Chapter IV, Insidious

"Damn." She forced her head to turn and her neck made a ghastly cracking noise.

"Dude, Lolly!" Tara came running from her room, nearly tripping over Amber's work shoes.

"Huh?" Amber squinted one eye as she attempted to see her friend clearly without her glasses on.

"I had the most insane dream last night!" Tara said, sitting on the coffee table.

"Oh great." Amber groaned, slowly leaning back into the couch. She had the unsettling feeling that what she dreamt last night wasn't just a dream.

Tara went on explaining eloquently how vivid her dream was-how Hannah and Amber were both a part of it, how they were each pulled into the boiler room to meet Freddy where he spoke of his astute plans to reap vengeance on "that chick from Freddy VS Jason!" She shrieked avidly, jumping to her feet to pace around the table.

Amber looked up at her friend with unease. "I need a cigarette." She said before slowly getting up and digging into the pocket of her denim jacked that lied in a heap on the arm of the couch.

"I… don't think it was just a dream, Tara." She poked a Newport between her lips and lit it. She took a long, dramatic drag from her cigarette before sighing out a cloud of smoke.

Tara stared at Amber questioningly. "What are you, crazy?"

"No, I'm serious. I had the exact same dream, and I bet Hannah did too. I don't think Freddy's lying."

"Why not? It's not unlike him. If he really is real, then he's probably just fucking with us so he can kill us later." Tara said.

"It's not like we can avoid it either way, if he's real, so why not go along with it? Nobody ever ended up surviving in the movies, so it won't do anything but buy us some time if we try to stop him. I say we do it… 'cause I hate that blond bimbo anyway."

"We don't have anything to lose." Amber's words were followed by a ribbon of smoke that slithered from her lips.

"Amber!" Hannah shouted from the hallway as she tripped over her own feet as she ran into the living room. "Let me guess: you had this insane dream last night, I was in it, Tara was in it, blah-blah-blah." Amber rolled her eyes and bobbed her head side to side.

"We know. Now… we just got to figure out how to find this Lori bitch." Amber pulled out her phone from her back pocket and checked her messages.

"That should be easy for you, Lolly. You're great at stalking." Tara said, gesturing her hand toward Amber with a smile.

"Yeah!" Hannah agreed before quickly falling into a cross legged sitting position on the floor.

"Oh shit… what's today?" Amber asked with a rushed tone.

"Monday?" Tara said.

"Oh, good I'm off today." Amber exhaled in relief.

"Let me get my laptop and see what I can find on Lori… if I can even remember her last name."

"Wait, I have a question." Hannah said before Amber got up.

"If those drugs are in the Benadryl you've been taking then how come we dreamt about Freddy last night?" She pried.

"You know what…" Amber ran a hand over her messy hair.

"I bet it's because the past week or so I've been taking Motrin PM instead. That's probably why."

"That doesn't explain why all three of us dreamt of him. Aren't we all pumped full of Hypnocil and Propranolol?" Tara questioned.

"Well, maybe it only took one of us for him to get to all of us." Amber replied, shrugging.

Tara and Hannah followed Amber into her room. Amber jumped onto her bed after grabbing her laptop from her desk. "Let's see… what was her last name…" Amber tapped her forefinger on her chin, thinking deeply.

"What was it…"

Her thoughts raced as she tried to remember when it suddenly hit her. She searched Lori

Campbell on White Pages, for Springwood, Ohio.

Lori jerked awake, kicking the covers from her curvaceous form.

"Whoa, hey, are you ok?" Will's tender voice promptly calmed Lori from her waking struggle.

"Yeah, just a bad dream…" She replied, motioning toward the bottle of Hypnocil that she kept on her nightstand. "I guess it wore off." Lori complained, her voice rough and groggy.

"Lori, you need to stop worrying. He's not coming back… it's been eight years. He's dead and gone, for good." Will assured her, petting her disheveled blond hair

"I know." Lori forced herself to smile and nodded. She slid her legs from beneath the blanket and stood up.

"Want me to make you breakfast?" Will offered, getting out of bed to meet her at the bedroom door. "Okay," Lori agreed.

"Holy shit, she still lives there…" Amber eyed the address on her computer screen.

"On Elm Street?" Tara asked, edging closer over Amber's shoulder to get a better view of her laptop.

"God bless the white pages." Amber gave her computer a quick peck on the screen before folding it shut.

"So, how're we gonna get there?" Hannah queried, toeing at her flipflops.

"My phone has a GPS on it, no big deal." Amber smiled wide, holding her phone up for her friends to see.

"Hold up. What exactly does Freddy want us to do when we get there?" Tara gave Amber a look of inquisition as she sat down on the bed, her legs folded beneath her.

Amber paused for a moment and thought about Tara's question. "Well, he said he wants us to spread fear… so, maybe we need to do something to remind her of where her place is on the food chain." She smirked.

"And how do you suggest we do that?" Hannah had more sarcasm in her tone than genuine speculation.

"Well," Amber started. "I'm going to assume that Lori's still taking Hyponocil on a daily basis… so what we need to do first is take that shit away from her. How we're going to do that, I have no idea… but then, we need to send her a little message… and I'm not talkin' about pulling some stupid prank. I mean we need to get our message across, that we mean business… that Freddy means business."

"Like?" Tara leaned in further with more curiosity.

"I don't know." Amber sighed.

"This is kind of hard to do… you know, if we don't want to get caught anyway." Hannah pursed her lips.

"I really can't think of anything, you guys. We need to brainstorm."

"Oh! What if… we get to the people who don't know about Freddy? Maybe we could get our message across… if Freddy starts killing again. Then after Lori's scared shitless, we can get to her." Tara said.

"Good idea… Freddy did say we needed to spread fear. That is technically part of the plan." Amber grinned.

"Okay, so, how are we gonna scare people? Tell them that a crazy guy who looks like a burnt up pizza in a Christmas sweater is gonna stab them in their dreams with his finger-knives?" Hannah laughed at herself.

"Hey!" Amber frowned briefly before an insidious initiative dug at the inner core of her mind. "Hey Hannah," she began, a smile curving along her full lips.

"Yeah?" Hannah looked at Amber with interest.

"Kam doesn't know about Freddy, does he?" Amber's smile bloomed into an outright malicious grin. Hannah smirked-she knew exactly what Amber had in mind.

"Why don't we make a phone call?" Amber proposed, her iniquitous stare pin-balled between Hannah and Tara. "Let's strike some fear up in him like a match."

"Should be easy, Kam's a pussy as it is." Hannah giggled excitedly.

"Hello?" Kameran answered, intrigued by the blocked number that appeared on his caller ID.

"One, two… Freddy's coming for you…" Tara replied, her voice pitched high like a little girl's, as she tried not to laugh.

"Who's this?" Kameran said, becoming frustrated.

"Three, four… better lock your door." Amber said, gripping the phone close to her mouth, her voice barely even a whisper as she sang the jump rope rhyme oh-so eerily.

Kameran hung up with an aggravated sigh.

The three girls giggled at his reaction. "Okay, let's give it five minutes, then we'll call back." Amber had the adept look of victory on her face.

"Five, six, grab your crucifix…" Tara and Amber sang in unison, their childlike voices made the hair on the nape of Kameran's neck stand up straight.

"Leave me alone!" He hung up again, and again they called to sing another verse of the limerick.

"Seven, eight… gonna stay up late!" Hannah joined Amber and Tara, that time.

Kameran didn't say anything before he hung up, that time.

"Nine…" Amber whispered. "Ten," Tara hissed. "Never sleep again." The three purred tauntingly before they heard the click that came before the dial tone.

They'd gone an hour before calling again to shout "Freddy!" into the phone. Amber made sure to call a few times with a blood-curdling scream and hanging up before Kameran got the chance to.

"Freddy's back!" Amber screeched into the phone. That was the last time they'd called that night.

"Well, I think we got the message across… hopefully Freddy'll be proud." Amber smiled lucratively as she lied back on the couch. They spent their entire day in the house, torturing Hannah's self-proclaimed friend with creepy phone calls, spaced out through the afternoon and evening.

Kameran sat in the opaque repression of his bedroom; the only source of light glowed conspicuously from his computer monitor, with an alabaster fluorescence that washed over the surface of his desk. It was nearing 3:00 in the morning and the monotonous whirr of the air conditioner subsequently droned into the only thing he could hear-the tune of that spine-chilling song his prank caller's had badgered him with earlier in the day, played through his mind like a broken record.

His eyes narrowed into glinting slits that reflected the images on the computer screen as he strived to stay awake-in tandem with paying close attention to the gay porn he had been ogling for over an hour.

He was palming the crotch of his jeans roughly as he scrolled through the vulgar display of pornography. However exhausted from lack of sleep for well over twenty-four hours due to a project he had previously been working on for college, Kameran was well-determined to finish what he had started. He slipped a hand into his jeans and licked his lips just as he clicked on a video. His eyelids were getting heavier but his adrenalin was pumping, particularly as the video started and the sound of two middle-aged men moaning climactically reverberated against the thin walls of his room.

Suddenly, a new window popped up on Kameran's internet browser and the loud keening of the two fornicating thespians was deluged by a scraping tenor that perforated Kameran's ears.

A blurry specter of a silhouette began to form within the blank page that had imposed on Kameran's lewd activity. His stare then fixated on the shadow that constituted itself into a man.

"Oh, am I interrupting?"

Kameran's eyes grew wide with awe as the man reached out from his monitor, to reveal himself with a twisted smile.

"Who the fuck are you?" Kameran shouted, yanking his hand from the restriction of his pants.

"Your worst nightmare," Freddy's raving laughter inundated anything within earshot as he swiped his blades across Kameran's shirt, leaving four razor-straight slashes in their course.

Kameran fell out of his computer chair, and when he looked back up to the monitor, Freddy was gone. He let out a sigh of relief only for his next breath to hitch in his throat as something from behind lifted him from the ground and threw him into the wall. Kameran hit the wall face first, his nose breaking on impact.

"You know what they say about doing that, don't you Kam?" Freddy cackled, flipping Kameran around by the shoulder, so that they were face to face.

"It'll make you go blind!"

He drove his fore and middle-bladed fingers into Kameran's eyes, plunging the knives deep into his skull. The sound of his blades gritting against bone was the last thing Kameran heard before he slumped into a lifeless heap onto the floor.

Freddy tore his hand away from the fresh cadaver; Kameran's lifeless body lied flaccid and the blood from his gouged eye sockets accumulated around his face in a pool on the floor.

"This, is just the beginning." Freddy trilled, flexing his metal fashioned hand.