Nightmare City (18 page)
Tom lowered his chin, looked at the floor. “Sometimes,” he muttered. He wished it wasn’t so, but it was.
“And you did want to steal Marie away from him.”
Tom shook his head weakly. That wasn’t why he wrote the story. It was never his reason.
“Are you sure?” said the Lying Man, as if Tom had spoken these words aloud. “Are you absolutely sure those weren’t your motives? Are you sure you’re not just as much a liar as Marie is? I mean, look at yourself, Tom. Really look at yourself for a change. Look at your life. You’ve lost your brother. You’ve lost your friends. You’ve spent years pining for a girl who despises you. And as for who you are . . . well, you like to think of yourself as a courageous seeker after truth, I know. But I sort of suspect you’re just an envious little person trying to use your newspaper to take vengeance on people who are more successful than you are.”
Tom stood slumped, unable to find the energy even to answer. Was it true? Was that really his life? Was that really himself? Right then, right after seeing Marie, right after hearing what she said about him and feeling his heart break inside him, he certainly felt . . . well, he felt as miserable as the Lying Man’s description of him. He felt worthless. Weak. As if life weren’t even worth living.
So maybe the Lying Man wasn’t such a liar after all.
Tom slowly lifted his head. He looked down the hall, peered into the shadows in the direction of the Lying Man’s voice. But he couldn’t see him anymore. The Lying Man seemed to have vanished into the darkness.
And then, suddenly—suddenly the man was standing right beside him. He was murmuring quietly into Tom’s ear.
“You see, Tom, it’s as I said. I just want for you what you want for yourself. And you know what that is, don’t you?”
“No,” said Tom weakly.
“Yes, you do,” said the Lying Man. “You know what you really want.” He chuckled softly. “Death, Tom. That’s it, isn’t it? You don’t want to come out of this coma at all, do you? Why should you? Your life isn’t worth living. Of course you want to die. You want to die.”
Horrified, Tom turned to him quickly. The Lying Man smiled, his expression seemingly full of kindness. But his eyes! His eyes were dancing with the raging electric power of his absolute wickedness.
“And now,” said the Lying Man, “we’re both going to get what we want!”
The next moment he was gone—all of him was gone, that is, except his laughter. His laughter continued to trail back to Tom out of the shadows, fading only slowly.
And as the laughter faded, a new noise replaced it. Soft at first. A steady, rhythmic pounding. It was coming from upstairs.
Tom listened. The thudding went on. It grew louder. Now and then it was punctuated by high, hollow shrieks that drifted like ghostly echoes down the stairs, down the hall, to where Tom stood.
The malevolents!
Tom’s eyes widened as he lifted his gaze to the ceiling.
Moment by moment, the pounding upstairs became more insistent. The shrieks became wilder, more ravenous.
Of course. He had forgotten. The Lying Man was the master of the malevolents. The Lying Man was the King of Death. He had kept Tom here, delayed him, stalled him with his talk while the fog climbed up the hill outside, while the malevolents advanced on the school.
And Tom, heartbroken and confused, weak with sorrow, had listened to him. Had stood here. Had given the malevolents the time they needed to make their approach.
And now they were here. Pounding on the windows. Shrieking for entry.
Hungry for Tom’s life.
T
he pounding grew steadily louder. Those strange echoing shrieks grew louder. And now there were other noises. A crack. A spatter.
Glass breaking. The windows were giving way.
Fear flowed into Tom like electricity, jolting him out of his weakness, jolting him out of his sorrowing daze.
He heard the Lying Man whisper in his mind:
I want for you what you want for yourself. Death. You want to die
.
Was it true? He was so confused now, so unhappy, so incredibly weary of fighting his way through this nightmare, that he didn’t know what was true anymore or whom to trust. But he
wanted
to know. He still had that—that curiosity to know the truth that drove him on, that wouldn’t let him give up.
You want
to
die
, the Lying Man insisted.
And Tom thought:
No. No, I don’t. Not yet, at least
.
He was still a reporter, after all. He couldn’t die before he learned the rest of the story.
He hesitated another moment. He heard the malevolents trying to break in upstairs. He thought of their poisonous claws, their ravenous teeth. He remembered the lanky man with blond hair who had been dragged away screaming into the fog. He had cut his wrists, Lisa said. He had given in to despair. He really
had
wanted to die.
That’s not me
, Tom thought, fighting down the voice of the Lying Man.
That’s not going to be me
.
He gripped his bat tightly and started to run.
He dashed through the darkness of the halls. Whispers trailed past him like wind. Shadows dashed by on every side of him. Memories. The haunting memories he had wanted to leave behind. Pulling at him. Calling to him.
He reached the bottom of the stairway. Looked up into the dim, gray light above. Not much light—just the light
leaking down the hall from the lobby windows—but enough to make his way by. The pounding up there continued. The shrieking continued. They would break through soon. He had to hurry.
He started up, taking the stairs two and three at a time.
It was not fast enough.
As he reached the top of the flight, he heard a tremendous shattering noise. He peered down the hall, through the shadows, into the brighter light of the lobby. He saw that two of the windows had already broken, their shards and splinters glittering on the floor in the gray light. Now, even as he watched, thunder crashed and lightning flickered and another window exploded and then another. The wind brought the rain lashing in through the openings. More lightning. More thunder. And then the fog tumbled into the corridor.
And the malevolents came with it.
Lit by the flickering blasts of light, the monsters climbed through the broken windows, fighting with one another to be the first in. They tore at one another’s rotting piebald flesh with their toxic claws. The jagged broken glass tore at them, too. They screamed—and their horrible screams were lost beneath the wild, raging thunder. But nothing slowed them down. Nothing stopped them. As the mist hissed into the school, as the wind-whipped rain drenched the glass-strewn
floor, as the thunder and lightning rocked the school and lit the corridor, the malevolents tumbled through the windows, staggering across the hall, sniffing the air and eyeing the darkness, searching for their prey.
There was no chance of getting past them. No chance of fighting so many. Tom had to find another way out.
He turned and looked away from the lobby, down the other hall. At the rear of the school, there were doors leading onto the athletic fields. Maybe there was still a chance he could reach them before the fog surrounded the school entirely. He could cross the fields and climb the fence and make his way to town, to Pinewood Lane, to Karen Lee.
Panting, terrified, he left the lobby of monsters behind and took off down the hall to the back of the school at top speed. Yet, even now, even in his fear, he was aware of the heaviness and confusion inside him.
Look at yourself, Tom. Really look at yourself for a change. Look at your life. You’ve lost your brother. You’ve lost your friends. You’ve spent years pining for a girl who despises you .
. .
He knew that heaviness was slowing him down, making him weak. He knew he had to fight against it.
Despair is
not
an option
.
He gritted his teeth. Pushed himself on, racing headlong down the hall.
There they were: the double doors that led to the fields
in back. There were no windows here, so he couldn’t check the conditions outside. He didn’t know what he was about to find. He didn’t know what he was charging into. But he had to try it.
He flung himself against the doors. Hit the bar of the doors with his shoulder and shoved it open, tumbling after it out of the school, into the back fields.
He tumbled into a tempest. The storm out here was raging full blast, the power of it almost unbelievable. The sky was flashing continuously. The thunder cracked and muttered and rolled. The wind lashed at his face and the rain pounded him.
But there was no fog. There were no malevolents. Through the streaming gray downpour, he could see across the playing fields to the horizon.
He headed in that direction—he tried to, anyway. He got three steps, and then the wind strengthened even more, hammering against him without ceasing. He fought forward another step, but the wind was overpowering. The rain whipped his face painfully. He had to raise his arm to protect his eyes.
As he stood there, trying to battle the wind, there was a flash of lightning and a blast of thunder so loud it deafened him. He felt the earth tremble beneath his feet, shake so hard he was afraid it would open up and swallow him.
He had never felt a storm like this—it seemed beyond the bounds of nature.
For a moment, the noise trembled lower, but it seemed to Tom it wasn’t fading but only gathering for some greater blast.
And then it came. A crackling flash of lightning like no lightning there had ever been, a supernatural explosion of radiance that blinded him and a crash of thunder that swallowed every other sound. The wind grew even stronger. The rain fell even harder. It seemed he was being spun and lifted and carried away by a whipping whirlpool of light and sound and air and pain. It was as if the chaos in his heart had overflowed into the chaos around him and the chaos around him had engulfed all the world.
Everything turned gray as the tempest overwhelmed him. There was nothing left anywhere except the storm.
T
he rain fell steadily. Drenched and weary, Tom trudged up a steep two-lane road. He moved in the shadows of overhanging oak and eucalyptus trees, the cold downpour dripping on him from their leaves.
He looked around, bewildered. It was strange—very strange: he couldn’t remember how he had gotten here. He had stepped out of the school into a raging storm—he remembered that. And he remembered the wind and the
lightning and thunder—the incredible intensity of them. But then . . . ? There was nothing after that. He was just suddenly here. It was as if there had been some weird skip in the video of his life, a missing transition.
And now? He wasn’t sure. Something felt wrong. Something felt different and strange. He couldn’t quite tell what it was, but he sensed he had entered a new phase of this nightmare.
He trudged on beneath the dripping trees, nearing the top of the hill. From there, he would be able to look down onto the main street of town, Route 190. There would be a little strip of stores, gas stations, and restaurants. The freeway to the right, and the ocean beyond. The high hills to the left, dotted with houses.
A few yards from the crest, Tom stopped. He had heard something. A sort of steady
whoosh
and whisper. He realized he had been hearing it for some time, but he hadn’t noticed it before because it blended in with the background and because . . . well, because it was so normal. He was used to hearing it every day.
It was the sound of cars on the freeway.
Tom’s lips parted in surprise as he realized this. This was what he’d been missing all this time—all this time he’d been in this bizarre coma-world. The noise of freeway traffic, the songs of birds, the presence of other people. The
normal sounds and movements of life. Had they all come back now? What did it mean?
He started walking again, faster, covering the last few yards to the peak of the hill.
He stopped at the crest and looked down into the center of town. A feeling of wonder and hope spread through him. Sure enough, there were cars passing on the freeway down there, just as there usually were. There were cars on 190, too. Cars pausing at the stoplight, moving on when the light turned green. Cars pulling into the diagonal spaces outside the shops and restaurants. Cars stopping at the pump for gas. Just like always.
Another movement caught Tom’s attention and he turned and saw, to his amazement, an actual pedestrian, a sure-enough ordinary normal human being, big as life. It was a woman with a shopping bag coming out of the Easy Mart at the Shell station, heading for her parked SUV. Tom stared at her with wonder, as if she were an angel descended from heaven. And then . . .
Then Tom lifted his eyes and he saw the Pacific. What a wonderful sight it was! The ocean was dark and churning under the gray sky, its waves rising to meet the rain, its whitecaps snapping at the clouds. But the best part was: there was no fog, no marine layer. In fact, now that he thought about it, there was no sign of fog anywhere. No malevolents.
Did that mean he had finally escaped them? Was he getting better? Was he going to live and regain consciousness?
His excitement rose as he started down the hill.
He entered the heart of Springland. He passed the Greenhouse Restaurant on his left. He could see people through the windows of the green clapboard building: more ordinary people sitting at the tables in there eating and talking. He could see people through the window of the antique shop, too. And more people pulling into the Shell station in their cars. It was as if he had returned to the land of the living after a long journey through a barren nightmare.
Just as he reached the corner, a tall, weathered ranchhand came out of the hardware store and moved past Tom toward a black pickup parked at the curb. Tom smiled a greeting at the man, eager to talk to someone, to anyone.
“Hey. How goes it?” Tom said.
The ranchhand took no notice of him. He walked past Tom as if he weren’t there. Got into his truck. Drove away.