Andrew Klavan - Nightmare City

How had he gotten here? He looked down at himself. There were cords and tubes running in and out of him. There was a contraption attached to his index finger that ran to a machine on the nightstand beside his bed. The numbers on the machine glowed with a red light, showing his pulse rate. Standing beside the nightstand was a pole with a bag of fluid hanging on it. A tube ran out of the bag and down to a gauze bandage on his arm. Tom had been in the hospital once before when he’d had appendicitis, and he knew that under the bandage there was an unpleasantly large needle embedded in his flesh, carrying the fluid into his vein. As he continued to examine himself, he saw that his upper body was wrapped in bandages beneath his pajamas. He’d clearly been injured pretty badly.

He turned his head. On the opposite side of the room from the window, there was another bed. It was empty now, but there had been a man in it before, a lanky young man with long blond hair. Tom wasn’t sure how he knew this, but he knew the man had cut his wrists for some reason, trying to kill himself. The young man had lingered for a while in a coma, but he hadn’t made it through. He was gone.

Tom looked up at the ceiling. He tried to remember what had happened to him. There had been pain. Fog. Those weird monsters…

No, that couldn’t be right. That didn’t make sense. A dream.

Well, he was sure to find out the truth eventually. Finding out the truth was a habit with him—more of an obsession, really. The important thing for right now was that he was getting better. He could feel it. Weak as he was, he could feel the strength beginning to return to him. Soon he’d be on his feet again, back in his ordinary life. Life had been pretty rough these last six months, since Burt had died. But he thought maybe now it would start to get better. He would always miss Burt. But Burt was okay. Burt was good. He wasn’t sure how he knew that either, but he did.

And for himself, after all the grief he’d felt, he knew now there’d be good times, too. He looked forward to being back in school. He could imagine himself sitting at his desk in the Sentinel ’s office again, joking around with Lisa. He could see Lisa’s pale, freckled face framed by the tumbling red hair, the bright green eyes behind the round glasses. He smiled to himself, lying in the dark. He’d never actually realized until now how much he liked her—really liked her. And she liked him, too, didn’t she? Funny, that had never occurred to him before. It was probably because he’d wasted too much time pining for…

Marie .

He stopped smiling.

Marie. Yes. All at once, he remembered. Marie flirting with him at school. Kissing him outside her house. Smiling at him at the dining room table as her father toasted him with an orange juice glass while the rainbows from the chandelier prisms danced around them. And then… and then Marie and Gordon in the gym and the things she had said when she didn’t know Tom was listening. And then Dr. Cameron…

The rest came back to him in one sudden rush.

You’ll be pulling a thread that will unravel relationships throughout this town, throughout this state, even beyond that .

The burned-out monastery amid the blackened trees. Dr. Cameron standing at the chapel entrance, the gun in his hand.

This is what happens to people who can’t keep their mouths shut .

The gunshot.

Tom opened his mouth, breathing hard. The memories fell into place like playing cards riffled by an invisible hand. Dr. Cameron had tried to murder him because he’d found out that he was the one selling drugs to the football team. His debt; his borrowing; his drug dealing; his gambling—the whole deal. He had the evidence—Karen Lee’s story—recorded on his phone.

He realized he had to tell someone right away. He had to make the story public fast in order to protect Karen Lee from Dr. Cameron’s retribution. And he had to tell the police as well.

He remembered his mother reaching for the Call button by his bed—to summon the nurse. That’s what he had to do. Summon the nurse. Have her call his mom. Lisa. The cops.

Fully awake now finally, he gingerly turned around on the mattress. He saw the tube with the Call button dangling from a cord on the wall. His chest ached as he reached across himself with his free arm—the arm without the needle in it—as he reached for the button.

But just then, the door swung open. A man stood in the doorway. His figure was silhouetted by the light from the hall, but Tom could see he was wearing the blue scrubs of a doctor. The man stepped forward and the door swung shut, covering the man in shadow.

Tom’s fingers closed around the Call button tube—but the very next moment, the tube was pulled from his fingers. The man in scrubs was standing directly over him.

“You never should have come back, Tom,” he said. “You should have stayed in the monastery. You should have stayed dead.”

Tom recognized the voice immediately: it was the Lying Man.

The red-light numbers on the pulse monitor rose rapidly as Tom’s heart began to pound in his aching chest. The Lying Man looked down at him from what seemed a great height.

“Believe me, your death is the best thing for everyone,” he said in his calm, hypnotic, soothing voice. “You had no business coming back.”

Tom remembered everything in that moment. The empty house. The fog in the streets. The malevolents reaching for him with their long claws, trying to tear him apart. It wasn’t a dream. It wasn’t a dream at all. It was real.

And the Lying Man was real. The King of Death had come back to claim him. Tom peered up through the darkness until the Lying Man’s face became clear above him: Dr. Cameron.

“I didn’t want to take this risk,” he told Tom serenely. “I hoped you’d have the good sense to die when you were supposed to. I thought you were dead when I left you at the monastery. But you just don’t know when to quit, Tom. So I’ll have to help you. This won’t take long. And the way I do it, it won’t even leave a trace. After all, I’m a doctor. And I’ll tell them: your lungs just couldn’t heal…”

Tom tried to shout for help, but his voice was too weak—and Dr. Cameron was way too fast. The big man moved like a panther. He yanked the pillow out from under Tom’s head—and in the same motion, in the same second—brought it down over Tom’s face.

The doctor was strong—and Tom had no strength in him at all. The pillow pressed down, pinning him to the bed. It closed off his nose and mouth, cut off his air completely. He felt his lungs working helplessly in his aching chest. He couldn’t draw breath. He was suffocating.

He tried to fight, to get out from under, but it was no use. He reached up and tried to push Dr. Cameron’s hands away, but the man’s arms were immensely powerful, locked into position, like stone pillars, unmovable. With every second Tom tried to push them away, he lost strength. A dizziness began to swim around him. He felt he was sinking into unconsciousness. He knew that this time he would never return.

He stopped fighting, stopped trying to push at Cameron’s hands. Instead, he dropped his arms, reached across himself. Felt for the bandage on the inside of his elbow. As the airless heat beneath the pillow closed over him like a sprung trap, as his consciousness began to swim and spin away, he tore the bandage off his own skin. Felt for the end of the tube, for the needle embedded in his flesh.

He ripped the needle out of himself and blindly plunged it into Cameron’s body.

Through the muffling pillow, Tom heard the doctor cry out in pain. He felt the man’s hold on the pillow loosen. With all the strength he had, Tom twisted his body away from him, out from under the pillow. He rolled over onto his side, taking a great, welcome gasp of air.