Blair’s Nightmare (11 page)

“What did you say to him, Bleeper?” Amanda asked.

“I said ‘lie down,' ” Blair said.

“Some dog language,” Amanda said. “Blair doesn't speak dog language. The dog speaks English.”

“Well, he's been trained, anyway,” David said.

Eventually, they all settled down where they were, with everyone sitting around one side of the table, except for Blair
and Nightmare. Janie and Esther, and now and then Blair, began to tell everything they knew about Nightmare, which turned out to be not a whole lot.

How it started was particularly vague because that part depended on Blair for the telling, and he had never been the greatest at explaining things. It was all pretty confusing, but the gist of the story seemed to be that Blair looked out of the window one night and the dog was in the garden and he was hungry, so Blair went down and found something for him to eat.

Actually what Blair said was, “We went down and found something . . .”

“We?” David asked. “I thought that was before Janie and Esther knew about him.”

“Yes,” Blair said.

“Then who . . . ,” David started to ask, when he suddenly knew the answer, even before Esther leaned over and whispered in his ear. Esther was famous for mushy-mouthed whispers, but this time there wasn't much doubt about what she'd said. It was, “Harriette.”

David decided Harriette was a complication they didn't need to get into at the moment. “Okay, okay,” he said. “What does he eat?”

“Everything,” Blair said.

“Lots of everything,” Esther burst out. “We feed him lots
and lots. Blair told me first, and then we told Janie, and Janie and me been finding lots of stuff for him to eat.”

“And I named him,” Janie said. “When Blair told me about him, I said he sounded like a nightmare, and Blair thought I meant that was the kind of dog he was, so he started calling him Nightmare. But what he really is, is an Irish wolfhound. I looked him up in the encyclopedia at school. He's an Irish wolfhound, and they're the tallest dogs in the world, and they're supposed to look shaggy and kind of bristly like that.”

“Hey,” Amanda said suddenly, “the bread. Remember David? That's what Blair was doing with the bread. What else have you kids been feeding him? He must eat an awful lot.”

“He does,” Esther said. “He eats an awful lot of everything. We've been feeding him leftovers and stuff Molly burns and lunches and dog food.”

“Lunches?” David asked.

“Sure,” Janie broke in. “At school I told everybody our father lost his job and we're very poor now, so everybody's been saving stuff they don't want from their lunches for us.”

“Ye gods,” David said.

“And once,” Janie went on, “when we had enough money, I went to the grocery store during lunch hour and bought a big bag of dog food. Only we couldn't let anybody see it, so we tore the bag open and poured it into our lunch pails.”

David vaguely remembered Molly making a fuss about the kids lunch pails a week or so before. “That rings a bell. Wasn't that when Molly kept asking you why your lunch pails smelled like dead fish?”

“Yes. You're right, David.” Janie sounded as if he'd just answered the winning question on a quiz show. “And how about the spring house? Does that ring a bell, too?”

“The spring house?” David was bewildered.

“Yes. Why I wouldn't tell you what I saw there?”

“Don't tell me . . . ,” David said.

Janie nodded hard. “It was toenail scratches. I was really looking for clues about the escaped prisoners, but when I saw toenail scratches near the latch and along the edge of the shelves, I knew it was Nightmare who took the stuff. Mr. Golanski probably would have guessed, too, except he thought everything was too high up for an animal to reach. But he hasn't seen Nightmare.”

“But I still don't understand why you wouldn't tell me,” David said.

“Because I thought you'd tell. You always tell Dad everything.”

“No, I don't,” David said.

“Yes, you do. At least you tell him if he asks,” Janie said.

David grinned. “Okay then. We'll just have to make sure
he doesn't ask. What we'll have to do is, be sure Dad doesn't just happen to ask if anybody is hiding the world's biggest dog on the premises.”

“Real cute, Davey,” Amanda said, “but you'd better not tell, no matter what. You know what he said about no more pets. I mean, if your dad wouldn't even consider a few ounces of hamster, what's he going to say about a half-ton of dog? And besides, if Nightmare really did steal all that stuff from Golanski, he's really in trouble if he gets caught. Golanski will probably insist on shooting him.”

Amanda was right. There didn't seem to be any solution except to keep Nightmare a complete secret. Which might have seemed pretty impossible, considering his size, except for the fact that Blair had already been doing it for three or four weeks.

“Where have you been hiding him?” David asked.

“I told you,” Blair said. “He hides himself. Janie hid him once, but he didn't stay.”

“I put him in the tool shed,” Janie said. “But he scratched the door open.”

“But how did you keep him from hanging around during the daytime?”

“I just told him,” Blair said. “I said not to.”

Apparently Nightmare had been coming to the house every
night to be fed and then disappearing back into the hills and not showing up again until the next night.

“I don't get it,” Pete said. “We get strays around our place sometimes, and if you feed them—man, you got 'em. I mean for good. They don't go off and hide for a minute, leave alone a whole day.”

“Hey, I got it,” Amanda said. “I'll bet he belongs to somebody else and he goes back there every day. Only they don't feed him enough or something so he comes over here every night to pig out.”

Blair shook his head.

“Well,” David said, “I don't know. If anybody around here had a dog like that, we'd know about it, wouldn't we?”

“Yeah,” Pete said. “I been living out here all my life, and my folks know just about everybody. It don't seem likely anybody'd get a dog like that and not mention it.”

They kicked around a few more theories about where Nightmare disappeared to during the day time, including one of Janie's that he was actually a kind of werewolf who turned into a human being as soon as it got light. None of the theories seemed very likely, and by then it was getting dangerously close to the time for Dad and Molly to get home. So when Amanda suggested that they shut Nightmare in the tool shed and padlock the door, everyone more or less agreed.

As soon as the decision was made, everyone swung into action. David went looking for a padlock, Amanda rounded up some old blankets to make a dog bed, and the rest of them went along as Blair coaxed Nightmare into the tool shed. He wouldn't go in at first, even when Blair told him to, and it all took quite a bit of time. They'd barely gotten everyone back into the house and the little kids upstairs to bed, when they heard Dad's car in the driveway.

Dad and Molly looked surprised to find Pete Garvey there at that hour of the night; but before they had time to say anything, David and Amanda started telling them about the prisoners and how they hadn't left the area after all.

Molly said, “Oh no,” in a very upset tone of voice, and Dad looked worried and asked some questions about exactly what the announcement had said.

“Well, that is discouraging,” he said at last. “I'd thought that was one problem we didn't have hanging over us any longer.”

“I thought so too,” Pete said. “I thought those guys were long gone or I sure wouldn't have come all the way over here alone in the dark.”

So then Dad offered to drive Pete home, and Pete accepted very quickly, and everyone else went to bed.

David wondered about that for a few minutes—about Pete being nervous about riding home on the motorcycle. It was an
interesting thought. It hadn't occurred to him before that a six-foot guy on a cycle could be nervous about anything.

He didn't think about it for long however. What he went to sleep thinking about was the fact that a fantastically enormous dog was actually hidden in the Stanley tool shed. It didn't seem possible. As he got sleepier, it seemed more and more like the whole thing had been a Blair-type fantasy and when he woke up in the morning the dog would be gone.

Actually, it was.

T
HE PLAN WAS FOR
D
AVID
and Blair to get up early and let Nightmare out of the tool shed. They were to feed him and let him exercise—out behind the garage where they couldn't be seen from the house—and then shut him back up. The only trouble was, Blair wouldn't wake up. If Blair had some kind of internal alarm system that went off when Nightmare needed attention, it apparently didn't function at six o'clock in the morning. Finally David gave up and went by himself.

In the kitchen he tiptoed around fixing a pan of leftovers and bread and milk. Outside, the wind had died down to a weak whisper, but the yard was full of reminders of its former power. Dead leaves, twigs and small branches were scattered everywhere. On the way out to the tool shed David wondered
what kind of a reception he would get when he opened the door—without Blair there to tell Nightmare that everything was all right. But he wasn't too worried. Dogs usually liked him, and the pan of food ought to make a good peace offering.

No sound came from the tool shed. Putting the pan on the ground, he took out the key and unlocked the padlock. Then he picked up the food, and holding it out in front of him, he slowly opened the door, while he said, “Good dog. Good dog, Nightmare,” in a calm soothing voice. The shed was empty.

For just a moment he was seized by a weird dreamlike idea that something entirely supernatural had happened. That Nightmare hadn't been a real dog after all—that he'd somehow dematerialized or turned into something entirely different. Or that the whole thing had been an incredibly vivid dream, or some kind of crazy vision. But then he noticed the broken plank.

The tool shed, like all the buildings on the property, was very old, and the wood was possibly a little deteriorated, but still it must have taken a lot of force to tear the plank loose. On closer inspection, it was apparent that the loose plank, as well as the one next to it, had been scratched until they resembled some kind of wide-ribbed wooden corduroy—and until the nails holding them had pulled free from the flooring.

After he'd pushed the plank back more or less in place and pulled the lawn mower and a five-gallon gasoline can over in
front of the scratched places, David went out and searched the yard. There was no sign of Nightmare anywhere.

Every one else was waking up when he got back in the house. As David tiptoed down the upstairs hall, Amanda popped out of her room, and a moment later Janie and Esther appeared. They all followed David into his room, where Blair was just climbing out of bed.

The little kids took the news calmly. “He'll come back tonight,” Esther said, and Blair nodded. “He doesn't like to be shut up.”

“But what if he doesn't?” Amanda said. “What if he goes back to wherever he came from?”

“He's come back a lot of times before,” David reminded her.

“Yeah, but he might stop. Or something might happen to him. Like what if he meets those prisoners out there, and they shoot him or something. We've got to find a better way to keep him here.”

David shook his head. “I don't think it's going to be easy.”

“We could keep him in the house,” Esther said.

Blair looked delighted. “He could sleep with me.”

“Don't be ridiculous,” David said.

“Who's being ridiculous now?” It was Molly, standing in the doorway. Everyone whirled around and stared at her, and then they all started talking at once.

“The Bleep was,” Amanda said.

“Tesser was,” Janie said.

“I was not,” Esther said.

“Everybody shut up,” David said. “Did you want something, Molly?”

Molly laughed. “Not me. I just wondered if anybody else did. Like breakfast, for instance.”

It was Saturday. The longest Saturday in the history of civilization. All day long David tried to get interested in things he usually looked forward to doing on weekends, with no luck at all. He wound up spending most of the day prowling restlessly around the house and yard, running into other members of the family who seemed to be prowling around, too. Where the kids were concerned, the reason was obvious, but they weren't the only ones. Jeff and Molly also seemed to be restless, and they didn't even know about Nightmare.

Right after lunch Pete showed up briefly. One of his older brothers had dropped him off to pick up the motorcycle, but he had to get right back to the farm.

“I got work to do,” he told David. “My old man said he'd have my hide if I didn't come right back.” He leaned forward suddenly and David stiffened, but Pete only whispered hoarsely. “How's the mutt?”

When David explained, he shook his head. “Hey, that's
too bad. But maybe the kid's right. Maybe he'll show up again.”

David said he hoped so, and Pete nodded and then stood there for a while, astraddle the motorcycle, but not making any move to start it up. “How about Amanda?” he said at last.

David was puzzled. “What about Amanda?” he asked.

“What does she think—about the mutt?”

“She thinks he'll come back tonight, I guess,” David said. “At least she hopes he will.”

“Yeah. Well-uh-where is she?”

“Oh, she's around,” David said quickly. “She was out here just a few minutes ago.”

“Oh yeah? Well, I got to be going, I guess,” Pete said, but he didn't. At least not for several more minutes. He got off the motorcycle and started fiddling around with it—checking the oil and looking in the gas tank in between looking around the yard and up at the windows of the house. But at last he climbed on the bike and roared off down the road.