Free The Devil's Dream: A Nightmare by David Beers

looked anywhere else in the kitchen. Matthew could tell the boy knew where the danger lay: the old, wrinkled woman in front of him. Nothing else in the kitchen mattered. Just what this woman decided to do.
    “Gramma, I gave it to you. You looked it over. I had four B’s and two A’s.”
    “My daughter, I hope she’s burning in hell right now to have pushed something out like you. You ain’t given me no nothin’ of a report card. Get over here,” she said, flattening the butt of her cigarette into the ashtray.
    Arthur walked forward. Matthew knew he didn’t want to. Matthew knew the boy had some idea of what came next, and Matthew didn’t think the boy was lying about the grades. Pain waited for this kid and if he had a report card he could give this old battle-axe, he would have given it to her. Instead he walked forward, hands worrying against one another.
    The black woman moved with a speed Matthew found amazing. She snatched up the little boy’s arms and drug him over to the kitchen sink, yelling, “Outta my way,” to Matthew as she did, shoving him with a force her arms didn’t seem capable of producing. She turned the knob on the faucet just as quickly as she’d wrenched the little boy from one end of the kitchen to the other.
    “Now you ain’t gon’ lie to me no mo’. You gon’ give me yo report card when I ask for it, ‘cuz I ain’t lettin’ you turn out like yo mother or yo daddy. You understand that?”
    The little boy cried, nodding, unable to pull away and unable to create an argument that would let this wild-haired lady understand that he had given her the report card, that she had looked it over.
    And then the hot water touched the kid’s arm, and all he could do was scream and cry.
    Scream and cry.
    Scream and cry.

    * * *
    M atthew opened his eyes .
    He stared at the side of a black tray, the one he had pulled from the microwave and placed on the kitchen table. He blinked a few times, realizing he was lying face down on his table, his head turned toward his dinner. Blood pooled before him—dark, red blood. Matthew lifted himself up slowly, placing his hands on the table. Vertigo rose in his head as he pushed himself to a sitting position.
    He looked down at the blood which nearly surrounded the entire tray of food. He brought his hand to his face and wiped at his nose; when he pulled away, his black skin was covered with the same red liquid as the table.
    What had he just seen? Who was that boy?
    You know who that was. That boy was the body of the man you now inhabit. That boy, Arthur, that’s the rapist’s body you decided to take over when you sprang out of The Wall for the second time.
    Jesus Christ.
    Where had he been? New York in the 1970’s? No. Detroit. Morgant was from Detroit. Somehow Matthew had relapsed back into the man’s memories, experiencing life as the boy had lived it, but also inserting himself into those memories. The old woman spoke to him, actually shoved him. Morgant’s mind had somehow supplanted his own, somehow risen to the top in a way much stronger than when Matthew had looked at Allison Moore’s unconscious body. Morgant’s mind, what was left of it, had taken over Matthew’s. It hadn’t made Matthew do anything besides experience that memory, but there was a hell of a lot of blood on the table that wasn’t there before.
    This is getting worse .
    It was perhaps the most obvious and frightening statement Matthew had ever thought.

    * * *
    M atthew needed to think about what happened. He would have to think deep about what it meant and what he might be able to do to control it. He didn’t think he could stop it, had actually thought this might happen. His mind had so severely overwhelmed Morgant’s; he settled in like a Tyrannosaurus Rex might with a family of otters. The otters could do nothing but try and hide, try not to become food. Given enough time though, the otters would adapt and learn to work around the dinosaur. That’s what was