Sara found herself standing near a playground, with Alex just a few feet away.
She was disoriented and confused, sure that she was still trapped in her strange lucid dream. It took a moment for her to realize this was no longer a nightmare. Or if it was, it was the kind that happened when you were wide awake.
She looked down at her thin cotton pajamas, the same ones she had put on before she climbed into bed with Alex. The ground felt damp beneath her bare feet and the cold air made her shiver. She looked beside her to find Alex staring sightlessly straight ahead.
“Alex,” she said, but he didn’t respond.
She gripped both his arms and turned him toward her, but he didn’t engage. He was alive and breathing, but his consciousness seemed very far away.
Sara glanced around her. The playground was unfamiliar. It looked like it hadn’t been used in years. There was a battered slide in one corner and several swings with rusty chains. The see-saw was broken, with one half lying on the ground and the other missing entirely.
In the dim moonlight, she could see a slight mist hanging over the equipment, adding to the terrifying atmosphere.
She reached into a pocket on her pajamas hoping to find a cell phone, but there was nothing there. She had no keys, no wallet and no sense of where she was. Nothing about this place seemed familiar.
The playground was ringed by trees. If there had once been a path into this park, it was long since overgrown. She needed to leave, but there was no obvious path out.
She shook Alex again.
“Alex, honey,” she said. “I need you to wake up.”
But he was completely unresponsive. It was as if he was...sleepwalking.
She realized that was what had happened to her. She remembered the dream of Soren’s room on fire and how she and Alex had escaped the building. The fire hadn’t been real, but opening the window and running into the woods had been.
She thought of the story of Alastair Horne, how he had vanished in the middle of the night with only the window open. They assumed that someone had broken into the house, but what if instead Horne had just left on his own? What if he’d been compelled to open the window, perhaps while trapped in a dream?
But Alex was still trapped in the dream. She tried slapping him gently, and then a little harder, to see if it would wake him up, but there was no response. Alex just stared straight ahead.
She thought of the monster that had been standing there with them and how it had hurt her. She hoped it couldn’t do the same to Alex.
Sara didn’t know how long they’d been walking, but they might still be near Soren’s apartment. It would explain why she didn’t recognize the place. It was somewhere in Loudoun County, an area she hardly knew.
“Soren!” she yelled. “Soren! Ken!”
Only the wind answered her. She heard a squeak nearby and turned to see one of the swings swaying in the breeze.
“Help me!” she screamed. “Please, someone! Help me!”
Her hands were shaking. She wanted to grab Alex and run, but without knowing where she was running to, it could just make the situation worse. Soren lived in Leesburg, but there was a lot of open land around the town. If she chose the wrong direction, they might end up even further from civilization.
“Help me!” she shouted again.
She heard a branch break nearby and turned in that direction. In the mist and gloom, she saw nothing.
“Is someone there?” she asked.
There was a metallic clang and Sara jumped. She spun around to see two of the swings had hit each other, apparently slammed together by the wind.
The shade had led her here. That must have been what happened. Yet even as she had that thought, she began to doubt it. Alastair Horne had disappeared from his bedroom; and now both she and Alex had done the same. What if the shade hadn’t taken Alastair?
What if it was someone — or something — else?
Whatever that was could have been responsible for bringing Alex and her here. She was suddenly sure it was the same thing pretending to be John in her dream.
That wasn’t just some figment of her imagination. It had been playing her. When it looked at Alex in the dream, there had been real anger in its eyes. Alex seemed to see through the illusion.
She heard another branch break in the woods near the playground. Sara drew Alex close to her.
“Whoever’s there, I want you to just come out,” she said.
She thought there would be no response, but instead she heard the unmistakable sound of a man chuckling. The noise made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. The wind carried the sound so that it seemed to come from all around her, as if there was a crowd of men just out of sight, laughing at her.
She needed to get out of there, and fast.
“Face me, you coward!” she screamed.
“But it’s so much better this way,” a voice answered. “Your fear is intoxicating. I never intended to bring you here. I thought I would leave you sleeping while standing in front of the window. But you insisted on coming with your boy. Now I’m happy you did. This is going to be so much fun.”
The voice sounded familiar, but she couldn’t place it.
“Who are you?”
There was another chuckle.
“The man who’s going to kill you and sell your son,” the voice answered.
She gripped Alex even tighter. She considered running in the other direction from the voice. Arguably her best chance was to blindly flee. But without knowing where she was and carrying an effectively unconscious child, there was no way she could outrun whoever was out there.
That left only one option — to stand and fight. Since she had no idea where she was, she didn’t think Soren or Ken would be able to track her down, so she couldn’t hope for rescue. She’d just have to defeat him on her own.
She was scared and vulnerable, but not defenseless. Sara had taken several self-defense courses over the past few years. She also took kickboxing as exercise, a choice for which she was now immensely grateful.
“Sell him?” she asked, playing for time.
She wanted to keep him talking and see if she could get a bead on his position, maybe develop some kind of strategy.
But when he responded, the voice seemed to shift position, moving elsewhere in the woods around her.
“What’d you think, I was Chester the Molester?” the voice asked. “No, no, I don’t swing that way. I only hunt special boys.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sara said.
“Of course you don’t,” the voice responded. “You live in a nice little suburban world, where the only things to worry your pretty little head about are the occasional homeless vagrants from D.C. Everything you read in the papers is true, the police are only a phone call away. A gun and a little self-defense training are all you need to protect you.
“But that world’s an illusion. It’s a pretty lie told so that you’ll accept your lot in life. The real world is a lot more dangerous, filled with creatures you can’t even conceive of. Some of them you know, you just think they’re stories. Others have never even been whispered about, and they like it that way. But they’re out there, watching you.”
“What does this have to do with Alex?”
There was another clang and she turned briefly to see the swings bang into each other again. She heard a furtive movement from the trees while she was distracted.
“Oh, you have quite a boy on your hands,” the voice said. “Quite an unusual child.”
She didn’t know what he was talking about. Every mother thought her child was unique, and this was true for her and Alex, yet she didn’t think of him as “unusual.” He seemed normal and well-adjusted.
“How so?”
“He hasn’t told you, has he?” the voice responded. “I thought not. Boys like that seldom do. Alastair didn’t.”
“What do you know about Alex?”
The voice giggled. It sounded
unstable and dangerous.
“The way he defied me in that dream, he may be more powerful than all the other boys I’ve taken,” the voice said. “I’m going to charge triple for him.”
“I don’t understand.”
“And you never will. I’m going to take Alex, like I took Alastair. I won’t harm a hair on your son’s head, but the creature I sell him to will. I’m sorry to tell you that Alex will suffer. It’s part of the process.”
“What process?”
“Harvesting his power,” the voice said. “I don’t know much about it really. It’s better that way. I know they have to take his blood. They’ll drain him like a bathroom tub.”
“Vampires?”
“Oh please,” the voice said. “I wouldn’t be working for any creature that trite.”
“Why don’t you come out of that forest?” Sara said. “If you’re going to kill me, at least face me like a man.”
There was another soft, low chuckle.
“But I’m not a man,” the voice said. “Oh, I pretend to be one. I walk among you. I even got married a few years back, because I knew it would make my job so much easier. In the old days, you used to be able to lurk at soccer games or near playgrounds. But now everybody’s a busybody. They gather around you and ask you questions.
“So I changed strategies. I got married, adopted a kid — I told the wife through tears that I was sterile — and now I can hang around on playgrounds all I want. Nobody questions why I’m there. And I can find the special boys I need to. They’re few and far between, but that’s okay. I don’t need many, just one every few years so I can keep it going.”
“I know you, don’t I?” Sara asked.
He continued on as if she hadn’t asked the question.
“I’m what used to be called a dreamweaver. Then that insipid pop song came along and ruined everything,” the voice continued. “Now you can’t call yourself that without somebody singing along. We just call ourselves dreamers now, which is really a misnomer because we don’t dream, you do.”
“The dream of the fire,” Sara said. “You conjured it.”
“Well, I had to bring you here, didn’t I?” the voice answered. “And a good thing, too. Without you, the boy probably wouldn’t have come at all. I never expected that. He’s still trapped in that dream, but I can’t scare him. All I managed to do was tie him up.”
“I do know you,” she said. “I recognize your voice.”
There was a soft rustling of leaves from the forest and then a figure stepped forward. She couldn’t make out who it was at first — his face was barely human — but then she realized who it was.
Standing before her was Richard Frye.
Chapter Fourteen