Nightmare Man by Alan Ryker Read Free Book Online Page A

anything. He just doesn’t like the sound. I don’t either.
    I smile at him and flex a bicep. It’s actually pretty beefy. I’ve got a chin-up bar in the basement and work out a few times a week. Whenever I reach a combination of heavy and weak, unable to do a set of ten chin-ups, I do a starvation/exercise combo.
    Logan grabs my arm and squeezes. I used to let him hang from it, but he’s gotten way too big.
    “Mom doesn’t know the power of Dad-Man, does she?”
    “Nope!”
    I hesitate to go over the lock system with Shannon while Logan is standing there, not knowing if it will scare him or make him feel safer. I decide not knowing what the setup is for will probably scare him more than knowing.
    Because we came to opposite conclusions at the exact same time, Shannon says, “Go back and play with your sister for a few minutes.”
    I nod at him, and he drifts off. He moves quietly for a nine-year-old boy.
    Giving the key to Shannon, I gesture toward the locks. She unlocks and removes them with no problem.
    I say, “This means you should try to make it to bed before five, or I’ll have to call you.”
    “Yeah, yeah.”
    “Mom’s going to lock you up?” Logan peeks around the corner into the hall. I wave him over, then squat down to him.
    “Just for the couple of hours when I do my running-around thing. This way, I won’t come out and scare you again.”
    “But what about the shadow man?”
    Everything stops. Everything goes silent and still.
    “Shadow man?”
    “The one you chased. The one you protected me from.”
    “That’s just a nightmare I have. That’s not real.”
    “But I saw him.”
    Shannon starts to talk, but I raise a hand and she doesn’t. For once she doesn’t.
    “What did you see?”
    “At first, I didn’t know it was you who grabbed me, but then Mom turned on the light and I saw it was you.”
    “That’s right. It was me, not a shadow man.”
    “But then I looked over your shoulder and I saw him. Will the locks keep him in your room?”
    * * *
    The combination of being locked in my room and a lack of my usual tranquilizer has me lying awake, staring up at the dark ceiling. I keep nervously testing my bladder, expecting to feel the need to pee but then being unable to open my door.
    Running through my memories, I search for a time when I might have mentioned the subject of my night terrors to Logan. I can’t find one where I described a man in black. He knows I have a nightmare problem—there’s no way to keep that from him what with the screaming and thrashing—but I’m not sick enough to describe the living shadow that emerges from the darkness almost every night to torment me. Shannon didn’t believe me, shouted at me as best she could without letting Logan or Madison hear. But I swear I never discussed the nightmare man in front of either of them.
    “Then how does he know?” she asked.
    How does he know?
    Shannon reminded me that I said, “The nightmare man was here,” after she threw me off of Logan.
    Then there’s the fact that he described him as a man in a black robe. Asking him what he meant, he explained that the man wore a black robe with a black hood. That perfectly describes the nightmare man. That says to me this is something Logan experienced firsthand rather than heard me talk about.
    But that’s crazy. Toying with the idea of his having more of an existence than a dream is one thing. Believing he is a fully separate entity capable of interacting with my son is another.
    I don’t know exactly what I’ve thought the nightmare man is. So much of my interaction with him is on a subconscious level that he defies my attempts at logical analysis. Attempting to solidify my thoughts on him now, maybe one way to describe him would be as an independent creation of my mind. He’s my Lucifer. I made him. I make him, every second he’s alive, I’m making him. But he’s otherwise independent of me, and intent on making me miserable.
    So I think a part of my