Andrew Klavan: Nightmare City

Tom was in heaven when the phone rang. At least, he thought it was heaven. He had never been there before, and the look of the place surprised him. It wasn’t what he was expecting at all.

Then again Tom had never really thought about heaven much. When he had, he’d pictured it as a place in the sky where dead people with newly issued angel wings sat on clouds and—whatever—played the harp or something. This, though—this heaven he was in now—this was just a sort of park, an expansive lawn with walkways curving through it and fountains spouting here and there and vast, majestic temple-like buildings with marble columns and peaked facades. There were no clouds to sit on. There were no clouds at all. A sky of perfect, unbroken blue covered and surrounded everything.

As for the people—the people strolling on the paths or sitting on the benches or standing amid the columns of the temples—they were also not what Tom expected. No wings for one thing. No harps either. Just ordinary men and women in all the various shapes and colors people come in. Dressed not in spotless robes but in casual clothes, slacks and skirts, shirts and blouses. And when Tom looked at them more closely, they didn’t seem as happy or as serene as he would have expected people in heaven to look. Some looked downright lost or fretful, worried or even sad. One man in particular caught Tom’s eye: a lanky young guy in his twenties or so with long, dirty blond hair and a thin, hungry-looking face; sunken cheeks and darkly ringed eyes. He was standing in front of one of the Greek temples, turning nervously this way and that as if he didn’t know where he was or how to get home.

Tom’s curiosity began to kick in—that eager electric pulse that compelled him to know more, to search for the truth, to solve the puzzle. He could never resist it. Even though he only worked for a high school paper, he was a real reporter nevertheless. It was his nature. It was who he was. Whenever there was a mystery, he didn’t just want to solve it, he needed to. And this was a mystery: What sort of heaven included fear and loneliness?

He had to find someone who could give him some answers—and it suddenly occurred to him that, since this was heaven, he knew just the person to look for.

He took a step forward toward the park—and then the phone began to ring.

And suddenly, heaven was gone.

Tom opened his eyes and he was in his bed at home. A dream. Heaven was a dream. Well, yeah . What else was it going to be? It wasn’t like he was dead or anything.

The phone rang again—his cell, playing the opening guitar riff from the classic Merle Haggard song “The Fightin’ Side of Me.” Dazed, Tom followed the sound to find the phone. It was on his computer table, jumping and rattling around as it rang. He reached out and grabbed it, looked at it to see who was calling. Number blocked , said the words on the readout screen. Which meant it was probably Lisa McKay, his editor at the Sentinel . What time is it, anyway? he wondered. What did she want from him this early on a Saturday morning?

Tom answered. “Yeah.”

The phone crackled against his ear. Static—loud static—a wash of white sound, like the sound of the ocean in a seashell. Something about that noise raised goose bumps on Tom’s arm, though he couldn’t have said exactly why. It was just that the static sounded strangely far away. It echoed, as if it were coming to him up out of a deep well. It made Tom feel as if he were listening to a noise from a foreign, alien place, another planet or something like that. Weird.

“Hello?” he said more loudly.

Nothing. No answer. Just that weird, white, alien noise. And then—wait—there was something. There was someone on the line. A voice—a woman’s voice—talking beneath the rattle and hiss.

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

The words, like the static, seemed to come to him from across a great distance. Tom just barely caught those two phrases. After that the words were unintelligible. But the woman was still talking and her tone was insistent, urgent, as if she was desperate to be heard.

“Hello? You’ve got a bad connection,” said Tom loudly. “You’re breaking up. I can’t hear you.”

The woman on the other end tried again. She wasn’t shouting or anything, just talking in a very firm, insistent tone, trying to get through to him. Tom listened intently. He thought he recognized her voice, but he couldn’t quite place it. He thought he heard the word please . He thought he heard the phrase “You have to…” But aside from that, the words were washed away by that ceaseless, distant, echoing static. It was frustrating.

“I can’t hear you…,” Tom began to say again—but then it stopped. All of it stopped. The voice. The static. It was all gone and the phone was silent. There were a couple of beeps on the line. Tom lowered the phone from his ear and checked the readout: Connection lost .

For a minute he tried to figure out who it had been, whose voice he had heard. It was so familiar. He had been this close to recognizing her… But no, he just couldn’t get it.

He shrugged and put the phone back on the computer table. Whoever it was, she’d call back, for sure. She sounded like she really wanted to talk to him.

Tom sat up in bed, tossing the comforter aside. He shook his head to clear it. Weird call. Weird noise. Woke him up out of that great dream, too. What was it? Oh yeah, he remembered: heaven. He sat there, looking around at the room. It was funny, he actually felt a little disappointed to be back from his dream, to be here again. It had been a nice dream, a restful place. And now the memories of it were breaking up in his mind, the images trailing away like smoke in the wind. He could barely remember what it had been like, and he was sorry to see it go.

He got up. Went to the dresser, started pulling out some clothes, dropping himself into them: sweatpants and a Tigers sweatshirt. He figured he’d go for a run after breakfast, maybe hit the gym at the Y.

His room was small. The bed, the dresser, and the worktable were all crowded together. Just about every space on the blue wall was covered with some picture or decoration or something. There was his unusually long American flag. His pennant for the Tigers, the school’s football team. Another pennant for the Los Angeles Dodgers, even though, let’s be honest, they were going to stink this year. There was a picture of his brother, Burt, looking all brave and noble and cool in his army uniform. And a bulletin board with some snapshots of Tom and his mom and Burt and some of Tom’s friends. Then there were a couple of framed copies of the Sentinel . There was the issue that had his first front-page story on it: “Governor Visits Springland High.” And there was another—the one with the big story—the biggest story and the one that started all the trouble for him. The banner headline was huge: “Sources: Tiger Champs Used Drugs.”

Tom left his bedroom and went down the hall to the bathroom—but he paused for a moment at the top of the stairway. He stood listening. His mom’s bedroom door was open and he could see her room was empty, her bed all made up. But he didn’t hear her moving around downstairs. That was kind of odd, actually. It was after eight. Normally this time of the morning on a weekend, Mom would be rattling around the kitchen or vacuuming, doing the housework she didn’t have time to do during the week. But the house was totally quiet below. Not a noise to be heard.