Nightmare City (15 page)

There was a long line of windows in the front of the school. They were tall, the panes starting just off the ground and rising to about shoulder height. The lights were off inside the building and the windows were dark. But as Tom looked, he was almost sure he saw a slow movement behind the unlit glass.

Where are you headed now? To your school? I’ll be right there when you arrive
.

Tom shuddered at the memory of the Lying Man’s promise—or was it a threat? Were the Lying Man and the creatures he controlled already ahead of him? Were they already waiting for him inside the building?

He swallowed. He glanced back over his shoulder. The wind continued to blow and the fog continued rolling toward him up the hill. Already, most of the playground equipment had disappeared in the whiteness. Already, the first of the malevolents were limping toward the bottom of the slope.

Tom had no choice. He had come this far. There was nowhere to go but forward.

He began to climb the hill again. He neared the school slowly. He reached the path at the top of the slope. Just as he did, another movement at one of the school’s windows caught his eye.

This time it was unmistakable. A figure was emerging from the darkness inside the school. It was approaching the window.

The thunder rolled. The wind blew. The fog rolled toward him up the hill.

The figure inside the school became clearer—and even more clear. It pressed itself against the glass and looked out at him.

“Gordon?” said Tom out loud—but his voice was lost in a fresh rumble of thunder.

It was. It was Gordon. The Tigers football star stood for a moment, pressed to the window. He peered out at Tom with a strangely empty expression on his face. Slowly, he lifted his hand in greeting.

But before Tom could respond, the thunder rolled again like dark laughter. There was a first flash of lightning. And Gordon drew back into the darkness of the school’s interior and vanished like a ghost.

INTERLUDE THREE

There came a nightmare day. A Wednesday afternoon. The last class period but one. For Tom, that meant PE. He and ten other guys doing gymnastics, climbing ropes in the gym, working on the horse and the beams and the mats and so on. When the class was over, the guys headed into the locker room. They showered. They got back into their street clothes. Tom was standing in front of his locker, buttoning his shirt, when he felt that something was wrong.

He looked up. Looked around him. Where was everyone? Somehow, while he was concentrating on getting dressed, all the other guys had quietly slipped out of the locker room. The place was empty. He was alone.

Alone—and then not alone. The locker room door opened
and three guys came in. Not just any three guys. Three Tigers. Big Tigers, too—jumbo size—from the defensive line: Matt Halliwell, Hank Thatcher, and Dub Simpson.

As Tom stood staring, they moved in on him. They stood around him in a semicircle. Tom’s back was against his gym locker. There was nowhere for him to run.

Tom’s fingers were still fiddling with the last button on his shirt. He didn’t even have his sneakers back on yet. He was in his socks. He realized this must’ve been part of some kind of plan: the other guys slipping out, leaving him alone; the three football players converging on him. His mind raced, trying to think of an escape strategy. He came up with nothing. He felt just about as helpless as it was possible to feel. If these guys wanted to rough him up, he was going to get majorly roughed.

Matt Halliwell spoke first. Broad-shouldered, fat-faced, flat-faced, with black hair so short it looked like iron filings standing up on top of a magnet. He put a finger the size of a sausage against Tom’s chest. Poked him hard.

“Nice story you wrote about us, wimp,” he said.

Dub Simpson, shaped like a cinder block and about as smart as a cinder block, shoved Tom’s shoulder with his open palm.

“What’d you have to do that for?” he said.

Tom’s eyes flashed from Matt to Dub—and then to Hank
Thatcher. Hank looked away, frowning. What a weird situation this was! Hank was one of the sources for Tom’s story. Hank had been a benchwarmer on the championship team three years before. He had seen the players taking drugs himself. He had pictures of them and e-mails from them proving it. He had met Tom in a parking garage one dark night. Handed the evidence over in a rolled-up manila envelope. But he had given Tom that information on the condition of anonymity. Tom had promised never to reveal his name. And now Hank, to protect his secret from his teammates, was joining with the others in taking vengeance on him—and Tom was bound by his promise to keep his mouth shut about it. If this was irony, then irony stank.

“You should’ve kept your stupid opinions to yourself,” said Matt, poking him in the chest again.

“Nobody asked you what you thought,” said Dub.

“It’s not what I thought,” Tom said. He figured, well, if he was going to get a beat-down, he wasn’t going to whine about it. He was going to say his piece at least, while he still had his teeth. “It has nothing to do with my opinions. You think I don’t like the team? I love the team. My brother played on the team. I didn’t want to write this story. I had to. Because it was true.”

Dub somehow wasn’t interested in hearing about the responsibilities of the press. “They say they may take our
championship away,” he complained, sticking out his jaw angrily.

Yeah, because you didn’t earn it fairly!
Tom thought. But he didn’t say that out loud. No sense pushing things too far. What he did say was, “Well, look, man, I’m really sorry, but like I said, I’m a news guy, I have to . . .”

“Sorry?” And this time Matt poked him so hard it made him step back into his locker with a clang. “What good does sorry do us now? You’re supposed to be loyal to the school, man! You’re supposed to stand with the team.”

Tom could see this was about to get ugly. He could see that Matt was working himself up to do violence and that Dub was already on the brink—Dub was pretty much always on the brink. And Hank was not going to do a thing to stop either of them because that would give him away.

But just as Tom was wondering how he was going to explain his broken bones to his mother, the locker room door opened again and in came Gordon Thomas.

One of the secret truths of the world, Tom had sometimes noticed, was that life is unfair and that some people get all the luck. This truth was so harsh that many adults couldn’t face up to it. But a kid only had to step out onto a playground
once to understand: some people are born smarter, some faster, some stronger, some simply cooler than the rest. Parents and teachers worked hard to convince kids that everyone was special, but kids could see for themselves it wasn’t so—otherwise, the word
special
wouldn’t mean anything. Every soul was important, sure—a unique work of creation—but when it came to the gifts of nature, most people were kind of ordinary. Only special people were special.

Gordon Thomas was one of those special people. He was handsome with chiseled features and reddish-blond hair that fell rakishly into his startlingly pale blue eyes. Fast and strong? Check. No one had ever beaten him in a race. No one ever tried to beat him in a fight. He was even smart—maybe not as smart as some of the geeks in school, but he always paid attention in class, always did his homework, and always got good grades. And as for being cool, it just came naturally to him. For all his gifts, he wasn’t arrogant or stuck-up. For all his physical strength, he never bullied anyone. For all his success, he always acted modestly and treated people decently. So you couldn’t even hate the guy!

And Tom didn’t hate him. He envied him sometimes. But he liked him. Everyone liked him.

Gordon came into the locker room fast now, and he
looked angry. Quickly, he shoved his way past Matt and muscled in between him and Tom, shielding Tom from the others with his body.

“What d’you guys think you’re doing?” Gordon asked them. He looked at each in turn: Matt, Hank, Dub. All three of them averted their eyes, shamefaced in front of the quarterback. “What, are the Tigers beating guys up now? Are we thugs all of a sudden?”

“We’re just talking to him,” Matt muttered.

“Oh yeah,” said Gordon. “I can see.”

The three linemen looked at their shoes, ashamed.

“Coach says they may take our trophy away,” said Dub. “It’s not fair.”

“It’s not fair?” said Gordon, staring hard at the cinder block. “How is it not fair? It wasn’t fair when our guys took drugs to win. That wasn’t fair to the Sandy Hill Panthers, who should’ve gotten the trophy in the first place. All Tom did was tell the truth about it. How is that not fair?”

Dub blinked stupidly. Dub did that a lot. “He wasn’t loyal to the team,” he grumbled.

“Well, maybe he was loyal to something bigger than the team,” said Gordon—though even he sounded miserable about it. “It’s his job to tell the truth even when he doesn’t like it. Maybe especially when he doesn’t like it. He was loyal to that.”

“We just wanted to make him understand what he did to us,” said Matt.

“I know what you just wanted to do,” Gordon said. “But the facts don’t go away just because you beat up the guy who tells them. That just makes you as bad as the guys who took the dope. You want the trophy back?”

“Yeah!” said Dub.

“Well, then let’s win it back,” Gordon said quietly. “If we do it right, we don’t have to be afraid of what anyone says.”

Dub blinked stupidly some more, but even he seemed to grasp this concept. Sort of.

“Now get out of here,” said the quarterback. “Leave Tom alone. He didn’t do anything wrong. And anyone who messes with him, messes with me.”

That was Gordon—typical Gordon. And that was why, when all the players had gone, when Gordon was gone and Tom was alone in the locker room again, he sank down slowly onto one of the benches.

Because he felt bad—really bad. It was true he hadn’t written the story about the team because he hated the team or because he was envious of Gordon, and he hadn’t done it to impress Marie. He had written the story because it was the truth and telling the truth was something he did, something he felt the need to do. But whatever his motives had been, the results had been the same: he’d gotten the team
in trouble and hurt Gordon and won Marie’s admiration. It made Tom feel guilty, as if those had been his motives after all.

He especially felt guilty when he was hanging out with Marie. And he was hanging out with her more and more now. The very next weekend, the next Sunday afternoon, he was at her house after church. He joined her and her father and mother and brother for lunch.

The Cameron mansion was even more impressive inside than outside. When Tom stepped through the front door, he came into a vast foyer with marble floors and a sweeping staircase rising to a second-floor balcony. In the study, where he sat with Marie before lunch was served, there were photographs everywhere. Dr. Cameron shaking hands with the mayor. Dr. Cameron with his arm around the governor’s shoulder. Dr. Cameron laughing with the owner of the Dodgers. Dr. Cameron with just about every famous person who lived anywhere near town.

When it was time to eat, they all sat in a vast dining room with a wall of glass doors that looked out across the hillside at the sparkling Pacific Ocean. Dr. Cameron sat at one end of the long glass table and Mrs. Cameron at the other.
Marie’s brother, Carl, was on one side, and Marie and Tom sat next to each other across from him. The room was bright with sunlight. The light hit the prisms in the chandelier and was turned into rainbows and the rainbows fell on the crystal goblets and the china plates and the hand-carved oak sideboard against the wall. Tom felt as if he had stepped into a world so plush and beautiful as to have an aura of magic.

Dr. Cameron lifted a glass of orange juice in a toast to him. He was a tall, trim, broad-shouldered man with a face as perfect as his daughter’s, his hair a silvery blond. “Marie has told us so much about you, Tom,” he said with a smile. He had a calm, reassuring voice—a good voice for a doctor, Tom thought. “We’re really glad to know we’ll be seeing more of you around here in the future.”

Tom was glad to know this, too—it was the first he’d heard of it! But Marie seemed to agree. She smiled in that way that made Tom ache.

It was a wonderful lunch. Tom talked about his work at the newspaper. He talked about his story, the one about the football team, and how he was working on new leads. Instead of being angry at him, Marie and her family admired him. It was a nice change from being at school.

After lunch, Marie walked him over the broad front lawn of her house to where Tom’s Mustang was parked at the curb.

“Daddy really likes you,” she said. She took hold of his arm as they reached the car. She pressed close to him. “That’s a really good thing, you know. He’s the best guy in the world. And he knows a lot of important people—all the important people around here, for sure! He can be a really good friend to you, Tom, when you’re applying to colleges or looking for a job, all that stuff.”

“Yeah, well, he seems like a really good guy,” Tom said. And he thought he could probably use some help applying to colleges now that the principal and all his teachers hated him.

They reached his car. Tom turned to look at her. He wanted to ask her about Gordon then. He wanted to make sure everything was over between them, that there would be no hard feelings about him moving in on Gordon’s girl or anything like that. But he didn’t say a word. With Marie holding his arm and looking up at him the way she was, he didn’t want to do anything that might ruin the moment.

He was still trying to convince himself to speak when Marie suddenly moved in even closer and kissed him.

At which point Tom completely forgot about Gordon Thomas, and about everything.

20.

U
rged on by the wind and thunder, Tom hurried over the last yards of the hill to the school’s front door. The door was made of glass and was dark, like the windows. As he approached it, he thought he saw another figure within, but it was only his own reflection. It was the first time he’d seen himself since he left the house. He was shocked by his expression of wild-eyed panic. With the baseball bat gripped in his fist, he looked like some sort of madman ready to bust up the world.