NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET: INNOCENT DEMON

Chapter VI:  "Dirty Little Secret"

REVISED EDITION
Written by Abri Isgrig and Diane N. Tran


He had awakened from a restless sleep at the cool, gentle touch of a hand, not his own, caressing his fevered brow.  He could hear the steady beeps of the medical equipment around him and feel the slow drips of the IV tubing underneath his skin.  Filling his lungs with air with a heavy amount of effort, the gardener shifted uneasily against the pillow and swallowed thickly a cough.  His mouth was parched.  His flesh felt hot and clammy.  His entire body felt heavy, as if weighed down by boulders.  Everything felt numb.  His eyes squinted to focus through the drug-fueled haze before him, but couldn't.  It was too bright to see.  He could, however, make out a silhouetted figure of what appeared to be a woman.

"Looorretta...?" he managed to weakly eke from his dried, cracked lips.  The name, that ever-beautiful, ever-familiar name, was spoken so faintly that he wondered if it was even heard.

The same gentle hand reached out and petted his damp hair.

"Shhhhh, you're okay now," said a voice, soft and feminine, warm and comforting.  "Everything's going to be fine."

He half-sighed, half-moaned at the touch, its movement were slow, careful, graceful, and affectionate, whilst he scooped the maiden hand into his, squeezing its delicate fingers and brushing its sweetened skin to his lips.  "I had...the most awful dream," his voice cracked and scratched with a weakness one could only deem as pitiful.

The voice meekly gasped in surprise that it, too, surprised Freddy.  Blinking lightly, his brow tightened in confusion, he opened his eyes and focused upward, squinting, to see the woman standing before him was not his wife:  It was Dr. Gwen Holbrook.

For a moment that seemed to stretch on for an eternity, Freddy and Gwen could only stare at one another with wide, frozen eyes, flustered and slack-jawed, unable to speak, unable to breathe.  The tense, awkward silence between them shattered when he heard a soft moan drift from across the room, seeing the woman whom was, indeed, his wife shifting sleepily in an uncomfortable hospital chair with a large, open textbook sprawled across her lap.

"Loretta?!" he croaked in a kind of stunned panic and abrupt dread that his wife may have caught him with Gwen, but he had jerked his hand away before she awakened at the sound of her name.

"Freddy!" cried Loretta, throwing her arms around her husband, which caused him to wince in pain, and kissing him longingly.  "Are you okay?  What happened?  How much do you remember—?"

The gardener placed a finger to his wife's lips to quiet her, as his eyes searched around the foreign contents of the hospital room curiously.  "I'm fine, I think."

"You think?"

"I admit I don't remember exactly how I ended up here."

It was Dr. Holbrook who interrupted, clearing her throat for a moment's attention and brushing a few strands of her long, reddish-blond hair behind her ear, as she began to fill in the blanks of his memory:  "Three days ago, you were in a severe car accident.  It was raining heavily, you were drinking, lost control of your vehicle, collided straight into a tree, and had a concussion, which was minor, but your leg, however, is another story entirely."

The gardener listened, blinking blankly as he did so, and flipped over the layers of blankets off him and was taken aback by the large plaster cast that virtually surrounded his entire right leg.  "Oh, wow..."

She continued, flipping through the clipboard of papers in her hands:  "You fractured your tibia, the shin bone, and tore quite a bit of tendons and cartilage that connected the patella, the knee cap, which pretty much dislodging it.  The surgeons were able to snap and re-align everything back, but had to install an artificial knee joint."

"Will I walk?"

"With therapy and determination, yes, but you'll likely have a noticeable limp."

"And how long am I gonna to be here?"

"A few months, perha—."

"Fuck that!!" snarled Krueger in a sudden burst of rage and fury, as he struggled to push himself upon balled fists and sat up on the bed, hissing and wincing, determined to ignore the pain that scorched through his body.

"Freddy, what are you doing?!" his wife pushed his shoulders back against the inclined mattress of the hospital bed forcefully.  

"I can't bum around here, gettin' sponge baths and poppin' painkillers, for the next few months!  We can't afford it!"

"I'll take care of it.  If you move out of this bed, you could be laid up for even longer."

"Lore, listen to me," his hands held her shoulders and his voice turned grave, "you already work yourself to the point of exhaustion with the preschool and the classes and the baby.  I just worry about you.  You should be taken care of.  Besides, I'm already late on the mortgage payment, again.  If I stay here, we might not have a house to go home to."

"Now, you listen to me, mister," she returned to him in a confident, equally indomitable tone, as her finger prodded his chest over the hospital gown.  "You need to relax and heal.  I'll talk to the other doctors to see if I can get an earlier release date, but that all depends on you.  The doctors don't know how strong you are yet, or if you can even stand, or if you have anything else wrong with you, so it's going to take some time to figure all that out.  Therefore, you have to promise me that you won't be doing anything stupid, like getting out of this bed when you're not supposed to and end up breaking something else."

The gardener was torn between laughing and cursing, but thought it best to do neither.  He, instead, emitted a defeatist's growl under his breath and crossed his arms over his chest to be left here and brood, but the preschool teacher couldn't help but smirk at this reaction.  Her palms pressed against his solid muscles of his chest and her tongue licked the tip of his nose teasingly, which caused her husband's grimace to inadvertently crack into a smile:

"So, now you're in the mood?"

"Just attempting to cheer you up.  Is it working?"

"Maybe."

As the couple leaned closer to kiss, they caught the sound of an "aww" somewhere between them.  Freddy's eyes searched for the origin of the noise and curiously tilted his head to the side, resembling a confused puppy, to discover Little Nancy Holbrook ogling him with a bright, adoring grin on her face, her elbows on the mattress, her chin propped up in her hands, and a twinkling sparkle in her eyes, as if she was watching the prince and the princess about to have kiss their way into their own "happily ever after" at the end of a Disney film.

"Nancy?  Whatcha doin' here, pumpkin?" Freddy inquired.  He looked up and saw Donny Holbrook, her father, in full uniform, pulling off his sheriff's hat at the doorway.  "Donny, what brings you here?"

"Fred, Loretta—," greeted the sheriff with a courteous nod to each of them, but his eyes immediately shot down to the floor, as he twirled the wide brim of his brown hat between his fingers uneasily, at the sight of his wife, "—Gwen."

The gardener had completely forgotten his doctor was still in the room.  He kicked himself a bit for taking such little notice of her.  It's not that Freddy disliked Gwen.  She was simply an unusually quiet woman who had a natural ability, or one could call a nasty habit, of vanishing from one's attention, someone who could "disappear" out of a conversation, despite still being in the room.  He couldn't help but consider her a bit of a voyeur because of this, always watching and always observing the people around her, seemingly content to live vicariously through them.

Holding the clipboard close to chest, not unlike a shield, she nodded to her husband and kindly smiled at Loretta and Freddy before slipping out of the room without a word.

The couple exchanged a private look before the gardener repeated the question:  "So, what brings you here, Donny?"

"Nancy has been beggin' me to take her to visit you since the day you were admitted," replied Lt. Holbrook, warmly, as he ruffled his daughter's hair and plopped his oversized hat on her head.  "Also, with you here and the truck totalled, I've been offerin' Loretta a ride to the college since the buses don't head that direction from here."

Freddy nodded.  "Then I owe ya one, Donny."

"Don't mention it.  It's the least I can do 'til you heal up."

"C'mon, it's just my leg," said Freddy with a dismissive wave of his hand.  "Should be alright and back to normal in a month or so."

"I think it's gonna take more than a month, Fred," continued the policeman.  "They had to put screws in your leg.  The accident fu—," the sheriff looked down at his daughter, cleared his throat and corrected himself, "—messed you up pretty badly."

Tired of her father stealing all of Mr. Freddy's attention, the five-year-old clambered up onto the hospital bed and sat next to him, as she shoved a piece of folded red construction paper proudly into his hands.

"I made you this, Mr. Freddy!" she announced cheerfully.

"Oooh, what's this?"

"I made it in school.  Miss Loretta helped."

Discovering that it was a get-well card, as he unfolded it, the gardener pointed to the drawings inside scrawled in crayon and asked with an amused grin:  "So, what's all this here?"

"That's you," she replied, more than happy to explain the little stick figure wearing a hat and striped shirt.  "And that's me, Kris, and Quentin," she continued, pointing to three smaller stick figures poking out from behind a tree.

"And what are we doing?" Freddy asked.

"Playing hide n' seek!"

Freddy barked into a hardy laugh.  "Well, if you're a good girl, I promise we'll play hide n' seek once I can walk again, okay?"

"I'm always a good girl, Mr. Freddy," giggled the child.

"Then that's not gonna be a big problem, is it?" grinned Freddy in response.

"Wanna see my other drawing, Mr. Freddy?"

"Of course."

The child rummaged through the pockets of her dress beside him, allowing her short, cool skirt to balloon and fall innocently over her legs, which extended comfortably across his lap.  Pushing a folded piece of blue construction paper into his hands, her tiny feet, dressed in bobby socks and Mary Janes, bounced betwixt his thighs.  His heart leapt into his throat and he swallowed frantically, trying to dislodge it.  His pulse hammered and his thoughts raced.  His teeth clenched and his muscles strained.  He fought for control, but his efforts were futile.  All he could do now is sit still and sweat, watching her tiny fingers point to the illustrated figures, chattering away, as he nodded in feigned interest, feeling her bare knees rub and knock guilelessly against each other.  He attempted to adjust his weight in a series of awkward movements, diverting the child's attention with tiny questions about her drawing, but the bed was too small to move away anymore than an inch or two.

"Are you feeling okay, Mr. Freddy?" inquired Nancy in concern with a pair of large, puppyish eyes.  "You look hurt."

"Juh—Just tired, I guess," he managed to garble just below a whisper, lagging behind his own breath, yanking the thick, woolen blanket higher over his lap to vain attempt to mask his lust.  "I really should get some sleep."

"Okay, Mr. Freddy," grinned the child who leapt up, wrapping her arms around his neck, and hugged him tightly.  Her small frame pressed against his chest, her legs sprawled over his thigh, and her knee wedged against his erection.  "Have a good night."

He couldn't breathe.  He couldn't speak.  He couldn't think.  He could smell the bubblegum-scented soap on her skin, feel the warm breeze of her breath waft upon his bare neck, and hear the gentle giggling of her voice.  Oh, god, he could taste her!  He was suspended on the brink of the abyss.

And, for an instant, barely registered in a moment of time, he slipped...

Rolling his eyes back, the gardener drew an arm around her waist in an embrace, keeping her close, as his twitching, glancing fingertips wrapped around the backwards curve of her plump legs and knobby knees that peeked under the entrance of her skirt, coddling at the gentle slope of her rear, caressing the cotton whisper of her panties, as he lowered his head under the broad brim of her father's hat and crushed a pair of course lips hungrily against her bare, blushing neck.

She wriggled and writhed against him, feeling the prickling scruff of his chin, with a loud titter:  "You're tickling me, Mr. Freddy!"

"Okay, munchkin, time to go," said Holbrook to this daughter.

Twisting herself free from the gardener's arms in the last throb of the longest ecstasy man or monster had known, the five-year-old rolled off the bed and jumped to her father's strong arms gleefully, straightening the sheriff's hat that perched on her head.

They had noticed nothing...

"Take care of yourself, sweetie," Loretta leaned over the bed to kiss his cheek, but her husband suddenly snatched her thin wrist in attention, wringing it between his course fingers tighter than he should.

"Lore!" Freddy managed to squeak between his urgent huffs and desperate, pleading eyes; "Don't leave me, please..."

"I have to go," insisted she.  "I have a huge test tonight.  I'll be back after class, I promise."

Krueger could say nothing.  How could he?  Taking in a deep breath to calm himself, to keep his emotions from breaching, he nodded in defeat.  He slammed the back of his head against the pillow once he heard the door click shut and allowed his eyes to roll back into his head, rubbing the wrinkles from his forehead, as he stared absently at the ceiling.  He balled his shaking hands into fists to cease the agitated fidgeting and scissoring of his fingers until his nails dug deep crescents into his palms.  His teeth gritted and grinded against each other.

He wanted to scream.  He wanted to punch something, or someone.  He just wanted to tear something apart!

He had thought his marriage long "cured" him from these urges.  He had thought they were locked away a lifetime ago, dead and done with, for they had not been acted upon since he and Loretta had met.  He had done so well for the last four years, four years of freedom, four years of peace, and he had vowed never to succumb to the urges again, but they had re-surfaced, stronger than he remembered, and they now flooded his very senses.  They would not, and could not, be ignored now.

But, at least, he was alone.  All alone, in fact...

Fuck it!

Impatiently, the gardener threw off the pile of scrunched up blankets his from his lap, pulled up the hem of his hospital gown, and gripped his fingers around his thickened shaft with a growl and a groan.

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