Dream Pool

In a place where nothing human lived, something stirred.

The dream pool was black as pitch, its surface as still as a mirror. But there was no light here, only darkness. The darkness of lost dreams, of dead hopes left to putrefy in a maze of rotting aspirations, a nest of nightmares.

A tiny ripple creased the pool's surface. Then another, subtle waves radiating from the center. A third followed. And a fourth, each increasing in size until the pool was choppy like a boating pond before a storm descends upon a children's park.

A head broke the surface, whispering a name.

"Alice," it crooned. "It ain't over till the red bitch sings."

The voice gave a wet chuckle, and the head—a furrowed, bald cranium crisscrossed with scar tissue—sank below the surface of the dream pool, a thin trail of bubbles marking its descent into the Stygian blackness.

    Short story: Dead Highways, Lost Roads from The Nightmares on Elm Street: Freddy Krueger's Seven Sweetest Dreams