Author's note: Attention! This chapter contains explicit descriptions of gore and mutilation! Not suitable for the sensitive readers among us (if there are any at all) ;-)
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Dream world
"One, two – Freddy's coming for you! Three, four – better lock your door! Five, six – grab your crucifix! Nine, ten – never sleep again!"
The sound of the old nursery rhyme trailed through the air. Sarah, dressed in a bleached jeans and a cushy black and pink striped t-shirt, stood at a crossroad to Elm Street, but even from this distance she could hear the tune. She had heard of that song – Freddy's song – before, but it was the first time she really heard it sung by someone. As if the parents in Springwood feared that singing this song could already conjure up Freddy from hell.
To the right of her stood the road sign, but the normally proper sign was badly damaged. The post was battered and the writing itself was not printed in the usual way but looked like it was scratched in the metal with crimson letters. Sarah had a long view on the road sign, then she sighed and began to walk down the long road. In her hand she held two computer discs; much to her relief she had been able to take them with her in her dream, which hopefully would somewhat increase her chances of survival. The longer she walked down the street the clearer she heard the haunting song, and finally she could see the singers: two little girls and a small boy, all about the age of ten, played at skipping rope. They were all dressed in an old-fashioned way, the girls in pure white dresses with pink and yellow ribbons in their hair, and the boy with a grey trouser, a white shirt, a dark green slipover and even a small necktie. The girls were singing the song over and over again while the boy was skipping between them.
When Sarah came closer, walking across the green grass, the children interrupted their play and stared at her.
"Hello!" greeted Sarah them smiling, "How are you?"
The two girls giggled childish, whereas the boy said with a black look: "You better go! He's home!"
He pointed to the neat white house behind him. It had a red door, windows with pretty curtains and a green roof, and its house number showed 1428. Freddy's house. Sarah glanced at the house. She was somewhat surprised to see it in such a good condition, after what she had seen in her last nightmare she had expected it to look more rotten and decayed. Perhaps this is how it looked before. Before it became the home of a dream demon with a propensity to gore, trash and filthiness.
"Don't be afraid, lad. I have an appointment with Freddy. He's awaiting me." Sarah said and turned back to the three children, letting out an appalled scream in the next moment. The three kids, which had been so pretty and neat one moment before, were now overflowed with shimmering blood and awfully mutilated. One of the girls had her eyes displaced, leaving only two dreadful empty holes. One of her ears was missing, the other looked as if someone had brutally ripped off the earring. Her throat was cut, pulsating blood still flowing out of the deep gash. Both arms seemed to be broken, as well as all fingers, which stuck out in grotesque angels. Furthermore, there were deep slashes all over her body, slashes only one weapon could cause: Freddy's razor glove. The second girl had the same slash marks on her body. In addition to that her right wrist was broken, her hand dangling loose on it. The fingernails of her left hand had been pulled out violently, and from the bruised fingers blood was still dropping. But the worst was her belly. Ripped open with an unbelievable force her guts were gushing out like a slimily and horrible stinking hose. The boy, however, was the most disgusting of all three. Besides the characteristic slashes his arms and chest were skinned, so that the raw bloody flesh and even some muscles were visible. His face was completely burned, leaving nothing left but black carbonized tissue in a vague human form.
"We are his children! Come and join us!" said the eyeless girl and started to tumble blindly towards Sarah, followed by her two dead playmates which started to sing Freddy's song again. In utter shock Sarah stumbled back, trying hard not to puke on the lawn as her stomach revolted badly in face of such cruel mutilations. Oh my god, they are his victims, the ones he killed when he was still alive! He tortured them to death!
Whirling around as fast as she could she ran terrified to the Elm Street house, barely noticing that is was not clean and tidy anymore but near-derelict with nailed up windows, rotten walls and a holey roof. The door was already open, and so she stormed right into the house, slamming the door so hard behind her that it trembled in the door frame. Resting against the shut door and breathing heavily she tried to calm down again, but then she noticed the hammering bass drum of some awesome earpiercing music coming from the living room. To Sarah it sounded like some kind of heavy metal, nothing she preferred to hear, especially not in such a full volume. Slowly she walked through the dusty hall, stopping only brief in front of the door to the living room before she took a deep breath, opened it and entered the room.
The deafening music hit her almost immediately, making her cover her ears with her hands, but since she was still holding the two discs in one hand it was kind of difficult. Hastily she scanned the room for Freddy, but he wasn't there. The only noticeable thing she saw was the hi-fi system responsible for this horrible noise standing in one corner of the room. With a few steps she crossed the room and pressed the stop button of the CD-player. Instantly the terrible din was replaced by wonderful silence. Sighing with relief Sarah uncovered her ears, when suddenly a steel bladed hand grabbed her at her shoulder.
"Who the fuck allowed you to shut off the music, bitch?" snarled the deep, guttural voice of Freddy Krueger right behind her. Startled Sarah dropped the computer discs and spun around.
"Damn, Freddy, you scared me almost do death!" she shouted and bent down to pick up the discs again. Freddy, who was dressed in his usual attire, closed up dangerously near and grinned mischievously:
"Too bad only almost. And by the way, coozie, you're late, again."
"Oh sorry that I didn't materialize right into your homey living place, but I had to walk down two blocks, and when I finally got here I was hold up by your cute little welcome committee outside before they turned into some horrible mutilated corpses, which I can tell you was the most disgusting thing I ever saw. Anyway, you can now go on with arguing, insulting me like usually, or you can let me start working on your computer before the night is over and I awake again. So?"
Sarah crossed her arms and gave Freddy a questioning look. Freddy scowled back at her, tapping restless with his blades against his chest as if he had to fight back the urgent need to thrust them deep into her stomach. But finally he stepped aside and grumbled: "Go ahead!"
Walking over to the already running computer Sarah put some of the trash aside that was still all around the messed up table, then she put one of the discs in the CD-ROM drive. The screen and menus looked all a bit different than she was used to, not to mention the crudity of the background picture showing a bound and terrible beaten up naked woman. But after some trying she got along with the system and restarted it.
"What are you doing now?" asked Freddy, who had followed her to the computer. Without turning away from the rebooting machine Sarah explained: "I want to do a complete virus scan, but since the whole system is infected I have to start the computer from my clean disc to remove all malicious stuff."
She waited until the rescuing operating system from her disc had finished to load, then she started the first virus scan. Almost immediately there were several alerts, which counted up to more than three hundred in just a few minutes.
"Well, this will take some time." said Sarah and leaned back in the chair. Freddy however frowned and asked impatiently: "Some time? Can't you make this fucking thing work faster? Or at least do something else in the damn meantime?"
Shaking her head Sarah replied: "No, sorry, we have to wait. I know that patience is none of your virtues, but I can't do anything until the scan is finished. But we… we can just talk awhile in the meanwhile."
"Talk?" Freddy gave her a look that left no doubt how silly he found her idea, "I don't talk, I kill!"
"Sure, I know. But right now you ain't killing anyone, especially not me. So what's the deal if we just talk a bit?"
"The deal is that I would have to talk to you sassy nag then, and hell, I have absolutely no desire for that!"
By saying this Freddy turned around and walked over to the couch, where he plugged on the video game console to the television and started to play his favorite Spencer-game. Sarah watched him a while from the distance, but the game he was playing seemed to her just mean and nasty, and so she concentrated back onto the computer and checked the progress of the virus scan.
About half an hour later, notwithstanding the fact that time in dreams wasn't as constant as in reality, the scan was finally completed. The result went even beyond Sarah's worst expectations, showing about ten thousand infected files with a total of about a hundred and fifty different computer viruses, trojans, worms and other spyware.
"Uh, Freddy?" Sarah called, interrupting Freddy in his crazy game.
"What, bitch?" he shouted back, still busy fighting the poor Spencer guy on the television screen.
"Well, the scan is done. And I think you better come and have a look at this!"
With an angry groaning Freddy threw the game controller aside and came over to Sarah.
"Now, brat, what is it that I have to give up my game only two hundred fucking points away from a new record?"
Sarah ignored his rude tone and pointed to the computer screen instead.
"See, you got more than ten thousand infected files on your computer, and my anti-virus program removed most of them. But unfortunately this is not enough, because when there is still just one virus left it will start to spread again, ending in the same disastrous result as before."
"So do you wanna tell me that all the damn waiting was for nothing, and that you, my so-called computer expert, aren't able to fix my system? 'Cause that would be too bad for you, you know?" said Freddy obviously annoyed and fanned out his blades in a threatening gesture. Quickly Sarah raised her hands.
"No, no, no! I'm not saying that I can't repair your computer. I'm just telling that it will be more difficult than I thought. I'll have to do a complete new installation of your system."
"A new installation? Does it go fast or…?" asked Freddy and twitched with his steel blades in the prospect of a chance for an early kill.
"Well, that depends. If you have already made a backup of your personal files and if you have the original installation discs right here, then it will probably take only some hours. But otherwise…" Sarah didn't speak any further but gave him a broad smile, knowing only too well that it was more than unlikely that Freddy had already done these things and that she was destroying his anticipation of killing her right now. The piercing glance of Freddy and the curses he mumbled through his gritted teeth hence proved her that she was right.
"I don't have any damned fucking discs!" he finally avowed. Sarah had almost expected this, nothing on Freddy's computer seemed to be legally obtained – not very astonishing considering the fact that there were hardly any official computer stores in the dream world or in hell.
"Why am I not surprised by that?" she asked herself rhetorical and ejected her disc from the computer drive, "Okay, then I have to bring my own discs tomorrow night and we continue then."
She wanted to stand up, but Freddy grabbed her on her shoulders and pressed her back on the chair, running his blades deceptively soft over her neck while hissing raspy: "You aren't just playing for time, are you? 'Cause if I find out that all this crap isn't necessary then I'll make sure that you will look much worse than the three beauties from outside, got it?"
The cold touch of metal on her skin gave Sarah the creeps, and unwillingly a slight tremor sneaked into her voice as she said: "I got it. But believe me, I can imagine much better ways of spending my dreams than working on a totally damaged system while you are constantly insulting and threatening me! So please, if you don't object, I'd like to go now and wake up!"
She wriggled out of his grip, took her discs and stepped aside, but then she turned around to Freddy again and asked: "How can I wake up willfully by myself? I don't want to sit somewhere, doing nothing, until I wake up some time eventually."
With a mocking chuckle Freddy swaggered slowly to her, circling around her like a tiger around his prey.
"You can't, bitch, you haven't the dream power for that. However, there is one way to wake up…"
"Which way?" asked Sarah uneasy. Freddy stopped right behind her, his horrible blemished face so close to her side that she couldn't see the perverted grin on it as he whispered in her ear:
"Pain!"
In the next moment, before Sarah could even move a muscle, he poked one of his razor knifes deep into her right shoulder. Sarah screamed with pain as warm blood started to run down her arm, and with the cruel cackling laughter of Freddy in her ears she woke up and vanished from the dream world at last.