Night Terrors (4 page)

She took a quick shower and then got dressed in her workout clothes: a pair of sweat pants, an oversized Tampa Bay Rays baseball shirt, and a pair of sneakers. She grabbed her gym bag with a change of clothes inside and tossed a few bottles of water in there.

The gym Tara went to was more of a traditional boxing/martial arts gym, but there was an area for free weights and exercise machines. She worked out with the weights and exercise machines sometimes, but mainly she worked out on the punching bags. She warmed up a little and did a few stretches. Then she strapped on her gloves and the pads for the tops of her feet. She had taken three years of karate and reached blackbelt very quickly. And then she quit. But she still incorporated the kicks and punches she’d learned into her workout routine. Like the knives and baseball bats stashed throughout her apartment, self-defense lessons and the constant workouts made her feel like she would be ready if
the Shadow Man
ever found her again, if
he
finally came to finish the job and kill her.

She hit the punching bag and it helped a little in a therapeutic kind of way, but no matter how hard she worked out she couldn’t keep her mind from drifting back to her nightmare about Jen.

Tara had always had psychic feelings as far back as she could remember. She grew up in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. It was a nice neighborhood with Victorian homes lining the streets. Her father, Ben, had been in the insurance industry and he’d done pretty well with investments in his spare time. Tara’s mother, Cynthia (but her dad called her Cindy), volunteered at the animal shelter and took part-time work from time to time to keep herself busy.

Tara had lived with her parents until she was sixteen years old, until her parents were murdered.

Tara had been an only child. Her parents always told her she was a gift from God; they had tried to have children for years and finally Tara had come along. She was always treated special by them, as only children sometimes are, but they never spoiled her.

She’d had nightmares ever since she could remember. She would wake up screaming and her mother and father would rush into her bedroom. They would try to calm her down, but eventually they would have to leave the light on for her so she could sleep. Or sometimes her mother would curl up in bed with her and hold her until she fell back asleep.

The nightmares were usually the same. There would be someone lurking in the darkness, and that shadowy person wanted to kill her; she was sure of that. And then she would run and she could hear the person chasing her, breathing hard, his footfalls pounding the ground. He would catch up to her, getting closer and closer. Sometimes she saw the person. She could tell he was male and muscular, but that was about all. He was always hidden in shadows; she could never remember any facial features, almost like he was a silhouette. And eventually she began to refer to him in her mind as the Shadow Man. Sometimes the Shadow Man had a knife in his hand, sometimes he had an ax. He never said anything to her; he never screamed at her or threatened her. He just chased her and chased her. And she knew that if he caught her he was going to kill her. He was going to hold her down and carve her up very slowly.

She would wake up hyperventilating and sweaty. She was afraid that if he killed her in her dream, she would die in her sleep.

When Tara was twelve years old she began to sleepwalk. That’s when her parents decided that maybe she needed some professional help. They took her to see a therapist, Dr. Kuehner, who diagnosed her with night terrors. The doctor was a nice woman, but she couldn’t help Tara. They tried talking about things, they tried hypnosis, even sleeping aids, but nothing took the nightmares away.

“Why do you think this Shadow Man is after you?” Dr. Kuehner asked Tara many times. Tara had told Dr. Kuehner everything she knew about the man that chased her in her dreams, the man who was trying to catch her and kill her, but she had no idea why he was after her; she just knew that he was real, and that he was out there somewhere looking for her. Dr. Kuehner explained that this person in her dreams was just a figment of her imagination, something her mind had made up to mask other feelings. But Tara told her she wasn’t trying to mask anything – other than the nightmares there was nothing wrong in her life.

When Tara turned thirteen her nightmares didn’t get any better, they got worse. And at the same time her “feelings” about people grew stronger. She’d always had these feelings where she just “knew” stuff about people. It wasn’t like she could read minds, more like she just knew things. Tara tried to explain these feelings to Dr. Kuehner. Tara told the doctor that she’d looked things up on the internet and that she’d seen psychics in movies and on TV. Her parents never allowed her to watch scary movies because of her night terrors, but when she spent the night at her friend Debbie’s house they would watch them, and from these movies and TV shows she realized what she was – she was telepathic, or a psychic, or she had second sight; whatever you wanted to call it. Dr. Kuehner tried to explain to Tara that she was just projecting feelings that she had created subconsciously onto her conscious mind about people she knew – or something like that. Tara didn’t understand the scientific lingo, she just knew that her psychic abilities were real, whether anyone wanted to believe her or not.

Eventually she learned not to tell anyone about it.

Life went on as normal as it could be for Tara over the next few years. But when she was almost sixteen years old everything changed. She woke up at night, three blocks away from her house in Mr. and Mrs. Taylor’s shrubs beside their garage. She was dressed only in the underwear that she’d worn to bed and she was screaming. It just happened that Suzy, the Taylor’s daughter, was one of the biggest loudmouths in the school and in record time everyone knew about her little “incident”. She could not only hear them snickering and making fun of her behind her back, she could
feel
them.

School became unbearable. Rumors began to spread about the scar she had on the side of her neck, rumors that she was crazy and had tried to kill herself. The scar, a thick jagged gash across the left side of her neck about four inches long, was something she’d always been embarrassed about. She tried to hide it with her long hair, but other people invariably saw it and asked about it. Her parents had told her that she’d slipped and fallen when she was a year old and had cut her neck open. They had rushed her to the hospital and had it stitched up, but because she was so young the scar had gotten bigger and jagged over the years as she grew. She never talked about her accident too much with her parents because they always seemed to feel so guilty about it.

As she walked down the school halls with students laughing behind her back about her latest sleepwalking episode, she felt like she could slink down to the floor and die right there.

She wished she could get away from this school and these asshole kids. She wished she could move far away.

And within a few months she got her wish.

The nightmares got worse and worse. Even while she was awake, she felt the constant dread that the Shadow Man was coming for her, like this killer was homing in on her psychic signal, like he was picking it up right out of the air and following it like a bloodhound trailing a scent. He was getting closer and closer. He was a psychic like she was; she knew that – they were the same in that respect.

One night she had a night terror and she ran from her house. She didn’t remember it, but she ran and ran. She woke up in a stranger’s yard with a whole family huddling around her. There was a cop there with a flashlight in her face, questioning her. She remembered that she was hysterical, screaming at the cop that the Shadow Man was coming to murder her and that she needed help.

And then a vision hit her – it almost seemed like it had been forced into her mind purposely. She knew her parents had been murdered. She’d seen flashes of the gruesome scene in her mind even though she didn’t want to. And the worst part was that there was nothing she could do to help them now, she couldn’t tell the cops to hurry because it didn’t matter now – her parents were already gone. She felt a crushing pressure on her chest, like she couldn’t breathe anymore, and she shut down.

A few minutes later the cops checked Tara’s house as she waited in the front seat of the squad car, numb with grief. They found her parents slaughtered. Whoever had killed them had entered the house and killed them quickly, hacked them up within minutes. The killer had searched through every room in the house; his bloody footprints had revealed that. He searched the rooms, but he hadn’t taken anything. It was like he was looking for something.

Or someone.

They never caught her parents’ killer. The police considered it a home invasion gone bad. But Tara knew better, she knew that the Shadow Man had picked their house specifically, and worse, she
knew
that he had been looking for her. It was a guilt that always stayed with her. Her rational mind told her that if she’d been at home, the Shadow Man would’ve killed her parents anyway. But it didn’t matter; she still couldn’t help feeling guilty about running away in the middle of the night.

Tara’s Aunt Katie, her mother’s sister, took Tara in. Tara moved to Philadelphia with her aunt. But they didn’t stay in Philadelphia very long; they moved around a lot. Even if they lived in the same town for a little while, they would move from house to house, never staying anywhere longer than six months.

Tara finished high school early, doing some of her studies online, and then she applied to an art school in Tampa, Florida. She was accepted. She had always been a good artist, but her teachers in school always commented on how “dark” some of her works were – they would rather she stick to ponies and rainbows.

Her parents had a life insurance policy in place, but it was held in a trust (along with the little bit of money that the sale of their “murder house” had made) until she was eighteen years old. Tara wasn’t a millionaire, but she was set for a while. But even though she had the money, she still wanted to get a college degree and do what she’d always wanted with her life – to be an artist.

When she moved to Tampa, she got a nice apartment. The night terrors had subsided some, but they never completely went away. She would have the occasional nightmare about the Shadow Man, but more often than that she would dream of a murder somewhere, she would see the person while they were dying – just like she’d seen Jen last night, like she was looking through the killer’s eyes. She had tried to help the police a few times, but she couldn’t give enough details about the killer, and she couldn’t see the future, she couldn’t see these things before they were going to happen.

At least not yet.

Tara was never able to live with anyone for very long. She had tried. But eventually a roommate would wake Tara up in the bathtub, or in a hall closet, or even out in the driveway, and she would have to explain to them about her night terrors.

And boyfriends found it a big turnoff when they woke up in the middle of the night to find Tara on top of them, punching them, clawing at them. And it didn’t help that her training in the martial arts allowed her to punch and kick with lethal force.

She had been with one guy, Rick, for almost a year. She had told him about her night terrors and he promised that he could learn to live with her condition. He told her that he would be there to protect her from the shadowy man that she feared in her nightmares. But when she broke his nose in the middle of the night, it was too much for him, the last straw. He was sorry, he told her, but he couldn’t go on like this. What if she grabbed a kitchen knife while in the middle of one of her night terrors? Tara agreed and she watched him pack his bags and leave. She cried for a few days after he was gone, but she could not blame him for leaving.

Tara was destined to be alone – she realized that.

She kept weapons around her house in case the Shadow Man finally found her again: knives in the kitchen, baseball bats in the closets, but never guns – she couldn’t trust herself with a gun. And she never had pets; she wouldn’t be able to live with herself if she hurt a pet in her sleep.

Tara finished up her workout with a flurry of punches and kicks on the bag. She grabbed her towel and headed to the locker room.

After Tara showered and changed her clothes, she walked outside to her dull brown Jeep Cherokee. She wore a pair of faded jeans, an oversized shirt, and white sneakers. She had to admit that she felt better after working out. Exercise always helped to clear her mind.

But she still felt that constant feeling of dread hanging over her, pressing down on her. It hadn’t been this strong for years, not since she was sixteen years old, but it was back now.

She couldn’t help but think that the person who killed Jen last night was the same one who had killed her parents, the same killer who had searched through her parents’ house for her, leaving bloody footprints behind in every room. She couldn’t help thinking that this killer had come to Florida to find her, that he had come back to finish the job he had started years ago.

As Tara got into her Jeep and started it, she didn’t notice that across the parking lot, near the edge of it, a man sat in his car watching her.

Tara got back home and went to work in the guest room that she used as her office and art studio. She worked as a freelance artist. She got some work through her website and other websites that she advertised herself on, and over the last year she had built up a group of consistent customers. She did book covers, media designs, illustrations for books, whatever customers wanted.

She did much of her work on the computer, but her latest assignment sat on the easel in front of her, illustrations for a children’s book – these had to be hand-drawn and then scanned into her computer.

After a few hours of working and touching up, she sat back and stared at the drawings. But she couldn’t focus completely on her work today; her mind kept returning to her dream last night, to the murdered girl, to the sketches on her desk.