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–
You’d panicked at first. Warned them all not to sleep.
You’d said He’ll hunt you down in your dreams and hurt you for real because you hadn’t known about how you were the only one, yet. You’d known you were special in this place with him but not how much.
So you’d had to tell them you knew him. You’d had to explain something so you’d told them about high school and the murders. Just the polite facts, colorless.
That works for a long time. Nobody expects you to know where demons come from or why.
–
You might be concussed, or what passes for concussed in the layer of unreality where the trials take place. He gets your shirt ripped to pieces beside the generator and palms your bloody chest through the scraps of it, the scars you didn't used to think of as a claiming mark but understand better now.
Board-flat. He taps the side of a blade cold against one of your nipples so you gasp and flinch. Useless urge to recoil like you could get yourself away from him, backed against the wall. He smirks his scarred smirk and says Your tits still haven’t come in.
You say Don’t but he’s not done talking. You get your hands up to his chest to show you're resisting and he only slaps them aside.
Our Nancy couldn't manage that trick, huh. Biological disadvantage. He says it like he's telling a joke. Like he expects you to laugh along and take sides with him, both of you against our Nancy. His Nancy.
He says it like he wants you to feel proud of yourself. Like your body is something you did for him on purpose.
(His Quentin. His Quentin. You’ve never belonged to yourself and you never will.)
He massages both of your pecs like he’s feeling up a girl, a little girl, or maybe like he used to do to you too and you just don’t remember yet. Either way you feel young, how he touches you. You feel helpless.
You feel nauseous.
He curls his hands in on themselves and rubs with the backs of his knuckles roughly up your chest where you’re trying not to be sensitive. You're trying to shut it off but it's biology.
Maybe I’ll change my mind about my favorite, now I have the time to really compare. Now I know who I get to keep.
He’s touching you bruise-hard but he kisses your cheek almost sweetly and says Maybe I’m even glad it's you and me forever, Quentin. Aren’t you?
You say No but you say it quiet, choking on it because there are other survivors out there still and the only thing worse than being touched by Freddy now is the thought of someone seeing you being touched by Freddy. So it's like you say it without any conviction. No.
Freddy, he grins with his mouth on your skin like you may as well not have spoken and murmurs My dream boy. My pretty little consolation prize. Like a virgin for me every night no matter how I break him in.
You don't make another sound except the blood you cough when he puts his claws in under your sternum, two or three fingers bunched together and then twisting, thrusting in-out bloody like he's opening you up there to fuck. Maybe he is, if you last that long.
Shhh. You can take it, baby. We both know you’ll take anything I dream up. Forever and ever.
–
You don’t find the crackling radius of the campfire a comfort like they do. You rest in its light with the group anyway but sometimes the wind will change, and you’ll breathe in ash so your lungs go frozen in your chest with how you can’t tell if you’re awake or asleep. It all smells the same whether he's around or not, in the moments before he starts putting blood in the air.
If you pinch yourself hard enough you’ll bruise for a while, even in this place where you’re immortal. Sometimes that will be enough to convince you you're awake.
–
He says Slut!
You know you’re asleep now because he’s holding your head underwater but there’s no interference, you can hear him clearly when he says Don’t even have to work to get you naked and wet because you do it all for free.
He hauls you up so you cough and gag and splutter while he says Attention whore. You always did need to be looked at. If not me then anyone. The whole team. The whole school district.
You say No, fuck you but it doesn’t matter. This isn’t one of his memories but it’s his territory now too and he’s going to ruin it.
He's going to warp it into something gross. You can feel the inevitability like your fingers slipping when you try to get ahold of the edge of the pool, anything stable.
And Freddy, he only laughs at your protest, dark and mean.
All this time stripping down and begging for it. Well, Freddy’s here now. He wraps your legs around his waist and dry humps against you which is almost worse than if he’d cut off your swimsuit, for how it shakes fragments of memory loose in your skull.
(Being held in a lap and thrust against so hard it was uncomfortable but clinging back anyway because that was how the game was meant to be played. Hands under your clothes urgent but discreet, so you could be set back down in the grass in an instant. Attention. Attention whoring.)
You don’t cling back now. You think you push like you want him off you but you’re too weak from drowning and the physics are wrong. You’re moving through syrup but he isn’t.
Or you’re five years old, you're weak, and it wouldn’t even matter if you tried.
He palms your ass bloody, squeezes so his claws sink in through wet lycra, through skin. But what you feel most are the hot pinpoints of his fingertips.
Slut.
You know he's thinking jealous thoughts about your body, your growing up, about the times when you weren't his anymore. (Or when you were still his, but you’d forgotten.) So you get forced into the stream of it with him, too. Figuratively and literally.
The water he pushes you under rushes past and over you like a river but it tastes like chlorine and it’s your favorite shade of blue. It's your favorite things. Now it's all hurting you.
Freddy ruts against you so your skin chafes. He snarls Your coach dreamed about doing this to you every time you paraded that sweet little ass around the locker room, I know it. Just like you wanted him to. Just like you wanted me to.
You know that's a lie but it gets into you all the same. And it poisons everything else, so when he says And how many other dicks were you teasing? Who else could have fucked my little dream boy and got away with it? you say No, nobody, stop but you do think about that seminarian who’d often leaned over you uncomfortably close at mass, the afternoon bus driver whose eyes used to track you in the mirror.
Imagined things. Maybe real. Not your fault. Please, don’t let it be your fault.
But you think of all these men like they’re connected now, pulled to yourself magnetic in a line because Freddy says You just can't help attracting it, can you.
Your whole body is under water that’s going pink with your blood and you’re not weightless, you’re heavy. You’re underwater, you’re under him and you’re sinking fast.
You saved yourself special for me, though. Even when you didn't remember me, you did, and if that’s not the most romantic thing.
–
Feng wakes you up. She says You were having a nightmare.
Your nose is bleeding. You wipe it with your hands that stink of pool water and say Thank you and pretend not to notice how she waits for you to say more.
–
You know it’s a personal kind of purgatory or it’s hell, this place you’re in, because it’s built to torture you the most. He’s here. And he can still slip after you into your dreams but now you’re the only one he gets inside and he can do it over and over again.
He can’t kill you outside of the game but he doesn’t really want to anymore, now that the rules are changed. Now that you’re the only outlet he has.
(Our alone time, he calls it. Just you and him and the mattress or the floor. Just you and him in your high school, in your house. Jesse’s bedroom. Nancy’s. Jesse’s again. Your parents’.)
I’ll figure it out and stop this, you say. Just like I was figuring out my dreams before.
You’re speaking with your teeth grit like you still think you could kill him if you could only get angry enough. Like you’ve learned anything that would make you strong enough to resist him and won't lash back around and hurt you worse.
(Resisting is what landed you here in hell but you have to hold onto that as a good thing, that if you’re stuck here, he’s stuck here. You’re walled in with each other and it hurts you worse but it hurts him, too. It does.)
Figure what out? You can’t. He says it definitively and sharply, like his knives in the flesh of your arm. (Keeping you still and punishing you, too, but you don’t cry out.) Figure out we're soulmates, baby doll. All you did is prove you're mine for keeps.
You wanted to have Mister Freddy all to yourself. Always have. Now you do.
You can say that’s not true, but he’s so confident he knows you better. He's been inside your skull. By now he's been inside all of you, every way there is.
–
You were like a little angel back then, he’s saying. You still have some of it. Like a doll, fresh out of the packaging.
His touch on your hairline, your lips, barely brushing the lashes under your left eye - his touch makes acid climb up the back of your throat but you don’t resist at all this time except for how your jaw goes tight.
(You thought you were saving your strength to escape but you don’t know anymore what you’re doing. You’re a puppet with its strings cut. Or a baby doll. Or a scared little kid.)
Freddy’s chuckle gets meaner. The others got so old and used up. Disgusting. Fat tits, thighs like telephone poles. You and Nancy though…
You cringe back when he licks you, corner of your mouth to up over your cheekbone but you won’t get away. His breath is hot and horrible, sulfurous on the side of your face. He pushes in close again like he wants to taste you while he speaks.
You kept yourselves beautiful for me. My best girl and my best boy.
You know what he means is that you still look younger than you are. That sits like a brick in the pit of your stomach. Crawls up your spine like a shudder you can’t afford to shake out.
When he puts your wrists up over your head and presses the scarred hot plane of his cheek to your shaved hairless armpit and sighs, nuzzling in, your throat feels raw like you're already screaming.
But all you say is I did that to swim faster. That’s all. It's not about you.
(You want to be able to say I won’t let you make my body a prison sentence. I have more control than that.)
He licks you under and up inside your arm instead of answering. It’s lewd, sweat and spit and teeth in the way you expect from him now but still can’t figure out how to tolerate. His tongue is a hot, invasive thing. You don’t have any say where he puts it.
Everything is about me, little boy. Everything.
–
(You don't know what to do with that except throw up after you get awake, far enough outside the light cast by the fire that you think nobody hears you.
You don't know what to do except go scrub yourself with lake water like you want to take your own skin off, nails dug in and scraping but never getting down to where the rot is.
You want to say My body isn't a trap i’m in.
You can't. This is you, forever, unchanging. The entity has made sure of that.)
–
You can feel the others looking at you sometimes, like they expect you to say more about what goes on during the bad trials.
Claudette’s eyes find your face in the firelight and you think you can tell she wants to ask about Freddy so you pretend not to notice her. You guess she’s thinking about seeing you beaten onto your knees in the basement last trial. How he’d gotten his claws into your mouth, thrust bloody down into your throat all the way with his knuckles past your teeth while he’d killed you.
He’d said No time to play-date tonight, puppy dog. Rain check and pushed your hair back from your brow. Then he’d torn your jaw off its hinges.
(He’d followed her but you had tried to hold him back. You’d clutched weakly at the blood-slippery skin of his wrist so that he’d paused to shake you off, the dying shell of you that he’d broken again.
You’d done enough to give her a head start. And enough to make him chuckle and bend to say something insinuating and intimate that you couldn’t even hear, not over the thunder of your last aching heartbeats.)
Or you guess she’s thinking about a time before that, when Freddy had gotten her slashed and cornered against the hedge and you’d come at him snarling No, me. Snarling but also begging with the instinctive raw urgency you feel to see another friend at risk. Me. I’m here, Freddy, you want me.
(Want you? He’d looked at you and smiled, yellow teeth. And then he’d said In your wet dreams, baby boy. Or mine. But she’d scrambled to safety and so had you, after enough running.)
But she hasn't asked you about him. And that's good because you won't have an answer if she does.
–
He knows you haven’t told them what he does to you. He sniffs that out about you right away, like he understands everything else that makes you hopeless and afraid.
–
He gets his knives against your throat, bright and hot points of threat so even the reflex to recoil is scorched out of you. (Your body knows better than your brain sometimes about what you can’t escape from. Your body knows better than your brain sometimes about what you won’t be able to endure.)
You say Wait like you really want to be saying Please. And he does.
You say Don't hurt me. I'll be good.
Sometimes he doesn’t listen to that and it’s only something humiliating to remember you said later, after your blood’s back in your veins. This time he looks at your face closely, up and down. Then he chuckles. Mixed signals, puppy. You've been playing so hard-to-get lately.
He puts on his old face, his kind and lying one. He says Are you trying to tease me, Quentin? Drawing out the word tease.
No. You close your eyes tight but that doesn’t take you anywhere else. You’re right here, and his breath is hellfire-hot on your skin. Ash in your mouth. You say I’ll do what you want. Okay?
He says Quentin again in his slow, considering voice like a warning and then you do say Please.
Maybe it's how you can’t stop trembling that makes him decide you're punished enough. Maybe it's how tears clump pathetic in your lashes that makes him decide to punish you differently.
He threads fingers through your hair, no knives, just stroking and proving to you both how you’ll take it. Then he kisses your forehead and releases you and says Guessing game. What does Freddy want, baby boy?
(Your jacket falls off your shoulders and your shirt comes off over your head. You don't look at him but you do it slow enough he can look at you.
Then you get down onto your knees. Small.)
–
You haven’t asked him if he touches anyone else. It’s because you don’t want him to think of it as something he can use against you.
It’s because this way you can decide to think it’s just you and you're protecting them. (Taking your punishment for old times. For your body. Your prison. Your fate.)
–
You’re pretty certain you thought it was just you back then, too, but you don’t remember for sure. You can’t trust anything in your head where he’s been.
–
How’s your memory now? He asks you while he holds you down on your stomach. Just you and the coal-hot weight of him on your back on the carpet where you used to play with Lego. Remember how you were my puppy dog, Quentin?
You realize you do. It had only been a game to you, crawling on all fours between the furniture legs. Butting the shaggy crown of your head into his calf, into his thigh when he crouched to pet you.
Your fighting rage comes back but it’s no good for anything. It’s all pointed into yourself now anyway, for being so dirty and stupid. For letting this man pull you into his lap like it was innocent and put his hands under your clothes like that was innocent, too, and believing in it. Just petting.
Now he’s putting his hand over your mouth - No, you remember what this is. He’s presenting you with his palm, his fingers. The gesture is familiar but the forcefulness of it and his mottled, scarred flesh, that isn’t.
(It never stops being jarring and horrible, being this close to him. You wouldn’t want it to stop being horrible. The alternative, the nostalgia, it’s worse.)
Go on, puppy. Lick.
It’s not you who obeys. It’s that stupid fucking five year old. (You can blame him for this right now but you shouldn’t. You have to expect what will happen when you take your hands off the reins of your own body. Someone with experience has to take over. Some little slut.)
It makes your face wet, getting his fingers wet. It’s disgusting, how he rubs it around on purpose while you lick mindlessly, how he spreads his fingers out so your tongue slips obscenely between them.
You try to go numb and naive to the sexuality in it like you used to be but he groans exaggerated and loud and rolls his hips against your ass. He threads the blades and fingers of his killing hand through your hair and tugs on it, uses it to push your face where he wants it.
Good puppy, he says. Now how about we bury a bone.
He keeps his hand in your hair pulling while he's jacking you off with your own spit and blood. While he’s fucking you like an animal, with your own spit and blood.
He's hurting you but sometimes he strokes your hair like he’s playing. He pushes your face into the carpet but pets you around the throat, down the back of your neck and then back into your hair. Like you’re his puppy and he’s only playing with you. Like he could take the hurt back in a second, but he won't.
There’s my good boy. Even better than old times.
He doesn't hold onto your paws because he doesn't think you'll fight him here like this. He's right about that. You’re too weak, too five years old and he knows you better than anyone.
–
Everybody notices when you cut it off. But you had to. Your hands stopped shaking the moment you got your fingers fixed around the knife.
I just need my hair out of my face. You just need to not be so vulnerable. You just need to forget about it. You just need to think you might never be touched that way again.
David and then Nea wants to help you clean it up but you don't let them. You can't imagine what you'd do about someone's hands on you.
It's all different lengths but your face is clear, and if you hide it under a beanie nobody stares with too much concern.
It comes back in the next trial, anyway, just like you’d known it would. Just like everything else you want to get rid of.
–
You're saying I'll decoy and Jake is saying No, I need you back on generators when he appears.
Freddy says No, I need you back on my cock. His voice is sing-song mocking but his knives flash.
One, two. Mister Freddy and you.
You say Fuck you and he says Uh-huh. It’s a date, baby doll. I’ve got a list but I’ll do you last and slow and sexy, that’s a promise.
He disappears, then, teleports to another survivor whose screams you hear as soon as they're hooked. You haven't looked at Jake because you can't, but you feel him taking careful glances at you while he works.
You start to say I’ll go for them but Jake says Like hell. Come on.
You get two more generators fixed. You don't like how it feels the whole time like you're putting him in danger more than it feels like he's watching your back.
(Eventually Freddy gets Jake hooked and then it's symmetrical - the entity grasps at him, while Freddy grasps at you and says Such a naughty boy. I might just have to spank you.)
–
Your body is solid again. Nothing aches anymore. But it's silent around the fire when you sit back down.
Nobody asks what happened and that's better or that's worse because it means they’ve all talked about it already and assume. Nea says Are you okay? quiet but like everyone is listening and you say Yeah. Of course. Thanks.
You don't know if their knowing about it hurts like you thought it would. You don’t know if it helps anything, either.
–
Dwight points to the sign while you’re all regrouping and asks Hey, was this your school? Like it’s been on his mind for a while but he’s trying not to make a big deal about it. And you swallow hard and say Yeah. Just for preschool.
Then you say Who am I supporting? without looking to see the shape his face takes.
They try not to leave you by yourself anymore, even when it isn’t Freddy. You try not to let that make you feel weaker and you try not to hate yourself for being comforted by it. You tell yourself it’s natural to take this game like a team relay, second swimmer looking for gaps to make up. Strengths to reinforce.
(You used to think of yourself as on a kind of team with Jesse and then with Nancy too, sort of. But you can’t say if it really made any difference. It’s just been instinctual for you to think about how you can join, what you can do for other people.
It’s not a bad thing but maybe you worry you learned that habit too young, from someone who haunts the margins of everything you’ve grown up into.)
–
The new strategy is better because it’s harder for him to get at you. It’s worse because when he gets at you, there’s usually someone else to witness some or all of it and say Are you okay? when you’re back fireside.
(They help you try to stay awake when you need to, now. Now that they can imagine what your dreams are like.)
–
In Jesse's bedroom, like he's only just thinking of it, Freddy lifts his bloody face from what's left of your crotch and he says You wanted him to be your boyfriend, didn't you? Aww.
He says Could have been sweet if you could have been sweet, baby. If you weren't such a ruined little skank.
–
You tell whoever was trying to wake you up, whoever you can't look in the face or think to even identify, that you weren't crying. You scrub your eyes dry with your hands and you say It's just a reflex. It's nothing.
–
Sometimes you can still find your anger and make that the main thing. Usually if he hurts one of your friends in front of you. Almost always if he brings up Nancy, or - Nancy.
But you're aware all the time that you're just reacting. That he's the one deciding what he wants you to be like, flipping switches until you fight or run or freeze.
Until you're a little boy or a whore or just a hurt animal trying to keep its blood inside.
(Sometimes it doesn't work. Sometimes your controls disconnect and you can't make yourself care or even focus, like your mind and body ended up in separate worlds and his frustration only flows over you like tv static. Like nothing at all.
When that happens you’re scared about it, later. Or you’re relieved.)
–
Bill puts his cigarette out in Freddy's eye while he's dying. Stabs it in ember-first and grinds like he doesn’t notice he’s being gutted the whole time, until Freddy is the one recoiling away and making horrible gagging, gasping enraged sounds.
You laugh.
It seems to shock him. The sound of your own voice shocks you too, so all of a sudden you think I could still do something. I could run like remembering you’re not preschool age scared but waiting for permission to move. And so you do, while your nightmare has his hand pressed to the jelly leaking from his charred eye socket you sprint up the stairs toward where you think you’ll find the hatch.
His claws catch you in the back, but that’s all. You make it. On the slow walk through the tunnel you feel the way the open edges of the wound throb in time with your heartbeat. It hurts. It feels like being alive.
(They make Bill into a hero for it and you let them. You help. It won’t last, but it’s been a long time since you’ve felt like you’ve won anything.)
–
You wonder if you really got away, or if he let you go. You wonder when running or fighting really started to feel pointless. When you want to ruin your own good feelings, you wonder.
–
Maybe I got…a tiny bit carried away, puppy. He’s panting like you are, maybe worse than you are but if he’s in any pain it’s only from the effort of contorting his shoulder to keep his fingers inside you, alongside his cock while he thrusts.
He’s trying to make you tight again but every time he moves you can feel him ripping the cut wider. He’s going to end up with his fist in you. It won’t be the first time.
Just drives me wild when you play your flirty little games, you know.
You’re feeling the kind of agony the soundtrack to a movie would use one high, vibrating violin note to communicate. It’s the kind of pain that makes your consciousness wash in and out in waves. And unconsciousness isn’t an escape route, because it’s him.
Your wound edges scream but all you have strength to do is whine, when he scissors his fingers to hold you open. He drools a thick heavy gob of spit down onto his cock, into you. The nausea spikes and you gag on the implications of that. Or you sob.
Freddy growls You’re so wet for me. Think you can still cum? and that’s what makes you try to strike at him. You try to crawl away again but you're too weak. It doesn't do anything but make him pick you up and slam you back down, that much closer to death.
(What it does is prove you’re not helping him this time. Sometimes that’s the most important thing. Even if you're not hard to get.)
–
You can’t keep it up though. You’re not always that strong. He wears you down.
I want you to play nice again is what you say looking out over the locker room. I'll be good, Freddy. Please.
You can't see him yet but the inevitability makes you clumsy as you strip off your clothes. You're already disconnecting. You can't make yourself look down to tell if you're wet from sweating or if the old cuts on your chest are opening up again preemptively for him. His idea of setting the mood.
There's a heart scratched inside the door of the locker you cram your clothes into. It's filled in with initials, FK + QS 4EVR.
You say I know you're here but you get nothing back so you continue the scene. You want to scream. You want to break the bathroom mirror and put the shards of it in your wrists but that won't work. You know that won't work by now.
It's hard to remember real showers. This one clouds the room in steam immediately but you don't notice it feeling like anything on your skin. It’s just another background for a dream, now.
You soap up. It makes you scared, waiting like this. It makes you tired.
There's another hand in your hair when you reach up. Unscarred, no gauntlet but that just makes you tremble worse.
Freddy, your old friend, he says Isn't this so nice. I could almost do this forever, couldn’t you?
–
You walk back within range of the firelight, clothes clean and all of your flesh knit back together. No marks. Only your actions to carry. Laurie says You okay?
You say Not really and it feels to you like breaking something fragile or like showing your own most cut-up vulnerable parts to say it but it isn’t, not really. Not really.
Nothing bad happens. She just nods, and makes room for you to sit down.
–