1:05 A.M.
Silently screaming, Benny Knox awakened from the nightmare. Occasionally, not too often, he had nightmares but this one was the worst ever.
It was a hell of a nightmare, quite literally. He'd been in hell, the very literal hell that his father had talked about so often, either to him alone or in sermons that Benny had heard. He was stark naked and standing knee deep in a lake of boiling, bubbling pitch. His feet and legs hurt horribly.
At the edge of the lake, a few feet away, stood three devils. Bright red devils with tails and horns and hoofs. Two of them had long pitchforks and they were jabbing them into Benny's chest and stomach, to drive him farther and deeper into the boiling lake. His arms were stuck; he couldn't use them to try to ward off the pitchforks. The pitchforks hurt badly and he was forced to take a step backward and was suddenly in the boiling pitch up almost to his waist. The slope was steep, and with another step or two he'd be completely in the lake.
The other devil, the one in the middle, didn't have a pitchfork. He was just standing there laughing. And even through his dream Benny knew that he had heard that exact laugh before and that he'd seen that devil's face before—but he couldn't remember where or when.
Over the laughter and from somewhere overhead, came a Voice. The voice of God or the voice of his father; he didn't know which.
"Hell forever, my son, for you have done evil. You can be forgiven only if you can make them believe you, and be punished on Earth for the evil you have done."
He tried to scream and answer but his voice was stuck too, like his arms. Then one of the pitchforks jabbed at his eyes and he had to take another step backward. He lost his balance and fell. As the boiling pitch closed over his head, he awoke.
Or had it been just a dream? Might not it have been a vision sent him by God or by his father in Heaven, to warn him, to instruct him?
He lay there sweating in the upper bunk, and then he remembered what Mrs. Saddler had told him to do whenever he awakened from a nightmare: get up and walk, walk till you're wide awake again and the nightmare goes away.
He climbed down from the upper bunk and walked—as far as he could in the cell, three paces one way and three back and three paces one way and three paces back—But the dream, if it had been a dream, stayed with him, more vivid than any of his memories of anything else that had happened to him that day or recently.
A sound made him pause in his pacing and look into the lower bunk. The sound was a snore. He saw that he was no longer alone in the cell; while he'd slept they'd put someone else there and he was now lying in the lower bunk. Fully dressed, as Benny was, except for shoes and coat. Even in the dim light of the cell, the man looked familiar to him.
Benny bent over him.
It was Mister Fleck. That surprised him, but what surprised him a thousand times more was that it was also the devil in his nightmare or vision, the devil without a pitchfork, the one who had laughed at him. The face of Mr. Fleck and of that devil were the same. And he remembered now why the laugh of that devil had sounded as though he'd heard it before. It was Mister Fleck's laugh, as Mister Fleck had laughed at him early in the evening, when he'd told Mister Fleck that he'd killed those women. The police hadn't believed him, but they hadn't laughed at him.
And suddenly he knew what he had to do to make the police really believe him, to make them believe that he'd done evil and must be punished.
He put his hands on Mister Fleck's shoulders and pulled him up to a sitting position. "Mister Fleck!" he said.
Mister Fleck's eyes opened and blinked. "Huh?" he said.
Benny was very earnest because this was very serious. "Listen, Mister Fleck," he said. "I'm sorry, but I got to kill you. I got to kill you like I killed them women so the police will believe I killed them."
"Huh? Benny—?"
"I want you to know, Mister Fleck, I ain't mad at you. Even if you laughed at me. It's bad to kill because you're mad and I want you to know I ain't mad. I just got to kill you. And besides, it won't be evil for me to kill you to make them believe me. It won't be evil, Mister Fleck, because you're a devil."
Mister Fleck opened his mouth to say something, or to scream, but nothing came out because Benny's hands were tight around his throat, and getting tighter. A minute later they let go, and something limp and dead fell back on the lower bunk.
Benny Knox went to the door of the cell and grabbed his bars, rattling the door loudly. Even more loudly he yelled, "Policemen! Policemen! Come here and see. Now do you believe me? Now will you try to tell me I never killed nobody?"
This time they believed him.