Blair’s Nightmare (3 page)

“Look, Blair,” they said. “Is he there? Is the dog there yet?”

Blair swayed toward the window until his head was resting against the glass and stayed there—until Janie whacked him on top of the head. Then he jumped and said, “No. He's not there yet. Not yet.” And then he curled up in a ball and went to sleep on the window seat.

David went back to reading, and after a while Esther and Janie gave up and started back to bed—leaving Blair where he was.

“Hey,” David said. “You come right back here and put Blair back to bed.”

Janie stopped in the doorway. She looked at Blair all curled up on the window seat and gave David one of her super-sweet smiles. “You're a lot stronger than we are,” she said. “You could carry him.”

“Huh-uh,” David said. “You got him out—you can put him right back where you got him. I'm reading.”

It was only fair, but afterwards David wished he'd just given up and done it himself. It took Janie and Esther so long to wake Blair up enough to walk him across the room that when it was finally over it was too late to do much reading. He'd only managed to read a few paragraphs, but with a seven thirty bus to catch the next morning, he knew he'd better stop.

It was a lot later when he woke up suddenly and sat up
in bed. He'd been dreaming but he couldn't remember what, except that he'd been running, trying to get away from something, and all of a sudden a dog was running beside him. The dog looked up at him and barked, and suddenly David was awake and sitting up, and feeling that something wasn't right. Across the room, Blair's bed was dissolved in darkness but somehow, even before his groping fingers found the lamp switch, he knew that Blair wasn't there. He wasn't in his bed, or standing by the window, or anywhere else in the room.

David went first to the window, and just as he reached it, before his eyes had finished adjusting to the change in light, he thought he saw something in the yard below. It looked like a beam of light, and it seemed to come from a spot near the gate that led from the garden into the backyard. But then it was gone, and in the dark window David could see only the reflection of the room behind him. Running to his lamp, he switched it off and hurried back to the window.

Gradually, as his eyes became accustomed to the darkness, he began to recognize the dimly seen shapes in the garden below. The moon wasn't very full, but there was enough light to see the white gazebo quite clearly. Next to it the gray stone of the sundial's pedestal was barely visible, and just beyond that the big pine tree near the gate threw its long dark shadow across the lawn. But surely he'd be able to see a big dog, even
if it were in the shadow. He'd have been able to see it, that is, if it had been there. But, of course, it wasn't. No dog, and no six-year-old kid in blue pajamas, either. But Blair had to be somewhere, and somebody had to find out where. As Molly said, sleepwalkers sometimes fell down stairs, or out of windows.

About one minute later when David was on his way downstairs, he met Blair coming up. He was wearing slippers and carrying David's flashlight, and if he was sleepwalking, he must have been dreaming that he was wide awake. Before, when he'd found Blair sleepwalking, David had been careful not to speak to him, but this time he decided to take the chance.

“Blair?” he said.

“Hi, David,” Blair said.

David took the flashlight out of Blair's hand and shone it on his face. Blair blinked and smiled. When you shine a flashlight right on someone's face, it makes most people look weird and evil, but not Blair. On Blair it just turned his hair into a curly halo and made his Christmas-card-angel face look even more so. “Hi,” he said again in the eager, breathless way he always talked when he was excited. David sighed. He knew what the answer was going to be before he asked the question.

I
T TOOK
D
AVID QUITE A
while to get back to sleep. A long time after Blair's breathing had shifted to a deep steady rhythm and he'd started making occasional little murmuring noises, David lay stiffly on his back trying to keep his mind a blank. A blank mind, he knew from experience, was the best kind at that hour of the night. In the evening when he'd just gone to bed, he never tried to keep his mind from freewheeling. At that time of night he could dream up whatever he wanted to and make it all turn out great, like a video game that he was so good at he could win every time. But late at night, when he'd been asleep and then awake again, it all got out of control. As if the joystick was disconnected and all the bombs were hitting you dead center and the blue meanies were gobbling up your
Pac-Man. And Pete Garvey was punching you out in front of the whole school, and Blair's dog was real and dangerous, or even some kind of a werewolf.

That night most of the gruesome scenes that kept appearing in front of his closed eyelids had to do with what Blair had told him. When David met him coming back up the stairs, Blair had been very excited. Excited and wide awake. David would almost swear to that. As a matter of fact, David couldn't remember ever having heard Blair talk so much and so fast, and it didn't seem likely a person could talk better asleep than awake. One of the first things Blair said was that the dog had licked him on the cheek.

“He licked me right here,” he'd told David, pointing to his cheek. “And he let me pat him.” Blair's teeth were chattering and his hands were cold as ice. “I p-p-p-patted him,” he said. “He never let me pat him before.”

David got him into bed and tucked him in, but he kept popping back up again. His cheeks were so red they looked painted, and his eyes glittered with excitement. He told David all about the dog—how it was taller than his head and how its fur was long and gray, and how big and white its teeth were when it smiled at him.

“Smiled at you?” David asked.

“Like this.” Blair lifted his lip in what looked like an
exaggerated smile—or what, on another kind of face, might have been a growl. David felt a shiver run up the back of his neck like a cold finger.

“Okay,” he said. “But don't go out there at night anymore. Okay?”

“But that's when he's there,” Blair said. “He's not there when it's daytime.”

“I don't care,” David said. “You shouldn't ever go outside at night, all alone like that.”

“I wasn't alone,” Blair said. “That dog was there.”

The conversation started going in circles after that and then Blair went to sleep—and David lay awake trying, without much success, to keep his mind a blank. The problem was that at that time of night he found himself taking seriously a lot of ideas that he would probably have laughed at in the daylight. Ideas like ghost dogs, or werewolves. There wasn't any such thing, of course, but if there were, a kid like Blair might see them when other people couldn't. A kid who just possibly saw and talked to a ghost named Harriette, who was a real person who once lived in the Westerly House and who some people thought still lived there, even though she was dead. And a kid who seemed able to talk to all sorts of animals, like crows and turkeys—not to mention wild cats that nobody else could get close to.

Those were the kinds of ideas that kept pushing into David's mind, sometimes in words and sometimes in vivid pictures that turned the inside of his eyelids into wide-screen horror movies. Pictures of a dark garden where a very small boy stood alone and helpless while something moved closer and closer through the shadows—something huge and shaggy with gleaming red eyes and huge white fangs in a gaping mouth. At some point the waking horror movies turned into sleeping ones, and when he woke up the next morning David could remember a lot of bits and pieces of scary dog dreams. Blair's nightmare seemed to be catching.

Dad and Molly overslept that morning, and everything was very rushed and hectic. There wasn't time to tell Dad about the latest development in the dog story, and by that evening David had decided not to tell. He couldn't very well admit that he'd stayed awake for hours worrying about Blair playing with a werewolf. And it was pretty obvious how Dad would take it if he only told him—again—that Blair had been dreaming about a dog. It was, David decided, a lot like the story of the boy who cried wolf, or dog, as the case might be.

“Now, let's not discuss it any further.” David could just hear it. So he wouldn't discuss it, and he definitely wouldn't worry about it. As it happened it was a resolution that was fairly easy to keep, because the next day turned out to be a different kind
of nightmare. Afterwards, there was something new to worry about.

In a way, Mrs. Baldwin, David's homeroom teacher, was to blame. What she did was to get called away to some sort of emergency meeting. When the messenger from the office brought the note, Mrs. Baldwin read it and said, “Oh drat!” and started looking around the room while she got out her purse and put on her sweater. Almost immediately, even before he had consciously figured out what she was up to, David started having a kind of premonition—a feeling that something terrible was about to happen. Premonitions ran in the family on his mother's side. His mother had had them, and of course Blair did. Blair's premonitions usually came true, and David's usually didn't. Except for certain kinds. Like now, when he seemed to be getting a warning that fate, or something, was about to pull the rug out from under him.

He was trying to lie low, squinching down and pretending to look for something in his desk, to get out of Mrs. Baldwin's range of vision, when she called his name.

“David,” he heard her say, “David Stanley. Would you come up here, please.”

“Me?” he said warily. By then he had guessed what was about to happen. It wasn't the first time. For some reason it had been going on all his life. Teachers who had to leave the
room picked him out to be in charge while they were gone. He had never wanted to be. Even in the first or second grade when nearly everyone raised a hand if the teacher asked for a volunteer, he had not wanted to be in charge of the class. And now, in the eighth grade—in the eighth grade at Wilson Junior High with Maribell Montgomery and Holly Rayburn giggling and the Garvey Gang raising their eyebrows at each other—there was nothing in the world he wanted less.

“I'd rather not . . . ,” he started to say, but Mrs. Baldwin ignored him and started telling the class what they should be working on while she was gone. Then she was standing beside David's desk and picking up his books. “Just bring your things up to my desk, David. All you'll have to do is keep an eye on things and jot down the name of anyone who starts wasting the taxpayers' money.” Mrs. Baldwin always called any kind of fooling around “wasting the taxpayers' money.”

He tried once more to protest, but she didn't seem to hear him. A few seconds later she was gone, and David was sitting in her chair in front of everybody. He huddled down as low as he could get, wishing he could disappear and thinking up all the things he should have said to Mrs. Baldwin.

“Look,” he should have said, “this is ridiculous. Someone's in charge of this class, all right, when no teachers are around, but it isn't me. It is definitely, absolutely, positively not David
Stanley. Look at me, Mrs. Baldwin. Do I look like the in-charge type?”

Over the top of the book he was hiding behind, David stole a glance at the five rows of eighth graders. What Mrs. Baldwin didn't seem to have noticed was that people in the eighth grade tend to come in a great variety of sizes, and most of them were a lot bigger than David Stanley.

At one time, only a couple of years ago, in fact, David had been of about average classroom size, but that was no longer true. He didn't think he was actually shrinking, but it was obvious that he hadn't been doing nearly enough growing. Nearly everyone was bigger than he was now, even the girls. Particularly the girls. There were, as a matter of fact, about ten people in the room who were about a foot taller than he was, and nine of them were girls. The other one was Pete Garvey. Pete Garvey was fourteen, almost six feet tall, and at the moment he was talking in a loud voice.

He started out by asking his friends questions about the assignment, and then he began to make comments about Holly's new sweater. Everyone laughed about the comments, and Pete got louder.

David couldn't decide what to do. At first he kept his head down and his eyes on his book, pretending he hadn't noticed. His face was hot and his teeth were clamped together so tightly
his jaws ached. It wasn't any of his business what Garvey did, and Mrs. Baldwin had no right to try to make it his business. But the laughter kept getting louder, and David finally realized how funny he must look pretending not to notice. So he started laughing, too. Or, at least trying to.

“That sweater sure looks good from back here,” Garvey said. After a second or two he stood up and said, “Think I'll just check to see if Holly needs any help with the assignment. You need any help, Holly? I'm real good at this metric stuff.”

The class cracked up. Pete was very good at some things, but none of them had anything to do with schoolwork. If Pete had been good at schoolwork, he obviously would have been in the ninth grade at least. Grinning at David, he got out of his seat, sauntered up the aisle to Holly's seat, and leaned over it. Holly ducked and giggled, and the whole class laughed—and watched David to see what he was going to do. Pete looked around the room, and then he swaggered on up to Mrs. Baldwin's desk. He leaned on the desk staring at David.

“Hey, Stanley,” he said. “You put down my name like the teacher said?”

David stopped pretending to laugh. “Not me,” he said. “I didn't ask to . . .”

But Garvey drowned him out. “Hey, lookee here,” he said. “Old Stanley didn't jot me down like the teacher told him. I'm
real shocked, Stanley. A good kid like you, not doing what the teacher says.” He stared at David, and David forced himself to stare back.