Chapter 35: The Curse of Immortality

Chapter 35: Chapter 35: The Curse of Immortality

Chapter 35: The Curse of Immortality

After Vera Cosgrove finished devouring the fried chicken, Lionel Cosgrove stood several feet away and waited until she stopped tearing through the last scraps of food. He swallowed nervously before saying, "Mother, I’m exhausted. I think I’m going to bed." Vera barely looked at him and answered with one cold word, "Go."

Instead of feeling insulted, Lionel almost sagged with relief. He hurried back to his bedroom, locked the door behind him, and leaned against it while trying to calm his breathing. What he failed to notice was that Vera’s cloudy eyes followed him the entire way until the door finally closed.

Once Lionel disappeared, Vera slowly pushed herself away from the table and staggered toward the basement. Her movements had become jerky and unstable, and a dry strip of skin peeled from her cheek and fell to the floor without producing the slightest reaction. The infection from the Sumatran rat-monkey had progressed far beyond anything that could still be mistaken for an ordinary illness.

Vera opened the basement door and descended into the darkness one unsteady step at a time. After searching through several dusty boxes, she dragged an old wooden chest from behind a shelf and forced open the lid. Inside were several small animal vertebrae tied together with cord, bundles of blackened herbs, and a rough piece of cured animal hide.

She spread the hide across the basement floor and arranged the bones and dried plants around its edges. From one pocket, Vera removed a small clump of dark hair that she had quietly collected from Lionel’s bathroom several days earlier. She placed the strands in the center of the hide with surprising care.

Vera picked up a small knife and pressed the blade against the tip of her index finger. Her hand trembled so badly that instead of making a shallow cut, the blade tore through the decaying flesh and severed the fingertip completely. The piece fell onto the floor with a soft sound, yet almost no blood emerged from the ragged wound.

Impatience crossed Vera’s ruined face. She threw the knife aside, squeezed the damaged finger with her other hand, and forced several drops of thick blue-green fluid from the wound. The infected liquid fell directly onto Lionel’s hair and soaked into the animal hide beneath it.

A smile slowly spread across Vera’s face.

The movement tore the skin along both cheeks.

Dark muscle showed underneath as she began mixing the bones, herbs, infected fluid, and Lionel’s hair together with her fingers. Vera then lowered her head and started chanting in a broken language that barely sounded human.

"Lionel... my good boy," she whispered. "You belong with your mother." Her grin widened despite the damage it caused to her face, and she added, "Now nobody will ever take you away from me again."

At the same time, Lionel lay curled beneath the blankets in his bedroom. Fear and exhaustion from the last several days finally overwhelmed him, and his eyelids slowly closed despite his determination to stay awake. The moment sleep took him, the bedroom disappeared.

Lionel opened his eyes inside a vast industrial boiler room glowing with deep red light. Pipes ran across the walls and ceiling while steam hissed through rusted valves, and somewhere in the distance metal scraped slowly against metal. The sound came closer with every second.

A low laugh echoed through the heat.

"Come on, Lionel."

Lionel turned toward the voice and froze.

A burned man wearing a filthy red-and-green striped sweater and a battered brown fedora walked toward him through the steam. His face was a mass of scarred flesh, and four long blades extended from the glove on his right hand.

Freddy Krueger dragged those blades across a metal pipe and produced another shriek of scraping steel. "Uncle Freddy came all this way to play with you." Lionel’s courage disappeared completely, and he turned and ran.

He sprinted until his chest burned and his legs felt ready to collapse. The boiler room stretched endlessly around him, and every doorway somehow led back into another identical corridor filled with pipes and red light. When Lionel finally looked over his shoulder, Freddy was still walking behind him at the same relaxed pace.

Lionel faced forward again and slammed directly into something solid.

Freddy was already standing there.

The burned killer grinned and leaned close enough for Lionel to smell scorched flesh. "Running already? We haven’t even started."

Lionel stumbled backward, but Freddy’s right hand flashed forward. The four blades plunged deep into his abdomen, and unbearable pain exploded through his body. Lionel screamed and collapsed while Freddy slowly pulled the glove free.

Then both of them stared at the wound.

The torn flesh closed almost instantly.

Within seconds, Lionel’s stomach was smooth again.

Freddy tilted his head.

"Well, that’s new."

Lionel touched his abdomen with trembling hands, unable to understand what had happened. Freddy’s surprise quickly turned into amusement, and he stabbed the glove into Lionel again with childish enthusiasm. The wounds vanished almost as soon as the blades came out.

Freddy tried again.

Then again.

Each slash opened Lionel’s skin, and every injury healed before much blood could even escape. Lionel continued feeling the pain, but after several rounds of torture his terror slowly turned into exhausted numbness.

Freddy finally stepped back and threw his arms out in frustration. "What is wrong with you?" He had spent years feeding on fear and suffering, yet Lionel was turning into the least satisfying victim imaginable.

The burned killer crouched and examined him more closely. Beneath Lionel’s skin, Freddy noticed a faint blue-green glow pulsing through his body, accompanied by an energy that seemed rotten, possessive, and deeply unnatural. The moment Freddy sensed it clearly, disgust appeared across his scarred face.

"Oh, terrific," he muttered. "First some little fat kid kicks me out, and now I get whatever the hell you are." He clearly meant Russell, whose nightmare had ended after drinking Axel’s Holy Water.

Freddy stood and retracted his bladed hand. "You’re no fun." With an irritated wave, he added, "Go back to your mommy."

The boiler room shattered around Lionel like breaking glass.

He woke violently in his own bed.

Cold sweat soaked his clothes, and his heart hammered against his ribs while he immediately grabbed his abdomen. There were no wounds anywhere on his body, but the memory of Freddy’s blades entering his flesh remained painfully vivid.

Across town, Axel Vance sat at a table inside the KFC and listened carefully to the exhausted teenagers. After hearing several versions of the same nightmare, he folded his arms and summarized, "So a burned man named Freddy finds you after you fall asleep, traps you in the dream, and hurts you there." Every teenager at the table nodded.

A dark-haired girl sitting near the middle looked worse than the rest. "It’s not just hurting us," she said quietly. "My friend Tina Gray died after Freddy attacked her."

Axel’s expression sharpened.

The girl introduced herself as Nancy Thompson, and the exhausted young man beside her was her boyfriend, Glen Lantz. Nancy explained that they had tried telling the police what was happening, but nobody believed that a man inside their dreams could kill someone in the real world.

Axel rubbed his temple and silently confirmed what he had already suspected. Freddy Krueger had somehow become another problem in a town already connected to Jason Voorhees, Lionel’s infected mother, and whatever other horrors were waiting nearby. His supposed vacation was becoming more crowded by the hour.

Still, Axel had one thing the teenagers had never tried.

He returned to his Ford pickup and brought several bottles of homemade Holy Water inside. Axel placed them across the table and said, "Drink these."

Glen picked up one bottle and examined it skeptically. "This is just bottled water."

"It was."

Glen looked at him. "What does that mean?"

"Holy Water," Axel replied. "Try it."

Another exhausted teenager snorted. "Seriously? We haven’t slept in three days and you’re selling us church water?"

Axel leaned back and crossed his arms. "I’m not selling anything. Drink it or don’t, but I’m not going to argue with people who asked me for help."

His complete lack of interest in convincing them made the group hesitate.

Nancy stared at the bottle in front of her for several seconds. She looked more exhausted than anyone else at the table, and desperation eventually outweighed skepticism. "Fine. I’ll try it."

She opened the bottle and took a long drink.

A cool sensation immediately moved through her throat and spread across her chest. The crushing fatigue behind her eyes began lifting within moments, and the constant nervous pressure that had followed every attempt to sleep suddenly weakened. Nancy slowly lowered the bottle and blinked several times.

"I feel better."

Glen immediately leaned toward her. "Better how?"

"Awake," Nancy replied, sounding surprised by her own answer. "My head feels clearer."

That was enough for the others.

Bottles opened around the table, and the teenagers began drinking the Holy Water with considerably less skepticism than before. Within minutes, several were sitting straighter, their eyes were more focused, and the terrible exhaustion covering their faces had eased.

One teenager stared at his bottle. "This actually works."

Another rubbed his eyes and said, "I don’t feel like I’m about to pass out anymore."

Glen finished his entire bottle before putting it down.

For the first time since Axel met him, genuine energy returned to his face. He looked from the empty bottle to Axel with completely different eyes and asked, "What exactly did you give us?"

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