The Ninth Nightmare Read Free

Kingfish, one of the characters from Amos’n’Andy, which hadn’t been aired on the radio since the mid-1950s.
    There was more laughter, louder and longer, and Katie began to panic, as if the studio audience were laughing at her . She hurried back down the hallway and fumbled in her back jeans pocket for her room key. When she reached out for the door handle, however, she found that she didn’t need it. The door was an ordinary six-paneled house door, and the handle was a simple plastic knob.
    She pushed the door open and stepped back into her bedroom, gasping with fright. For a split second, the bedroom was just as it had been before, Room 717 at the Griffin House Hotel. But then, with a sharp pop, the bulb in the bedside lamp went off, and the room was drowned in darkness again.
    Katie stayed where she was, still panting, with her back against the door. She could see the gray light that strained in through the window, and hear the rain pattering. She could smell that bleachy-fishy smell, too, and that greasy odor from the bed linen, except that there were some fresh smells that were even stronger than both of them. A metallic smell, like blood, and another appalling smell that made Katie’s gorge rise.
    She could still faintly hear the Amos’n’Andy show behind the door. But then a voice much nearer, a woman’s voice, said, ‘ Help me .’
    Katie pressed her hand over her nose and her mouth. She stepped toward the bed and as she came closer she could see that there was a red-haired woman lying in it, a red-haired woman with a very white face, almost as if she had made herself up to look like a Venetian carnival mask.
    â€˜ Help me ,’ she repeated, and held out one hand.
    Katie came around the end of the bed and stood beside her, but not too close. The woman looked about twenty-seven or twenty-eight, although her white pancake make-up was cracked and fissured, and her eyes were smudged black with mascara, so it was difficult to tell for sure.
    â€˜Who are you?’ Katie asked her. ‘What is this place? Where are we?’
    â€˜ Please ,’ the woman begged her, and suddenly a dark runnel of blood slid out of the side of her mouth and on to the pillow.
    â€˜What’s wrong with you?’ asked Katie. She was afraid to approach any nearer in case the woman was suffering from some kind of infectious disease.
    The woman took hold of the corner of the quilt with one hand and tried to pull it off her, but she obviously didn’t have the strength. Katie hesitated for a moment and then she reached across and drew it back herself.
    â€˜Oh God,’ she said. ‘What happened to you?’
    Beneath the quilt, the woman was covered with a sheet, but the sheet was sodden and shiny and dark. That was the metallic smell that had overwhelmed Katie when she first came back into the room – the smell of blood.
    â€˜I couldn’t stop him,’ said the woman, so quietly now that Katie could hardly hear her. ‘I tried, but he was much too strong for me.’
    She tried to raise her head from the pillow, but she couldn’t. Katie said, ‘Don’t try to move. I’ll call nine-one-one.’
    She looked around. There was no nightstand beside the bed, no lamp, and no phone. She dug in the front pocket of her jeans and took out her cellphone, but when she flipped it open the screen was blank. Wherever this bedroom was, it was a dead area, out of range of any cellphone signals.
    â€˜Look,’ she said, trying to keep herself calm, ‘I’ve had a little training in first aid. Let me try to stop the bleeding. Then I can go find somebody to help you.’
    â€˜It’s no use,’ the woman told her. More blood welled out of the side of her mouth and the stain on the pillow grew wider.
    â€˜I can try,’ Katie insisted. ‘Look – I can tear up this other sheet and use it as a bandage.’
    â€˜It’s no use,’ the