"I've… been having the dreams again," she said.
"Recurring nightmares are a very ordinary response to traumatic events, Amanda. If you feel comfortable, why don't we go through it together, one more time. The details might have some hints about how you're processing things."
The doctor meant well with his professional, doting smile and even tone, but she wanted to shriek in his face that it was all bullshit regardless. She wasn't crazy. Amanda had seen Kayla's body with her own eyes, carved up like a Thanksgiving turkey. The insane thing was that everyone else could accept a closed casket funeral and the line that her friend had suddenly died peacefully in her sleep.
"The last one started in the school gym." Kayla had been a pretty, popular cheerleader that Amanda had seen going through her perky routine on the sidelines countless times. In the dream, she was doing it again, shaking her pom-poms when a red gash split her torso. She carried on jumping, oblivious as her guts spilled out onto the polished basketball court. She was sliced and diced by invisible blades into bloody chunks, what remained of her head still smiling. "I guess she couldn't… make the cut!" a deep male voice boomed out, laughing at its own terrible joke as Amanda jerked awake screaming.
She expected the doctor to go through the spiel again about how, officially, there was no foul play behind Kayla's death and this man who kept showing up in her dreams was a mental manifestation, an easy boogeyman and guilty party she could project her complex feelings of loss onto— blah, blah, blah. Amanda had flunked creative writing. If she had the inventive horsepower to make all this up lurking in her head, she thought she'd do something with it other than build new scenarios to torment herself with at night.
More and more often, she dreamed of the boiler room: a labyrinth of rusting catwalks, full of corroding pipes and steam, dimly lit by red light. She would wander, getting hopelessly turned around until the screeching scrape of metal-on metal would pierce her ears. The silhouette of a man would loom in the mist, one of his hands a gauntlet of knives that clinked as he drummed them against a railing. She could run, but he'd always be a step ahead. When she managed to get a clearer look at him, she saw that his skin was a mess of scar-tissue like he was a burn victim. He wore an old hat and ratty, striped sweater and smiled, laughing like it was a game as he closed in on her, heart-pounding as avenues of escape were cut off until finally she was cornered. Every time so far, she would jolt awake in a cold sweat just before his blades made the fatal connection.
Amanda was trying to figure how to put it into words to explain to her doctor that this felt like more than a dream, that her life was on the line. If she died in the nightmare, she thought, she'd be chopped up just like Kayla. She started to speak when something seemed off about the kindly old man sitting across from her. Had he always been bald? He moved the clipboard obscuring his face aside, revealing his features were different. His nose was long and crooked, his smile a malicious sneer. His skin molted away into a burnt char and the label on his coat changed to read, "Freddy Krueger."
"I've got a prescription for you, bitch!"