The Nightmarys - By Dan Poblocki Page 0,56

and green slip behind a curve in the staircase. He took a slow, deep breath.

This can’t really be happening, he thought. This must be a dream—a nightmare like the one he’d had earlier that week when Ben had crawled out of the giant jar in his closet. In real life, old men did not place curses on children. In real life, groups of ghostly girls didn’t kidnap his friends. In real life, paintings of enormous monsters didn’t crawl off their canvases to hunt him.

Quietly, Timothy stepped backward into the street. The forest grew dark, shadows looming as the sun finally settled past the horizon across the river. He looked for any sign of movement between the trees, but the woods were still. Yet Timothy sensed a presence watching him, waiting for him to turn his back. The hill beyond the sidewalk was steep, a good hiding place for something as large as what Timothy feared might be there.

This isn’t real, he thought. I’m not scared.

If he could make himself believe this, then it would be true. That was how the curse worked, wasn’t it? That was the key.

Bracing himself, Timothy turned around. “I’m just walking home,” he whispered. “This is an ordinary day. I’m not scared.” He crossed Edgehill Road, making his way slowly back up Beech Nut Street toward his house. “Everything is totally fine.” But your hand is throbbing. Your knees ache. Abigail is gone. Doesn’t that mean everything is not fine? Doesn’t that mean everything that’s happening … is real?

Shut up! Timothy thought at the voice in his head. He was nearly home now. His front yard stretched before him, and beyond that was his front door. Then what?

He’d call Zilpha. She’d be livid, he knew, but she was the only one who understood what was going on here; besides, any worry he had of getting yelled at was outweighed by Abigail’s disappearance. He couldn’t imagine her fear.

Behind him, an enormous crash shook the ground, as if one of the great oaks clinging to Edgehill’s hill had tumbled down the cliff toward the college athletic fields. Timothy stopped at the bottom of the front steps and squeezed his eyes shut. Down the block, something growled—a lower rumble than any car coming up Edgehill Road with a bad exhaust pipe could possibly make. Slowly, Timothy turned around.

Crouching on the shattered remains of the Dragon Stairs tunnel was an enormous green snakelike monster, its long body twisting down the hill past the battered guardrail. Its wide black eyes spiraled and spun, trying to hypnotize Timothy, daring him to look away. It tapped its silver claws on the sidewalk and began to grin, revealing huge, sharp white teeth. Two thick orange whiskers swirled and twirled from its curled top lip, like in the painting from which they’d come. The creature’s long red tongue flicked from its mouth, stretching halfway across the road. The creature didn’t look angry or hungry. Its expression was more frightening than that—it reminded Timothy of a cat looking to play with its dinner. “Delicious,” it whispered in a breezy gasp of breath.

Timothy would be the mouse.

It stepped forward, dragging its long body up over the cliff, onto the street. It must have been two hundred feet long, with at least half as many actual feet.

Mesmerized, Timothy couldn’t move. As he’d come up the street away from Edgehill Road, he had tried to force the image of the dragon becoming real out of his imagination. In a way, it had worked. This wasn’t a real dragon, but the painting itself. The creature was flat, two-dimensional, as if it had simply peeled off the wall.

For a brief moment, Timothy’s fear floated away. A painting could not hurt him. Then the image of the crushed stairway behind the dragon brought him back to reality … or at least back to whatever was pretending to be reality.

They’ll kill you … because I’m terrified that they will.

Not true, Timothy hoped. What if I just close my eyes and wait for the fear to pass? Can I risk taking such a dangerous chance?

As the dragon slinked farther up the hill, it opened its mouth and bleated a high-pitched burst of laughter. It rattled the windows of his house and knocked Timothy off his feet. Falling back, he caught his ankle on the bottom step, and he hit the stairs.

Across the street, Mrs. Mendelson stood at her mailbox, collecting her mail. She glanced up at Timothy and waved. “You all right?” she called,