A girl with thick chestnut hair in a ponytail staggers along a metal catwalk, steam rising from below. She pauses, grips the cold railing, and looks down: A dizzying drop terminates in a dull red glow. Is it lava? Fire? Hell? She doesn't know, but she doesn't want to find out.

She follows the walkway down a step of stairs and into a narrow hallway. Pipes and exposed wires run along the walls, while bare lights overhead cast murky pools of illumination on the floor. She is uncharacteristically scared, her heart racing and her brow covered in sweat.

"Lynn!" a voice cries in terror.

It's Lincoln.

She comes to a halt, her body tensing.

"Lynn! Help me!"

She unfreezes. "Linc!"

"Help! He's got me!"

Her heart blasts against her chest when she hears the loud shriek of metal scraping metal followed by dark, demonic laughter. Unthinkingly, she begins to run, her body flooding with adrenaline and her teeth gritting in determination. She doesn't know what lies ahead...she only knows that her brother is in danger and needs her.

Ahead, the hallway ends at an intersection. She comes to a shuffling stop, already beginning to pant, and jerks her head left and right, seeing identical corridors running into forever. Which way, damn it? Which way?

As if in answer, she sees Lincoln being dragged into an open doorway, one arm flailing. "Help me!"

"Lincoln!"

She pounds down the hallway, pumping her arms and legs as fast as she can and tucking her head against her chest to cut down on wind resistance. She doesn't know who has her brother, but she's going to rip them apart when she gets her hands on them. She reaches the doorway and bursts through it; a set of stairs lead down to a landing, and her momentum pushes her toward them. To keep from falling, she leaps, and lands on the landing, her knees bending and her hands touching cold metal. She jumps up, and goes down the rest. She is in another long hallway; the walls of this one are bare, cracked concrete splotched here and there with brown water stains. At the end is a door with a sign. She stops to read it.

HALT. NO WEAK LITTLE GIRLS BEYOND THIS POINT.

She snorts and opens it, but draws back with a gasp. What she sees is hell...literally hell. When she was a little girl, she was terrified of the hellish visions preached from the pulpit of her parents' church. She feared going there herself, and sometimes she would lie awake at night imagining what hell must be like.

And here it was. A blasted moonscape of red soil and fiery skies, the ghastly terrain dotted with dead, black trees like charred skeletons. Tortured sinners were buried in the ground to the chest, their faces burned and twisted in agony, their decaying arms reaching to her as if in supplication. All of her determination, all of her courage, was suddenly gone, and she shook like a leaf in a violent wind.

"Lynn!" Lincoln's voice drifted from deep in the hellworld.

She was hyperventilating now, her hands clutching the front of her jersey. She had to help her brother...he needed her.

"Lynn! Please!"

I can't!

A moaning wind sprang up and washed over her: It stank of burned flesh and death.

"Ahhhh, Lynn, please!"

His voice was high-pitched and warbling. A vision of him being hurt flashed before her eyes, and that decided her: Mustering everything she had, she drew back and took a running start, leaping over the threshold and planting her feet in the soil, kicking up clouds of dust. She moved as quickly as she could, screams, wails, and weeping rising all around her. Tears streamed down her freckled cheeks, and she kept her eyes straight ahead lest she turn and see something so awful it drove her mad.

She reached a pile of blasted rocks, and saw an open door. She ducked inside, and was back where she had started, standing on the catwalk. She whipped her head around, turning in circles. "Lincoln!" she screamed, her voice rebounding. "Lincoln!"

He didn't answer, and she began to cry. "Where are you?"

"Right here, Lynn," he pipped, and she spun, her rising joy crashing when she saw not Lincoln, but someone else...a tall man with a burned face. He was clad in a ragged red and green striped sweater, tattered brown pants, and muddy work boots, a dusty fedora covering the top of his head. He lifted his right arm, and firelight shone on the metal knives affixed to each finger.

Freddy Krueger.

Horror washed through Lynn, and her knees went weak. "No," she muttered, taking a step back and shaking her head, her hand gripping the railing, "no...no..."

Freddy opened his mouth, and Lincoln's voice issued forth. "It's me, Lynn, I swear. I just had a growth spurt...and got burned. I'm so scared. Can I have a hug?"

Freddy sprang, and Lynn reacted on pure instinct, lashing out with her foot and catching him in the stomach. He doubled over, and, grinding her teeth in a mixture of terror and rage, she spun and kicked him across the face, throwing him against the rail. With a dark scream, he went over the side and fell. Lynn rushed over and looked down, her eyes locking with his before he disappeared into the hellish glow.

She released a breath she didn't know she was holding, and turned.

Freddy grabbed her by the front of her jersey and shoved her against the rail. She screamed.

"It's just you and me now, bitch," he said and brought his hand up.

"Fuck you!" Lynn sneered, and spat in his face, a glob of saliva breaking against his nose. He smiled, and to Lynn's unending horror, an abnormally long tongue shot out snake-like and licked it up.

He laughed, and lashed her with it: She cried out with revulsion as its tip danced along her cheek, then down her neck. She thrashed, but Freddy was too strong. "The taste of girl," he said as his tongue slipped down the front of her shirt and under her sports bra. She panicked, and kicked him between the legs.

It had no effect. He simply tilted his head and regarded her with sparkling, fire lit eyes. "Uh-uh," he said, "that burned off a long time ago." He drew his claw arm back, and Lynn knew she was going to die. She closed her eyes and took a series of hitching breaths, using the last of her determination to not give him the satisfaction of seeing her fear. "Say hello to Luna and Luan for me," he said, and...

Beep-beep-beep.

Lynn sat bolt upright in bed, a scream locked in her throat. Her heart was racing and her body was slathered with sweat. Pale, early morning light streamed through the window, painting the room an eerie shade of ghost. In the next bed over, Lucy's breathing was steady and shallow, as it was every night. Lynn glanced at her sister and unconsciously touched her own chest, expecting to find blood and ripped flesh, but finding only her shirt and smooth, unbroken skin below.

Just a dream, that's all, a regular, normal nightmare; Freddy was dead.

This wasn't the first time she dreamed of him, and she wasn't the only one: Lincoln, Lori, and Lola all had at one point or another, and it always turned out to be nothing. Still, there was a protocol, and if there was one thing you could never say about Lynn Loud Jr., it's that she's not a team player. She swung her legs out from under the covers, crept into the hall, and pushed Lisa's door open. The little girl was snuggled under the blankets, her face resting on folded hands. Lynn went over and sat on the edge of the bed: Lisa instantly came awake, her eyes clear.

"It's just me," Lynn said as Lisa reached for her glasses.

"A Freddy dream, I presume?" Lisa asked as she slipped her glasses on.

Lynn nodded.

"Alright," Lisa said. She got up and went over to her lab, where she opened up a drawer and pulled out a pill bottle. She unscrewed the cap, shook one into the palm of her hand, and came back to the bed. Lynn held out her hand, and Lisa dropped a small white capsule into her palm. "You know the drill."

The pill was to be taken a half an hour before bed. It would suppress the REM cycle and prevent dreams. Lisa's rationale was this: While she could not keep Krueger from attacking if he did somehow find his way 'back,' she could at least differentiate between dreams that were harmless...and dreams that were not. If a dream managed to form despite the chemical, it was bad. "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it," Lisa had said. How, Lynn did not know, and she suspected that Lisa didn't either.

"Thanks," Lynn said, and got up. Lisa took a logbook from her nightstand drawer and wrote the pertinent information on a graph chart: LYNN – OCTOBER 9, 2017."

Lisa looked up at her, and Lynn said, "I was in a...I don't know, it looked kind of like a boiler room. There was a catwalk and fire everywhere. I heard Lincoln screaming, and I followed the sound of his voice through a door and into hell. On the other side, Freddy got me. He was using Lincoln's voice."

Lisa nodded and jotted that down. "You said he got you. Does that mean he actually harmed you?"

Lynn shook her head. "My alarm woke me."

"Ah." Lisa added that, then snapped the book closed. "We'll see."

In her bedroom, Rita Loud sat against an overstuffed pillow, her arms crossed over her ample bosom and the last vestiges of the previous night's dreams swirling in her mind like acrid smoke. Next to her, her husband was a lump under the blankets, his breathing slow and regular. Rita was tempted to wake him so she could talk to him...or let him hold her and cover the back of her neck in comforting kisses, but he got home late from work last night, and was heading in early today, so she let him sleep.

She was a grown woman. She could deal with a nightmare on her own.

Tears came to her eyes as she remembered it. She was a little girl in a white dress and pigtails, and she was lost in the shadowy corridors of a house she didn't recognize. Ratty curtains hanging over broken windows fluttered in a cold, stale wind, and water dripped from the ceiling. The walls were black and skeletal, and debris littered the floor. She was not scared. In fact, she felt an inner peace that she had not known since she was a child.

At the end of the hall, she opened a door and walked into a room that was different from the rest of the house. It was dusty but warmly lit and bore no traces of the fire that apparently ravaged everything else. A long work bench ran along a far wall, and above it was a pegboard on which hung dozens of strange contraptions. Rita cocked her head curiously and went to the bench. As she drew closer, she realized that they were gloves, each retrofitted with knives: Long knives, skinny knives, blades shaped like cork-screws, blades that were really spikes. The flickering light of an oil lamp gleamed on cold steel, and Rita began to feel fear rising in her chest.

Framed newspaper articles hung proudly on either side of the pegboard. SPRINGWOOD SLASHER STRIKES AGAIN, blared one headlight. MISSING CHILD FOUND SLAIN, screamed another.

She heard something behind her, and spun with a tiny "Eeep!"

A man with a narrow face stood in the doorway, deep crow's feet spreading from faded blue eyes. His nose was hooked, and his dull blonde hair was receding back from his forehead. He wore a long black trench coat over a red and green striped sweater, a fedora clutched in his hand.

He smiled coldly, and Rita took a step back, bumping into the edge of the table. "Rita," he drew in a tone a parent might use with a naughty child, "you shouldn't be in here."

Rita opened her mouth to reply, but her lips trembled and she started to cry.

"Awww," the man said. He tossed the hat aside and came forward. "I'm not going to hurt you."

She turned to run, but suddenly the scene changed, and she was standing in what appeared to be a wide ballroom. The walls were black and decayed. Curtains fluttered. Her heart clutched, and when she heard a shuffling footfall behind her, she turned. A figure emerged from the shadows, and when Rita saw who it was, her entire body was wracked with pins and needles.

"L-Luan?"

Rita was a child...but she recognized her daughter, and felt again the flood of agony that always accompanied memories of her. You see...Luan was dead...died mysteriously in the night, followed several days later by Luna.

Luan was dressed as she always was in Rita's memory: White blouse, yellow skirt with thin black pinstripes, and knee high socks. A little pink flower was affixed to her shirt. She smiled, cold moonlight glinting on her braces. "Hey, Mom," she said happily.

Tears sprang to Rita's eyes, and she tried to fight them back but couldn't. Luan was dead...but somehow, here she was, alive and whole. "C-Come here, baby," Rita wept, opening her arms. Luan's smile widened and she went to her mother. Rita only came up to Luan's waist, but she hugged her daughter's legs as tightly as she could, crying against her skirt.

"It's okay, Mom," Luan said, "I'm back...and as long as you keep dreaming of me, I'll only get stronger." She laughed, her voice changing, becoming dark, deep. Rita's heart seized, and she pulled away from the girl, gasping when she saw that she had changed. She now wore a red and green striped sweater and black pants. A fedora sat atop her head, and her eyes blazed with the fires of hell.

"L-Luan?"

"Fear is what keeps me keepin on," Luan said in a sinister voice that was not her own. She took a step forward, and Rita fell back a step. "Fear is what makes me the man of your dreams...get it?"

Luan threw up her right hand, and Rita saw the blades. She screamed, and when she came awake, she was trembling. That was almost two hours ago, and in that time she hadn't moved from her spot...she couldn't say why, but she was afraid to get up...afraid that a clawed hand would shoot out from under the bed and grab her ankle...afraid that she would fall and that she would see Luan's rotted face, her empty eye-sockets squirming with maggots and her shrunken lips peeled back to reveal too big teeth.

Presently she folded her hands over her face and fought against the emotion welling in her. Losing Luan, then Luna, had been hard on her. For nearly three months she couldn't sleep without a Valium, and when she was awake, she couldn't bring herself to get out of bed; everywhere she looked she was reminded of her lost daughters. Their faces smiled from framed photos, and every time she saw them, she couldn't stop herself from wondering what they looked like right now...six feet down...in leaky coffins...

She had other children, and they needed their mother; that was the only thing that kept her from swallowing the whole bottle of Valium and downing it with whiskey to escape the pain, was the only thing that pulled her from the pit of despair she had fallen into.

She had to be strong, for them.

Even though she was afraid, she got up.