Andrew Klavan - Nightmare City

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 basement.

“…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 basement door in the kitchen was closed and the voice was muffled. 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 basement up into a family room two summers ago. Most Southern California houses didn’t have a basement 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 basement much except to do the laundry in the other half of the space. 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 basement 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 basement door—and froze stock-still, his heart pounding hard in his chest.

“This is what you have to do,” said the voice from the basement, 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 basement. 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 basement, 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 basement 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 basement 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.

“How’s his pulse?” one TV actor shouted to another.

“Sixty and falling fast,” another actor shouted back.

So that was it. Mom was down here watching her favorite show on TV. Big mystery solved, right? Tom was already beginning to think he had only imagined hearing Burt’s voice a second ago. He turned the corner and stepped into the family room.

“Mom?”

But the room was empty. Mom wasn’t there.

There was nothing there but the entertainment center. The armchairs arrayed on the carpet around the flatscreen were empty. The TV was turned away from him so he couldn’t see the screen, but the shouts were definitely coming from the set. And they were definitely from the doctor show.

“Where’s Dr. Cooper?”

“We don’t have time to wait for him. Let’s go! Let’s go!”

Tom glanced through the door into the laundry room, just in case Mom was listening to her show while she loaded the washing machine. But no Mom there either. And the washing machine and dryer were both off, both silent.