Night Terrors Read Free Page B

metal contraption in his gloved hands.
    And that’s when Jen started screaming.

CHAPTER TWO
1.
    Tara woke up panicking as she clawed at the air and screamed out a name: “Jen!”
    She sat up and looked around at the bathroom.
    Then she began to relax – she knew where she was now; she was in her guest bathroom, in the bathtub. She had been sleepwalking again. She’d been having a nightmare about a girl being murdered.
    But this wasn’t a nightmare. It had really happened. Some girl she didn’t even know, a girl named Jen, had been murdered by a killer. She could remember Jen’s face, but she couldn’t remember anything about the killer – because it was like she had been watching everything through his eyes.
    He wants it that way , a voice in her mind whispered.
    Tara closed her eyes for a moment, trying to catch her breath. She was dressed in her usual bedtime clothes – pajama bottoms and an oversized T-shirt. She never wore anything too revealing to bed anymore ever since she was a teenager and she’d woken up three blocks from her house in her underwear after a sleepwalking incident.
    She crawled out of the bathtub. There was light coming from some other place in her apartment, but the bathroom was dark, and she couldn’t be in the darkness. She turned on the bathroom light and caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror, her dark hair was disheveled and her blue eyes were haunted by the images she had just seen in her dreams. Her eyes darted for a moment to the thick, four inch long scar on the side of her neck. She turned away from the mirror and hurried out of the bathroom into her living room.
    She went to the spare bedroom which was around the corner from the guest bathroom she had just woken up in – the light was coming from this room which she used as her office. Along one wall was her desk with the computer on top and two battered filing cabinets next to it. Two bookcases crammed with books took up another wall, and in the corner between the desk and bookcases was her art easel.
    Scattered on the floor were three sheets of drawing paper.
    She picked one of them up, then another, and then the last one. They were quick sketches of Jen. She had drawn them in her sleep. She did this every once in a while when she had a terrible nightmare or vision, but it had been a while since she’d had a night terror this bad – years.
    She studied the sketches, the lines were quick and heavy, not too much detail, but Tara could see the terror in Jen’s eyes, her hands held up in defense. But Jen had not been able to defend herself against this monster.
    Tara wanted to shove the papers away in a drawer, maybe even tear them up and throw them away. She didn’t want these reminders that she’d seen the murder of a seventeen year old girl that she could do nothing about, nothing to help her. But something stopped her. At the edges of each drawing were a few numbers and a word: a number three on one drawing, a number five on the next, and one word on the last one – Run.
    What did this word and these numbers mean? She tried to remember if they had anything to do with the dream – but she couldn’t remember. But they had to mean something.
    Run. Maybe something was telling her to run. Hadn’t that been what she’d been doing during her night terror – running away? Running to her bathroom and hiding in the tub? Jen had been running away from the killer, maybe that’s what the word had to do with it. But Tara felt that the word was targeted towards her, that it was meant for her.
    And the numbers: a three and a five. What did they have to do with anything?
    After a dejected sigh, Tara set the sketches on her desk and left the room. She turned off the light and closed the door. She hurried to the front door and checked to make sure the deadbolt was engaged. She checked the windows. Everything was locked – she was safe.
    But she didn’t feel safe. She still couldn’t push away the feeling of dread that had