Chapter 7: Channel Surfing (Patreon)

The problem with Nancy's plan was time zones.

"Ten o'clock," she said on the phone Sunday morning. She'd found a quieter pay phone; I could hear birds. "Simms is off Sundays. Dr. Gordon's on nights, and as of about eleven o'clock last night, Dr. Gordon has decided he'd rather be a doctor who believes his patients than a doctor who fills out forms about them. He's giving me the rec room. He's going to sit in the hall and read a book." She said it like she was describing a miracle. "Ten o'clock. All seven of them, in a circle. I take them down, Kristen reaches, and we go."

"Ten o'clock Ohio," I said.

"Yes."

"That's seven o'clock here."

"Is that a problem?"

"Nancy, I'm seventeen, not four. I haven't gone to bed at seven since the Reagan administration."

"You told me you fall asleep in drugstores."

"That's at nine-thirty. At seven o'clock I'm at my peak. At seven o'clock I'm watching The Simpsons."

A pause on the line.

"Then figure it out, Mr. Meeks," Nancy said. "Because I'm not taking seven kids into his house without the boy with the remote."

She hung up, and I stood in the kitchen looking at the phone while something in the back of my head lit up like a scoreboard at the boy with the remote.

Don't let it go to your head, I told him.

It's already in my head, he told me. I live in your head.

Fair.

So I ran. Three miles, a mile more than I'd ever done in this body, with Martha behind me on her ten-speed yelling splits at a Sunday surcharge of five dollars. I did wall sits until my thighs caught fire and left-handed push-ups against the kitchen counter until my arm shook. At five-thirty I ate a massive plate of Mom's spaghetti, then a second one, and then took the longest, hottest shower in the history of the Meeks household, until Martha pounded on the door and yelled that she needed to exist.

At six-forty I came downstairs in my eighth-grade cargo pants, rattling. Mom was at the stove. She looked at me, then at the pants, and listened to them.

"Big night?" she said.

"Big night."

She didn't ask; she never asked anymore. She turned off the burner, got down a mug, heated milk in a saucepan, stirred in a spoonful of honey, and handed it to me. "My mother used to make this. When I couldn't sleep."

I drank it standing in the kitchen in my battery pants while she watched. It was sweet and warm and tasted like something from a life I'd never had.

"Thanks, Mom."

"Say hi to Kristen for me," she said.

"Mom."

"What? I'm just saying." She took the mug back. "Go to sleep, honey."

I went up the stairs with the taste still in my mouth, and halfway up the kid said, very small, She used to make me that.

I stopped on the landing.

No, he said a second later. She didn't. That's not... I don't think she ever did. I never couldn't sleep. Or I never told her. A pause. She makes it for you.

I stood there with my hand on the rail, because anything I said was going to make it worse. His mother, his kitchen, his stove, his grandmother's recipe. He'd lived in that house seventeen years and never once gotten the honey milk, and I'd been there six weeks.

It's okay, the kid said. I'm not mad. It's just weird. Watching.

I know.

It was really good, though, right?

Yeah, man, I said. It was really good.

I was out cold by 7:06, which I'm crediting to the spaghetti.

This time there was no rope. It was more like being called, the way somebody in a big house calls you down to dinner and your feet just go, warm and easy, and at the far end there wasn't one voice but a lot of them, overlapping, with Kristen's in the middle holding them together: come on, come on, all of you, come ON—

I landed on Elm Street. The fog, the trees, the house with the red door, and in the street in front of it, in a loose, nervous circle, blinking at each other in the moonlight, nine people.

Kristen, in the mint cardigan and a green video store vest with RANDY on the name tag—wearing, in a dream, a vest she'd brought out of a dream, which I decided not to think about too hard. Kincaid, huge, in a white T-shirt, fists already balled. Taryn, arms crossed, hunched. Jennifer in her pajamas with her hair up, staring at the house. Phillip, pale, holding the little wooden face with no strings. Joey at the edge of the circle, silent. Will in his wheelchair. And Nancy Thompson, in jeans and a gray sweater, the white streak in her hair glowing like a stripe of moonlight, standing a little apart from the kids the way a sergeant stands a little apart from the squad and looking at the house like it owed her money.

Beside me, in his vest and flannel, clinking faintly every time he moved, was the kid.

Nancy turned at the sound of our boots. She saw the kid first—skinny, green vest, remote, the boy from Top Story—and her face did something like oh, of course. Then she saw me. The fatigues, the bandana, the M60, the Bowie knife, two hundred and some rounds of belted brass crossed over my chest. Five-eight of VHS-cover action hero. She kept looking.

"So," Nancy Thompson said finally, "you're the other one."

"Ma'am," I said.

"Don't ma'am me."

"Nancy. It's an honor. Really, I mean that."

There was something in her face I couldn't read, and then the corner of her mouth moved. "You're taller than your voice."

"I get that a lot."

"He really doesn't," said the kid.

I don't think she meant anything by it, looking at me longer, and I don't think he thought she did. A grown man in fatigues with an M60 is just something your eyes go to. But I felt it go into him anyway like a splinter, small and sharp and not worth mentioning, and he didn't mention it. He stood a little straighter in his vest with his remote, and when Nancy turned to lead us up Elm Street, he walked next to her instead of me.

It happened to all of them in about a minute. Dream powers, it turns out, you don't have to learn. You have to believe them, and the second you're in the right place with the right people, and somebody's told you it's allowed, they show up.

Will went first. Of course Will went first. He was sitting in his chair in the street staring at his hands with his lips moving—I think he was reciting rules out of a Player's Handbook—and then he stood up, out of the chair, onto his own two feet. The wheelchair rolled away behind him and he didn't notice, because the air around him was changing. Long deep-blue robes with silver stars sewn into them fell around his feet, and then a hat, a tall, pointed, floppy-brimmed blue wizard hat with stars on it, rising up and up to about three feet, by my estimate.

Will looked down at his legs and the robes. Then he reached up and touched the brim.

"A big hat," he whispered.

"The biggest," I said.

He started to cry, just a little. Then he laughed and held out his hand, and a little ball of blue-white fire popped into being above his palm and spun there crackling, lighting up his whole face.

"I am the Wizard Master," Will said, like he'd been waiting his whole life to say it out loud, which I guess he had.

After that it went fast. Kincaid's white T-shirt split at the shoulders into a sleeveless vest, a fistful of gold chains came rattling down around his neck out of nowhere, and his hair went up into a short, hard mohawk. He looked down at himself, then over at the kid.

"You're Mr. T," the kid said, delighted. "Kincaid. You're Mr. T."

"I pity the fool," Kincaid said, trying it out. Then, liking it: "I pity the fool." He grabbed a fire hydrant off the curb, the whole thing, water main still attached, and held it over his head, and then looked at it like what am I supposed to do with this, set it down very carefully, and said, "Oh, HELL yes."

Taryn's hair went up into a spiked black punk-rock crest. Her clothes went black and leather and studded, and in the blink of an eye there were switchblades in both hands, long and gleaming, snapping open with a sound like fingers clicking. She caught herself in the dark window of a parked car, and her mouth fell open and then closed into the meanest, happiest smile I've ever seen.

"Oh, I look good," she said. "I look dangerous."

"You look terrifying," said the kid, and turned very red.

Taryn looked at him over her shoulder, twirled a switchblade, and I swear to God she winked.

Phillip held up the little wooden face, and strings came out of his fingertips, twenty of them, glowing, thin as spider silk, curling in the air like they were looking for something to hold.

And Jennifer—Jennifer was the one I didn't know. I'd told her I wasn't sure, and to find it herself, and now she stood in the middle of the street with her arms wrapped around herself, shivering, staring at the house, and I could see her thinking about the TV, the talk show host's voice, the arm.

"I don't have one," she said. "Randy. I don't think I have one."

"You do," I said. "What did you always want?"

"To be on TV." A shaky laugh. "To be seen. To be a star. That's so stupid. That's what he used on me."

"Then take it back," said the kid.

Jennifer looked at him. Then she lifted her chin like an actress walking onstage, and the light came. It came from above, from nowhere, a pure white stage spotlight blazing down out of the dark onto Jennifer Caulfield, and then another, and another, sweeping and crossing, lighting up the street and the fog and the trees and the house so bright the shadows ran for the corners like cockroaches. Wherever Jennifer looked, the light went, and wherever the light went, there was nowhere to hide.

"Oh," said Jennifer, glowing in her own spotlight. "Oh. That's mine."

"That's yours," Nancy said. She was watching all of them like a drill sergeant on graduation day. "That's all yours."

Joey didn't change. He stood at the edge of the circle watching the others, touched his throat, and nothing came.

"It's okay," the kid told him. "It'll come. Yours is the big one. The big ones take longer."

Joey looked at him and nodded.

"All right," said Nancy Thompson, and pointed at the house. "He's in there. He's hurt. He's got a hole in his chest that two of you put there, and he's never been hurt like that in seven years. So we don't wait. We don't split up. We don't go anywhere alone." She looked at me. "Rule one."

"Rule one," I said.

"We go in," Nancy said, "and we find him, and we end it."

We didn't end it. We did humiliate him so badly I'm pretty sure part of him died anyway.

He met us in the front hall, of course. The red door swung open before we touched it, and the hallway stretched away in front of us, long and peeling and breathing, and at the far end, in the dark, a figure leaned against the wall: hat pulled low, arms crossed, the glove catching the light. The gray hole in his chest still hadn't healed. There were smaller holes at his wrists and elbows and knees where Phillip's strings had gone in, and for the first time since I'd met him, he looked patched. He was also smiling.

"Well, well, well," Freddy Krueger said. "The whole class. The Elm Street All-Stars. Plus the teacher's pet." His eyes went to Nancy. "Hello, Nancy. Been a while. Love what you've done with the hair."

Nancy didn't flinch. I'll give her that. She'd been waiting seven years for this.

"And the boys from California." His voice dropped into something slow and rich and theatrical, an actor getting into the big speech, and he pushed off the wall and started walking. "Let me tell you something, kids. Let me tell you a little story. About a man named Fred. About the children of Elm Street, and their mommies and daddies, and what mommies and daddies do in the dark with gasoline and matches. About a boiler room. About a fire. About how, when the flames took me, I laughed. Because I knew. I knew even then that I'd have all of you. Every one. Forever. Because you see, children—"

"Oh my God," said the kid. "Is he doing the monologue?"

"He's doing the monologue," I said.

"We don't have time for the monologue."

The kid pointed the remote down the hall and pressed a button I'd never seen him use, a little one on the side with a picture of a speaker with a line through it.

🔇 MUTE

Freddy's mouth kept moving, and nothing came out. He was coming toward us with his arms spread wide and his face twisted up into the full dramatic horror of the speech, pointing his glove at each of us in turn, clearly saying something magnificent, something he'd been working on for years, and the only sound was the creak of the floorboards under his boots while his lips flapped in the dark like a fish's.

Nobody moved. Then Kincaid started to laugh—a big, deep, helpless belly laugh that came up out of him like a geyser and bent him over with his hands on his knees, pointing, unable to stop. Then Taryn went, snorting through her nose. Then Will. Then Jennifer in her spotlight with both hands over her mouth, then Phillip, then Kristen, shaking, holding on to the kid's arm. Even Nancy. Nancy Thompson, who hadn't laughed in Freddy Krueger's presence in seven years, put her hand over her face and her shoulders shook.

Freddy stopped walking. He looked at us laughing and kept talking a second longer out of habit, silently, and then he got it. His hand went to his throat, his eyes went wide, and he looked at the kid, at the remote, at the little button on the side, and he screamed—you could see it, his whole face went into it, mouth wide, veins standing out in his burned neck—without a sound, and Kincaid laughed so hard he fell over.

He came at us fast, furious and silent, which was honestly scarier than the monologue. The hallway twisted. The floor tilted, the walls folded in like a paper fan, the doors on both sides flew open, and out came dozens of grabbing, pulling hands. Kristen went one way and Will another, a door slammed between me and the kid, Taryn was screaming somewhere, Nancy was yelling DON'T SPLIT UP in a voice that shook the walls, and then, faint through a door, the kid's voice: "Take two!"

◀◀ REW

The world ran backward, fast. The hands went back into the doors, the doors slammed, the walls unfolded. Kristen flew backward across the hall and landed on her feet next to the kid, Will slid back to where he'd been, and I felt myself reeled in like a fish on a line, until all nine of us were standing in the front hall again in a nice tight group, exactly where we'd been ten seconds before, and Freddy was at the far end of the hall again, opening his mouth again, silently again.

He stopped and looked at us, and then around at his own hallway, back exactly the way it had been, doors shut, walls straight. He tried to say something. It was clearly WHAT. It was also silent.

"You're still muted," the kid called helpfully.

Freddy's face turned a color I didn't know a burned man could turn. The kid pressed the button again, and the sound came back, and the first thing it brought was a scream of such pure, concentrated rage that the wallpaper peeled.

"STOP. PRESSING. THINGS."

"No," said the kid.

What followed was, I think, the worst night of Freddy Krueger's life.

To be fair to him, he had a repertoire. He'd been at this since 1968, he'd written every trick in the book, and he tried all of them.

He tried the classic. He melted into the floor and came up behind Jennifer, glove raised, grinning, the jump scare to end all jump scares, and Jennifer turned, and her spotlight turned with her, and there was Freddy, lit up like a deer in headlights, blinking, in the middle of a creep with his arms up and one foot off the ground. It's very hard to be scary when somebody turns the lights on mid-creep. Honestly, he looked a little embarrassed.

"Boo," Jennifer said, and Taryn put a switchblade through his shoulder.

He tried the big one. The house shook, the walls split, and he came up out of the floor as something enormous, a monstrous, scaled, sixty-foot worm with Freddy's burned face on the front and his hat on top, rearing over us, its mouth opening wider and wider on rows of teeth, going for Kristen—

"Boring," said the kid, and pressed ⏩.

The transformation skipped. Everything went jerky and fast, and the snake finished rearing and opening its mouth and lunging in about a second and a half, comical double speed, so that by the time the kid let go of the button the lunge was over. Kristen was already twenty feet to the left, and the giant Freddy-snake had its head buried to the eyebrows in the floor where she'd been. It pulled its head out slowly and shrank back down into Freddy, standing in a crater covered in splinters with his hat on crooked.

"You skipped the transformation," he said, his voice shaking. "Do you know how long that takes? Do you know how long I've been working on that?"

"It was a little long," I said. "Honestly."

"It was not LONG."

"It kind of dragged in the middle."

He threw his hat at me. It bounced off the M60 and landed on the floor, and we both looked at it.

He tried to split us up again. The kid rewound it.

He tried to make Will doubt, and that was the smart one, the one that almost worked. He came at Will slow and soft and reasonable: Where's your chair, Will? You don't really think you can walk. You know you can't. You'll fall. You know what happens when you fall... Will's legs started to shake, and the wizard robes flickered, and I saw the chair start to form out of the dark behind him.

"Will," said Kristen. "Will, you're the Wizard Master."

"You're the Wizard Master, man," said the kid.

"Wizard Master," said Kincaid, gruff and embarrassed about it, but meaning it.

Will set his feet, pushed his three-foot hat up out of his eyes, and said clearly, "No. I'm not falling. I don't fall. I'm the Wizard Master," and threw a ball of blue fire at Freddy that knocked him through a wall. Behind him the chair came apart into smoke.

He tried Taryn. That was the cruelest one. He came at her out of the dark with his glove up, and every blade on it was a full syringe held out to her, and his voice went soft and sweet and awful: Come on, sweetheart. Just one. You've been so good. You deserve it. Just one little taste...

Taryn hesitated. I saw it. Her face went hungry and scared and sick all at once, her switchblades dipped, and she took one step toward him.

The kid pressed another button I'd never seen, a little one with a picture of a snail on it.

▶ SLOW

Everything slowed down—Freddy's syringes, Freddy's smile, Freddy's voice, which sank into a long, low, sludgy growl like a cassette in a dying Walkman, juuuuuust... ooooone... taaaaaste...—except Taryn, who stood there listening to that sweet, awful voice coming out of him slow and stupid and deep, like a record at the wrong speed, and started to laugh.

"Oh my God," she said. "You sound so dumb."

She cut all five syringes off his glove with one swipe of each blade, snick snick snick snick snick, in real time, while he was still in slow motion, and over the next four seconds his face turned, very slowly, from sweetness into absolute stunned horror.

"Thanks, video boy," Taryn said over her shoulder.

"Anytime," said the kid, and turned red again.

That was when the kid found the channel buttons.

I don't think he meant to. I think he was fumbling for PLAY to unslow Freddy, and his thumb landed on the little rocker switch on the side that every remote in 1996 had. CH ▲.

The world changed channel. One second we were in the boiler room, where the house had dumped us, and the next we were in a bright, flat, cheerful 1950s sitcom living room with a big couch and a lamp with a fringed shade and a canned laugh track rolling out of nowhere, HA HA HA HA, and Freddy was standing in the middle of the set in his sweater and hat and syringe-less glove, turning in a circle.

"What is THIS," he said.

HA HA HA HA HA HA, said the laugh track.

The kid, shocked, pressed it again. CH ▲.

An aerobics tape: a bright pink studio, leg warmers, a synth beat, and a woman in a leotard in the corner yelling AND REACH! AND REACH! AND ONE MORE! at Freddy Krueger, who stood in the middle of the floor dripping, in his sweater, with his mouth open.

"AND REACH!" yelled the aerobics lady.

Slowly, reflexively, Freddy reached.

Kincaid made a noise like a car alarm and sat down on the floor.

CH ▲.

A nature documentary. Savannah, golden grass, and a plummy British voice over soft music: "...and here, at the edge of the watering hole, we observe the burned predator in its natural habitat... note the distinctive striped sweater, which serves no discernible purpose... the creature is clearly agitated... it has not had a good night..."

"CHANGE IT BACK," Freddy screamed.

"You sure?" said the kid. "There's a cooking show on eleven."

"CHANGE. IT. BACK."

The kid pressed CH ▼ three times, and we were back in the boiler room. Freddy stood there soaked in sweat, leg-warmer lint on his sweater, the plummy British voice still echoing faintly off the pipes, and he was shaking all over, the glove rattling.

"This isn't," he said. "This isn't how it works. This isn't a SHOW. This is my house. These are my children. I have been doing this since before your mother was born, you little—you pimple-faced, video-renting, remote-control little—"

"Seventeen years, actually," said the kid. "Well. Me."

"And HIM?" Freddy screamed, pointing the glove at me. "What is HE even SUPPOSED to be?"

"It's complicated," said the kid, me, Kristen, and, to my surprise, Nancy, all together.

He lost it then. Really lost it.

He came at the kid—not Kristen, not Nancy, not Will, but the skinny boy in the green vest with the remote—head down, glove up, screaming, a burned freight train of pure rage, the whole boiler room tilting behind him, pipes bursting, the furnace roaring up like a dragon.

I got in front of the kid. Kincaid got in front of me. Taryn took one side and Will the other, Phillip's strings came whipping out of the dark and wrapped around Freddy's ankles, Jennifer's spotlight hit him full in the face, and for a second Freddy Krueger was blind and tangled and surrounded by every kid in Springwood who'd ever been afraid of him.

Then Joey opened his mouth.

I think he'd been waiting for exactly this: Freddy right there in front of him, screaming at the people Joey had decided were his friends. Joey stepped out from behind Kincaid, looked Freddy Krueger in the eye, took a breath all the way to the bottom of his lungs, and screamed.

I don't have a word for it. Calling it a sound undersells it; it came out of that silent skinny kid like a wall, like a jet engine, a shockwave, every word he hadn't said in two years all at once. It hit Freddy in the chest and lifted him off the floor, across the boiler room, through the furnace, through the wall behind the furnace and the wall behind that. The pipes blew out in a line behind him like dominoes, and every piece of glass in the house shattered.

When it stopped, there was a Freddy-shaped hole in the boiler room wall, and through it you could see the dark, and far down the dark, very small, something that might have been a hat, spinning.

Joey closed his mouth, looked at us, and touched his throat.

"Told you," the kid said softly. "It's loud."

And Joey Crusel smiled, for the first time since I'd met him, like he'd been saving it.

Freddy came back, of course. They always come back. He came back slowly through the hole Joey had put him through, limping, holding his side, hat in his hand and sweater in tatters, with holes in him everywhere: the gray one in his chest, the little ones from Phillip's strings, the switchblade wound in his shoulder, and a fresh set of scorch marks courtesy of Will. He didn't come at us this time. He stood in the hole in his own wall and looked at all nine of us, and he looked tired, which I'd never seen on him before.

"Okay," he said, low and almost reasonable. "Okay. Enough." He held out his real hand, the one without the glove. "Give me that. The remote."

"No," said the kid.

Freddy moved so fast I didn't see it. One second he was in the hole in the wall and the next he was in front of the kid with his hand around the remote, and he yanked, and the kid, who had arms like wet spaghetti, let go.

Freddy Krueger stood in the middle of the boiler room holding a cheap black Panasonic VCR remote. He looked at it, then at us. Then he pointed it at the kid, grinned, and pressed EJECT.

Nothing happened.

He pressed it again. Nothing. He pressed PAUSE. He pressed MUTE. He pressed CH ▲ so hard I heard the plastic creak, and the little LED on top didn't even light.

The kid stepped forward and held out his hand. "It only works for me," he said. "It's mine. It's what I think I am in here. You can't use it any more than you could use my face." Freddy looked down at the remote in his hand. "Also," the kid said, "you gotta point it at the sensor. You're pointing it at my feet. Everybody over forty does that."

Freddy Krueger made a noise I've never heard a living or dead thing make, part scream, part sob, part the sound of a very old engine finally throwing a rod, and threw the remote at the kid's head. The kid caught it without looking, like you catch your own keys, and the LED came on, solid red.

"Thanks," the kid said.

All nine of us stood there looking at Freddy Krueger, and Freddy Krueger looked back.

I think if we'd pressed it right then—if Nancy had yelled NOW and everybody had gone at him at once—it might have ended there. Maybe. I've thought about it a lot. But Freddy was smarter than that, and had been since 1968.

He started to laugh, softly, and stepped back into the dark. It began to take him, and his voice came out of it calm and low and horribly pleasant.

"Enjoy it, video boy," he said. "Enjoy your little clicker. Your little batteries. Enjoy it while you can." The dark was eating him from the feet up. "You know what I learned tonight? I learned you're not mine. Either of you. Not the soldier. Not the boy. I can't keep you. Fine. Fine."

His grin hung in the dark, the last thing to go.

"But she is," he said. "Kristen is. All of them are. You're a guest, video boy. And every night, when they fall asleep, you have to wait by the phone for somebody to invite you in." The grin widened. "And guests can be uninvited."

Then he was gone, and nobody was laughing anymore.

The dream let go of us slowly this time, no rope, no yank. It was more like a party ending, everybody standing around a boiler room that was fading at the edges and not wanting to leave. Kincaid clapped Joey on the back so hard Joey staggered. Will held his hat in both hands, turning it around and around like he was memorizing it. Taryn twirled a switchblade. Jennifer sat on the edge of the furnace, gone cold now, swinging her legs in her own spotlight.

Kristen came over in the vest and stood between me and the kid. "Uninvited," she said. "What does he mean?"

"I don't know," I said, which was true. But I had an idea, and I didn't like it, and I could feel the kid next to me having the same one.

We only got in when Kristen reached for us. That was the rule, and it was what kept Freddy from ever touching us: we weren't his. It also meant the only door into this place was her. If something happened to her—if she couldn't sleep, if somebody got to her in the waking world, if Freddy figured out a way to close the door she opened—then seven kids in Ohio would be alone in the dark with him, and the boy with the remote would be two thousand miles away in bed in his battery pants, dreaming about nothing at all.

"We'll figure it out," the kid said to Kristen. He sounded surer than I felt. "We always figure it out. We've got, like, forty batteries."

Kristen looked at him. Then she took his hand, the one without the remote, and squeezed it. "Okay," she said.

The kid did not make the teakettle noise, and I was proud of him. He managed one very small, very squeaky okay back, and that was all.

Nancy was the last one I talked to. She came over with her arms crossed while the boiler room went gray around us, and studied me. "That," she said, "was the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen."

"Yeah."

"I've been fighting him for seven years. I've never once seen him scared." She looked at the place where he'd gone. "He was scared tonight, Randy. Of a remote control."

"He should be."

"He's going to do something about it." She turned back to me. "He said it himself. He can't touch you. So he's going to go after the door."

"I know."

"So we need to end it. Not scare him. Not embarrass him. End it." She lowered her voice. "Do you know how?"

I looked at the white streak in her hair glowing in the fading light, at the girl who'd beaten him once in her own house seven years ago and then come back and done it again as an intern because nobody else would.

"His bones," I said. "He's still got a body out there, what's left of it. They never buried him. The parents who burned him hid what was left somewhere it would never be found. You have to find the bones and bury them in hallowed ground, with holy water. That's what ends him."

Nancy froze. "How do you know that?"

"You know I can't tell you that."

"Where," Nancy said. "Where are they?"

The boiler room was almost gone. The kids were fading around us one by one, back to their beds at Westin Hills, Kristen still holding the kid's hand, and I could feel the pull starting soft at the back of my chest.

"In a junkyard," I said. "In the trunk of a car. In Springwood."

"Which junkyard? Which car? Randy, there must be—"

"I don't know which one. But I know who does."

She was fading already; I could see the wall through her. "Who?"

I didn't want to say it. On the phone I'd told her the most important part—if you're ever in the dream and you see your dad, it's not your dad—and now I had to tell her the rest.

"Your father," I said. "He was there. He was one of the parents. He knows exactly where they are, Nancy. He's always known."

The last thing I saw before the dream let go of me was Nancy Thompson's face gone perfectly still, the face of somebody who'd been holding up something heavy for seven years and had just been told it was about to get heavier.

Then I was in my bed in Woodsboro in my battery pants at 11:48 at night, with the kid warm and very proud of himself in the back of my head, and the panel opening.

Feat Achieved! Steal the show from a dream demon+1× Silver Random Gacha Ticket(Story in progress. Ticket held.)

Theo? the kid said. Can I ask you something?

Shoot.

When it's over. Springwood. All of it. A second's pause. In there, I've got my own hands. I've got the remote. Kristen holds my hand. When it's over, and there's no more dream... do I just go back in the back seat? Like, forever?

I lay in the dark and didn't answer for a while, and then I gave him the only honest thing I had. I don't know, man.

Okay, said the kid. Okay. Just checking.

He'll be back, I told him. He's going to go after Kristen.

I know, the kid said. Then, after a while, softly, with a feeling like somebody smiling in the dark: ...but did you see his face? When the aerobics lady told him to reach?

I started to laugh and couldn't stop. I lay in bed at midnight in a pair of cargo pants full of batteries and laughed until I cried, while two thousand miles away a dream demon sat in the ruins of his own boiler room, picking leg-warmer lint off his sweater, and planning.