Andrew Klavan - Nightmare City

The voice of the Lying Man played in his head.

I’m waiting for you wherever you go. Where are you headed now? To your school? I’ll be right there when you arrive. Me and all my friends. You can’t get away from us .

Maybe he was right, Tom thought. Maybe going to the school was a mistake. Or maybe the Lying Man was just trying to scare him, to keep him away from the place where his memory was, where the truth was.

Yes , Tom thought. Yes, that was it. The Lying Man would say anything to keep him from finding out the truth, to keep him from…

His thoughts were cut off by a high, hollow, echoing shriek as a malevolent lunged out of the fog, reaching for him.

Tom screamed and twisted away. He felt the thing’s claws slice through his sleeve and nick his shoulder. He felt darkness swim up through his mind at the poisonous contact. He staggered back, nauseous, unsteady. The malevolent recovered its balance, turned, preparing to lunge again. Tom braced himself. He grabbed the Warrior bat in both hands. He pulled it back over his shoulders.

With another awful shriek, the malevolent rushed at him again, its distorted features careering toward him out of the fog.

Tom swung with all his might, swung for the fences.

The bat connected—but it wasn’t a good hit. The creature was too close. It jammed him. The thinner midsection of the bat struck the beast on the arm. The impact wasn’t solid enough to knock it down. But the thing did stagger a few steps to the side. That gave Tom the chance to dance away from it, stepping back quickly out of its reach.

He almost bumped into the malevolent right behind him. Fortunately, the thing let out an eager, hungry shriek and Tom heard it. He spun around—just in time—the beast was nearly on him. It was lurching forward, its eyes gleaming, its dagger-like claws extended toward his face.

There was no time for Tom to bring the bat around again, so he jabbed with the head of it. It hit the malevolent in the throat. The creature gagged, and a nauseating green slime came out of its mouth as it tumbled over, clutching at its own neck. It fell to the pavement, writhing and choking and spitting.

Tom didn’t pause to watch. He knew the first beast was coming after him. He turned—and there it was, nearly on top of him. And here came the others, an army of hulking shadows limping toward him out of the swirling white.

The closest creature gave a high-pitched snarl, its sunken nostrils flaring at the scent of him, its eyes bright with hunger.

Tom heard Lisa’s voice as if she were whispering into his ear: The doctors say if they lose you again, if your heart stops beating again, they doubt they’ll be able to revive you. They doubt you’ll be strong enough to make it back .

He didn’t hesitate. He cocked the bat again and swung full force. There was a sickening thud as he made home-run contact with the nearest creature’s head.

What happened next was too disgusting to describe. Even the howl the creature made was so awful that Tom, hearing it, felt as if his blood had turned to ice. In the next second, what was left of the malevolent was writhing at Tom’s feet, transforming, smoking, boiling and bubbling into a hideous goo.

Tom took one second to gape at the mess where the creature had been. But that was all the time he had. The rest of them were closing in fast; the one in the lead was so near that Tom could see its burning eyes and the white flash of its sharp teeth.

He turned. He saw the other monster—the one he’d hit in the throat—lying in his path. It was also starting to smoke and melt, its substance bubbling and dissolving into the pavement.

Tom took a long step and leapt over the thing where it lay.

He ran.

He ran—and the mist surrounded him. It chilled him and turned his sweat cold and clammy. The fog was so thick he couldn’t see two feet ahead of himself. With each step he expected one of the beasts to loom suddenly out of the whiteness in front of him. Now and then, as he raced on blindly, he caught a glimpse of the things hunched and skulking in the depths of the white. They were keeping pace with him, tracking him, waiting for him to get tired, waiting for him to stop and rest so they could close in for the kill.

And he was getting tired. He was already out of breath. His legs were beginning to ache. His lungs were burning. His speed was beginning to dwindle away. He couldn’t keep this pace up much longer. He needed to rest.

He dared to take a look back over his shoulder now. Nothing but whiteness. He looked forward. Whiteness. He glanced to the right and the left. White and white. Maybe he’d lost them. Maybe he could pause for just a moment…

He slowed to a jog. He slowed to a walk. Almost at once, he heard a bizarre, echoing squeal right behind him. He spun to look, panting.

“Oh no,” he whispered.

The fog was suddenly full of them. So many. A whole army, it looked like. Close and moving in. He could hear the harsh snorts of their breathing. He could hear the whisper of their shuffling footsteps. He could see them slumping closer and closer, their forms becoming clearer and clearer as they moved in on him step by slow step.

Just then he heard something new. A soft whisper. A gentle rattling noise above his head.

It was the wind. Now he could feel it. The wind was lifting, stirring the leaves on the trees. The fog began to move and shift with the current of it. Tom began to hope: maybe…

He looked around. Yes, there, in the direction he’d been running: the mist was growing thinner.

The wind continued to blow. The mist continued to disperse. Slowly, something new was becoming visible in the whiteness.

What was it? He wasn’t sure at first. Just a cluster of strange shapes and shadows. He couldn’t figure out what they were. But there was no time to think about it. The malevolents were closing in, dozens of them. Another few seconds and they’d be on him. They’d tear him to pieces. He had to go toward where the fog was parting.

Even with death so near, he had to force his weary legs to move. Ignoring the ache of his muscles, ignoring the burning sensation in his lungs, he started running again.

The wind grew stronger. The fog tumbled dizzyingly around him, leaving him disoriented, off-balance. Still, he managed to stumble toward those bizarre shapes in front of him. They started to become clearer. Now he began to see them through the mist. Was it possible they were… ? Yes…

Tom felt the hope swell inside him. With his last reserves of energy, he put on an extra burst of speed. The fog continued to thin around him as the wind grew stronger. He ran—and finally, the great mass of mist parted, parted as if a pair of huge hands had seized it on either side and pulled it open like curtains. The edges of white drew apart, threads and tendrils lingering between them. And then even the tendrils blew away and the scene was revealed.

He was in the playground. He had stumbled into the playground of the lower school. It was a sandy pit filled with equipment and structures. Those weird shapes he’d seen—they were the climbing frame, the slide, the crawling tube, the seesaw, and the carousel. Once the fog was peeled away from them, their colorful plastic shapes weren’t strange to him at all. He passed this playground on the way to school every day. He knew it well. He’d played here as a little kid.

Quickly, Tom looked around. The wind had blown the fog back from the edges of the sandpit. It was as if an invisible barrier was holding the mist at bay. Tom could still see the monsters in the whiteness behind him. He could still hear them shuffling and grunting. But they couldn’t come any closer. They couldn’t breach the fog to enter the clearer playground. They drifted back and forth in the mist in hungry frustration.