Title: Threefold

Summary: If you ask Blaine Emberly-Knowles about second grade, she will tell you three things: she aced every spelling test, her teacher's name was Mrs Hartsig, and there was a red-haired boy who was horribly bullied. One-Shot.

Rating: M for Violence, Cussing, Implied Sexual Situations, Domestic Abuse, and Possible OOCness.
Oh, and Brain Fuckery.

Disclaimer: I'm not even sure what this fanfiction is, but I definitely don't own it.

...

If you ask Blaine Emberly-Knowles about second grade, she will tell you that she remembers three things: that her teacher's name was Mrs Hartsig, that she had aced every single spelling test, and that there was a red-haired boy who got bullied horribly.

She can't remember his name—it was second grade, after all—but she can remember the way the kids circled him on the playground, or when Mrs Hartsig wasn't around. Son of a hundred maniacs! Son of a hundred maniacs! It had been a game for them, an evil pleasure. Children, you know. Like little wild animals, they tear at anything beneath them. Students in grade school know about "survival of the fittest" long before teachers start spouting meaningless words like Darwin and Evolution.

Blaine can remember his big eyes: scared and frantic, yes, but with something impatient and fiery twitching in them as well. She can remember that he always looked like he was waiting for something. Combustion, perhaps. She remembers wishing she was braver, courageous enough to stand up to the other children and make them stop. She remembers wishing she was stronger.

Now, however, she just wishes she could remember his name. She'd like to check up on him, thirty years later. Try to get in touch with him. See if he made it. She remembers that he switched schools and she never heard anything about him since. She hopes he found a place where that awful rumor wasn't going around, a place where people didn't pick on him for the questionable circumstances of his birth. She hopes that he has flourished, and found himself a pretty wife, and maybe made a family. She hopes he's found success.

She hopes, perhaps, because she has found none of this happiness for herself. She thinks of him, and his scared wild eyes waiting to be freed, while her husband pummels her into a corner. She has lost a molar, and she has had to purchase another mirror for the living room wall of their apartment, to cover the place where he cracked the plaster with her head. Son of a hundred maniacs! seems like a tame epitaph compared to the things Edward Knowles calls her, but she knows the world is different when you are a child. And at least there's only one of her husband, where there had been twenty and more children surrounding that poor red-haired boy.

But her husband has been gone for two weeks on business. Which is fine by her, because now she can sleep, and she can put on her pretty suit in the morning and go to the office without a headache, wearing a genuine smile. She can tie her sleek hair back and pretend she feels lovely. She can enjoy her work. She can enjoy her paycheck. She can enjoy cocktails with the girls afterward without having to worry about getting home at a certain time, and whether or not he will be in a Mood.

She can enjoy her upper middle-class life, if only her husband isn't in it.

But at night, she lays in her bed and thinks of the red-haired boy and how once, she'd held out a hand to him, and he'd bared his teeth like a feral animal and almost bit her. She'd wanted to be his friend, wanted to be something for him, a haven; now she can't even recall who he was. She thinks it's sad and awful, that once she could care so much about a person she barely knew, and now she's so selfishly wrapped up in her own pain that even his name escapes her memory.

...

Freddy Krueger has not forgotten anything about second grade. If you ask him what he remembers, he'll tell you three things: that his teacher was an ignorant twat, that he can recall almost every one of his classmate's names and how he killed them, and that Blaine Emberly aced every fucking spelling test.

He didn't really notice her at first that year, or the year before that. But then the taunting and the chanting started, and if she can't remember ever actually standing up for him, it's emblazoned on a corner of his memory that he generally likes to ignore. He can pretend all he wants that it doesn't exist, but if you enter Freddy's dreamscape alive and manage to make it past his house and the jump-roping girls, through the preschool and up all the ladders and catwalks in the factory, and come out the fire escape on the roof, there is another whole swamp full of Freddy's personal nightmares to wade through.

Of course, for the most part, no-one ever makes it that far. Someday he might let his daughter see, but for now, there's been only one, and he gutted that fucker like a pig.

Like a piggy.

The swamp—neglected, avoided, hidden—is made up of Freddy's imaginings of his mother's rape in the asylum, which he has never seen during his life. It is made up of a hodge-podge of classrooms where he was mocked and harassed, and the basements and attics of the foster homes in which he lived, and the shed where his step-father gave him his medicine with the buckle-end of a leather belt. The nightmares run together: here is Freddy smashing the class pet, essentially taking his first life. Here is his mother, screaming and begging. Here is Freddy being beaten. Here is Freddy being beaten again. Sometimes his father whips him in the shed, and sometimes in the classroom while the other children chant.

But then, while the children are singing their voracious, sadistic song, a girl in braided pigtails pushes through the ring they've formed. Her little face is furious.

"Stop it!" she yells. "You mean, nasty pigs!"

To a one, they fall silent. The light is coming in through the big classroom windows goldenly, and it makes her glow. Dust motes drift in it.

She's shaking, she's so taut with rage. All her fragile little bird-bones can barely hold together under the onslaught of her scorn, and she's placed herself squarely between Him and Them. He watches her, his eyes huge. "You leave him alone," she all but spits, and then repeats for good measure, "Dirty pigs."

He thinks it's fitting. They are pigs: filthy, squealing, snorting piglets, pink and stupid and waiting to be butchered. He also thinks Blaine Emberly looks like the picture of an angel that his mom keeps on the wall in her room at the sanitarium, with the way the sun keeps coming through the streaky windows like that. But he's still young, still hasn't learned how to pretend to be a person instead of a monster, and he still feels like a trapped animal. So when she holds her hand out to him (the only part Blaine herself remembers, because she's forgotten that she was ever capable of courage), he snaps at it viciously with his sharp white teeth. She recoils, and the class laughs, but then she shoots them another angry glare and it quiets them immediately.

The rest isn't part of his dreamscape, but he remembers it. He remembers suddenly paying attention to her, wondering why the other kids had listened. Well, because she is pretty. And smart. And she has two parents instead of a hundred and one, and both of them seem to be sane. He realizes that in the pyramid of grade school popularity, she is near the top because not only is she rosy-cheeked and large-eyed (and not-crazy) but she is nice, too, and honest, and she isn't even aware of her own power.

But the tables turn, and power changes hands, and he knows now—has proven to them, in their dreams and their deaths, and in the deaths of their children—that he is more powerful than any of those cocksucking piggies. He has watched them through their dreams, and through the mirrors in their homes, and he has pulled them through into his world, where he calls the shots, and they have wet themselves in their terror.

And then they have grieved deliciously over the horrific losses of their own children.

And then they have wet themselves again.

It had been funny while it lasted: how they'd forgotten what they'd done. Not to worry; Freddy has reminded them, with a smile on his face. Freddy has paid them back threefold for their mockery and abuse, because power always changes hands.

They aren't the only ones, though. Blaine Emberly—Emberly, because he refuses to acknowledge that she married such an ass—Blaine has forgotten what she did for him as well. What she did to him.

Or maybe she just never recognized its significance in the first place.

...

Freddy knows when she has finally hung the new mirror, though he doesn't like to admit it. He assesses her regularly. Almost forty, and still thin and sweet-looking, more lovely than she believes. But there's a kind of gaunt hunger to her eyes now, and if she were anyone else, he'd relish the tormented shadows under her eyes. As it is, he only shifts in vague discomfort, because he's paid back all his classmates threefold—except her. He frowns through twisted, charred lips and shoves his hands deeply into his pockets, sulking. Thinking.

He's learned much about her. She plays the guitar—something she picked up while in high school or college, it seems. Her husband doesn't like her to have any enjoyment, so she plays it in the attic when he's gone, and then only rarely. Usually she's too busy going on walks (anything to escape) or catching up with mountains of paperwork that she brings home from the office (anything to escape). She'd had a yellow canary last year, a gift from a friend, but then she'd made the mistake of crooning to it while he was home a month later, and he'd cut off its head with a pair of garden shears.

It's just a bird, she had told her reflection the next day. Freddy had stared back at her. Her eyes had been dry, but her lips had trembled.

He doesn't like to seem obsessed, even to himself, so he takes care not to watch her too much. But he has caught her at her morning routine once or twice. She brushes her teeth first, no matter what. Then washes her face. Her hair is always still damp from her shower the night before, and she will sleek it back into a low bun at the nape of her neck secured with long, elegant hairpins. He'll watch her smear stuff on her face, peer closely as she delicately outlines her eyes. Her husband rarely bruises her anywhere but on her scalp, but occasionally the purple shadows will creep out from under her hairline and she will faithfully cover them with colored ointments and lotions that Freddy doesn't bother to identify. The blue shadows under her starving eyes are impossible to hide, but they only heighten her look of fragile prettiness.

Those eyes, though. She looks like a refugee, and Freddy is amazed that the stupid pigs at her office don't see it. Yes, power always changes hands, and Blaine Emberly has forgotten that she was once beautiful, and unbruised, and brave.

It doesn't matter, though. He's figured out a way to pay her back.

Threefold.

Her husband comes home that night. He does not hit her, but his words are vicious enough. Blaine knows she is currently in that part of the cycle where his fury builds. It will be three days or a week till he explodes again, and at that point, there will be nothing she can do to prevent it. The smallest thing will send him into a remorseless rage. She'd leave him if she thought she could survive it, but she knows he will kill her if she does. She's looked into statistics: two-thirds of women killed in domestic violence cases are murdered because they are leaving. She's looked into the protection that can be offered to her by the police, but it's not enough. It could never be enough.

Her lost molar tells her that. So does her dead canary, and the guitar hidden in the attic. So does the mirror covering the cracks in the wall.

Knowles leaves her alone that night, and for that she is eminently grateful. She won't have to lie on her back and try to anticipate his desires. Does he want her to moan and pretend to enjoy it? Does he want her to debase herself? To fight him? It's never the same. She is always on her toes.

Inevitably, her thoughts turn to the red-haired boy (Freddy thinks, Yessssss…), and she remembers how trapped he looked, how violent and scared and vicious. Tears leak from her eyes for him and she imagines, again, reaching out to him, and his snapping teeth. Sleep only comes in spurts, where she drifts off and is jolted awake by some sound in the apartment complex. Her heart races in terror, because she is sure her husband has woken up and is coming to her—but then she realizes she is wrong, and her pulse slows, and she drifts some more.

Finally, she can't take it anymore. She creeps out of bed and moves to the bathroom. She hesitates, but the apartment is big enough that she shouldn't wake him if she takes a shower. She dims the lights and almost locks the door—almost, because though she wants to, she knows he'll be mad if he wakes and finds that she's closed him out. She climbs in the shower instead, letting the hot water stream over the knots that bulge uncomfortably across her back and straight down to her elbows. She hadn't known a person could be so tense—not until about three years into her marriage.

She feels a slight pressure on her bare wet hip and whirls, miraculously keeping her footing in the slick tub. She is sure that her husband is there.

But no, it's nobody, and she laughs with breathless, panicked relief. Of course he isn't in the shower with her. She would have heard him enter the room, surely.

But it had felt like a hand.

The water runs suddenly cold, and she is surprised. Usually it seems as though their complex has a never-ending supply of scalding water. It doesn't bother her, though. She lifts her face and lets the water flow over her lips, into her mouth, down her throat. She massages the back of her neck, trying to work away some of the knots. She doesn't move, even, until the water becomes so cold that her breath forms a vapor before her eyes.

Strange, she thinks.

She dries herself in the red-and-green striped towel that is on the rack. It doesn't look like any towel that she remembers purchasing, but it feels warm and woolly, and it works. She lingers with the towel, drying every part of her body thoroughly. The towel feels good on her damp, naked skin, and she does not want to leave the safety of the bathroom, with its lockable door.

No more can be done. She puts on a woolen robe—in this light, it looks red and green too, instead of the deep pink Knowles had insisted on—and steps out into the hallway. She looks down. There is snow underfoot, and she wonders how that got there. It seems strangely magical, and some part of her smiles even though she knows that her husband will be furious if he finds out she put snow in the hallway. But when she walks down the corridor—which seems longer and darker and bluer than she usually notices—she realizes that his bedroom door is open, and his bed is made, and he hasn't actually come back from his business trip at all.

Good, she thinks. It will give her time to clean up the snow in the hall.

The snow is falling in the living room, blue and soft. The flakes flutter onto her eyelids. Her canary is sitting in its cage, singing merrily, and she starts toward it in surprise. There is blood on the floor of the cage and she thinks she remembers it lying there, headless, but right now she is too thrilled to question the bizarre and momentary lapse in vision. The bird glows yellow in the blue shadows, like a candle, beckoning. She reaches through and strokes it with one infinitely gentle finger. It feels like fire.

I can't come through unless you remember, Emberly.

She lifts her head at these words and half-turns, her eyes seeking out the source of the voice. It rasps against her senses like the tongue of a cat: sandpaper, gravel, grit, smoke. The snow continues to fall, only she realizes now that it's ash, ash that doesn't burn. She catches some between her fingertips and rubs them together, leaving soft white streaks in her hand.

Her guitar is on the couch. It startles her, because it shouldn't be out where her husband can see (the canary shouldn't be out, she thinks suddenly, frantically, but then the thought is smoothed away). She moves toward it, and sits on the couch full of snowy ash, and she tunes it, then plays a chord. Before she can blink, one taut string snaps wickedly, lashing across her mouth in a stinging kiss. She pulls back, startled, and touches her lower lip. Blood comes away on her fingers. Her whole mouth is vibrating and numb with the sudden burn of it. She doesn't know why, but it elicits an answering warmth in her lower belly.

It is the first time she's felt sexual desire in the last eleven years.

I can't come through unless you remember.

She responds to the smoky, sooty voice, rising to her feet, setting the guitar carefully aside. The broken string quivers in the air.

The mirror on the wall is not, she knows, hiding a crack anymore. To be honest, it isn't even really a mirror at all, but a window. In it, she can see a classroom that looks slightly different than she remembers, and a red-haired boy, huddled in a ball, encircled by children like sharks.

There's blood in the water, she thinks.

They chant, and without thinking, she steps through—never mind that the mirror is small, or that the scene happened long ago. She steps through as easily as though it is a door. "Stop it!" she says, and her voice is both fierce and innocent. "You mean, nasty pigs!"

She looks around at the children and at the same time, she sees herself reflected in their eyes: golden, like an avenging angel. For a moment her mind trips at this unrecognizable version of herself, and she thinks that there must be some mistake, but then the boy on the floor whimpers—cleverly—and her attention is drawn away. Somehow, he is wearing a shabby fedora, and it covers his bright red hair.

"Leave him alone," she says ferociously, like a mother cat. "Dirty pigs." She reaches out a hand to him, knowing he will snap at her fingers.

Except that he doesn't.

He looks up slowly, and the goldenness of the room goes blue and dark, and he's not a little boy at all. He's a man, entirely a man, with a bald scarred head and a burned, twisted, melted face. He grins, but it's more like a baring of teeth, and his eyes shine like a wolf's in the darkness.

"Oh," she whispers wretchedly, falling to her knees. "Oh, what did they do to you?" she asks, and the sound of her voice is the sound of a woman in pain, as though she can feel the burns herself. Both hands reach for him now, though she knows he will bite.

Except, again, that he doesn't.

He takes her hands instead, and his own are twisted and mangled. One is wrapped in leather and steel, a glove made into a vicious claw. She thinks of the shears that cut her canary's neck. Her skin burns and blisters where he touches her, but she doesn't even notice, letting him pull her in. His arms, under the sweater and scars, are powerful. "Shut up, bitch," he tells her, but his voice is husky with laughter and not at all like Knowles'. She recognizes the sound of it: I can't come through unless you remember, Emberly.

"Shut up," he repeats, and she feels the leather glove at her back and a prickle where the four bladed fingers pierce the robe and catch on her skin. He chuckles, and the sound is dangerous.

"Freddy's got you now."

Blaine doesn't know if it's a reassurance or a warning.

...

When she wakes up in the morning, she rubs the cobwebs of dreams from her eyes. Freddy knows she remembers almost nothing, but there is a blistery pink handprint on her wrist—warm to the touch—and four needle-fine points at the small of her back. And when she looks in the mirror, she gasps, and she touches the delicate burning weal left by the guitar string. It has seared her, leaving her mouth swollen and bruised. She looks like a thoroughly-kissed woman.

"Freddy," she whispers, and looks startled and confused. He grins wickedly. He can almost see the wheels turning in her head: Where did that come from? And then her eyes widen, and she remembers him: "Little Freddy Krueger." It's like the snap of a rubber band: freedom. Acknowledgment. Access.

All thanks to her memory. She's quicker than he's given her credit for, but he grins, remembering how she aced every fucking spelling test back in second grade. He should've known, probably, that it would only take one little dream.

Then she flushes, her fingers still on her lips, and he knows she's not thinking of Little Freddy Krueger anymore, with the red hair and wild, wounded-animal eyes. No; she's thinking of the slender, monstrous man in the fedora, with his dangerous laugh and hungry claw and surprising strength, and the burning-coal heat of his skin when he pulled her in. She flushes, and her eyes widen, and she turns away from the mirror.

The sight makes Freddy smug. He didn't fuck her last night, but he'd like to. He will. In the meantime, she's wearing his brand, and that's enough for now. There are more important things to take care of, after all. Now that she's given him entry. Now that she's given him power.

Her husband is already up and showering. Blaine dresses for work, then makes coffee for both of them. When he sees her swollen mouth, thunderclouds gather on his brow.

"Who have you been kissing?" he demands. His hands grip his mug violently.

She touches the burning welt again. "I must have bitten myself in my sleep," she offers. She has never gotten a knack for the apologetic tone that she knows she must use to appease him. She tries again. "I honestly don't know what it's from, Eddie. You know I haven't been anywhere since you came home yesterday, and it was fine then."

Even he can't argue with that, but he glowers at her over his breakfast. So suspicious, Freddy thinks, and it makes him snicker. He can't wait to get inside that filthy pig's head tonight. Doubtless he'll find all sorts of nasties to play with.

Knowles walks his wife out to the car, and Freddy watches from the side-rearview mirror. The pig kisses Blaine's cheek affectionately, like a good husband should—but it's all a show for the neighbors, because his grip on her hip is painful and his eyes carry a threat in them. "Have a good day, Mrs Emberly-Knowles," he says teasingly, winking at old Mr Sage, who is watering the rose hedge. Mr Sage grins back at the husband-and-wife duo as though they are simply too precious for words.

It makes Freddy want to puke.

"Drive safely!" Knowles adds as she rolls down the driveway. He grins at Mr Sage. "We have a perfect marriage," he confides. Blaine waves back at him cheerily, deserving of an academy award. Freddy tries to calm himself with the knowledge that she's wearing his mark on her mouth like the lash of a whip, and that he will be gutting the piggy husband before the night is through.

After all, he means to pay her back.

Threefold.

...

Edward Knowles doesn't sleep with his wife. On one hand, he would like to keep her within strangling distance. He wants to be assured that she isn't creeping out the window to a lover while he sleeps, or plotting to divorce him. At the same time, he values his space and privacy, and so he allows her the smaller bedroom in the apartment, though he has searched her belongings many times.

Knowles goes to work and Freddy is torn between following him, following Emberly, and slaughtering some of the toddlers down at the Happytime Daycare facilities while they take their naps. He settles grudgingly for the latter, because he knows it will offer him an even greater advantage tonight.

So he goes, and he first kills the fat teenaged volunteer who is supposed to be watching them but has dozed off over a smutty romance novel instead. Her death is quicker than he likes, but he makes up for it by tormenting the other little piggies at his leisure. He chooses four of them to butcher at once, skewering them on his blades like little piglet shishkabobs while the other brats wake screaming. Three staffmembers come rushing in, and are horrified by the sight of the gore on the walls. He observes them, snickering, while he eats the innocent souls like fresh pork sausage and bacon, then licks the blood off his blades. Tonight there will be at least sixteen other children dreaming of him, and three women besides—he could take his pick if he wanted.

But there's only one target he's got in mind for this evening. Its name is Edward Knowles and it got home late from work, and it's getting into bed and it's falling asleep.

Right—

Freddy's got you—

—now.

It's easy, with Blaine Emberly in her own room across the hall, offering her hands to him as though to pull him right through into the real world. It's easy, with his memory and his mark on her lips like some sort of burning kiss. It's also easy, he admits, with fresh souls under his belt. He jams his hands into his pockets, which sit low on his hips, and he stands over her husband's bed and lets his eyes burn out of his twisted, scarred skull.

So when dream-Knowles rolls over and sits up in his bed and see him, Freddy thinks, Piece of cake.

"Who are you?" her husband gasps, crawling back on his bed. He bumps the headboard. He's frightened first, then angry. "Get the hell out of my house," followed by: "Are you fucking my wife?"

Freddy smiles. It's a smile that has driven men mad. "Not yet," he says, and shows all of his pointed teeth.

Knowles screams.

The headboard flips back and Blaine Emberly's husband tumbles, falling with a sickening crack on one side. He tries to move, and then howls in agony. Something has been broken. Heat flares from his hip. He breathes deeply: in through his nose, out through his mouth. He focuses his gaze on the pebbles in the sidewalk. He hears giggles.

He's on a suburban street, and he's not sure how he's gotten there. Three little girls are whispering and tittering behind their hands, a jumprope lying abandoned on the sidewalk, right next to a chalked hopscotch board.

"Hey," he says, and is surprised at the hoarseness of his voice. "Hey, can you help me? I think I've fractured—"

The girls walk over to him, and he's surprised into silence. There's something in their eyes that shouldn't be in little girls' eyes. Something—knowing.

The girls reach out their hands to each other, smiling close-lipped smiles as though there is a secret they know. They form a ring around him, and when he says hey again, they ignore him and begin skipping around him instead. Fury follows frustration, and he drags himself into a sitting position, yelling, "Hey!" even as they begin singing.

Ring around the Knowlesie!
Pocket full of posies!
Ashes, ashes—
We all!
Fall!
DOWN!

"HEY!" he bellows as they collapse around him. He staggers upright, gasping with the pain, but the girls don't move. And now that he looks more closely, wiping the streams of sweat from his eyes, he realizes that they are all staring blindly. He nudges one with his good foot, then jumps back as she begins crumpling into cinders. He lands on his bad leg and gives a shout, barely catching himself, while the girls crumble to soot and dust.

"Shit," he says. He looks up and down the street, hoping no-one has seen him. It is at that moment, however, that he realizes that the world is too quiet; that not only has he remained unnoticed but also completely alone. Then he sees the blade of a window-shade flicker in the house up ahead, and a shadow move behind it, and he thinks with relief, At least someone is here.

He staggers up to the door, dragging his leg. Perspiration pours down his face in a wave, bearing witness to the energy exhausted both in movement and in pain. He bangs on the door. "Hey!" he yells. He glances back at the mailbox. "Hey! Uh—Krueger! Mr Krueger, or Mrs Krueger—or whatever! I need help! Open up!"

The door obeys, and for a moment, Knowles feels a chill. There is no-one behind it. Still, he's in pain. He stumbles in. He looks for a phone, gripping the edges of tables and chairs and counters as he tries to find one. There's nothing, though: nothing but papers he doesn't look at (if he did, he would see they were death certificates made out for Edward Knowles) and scraps of metal and springs, an empty birdcage and some old guitar wire.

Then the back door opens up, a kind-looking man with red hair peers through.

"Oh, hey," the man greets him. "I thought I heard something. You coming in? You're late for class."

"I'm hurt," Blaine Emberly's husband says.

"That's okay," the red-haired man replies. He smiles, and there's something about it that makes Knowles uneasy, though the man's expression is nothing but kind. "I have your medicine."

So Knowles follows, limping and staggering, struggling to the door. It's the garage, and there's another hidden door that the red-haired man ushers him through, and inside that door is a classroom. The windows are streaked and grimy, but golden light breezes through. The walls are covered in slates and pegboards. Wicked-looking tools and gloves hang from the pegboards; on the chalkboards, someone has been sentenced to write lines.

"I will not break Mr Krueger's toys," the red-haired man explains with a dry little grin, man-to-man. He rolls his eyes. "Seventeen-million times; you know how they are about corporal punishment these days."

Children are sitting on the floor, cross-legged and attentive. A small yellow bird hops along the window sill, singing merrily. Everything looks cheerful enough, but it's giving him chills, and Knowles feels suddenly impatient.

"Where's my medicine?" he asks, and the red-haired man pulls his belt out of his pants. It's leather, and the buckle is wicked-looking and large.

"You know," Mr Krueger says conversationally, "you killed that bitch."

Knowles scowls. So this schoolteacher had seen him nudge that girl in the street with his foot and watched her turn to ash—so what? It isn't his fault. "She was already dead inside," he excuses himself sulkily.

The children giggle.

"Not that bitch," Mr Krueger says, and tsks. "Maybe you need to write lines too. Detention for eternity."

The kids giggle again, on cue.

"I didn't kill anyone, Mr Krueger," Knowles shoots back, but he's eying the belt nervously.

"That bitch," the red-haired man corrects, gesturing with one hand (and when did he put on that awful glove?) to a girl standing primly just beyond the vast sea of sitting children.

The girl is haloed in sunlight, with shining plaited pigtails and wide, wide eyes. Her hands are folded neatly in front of her.

"I've aced every fucking spelling test," she says sweetly.

Knowles takes a step back. New sweat breaks out on his brow. "I didn't kill her," he says fervently, but suddenly he isn't so sure.

"I'm very brave, too," the girl says, and he can tell that it's true. She takes a step forward, and she sheds her skin like a snake. Her eyes are darker, and her hair is a loose, rippling mane. She has slight, blossoming curves and coltish legs. She glows in the sunlight and Knowles thinks she looks frighteningly familiar.

"I'm such a good girl that Mr Krueger would have given us a hall pass," she says, stepping toward him again. "Just you and me." Knowles flinches, and tries to back up more, but the pegboards full of frightening tools are right behind him. By now he knows who she is, because she looks twenty, and he's seen pictures of his wife when she was twenty. Her shoulders and wrists and ankles are delicate, and she looks like a flower in full-bloom. At the same time, she's not his wife, because there's something about her that's more shining and golden than any mere mortal.

"But you've been mean," she says, frowning, and her eyes look infinitely sad, and now she's even older, ageless in a way, and she's all but blinding him with the light that's pouring out of her. He'd thought it was just the glow of the sun reflecting off her hair, but now he knows—she's radiant, at least right here and now, in this place.

He's never seen her that way before.

"Very mean," says Mr Krueger's voice, and Knowles turns toward him. But there's no red-haired man there now—it's a thing, something scarred and twisted and burnt, a monster with glowing eyes and a demonic claw. "You know, they say you get what you give, threefold," he muses, and grins at Knowles viciously.

"I didn't—I didn't do anything!" Knowles protests. He can feel all the tools digging into his back.

"Stop it," Mr Krueger says, and the voice sounds like Blaine's. "You mean, nasty pig!"

And then the children are gone, and the belt whistles through the air, and it slices through flesh.

...

Blaine Emberly wakes up. She is surprised that her husband isn't already in the shower, but she knows better than to wake him. She dresses and makes coffee for them both. She waits at the kitchen table, then hesitantly rises. The trouble she'll get in for waking him up isn't as bad as the trouble she'll get in if he's late.

She knocks first, and calls his name gently. There's no answer, and she feels her gut tighten. She hates to go in, doesn't want to, because there's no telling how he'll respond to that.

"Eddie? Honey, I—I'm opening the door." She tries to sound timid, but it still comes out too strong, and she winces.

The room is too dark to see. She slips and falls, crashing on her tailbone with a muffled moan. There is something wet on the floor. She climbs to her feet, glad she hasn't woken him like that, and she turns on the light.

The room is a study in red.

She stands still, her eyes wide, taking it all in. She feels cold. The floor is spattered with blood so dark it's black; the headboard is smeared with it. The thing on the bed still has a face (Knowles' face) but it looks as though something climbed out of his stomach. A streamer is hanging from the ceiling fan; Blaine thinks distantly that it looks like a yard of intestine.

She backs up slowly, one foot leaving red prints in the hall. She picks up the phone and stares at the numbers. She dials.

When the operator answers (911; what's your emergency?), Blaine says blankly, "I think someone has killed my husband. Please come quickly."

She stands in the doorway of the bedroom, staring in. She doesn't go in any further; her husband has trained her well, after all. When the EMTs arrive, they take one look at her and say she's in shock. The police question her, but it's half-hearted. Though they're surprised she didn't hear anything, didn't wake up, there is no murder weapon and no fingerprints. The only sign of her presence is the single smeared footprint in blood at the threshold, and it's clear to any investigator that it was made entering the room after the crime. There are no splatters on her nightclothes, no traces of his blood on any of her things except where she fell when she slipped. When they ask the neighbors (who also heard nothing), old Mr Sage vouches for Mrs Emberly-Knowles, saying he's never seen a couple so in love. "They had a perfect marriage," he says sadly, echoing her husband's words. Halfway through the interrogation, Blaine starts crying, and they pity her enough to back off.

She doesn't tell the police that they're tears of relief.

What the coroner finds leaves them baffled. Knowles was apparently whipped first, likely by a leather belt. The perp appears to have used the buckle-end on Mr Knowles, and it flayed him. Then, when the poor man was too weak (skinned) to fight back, he was eviscerated. But the wounds are unique—the way the tissue is curled, the innards splayed. It's almost as though he was gutted from the inside out. If it weren't for the clear, deliberate slashmarks—almost like an animal-claw, but made from something smoother, like metal—they might have thought that he'd been implanted with a small explosive.

It was certainly nothing that his wife could do.

Blaine Emberly (just Emberly, now) moves out of the apartment. Her deposit is gone, thanks to the cracks in the plaster in a couple of rooms, but she is all right with that. It's a small price to pay for freedom. She begins renting a small house just past the suburbs, at the edge of the country, and she commutes into town for her work at the office. The guitar is propped in the corner of her living room. She has a puppy now, a tiny thing with huge paws that trips over its own ears, and she's not worried that it will get decapitated by a pair of garden shears. She goes out for drinks with the girls whenever she likes, and she hangs mirrors wherever she wants them and never ever because of cracks in the walls.

And at night, Blaine Emberly rolls herself over on her mattress, and she sleeps without listening for sounds in her house. One arm falls over the edge of the bed, her knuckles brushing the snow-covered hardwood floor. Something wickedly sharp prickles its way down her forearm and she lifts her head sleepily, her eyes limpid in the shadows. At first she thinks there's nothing there.

But then she looks across the way, at the full-length mirror hanging on the door. The reflection shows a beautiful, golden woman on a bed, and a man in a fedora kneeling next to it. He's got her hand trapped in one vicious, blood-drenched claw. Blaine can feel his sharp teeth gripping her knuckles firmly, biting, and she realizes with a start that the woman is her.

She looks down and she can see him now: the gleaming claw, the mocking eyes. Not a monster, but a man. Not a man, but a monster. Everything about him should frighten her.

Instead, she blushes. "Is that how you see me?" she asks, glancing again at the mirror.

"Shut up, bitch," the man says with a wicked grin, his twisted lips sneering against her skin. "Freddy's got you now."

...

I would like to take this moment to say that I have no fucking idea what this is. I got an idea and vomited it out onto my laptop in a matter of a few brief hours. I thought at first that it was going to be about five pages, but it has now ended up three times as long. Plus I think the premise is cliché, but you know how sometimes a fic just demands to be written?

Bossy bitch.

Furthermore, I have no idea what the ending means. When I was writing it, I thought, "Whoa, I am wayyyyy overfluffing this." Then I read it again and realized that it actually sounded kind of creepy. I mean, okay, so Blaine Emberly is envisioned all bathed in a rosy glow by Krueger, and she seems to have a normal waking life. I mean, he hasn't killed her dog. Yet.

But what he says to her is not reassuring. I don't know. I mean, writing this, I saw absolutely ZERO urge in Freddy to hurt Blaine (unlike Ash in Fearless, my other NOES piece). In fact, I originally got the pretty clear impression that it was important to Freddy that nobody hurt Emberly. But still, rereading it, I'm no longer certain of his agenda (the sneaky bastard).

Freddy, your evil is showing.

The point is, I don't know if this is a "happy" ending or not. Also, I'm not advocating Freddy Krueger as a healthful alternative to an abusive relationship. Nevertheless, this one-shot has definitely grown on me in the last few days. I think I might even like it. I'll let you make of it whatever you want.

Sweet dreams.