as he held it in his trembling hands.

"Where did you get this?" he whispered, his voice so low it was barely even audible.

"I found it in Mom's place," she explained, "when we were cleaning it out after her funeral."

"I can't believe..." Donald muttered, his hand balling into a quaking fist, crumbling the picture, "You were... never... supposed to..."

"What are you talking about, Dad?"

"Nothing," he said, tossing the balled up paper on the counter. He then grabbed a handful of paper towels and got to work on wiping up the mess on the floor. "Just forget about it, okay?"

"Forget about what Dad?"

"I said it's nothing!" he snapped, the volume of his voice raised louder in anger, dumping the paper towels and busted carton into the garbage, "Now drop it!"

Donald moved towards another bag, but Nancy stepped in his way, blocking him off.

"Tell me!" she urged.

He tried to just reach around her, but she remained in his path, holding her arms out. Seeing the strength of his daughter's persistence, Donald sighed in surrender.

"Fine," he grumbled, "His name was Fred Krueger, and he was the guy your mother was having an affair with while we were married. There, mystery solved."

He made another attempt to move around her, but she still stayed in his way.

"How come we're in that picture together, then?" she asked.

"Maybe... you and he met once. How the hell should I know?"

Thinking the matter was closed, Donald extended an arm around Nancy to grab a bottle of rum to put away in the freezer. But it wasn't over yet; it was obvious to Nancy that her dad was still withholding some key piece of information from her. So, faster than Donald could register, Nancy had yanked the bottle out from his hand.

"Hey!" he exclaimed, "You give that back!"

He tried to grab it back from her, but she backed away from him into the living room, keeping his precious liquor just out of his reach.

"Not until you tell me the truth."

"I have told you the truth!"

"You're keeping something from me," she retorted, "I know it. Now tell me!"

"I can't tell you, okay!" he shouted back at her, "I just can't! Why can't you just let it go already?!"

And for Nancy, that was the straw that broke the camel's back.

"Well, gee, I'm sorry Dad, but I can't just let it go," she said, her voice rising higher and higher with each word until she was practically screaming, "I'm sorry I can't just sit around feeling sorry for myself, ignore everything happening to me and my kid, and drink myself stupid like YOU!"

With that, Nancy hurled the bottle clear across the room, sending it soaring through the air until it finally impacted against the far wall, shattering into a thousand pieces.

They both stood, frozen in awe at what had just occurred, both staring at the clear alcohol running down the wall, getting soaked up in the carpet. The first to break the stillness was Donald when he stepped up to Nancy and slapped her, hard, across her left cheek. For a second, she just stood staring up at her dad in shock. After that second had passed, she returned that slap with a punch to her dad's jaw.

For several minutes, the two just stood there, eyes locked, both holding there faces from the respective blows they had received from the other, Nancy with a red handprint on her cheek, Donald with a spot of blood running down his chin from the corner of his mouth.

"Go to your room," he finally ordered her, to which she obeyed, storming up the stairs, fuming, back up into her bedroom, slamming the door shut so hard she nearly caused it to snap off of its hinges.

## 17.

It was hours before they spoke again. Nancy had holed herself up in her room, keeping her music blaring in her earphones so that she wouldn't have to hear her father's movements downstairs. It was by the time the sky outside turned orange with the setting sun when Donald finally came up to Nancy's room.

He rapped the door twice with his knuckles first before poking his head in. "Nancy?" he called to her meekly, "Can I come in?"

Instead of responding, she opened a textbook in her lap, pretending to study, her eyes glued to the page, while turning up the volume on her MP3 even higher. She was still far too angry with him to even look at him, much less to anything he had to say.

Regardless of being denied any invitation, Donald entered her room anyway. He took a seat on the far corner of her bed, glass full of booze in his hand. When he saw that she was still doing her best to ignore his presence, he reached over and pulled one of the buds out from her ear.

"WHAT?!" she snapped, for more than irritated with him, "What do you want now?!"

"I just came to apologize," he said. His speech was already somewhat slurred. "I'm sorry that I got s' short with you, and that I hit you. That wasn't right."

"Well I'm _not_ sorry for punching you in the face," she responded, crossing her arms over her chest and pulling her knees up.

"I had it coming," he whispered sullenly, looking down at the glass in his hand, "I think it's time we talked."

"I'd rather we do that when you're sober."

"I'm not sure I'd b' able to do this if I was."

With a deep, weighed sigh, Donald gulped down the remainder of his drink with one single, final swig. First he inquired of her, "Why were you so damn curious about... _him,_ anyway?"

"Because," she answered, "I've been having nightmares, about him, and some old boiler room."

"Christ, I was afraid this'd happen," he whispered, "I prayed that you would jus' forget, that you would never have to 'member him."

"What are you talking about, dad?"

After a beat, Donald began, "When you were 'bout five years old, you were friends with this girl your age, Katherine Krueger, Fred Krueger's little girl. You two were th' best of friends, thick as thieves, and apparently Fred and your mother used the times you and Kathy would spend playing together to screw around. The guy was even married himself, the creep. One night, you slept over at Kathy's house. I got a bad feelin' about it, but o' course, your mom trusted Fred completely. After you came back the nex' day, something wasn't... right with you. It wasn't 'til a couple days or so later, when I saw the cuts on your back, that you finally told me what happened. Freddy had done it; he... h-hurt... you, did... things to you."

Nancy sat, petrified, her arms wrapped around her knees, holding them to her chest as she absorbed all of this information.

"And then," Donald continued, "when I tried t' tell Marge what you tol' me, she refused to believe it. That's when she told me how she and Krueger had been seein' each other. She _defended_ the pervert bastard!"

"D-Did..." Nancy gulped, "Did you... put him away? I mean, you had him put in jail, right?"

"I tried," Donald growled, his teeth clenched, "Me and Roman both tried our damn hardest to get the sonuvabitch locked up for good, but 'cause there wasn't enough evidence to tie him t' you, we had nothing to hold him on, not even to get a search warrant! And your mom, she wouldn't allow you t'be examined. She was in complete denial about the whole thing!"

"So... what did happen to him?"

Donald looked up to Nancy with wet, bloodshot eyes, his quivering lip stretching into a tight smile that was meant to be comforting but only made him look even more pathetic.

"I took care o' him princess," he told her, reaching out and squeezing one of her hands in his, "He can't hurt you, or any other little girls anymore. You don't have t' be afraid. He's gone now, for good."

Nancy's eyes widened, horrified by what her father had just revealed to her.

"He's dead," she then said in a hushed whisper, "Isn't he?"

Donald gave her no reply more than relinquishing her hand and looking down at his empty glass, mutely wishing it were full. That was all the answer she needed.

It all became crystal clear to her; Fred Krueger had hurt her when she was a small child, too young to remember. Now those memories were pushing up through her subconscious through her dreams. And not only that, but if she wasn't mistaken, it looked like the late Fred Krueger himself was using these dreams as a conduit to get to her now. He was playing some sick, twisted game with her, trying to mess with her head.

Nancy slid down from her bed, moving past her father, and continued on downstairs and into the kitchen. She tried to pour herself the remainder of coffee that was left in the pot, but her hands were shaking so badly that she just ended up splashing it all over the counter and sink, also getting it all over her hand in the process. Only a couple drops actually landed inside the cup.

On the verge of hysterics, Nancy set the empty pot and cup back down, cursing herself under her breath as she grabbed a rag to wipe up the mess with. After the tile countertop was polished off, Nancy stood with her arms propped up by her hands on the counter's edge, her elbows buckling and her head hanging.

When she finally raised her head again, she viewed out through the window through strands of her hair and teary eyes, looking towards the sun as it passed beyond the horizon, which cast a burning red-orange glow into the kitchen. Her attention was diverted by a fly whizzing by in front of her. Her arm rose to squish the bug, then froze when she noticed something sitting inside the sink; a doll, with golden pigtails and rosy cheeks, wearing a lacey blue dress. Her hand lowered to touch it, when in an instant, the doll spontaneously burst into flames. By the time she turned up the water from the tap to put the fire out, the burning doll had vanished.

From the edge of her peripheral vision, she could see somebody standing in the hallway just outside the kitchen door. When she turned to see who it could be, she was petrified to see that it was herself, at least, her five-year-old self, dressed in those white pajamas, that little charred doll dangling from her hand. In the same moment that Nancy caught sight of her miniature doppelganger, Freddy's steel claws appeared from behind the corner, grabbing the little Nancy by her tiny wrist and pulling her out of sight.

"Oh no," Nancy quivered, overcome with an overwhelming sense of dread, "Please, no. Not now, please not now!"

Nancy reached for the coffee pot. Unfortunately for her, she had wasted the last of what was left when she splashed it all over the kitchen minutes ago. To make matters even worse, they were all out of coffee grounds, so there was no way she could make a fresh batch. She looked into the refrigerator next, hoping to find some more energy drinks. Her misfortune grew when she saw that there were absolutely none left. She was really screwed now.

There was only one thing she could think to do. Wasting not a single moment, Nancy raced back up to her room, pushing past her father who was on his way downstairs as she was going up. She dug around in the drawer of the nightstand beside her bed until she found her wallet. After she had brought it out and tucked it in her pocket, the wall before her suddenly bulged, stretched like a sheet of spandex over a monstrous human face pressing out from inside, its jaw stretched agape as it uttered an unearthly roar.

Nancy shrieked, jumping back, and fell flat on her back. When she looked back up, the face was gone as quickly as it had appeared.

"Screw this!" she panted, her heart threatening to explode out through her chest, as she scrambled to her feet and ran down the stairs, bumping straight into her dad once she had descended to the ground floor.

"I heard you screaming," Donald said, after a moment of recovery, "What happened?"

"Nothing," she replied quickly, "I got to go."

"Hold on a minute," her dad then said, stopping her as she tried to move past him to get to the garage door, "Where do you think you're going?"

"I have to go get some caffeine," she told him. When she tried again for the door, her dad blocked her off.

"Oh no you're not," he slurred, "There's no way you're going out on your own; it's already gotten dark out. Besides, after everything that's happened today, on top of everything that's gone down this past week, I think it's best we stay in and get some rest."

"Don't you get it, you stupid drunk?!" Nancy yelled back at him, "That's exactly what I can't do!"

"That's enough Nancy!" he yelled right back, his foot officially being put down.

But Nancy was not going to stay in this house while in her current situation, and she was not going to let anyone, especially her drunken father, get in her way.

"Get," she growled, more furious than she'd ever been in her life, "The hell. Out of my WAY!"

She shoved her dad away from the door, his intoxicated state allowing him to moved all the easier, also causing him to lose his balance and fall to the floor. She was just about to pull the door open, when her dad recuperated and came up behind her, gripping her arms firmly by her biceps and dragging her away.

"I said," Donald grunted as he fought to keep his daughter detained as she continuously kicked and struggled to break free from his grasp, "You, urgh, are not. Leaving. This house!"

"Grrr! Goddamn it!" Nancy shrieked at the top of her lungs, "LET ME GO!"

Nancy raised her right foot and brought it down on Donald's foot, crushing his toes; lucky for her he was wearing his old tennis shoes instead of his usual police boots. Donald howled in pain and stumbled back slightly. Nancy used his loss of balance to her advantage and shoved him back, slamming his spine against the stair railing. This caused his hold on her to loosen at last enough so that she was able to pull one arm free and elbow her dad in the ribs as hard as she could.

Donald collapsed to the floor, groaning and holding his bruised ribcage, while Nancy ran for the door.

"Nancy," Donald pleaded, pathetic and wheezing, "please..."

"Shut up dad," she sneered at him before she turned her back on him and walked through the door, slamming it shut behind her. She then opened the garage door and wheeled out her bicycle, mounted it, and rode off.

## 18.

She rode as far and as long as she possibly could, her legs pumping like she were in a marathon. After about a mile or two, her legs became sore and she couldn't push herself any farther. So she dismounted her bike and merely walked, rolling it alongside her. Needing to catch her breath, she stopped under a streetlight, leaning against it, panting and sweating, her legs threatening to give way under her. She dabbed her forehead with the sleeve of her sweatshirt, minding her band-aid, then rolled both her sleeves up above her elbows.

Her head was throbbing now, on account of the sudden exertion she had just put herself through. She hunched over, resting her hands on her knees as she tried to breathe through it, but it only seemed to be getting worse. As she raised back up, the headlights from the cars that passed by glared in her eyes, causing her ache to flare up even greater.

She rubbed her fists into her sore eyeballs to help ease the pain. As she did so, she felt a wet drop hit the top of her head. Then came another, and another. In an instant, it began pouring down rain.

"Crap," she hissed, regretting not having anything with her to shield herself with from this torrential downpour. The best she could do for the moment was to find a place where she could duck into for a while until the weather let up.

Just when she turned back around to continue walking, Freddy suddenly appeared, standing not an inch in front of her. He extended his bladed hand towards her, and Nancy jumped back. When she did, her right foot slipped off the edge of the curb, sending her plummeting off the sidewalk, landing right in the middle of the road. She was blinded by bright headlights on a car that was barreling straight for her. Acting quickly, Nancy rolled across the asphalt, narrowly evading the car as it whizzed right past her. She got to her feet and ran onto the sidewalk. She looked this way and that, but there was no sign of him anywhere.

After waiting for the road to clear up enough, Nancy ran back across the street to retrieve her bicycle. Her thin body shivered from the cold rain as she continued onward, finally coming across a business juncture. Up ahead she spotted a convenience store, where there were sure to be fresh coffee and energy drinks galore, not to mention warm dryness, inside. Her pace quickened as she walked towards it. Nancy picked up the pace to a near-run as she hurried into the store, chaining her bike to a post before she entered.

Sitting behind the counter and popping bubble-gum was a twenty-something year old clerk named Eric, according to his red name tag. There were no customers in the store that night, other than Nancy, so he sat lounged lazily back in his chair with his ankles crossed on top of the counter with a comic book on his lap. Upon hearing the door ding with Nancy's entry, Eric looked up from his comic.

"What the hell happened to you?" he chuckled, a pierced eyebrow raised, "Get lost on the way back from a wet t-shirt contest?"

"No," Nancy replied, crossing her arms over her chest, "I just got caught in the rain without an umbrella. If I had had known it was going to start raining, I would've brought one with me."

Eric's brows then furrowed together. "What are you talking about? What rain?"

Now Nancy was the one confused. She turned back and looked out through the windows, and she could not believe what she saw. More correctly, what she didn't see. Not only was it not raining, but the streets were bone-dry, and there was not a single cloud out, nothing but a clear night sky glittering with stars.

Nancy gulped as her whole body shivered, as much from her terror as much as her damp clothes.

"I don't suppose you have a towel I could borrow?" she then asked.

Eric rummaged around under the counter and resurfaced with a white towel in hand. "Here you go," he said as he tossed it through the air to Nancy, who caught it in both hands.

"Thanks," she said before hurrying through the labyrinth of aisles into the unisex bathroom in the rear of the store. Before she had gone in, she noticed one of the fluorescent bulbs was beginning to short out, its light rapidly flickering.

She locked the door, then went to work on getting herself dry. First she wrung her hair out in the sink, then peeled off her shirt, stripping down to her bra, and did the same with it, twisting it good and tight to drain as much water out of it as she could. Next she patted her whole body down with the towel from head to toe, wincing when she went over the "F" cut into her stomach.

After she was finished drying her hair with the towel, just as she was reaching for her shirt that was draped over the sink's edge, she looked up in the mirror, and saw Freddy, standing right behind her. He leered down at her scantily clad body. She spun around when his gloved hand ran down her back, the tips of his blades grazing along the scars in her skin, but he was gone.

Quickly, Nancy grabbed her shirt and pulled it back over her head. As she did, the bandage fell off her forehead, its adhesive having worn from getting wet. She hissed a curse under her breath and dropped the useless strip into the trash bin. Wanting to see if she even needed a bandage, she pushed her hair aside from her face to examine the wound in the reflection.

Then suddenly, a horrible, sharp pain permeated through her brain. First she thought it was just her headache acting up, but the pain moved forward from inside her brain, pushing up to the front. To her horror, she watched as her cut was beginning to split open by a single gleaming, curved steel blade piercing forth through the cut from inside her skull.

Nancy screamed at the top of her lungs, her eyes squeezing shut as she hunched over, clutching the sides of her head. All too soon, the pain subsided, and she raised back up to find that Freddy's blade was gone from her head and her cut was perfectly okay. But as she was looking in the mirror, blood began to run down her lips from her right nostril, dripping off her chin into the sink. She grabbed a fistful of toilet paper and wiped her face off, then held it under her nose to stifle the bleeding.

She exited the bathroom and was on her way to find the energy drinks, when she was forced to stop by a literally crippling headache. A deep, throbbing pain coursed through her cranium that was so intense that the whole place seemed to spin around her and black spots began to flood her vision, causing her to lose her sense of balance and collapse against one of the aisles' shelves.

After a long moment of nauseating vertigo, gravity returned to normal and Nancy trekked onward. That light above her still flickered, but she ignored it and went on. From behind her suddenly came a noise that was all too familiar to her.

Screee-eeeee

Cautiously, she looked back, her eyes bugging out from their sockets now. The light in the rear of the store continued to flicker on and off, taking that zone in and out of darkness. Inside that dark, a tall shadowy figure began to materialize, one with a square, brimmed hat and claws on his right hand. The bulb finally shorted out, leaving the rear section of the store in the shadows, wherein Fred Krueger now stood.

Step by step, he sauntered in closer, and with each step, Nancy, terrified out of her wits, took a step back away from him. The corner of his lips curved up in an almost amused smirk as he raised his right hand. Nancy anticipated a direct attack, but instead, he brought his hand around his left shoulder, and backhand-slapped the items on the shelf beside him, sending them flying directly at Nancy's head. She shrieked and threw her arms up to shield herself as she was attacked by dozens of cereal boxes.

She spun on her heels and sprinted straight for the door, allowing the bloodied ball of paper to fall from her grip. Just when the exit was within sight, the flat sole of her shoe slid across the puddle of water that she had left, just by the WET FLOOR sign that had been put up, sending her falling face-first to the floor. Her head smashed against the linoleum, and everything went black.

When she was able to open her eyes again, at first, it was all too blurry for her to see. Once her vision sharpened, she was able to see that she was no longer inside the convenience store anymore. Instead, she was lying on top of a filthy mattress in a small, dank room, lit only by the fire coming from the furnace burning in the corner to her right.

She jumped at the sound of a loud, whirring shrieking noise. Her attention turned towards a long wooden work bench at the far end of the room. Sitting at said bench, the light of the fire glowing against his broad red-and-green striped back, was none other than Freddy Krueger. Bright yellow sparks sprayed like fireworks from something that his wide frame kept Nancy from being able to see clearly, but it appeared he was busy sharpening something, and she had only one guess as to what. Freddy ceased his work and extended his right hand, which was clad with that horrid glove, arcing and stretching out his four bladed fingers as if they were real claws. The fire's light gleamed off of the steel blades, shining them into Nancy's eyes, making them appear all the more threatening. He then snapped his head around, glaring at Nancy with that horrible grin on his disgusting face.

Nancy leapt from the mattress and raced down a long corridor, but as far as she ran, the end seemed to only stretch farther and father away from her, like some horror funhouse. Suddenly, her feet were pulled out from under her by invisible hands and she was being dragged back towards the room. Once inside, her body soared through the air in an arch, crashing her down back onto the mattress. Before she even had a chance to push herself back up, Freddy was already on top of her, grinning down at her with a mouthful of gnarly, cracked, rotten teeth.

_"Welcome back,"_ he said in a growling purr, _"Miss me?"_

His breath was like hot sulfur; it made Nancy want to vomit even more than his face and mouth already did. She turned her head away, facing to her right so she wouldn't have to look at him, nor suffer his rotten breath. That's when she found that charred plastic doll, the one she always had seen her young self holding. Hoping to use it as some kind of impromptu weapon, she reached out and grabbed it by its legs, and swung it straight at Freddy's face.

As quick as Nancy's attack had been, Freddy was quicker still. He caught the doll in his claws and wrenched it from her.

_"Heh, naughty, naughty,"_ he chuckled tauntingly, _"You remember this?"_

In an instant, the doll combusted in a sudden burst of flames that consumed it in a matter of seconds, reducing it to a pile of ash.

_"Well then,"_ he then said, raising his glove and extending his index blade, his left hand grabbing Nancy's throat to keep her held down, _"I guess I better reach in and dig those memories out for you. Ha ha ha ha!"_

With that, Freddy aimed his claw down at Nancy's forehead and moved in. She grabbed his right arm at the wrist with both of her hands, using every ounce of her strength to push it away, but no matter how hard she fought, Freddy was still stronger than her. All she could do was slow him down, and it was barely by much. His blade continued to progress inch by inch closer to her face.

She needed to try something else to save herself. Her legs were pinned under Freddy, leaving her incapable of kicking. The best she could think of was a feeble and desperate attempt, but it was better than lying there and doing nothing. So she removed her right hand from Freddy's arm, reached up, and sank her nails into his face just above his left eye. She dragged her nails down the left side of his face, clawing through the flesh. But in doing so, the melted flesh of that half of his face peeled right off of his skull in her hand, exposing the bone beneath. Maggots sprouted out from under the torn layers of his rotting skin, squirming and crawling across his skull. His left eyeball was sliced through by Nancy's fingernail and was leaking and oozing out a yellow-green puss.

This did not seem to hurt or even bother Freddy in the slightest. In fact, he cackled madly, his tongue falling out of his mouth and waggling obscenely in Nancy's face, his saliva dribbling all over her. The maggots one by one fell off his face and dropped onto Nancy's, the bugs and his drool falling into Nancy's mouth as she screamed, and screamed, and screamed. Her hands started flailing, slapping and pushing at Freddy's face and chest, fearful and desperate. With no effort, Freddy was able to grip both of her wrists in his left hand and held her arms down above her head, while his claw touched the cut in her forehead. The tip pierced the wound, then sank in deeper, deeper, and deeper, until the steel scraped the bone. Nancy's eyes squeezed tight as she screamed even louder, her vocals chords tearing inside her throat, while Freddy's tongue licked up her neck and laughed.

All of a sudden, the blade retracted from her head and the pressure was lifted from her arms. Her fists immediately went flying, blindly hitting with all her might. Hands grabbed her arms and started shaking her while a voice shouted, "Hey! Wake up!"

Her eyelids then opened to be blinded by bright lights. Above her was Eric, the convenience store clerk.

"Are you okay?" he asked, releasing his hold on Nancy's arms.

"Wh-What..." Nancy groaned, "What happened?"

"You slipped and hit your head," he explained, "You were out like a light."

Nancy started to push herself up, but hissed at a pain in her head and fell back on her elbows. She rubbed her head where she felt the soreness, and her hand came back covered in blood.

"You head split like a pumpkin," Eric further explained, "There's already an ambulance on the way." He then unbuttoned his shirt, leaving him in a white tank top, and rolled it up in a ball, placing it under Nancy's head for her to use as a makeshift pillow. "Just chill for a while. The meat wagon'll be here in no time."

He then rose and walked back behind the counter. When he came back, it was with a rag with ice balled up inside.

"Here you go," he said as he moved to put it to Nancy's split head, but she just seized it from him and put it to the wound herself.

He gave a little laugh at this act. "You're certainly not like any damsel-in-distress I've ever known, are ya?" he said as he plopped down, sitting cross-legged about three feet from her.

Nancy rolled her eyes, despite how much it hurt to do so. "You get many of those in here?" she asked sarcastically.

He shrugged as he answered, playing into her sarcasm, "One or two, hehehe."

But Nancy just smirked and rolled her eyes again.

"So, can I ask what your name is, damsel?" Eric next queried.

Nancy scoffed, answering, "Lois Lane."

But Eric just laughed even more. "Okay Lois, you want me to get you something while we're waiting for that ambulance? Like, water, or soda or something? On the house."

As much as she wanted to ignore and refrain from any more conversation with this persistent young man, there was one thing she needed more than anything at the moment. "Actually, a Monster would sure be nice," she told him.

"Coming right up." Eric then rose back up and walked off to fetch her the energy drink she requested.

Once he was gone, she let out a sigh, glad to finally get that guy out of her hair, even if for a few seconds. After Eric had left, Nancy looked down and saw something in her right hand. Still inside her palm and stuck under her fingernails were chunks of the blackened blood and rotted flesh of Freddy that she had ripped off his face.

She was nothing short of amazed by this. She almost could not even believe it. She had actually brought something out from her dream with her into the real world. Was this even possible? She already knew fully well that wounds could be carried from dreams into reality, so bringing out objects wasn't entirely far off. After all, the evidence was right there in the palm of her hand. While she wiped the molten tissue onto the side of her jeans, she wondered: what else could she bring out?

## 19.

With four stitches sewn into her head, Nancy was driven back home in Roman's car. During the whole ride, he, of course, tried to get out of her exactly what happened. Interrogation came naturally to him, even while being off-duty.

"Your dad called me right after you ran off, you know," he told her, "Asked me to ride around and look for you. Lucky he did; I was still on the road when the hospital called me, saying you asked for me 'cause your dad wasn't, well, available."

The whole time he spoke, Nancy just sat silently staring out the window, watching the streetlights whizzing by over them.

"He also told me about, you know, what he told you," he continued, "You're mad at me now, I bet, for not telling you myself before. I'm sorry Nancy. Really, I am. I wanted to tell you, but your dad made me swear never to say a word to you about it. He didn't want you to have to live with the memory of what Krueger did to you. He just cares about you, he really does. I mean, I couldn't even imagine if it was my own kid that... that happened to."

Still, Nancy remained mute, soaking in Roman's words without response, looking out the window while she picked remaining flicks of dead skin from under her nails. For the moment, she was too preoccupied thinking on what was soon to come.

Soon, they pulled up along the curb in front of Nancy's house. The lights were all still on inside, just as she expected.

She reached for the handle, but before she opened the door, she turned to Roman.

"You don't have to be sorry, Roman," she told him, "You were just looking out for me, you and my dad both were. I understand."

He gave her a tight smile. Nancy returned it before she stepped out from the vehicle.

"And thanks for the ride," she said in farewell, leaning her head down into the open car door.

"Take care Nancy," Roman replied.

Nancy shut the door and watched as Roman's car drove out of sight.

The front door was left unlocked. When Nancy entered, her father was lying on the couch on his left side, fast asleep with his right arm draped over the edge of the cushion, his knuckles rested on the carpet. A nearly empty bottle of booze lied on the floor an inch from Donald's hand, sideways the same as he was. Nancy picked it up and placed it atop the coffee table. The resounding thunk from the bottle against the table's surface woke Donald from his inebriated rest.

"Nancy?" he grumbled, still partially asleep, his red eyes opening only halfway, "That you?"

"Yeah, dad," she answered him, crouching down on her knees so that their faces were level, "I'm home now."

Donald sighed and extended his arm to stroke her face affectionately. He then attempted to push himself upright. Seeing her father struggle to even perform this simple task, she grabbed a hold of his hand and hoisted him to his feet.

"Come on dad," she grunted as she put Donald's arm around her shoulders to support his weight as they both slowly trudged their way up the stairway, "Let's get you up to your room so you can sleep this off. We could both use a good night's sleep."

Her dad flashed her a look of amazement, bordering on shock, at hearing her say this.

"I'm so s'rry 'bout this, princess," he slurred as they made their way down the hall towards his bedroom, "'Bout ev'rything. I guess I shoulda told you a long time ago. I jus' want'd t' protect you. I alr'dy failed once."

Tears rolled down his puffy cheeks, and Nancy felt her own throat tighten, but she swallowed it. "I know dad, I know," she coughed, "It's okay. Everything will be okay."

She helped her dad crawl into bed, pulling the blankets up to his neck. She gave him one last hug, then stepped out.

"Good night Daddy," she said to him as she stood inside the doorframe, her hand on the knob.

"G'night, pr'ncess" he said back, rolling over onto his side, turning away from the door. Nancy pulled the door shut as she exited. As she did, she took note that her father's gun was still in its holster on his belt that was hung over his bedpost.

She took a deep breath to collect herself, then walked back downstairs and into the kitchen. She looked through the silverware drawer until she took a long, sharp, slender-bladed knife. From there, she went back through the living room. Nancy reset the security alarm before walking back up the stairs and to her room.

First, she took her marble jar and placed it on top of the bookshelf near her door. After that, she set her alarm clock to go off after ten minutes, then tucked the knife under her pillow and lied back in bed, on top of all the sheets and blankets, folding her hands together over her stomach. Her eyes closed, and she allowed herself to slip gently out of consciousness.

## 20.

Her eyes opened again when she felt her bed rocking about, only to see that she wasn't in her bed anymore. She was lying bundled up in the front passenger seat of a car, which was speeding like a bat out of hell down some pitch dark road. Tiny sprinkles of rain droplets pattered against the windshield. Only problem with the scene was: there was no driver.

The car eventually came to a halt. Nancy sat upright and peered out through the windshield, seeing what appeared to be an old power plant. Her head turned to her left as she heard a steady _'tap tap tap'_ noise coming from the next seat. It was him, sitting in the driver's side, his left hand on the wheel with his finger-knives tap-tap-tapping against the dashboard.

The next thing she knew, he was on top of her, pinning her body down across the seat under the weight of his body, too heavy for her to escape. Next, she saw Freddy's gloved hand as he inched his index blade closer to her face. She turned her head away and squeezed her eyes shut, not wanting to have to look at him, then felt the cold metal of Freddy's finger-blade grazing across her forehead as he brushed her hair out of her face and tucked it behind her ear. Nancy groaned in revulsion, feeling sick to her stomach from having this deformed pervert on top of her, touching her in all the ways she hated. When she peaked up at him through one eye, she noticed that his eyes had changed. They were no longer glassy-white as usual, but contained dark green irises, which were razor-thin around pitch black pupils the size of dinner plates.

_"We're gonna play a little game, 'kay?"_ she heard him whisper to her, _"You and me, hide and seek. Ready?"_

He raised his body up slightly, relieving some of the pressure he had on Nancy's body. His eyes closed, and he began to count down. _"Ten, nine, eight..."_

As he continued counting, Nancy was able to push the car door open and slither her way out from under Freddy, landing hands-first onto the cold dirt floor, her head pelted by the cascading raindrops.

"...seven, six, five..."

Nancy got to her feet and headed for the open doorway to the power plant. Behind her she could hear Freddy completing his countdown. _"...four, three, two, one. Ready or not, here. I. Come."_

Nancy looked back behind her to see Freddy stepping out of the car from the same door she herself escaped through. She turned back and hurried inside, looking around at her surroundings as she entered, finding herself in the long concrete hallway she had been through before. At the end of the hall, she saw what looked like a small girl, wandering fearfully down the dark corridor.

Nancy called out, "Hey!"

Her voice reverberated down the walls, causing the little girl to jump and spin around, meeting Nancy face to face.

The little girl was dressed in white flannel pajamas, which hung loosely over her tiny body, brown-haired, and had a little blonde-haired plastic doll clutched to her chest, her little round blue eyes wide in fear. Nancy Thompson, at age five.

Nancy stepped closer towards her miniature self, but then stopped when she noticed that the little Nancy wasn't looking at her, but at something that was just behind her. Nancy turned her head hesitantly back, seeing Freddy Krueger himself, a large, imposing black silhouette in the doorway at the other end of the corridor. His mouth opened and he uttered a hideously loud bleating sound, like a sheep.

"BA-A-A-A-AGGH!"

The loudness of that bleating noise echoing through the corridor made both Nancys jump. The smaller one fled into another passageway.

"Hey," Nancy called out after her, "Wait!"

Nancy ran after her, following her straight into the boiler. Though Nancy could not see that young doppelganger of hers, she could hear her frightened tiny footsteps pattering against the catwalks somewhere in the darkness. Nancy herself followed those sounds until she found her miniature self going down a set of steps that spiraled to the ground level. Nancy followed her as she stepped down the spiral stairs to the ground below.

The younger Nancy was blindly wandering down the hallway, clutching that little doll to her chest as if for protection. Nancy caught up to her, but her young self still didn't appear to even notice her presence. She waved her hand before her younger self's face, but little girl still kept walking. Nancy followed behind her little self to the end, where there was a room illuminated by the orange glow of firelight coming from a furnace in the corner, the same room Nancy watched her mother die in, and the one she had been in before.

Along the far wall was a work bench, covered by scattered tools and bits of metal. Sitting at bench was Freddy Krueger. Freddy the monster. Freddy the boogeyman. The light of the fire glowed off of the red and green sweater stretched over his broad back.

Both Nancys jumped at the sudden sound of some horrid, metallic squealing. Freddy's back obscured Nancy's view of what it was he was doing, but judging by that loud metallic screeching and the bright orange sparks spraying, it seemed like he was sharpening something. He then stopped and extended his right hand, which was wearing his glove with now-freshly sharpened bladed fingers, stretching his fingers like they were real claws. Nancy, along with the little Nancy, stepped back, and Freddy snapped his head around, facing them both.

Nancy quickly scooped up her younger self in her arms and took off down the hallway. She looked back to see Freddy following after her, sauntering down with his finger-knives scratching against the wall's surface. Nancy continued running, only to come upon a dead end. She frantically looked around, but there was no escape for her in sight.

At that moment, Nancy realized that she suddenly could no longer feel the weight of that young toddler self of hers in her arms. She looked down to see that her younger self was indeed no longer in her arms at all. As she was looking down at herself, she saw that she was now dressed in white flannel pajamas, the very same her younger self was just wearing, and clutched in her right hand was the doll the little Nancy was holding.

Nancy's feet were then suddenly yanked violently out from under her and she was being dragged across the floor back down the hall towards that room. Upon reaching the far room she just ran away from, her entire body was raised up in the air and she was slammed down on her back onto the mattress. Before Nancy could raise herself back up, Freddy was already on top of her, grinning wickedly down on her.

_"I win,"_ he chuckled, running the back edge of his index blade up the side of her face.

Nancy gripped the doll firmly in her hand and swung it towards Freddy's face, but he caught it easily in his bare left hand.

_"Hmph, naughty, naughty,"_ he chuckled in a cold sing-song voice.

He then stood up off of her and moved towards the furnace with the doll. Nancy knew she should have run then, yet some terror deep within her kept her rooted to the spot. She felt so vulnerable and frightened, like a helpless little child.

Freddy opened the door to the furnace, and tossed the doll into the flames to roast. Nancy watched, petrified, as the doll's plastic flesh melted like the wax of a burning candle, its golden synthetic hair flaming up. It was like watching her mother burn all over again.

After the doll was out of his hand, he looked down on that same hand and he and Nancy both watched as the melted flesh melded back together, his color turning from raw burnt pink to soft tan. Soon, his entire skin molded itself back together, starting from his neck going up his face. His skin was actually healing. Blonde hair sprouted from his scalp, and his eyes turned from bloody to crystal green, transforming from Freddy the boogeyman to Fred Krueger the man. His red and green sweater also changed, going from singed and dirty to crisp and clean, darkening into a coal-black sweatshirt.

Freddy then turned back to Nancy, his body appearing as a large, dark silhouette as it blocked the fire's light. The only part of him clearly visible was his mouth splitting his face in a maniacal grin, his teeth glistening with the drool that was frothing up over his lips.

"Next?" he rasped, raising his right hand with the glove with bladed fingers on it.

Nancy then knew: this was it; this was what happened, and now, it was going to happen all over again.

"NO!" Nancy screamed and scrambled to her feet to run to her escape. But Nancy just wasn't quick enough. Before she could even reach the exit, Freddy was upon her in just a couple long strides and extended his arm, catching the back of her shirt in his fist. With a single powerful pull, her body was soaring back, landing once again back onto the filthy mattress on the floor.

Before Nancy even had a chance to react, Freddy was already on top of her, grabbing both her wrists inside his left fist and holding her arms above her head. He then forcibly grabbed Nancy's face by her jaw in his clawed hand and crushed his mouth against hers, keeping her arms held above her head in his bare hand. Meanwhile, his gloved hand made its way underneath her, making her wince as she felt the tips of his knives touching her spine at where her scars began. Then she screamed even louder as she felt Freddy's knives pierce through her flesh.

"Mmmmh, that's it baby girl," Freddy moaned against Nancy's mouth, "Scream for me."

His "claws" continued to slice further and further down her back, shredding her scars back open all over again. At the same time, Freddy was grunting into Nancy's mouth as he pressed his groin into hers, grinding it against her, forcing her to feel him growing hard, aroused by Nancy's vulnerability, her suffering, her blood, her tears, and most of all, her fear.

"Stop," Nancy cried weakly, helplessly, "Please, stop."

"You know you like it," Freddy purred wickedly with a wet lick up her ear. He continued to lick down her neck, slobbering all over her clavicles. Nancy wriggled and struggled with all her might to pull away from him, fight back, something, but his grip on her arms and his weight crushing down on top of her was too great for her to escape. Freddy sliced through the fabric of her pants and ripped them down off her legs, leaving her in her pink cotton underwear. Those too were soon sliced apart so that they fell off her thighs, leaving Nancy completely exposed and open to him.

Freddy chuckled darkly deep down in his throat, his lips just against Nancy's ear, "You ready to play little Nancy?"

She squeezed her eyes shut, hearing the _'zzzzzip'_ of Freddy's pants unzipping. Then Nancy heard something else. A loud ringing echoing through the air. As it grew louder, Nancy realized, it was her alarm. She was waking up.

While Freddy was distracted by the noise, Nancy spit directly into his eyeball. He hissed and loosened his grip just enough for Nancy to pull her arms out from his grasp. She gripped his shoulders and flipped them both over so that she was on top of him, feeling the room instantly transition into Nancy's bedroom. Into the real world.

"I got you now, you bastard," she hissed in his face.

Freddy then froze, his eyes looking around at the bedroom he was now in. He almost couldn't believe it, but there he was, pulled right out of a dream and back into the real world.

"Clever brat," Freddy scoffed, grabbing Nancy by her throat, cutting off her windpipe, "So what now, huh smart-ass?"

Nancy reached her left hand under her pillow behind Freddy and, bringing out the kitchen knife, stabbed it into his side, just below his ribs. His hand relinquished her throat at the same time Nancy ripped the blade free, or at least tried to. When she tugged on the handle, the blade broke off from it, remaining inside Freddy's body while Nancy kept the handle. As he was distracted, staring, mortified, at the metal protruding from his side, Nancy leapt off the bed.

While he was busy pulling it loose, using his other hand to stifle the blood spilling out, she took her lamp off her bedside table and smashed it over his head, shattering its porcelain body, knocking Freddy down, along with his hat, and Nancy took for the door. On her way out, she took her marble jar and spilled all three-hundred-eighty-four marbles across the floor just inside the doorway, dropping the jar as she sped down the hall towards her dad's room.

At the same time, Freddy was stumbling out of Nancy's room, clutching his bleeding side, his head now bleeding as well, his hat back on but slightly askew. His boots slid across the marbles on the floor, causing him to fall forward in an almost amusing, cartoonish way, but Freddy quickly got up to his feet, put his fedora back on top of his head, and charged towards Nancy.

Before he could get close to reaching her, she had already run into Donald's room, slamming the door shut and locking it. She immediately headed for her dad's gun, while behind her, the door banged loudly again and again as Freddy slammed his body against it, trying to break it down.

All the noise caused Donald to be roused from his sleep. "Urgh, Nancy?" he groaned, still drunk and partially asleep, "What th'hell's goin' on?"

At that moment, the door burst open, the frame busted to splinters, as Freddy came crashing through.

"Found you," he smirked as he moved towards Nancy. He stopped when she held the gun up in both hands, aiming it straight for his head.

"Not one more step," she snarled at him, cocking the gun with her thumb, "Or I'll blow your fucking head in two."

Freddy froze for a moment, looking straight down the barrel, then grinned up at Nancy. "You don't even know how to use that thing," he snickered at her.

He took a step closer, and keeping true to her word, Nancy put her finger on the trigger, but was unable to pull it. She pulled on it again and again, but it was jammed. Freddy laughed, mocking her and her failed attempt at shooting him, and grabbed the firearm with his left hand and yanked it straight out of her grasp, tossing it across the room.

"Works better without the safety on," he said with a grin before he backhanded her across the face, striking her with such force that it knocked her down to the floor.

Meanwhile, Donald, who sat petrified witnessing the whole scene, could not believe what he was seeing: Fred Krueger, alive and well, and brutalizing his daughter. He was almost certain he was still dreaming.

"Y-you," Donald gasped, his face white, "How-?"

"You!" Freddy growled, glaring at Donald with a searing rage.

"I killed you once before, you son of a bitch," Donald snarled, rising to his feet, his hands balled into fists, "I'll do it again!"

He then charged toward Freddy with his fist raised, ready to strike him down. Unfortunately, his movements were slowed by his age and his inebriation. Freddy grabbed Donald's fist in his bare hand with almost zero effort, and sank his knives into Donald's stomach with ease and precision.

Freddy chuckled in Donald's face while the man gasped and choked on his pain, before raising Donald's body and throwing him across the room. The man hit the wall before falling to a heap on the floor.

From behind him, Nancy rose to her feet and jumped onto Freddy's back.

"You fucker!" she shrieked as her arm wrapped around his neck in a choke-hold. Freddy gagged, unable to breathe, his head already beginning to feel lighter from being deprived of oxygen. He slammed his body back against the wall, crushing Nancy against it. It felt like her ribs were about to snap, but she still held on, making her hold on his windpipe even tighter. Freddy slammed her back against the wall one more time, and Nancy involuntarily loosened her grip. Freddy grabbed her and threw her over his shoulder, slamming her on her back to the floor. Not giving her even the smallest second to recover, Freddy raised his right boot and stomped down on Nancy's stomach, hitting right into her diaphragm, knocking the air right out of her lungs and leaving her incapable of drawing a new breath.

Taking advantage of her feeble state, he pulled Nancy up by her hair, ripping out a handful in the process, and threw her down across the bed. His left hand held both her arms above her hand, while his right one held her face by her jaw as he licked up the blood that had run down her chin from when he hit her. His tongue then slipped between her lips, forcing itself inside her mouth. Nancy gagged as it snaked down her throat.

"Mmmh," he moaned as he separated his mouth from hers, "You taste so much better in reality."

"YOU LEAVE HER ALONE!"

Freddy was taken by surprise as Donald shouted, then leaped straight at him, tackling him down and allowing Nancy to roll out from under him.

Donald was on Freddy's back, grabbing a hold of Freddy's arms, and he forced Freddy's right arm down, stabbing Freddy's steel claws into his own stomach, the blades sinking halfway into his own guts. Freddy screamed and fought with all his might to get Donald off of him, but Donald's hold on Freddy's arms was so strong that Freddy just couldn't shake him off.

At the same time, Nancy crawled across the floor in search for her father's gun, finally starting to regain the ability to breathe.

With his left arm, Freddy socked Donald in the abdomen, his elbow hitting him right in his stab wounds. Donald howled in pain, but would not relent his grip. Freddy then tossed his head back, bashing the back of his skull against Donald's nose. His thinking too clouded by pain and alcohol, Donald released his grip to cup his hands over his broken, bleeding nose. With him distracted, Freddy spun around and grabbed Donald by the throat, pinning him back against the wall.

"Why! Won't! You! Fucking! DIE?!"

Each word shouted from Freddy's mouth was puncuated by his claws being stabbed again and again into Donald's stomach. After his innards were diced like an onion, Freddy hurled his body across the bed.

"Back to business," he mumbled to himself as he turned back towards the main focus of his attention. When he did, he was met with Nancy standing with the gun in her hands, safety lock undone and ready to fire. She aimed straight for his head, and pulled the trigger. Freddy's arms flew up to shield his face as if they could protect him from the bullet, but it was pointless, because there wasn't one. She pulled on the trigger again, and again, and again, but all it produced was a series of dry clicks.

"Ahahahahaha! No bullets!" Freddy guffawed, "What rotten luck!"

Her plan foiled with no plan B, all Nancy could think to do was drop the gun and run. She dashed straight for the stairs, but Freddy quickly caught up with her.

"Where do you think you're going?" he grunted as he grabbed her by her hair, pulling her back and smashing her face into the wall. Freddy held her up and licked the blood off her split cheek, then tossed her body down the stairs. Nancy plummeted down the steps, landing on her back. She got up on all fours, one hand gripping her sore head where it hit the floor, and she felt that one of her stitches had popped. Her eyes peeled open, seeing double for a moment, to see Freddy stomp down the stairs towards her.

In a panic, Nancy tried to get back on her feet to run for the door, but when she tried, she screamed in pain as she felt her right ankle give out under her weight. It was broken. All she could do was crawl the short distance. She used her arms to drag her body forward.

The doorknob was just within reach, when she was suddenly jerked away from it. Freddy had a hold of her right leg by her calf and was dragging her away.

"Nuh-uh-uh-uh," he chided in a musical voice, "Running out on a guest is rude, you know."

But Nancy wasn't going to allow him to keep her from escaping. She turned on her back, raised her good foot, and used it to crush Freddy's groin. His hands relinquished Nancy's leg to hold his squashed jewels, his legs buckling under him. He fell to his knees, his face puffed up in a horrible pain that he had not been able to feel in a long time.

"Christ," he puffed, "I forgot how much it hurts being alive."

At the same time, Nancy had reached the front door, and pulled it open, tripping the security alarm.

"Oh no you don't!" he snarled, watching her make another escape attempt.

Ignoring the pain of his privates, Freddy rose to his feet and grabbed Nancy by the collar of her shirt, pulling her away from the door and tossing into the living room.

He then raised his right boot and swiftly kicked Nancy across the face, flipping her over onto her back. Nancy turned over and stood on her hands and knees and spit out a mouthful of blood and teeth on the floor.

"Oh, did that hurt?" Freddy asked coldly, resting his claws over his heart in faux sympathy. With a kick to Nancy's ribs, a scream sounded from her as she felt her ribs shatter.

"YOU DON'T KNOW THE FIRST FUCKING THING ABOUT PAIN PRINCESS!" he roared, raising his boot so the sole hovered over her face, ready to trample her.

Just as he was about to bring his foot down on her, she reached out to grab the bottle that had been left on the coffee table, and chucked it at his face, hitting him right in the nose. He stumbled back, groaning and holding the broken cartilage in his left hand.

"Grrrr, my nose!" he growled, "You bitch! You broke my fucking nose!"

Fearful of Freddy's explosive rage, Nancy scurried away, but he stopped her by pinning her down flat on her stomach with his foot, pressing the sole of his boot into her spine. The pressure of his weight on her already shattered ribs, plus his heel digging into the cuts in her back, was pure agony, but she kept her teeth clenched, not allowing him the pleasure of hearing her scream.

"What was that?" Freddy hissed, "I didn't quite hear you."

He then pressed his boot down even harder, nearly crushing Nancy's ribcage flat. At the same time, he grabbed Nancy's left arm by the wrist, extending it behind her back, and pulled.

Nancy saw stars as she found herself unable to breathe, feeling her broken rib bones jabbing into her lungs. She then felt a snap as her arm was ripped out of her shoulder socket. She tried to fight it, but she couldn't help herself; the pain was all too much. She opened her mouth all the way and uttered the loudest scream she had ever screamed.

"Fuckin' A baby girl!" Freddy exclaimed, his palm rubbing the hard bulge in the front of his pants, "Now that's more like it!"

He then grabbed her by her jeans and her shirts, hoisted her up above his head, then threw her down onto the coffee table. Nancy saw red through the blood pouring into her eyes from her busted-open head. She started to try and get back on her feet, but was stopped by the pain of a foot-long splinter of wood was stuck halfway into the outside of her right thigh just above her knee. She tried taking in a breath, then cried out, fresh tears squeezing out from between her eyelids, as she felt her smashed up rib bones jab painfully into her lung. If she took too deep a breath, she could easily puncture a lung.

Freddy sauntered his way over to Nancy, who was growing too weak to move, her body squirming pathetically on the floor in pain. He smiled down at her, then scooped the injured girl up in his arms. He kicked open the door to the basement, then tossed bloody little Nancy down the steps, sending her tumbling down like a sack of potatoes onto the cold, hard cement basement floor below, broken, bleeding, and barely conscious.

She could barely see anything now, but she could feel the warmth from Freddy's body crouching on top of her as he rolled her onto her back. She could feel his nose burying in her hair and heard him inhaling her scent, then felt his hot wet tongue licking up the blood running down her face.

Through her blurry vision and the dimness of the basement, Nancy could see the shape of Freddy's head as he loomed over her, his cold eyes staring down into hers.

"You ever been stabbed before?" Freddy whispered.

He extended his index blade and pressed the tip into the skin of her right shoulder, ever so slowly piercing through the fabric and her flesh, sinking the blade deeper and deeper into her, relishing the sounds of her pained gasps and whimpers, tears running down her cheeks along with the blood flowing from her head.

"Hurts like hell, don't it?" he growled in her ear as he twisted the blade around inside her, making her cry out even louder.

Freddy withdrew his claw and stood upright on his knees and moved his hand to his crotch and he began pulling down his zipper.

"Ready to play little Nancy?" he murmured, that monstrous grin once again on his face as he opened his pants, then reached to pull down Nancy's.

Upon realizing just what he was about to do, adrenaline rushed through Nancy's blood like a bolt of lightning. She gripped the chunk of wood in her leg in her right hand and ripped it out, her adrenaline high leaving her incapable of feeling any pain from it even as blood poured out like a faucet, then stabbed the giant splinter in his left eyeball.

Freddy fell over onto his back, rolling across the floor, screaming in pain and gripping the piece of wood protruding from his eye socket. While Freddy was on the ground suffering, Nancy pulled herself across the floor towards the barbecue grill. She reached out and gripped one of its legs and pulled, tipping it over. The lid fell open and the box of matches and the bottle of lighter fluid spilled out from it.

Meanwhile, Freddy had pulled the hunk of wood from his socket, leaving only a hollow, bleeding crater in his face, bits of splinters still stuck in his flesh. He slowly got on his feet, breathing in heavy, shallow pants, his left hand covering his bleeding socket.

"I am going to reach down your throat," he growled through his teeth, dribble foaming from his lips like a rabid animal, extending his blood-stained steel claws, "and rip you inside out!"

Freddy advanced on Nancy, his claws raised and ready to slice her to ribbons. Once he was close enough, Nancy picked up the lighter fluid and sprayed it directly into his face, blinding him.

"GAHHH! YOU BITCH! YOU FUCKING BITCH!" Freddy hissed as the liquid burned his gaping socket.

Nancy continued spraying Freddy until his entire body was soaked and the bottle was empty. She then took a match from inside the box, struck the match's head against the side until it ignited, then lit the entire box aflame.

"You ready to play, Freddy?" Nancy croaked as she lifted the flaming box.

Freddy stood, frozen, his good eye wide as it saw what was coming to him.

She then tossed the flaming match box at Freddy, hitting him square in the chest, igniting his fluid-soaked body. He then collapsed into a flaming mass on the floor, rolling around in a helpless effort to put out his burning body, wailing and howling.

Nancy turned away from him and pulled herself up the wooden stairs, ready to leave Freddy to burn. After just a couple steps, something gripped Nancy's right ankle. She looked down to see Freddy's flaming hand keeping a firm grasp on her leg, the flames burning her skin. His hat was gone, his head a flaming skull covered in bubbling, molten flesh.

_"Nannn-cyyyy,"_ Freddy groaned, his voice a raspy hiss, black acrid smoke seeping from between his teeth.

"FUCK! OFF!" she screamed before pulling her left leg back and kicking Freddy in the face, knocking him back. His skull cracked against the concrete floor, and he did not move any more.

Nancy let loose a heavy sigh of relief, and continued pulling herself up the stairs. She only made it about halfway up before her head began starting to get light and her body began to feel cold, except for the searing of her foot as it was being consumed by flames.

Before everything went dark, the last thing Nancy heard was the sound of sirens coming closer and closer.

## 21.

_'I'm dying,'_ she thought.

Through the blackness came this white light. It grew and grew, as if Nancy was drifting closer and closer up into it. It wasn't anything like Nancy expected. She expected choirs, music, flowery fields, seeing Jesus in person; something like stuff everyone hears about.

She did hear something though. It was the sound of a steady dull beeping noise fading through. But this was because, as Nancy soon realized, that light wasn't the light at the end of the tunnel. It was fluorescent bulbs.

She found herself awakening in a room of white, lying in a bed with a polyester blanket pulled over her body, covering her up to her chest. She was in a hospital room. Outside, the sky was bright and half-clouded. According to the clock, it was shortly after three o'clock. Beside her bed was an EKG machine, beeping steadily along with her heartbeat. As she took in a deep breath, she hissed as her ribs seemed to be stabbing her from inside. She couldn't move her head, as her neck was bound up in a brace. The inside of her mouth was full with bandages where her missing teeth were. Her left hand reached up to feel the stitches in her forehead and the butterfly stitches in her cheek. As she lifted her arm, she saw an IV needle stuck in a vein on the back of her hand, a strip of white tape keeping it taped down in place. An air tube was taped under her nostrils. She could feel the weight of a cast around her right leg that mended her broken ankle. She ran her fingertips over the stitching keeping the wound in her right thigh sealed.

"I'm alive," she gasped quietly.

She reached around the edge of the bed and grabbed the red call button and pressed on it again and again. In about five seconds an old curly-haired nurse walked in the room. Her eyes behind her thick, red-rimmed glasses widened upon seeing Nancy finally conscious.

"Oh, she's finally awake," she gasped to herself. She then stepped out of the room to grab the phone from behind the counter at the nurse's station. She dialed a number and after a couple beats, she spoke into the phone, "Hello, Officer Campbell please? Yes, this is Nurse Jackson at Springwood Memorial Hospital. It's the Thompson girl. She's awake now. Alright. Good bye." She then hung up the phone before walking back into Nancy's room.

Nancy tried to speak, but her mouth was so dry her voice was merely a weak hiss.

"Here you go dear," Nurse Jackson said as she brought up a glass half-filled with water with a straw in it off the table nearby.

"Drink some of this," she said as she brought the end of the straw close to Nancy's lips, "It'll help."

Nancy pulled the straw in between her lips with her tongue and started sucking down the water, quenching her achingly dry throat.

After swallowing the cool liquid down, she rasped, "What's... what's going on?"

"Officer Campbell will be here soon sweetie," Jackson answered. "Do you need anything else?"

"No, no I'm-" Nancy said, hesitating as she looked down at her damaged body, "Heh, fine."

"Alright then," Jackson said before walking back out of the room.

In no more than five minutes, a mid-thirties man dressed in a navy blue uniform with a gun and gold badge strapped to his waist stormed into the hospital, Roman Campbell.

He walked up to Nurse Jackson, who was sitting behind the desk at the nurse's station. She pointed towards Nancy's room, and he rushed in.

"Oh god, Nancy," he gasped, rushing beside her and falling down to his knees and holding Nancy's hand.

"Hey Roman," Nancy rasped.

"How are you doing?" Roman asked.

"Heh heh," Nancy chuckled dryly, touching the bandages on her forehead, "How do I look?"

"Like you put up one hell of a fight, and won," Roman laughed.

'You should see the other guy.' Nancy thought to herself.

"It was a close call," Roman said, "Real close. You were out for quite a long while."

"How- how long have I been here?" Nancy asked.

"Um, about four days now," Roman answered.

'My god!' Nancy thought. It seemed like just a little while ago that she had collapsed on the stairs. Then she remembered... her father!

"What about my dad?" she asked.

"Your dad..." Roman started, his voice hesitant.

_'Oh god!'_ Nancy thought, a tear rolling down her cheek, _'He's dead! My dad is dead and it's all my fault for pulling Krueger out! All because I thought I could handle it by myself! I'm so stupid!'_

"...is hanging in there. It's pretty bad; he took multiple stab wounds to the abdomen, plus the trauma to the head. He may be here for a while, and it may be a while before he wakes up, and he'll probably have to undergo a load of physical therapy, but it looks like he'll live."

"He's alive?!" Nancy gasped, wiping her cheeks dry.

"Yes ma'am," Roman replied with a half-smile, "That's why we love having him on the force; the guy's tough as nails. It takes a lot to keep him down. I'm glad to see you've inherited that gene," He laughed again and gave her another friendly fist-bump against her shoulder.

"Unfortunately, as good as it is to see you again, I am here on official police business," he said as he pulled up a nearby chair and sat in it before taking out a notepad and pen out of his coat pocket, "I'm gonna need to ask some questions. Do you think you're okay to answer them right now?"

"As good as I'll ever be," Nancy answered, "Fire away."

"Alright," Roman sighed as he held the tip of his pen to the paper of his notepad, "First off, do you remember any of what happened?"

"Um, yeah," Nancy answered, "s-some of it."

"Well, do you think you could give a good description of who attacked you? What he looked like?"

"I... I can't really remember. It was too dark and I got hit pretty hard; it's all still kinda fuzzy."

"Do you think you could describe what happened?"

Nancy proceeded to dictate everything that had happened between her and "the intruder", starting from when she woke up with him on top of her to her fighting him off and setting him on fire. When inquired as to how the guy could have gotten inside the house, she told him it was because she had accidentally left the front door unlocked, which was what had triggered the alarm. She laughed a little on the inside; for years, she had always thought of that security alarm as nothing more than a dumb hassle, but now thanks to it, she lived to prove herself wrong.

She hated having to alter her story, but what else could she tell them? _'Officer, you know that man I killed? Yeah, I actually brought him out from my dream into the real world. Oh, and you wanna know the real twist? That man was actually the ghost of the man who raped me when I was little.'_ They'd lock her up in the loony bin for life.

That was when she finally thought to ask, "Is... is the guy...?"

"Well, by the time the authorities got to your house and found you," he explained to her, "there was barely anything left. Nothing but a smoldering blotch on the floor."

After they were through, an elderly doctor with white hair and plenty of wrinkles walked in.

"I'm sorry detective, but I'm afraid that Nancy needs to return to her rest," he told Roman, "She's going to need plenty of it after the ordeal she's been through."

"She sure will," Roman said as he stood up on his feet, "I'll be seeing you Nancy."

"Okay," Nancy said, "Later Roman."

Roman Campbell waved Nancy goodbye. She raised her IV-connected hand to wave back, and he was gone.

Nurse Jackson then returned with a glass of water with a straw in one hand, and a small plastic cup with an orange pill in it in the other.

"Here's something that'll help you sleep," the doctor told her as the nurse brought the plastic cup to Nancy's lips and tipped it up, allowing the pill to drop inside her mouth. Then the nurse brought the straw to Nancy's mouth. She captured it between her lips and sipped, washing the pill down her esophagus with the cold water.

After she had gulped the pill down, she laid her head back on her pillow. The doctor and nurse left the room, allowing her some privacy.

Nancy sighed a small laugh to herself. She had won. Fred Krueger was gone, for good this time. Her eyes drooped shut, and she continued to keep that victorious smile on her face as the pill took effect, delivering her into the deepest, most peaceful sleep she had ever known.

THE END
