A Nightmare Reborn Ch. 05

"This town is sick," Parker insisted, "I thought through the hypnocil we could contain Krueger... even drain his power. No dreams, no fear and power... but we were wrong. It's been two years since people moved back to Springwood and there are more and more substantial incidents of Krueger appearing in dreams."

"It's controllable," Campbell insisted.

"If you follow this through, Richard," Maggie warned, "It's not. Krueger will come back. I recommend Springwood be destroyed to stop Krueger here. If there's no host body to invade, there's no way he can survive and spread."

"We are his jailers," Campbell said, "We can control him. Unfortunately, sacrifices are necessary."

Parker stood up to leave, "And will you tell that to yourself when it's Lori on the slab, doctor?"

"Sacrifice," Campbell said to no one as he poured the scotch all over the kitchen, "Sacrifices must be made, Dr. Parker! Dr. Gordon!"

The alcohol splashed across the floor and collected in a puddle at the foot of the refrigerator. He showered it over the countertops and across the walls, making his way down the hall and to the living room where he continued until the bottle went dry. He then opened the tinderbox beside the hearth of the fireplace and grabbed the squeeze bottle of lighter fluid.

"I ask nothing of you that I wouldn't ask of myself!" he screamed at the memories of his colleagues. He looked into the kitchen and saw kids standing there, shoulder-to-shoulder and dressed in hospital gowns. Their eyes were covered with strips of bloody gauze, soaked with gore and hellacious red in the dimming light. Campbell laughed a crazy chuckle and pointed at them all, "All of you! It was for the good, you fuckers!"

He stumbled through the living room, spraying the boxes of records and reports from the cover-up and all the evidence he had of Freddy Krueger. He bellowed and raved like a madman as lighter fluid soaked his bare feet. The carpet was wet with kerosene and liquor as he threw the half empty bottle of whiskey through the living room. It shattered against the wall by the door.

"I will not be responsible any more!" he shouted defiantly, stomping up the stairs and spraying lighter fluid along the walls, "You sons of bitches aren't going to judge me!"

As he reached the top of the stairs, he suddenly stopped.

In the doorway leading to Lori's old room was the ghostly apparition of Will Rollins. His face was transparent and faded, yet possessed of a horrible ethereal energy that made Campbell want to scream. His son-in-law's eyes were sunken in and his wounds were hideous. Spectral blood dripped from the wounds and collected on the floor at his feet. The ghost pointed at him and laughed wildly.

"It's not my fault!" Campbell screamed, breaking into hysterical sobs as he ran through the upstairs floor, letting loose the last of fluid from the squeeze bottle, "We didn't know!"

Campbell knew he had lost it. He could feel the giddy horror of his fall into the mental abyss like the potent rush of adrenaline from a really good erection. He was smiling and laughing to himself as he slammed doors and opened them, his face contorted in a leer of panic and lunacy. He stubbed his toe hard on the crown-molding base around the banister of the stairwell. The toe nail ripped off and he fell. A muted cry of pain issued from his throat as his nose smashed into the floor along with the rest of his body. Blood gushed from the shattered bridge of his nose and stained his flannel robe.

"Fuck it!" he cried out, both laughing and wailing, "Fuck it fuck it fuck it!"

He ran into his room and grabbed his shotgun from under the bed. The shells were already in it as he knew this day would eventually come. He had known ever since Lori found out about his involvement in Will's disappearance and stay at Westin Hills. The fact that her love and faith in him had been shattered had destroyed him, finishing the job Freddy Krueger had started when he killed Campbell's wife. That was when he had died. Campbell knew he was already dead only his body just hadn't come to grips yet.

Campbell thought of burning bodies. That's what he had to do. He threw his head back, eyes wide as he began chanting his favorite old chestnut like a ritualistic pagan, "Try to set the night on fire... set the night on fire... try to... fire..."

Campbell bolted back into the hallway to find the ghost of Will Rollins standing before him. The dead man grinned at him as rotting skin fell from his face and hung in tattered ribbons. He was no longer a ghost, but an opaque and very real creature. Campbell could smell the rot on him and knew he was either dreaming or was having the most realistic fucking breakdown in the history of world lunacy. Either way, Campbell was scared shitless.

"You killed me," the dead man croaked as tendons in his exposed jaw pulled and stretched, "You fucking killed me."

"TRY TO SET THE NIGHT ON FIRE!" Campbell hollered and brought his gun to bear, "SET THE FUCKING NIGHT ON FIRE!"

"You know I fucked your daughter," the zombie chuckled, only it wasn't just the voice of a recently dead son-in-law. It was the watery voice of Freddy Krueger, "I fucked her so hard my dick was tickling the base of her skull."

"FIRE! SET IT OFF MOTHERFUCKER!"

The Freddy/ Will Rollins creature laughed, "Jim Morrison is rolling in his grave, doc..."

Campbell was babbling now as he squeezed the trigger of his shotgun. The head of Will Rollins exploded in a shower of skull fragments and bloody gray matter. It spattered on the floor and walls as black, shiny beetles skittered from the smoking stump of Will's neck. Their iridescent carapaces shined in the stormy lighting of the upstairs hallway as they fell to the ground and scrambled towards him. Campbell turned and began running. He tripped over the top step and tumbled down the stairs, end over end and his legs flailing wildly.

"For God Sakes your wife has been murdered!" Freddy Krueger howled from the top of the stairs as Campbell crashed into the front door. The demon in the fedora slashed at the wallpaper and tore it to shreds as he laughed, "Sacrifices, Doctor!"

"I'm dreaming!" Campbell screamed as he managed to right himself and stand on legs that shook badly.

"What dreams may come, Dick," Freddy tapped his bladed fingers on his dusty brown pants, "This is no dream... this is reality now."

Campbell aimed at the television set and fired. The set exploded in a hail of sparks that immediately lit the alcohol and kerosene soaked carpet. The entire living room was engulfed in flames with in moments as he turned and fired up the stairs. The blast tore apart the ceiling and echoed through the burning house. No one was there. He had imagined both Krueger and the dead corpse of Will Rollins.

"NO!" he yelled, "I know you were here!"

Campbell looked around as the house began to surge with living flames that crackled and popped loudly. The heat was almost unbearable as he slid down the front door and sat. He could feel his hair beginning to singe as flame followed his trail of lighter fluid up the stairs, along the walls and into the bedrooms. He laughed to himself and placed the shotgun between his legs. He managed to place one toe against the trigger and then looked into the black barrel of the gun.

"They say fire purifies," he laughed and took a deep breath, suddenly feeling very clear and lucid despite the smoke and his drunken stupor, "It smelts out the imperfections."

The house groaned as the flames destroyed it.

"I ask nothing of you," he said quietly as his robe caught fire and burned his flesh, "That I would not do myself."

Campbell lowered his mouth to the shaft of steel and closed his eyes. His toe jerked and the splattering remains of Campbell's head all over the door accompanied the loud report of the blast. His body wavered a moment and then fell to one side as smoke curled around him. The flames ate away at the wood of the house, destroying the flesh and skeleton of Freddy Krueger's home away from home. In the crackling hell of the inferno, there was a bellow of pure rage as the dream killer watched it burn. All the times it had been fixed up and saved were worth nothing now. Fire was one element Krueger could not control.

Once a young, brave girl had faced Krueger here. She had stood her ground and renounced him, turning her back on him and defeating him by denying him his power. A mother had been killed here, stolen from her husband and daughter through the safety of her own bed. A young boy had lost his soul here, taken over by Krueger in much the same way Mary Stilfreeze had been. In the netherworld between sleep and awake, a dream warrior had died here and yet the house had set a dream master on her course. The house had been the centerpiece to countless nightmares for so many. It was a place of evil, no matter how pure the soul that lived there.

Windows exploded outward in a powerful blast of heat. The iron bars outside the window frames superheated and glowed before they burned the wood around the bolts holding them in place. The metal constructs crashed the ground and hissed in the rain, billowing steam. When the fire reached the furnace, there was a loud explosion that tore away the remains of the kitchen and rained debris throughout the flaming structure. The ash in the furnace, which had once hid the razor tipped glove of Freddy Krueger, smoldered in the air.

The explosion brought people from their homes, though none of them was really startled. They all knew somehow. No one made any effort to save the house or even try and find out if anyone was inside. They simply stood on their front porches and in their driveways and in the wet grass of their front lawns as the house that had watched them for so long like a demonic sentinel fell into smoldering ash. Blinding flames licked into the stormy sky like the wicked tongues of perditions fury. Black smoke poured from the disintegrating roof and curled high into the sky as the rain fell even harder.

What everyone who saw the fire noticed, and yet never mentioned even to each other or the police afterwards, was that the rain did not extinguish the fire. The flames were defiant of the laws of nature and the order of all things rational in much the same way Freddy Krueger was. The haunted house at 1428 Elm Street was dying slowly, and it seemed not even Mother Nature could stop that.

Maybe she didn't want to.

***

"Good God," Officer Charlie Malone shook his head as he watched the firefighters extinguish the last of the flames that had destroyed the Springwood Police Station. He had no idea how many of the others had been inside when the place went up, but the mere fact that only he and one other officer, Tom Daniels, were standing outside the ruined structure left him feeling doubtful. Surely, if Sheriff Williams or Don or even Sean and Tessa were alive, they would be here now. Springwood had been blessed with good cops and in Charlie's opinion, the best the state of Ohio had to offer.

"You think anyone was in there?" Tom asked as though he had been reading his mind.

Charlie shrugged, his eyes red and irritated from smoke, "I don't know. You'd think if anyone were out and about they would have been here by now. The radio is hot with the news."

Tom nodded. The big black man hooked his thumbs on his belt and leaned against his squad car. His wide brimmed hat was pulled down low over his handsome features and hid the fact that his eyes were as equally red as the fire itself. The smell of pot was wafting through the air like a thick illegal perfume. Apparently the fire had also engulfed the evidence storage lockers along with the twenty pounds of marijuana held there from the bust a few months back at the water tower.

"Goddam if I don't get a slow burn off this shit before they put it out," Tom laughed and nodded to the firefighters. There wasn't much humor in his comment, but Charlie tried to smile. The fighters were spraying their hoses as their big trucks hummed and thrummed, pumping out water and racing against time to save what they could. But to Charlie, one of the few officers still around from the days of Donald Thompson and a child killer named Fred Krueger, the destruction of the police station seemed almost a natural function of the cosmos.

He hadn't been surprised to hear that the station had gone up. Somewhere in the deep recesses of his mind he had been waiting for it to happen since the he came to work and discovered their beloved Sheriff Thompson had been killed in the old junkyard. Even more tragic was the fact his daughter, Nancy Thompson had died at Westin Hills the same night. Stabbed by four bladed weapons.

Charlie knew just as the others in the loop had known that Freddy Krueger didn't die the night everyone got together for a good old-fashioned lynch and barbeque. Charlie hadn't thrown a flaming liquor bottle or chucked a torch into Krueger's boiler room that night, but he had watched the scene unfold as though it were a dream. He remembered the look on Thompson's face and the way his wife was screaming at the flames as Fred Krueger burned alive. The death of Krueger was like a dramatic exorcism of a town demon, a spirit that not only possessed the social conscience but also took the lives of the young. It was almost as if Krueger was more pissed at the grown ups than the children.

He remembered thinking after the first or second time Krueger showed up after his death that it was like the man wanted to take away the futures of those who had killed him. Having no children himself, a lifelong bachelor and all, Charlie could only imagine what it was like to lose a child. But seeing what happened to the parents of kids who were killed by Krueger's hand gave him a pretty solid indication of what that loss is like. Freddy didn't just want revenge, he wanted to make people suffer as he had suffered.

He supposed the whole town had been living on borrowed time.

"You okay Charlie?" Tom nudged him.

"No, man," he shook his head. Charlie turned and opened the door to his police cruiser. With a grunt he sat down in the seat, his pot belly getting to be more and more of a hindrance with each passing year and grabbed his radio. He turned it on and said, "This is six-baker-six calling any officer in the Springwood area, come back. Over."

Tom stood by the open door as static hissed over the radio.

"Calling anyone in the area of Springwood, over?"

Again, nothing.

"Tommy," Charlie slammed the radio down, "I think we're the only ones left."

And then the radio crackled, "Six-baker-six this Officers Renaud and Alexander, over?"

"Jesus," Charlie shouted and then replied, "Renaud, where the fuck are you?"

"We're-(hiss and crackle of radio static) ...to Elm Grove and..."

"Renaud, you're breaking up. Come back..."

"...(hiss and more static)... Krueger and Voorhees...(static)"

"I fucking knew it," Tom growled, "It's just like last time. Those two assholes are back."

"Renaud," Charlie frowned, "Please say again?"

"I said Krueger and Voorhees are back... new fucker named Michael My-"

Charlie looked at Tom.

"... stay with... do not attempt to engage them..."

"Listen," Charlie shouted as the fire engines around the smoldering police station revved their engines and moved to a new position across the parking lot, "The whole station had burned to the ground. We need to regroup."

"Everyone's dead," came the reply from Sean, now more clear and concise as the fire engines pulled away, "Sheriff Williams and the others were killed by Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers. Do not try to... (more static and hissing)... have a pla-"

"We need you here!" Charlie said as he slapped the side of the CB unit, "Come back, over?"

Finally the radio went dead and simple relayed static.

"Fuck!"

"Jesus," Tom said.

The radio crackled with grating garble as the open frequency rolled and spat at them. Charlie rubbed his eyes and sat back against the driver's seat. Sweat was beaded across his forehead as the heat from the fire began to die down. Thick smoke billowed and misted across the parking lot and dimmed the already overcast day. He looked out the front windshield and saw a town that was silent and dead, all the living souls hiding in their homes. And why shouldn't they? Those that had been here long enough knew that death was walking their streets unchallenged and unchecked once again. Those that didn't still sensed the danger and hid anyway. Charlie wished he could hide and be anywhere but in a cop's uniform and out in the open.

"I think it's safe to say to Jason is back," he said and then closed his eyes, "Freddy too."

"Sean mentioned someone else," Tom said, "Michael something?"

Charlie shrugged, "I couldn't make it out."

"What now?"

"We call for state back up and then let someone else be in charge," he looked to the burning building, "The sheriff and the others are gone."

"Well at least Sean and Tessa made it out," Tom offered, "That's positive, right?"

"Yeah, but still we-" Charlie jumped back and covered his face as hot liquid spattered his face. Something was in his eyes, clouding his vision and blurring the world over. He could hear a wet, gristly tearing sound as he blindly reached out and shouted, "What the fuck was that? Tom?"

No reply, only that tearing sound and then another distinct noise, that of teeth chattering hard. Charlie wiped his eyes so hard that lights exploded in his field of vision. He focused and looked up to see Tom rising into the air as though by magic. The big cop was convulsing, his hands thumping against the open door and frame as blood gushed from a wound on his chest. He realized it was Tom's blood all over him and the interior of the car.

Tom looked down at him, his eyes wide and white with fear as blood erupted from his mouth in a sick spray. He looked surprised and maybe even a little offended at this sudden attack, and when he was tossed to one side like a rag doll Charlie knew he had lost his mind. A man in a white mask with wild untamed hair was standing there holding a blood-drenched knife. It was one of the long eighteen inch blades that people hawked through info-mercials, one of those magnificent knifes that could cut through tin cans and maybe even cinderblocks for $49.99.

Black eyes, like those of a killer white shark stared impassively at Charlie for only a moment. The man in the mask slowly looked down at the dead body beside the police cruiser and cocked his head to one side, as though admiring his handiwork. When the killed looked back up at him, so slow and purposeful in his gaze, Charlie felt his bladder release a warm flood of urine that soaked his pants.

"I think-" he began and reached for his gun but never finished the thought. Michael Myers rammed the blade into Charlie's skull with the force of a shotgun blast. The tip of the knife entered through his right eyeball, collapsing the gelatin of the orb and then punched through the ocular cavity and to the brain. Charlie was shoved back as his fingers spasmed and the worst fucking headache he had ever known seared through his skull.

"Aughck!" he spit up a thick mixture of phlegm and crimson spittle as blood drained from his sinuses. Charlie kicked his boots against the floorboard once, then twice as he died. The masked killer then wrenched the knife sideways and tore apart the surrounding tissue and bone with a muted crunch and squelching sound. Charlie managed to notice a strange little tattoo on the inside of the killer's wrist, a small thorn shape. He thought it was an odd tattoo and while he was contemplating it he fell into darkness.

Michael Myers stood there for a moment before withdrawing the knife. He watched the policeman die and then when he was certain the man was dead the knife came out. He grabbed the officer by the collar and hauled him out of the driver's seat. With a mighty throw he hefted the body into the bushes where it twisted and broke in the thick branches. Michael turned to see if anyone had noticed. The firemen were too busy with the burning building to even care.