A/N: I have some wonderful news that none of you probably care about, but I'm going to force it down your throats anyway:
I gutted a piggy!
Alright, settle down, it isn't as bad as you think. It was dissection day in my biology class. I got to cut it open, and I was channeling Freddy the whole time. Our professor told us we could slice open the skull and examine the brain if we wanted to, but it wasn't a requirement. So I did it (in the name of science, of course). Me and one of the guys in my group decided to remove it, and we ended up mutilating the entire head pretty badly before we finally got the brain out.
The guy asked this squeamish girl who had been standing a few feet from us if she wanted a turn with the scalpel, and she said "No way! It has a face!"
And I, being the sensitive soul that I am, couldn't help but reply, "not anymore."
It was a good day.
But before we go any further, let me send a huge thank you to Darkness Takes Over and thatredheadedchick for reviewing chapter 5. That pig mutilation was for you guys. *Clasps hand over heart*
Anyways, on to the story!
DISCLAIMER: I don't own A Nightmare on Elm Street or any of its characters.
WARNING: CERTAIN CHAPTERS OF THE FOLLOWING STORY WILL CONTAIN GRAPHIC SEXUAL CONTENT, GRAPHIC VIOLENCE, AND ADULT LANGUAGE. TO AVOID SPOILERS, THERE WILL NOT BE INDIVIDUAL WARNINGS FOR EACH CHAPTER.
Chapter Six: Common Trauma
The rock wall was rutted and hard against her back, but Nancy was tired of standing. Tired of pacing. She sunk down and drew in her knees, cradling herself as she looked around the tiny cave that Krueger had locked her in. Stalactites hung from the low ceiling like jagged stone icicles, and the open end of the alcove was barred off like a tiny jail cell. On the other side of a narrow walkway she saw rows of identical cells with hushed darkness hanging thick behind the bars. If anyone else were trapped in here with her, they weren't making a sound. But she didn't mind the silence. It helped her think.
Nothing is more difficult for a conscious mind to accept than the fact that it is dead. The act of thinking is the evidence that the mind clings to as it screams in protest, and it is left with two choices: continue to reject its death, or accept that death is not what it imagined. That it's not the end.
She didn't want to believe what that bastard told her, but his words were like the first cracks in the dam that had kept reality at bay, branching out in all directions until it breaks down the concrete wall and releases the flood. The memories were coming back, and there was no way to deny it. She saw it all in flashes: the first night Freddy crawled into her dreams. That perverted nursery rhyme playing over and over in her head. And the running. She had run from him for so long, wasting away on caffeine and adderall. She had tried to tell someone, but no one believed her. Not Tina. Not Glen. Not even her own father, who had stood and said nothing while the paramedics strapped her - screaming, struggling, flailing - onto a gurney and loaded her into the ambulance. He had promised her that she'd only be staying at Westin hills for a little while, and he had been right. Because Freddy had sliced open her throat as soon as they'd sedated her on the second day.
She curled up tighter on the rocky floor, touching her neck and knowing that the cut was not there anymore. This wasn't her body; her body was probably rotting under a headstone in the Springwood Cemetery. This was only her soul.
Leaning her head back on the cave wall, she took a deep breath. Her mind was spinning. How long has she been here? Weeks? Months? Years? She prayed that Freddy hadn't gotten to Glen or Tina. It had crossed her mind that they might be in the cells across from her, but she was too scared to call out.
She shook off those thoughts and set her mind to separating reality from lies. As real as it had felt, she knew everything she'd seen and heard during her most recent stint in Westin Hills had been a fabrication. Freddy had stitched it together from pieces of her brief experience with the hospital, and no doubt mixed in a heaping helping of his own bullshit to screw with her head.
She shuddered, remembering how she'd kissed Glen and hugged Tina in the shower. But that wasn't Glen she kissed and it wasn't Tina she'd pressed her naked body against.
It was Freddy the whole time.
He was every nurse, every orderly. He was Rod and Glen and Tina and Kevin Murdock. He was Max. He was the Doctor. None of it was real.
…Right?
The sides of her head throbbed, unable to process the thoughts pulsing through it. The more she tried to think, the blurrier everything became. All she could do was clutch her forehead and hope that her friends were okay.
Footsteps jolted her from her thoughts. Half of her wanted to sink back into the shadows of the tiny jail cell and hide, but her curiosity urged her forward. She crawled up to the bars and looked out in the direction of the weak light at the entrance.
The tapping of shoes on the dirty stone ground echoed throughout the cavern, reverberating off the jagged walls. Her fingers trembled as she wrapped them around the bars and pressed her face into the gap between them, trying to see around the curve in the walkway. The top of a shadow stretched across the ground. It got closer with every step. Every fiber in her muscles was screaming at her to cower back, but she made herself stay. She wouldn't give that motherfucker the satisfaction of seeing her scared.
The head, neck and shoulders of the long shadow fell across the dirt. When the person stepped around the bend, she didn't trust her own eyes. It wasn't Freddy.
It was a little girl.
She stood like a doll in a white lace dress and a pair of black Mary Janes. The skirt puffed around her legs, falling in airy, gauzy layers. The girl twisted her finger into one of her brown plaited pigtails and looked at Nancy with eyes that seemed too old to belong to a child.
"Welcome back," the little girl said. "I missed you."
Nancy's brow furrowed in confusion. "What are you talking about? Who are you?"
"It's okay. I knew he would make you forget about me," she said. Her words came out with a hint of sadness.
As she studied her, Nancy thought that she did seem familiar. Then all at once, she saw in her mind the white skirt bouncing around the child's legs as she leapt over the curve of the jump rope. She heard the other children chant that nursery rhyme as the little girl's braids floated around her head at the height of the jump. The sidewalk they played on was covered in chalk drawings and hopscotch boards. The scene slowed down and the color drained from everything, leaving the child suspended in the air and the rope frozen in mid-swing.
She had seen the girl before. In her nightmares.
"Wait," Nancy said. "I think I do remember you."
"But you don't remember the first time he locked you up in here," the girl said, running her little hand over the rusty bars. The metal whispered under her fingertips.
"I've been here before?" Nancy asked. "When?"
"When he killed you. Before he put your soul in that place."
"You mean his fucked up version of Westin Hills."
"Yeah," said the little girl. "And he's going to put you back in there again, and then you'll forget all about me a second time."
"What?" Nancy said, bolting up onto her feet. She clutched the bars and they rattled from the weight thrown against them. The small child had to crane her neck back to look up at Nancy.
"He told me that's what he's using you for. He likes to chase you and catch you; he's going to do it again, and again, and again."
"Not if I have anything to say about it," Nancy shouted. Her feet left tracks in the dirt as she paced back and forth in front of the bars like a caged tiger. Her skin flushed red, and the rage simmering behind her blue eyes was almost enough to hide the fear.
"You don't," the little girl replied flatly. "You can't stop him. Not unless…"
"Unless what?"
The girl shook her head and looked down at her shiny shoes, scuffing them against the dirt. "Forget I said anything. It would only make things worse for you."
"I can't imagine anything being much worse than this," Nancy said. She stared at the child with an earnest anger.
"You don't have much of an imagination, then."
"Please," Nancy begged, "please just tell me. What's the worst that could happen? I'm already dead."
The girl heaved a sigh. "Alright. But if it ends the way I think it will, it'll be your own fault. Don't blame me."
"I won't," Nancy said, touching the girl's fingers through the bars. The child pulled her hand away and looked off to the side.
"There's a way to get out of here, but it's not easy."
Nancy's gaze narrowed and locked on the child. "What do you mean 'out of here'?"
"Out of the Dreamscape. To the place you were supposed to go."
"Heaven?"
"Maybe. I don't know," said the girl.
"How do we escape?" asked Nancy.
"You can't escape," replied the child, rolling her eyes.
"But you just said-"
"I said you can get out. That's not the same thing as escaping."
Nancy shook her head, making the waves of her tangled brown hair lash at her cheeks. "You're not making any sense."
"If you want to leave the Dreamscape, Freddy has to let you out."
"And how the hell am I going to make him do that?" Nancy shouted, frustration thinning her voice.
"That's why I told you it's not easy," the child said. "But it's not impossible, either. There's something he wants that he can't do on his own."
"What do I have to do?"
"You have to find him and give him a reason not to drag you right back here," said the girl. "Come closer."
Nancy tilted her head to the side and crouched, pressing it against the bars. The little girl cupped her hands around her mouth and whispered something into her ear. Nancy's expression flashed from shock to confusion.
"That sounds insane," Nancy said.
"I know it does, but there's no other way."
"What if he doesn't agree?"
Whatever small amount of light left in the little girl's eyes vanished. They became dark and hollow, revealing thoughts that no child should ever have to think. "Then he'll put you inside his chest with the others. You don't want to go in there."
Nancy wanted to ask the girl what she was talking about, but she bit her tongue. Something in the child's face told her that she had spoken from experience. A horrifying experience.
The girl noticed the confusion that Nancy was trying to hide. "Do you want to know what's inside his chest?" she asked in the same flat voice from before.
All Nancy could do was give a single nod.
"Hell," said the child. And neither spoke another word about it.
The girl went to the lock on the bars and slipped a silver key out from behind her ear. She stuck it into the keyhole, and it turned with a click. The wide door of bars creaked open under its own weight as the child stepped back.
"Come on," she said, motioning Nancy forward.
The child had started to walk back toward the entrance of the cave, leaving Nancy to follow at her leisure.
"Wait," Nancy called. "What's your name?"
The girl stopped and turned to her, and her voice sounded as distant as an old woman recalling her youth. "Anne Foster."
The name flipped a switch in Nancy's mind, flooding another section of her memories with light. She saw herself hunched over a microfilm reader in the library. The blacked out old newspapers on record that she had read when the nightmares started were scrolling by in front of her. The earliest censored article had a black and white photograph of a little girl with dark plaited pigtails. The bold black headline shouted "ELM STREET CHILD MISSING." A caption with her name and age was printed below the photo: Anne Foster, six years old. The first victim of the Springwood Slasher.
Nancy caught up to her as she was stepping out through the mouth of the cave. "How will I find him?"
Anne kicked a rock and it skipped across the dusty ground. Her back was to Nancy. "He likes to be alone after a kill so he can sharpen his claws. He might make it impossible to reach him," she said.
"Where is he?" Nancy insisted.
The child shook her head. "It doesn't work like that here. The ground stretches and shrinks with a twitch of his finger. We're standing in the palm of his hand, so just start walking. And be careful."
A dozen questions popped into Nancy's head, but before she could ask any of them, Anne started backing towards her. She looked all around, pigtails whipping against her neck and eyes wide and watery as if she alone could hear a howling wolf near by. She ran back into the cave without saying goodbye, her white dress being swallowed last by the shadows.
When the girl was gone, Nancy turned back to find that something had appeared in the great, vast nothing in front of her. A long burrow cut through the earth at an angle, leading down to thick blackness. The opening was wide enough for her to fit through, and, with no other place to go, she dropped to her hands and knees and crawled into it. She felt like she were sliding down a dry trachea, rubbing dirt loose from above as her back grazed the tunnel. The dirt became moister the farther she went, and soon the cool, damp smell of earth filled her nostrils. The light had been snuffed out several yards back, but she could feel the pressure of caked up dirt under her fingernails and the wet sandy texture on her palms.
The burrow emptied out into a small dug-out. Nancy clawed through to the opening, tumbling onto the ground. The floor of the underground room was the same kind of dirt, but with something dry and scratchy scattered over it. Scraping up a handful of the stuff, she examined it in the dim light. Long, stiff pieces of straw stuck out from her balled fist. She let them flutter back down and stood to her feet, noticing the objects around her for the fist time. They were furniture.
Her old bedroom furniture.
The set-up was the same as it had been when she was a child. Her tall white dresser stood against the back wall of dirt with a familiar lilac design stenciled on the center of each drawer. The blue quilt was spread across her bed and folded over at the top, letting her fluffy pillow peak out invitingly. On the left of the bed was the little nightstand, as squat as a tree stump, with a pink piggybank on top beside the lamp.
She didn't notice the closet door embedded in the wall until it creaked open.
Her hands fisted into the blanket as she pulled it close to her mouth, registering vaguely at that moment that she was now tucked in bed. The door continued to swing out on its squeaking hinge, and the sliver of black widened fully as it came to a stop. The burrow was silent. The open doorway stared back at Nancy.
"Mommy," she called. "Daddy."
No use. They couldn't hear her over the noise they were making. She heard them downstairs, locked in one of their shouting matches. Harsh, angry voices echoed up the stairwell (Had they been yelling the whole time?). Their words were almost clear enough to distinguish if she strained to hear.
But she didn't strain to hear. Because something much worse was going on right in front of her.
It was only a shift within the shadows at first, but soon she could see it emerging from the back of the shrouded closet. Its outline took shape, filling the doorway. Meaty arms. Stiff, gnarled ears. The Rabbit lifted its massive paw and waved, which would have seemed friendly if she didn't already know what it planned to do to her.
The straw crinkled under its long, heavy feet as it thumped towards her. Panic clogged her veins, making her heart work harder and harder to pump her icy blood. The back of her throat clenched dry around what was supposed to be a swallow as she stared at it. Two uneven, saliva-slicked teeth protruded from under its muzzle. The nightmarish shambling movements of its bowed legs made it almost look like a cripple in a mascot costume. But it wasn't a costume. She could see the nose twitching.
She scrambled up to the headboard, clutching the blanket like a shield as she remembered the first time she'd dreamt of it. Although it came silently towards her now, she could still hear the words it had spoken to her all those years ago. Its voice was male, but pitched higher than any man she'd ever heard, and sickly-sweet. It had stood at the foot of the bed and asked her what her favorite food was. She had said chocolate-chip cookies. Then it had asked her if she knew what its favorite food was. She didn't know. It had parted its muzzle slightly, which she took for a smile.
"Little girls' feet."
The straw rustled over the ground, bunching up in front of its toes as it left bare streaks in the dirt behind it. Nancy's bones felt like led; she couldn't move. It was close enough that she could see its ratty fur and the patches of hairless, leathery skin that wrinkled as it moved.
"Go away," she cried. "You're just a bad dream. I'm not scared of you."
But her face disagreed with her words. It was pale and sweaty, and her eyes were frozen open. Black, dilating pupils filled her blue irises, adjusting to the dark and not liking what they saw. Its stiff nails coming to rest on her leg jolted the life back into her limbs. She barrel-rolled to the other side of the bed and fell to the floor. Kicking up straw, she bolted out of the bedroom. If it had chased her, she didn't know, because she didn't look back until she was out in the hallway on the safe side of a closed door. She kept a tight grip on the knob and, looking down, saw the shadows of its feet in the gap along the bottom. It was on the other side. Waiting for her to come back
The shouting had gotten louder and more distinct, filling the dark hall. She followed the sound to the top of the staircase and placed a hand on the railing. The lights were on downstairs. Their yellow glow almost reached her face, lighting her toes as they curled around the edge of the landing. She dropped her foot to the first step. As she went down, the yelling became clearer.
"Don't pretend like you don't know what I'm talking about, Marge," came her father's voice. "You spent two hundred dollars on a fucking purse. You think we have that kind of money?"
"There's nothing wrong with buying something nice every once in a while. If you got your head out of your ass and stopped spending every fucking spare minute of your life at the station, you might learn how to enjoy yourself," her mother screamed back.
A cabinet slammed shut.
"Oh, great," said Don, his voice nasty and ironic, "Good thinking: have another drink. Because seven shots of vodka isn't enough for one day."
"Shut the fuck up, Donald. I wouldn't need to drink so much if I could tolerate being sober around you."
Nancy heard the sound of clinking and walked through the kitchen archway as her mother was filling a square glass. The long neck of the bottle rested on the rim of the cup, spilling out ice-clear liquid. Marge was gripping the bottle like she was trying to strangle it with a single hand. When her cup was brimming, she slammed the bottle onto the counter and left it there.
"Mom," Nancy said. But her words went unnoticed as her mother knotted her bathrobe and took a sip.
Donald clenched his stubbly jaw. He was seething beside the sink, and before Nancy could gasp, he lifted a dirty plate from the top of a pile of unwashed dishes and threw it into the wall. It shattered into thick ceramic slices, scratching up the tiles where they fell.
"Now who's wasting money?" Marge sneered. "You're gonna have to buy a replacement for that."
"Fuck you. It's my house, and I'll break every goddamn thing in it if I want to," he roared, knocking over the empty vase on the table for good measure. The crash made Nancy flinch.
"Daddy, stop it," she said. But again, it was as if she were watching a movie with her hands on the screen, unable to reach the characters inside. She may as well have been invisible.
Yanking down the zipper, Donald pulled off his windbreaker and tossed it to the floor. His dark collared shirt had come untucked at the waist. Half of it hung out like a lolling tongue over his black leather belt.
"Why don't you clean up after yourself, you fucking slob?" said Marge. With one arm propping her up, she leaned over the table and sipped her vodka. Her messy blonde hair hung over her cheeks and her lips were drawn tight into a thin, spiteful line.
"Why don't you? What the hell do you do all day?"
"I keep-"
"Besides getting drunk," he interrupted.
She spun around and glared at him. "You shut your fucking mouth."
But he didn't. He went on, mocking her with a look of sudden enlightenment. "Oh, wait. I know what you do while I'm out working to give you and Nancy food to eat: fucking the neighbors. That explains why you waste so much goddamn money on designer handbags and lipstick. You need to look good for your boyfriends."
"That is bullshit and you know it," Marge yelled.
"Is it?" asked Don, spreading his arms wide. "It makes sense to me. That must be why we don't fuck anymore."
"It's not my fault you can't get it up," Marge muttered.
"What was that?" he hollered. "What the fuck did you just say?"
"You heard me, limp dick," she sneered again.
Storming up behind her, he caught her by the hair and slammed her face into the table. She slipped off and hit the floor when he released her. Nancy wanted to rush to her mother's side, but didn't move. Marge wasn't unconscious. She was reaching for something.
She seized a long plate shard from the mess on the floor and spun around, stabbing it into Donald's thigh. A smile, satisfied and breathless, spread across her smashed face. The gash on her bottom lip split open, sending a stream of fresh blood trickling down her chin.
"You bitch," he screamed. He clamped a hand on her throat and kneed her in the stomach twice.
"Stop it! What are you doing?" cried Nancy.
Marge reached up and sunk her manicured nails into Donald's cheeks. She had raked them down to his jaw line before he finally shoved her away. Her legs buckled as she stumbled backwards, catching herself. They both stood facing each other. Eyes locked. Chests heaving.
Fists clenched.
They clashed at the center of the room. Don wound back his arm and swung at her jaw, cracking several of her teeth. The force knocked her head off to the side, but she brought it back around and cracked her neck. She spat blood into his eyes, and as he wiped at it, she hobbled him with a kick to the knee. He collapsed.
The bloody ceramic shard lay on the tiles above his head. Marge crawled over him and picked it up, burying it in his guts. His scream blended with Nancy's as Marge tilted the shiv and peeled open his abdominal wall. Lumpy blue intestines, smeared in red, were bunched up inside him. She dug into it, curling her fingers around the slimy tubes, and pulled them out in a tangled knot. Don's teeth ground together. His back arched and his hands clawed at the floor, trembling.
When she leaned in to sneer at him, he boxed her in the nose. The impact sent her sprawling out onto the tiles. Rising on shaky legs with trails of knobby, kinked intestines hanging from his hollowed stomach, Don stalked toward his wife. Nancy was pressed against the wall, hyperventilating.
"Daddy," she whispered.
Don clutched her jaw and pried the shard out of her hand. He sliced down her cheek, curving the sharp edge back up towards her eye and jabbing it straight through her pupil. Marge fell backwards onto the table, and the red picnic cloth bunched under her writhing body. The broken piece of plate stuck out from her head like a giant thorn, splashed with fresh blood. She yanked it out and leapt off her back, throwing herself into her husband as Nancy slid down the wall and hugged her knees. She was sobbing, with streaks of clear snot and tears on her contorted face. Her parents tangled themselves together, clawing and struggling. Marge stabbed clean through Donald's arm. Don flipped her over and pounded her face flat until her nose was nothing but splattered bits of bloody cartilage. He gnashed his teeth on the side of her neck and bit out a chunk of flesh with part of an artery sticking out of his mouth. Black blood poured from the crater.
Marge clamped both of her hands around Don's stabbed arm and twisted it around, throwing her body weight to the floor. The bones shattered and splintered out through his elbow as the flesh tore loose. She released him and crawled away. His arm dangled low by his knees, held on by a few thick strings of muscle and skin. It swung around and bounced against his legs as he came towards his wife.
"Stop it," Nancy said, voice hitched and shaky.
After bending over to pick up the plate shard, Don caught Marge by the shoulder and rammed it into her chest. She pried it out of herself and slashed it across his throat. His head tipped back as the wide red smile on his neck opened up. At the widest point, Nancy saw glimpses of his hollow trachea inside. Marge continued to stick him with the shard, and he hooked two of his fingers into her swollen, punctured eye socket. They came at each other over and over, as relentless as zombies.
"Stop it, Nancy said again. Her voice grew louder, more frantic: "Stop it. Stop it. Stop hurting each other!"
The plate shard hit the floor, and everyone in the room was silent and still. Her parents turned to stare at her.
"You know what, honey?" Marge said. "I think she's right."
Donald nodded his head. "Yeah, she is."
They started closing in around her, their skin in tatters.
"We shouldn't be hurting each other," continued Marge. "It's Nancy's fault we argue so much. We should be hurting her, instead."
They lunged at her, and grabbed her by the legs. She clawed at the floor in a desperate attempt to pull herself free. Her legs kicked back against her parents as they dragged her in. She flipped over and reached out her arms, clinging to the kitchen doorway. Her fingers struggled to keep their grip around the edge of the frame. Marge's nails sunk into her thighs, and she screamed through grinding teeth.
Clamping her hands tighter around the doorway, she yanked herself forward and managed to rip free. She scrambled to her feet and ran through the living room. Behind her was the sound of their feet padding across the floor and the soft thump of Donald's dangling hand hitting his knee with each step. She jumped over the back of the couch and slid down to the cushions, bouncing off them like a springboard.
The door knob was almost within reach. She ran to it and twisted it, throwing open the front door and slamming it shut behind her. But just like the Rabbit, her parents never tried to come out of the house. She released the knob and turned.
And pressed her back against the door.
Mere inches from her toes was a jagged cliff, and beyond it stretched an endless land of crooked rocks and barren earth. The skyline was like a row of sharp, fractured teeth, fading into that purple haze far in the distance. Not one living creature could be seen for miles around. Only dirt and dust.
With the red door behind her beginning to rattle and the wasteland in front of her being lashed with a dry wind, Nancy finally felt the thoughts connect in her mind. She was dead.
Dead and lost.
.
.
.
To be continued…
A/N: I have final exams starting this Monday, so I won't be able to begin writing chapter 7 until after they're done. On the plus side, once the semester is over I will have LOADS of free time to write, and that translates into faster updates (and, ideally, BETTER chapters) for you guys.
Please review if you have a spare minute. It always makes my day brighter.