Andrew Klavan - Nightmare City

Then, most horrifying of all, a doctor, his face obscured behind a surgical mask, stepped forward and set a scalpel against his skin—Tom’s skin. They were going to cut him open on television right before his own eyes. Tom—standing there in the family room, staring at the TV—could almost feel the cold touch of the blade against him.

But all at once the scene went blank. The television turned itself off.

The sudden darkness on the screen snapped Tom’s trance. He shook himself as if he were waking up. Without thinking, he turned and found the remote on one of the chairs, lifted it, pointed it at the TV, and tried to turn the show on again. The prospect of watching himself cut open made him sick to his stomach, but he had to know what happened next, had to find out what all this meant.

Training his intense blue eyes on the TV screen by sheer force of will, he pressed the Power button. Nothing happened. Pressed it again—nothing. He tossed the remote back down onto the chair.

Think , he told himself. Figure it out. Finding answers is what you do. Find them!

But how could he? His own image on the TV. Burt calling him by name. Marie urging him to the burned-out retreat in the woods. Monsters in the fog. How could he put any of it together? How could he make sense out of any of it?

Marie , he thought. She—or her father—was the only one who seemed to know anything. He had to get back to her, find out more. Why did he have to go to the monastery? She must know. She must know something she wasn’t telling him.

He raced back to the stairs, back up the stairs. He reached the top and pushed through the door into the kitchen. He stopped short on the threshold, staring.

Marie was gone.

The breakfast nook was empty. The kitchen was empty. Other than that, everything seemed to be exactly as he had left it. The chairs were in disarray. The one chair Marie had knocked over was still lying on the floor. Tom could even still smell a trace of Marie’s perfume lingering in the air. It was as if she’d only just now left the room.

“Marie?” he called out. “Marie!”

But there was no answer, and once again the house had that feeling of complete emptiness.

He stepped to the hallway and called again.

“Marie!”

But the hall was empty. He knew she was gone.

Tom felt the bizarre events of the day spinning through his mind, ideas spinning through his mind as if they were trying to put themselves into the right order, looking for the pattern in which they fit together.

It’s not a dream , Marie had told him. It’s not a hallucination. You’re not dead. You’re not mad. Go to the monastery. That’s where the answers are .

What did she know? What was it she wasn’t saying?

His thoughts whirling, he turned back to the kitchen. And as he turned, his thoughts stopped.

Something was off. Different. His eyes went over the empty room. He had been wrong before. He had thought the kitchen was just the way he’d left it. But it wasn’t. Not exactly. Something had changed. But what? What was it?

He couldn’t tell. He stood still, looking the place over. There was the table, as before. The chairs in their skewed positions, the one fallen over. The sink, the cupboards, the door across the way that led into the dining room, the stove on the opposite wall—everything familiar, everything unchanged, a scene so normal that it made Tom ache for all the ordinary mornings when he would wake up and come downstairs to find his mom in here, making breakfast.

But something was definitely different. What was it?

His searching glance went from corner to corner. The cabinets, the basement door… back around to the table again, sitting empty there in the breakfast nook with the window behind it…

He stopped. That was it. The window.

The fog.

When he had come in here before, when he had first found Marie sitting at the table, he remembered he could see the backyard outside. There was mist out there, but it was thin. The scene was much clearer than it was out on the street, where the marine layer was so thick you could barely see a few feet in front of you.

Now, though, that had all changed. The fog had come in dense and close. It was pressed hard against the windowpanes. The glass was white, completely misted over, dripping with moisture. The backyard was now totally invisible.

Tom moved toward the window slowly. Fear and curiosity were warring within him—and the fear was winning. Up until now, he’d had the feeling that the house was somehow protected, somehow surrounded by a sort of safety zone that kept the fog—and the monsters in the fog—at bay.

But he saw now it wasn’t so. The fog was right up against the house, a wall of white, impenetrable.

Did that mean the monsters were also close?

Frightened as he was, he had to find out—had to. He moved toward the breakfast nook. He edged around the table. He leaned in to the window, pressed his forehead against the cool glass, trying to peer out.

He could see nothing. Stillness. Fog, thick and swirling. Or wait… Was something there? Did something just move? Tom squinted, peering harder. Tendrils of fog turned and curled and the whiteness seemed to thin a little. The view began to clear.

A creature was staring back at him through the window, its sharp teeth bared, its cruel eyes gleaming.

Tom had only a second to react—only a second to step backward.

Then the window exploded as the creature lunged at him through the shattering glass.

The creature burst through the window with an echoing screech that obliterated thought. It was a screech of ungodly hunger. It twisted the monster’s already hideous features into a fanged, snarling portrait of pure brutality.

Tom stumbled backward in terror, his arms pinwheeling. His side banged painfully into the edge of the breakfast table. The jolt knocked him off-balance and he went down on one knee, grabbing hold of one of the chairs to break his fall. The creature—half inside the house and half out—strained and reached for him and screamed again, trying to clamber the rest of the way through the window to get at him. Tom saw the wicked, razor-sharp claws on its fingers stretched out toward him, inches away from his face.

Holding on to the chair, Tom quickly dragged himself to his feet. For a second, the monster withdrew its reaching hands and grabbed hold of the windowsill in order to propel itself inside. Completely ignoring the shards of glass that lanced into the flesh of its palms and arms, the beast started to climb in.

Tom lifted the chair with both hands. He brought it back over his shoulder. Swung it as hard as he could at the monster’s face.

One of the chair legs connected with the beast’s head. The thing gave an ugly grunt and tumbled backward out of the house, vanishing into the fog again.

But the fog was pouring into the kitchen like smoke. Tom knew it would be only moments before the monster tried to come in again.

And now he heard the sound of shattering glass in the living room.

“Oh no,” he whispered.

They were breaking in everywhere.

He dropped the chair. He rushed across the kitchen to the far door. He looked through—through the dining room—into the living room at the front of the house.

He thought he had been afraid before. He thought he had been afraid out in the fog when the creature had attacked him. That was nothing compared to this. Now the fear was like a raging fire inside him. It nearly burned his will away. It nearly left him weak and helpless.

Three of the things were crawling, clawing, climbing into the house. They had smashed the living room windows—the windows that ran all across the front wall—they had smashed all of them, and the fog was pouring through the openings. Second by second, the room was filling with white, swirling mist and the three creatures were coming in with it. They were scrabbling over the jagged shards of glass and tumbling through. One landed on the sofa, two fell to the floor. They all climbed slowly and clumsily to their feet. They looked around them with gleaming eyes.