"You said it was scary," Tom objected.
"I didn't finish. It's a haunted house. You run into a different nightmare in every room while you're trying to get to the top. And you have to watch out for the Shadow Man."
"The what?" Jenny said.
"The Shadow Man. He's like the Sandman, only he brings you nightmares. He's lurking around inside, and if he catches you, he'll-well, listen. He'll 'bring to life your darkest fantasies and make you confess your most secret fears,'" she read with obvious enjoyment.
"All right!" said Tom.
"Oh, geez," said Michael.
"What kind of darkest fantasies?" said Summer.
Mystery, thought Jenny. Danger. Seduction. Fear. Secrets revealed. Desires unveiled.
Temptation.
"What's wrong with you, Thorny?" Tom said affectionately. "You're so nervous."
"It's just-I don't know if I like this game." Jenny looked up at him. "But you do, don't you?"
"Sure." His hazel eyes, brown flecked with green, were sparkling. "It's good for a laugh." Then he added, "Don't be scared. I'll protect you."
Jenny gave him a mock glare and leaned against him. When she was away from Tom, the skin of her forearm missed him, and so did her shoulder and her side and her hip. The right side because she always sat on Tom's left.
"Go get some of Joey's crayons," Dee was ordering Summer. "We're going to need to draw a lot. Not just the paper dolls that are us; we're also supposed to draw our worst nightmare."
"Why?" said Michael unhappily.
"I told you. We have to face a different nightmare
in every room. So we each draw one on a slip of paper and shuffle the papers and put them facedown on the floor of different rooms. Then when you get to a room, you can look at the slip and see what that person's nightmare is."
Tom wiped his fingers on his jeans and went to sit by Dee on the couch, bending his head over the instructions. Summer jumped up to get crayons from Jenny's little brother's room. Zach, ignoring the rest of them, was working silently. Zach didn't say anything unless he had something to say.
"I think I'm going to like this," Audrey said, judiciously placing furniture in the different rooms. She was humming a little, her polished nails gleaming, her hair shining copper under the track lighting.
"Here are the crayons, and I found some colored pencils, too," Summer said, returning with a Tupperware container. "Now we can all draw." She rummaged through the sheets of glossy tagboard left in the box, finally producing one printed with human outlines. The paper dolls.
They were all enjoying themselves. The game was a hit, the party a success. Jenny still felt cold inside.
She had to admit, though, that there was a certain satisfaction in cutting neatly along dotted lines. It brought back long-ago memories. Coloring the paper dolls was fun, too, the Crayola wax sliding richly onto the stiff matte tagboard.
But when it came to drawing on the rectangle of paper Summer gave her next, she stopped helplessly.
Draw a nightmare? Her worst nightmare? She couldn't.
Because the truth was that Jenny had a nightmare. Her own, personal, particular nightmare, based on
something that had happened long ago ... and she couldn't remember it. She could never remember it when she was awake.
The bad feeling was coming on, the one she sometimes got late at night. The scared feeling. Was she the only person in the world who woke up in the middle of the night sure that she'd discovered some awful secret-only, once she'd awakened, she couldn't remember what it was? Who felt sick with fear over something she couldn't remember?
A picture flickered through her mind. Her grandfather. Her mother's father. Thinning white hair, a kind face, tired, twinkling dark eyes. He had entertained her when she was five years old with souvenirs from far-off places and magic tricks that had seemed real to a child. His basement had been full of the most wonderful things. Until the day something had happened....
That last horrible day...
The flicker died, and Jenny was glad. The only thing worse than not remembering was remembering. It was better to just leave the whole thing buried. The therapists had said differently at the time, but what did they know?