Her blood went cold. She hadn’t seen. She was four. But there was a fire that night—not the one that killed Freddy, but the one at the old Thompson house. And a little girl with pigtails had watched from her window as a man in a striped sweater led a boy into a van.
She had. Every Friday the 13th marathon. Freddy Krueger. The burned face. The glove. The dream murders. But this wasn’t a movie. This was her childhood street—Elm Street—where she’d moved away from at ten. And she’d been having the same dream for six nights: a boiler room, a red and green sweater, and a voice asking her to count .
Then the scratching started. Slow. Rhythmic. Like a single claw dragging across the inside of her door.
The closet door creaked open. Inside, instead of clothes, there was a hallway—the hallway of her old house on Elm. And at the far end, a silhouette. The fedora. The claw scraping the wall as he walked.
The phone screen changed.
Scrrratch. Pause. Scrrratch. Pause.
Freddy’s voice echoed from everywhere and nowhere. “How many kids on Elm Street did I kill before they burned me, Jenna? Come on. You were there. You saw .”