Chapter 6: Strings (Patreon)

According to the kid behind the counter, the Thrifty drugstore on Main Street had never in its history sold forty-eight double-A batteries to one customer.

"Forty-eight," he said, looking at the pile—twelve four-packs, Duracell and Energizer, none of the cheap store brand, because somebody way back in my head had informed me in no uncertain terms that store brand doesn't count. "Are you, like, building something?"

"Remote control," I said.

"For what?"

"Life."

He looked at me, at the sling, at my face, which he'd seen on Top Story, and his eyes did what everybody's did now: the little jump, the oh, the careful look away. "That's twelve forty-three."

Martha, who'd come along because of rule one and a Slurpee bribe, leaned on the counter and told him, "He's weird now. Since he got shot. We're all just going with it."

"Cool," said the kid, and gave me my change, and didn't look at me again for the rest of the transaction, or possibly his life.

I'd worked it out lying in bed Friday morning, with gauze on my wrist and the kid finally quiet.

The Gacha doesn't let me take items into dreams. Physical things stay here: Soul Solid stays in storage, and Dad's Beretta stays in a paper bag in the Woodsboro sheriff's evidence room. I'd written that rule in the unicorn notebook and I believed it. But the remote belonged to the kid, and it came from the same place as my M60 and Kristen's flips, whatever the dream builds out of who you think you are. And those batteries hadn't died because of some cosmic accounting. They died because the kid believed remotes die. Every remote in every living room in 1996 died eventually, every kid in America knew that, and the dream knew it because he did.

The dream runs on belief. I'd told seven kids in Ohio that over the phone like I knew what I was talking about, so I figured I'd better act like it. I couldn't take forty-eight batteries with me, but the kid could believe he had them.

It's stupid, I told him that night, lining them up on the nightstand in rows like ammunition. You know it's stupid. Something in the back of my head was extremely pleased with itself anyway.

I spent most of Saturday in the den being a webmaster. That's what GeoCities called it, webmaster, like I was running a ship. What I was actually doing was sitting at the family Packard Bell in a sling, hunting and pecking with my left index finger like a grandpa, while the modem screamed every twenty minutes and Mom walked past the doorway pretending not to look.

The counter said 047,281 when I logged in, and the guestbook had two hundred new entries since Thursday. Most were the usual: people who hated me, people who thought I was hilarious, people who wanted to know what it felt like. A kid in Albuquerque wanted to know if you could kill a vampire with a Super Soaker full of holy water, which honestly was a better question than most of the ones I got from adults. But some of them were new.

Kathy — Springwood, OH: my little brother has the same nightmare every night. a man in a hat. is that one of yours. please answer.

anonymous — Springwood, OH: My son is at Westin Hills. He says you're helping. I don't know what that means. Thank you, I guess.

J.C. — Springwood, OH: tell R. that the goodnight thing was NOT on purpose. also hi.

I read the last one about eight times. J.C. was Jennifer Caulfield, on the one computer at Westin Hills, probably during Dr. Gordon's lunch break while he pretended not to see. In the back of my head the kid was doing something that felt like a cartwheel.

The goodnight thing, I told him. Her and Taryn, in unison. She's embarrassed about it.

What came back was very clear and very smug: She's embarrassed about it on a public website. Then, smaller: ...do you think Kristen reads the guestbook?

I let him have that one.

I couldn't really answer the Springwood entries, not with Simms reading everything with a highlighter, and Elaine Parker probably reading it too, and God knows what the Springwood police thought about a teenager in California who knew which kids were going to wake up bleeding. So I did the one thing I could and wrote a new lesson, right under LESSON 1 on the front page, where anybody could see it.

LESSON 2: How to survive not sleeping.If you or somebody you love keeps having the same nightmare, and it's the same place and the same man, here's what you do.Don't sleep alone. Take turns. One of you sleeps, one of you watches, and you switch. If the sleeper starts thrashing or talking, WAKE THEM UP. Don't wait to see what happens.Coffee is good. Cold water is better. Pain works best of all, but don't do that one, I'm serious.Stay away from anything that looks like home and isn't. Stay out of boiler rooms. Stay away from high places, bathroom sinks, and the TV after the stations go off the air.And if you meet somebody else who has the same dream, stick with them. You're not crazy. You're awake. That's what makes you dangerous to him.

It looked insane. Dr. Simms would've called it reinforcing a shared delusion. I posted it anyway, and then spent an hour on the Mailbag one-handed: vampires and Super Soakers, whether you're safer hiding in the attic or the basement (neither—attics have one exit and basements have zero), whether my rules applied to Mortal Kombat. When my finger was cramping and the modem had hung up on me for the fourth time, I leaned back in the chair, closed my eyes, and let my brain wander off.

It wandered somewhere embarrassing, and I'm telling you anyway, because that's the deal.

It wandered to a Top Story segment. Gale Weathers in her red blazer in front of Woodsboro High: "...the teenage survival expert who, sources say, has become the most eligible young man in Northern California..." Cut to Jennifer Caulfield in a studio chair telling the camera "he has a great phone voice." Cut to Taryn, arms crossed, leather jacket on: "...he's all right," which from Taryn is a sonnet. Cut to Kristen, blonde hair everywhere, holding up a popsicle-stick model of the Meeks house with a little popsicle-stick Randy on the porch. Cut to Tatum at the fountain: "I was in the garage too, you know." Cut to Nancy Thompson, lit like a noir movie, saying "Go to sleep, Mr. Meeks," and winking. Cut to Gale herself, turning to camera and lowering her voice: "And this reporter can confirm—"

"Randy," said Martha from the doorway, and I opened my eyes so fast I nearly fell out of the chair.

"What."

She was leaning on the doorframe eating a Pop-Tart and looking at me with enormous suspicion. "You were smiling."

"People smile."

"Not like that. You were smiling like Dad smiles when he's thinking about the Giants." She pointed the Pop-Tart at me. "Were you thinking about the girl? In Ohio?"

"I was thinking about the Giants."

"Liar," said Martha, with deep satisfaction, and went away.

The kid was mortified. I mostly thought it was funny, and kind of nice, honestly: a month of working out how to keep everybody around me from dying, and I got five minutes of something stupid. The really stupid part was that it wasn't entirely made up. A girl in Ohio had asked if she could meet me. A girl in Ohio who wore a leather jacket in her head had turned pink over a phone. A twenty-three-year-old grad student had laughed at my joke and told me to go to sleep in a voice that made my ears hot. Randy Meeks, who in four years of high school had talked to maybe six girls on purpose, had gotten interesting overnight, and neither of us had the first clue what to do about it.

Nancy called at four, Ohio time. Not through Kristen or the Parker house, but Nancy herself, from a pay phone by the sound of it, traffic behind her and a quarter clinking in and her voice pulled tight.

"Simms found the Hypnocil," she said, no hello. "Last night, after the call. She did a bed check at midnight and found Taryn's pill cup, and then she went through my bag and confiscated all of it. Called it an unauthorized experimental substance. Which it is." A hard breath. "I'm on probation. I can't dispense anything. I'm lucky I'm not fired."

"Did they sleep? Last night?"

"Like the dead." She heard it as she said it. "Like babies. No dreams, all seven, first time since August for some of them." A pause. "Tonight they won't have it."

I stood in the kitchen with the phone cord wrapped around my finger, watching Mom through the window weed a flower bed like her life depended on it.

"Then tonight's the night," I said.

"The night for what?"

"The bell tower."

Nancy didn't say anything. A truck went by on her end, then a bus, and I could hear the quarter running down.

"Phillip cut his strings," she said. "He's scared out of his mind, but he's doing everything right. Kincaid says he'll sit up with him. Will says he'll sit up with Kincaid." It was almost a laugh. "They've got a whole watch schedule. Will drew it on a legal pad. With initiative rolls."

"It won't be enough."

"How do you know that?"

"Because it's never enough. That's the whole genre. Everybody does everything right, and somebody falls asleep for five minutes." I closed my eyes. "Tell Kristen to go to bed early. Tell her the second she sees anything—anything—she reaches for me. Don't wait. Don't be brave. Reach."

"And you'll be asleep."

"I'll be asleep."

"How can you possibly be sure you'll be—"

"Nancy. Have you met a seventeen-year-old boy? I'm out by nine-thirty if I'm not doing something. I nearly fell asleep in the drugstore."

She laughed then, short and surprised, over the traffic. "Randy. Thank you. For... all of it. For last night. I hadn't heard those kids laugh once until last night. Will's been drawing wizard hats all day."

"Tell him to draw a big one."

"He already did." A beep on the line. "I'm out of quarters. Go to sleep, Mr. Meeks."

"That's the nicest thing a woman's ever said to me."

"Goodnight, Randy," she said, and hung up, and I stood there holding the receiver with my face going hot, and I honestly couldn't have told you whether it was mine or the kid's.

Tatum showed up at three, with Sidney. I heard her mom's old Corolla in the driveway, then the doorbell, then Mom's voice doing what it did now whenever anybody from Woodsboro High came to the house, which was sound thrilled and suspicious at the same time. Tatum walked into the den like she owned it, flopped onto the couch behind my chair, and put her feet up on the coffee table.

"Hey, psycho."

"Hey, Riley."

Sidney came in behind her slower and stood in the doorway with her hands pulled up into the sleeves of her sweatshirt. She looked better than she had at the fountain, like somebody who'd slept four hours instead of none.

"Hi, Randy."

"Hi, Sid."

The kid did the lurch—it's Sid—and I let it go by like a passing car, no wave, no glare.

"Your mom says you've been on the computer all day," Tatum said. "Is this the famous website? Can I see? I want to know if you wrote anything about me."

"I wrote about the garage."

"Did you say I was brave?"

"I said you threw a six-pack at a killer."

"That's brave." She craned over my shoulder at the screen, where LESSON 2 was up, and I watched her read it. At stay away from high places, bathroom sinks, and the TV after the stations go off the air her eyebrows went up. "That's really specific."

"It's a specific kind of problem."

"Is this the next one?" Not joking now. In the doorway, Sidney went still. "The thing you're not telling me. Is it this?"

I thought about lying, and I was tired of lying. "Yeah. It's in Ohio. There's a girl. There's a bunch of kids, actually. And a... guy. Who's bad."

"A girl," Tatum said, flat as a parking ticket. In the doorway Sidney's eyes flicked to me and away fast, like she'd touched a hot pan, and Tatum looked very hard at the screen, like LESSON 2 was the most fascinating thing she'd ever read.

My eyebrow went up on its own. Randy's eyebrow, Theo's timing.

"Riley. Are you jealous?"

"Of what?" She didn't look away from the screen. "Some girl in Ohio? That you've never even met?"

"We've met. Sort of."

"Sort of."

"It's complicated."

"Everything with you is complicated." She finally looked at me, and her face was doing something I'd never seen Tatum Riley's face do, which was lose an argument. "I'm not jealous. I'm concerned. You got stabbed and shot in the same week and now you're running off to Ohio, in your sleep, for some girl—"

"Some kids."

"—for some kids, and one of them's a girl, and you've got a look on your face when you say it."

"Well," I said, "actually, there's a lot of girls. I've been flirting with all of them. Over the phone." I thought about it. "And the young woman who's supervising them."

The den went dead silent. In the kitchen Mom ran the tap and shut it off.

"All of them," Tatum said.

"Most of them. One of them has a leather jacket she's not allowed to wear."

"The young woman who's supervising them."

"She's twenty-three. She told me to go to sleep. It was very moving."

Tatum stared at me like I'd just confessed to being a Russian spy. In the doorway Sidney made a small strangled noise that might've been a laugh or might've been choking on nothing, and put her hand over her mouth.

"You," Tatum said slowly, "are unbelievable." She pointed at me. "Sid. Tell him he has a look."

"He has a look," Sidney told the carpet.

The kid was having the best afternoon of his entire life. I could feel him with his face pressed to the glass. Four years, and Sidney Prescott had never once noticed he had a face, and now two girls were in his den arguing about the look on it.

"I don't have a look," I said, with a look.

"Oh my God," said Tatum.

"How bad is it?" Sidney said, a little too loud, desperate to change the subject.

"Worse than Billy."

Sidney made a small sound. Tatum kept her eyes on me. "Can I help?"

"It's in Ohio, Tate."

"So?"

"So I'm not even going to Ohio. I'm helping from here. It's—complicated. It's a phone thing. And a sleeping thing."

"A sleeping thing."

"I can't explain it."

Tatum looked at the forty-eight batteries lined up on the desk next to the computer, then at me, then back at the batteries. "What's with the batteries?"

"Part of the sleeping thing."

"Randy." She put a hand on my good shoulder and left it there, and the kid went off like a car alarm. "You're a freak. You know that? You're the biggest freak I've ever met." A squeeze. "When you figure out how I can help, you call me. I mean it. I'm not sitting on my hands while you fight bad guys in Ohio by sleeping."

"Okay."

"Promise."

"I promise."

"Good." She took her hand back, and I spent the next ten seconds remembering how breathing works. She glanced at Sidney in the doorway, then at me, and got up off the couch. "I'm gonna go ask your mom if she has any of those donuts."

"We ate them."

"I'm gonna go ask anyway," Tatum said, and went out, and very pointedly shut the den door behind her, which left me and Sidney and a humming computer.

She didn't sit. She stood by the door with her hands in her sleeves and looked at the carpet, then at me. "I brought you something. From my dad."

It was a pie, a real one in a glass dish with a dish towel over it, apple, still warm. She held it out, and I took it one-handed and nearly dropped it, and she caught the other side, and for a second we stood in the middle of my den holding a pie together like idiots.

"He made it," she said. "He's been baking. Since. He says it helps. He says he doesn't know how to say thank you in a way that's big enough, so he's going to make you a pie every week until he figures it out."

"That's..." I looked at the pie. "That's really nice, Sid."

"He means it. You're going to get so many pies."

"I can live with that."

She almost smiled. We put the pie on the desk next to the batteries, and then she stood there and I sat there and neither of us said anything until she did.

"I'm not asking you to be there yet. At the fountain. You said you're not there yet, and that's okay. I just wanted to be in the same room. Without it being weird. Or—less weird."

"It's a little weird," I said.

"It's a lot weird."

"Yeah."

She looked at the screen, at LESSON 2. "Can I ask you something? When you said worse than Billy." She wet her lips. "Are you going to be okay?"

I thought about a forty-foot arm coming out of a TV, a stairwell that went up forever, and Freddy Krueger in his own boiler room telling me I was a coat somebody else was wearing.

"I've got a lot of batteries," I said.

That got her. The almost-smile turned into a real one, surprised out of her, the first I'd seen since the lawn, and she put her hand over her mouth like she'd done something wrong. "You're so weird."

"People keep saying that."

"People keep being right." She took her hand down. "Okay. I'm gonna go before Tatum eats your whole kitchen." At the door she stopped. "Randy? The girl in Ohio. The one with the... sleeping thing."

"Kristen."

"Kristen." She nodded like she was filing it. "Is she nice?"

The kid did something complicated in the back of my head, a lot of things at once: guilt, loyalty, four years of old crush saying wait, and something new and bright pushing right past it going yes, she's nice, she's really nice, she laughs at stuff before you even get to the end of it.

"Yeah," I said. "She's nice."

Something crossed Sidney's face, fast. It was the look you'd give a sweater you gave to Goodwill years ago when you see somebody else wearing it in the grocery store, and it looks good on them, and you don't exactly want it back, but it used to be yours.

My eyebrow went up again. "Sid. Are you jealous too?"

"No!" She went pink to her hairline. "No. God. No." A pause. "Maybe a little."

The kid fell over in the back of my head. I felt him hit the floor.

"It's not like that," Sidney said quickly. "It's just—you were our weird guy, you know? The weird guy at the fountain with the movie facts. And now you're some girl in Ohio's weird guy, and she gets you at one in the morning on the phone, and we get you in a sling in your den with a pie." She pulled her sleeves down over her hands. "It's stupid. Ignore me."

"Sid," I said. "I can be everybody's weird guy. I contain multitudes."

She laughed without meaning to, a hiccup first and then for real, hand over her mouth, shaking her head. "You're so weird."

"I've been told."

She got her breath back and smiled again, smaller, but real. "Good. About the girl. You deserve nice."

She went out. I heard her in the kitchen, and Tatum laughing at something, and Mom laughing too, which almost never happened anymore, and then Martha's voice pitched to carry, with the words phone bill and every single night in it. A second later Tatum stuck her head back around the den door holding a donut she'd found somewhere, which should've been impossible.

"Forty dollars," she said. "Of long distance. In one week. Your sister told me everything, Meeks."

"Jealous?" I said.

"Dream on," said Tatum Riley, and took a bite of the donut, and left.

Dream on. If she only knew. I sat there with my mouth open while the front door went and the Corolla backed out of the driveway, and then I sat there some more, looking at the pie. Getting there, I told the kid. He didn't argue, and he didn't stop being a little sad about it either, but he didn't argue.

I went to bed at nine-fifteen. Mom looked in on her way past and found me lying on top of the covers in the dark in a T-shirt and my old cargo pants from the eighth-grade camping trip, the ones with eight pockets, every one of them stuffed so full of double-A batteries that I rattled like a maraca when I breathed. She stood in the doorway a while.

"Big night?"

"Something like that."

"Is it the girl? In Ohio?"

"It's her friends," I said. "They're going through a hard time. I told them I'd be there."

I could see her deciding not to ask how you're there for somebody two thousand miles away by lying in the dark in Woodsboro. "Okay," she said. "Sleep tight."

"You too, Mom."

She pulled the door most of the way shut; she didn't close it all the way anymore. I listened to her go down the hall, to Martha's radio through the wall and Dad downstairs with the late news, and lay perfectly still so I wouldn't rattle, forty-eight batteries' worth of stupid. Stupid didn't matter. I had no idea how long I'd be in there. I was out in about four minutes, because, again, seventeen-year-old boy.

The rope came at 12:51 Ohio time, which I found out later. All I knew then was the pull around my chest, sideways and hard, a lot harder than last time—less a rope than a hand grabbing my collar and yanking—and the voice at the far end had quit saying my name like a prayer and was screaming it. RANDY. RANDY, THE TOWER. HE'S GOT PHILLIP, RANDY, THE TOWER—

I hit the ground running before I knew I was. Boots on stone, the M60 already on my shoulder and the bandana already on my head, and next to me a clatter and a whoa as the kid in his green vest and flannel stumbled to catch up, remote in hand.

"Where are we," he said.

Old stone stairs spiraled up around us, lit by moonlight through slit windows, so cold our breath smoked. Somewhere above, a bell was tolling slow and heavy, like a heartbeat at the end of something.

"Westin Hills," I said. "The bell tower. The real one, in the building. He's dreaming the real place."

"Why?"

"Because Phillip's walking it for real. Right now. In his sleep."

The kid went white; he'd seen the movie forty times on the VCR in his room, same as me. He looked down at the remote. The LED was solid red, bright, full. Then he reached into his vest pocket and stopped, because the pocket clinked.

He pulled out a handful of double-A batteries. The other pocket was full too, and the inside pocket, and the little pen pocket on the chest, and when he patted his flannel, that clinked too. He was carrying so many batteries he sounded like a wind chime. He looked at them, then at me, and his whole face lit up like Christmas.

"Dude," he breathed.

"Don't," I said. "Don't say anything. Put them in your pocket and run."

We found Kristen three turns up, on her knees on the stairs, hanging on to the stone rail with blonde hair everywhere and her mint cardigan torn at the shoulder, looking up.

"There," she said, and pointed without looking at us.

Phillip was twenty steps above her, walking. His eyes were open and empty. He was in pajamas, barefoot, climbing the spiral with the jerky, too-high, too-loose steps of a marionette, arms lifting and dropping with every step like somebody up top was working a wooden cross. And there were strings, running from his wrists and ankles and knees up into the dark at the top of the tower, red and wet, coming out of Phillip's own skin through little slits at every joint. I didn't need to get any closer to know what they were. Freddy had pulled out Phillip's veins and tied them to a stick.

"Oh, God," said the kid. "Oh, God, it's worse. It's worse in person."

From the top of the tower somebody laughed, and the rough, delighted voice came echoing down the stone: "Well, look who's back. Army man and video boy. Did you bring the batteries this time?"

"Yeah," the kid yelled up. His voice cracked, and he yelled anyway. "I brought FORTY-EIGHT!"

Freddy laughed harder. Phillip took another step, and another, and the bell tolled.

"We go up," I said. "Now. Kid, you're on the remote. Kristen, stay close to him. If Phillip gets to the top—"

"I know what happens at the top," Kristen said, already climbing.

It was a long way up. Dream stairs always are, up and around and up and around, every turn the same turn, and Phillip stayed exactly twenty steps ahead no matter how fast we climbed. The kid took them two at a time on his long young legs, and mine were an action hero's legs, and neither of us could close the gap. Kristen, faster than both of us, ran sideways along the outside wall of the stairwell like she had in the hallway, and even she couldn't close it.

"It's the story," the kid panted. "He's always twenty steps ahead because the story says he gets to the top. That's the scene. The camera stays on his back. He gets there."

"So change the scene."

"How?"

"You're the guy with the remote!"

The kid stopped on the stairs with his chest heaving and looked down at the remote in his hand, and I watched the idea land on his face. He pointed it up the stairwell at Phillip's back and pressed ⏩, and everything lurched.

It was like standing on a train that starts too fast. The stairs blurred. The walls smeared past in long gray streaks with the moonlight strobing through the slit windows, flash flash flash flash, the bell's toll stretched out into one long warbling note, and my feet left the stone—

▶▶ FF

—and then we were at the top, all three of us, on a stone landing under an open wooden trapdoor, with a ladder going up and cold air coming down. The fast-forward had skipped right past the part of the scene where we chase him, straight to the part where we arrive.

Phillip was halfway up the ladder, climbing on his strings. Above him, through the trapdoor, crouched on a beam beside the great black shape of the bell with a wooden marionette cross in his bladed glove, was Freddy Krueger, and the gray hole in his chest still hadn't healed. Something in me saw that and went good.

"You skipped the best part," Freddy said, sounding honestly hurt. "That's cheating, video boy. That's like fast-forwarding through the credits."

"Nobody watches the credits," the kid said.

"I watch the credits." Freddy tilted the cross, and Phillip's arm jerked up and his hand closed on the next rung. "I like to know who worked on the picture."

"Kid," I said. "Pause him."

He hit ⏸.

II PAUSE

Freddy froze on the beam mid-grin, and the bell froze mid-swing, tilted, its clapper hanging in the air. The wind stopped. Phillip froze on the ladder with one hand up and one foot lifting, the red strings running taut from his joints up through the trapdoor to the frozen cross in Freddy's frozen glove.

"Go," the kid said through his teeth. "Go go go go, it's pulling hard, it's pulling HARD—"

I dropped the M60 and pulled the Bowie knife off my hip, twenty inches of First Blood honed to a mirror by the belief of a ten-year-old at a Goodwill shelf, went up the ladder two rungs behind Phillip, reached past him, and started cutting. Wrist: the string parted with a wet snap and whipped up into the dark. Other wrist. Elbow. Knee. The knife went through them like nothing, but there were so many.

"Theo," the kid gasped. "Theo, I can't, it's—"

The LED was blinking. I got the last one, at Phillip's left ankle, right as time came back on with a jolt that nearly knocked me off the ladder.

The whole tower lurched. The bell swung and struck, and the sound was a bomb going off in a church. Up on the beam Freddy jerked his marionette cross and nothing happened, because nothing was attached to it anymore. It swung empty in his fist, trailing cut red strings, and for a second he just looked at it. Then he looked down the ladder at me, and his face did what it had done in the boiler room when his glove closed on air.

"That's MY puppet," he said.

On the ladder below me, Phillip woke up—in here, I mean, not out there. The emptiness drained out of his eyes, and he looked at his own wrists, at the little slits where the strings had gone in, and then up through the trapdoor at the man with the cross, and you could watch him understand exactly what had been done to him. I've seen a lot of faces go through a lot of things. I'd never seen one go from scared to furious that fast.

"No," Phillip said. "It's not."

He reached past me through the trapdoor, grabbed a fistful of the cut ends where they hung off Freddy's cross, and pulled, and Freddy came off that beam like a yanked tablecloth.

He hit the landing between us so hard the stone cracked. Phillip didn't let go. The strings in his fist weren't attached to him anymore, and I watched them move, wriggling and stretching and snaking through the air like something alive, and fasten into Freddy's wrists and elbows and knees with a sound like somebody stapling meat.

"What," said Freddy Krueger.

Phillip climbed down the ladder holding the cross now—Freddy's cross, with the strings running from it into Freddy's joints. His hands were shaking. His face wasn't.

"You made me walk," Phillip said. "Every night. For a month. You made me walk."

He tilted the bar, and Freddy's gloved right arm came up against his will. You could see it was against his will. He was straining, every burned tendon in his neck standing out, and the arm rose anyway, slowly, and turned until the five long blades were pointing at his own face.

"Phillip," the kid breathed. "Oh, man. Oh, MAN. That's your power. That's your POWER, dude, you're the PUPPETEER—"

"I told you I'd tell you," Phillip said, without taking his eyes off Freddy, "when I found out."

Six inches from Freddy's eyes. Four. Three. He was screaming now, wordless and enraged, the strings creaking, and Phillip's arms were trembling with the strain, because he'd never done this before and he was seventeen and scared to death and holding a dream demon by his own strings. It couldn't last. I've been the new guy with a weapon he doesn't know, and it never lasts the first time.

"Kid," I said. "Get him out. Now, while he's winning."

The kid pointed the remote at Phillip. The LED was blinking. He dug into his vest and fumbled out two of the forty-odd batteries from a drugstore on Main Street in Woodsboro, California, which could not possibly be in here and were, swapped them in with shaking hands, and the LED went solid red.

"Phillip," the kid said. "You won. You won, man. Go home."

▲ EJECT

Clunk-whirr. Phillip came apart into light. The cross fell out of the air where his hands had been and hit the stone, the strings went slack, and Freddy Krueger staggered back against the wall clawing red threads out of his own joints, howling.

Somewhere in the real Westin Hills, on the real stone stairs of the real bell tower, a seventeen-year-old boy in pajamas opened his eyes three steps from the top and screamed, and a pair of arms the size of tree trunks caught him around the waist from behind. I found that part out later, too. Max had seen the stairwell door standing open on his rounds and gone up after him.

Freddy didn't come after us, and that scared me worse than anything he'd done yet. In the boiler room he'd come at us every second. Here he just leaned against the wall of the tower, pulling the last red string out of his elbow and breathing hard, with the gray hole still in his chest and little new holes at every joint where Phillip's strings had gone in, leaking something dark. Then he looked up at us and smiled.

"Busy boys," he said. "Busy, busy, busy. All the way up here in the tower, saving the puppet boy." He tilted his head. "It's a big building, army man. Lots of rooms. Lots of kids. Lots of TVs."

The kid went rigid beside me.

"You can't be everywhere," Freddy said. "That's what's so funny about heroes. They always think they can, and there's always one more room."

He stepped backward off the edge of the landing into the dark, and the dark took him, and the kid grabbed my arm hard enough to hurt.

"Jennifer," he said.

Kristen had heard it too and was already moving. She hit the ladder and dropped, catching a rung every six feet to slow down, and we went after her down and around and down, the kid hammering ⏩ with his thumb. Every time, the stairwell lurched and skipped and blurred, and every time it wasn't enough.

"It's too far," he kept saying. "It's too far, the building's too big, he made it too big—"

We came out the bottom of the stairwell into a corridor that was every corridor at Westin Hills at once, doors on both sides going on forever, and way down at the far end, faint, was a sound every kid in America knew: a TV late at night after the station signs off, the soft, unbroken hiss of static. We ran at it forever. The kid kept hitting ⏩, the corridor kept lurching and smearing and skipping, the static kept getting louder, and the building stayed exactly as big as Freddy wanted it.

Then, far ahead, the static changed. A voice came out of it, warm and oily, a late-night talk show host with a tan and too many teeth: "...and our next guest tonight is a young lady who's always dreamed of being on television..."

And a girl's voice, sleepy and confused and delighted: "Me?"

"He's got her," the kid said. "He's in the TV. He's got her, Theo, it's the scene, it's happening right now—"

We weren't going to make it. I knew it like you know you're not going to make a yellow light. There was too much hallway, and the story had already decided.

Then Kristen stopped running, so dead in the middle of the corridor that I almost ran her over, and stood there with her eyes squeezed shut and her fists clenched and her whole body shaking, like somebody trying to deadlift way too much weight.

"Kristen, we have to—"

"Shut up," she said, eyes still closed. "Shut up, shut up, I'm reaching."

I got it about half a second later, and so did the kid, who grabbed my arm. She'd pulled me in from California, two thousand miles, two of me at once. She'd pulled Joey into a boiler room by accident. And Jennifer was forty feet away, asleep in her own dream.

"Come on," Kristen whispered. A thin dark line of blood ran from her nose over her lip. "Come on, come on, Jen, come on, I know you hate me, you think I'm weird, come ON—"

Down the hall the talk show host was laughing. "Now, Jennifer, don't be shy. Come closer. Closer. The camera loves you..."

Kristen pulled, and we all felt it. The whole corridor jerked like a rug yanked out from under us, something at the far end banged like a screen door, a girl screamed, and then the scream was right behind us, where Jennifer Caulfield was sitting on the corridor floor in her pajamas with a blanket still around her shoulders and eyes as big as dinner plates.

"Kristen?" Jennifer said. "What the hell? I was—there was a TV, and this talk show guy was—"

From the end of the hall came a noise like a transformer blowing. The dayroom door burst off its hinges, and out of the dark behind it came an arm, a long, impossible, gray-skinned arm stretching out of a television set and reaching down the corridor at us, forty feet long and growing, with the glove on the end of it, clicking.

"THAT'S MY GUEST," something screamed from inside the TV.

The kid already had the remote up. "Jennifer," he said fast, "hi, I'm Randy, we talked on the phone, you have a great voice, I'm so sorry about this—"

▲ EJECT

Clunk-whirr. Jennifer came apart into light, blanket and all, and the glove closed a foot above the floor where her head had been. It hung there a second, fingers flexing on nothing. Then the arm pulled slowly back down the hall, through the broken door, into the dayroom, into the screen, and the static hissed and stopped.

For a while nobody said anything. Kristen sat against the wall with her head tipped back, pinching her bleeding nose. The kid sat next to her holding the remote against his chest in both hands like a teddy bear, the LED blinking, his pockets still full of batteries and his hands shaking too hard to get at them.

"Two," he said finally. "We got two."

"Kristen got two," I said. "Kristen got that one."

Kristen took her hand away from her nose and looked at the blood on her fingers and started laughing, a crazy laugh, a little too high, and then she was crying, and then she was doing both. "She hates me. Jennifer. She thinks I'm a freak. She told Taryn I build dollhouses because I'm a baby."

"She's gonna have to be nice to you now," said the kid. "That's the rule. You save somebody's life, they have to be nice to you. At least for a week."

Kristen laughed harder through the crying, and then she put her head on the kid's shoulder for a second, and he went so still and so red I could see it glowing in the dark.

It got quiet after that, actually quiet for the first time all night, and I noticed the corridor was changing. The endless doors were going away one at a time, like lights being switched off down a hallway, and the cold was leaving the air. The walls had gone from Westin Hills green to a soft yellow like the inside of a lampshade, and the carpet under us was getting thick and a little shaggy, very 1979 living room. Somewhere, faintly, a record was playing, something sad and English with a lot of guitar.

"Is this..." the kid said.

"It's hers," I said. "He's gone. It's just her dream now."

Kristen lifted her head off the kid's shoulder and looked around, and her whole face let go at once. "Oh," she said. "I forgot it could do this."

I pulled off the bandana. It was soaked with sweat that wasn't real, but it was the only cloth I had and her nose was still going, so I folded it into a square, crouched, and held it out. "Pinch. Tilt forward, not back. Back is a myth, you'll just swallow it."

She took it and pressed it to her nose and looked at me over it, at the tiger stripes and the bandoliers and the M60, like she was seeing me for the first time. "Are you always like this?" she said, muffled.

"Like what?"

"Like a movie."

"Only in here," I said. "Out there I'm a skinny kid in a sling who puked in a neighbor's azaleas." I nodded at her. "That was the best rescue I've ever seen, Kristen, and I was in the Army. I mean it. In the middle of all that you stopped and thought, and then you did the one thing nobody else in the building could do. I served with guys who never figured out how to do that."

She went pink behind the bandana. Next to her the kid gave me the purest look of betrayal I've ever seen on a human face. The bandana, it said. You gave her the bandana. That's MY move. That's a movie move. I was gonna—

"I was gonna give you my vest," the kid blurted out loud. "For the... it's cold. It was cold. Before. It's not cold now. But it was. Earlier." He was already half out of it. "Here."

Kristen looked at the green Bradley Video vest he was holding out, RANDY on the name tag in white label-maker tape, then at him. "It's not cold anymore."

"Right. No. Totally." He started putting it back on and got his arm stuck. "You know what, I'm just gonna—you have really nice hair. In here. I mean out there too, probably. On the phone it sounds nice. That doesn't make sense. Your hair doesn't make sounds. I'm going to stop."

Kristen stared at him, and then laughed from her stomach with the bandana pressed to her face, so hard she had to lean on the wall. "You're both idiots."

"Yeah," the kid agreed, arm still stuck in the vest.

"Guilty," I said.

"I pull you across the whole country," Kristen said, wiping her eyes, "and I get two idiots."

"Two for one," the kid said. "You love a bargain."

Then he realized who'd said that line first and went white, and Kristen laughed so hard she slid all the way down the wall.

"Too soon," the kid said. "Way too soon. Sorry."

"No," Kristen gasped. "No, it's good. It's so good. He can't have it. It's ours now."

She sat on the shaggy carpet of her own dream in her torn mint cardigan, blood on her lip and my bandana in her hand, with a boy in a Bradley Video vest next to her trying very hard to look like he wasn't looking at her, and for the first time since I'd met her she looked like a seventeen-year-old girl having a good night. The kid was looking at her like she'd hung the moon. I let him. In here it was his face to look with.

"Hey," she said to him, softer. "Randy. The one with the remote."

"Yeah?"

"Can I still have it?"

The kid blinked. "The—what?"

"The vest." She held out her hand. "It's not cold. I just want it."

The kid looked at the vest still hanging off his stuck arm, then at her, and very carefully, like it might break, he finished getting it off and put it in her hands. She put it on over her torn cardigan. It was way too big, and the RANDY name tag sat crooked on her chest, right over her heart.

"There," she said, and looked at him, and the kid made a noise I've never heard a human being make, like a teakettle trying to decide whether to go off.

She held the bandana out to me.

"Keep it," I said.

"Both?"

"Both. Call it a first aid kit. You're the medic now."

She folded it and tucked it into the vest's front pocket very neatly, like it mattered. I didn't know if you could keep things from a dream. I hoped she could.

Then the rope around my chest started to pull, because Kristen was waking up, and this time I let it take me without a fight, the kid next to me, backward through the dark. The last thing I saw was the dayroom door hanging off its hinges at the end of the hall and the TV behind it, dark and quiet now, with a crack running down the middle of the screen from the inside.

Somewhere in all that dark, flying backward toward California, the kid turned his head toward me, his hair blowing straight back and his vest gone. He looked like a boy who'd just been handed the keys to a car he didn't know how to drive.

"Theo. Can I ask you something?"

"Now?"

"Now." He swallowed. "Why the hell are all the women interested in us now?"

I actually thought about it, falling backward through the dark at a thousand miles an hour. "Beats me. Women are creatures of strange habits, man. My guess is once one girl flirts with you, you're on the map. It's like a restaurant with a line out the door. Nobody wants to eat at the empty one."

"That's it?"

"Also," I said, "most of them just lost their boyfriends, or their friends, or their whole idea of what's safe. So some of it's probably trauma bonding."

The kid didn't say anything for a while, and the dark rushed by.

"That's the least romantic thing anybody's ever said to me."

"You asked."

"I did ask," he admitted. Then, after a while, softer, with a little smile I could hear even if I couldn't see it: "...Still counts, though."

"Yeah, kid," I said. "It still counts."

Westin Hills. 1:38 a.m.

Kristen.

Max came in because I was laughing. That's what he told me later. Everybody on nights was used to screaming from the Elm Street rooms, but at 1:38 in the morning he heard somebody in room 12 laughing, soft and helpless, the kind you do when you've cried so long it's turned into something else, and that was strange enough that he came to check.

He turned on my lamp. I was sitting up in bed with my back against the wall and my knees pulled up, and my nose had stopped bleeding, but there was dried blood on my lip. And I was wearing a green vest: a cheap polyester work vest, way too big, BRADLEY VIDEO on the back and a crooked name tag on the front over my heart, in white label-maker tape. RANDY. In the front pocket, folded into a neat square, was a green bandana, stiff with dried sweat and a little of my blood.

Max stood in the doorway for a while. "Kristen," he said slowly. "Honey. Where'd you get that?"

I looked down and touched the name tag. It was real under my fingers, that rough cheap plastic every store in America uses. I thought about a skinny boy with his arm stuck in a sleeve saying your hair doesn't make sounds, and a soldier in a bandana crouching in front of me saying you're the medic now.

"A boy gave it to me," I said.

Max looked at me, at the vest, at the locked window, at the locked door he'd just unlocked, and at the camera up in the corner of the ceiling that had been pointed at my bed all night. Then he turned off the lamp, very gently, said, "I didn't see nothing," and pulled the door most of the way shut, leaving the crack of hall light he always leaves.

I woke up at 9:04 Woodsboro time soaked through, T-shirt and pillow both, like I'd run a fever all night. The kid was back where he always was, humming something tuneless and happy in the back of my head. I'm pretty sure it was the Rocky theme.

The panel opened.

Feat Achieved! Cut a puppet's strings+1× Silver Trait Gacha Ticket(Story in progress. Ticket held.)

Feat Achieved! Beat the story to the next room+1× Bronze Skill Gacha Ticket(Story in progress. Ticket held.)

Beat the story to the next room. I read that one three times, and lying there looking at it, the good feeling started going sour at the edges.

I thought about Kenny in the van, and Himbry on the goalposts, and Casey Becker, who died before I even woke up in this body. I'd saved Tatum, and the movie took Kenny. I'd tried to save Himbry, and it took Himbry anyway. Last night we'd saved Phillip and then Jennifer, two bodies the story wanted, and it got neither. I didn't know if that's how it worked, or whether anybody was even keeping count—but if somebody was, I'd just walked out of the store without paying for two things, and I had a bad feeling somebody was going to come around eventually asking for the money.

At nine-thirty Mom knocked and opened the door before I could answer, and found me sitting on the edge of the bed in a soaked T-shirt and cargo pants with forty-eight batteries in them.

"The girl's friends?" she said.

"They're okay. All of them. It was a bad night, but they're okay."

She didn't ask how I knew. I was only starting to figure that out about my mom: somewhere along the way she'd decided whatever was happening to her son was bigger than she could fix, so she'd quit trying to fix it and started trying to sit next to it. She sat down beside me on the bed and put her hand on the back of my neck, like Dad had with the donuts, and left it there.

"You look like you ran a marathon," she said.

"Kind of did."

"Did you win?"

I thought about Jennifer on the corridor floor with her blanket around her shoulders, saying what the hell?

"Yeah," I said. "This time." She nodded like that was an answer she could live with, and kept her hand where it was.

Nancy called at one Ohio time, ten in the morning mine, and I picked up on the first ring.

"Tell me what happened," she said, no hello. Her voice was shaking, but not the bad kind. "Tell me everything that happened. Because I've got two kids in the infirmary who should be dead, and a TV in the dayroom with a crack in the screen that goes outward, and Dr. Simms is walking around this building like somebody stole her car."

So I told her. The tower, the veins, Phillip's power, the talk show host, Kristen in the corridor with her nose bleeding, reaching. Then the arm, and Nancy went quiet on the line for so long I checked the cord.

"Jennifer woke up in the dayroom chair screaming," she said finally. "The night nurse was in the bathroom. When she came running, Jennifer was on the floor, and the TV was on the stand, and the screen was cracked. The nurse thinks Jennifer threw something at it. Jennifer won't say anything except that the talk show guy is a creep and she wants to talk to Kristen." A pause. "They're sitting together at breakfast right now. Jennifer's doing Kristen's hair."

Then her voice changed. "And Randy. Kristen came to breakfast wearing a work vest from a video store in California. With your name on it. And a bandana in the pocket." A pause. "Max says she had it on at one-thirty in the morning in a locked room, and it wasn't in her bag when she was admitted, and it wasn't in her room at bed check. Max also says he didn't see nothing, and I'm inclined to let him."

I couldn't answer. I walked to my closet with the phone and opened the door, and there on its usual hook was my Bradley Video vest, green polyester, RANDY on the name tag, right where I'd left it. So the one in Ohio was a second one, made by the dream out of the kid's idea of himself, and a girl had pulled it out into the waking world the same way Nancy once pulled out a hat.

"You can bring things out," I said slowly.

"I know," Nancy said. "I brought out his hat, once. When I was sixteen." A breath. "I've been wondering all morning what else those kids could bring out."

The kid in the back of my head was not thinking about tactics. He was thinking about a girl in Ohio eating breakfast in his vest, and taking a little victory lap about it, and glowing like a space heater.

"And Phillip?"

"Max caught him three steps from the top of the ladder. He's got cuts at every joint—both wrists, both elbows, both knees—like somebody slit them with a razor. He won't stop talking. He keeps telling everybody he pulled the strings back." A pause. "Simms has him sedated. She says it's a delusional episode. Will told her to go roll a d20."

I laughed. It came out a little cracked, but it came out.

"Randy," Nancy said. "Listen to me. I read their files last night. Phillip would have gone off that tower. Jennifer would have gone through that screen. I know it, the way I knew about Tina, and Rod, and Glen." A breath. "I've been fighting him since I was sixteen. I've never saved two in one night. I've never saved anybody who wasn't me."

"Kristen did the second one," I said. "Not me."

"Kristen did it because she knew she could. Because somebody told her what she was." Her voice had gone fierce. "You and Will and your wizard hats."

There's always one more room, Freddy had said. For once there hadn't been.

"He's going to try again," I said. "Harder. He got embarrassed last night, twice, and you don't embarrass something like him and walk away clean."

"Then we stop letting him pick the room," Nancy said, and there was something new in her voice, hard and bright, like a match getting struck. "I've been thinking about it all night. What you said, and what Will said. About being a party. About all of them going in together." A pause. "Randy, what happens if we don't wait for him to come to us? What if we go to him? All of us, tonight. Kristen pulls everyone in at once, and we go looking for him."

The kid quit his victory lap and lifted his head.

I thought about Kincaid picking up a boiler, Will in a wizard hat, Taryn winning the fight, Joey's voice—whatever it turned out to be—loud. Phillip, seventeen and furious, holding the marionette bar with Freddy's own glove pointed at his eyes. Kristen with her nose bleeding, pulling a girl out of a TV from forty feet away, and a gray hole in Freddy Krueger's chest that still hadn't closed.

"Nancy," I said. "That's the best idea anybody's had since I got here."

"Then get some sleep tonight, Mr. Meeks," Nancy Thompson said. "And bring your batteries."