Free Stranglehold by Jack Ketchum

would and when his head cleared the water he saw that he wasn't in a pool anymore but in the middle of a lake with trees and bushes all around.
    That was when he saw the snakes.
    Three of them, black, right behind him, swimming right for him, he could see their heads sticking up pointed at him and the fast side-to-side motion of their bodies skimming the surface of the dirty black water under the suddenly darkening sky.
    "Help!" he yelled but there wasn't anybody around and then he remembered that, sure, the lifeguard was off duty. He turned and started kicking his feet and pounding at the water swimming as fast as he could toward shore but the snakes were coming faster, he knew it, he could feel it, they were moving faster than he'd ever known any other living thing to move before like living torpedoes, and he knew he couldn't make it, thinking over and over go away, go away, please go away and praying that he'd been wrong, that the snakes weren't really coming for him , not for him, that maybe he'd been mistaken and they were going somewhere else and didn't like to bite kids his age and just seemed to be going in his direction so he turned to check that out, his one and only hope, and saw them inches from his feet and ready to bite, their snow-white mouths open wide and their needle-sharp fangs glinting, dripping thick venom in the sun, and he screamed and woke himself just in time. And he found he was still screaming into the wet writhing darkness of the room when his mom came in and grabbed him, held him—and he realized from the way the bed felt under him that he'd done that thing again.

    Something was happening to Robert.
    She could see it, his teacher Mrs. Youngjohn could see it, Arthur could see it. Even Ruth was commenting.
    He'd begun stammering for one thing.
    She'd stand by watching helplessly as he struggled to get some word out, his lips pursed tight together as though the word had somehow got trapped inside him fully formed, and then likely as not when he finally managed to pry it out of him it dropped out twice, uncontrolled, in rapid succession. His eyes would be blinking all the while, the muscles around them completely engaged in the effort.
    She could count on nightmares awakening him two or three times a week.
    And suddenly he was getting clumsy. Robert had more scraped elbows and knees these days than any kid she'd ever seen. He'd be running around and he'd trip over his own two feet. He'd topple off his bike. Drop things. Walk into banisters. The summer before she had been highly aware of the bruises on his legs, to the point that she hated to see him put on a pair of shorts for fear that somebody out there somewhere was going to take one look at him and accuse her and Arthur of child abuse. It happened.
    He scalded himself one morning stepping into a too-hot shower. She was downstairs ironing. She heard him scream and ran upstairs and saw him standing sobbing on the bath mat, dripping wet, his right foot, leg, thigh, and the right side of his butt splotched lobster-red. She reached into the medicine cabinet for the antiseptic spray and covered him with the stuff.
    "It's going to be all right," she kept saying, hugging his chest. Robert just kept crying.
    Finally the spray had its effect and he calmed down. She took him by the hand and led him into his bedroom and laid him on his left side on top of the cool, fresh sheets.
    "Just stay here awhile," she said. "Don't try to get dressed."
    Then she went looking in his drawers for something big and loose for him to wear, pyjamas or something. Everything looked too tight so she went to her own bedroom and took a pair of Arthur's.
    He looked at her and laughed when he saw what she was carrying.
    " Those're Daddy's ," he said.
    "That's the point," she said. "They'll be nice and big on you."
    "They'll fall down!"
    "Let 'em."
    He laughed again and then went suddenly serious on her.
    "Daddy says pain's all in your head," he said.
    "Does not."
    "Does too. That's