Andrew Klavan - Nightmare City

Tom pulled the phone out. He checked the readout: Number blocked .

“I’m serious,” said Marie. “Don’t.”

The urgency of her tone made him hesitate a second. But finally he said, “I have to. It really might be my mom.”

Marie let go of his other hand. She dropped back against the chair and let out a long breath, giving up.

Tom answered the phone. “Hello?”

There was a silent pause. And then—Tom’s heart sped up as he heard the static—that same odd, distant static he’d heard first thing this morning when the phone woke him. Again, it sounded like it was coming from somewhere far away, some alien place, some frightening place he could not imagine. And again, as he listened, he heard that voice, that woman’s voice, trying to reach him through the noise.

“I need to talk to you. It’s so important. I need…”

Tom leaned forward, gripping the phone hard in his sweating fingers. He knew that voice—he knew it! It was that woman. The woman in the white blouse who had been standing down at the base of the driveway. The woman who had gazed at him with that peculiarly blank, dead expression—and then vanished into the fog. He didn’t know how he knew it was her, but he knew. Why couldn’t he remember her name?

“What do you want?” Tom said to her, nearly shouting over the static. “I can barely hear you. What do you want?”

“I need to talk to you…,” the woman said again, but already the static was closing over her voice as the fog had closed over her figure.

“What do you want?” Tom shouted, more desperately this time as he heard her fading. “Why didn’t you wait for me in the driveway? Why didn’t—”

But the phone beeped twice: Connection lost . She was gone.

Tom cried out in frustration.

“Tom…,” Marie began to say. “Tom, listen to me. You have to listen—”

But before she could finish, another voice interrupted her.

“This is your mission! This is what I’ve been trying to tell you about all along… The Warrior… Do you remember the Warrior?”

Burt! It was his brother’s voice! It was coming from the basement again. What was happening here? What was going on?

Tom leapt up out of his chair. Marie jumped up, too, jumped up so quickly her chair fell over behind her, banging loudly against the floor.

“Tom,” she whispered. “Don’t…”

“That’s Burt,” he said. “Don’t you hear it? That’s Burt’s voice.”

“It’s not. It can’t be. You know that. Burt is dead,” said Marie.

“I heard him before. The same way. From down in the basement.”

“Tom, listen to me, do not go down there.”

Tom stood looking at her, uncertain. He licked his dry lips. He wanted to help her, to keep her safe. He wanted to do what she said. But it was Burt…

“Marie, I don’t understand any of this,” he said. “Do you know more than you’re telling me? Is there something you don’t want me to know?”

“All I know is that you have to go to the monastery,” she answered urgently. “ That’s where the answers are. You have to find them. You can’t wait any longer. You have to go there now.”

But Tom could hear Burt shouting again: “This is what I tried to teach you. This is what you have to do…”

And then he said, “This is your mission, Tom.”

Tom started. Did Burt just call him by name? From the TV? How was that possible? He had to know—he had to find out—where the voice was coming from.

He looked helplessly at Marie. “I’ve got to look,” he said.

He turned away from her. He went to the basement door.

Marie called out behind him in a sharp tone of voice he’d never heard her use before. “Tom! Listen to me! Please! You don’t always have to know everything! You’ve got to stop this!”

He looked at her. He saw the fear and frustration flashing in her eyes, her bowed mouth twisting in a strange and ugly way. But it didn’t matter. He heard Burt downstairs.

“Remember the Warrior, Tom.”

He had to go. He pulled open the door.

Marie shouted at him: “Tom, I mean it! Don’t!”

Tom flipped the light switch. He left Marie in the kitchen and thundered quickly down the stairs.

He hit the basement floor and spun around the corner into the family room, moving fast. He saw the side of the television. He heard Burt’s voice coming from the speakers: “This is what you have to understand! This is what I have to get you to understand…”

His brother sounded so present, so real—so alive!—that it made Tom hurt inside to hear him. He missed his brother so much it was like a physical pain.

He needed to get around to the front of the TV. He needed to see Burt’s face, to see what he was doing on the video before the whole thing vanished again as it had earlier, before the voice went silent and Burt was gone.

He took a quick step forward.

“All along,” said Burt, “this was what I was trying…”

And then, sure enough, the voice stopped, mid-sentence. And the next moment there was another voice: “Dr. Cooper to the ER—stat!”

“No!” shouted Tom.

He hadn’t been fast enough. There was that stupid doctor show again!

And yes, there it was. As he got in front of the TV, he saw the same scene that had been on before.

The nurse was shouting, “Single GSW to the chest! Clear Trauma One.”

The doctors and nurses and aides were crowding around the gurney, rolling the gurney frantically down the hospital hallway to the emergency operating room. The patient—the person lying wounded on the gurney—was obscured by the crush of bodies around him as they all hurtled together down the corridor shouting urgently to one another.

“How’s the pulse?”

“Sixty and falling fast!”

Exasperated, Tom’s eyes went heavenward and his shoulders slumped in defeat. The monsters in the fog. The images on TV. Marie telling him to leave everything behind and go to the monastery. What was happening? What was it all about?

He looked at the TV again. The scene had changed now. The doctors and nurses and aides had pushed the gurney around the corner into a trauma alcove. They were leaning over the patient on the gurney, preparing to lift him onto the operating table.

“On three,” said a doctor. “One, two, three!”

All together, as Tom watched, they hoisted the bloody form off the gurney and laid him on the table. When they were done, the cluster of people broke apart, each hurrying into a different corner of the little space, each turning to his own chore, wrangling his own piece of equipment. One nurse grabbed a tray of surgical instruments. A surgeon pulled on a sterile gown. Another nurse hooked up an oxygen tank. For a moment, as they worked, the patient lay alone on the table with no one around him, no one blocking him from view, so that Tom could finally see him, see his face.

The sight was as shocking as anything he had seen this whole shocking day. Tom’s mouth fell open and the breath came out of him as quickly as if he had been punched. He stared unblinking at the TV, unable to believe what he was looking at, unable for a second or two even to comprehend it.

The patient on the gurney: It was Tom. It was Tom himself.

The sight of himself on the TV screen, the sight of himself as a character in his mom’s favorite medical show, hit Tom so hard he actually took a step back. He went on staring, went on gaping, second after second as the scene unfolded. He watched as the patient—himself—lay on the table unconscious, his eyes closed. He saw with a growing nausea that his shirt was covered in blood, the stain spreading all the way from his collar to his belt buckle.

And now the nurses were cutting his clothes away with a knife. The place where the bullet had ripped into his body was exposed, his flesh gory and torn. A nurse was stuffing a tube into his throat—it made Tom gag just to watch it. Another nurse was jamming a needle into his arm—he practically felt the sting.