Nightmare City Part 1

Nightmare City.

Andrew Klavan.

This book is for the Ditmore Family-Michael, Rebecca, Nick, Catie, Morgan, and Jessie.

PART I.

THE HORROR IN THE FOG.

Tom was in heaven when the phone rang. At least, he thought it was heaven. He had never been there before, and the look of the place surprised him. It wasn't what he was expecting at all.

Then again Tom had never really thought about heaven much. When he had, he'd pictured it as a place in the sky where dead people with newly issued angel wings sat on clouds and-whatever-played the harp or something. This, though-this heaven he was in now-this was just a sort of park, an expansive lawn with walkways curving through it and fountains spouting here and there and vast, majestic temple-like buildings with marble columns and peaked facades. There were no clouds to sit on. There were no clouds at all. A sky of perfect, unbroken blue covered and surrounded everything.

As for the people-the people strolling on the paths or sitting on the benches or standing amid the columns of the temples-they were also not what Tom expected. No wings for one thing. No harps either. Just ordinary men and women in all the various shapes and colors people come in. Dressed not in spotless robes but in casual clothes, slacks and skirts, shirts and blouses. And when Tom looked at them more closely, they didn't seem as happy or as serene as he would have expected people in heaven to look. Some looked downright lost or fretful, worried or even sad. One man in particular caught Tom's eye: a lanky young guy in his twenties or so with long, dirty blond hair and a thin, hungry-looking face; sunken cheeks and darkly ringed eyes. He was standing in front of one of the Greek temples, turning nervously this way and that as if he didn't know where he was or how to get home.

Tom's curiosity began to kick in-that eager electric pulse that compelled him to know more, to search for the truth, to solve the puzzle. He could never resist it. Even though he only worked for a high school paper, he was a real reporter nevertheless. It was his nature. It was who he was. Whenever there was a mystery, he didn't just want to solve it, he needed to. And this was a mystery: What sort of heaven included fear and loneliness?

He had to find someone who could give him some answers-and it suddenly occurred to him that, since this was heaven, he knew just the person to look for.

He took a step forward toward the park-and then the phone began to ring.

And suddenly, heaven was gone.

Tom opened his eyes and he was in his bed at home. A dream. Heaven was a dream. Well, yeah. What else was it going to be? It wasn't like he was dead or anything.

The phone rang again-his cell, playing the opening guitar riff from the cla.s.sic Merle Haggard song "The Fightin' Side of Me." Dazed, Tom followed the sound to find the phone. It was on his computer table, jumping and rattling around as it rang. He reached out and grabbed it, looked at it to see who was calling. Number blocked, said the words on the readout screen. Which meant it was probably Lisa McKay, his editor at the Sentinel. What time is it, anyway? he wondered. What did she want from him this early on a Sat.u.r.day morning?

Tom answered. "Yeah."

The phone crackled against his ear. Static-loud static-a wash of white sound, like the sound of the ocean in a seash.e.l.l. Something about that noise raised goose b.u.mps on Tom's arm, though he couldn't have said exactly why. It was just that the static sounded strangely far away. It echoed, as if it were coming to him up out of a deep well. It made Tom feel as if he were listening to a noise from a foreign, alien place, another planet or something like that. Weird.

"h.e.l.lo?" he said more loudly.

Nothing. No answer. Just that weird, white, alien noise. And then-wait-there was something. There was someone on the line. A voice-a woman's voice-talking beneath the rattle and hiss.

"I need to talk to you. It's very important . . ."

The words, like the static, seemed to come to him from across a great distance. Tom just barely caught those two phrases. After that the words were unintelligible. But the woman was still talking and her tone was insistent, urgent, as if she was desperate to be heard.

"h.e.l.lo? You've got a bad connection," said Tom loudly. "You're breaking up. I can't hear you."

The woman on the other end tried again. She wasn't shouting or anything, just talking in a very firm, insistent tone, trying to get through to him. Tom listened intently. He thought he recognized her voice, but he couldn't quite place it. He thought he heard the word please. He thought he heard the phrase "You have to . . ." But aside from that, the words were washed away by that ceaseless, distant, echoing static. It was frustrating.

"I can't hear you . . . ," Tom began to say again-but then it stopped. All of it stopped. The voice. The static. It was all gone and the phone was silent. There were a couple of beeps on the line. Tom lowered the phone from his ear and checked the readout: Connection lost.

For a minute he tried to figure out who it had been, whose voice he had heard. It was so familiar. He had been this close to recognizing her . . . But no, he just couldn't get it.

He shrugged and put the phone back on the computer table. Whoever it was, she'd call back, for sure. She sounded like she really wanted to talk to him.

Tom sat up in bed, tossing the comforter aside. He shook his head to clear it. Weird call. Weird noise. Woke him up out of that great dream, too. What was it? Oh yeah, he remembered: heaven. He sat there, looking around at the room. It was funny, he actually felt a little disappointed to be back from his dream, to be here again. It had been a nice dream, a restful place. And now the memories of it were breaking up in his mind, the images trailing away like smoke in the wind. He could barely remember what it had been like, and he was sorry to see it go.

He got up. Went to the dresser, started pulling out some clothes, dropping himself into them: sweatpants and a Tigers sweatshirt. He figured he'd go for a run after breakfast, maybe hit the gym at the Y.

His room was small. The bed, the dresser, and the worktable were all crowded together. Just about every s.p.a.ce on the blue wall was covered with some picture or decoration or something. There was his unusually long American flag. His pennant for the Tigers, the school's football team. Another pennant for the Los Angeles Dodgers, even though, let's be honest, they were going to stink this year. There was a picture of his brother, Burt, looking all brave and n.o.ble and cool in his army uniform. And a bulletin board with some snapshots of Tom and his mom and Burt and some of Tom's friends. Then there were a couple of framed copies of the Sentinel. There was the issue that had his first front-page story on it: "Governor Visits Springland High." And there was another-the one with the big story-the biggest story and the one that started all the trouble for him. The banner headline was huge: "Sources: Tiger Champs Used Drugs."

Tom left his bedroom and went down the hall to the bathroom-but he paused for a moment at the top of the stairway. He stood listening. His mom's bedroom door was open and he could see her room was empty, her bed all made up. But he didn't hear her moving around downstairs. That was kind of odd, actually. It was after eight. Normally this time of the morning on a weekend, Mom would be rattling around the kitchen or vacuuming, doing the housework she didn't have time to do during the week. But the house was totally quiet below. Not a noise to be heard.

Tom continued into the bathroom, trying to explain the odd silence to himself. Maybe they'd run out of eggs and Mom had ducked out to the store for a minute to do the shopping. Or maybe she'd gotten up late and was just going down to the bottom of the driveway to get the newspaper.

Whatever. He washed up and shaved and stopped thinking about it. He was wondering instead if the Dodgers had won last night-for a change-and trying to remember who the starting pitcher had been.

He toweled the shaving cream off his face and took a look at himself in the mirror. He didn't like his looks much. He didn't think his face looked brave or n.o.ble or cool like his brother Burt's face. But then maybe, like a lot of people, he couldn't see himself as others saw him. The fact was, when he used his fingers to brush his black hair back, his blue eyes shone out intense, smart, steely and unwavering. His features were narrow and sharp, serious and purposeful. He didn't see it himself-he couldn't see it-but anyone else who looked at him recognized a young man who knew how to go after what he wanted, a young man who could not easily be turned away.

He came out of the bathroom, went downstairs, thumping half the way down, creating the satisfying thunder of a buffalo stampede, then leaping the rest of the way, his hands on the banisters, his sneakers. .h.i.tting the floor so hard when he landed that the light fixture in the foyer ceiling rattled. Now he was sure his mom wasn't here, because normally when he came down the stairs like that, she'd call out to him with some snarky remark like, "Hark, I hear the pitterpatter of little feet." Or something. But there was nothing. No noise in the house at all. Just silence.

He glanced out through the sidelight next to the front door, looking past the gold star decoration on the gla.s.s. Well, that's weird, he thought. A puzzle. His mom's Civic was in the driveway. So she hadn't gone to the store. So where was she?

Tom was about to turn away when his sharp eye noticed something else, too. The newspaper was there, outside, lying at the end of the driveway where the delivery guy had tossed it. That really was strange. His mom was the only one in the house who read the paper. Tom got the sports scores off his phone and checked the rest of the news online. But his mom-the first thing she did every morning-the second she came downstairs, before she started making breakfast, before she did anything-was bring in the paper so she could read it while she drank her coffee.

So yeah-a puzzle: Where was she?

"Mom?" he called.

Just the silence in answer. And it was that kind of silence that goes down deep. It made Tom feel sure that the house was empty.

He opened the door and stepped out. He went down the driveway, the gravel crunching under his feet. Bent down to pick up the paper. Straightened-and again, he paused. And again, it was strange . . . Like, really strange.

Tom lived in Springland, California. It was a small beach town north of L.A. Usually the weather was just about perfect here-clear skies, sixty-five degrees in winter, eighty in summer, seventy in between. Today, though-though it was late April-it was cold and damp. The marine layer-the fog-had come in off the water, and come in thick. To his right, Tom could see past the Colliers' driveway next door, and after that there was nothing but a wall of drifting white mist. Same to his left: he could see the Roths' driveway and the Browns' across the street-and then nothing but fog, slowly swirling in the early morning breeze.

But that's not what was so strange. The fog was like that sometimes here. It would totally shroud the place in the morning, then burn off by noon and give way to a clear, warm Southern California day. No, it wasn't the fog that made Tom pause.

It was the silence. Deep silence. Just like in the house. It made Tom feel like the entire neighborhood was empty. Which was crazy.

Alert, that pulse of curiosity beginning to rise in him, he turned his head slowly from side to side, looking, listening. Something was missing here. What was it?

It came to him. Birds. There were no birds singing. No birds singing on an April morning. What was that about? Must've just been some sort of coincidence, all the birds stopping at once, a bird coffee break or something, but then . . . where was the noise from the freeway? The freeway wasn't even a quarter of a mile away. Normally Tom didn't hear it because he was so used to the constant whoosh of traffic that it just sort of faded into the background of his mind. But it was always audible. He could always hear it if he listened. And yet, he was listening now-and he didn't hear it at all.

Something new rose beneath his curiosity: fear. Not a lot of fear: he was sure there was a reasonable explanation for all this. But a definite chill went through him, a finger of ice reaching up out of his inner darkness and touching him on the spine. No bird noise? No freeway noise? And no one on the street? What was this? Normally there'd be someone around. Stand here long enough and you'd see Mrs. Roth walking her dog or Mr. Collier taking out last night's garbage. A car driving past. Or old lady Brown-Mrs. Brown's mom, who lived with the Browns-looking out at him from the window in the gable upstairs. That was pretty much all she did all day: look out her upstairs window at the neighborhood, at anyone who was pa.s.sing. But the gable window was dark. There was no one there. There was no one anywhere as far as Tom could see.

Still feeling that little chill of fear, Tom turned again and looked into the thick fog. A thought went through his head. It was a really unpleasant thought. He suddenly had the idea that something was moving in there, moving unseen in the depths of the mist. He had the idea that whatever it was-whatever was moving in the fog-was coming toward him, shuffling slowly toward him so that any minute now it would break out of the swirling whiteness and he would see it . . .

Tom gave a snort of a laugh. Imagination kicking into overdrive, that's all it was. "Silliness," as his mother would call it. And in this case, she'd be right. He was creeping himself out with silly thoughts. His reporter's mind looking for a puzzle where there was none. The marine layer was thick this morning, that's all. The fog m.u.f.fled the noise-bird noise, freeway noise, all the noise. And as for the rest, it was a quiet street. It was Sat.u.r.day. People were sleeping in. There was nothing strange about any of it.

You're being kind of an idiot, Tom told himself.

He started back up the path with the paper in his hand.

So where was his mother, then? The question niggled at him. He could never let a question go until he had the answer. Still, he tried to shake it off.

She was probably abducted by aliens, he told himself. That has to be the most reasonable explanation, right? Either that or she took a walk. But nah, I'm going with aliens. That's gotta be it.

Tom was smiling to himself-smiling at himself-as he stepped back into the house. Smiling, he shut the door behind him. Smiling, he tossed the newspaper onto the front hall table: whap.

Then he stopped smiling.

He heard something. He heard a voice. It wasn't his mother. It was a man talking. It was coming from inside the house.

Tom was still a little spooked by the idea that had come to him outside-the idea that there had been something moving around in the fog. His heart beat a little quicker as he walked down the hall toward the sound of the voice. With every step he took, the voice grew louder, more distinct. He started to be able to make out some of the words the man was saying.

". . . your mission . . . what you have to do . . . remember . . ."

Tom came to the end of the hall and stepped into the kitchen. That sharp eye of his-and that sharp, questioning mind-saw immediately that his mom hadn't been in here this morning. She hadn't been in here at all. The lights were out. There were no dishes in the sink. There was nothing cooking on the stove. No trace of food on the counter. The place looked as it always did after Mom cleaned it for the last time at night and before she used it first thing in the morning.

Where is she?

Then he noticed something else. The voice-the man's voice-was coming from the bas.e.m.e.nt.

". . . the game is the point . . . play the bigger game . . . ," the man was saying in a firm, even tone. Then there was something Tom couldn't make out because the bas.e.m.e.nt door in the kitchen was closed and the voice was m.u.f.fled. Then he heard, ". . . that's the mission . . ."

Tom hadn't realized he'd been holding his breath, but it came out of him now. Everything suddenly fell into place with satisfying certainty. Tom and his brother, Burt, had fixed half the bas.e.m.e.nt up into a family room two summers ago. Most Southern California houses didn't have a bas.e.m.e.nt at all, so they'd wanted to take full advantage of theirs. They'd paneled the walls and laid carpet down over the stone floors. They'd set up an entertainment center complete with a flatscreen, a couple of humongous speakers, two game consoles, and a laptop control center-some of which Tom had paid for himself with money he made that summer busing tables at California Pizza Kitchen. They'd even put in a small refrigerator so they wouldn't have to run up and down the stairs for sodas and snacks in the middle of a football game or a Call of Duty shoot-out.

Mom didn't go down into the bas.e.m.e.nt much except to do the laundry in the other half of the s.p.a.ce. She said she couldn't even figure out how to turn the TV on. But that was a typically Mom-like exaggeration. She could turn it on when she wanted to. So, obviously, that was the answer. Obviously she'd gone down to the bas.e.m.e.nt this morning and was watching TV for some reason. Maybe there was a big news story breaking and she wanted to find out about it before she made breakfast.

Tom stepped into the kitchen, pulled open the bas.e.m.e.nt door-and froze stock-still, his heart pounding hard in his chest.

"This is what you have to do," said the voice from the bas.e.m.e.nt, quiet but firm. "Do you hear me? This is the point of everything. There's no getting around this."

Tom's mouth went dry, his satisfying certainty gone as quickly as it had come. That was not the television. He could hear the man clearly now and he recognized the voice right away. He'd have known that voice anywhere. It was Burt's voice. It was his brother.

Now Tom was scared again, and not just a little scared this time. This time he was really scared.

Because his brother, Burt, went on talking quietly in the bas.e.m.e.nt. And his brother, Burt, had been dead these six months past.

As Tom started down the stairs, his mind was searching for answers again. His brother's voice must be coming from a video-sure, that's what it was-some old vid of Burt that Mom was watching. That made sense. Mom was sad about Burt getting shot in Afghanistan. They were both sad-incredibly sad-how could they not be? Burt had been the coolest guy in the universe. Brave, honest, humble, funny. He'd been there for Mom whenever she needed him. He'd been Tom's best friend and his guide through life. So yeah, they were sad. And so Mom, feeling sad, had gone downstairs and pulled up one of their old video files of Burt so she could see his face again, hear his voice.

That's why she hadn't picked up the paper. That's why she wasn't making breakfast or vacuuming or whatever. She was down in the bas.e.m.e.nt, feeling sad and watching a vid of Burt. That made perfect sense.

It did make sense-but Tom knew it wasn't true. In the months since Burt had been killed by a Taliban sniper, he himself had watched every video they had of him. Burt clowning around. Burt teasing Mom. Burt wrestling with him and so on. There was nothing on any of those videos like what he was hearing now: Burt's voice barking out with so much intensity, so much urgency.

"This is your mission, do you understand me?!"

Like he was talking to his fellow soldiers. Like he was giving them a pep talk before they set out into the wilds of the Hindu Kush. They had no video of Burt like that.

Tom licked his dry lips. He flicked the light switch on the wall. The bas.e.m.e.nt lights went on below him. He couldn't see much down there-just a little section of stone floor at the foot of the stairs. You had to turn the corner before you came into the family room where all the equipment was.

Anything could be waiting around that corner, he thought. But then he forced himself to stop thinking that. Don't wimp out on me, Harding. What could be down there? This wasn't a horror movie. This was real life.

He continued down the stairs. He told himself again that he was being an idiot for feeling afraid. Whatever the reasonable explanation was, there had to be one. Just because he couldn't think of it, didn't mean it wasn't there.

And yet, it was so strange, so strange. With every step he took, Burt's voice grew louder, clearer, more unmistakably Burt's . . .

"Look, what did you think this was? A joke? It's not, man! It was never that. Remember the Warrior. Right?"

. . . and yet, it couldn't be a video because they had no video like that. And it couldn't be Burt.

Because Burt was dead.

Tom had to force himself to breathe as he continued down into the cellar, step by slow step.

"This is what you have to understand," said Burt from the family room. "This is what I've got to get you to understand."

Just as Tom reached the bottom of the stairs, just as his sneaker touched down on the bas.e.m.e.nt floor, Burt's voice suddenly stopped in mid-sentence.

"This is exactly what I was always trying to get you ready to . . ."

And silence.

Tom halted where he was. He swallowed hard. The silence went on for a single second. Then: "Dr. Cooper to the ER-stat!"

A totally new voice! A woman's voice. Speaking as if over a loudspeaker. And then a man was shouting, "Single GSW to the chest! Clear Trauma One!"

Tom narrowed his eyes in confusion. He recognized these voices, too. They belonged to the actors on his mom's favorite doctor show, The Cooper Practice. It was a show about a bunch of doctors in a hospital who spent their days falling in and out of love with one another between treating emergencies. Real realistic-in the sense of being not realistic at all. But Mom liked it, so Tom had watched it with her a couple of times.